ASHY WINGS, BROKEN HEART

Learning to trust the gravity of Light and Love

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir
As great in admiration as herself;
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix'd.

--Shakespeare, Henry VIII.

A star is born when atoms of light elements are squeezed under enough pressure for their nuclei to undergo fusion. All stars are the result of a balance of forces: the force of gravity compresses atoms in interstellar gas until the fusion reactions begin. And once the fusion reactions begin, they exert an outward pressure. As long as the inward force of gravity and the outward force generated by the fusion reactions are equal, the star remains…

--Richard Brill, Scientific American.

I’ve always been fascinated with the sun.  It sounds ridiculous to say that, it being the central star in our galaxy and a somewhat obvious player in our planetary existence.   What I mean by fascination is not a scientific curiosity, but rather a sort of devotion.  Surrounded as I was in Spain by fields of sunflowers, I must have apprenticed myself to their turning faces, unknowingly being grafted into their ancient mysticism of light. 

When I was three I told my mother I wanted to be a star.  “What’s that?” she asked.  “When you stand in front of everyone and shine and everyone loves you,”  I answered matter-of-factly.

We’ve laughed about that statement for years, brushing it aside as an obvious indication of a little budding performer.  But now as I consider this childlike declaration I wonder if there isn’t more to my desire than just to receive the adoration of an audience…I wonder if there wasn’t a deeper intuition driving my words. 

I remember as a child, how my brother would tell me to stop staring at the sun, catching me as he would staring directly at that blinding ball at the center of everything.  I have no doubt I have done irreparable damage to my corneas from this dangerous practice.   I can’t tell you why I did—and sometimes still—do it. For me it always felt like the most natural thing, which makes no sense…unless some part of my deeper memory just gravitated toward  our star in deferential recognition for its key role of our joint evolutionary toil.  But I think for me, it was a devotional instinct. 

When I imagined God, my childlike imagination probably somehow recognized that settling on a faceless source of warmth and blinding star-light was the closest material approximation to a God-concept.   I had no idea then what a radical insight this was, of understanding God as inextricably within our universe.  It was just instinct.   Instinct also led to a ritual around this God-light worship involving an acknowledgement of the alchemy of suffering and love.

When I think back on the memories that play themselves like notes through the melody of my life, they are all punctuated by a sort of anguish…an unbearable compression of joy and sorrow, devastation twinged by hope, tragedy held by arms of love.  I remember the agony of constant moves, constant change.  I remember the agony of slowly losing adoring “uncles” to AIDS,  of living with the fear of bomb explosions at the hands of the terror organization ETA at the nearby civil guard base,  or when I was told one of my closest  friends had inexplicably hung himself at the age of nine.   I remember the tears of my mother when things were tighter than I could imagine for us financially, how well they hid their anxiety when we were suddenly homeless due to rising rent.   And on and on the rupture points shine, like constellations holes punched in the fabric of my life.

Somewhere along the way, I started doing this thing, this private ceremony for no one else but the sun or the stars.  Like a tiny priestess in recognition of the two forces always present in all things—the joy and the sorrow, the beauty and the pain, death and life-- I taught myself to retreat into my room to be alone when things were unbearable.  In every instance there was a tipping point of anguish when I would stop fighting the sensation of suffering, but instead let it come.  And it would rise in me like a swell of feeling-ness until it would at last crest and shatter my heart, my vision would blur with the stream of tears, and my body would shake.  

Eventually…through the shattering…something else could always be felt.

This “something else” felt instinctively like the basin of everything, the underside of the quilt of living, like the matrix of reality itself…and here’s the curious thing: it was profoundly personal.  In every one of these moments throughout my life has been the inexplicable presence of an indefinable and non-localized intimacy.   Out of the grief would arise the distinct sensation of being known, down to each hair on my head, down to every cell in my body. 

This inexplicable “knowingness” didn’t just function in a unidirectional way.   It went the other way too.  It wasn’t just the sensation of being known, but the sensation of knowing would wash over me as well: a deep instinct of being far more ancient than my few years on this planet.  In these moments, the veil parts momentarily, giving way to a remembering of something, a familiar recognition in having had some participation in everything around me.

And then, opening the windows so the sun or stars could see me, came the only response to this knowing I could think to offer: to dance.   Feeling the weight of gravity move through the muscles of my body, pushing the emotions through into a physical offering, the tears wouldn’t stop but would take on a deeper quality.  These were not the tears that had come before, these were tears born out of a sense of relief, gratitude and strength. My body moved in service to unknown melodies creating my own stubborn defiance against letting one force overtake the other in the anguish. 

These were the most honest and authentic prayers.  The ones that had no words.  The ones that moved.  The ones that were somehow just as much addressed to myself as they were to some sense of God-as-light, to the force of light and gravity…an ode to the  persistence of living.

I can barely hold the tenderness of this now as a mother—to think of this small child, in countless rooms across two continents performing this ritual of hopeful belief.  Somehow I knew that as I turned, that the dynamism of life itself would turn too…the sensations wouldn’t always be this acute, this was just a momentary baptism in the innermost point all things in the process of becoming.  It was the intuition of a future singularity, a way of habituating myself to trusting that place where density crushes, and needs to.   It’s the way of everything in evolution. 

What is the cost of our arising in this life? 

How is a star born?

Is it so different from our human intuition around such ideas as reincarnation, or the mythic phoenix?  Do we not seem to remember that the cost of being is somehow in our dying….is this not why our native and religious rituals, our liturgies, songs and poems all indicate that the doorway of living is through death, that death is somehow the beginning of our living?

There is something about being present to our suffering—radically present—that in the surrender into its depths, whatever that depth may be (anger, sorrow, shame, confusion) our hearts beak open enough to expand our vision to a clarity we can barely comprehend.    Sometimes life affords us the perfect nebular storm—a true riot of interstellar collision—of being so profoundly broken down to run out of every usual escape route of our egoic patterns until we somehow break through reality as we assume it to be.  It is only in our poverty of being stripped down that we seem to emerge into a deeper dynamism that as ancient as the universe itself.  Its almost as if radical presence to suffering is the only way we break through the entrenched ordinary way and we are dislocated enough to suspend disbelief enough to allow the real to be born. 

The raw materials for stars exist in a vast nebular confusion.   I wonder if our lives on this planet are not the same: a swirling composite of absolute raw potentiality, a chaos of experiences in which the heart is slowly being woken up…little by little…until enough gravitational force at the center of our beings causes a reaction to occur.  Something falls in on itself and forms a certain kind of density.

We’ve all met people that feel somehow more solid, more dense, more here.   And couldn’t you say that your experience at being by or with people like that was one of gravitational attraction?  Do you not instinctively draw nearer and feel that inner sense of a recognition you can’t quite name?

I can feel it with some of the people in my life.   I can feel the years and years of this quiet work of presence in their own suffering, the interweaving of light and gravity in an alchemy of soul creation.   I can also feel it with certain mystics, authors or poets that have long “passed”: there is this sense that as their life ended they had amassed enough light gravity to make of their short lives a supernova—a self-surrendered explosion that expands the unique qualities of their lives outward into the universe,  finding a way in death to be more present somehow in the matrix of all reality.   It feels like the ultimate act of love and trust in the universe, the final act of self giving, come at the cost of the density realized in their presence in this life.

What is the cost of our arising in this life?  How is a star born?
Are they so different?

What if every metaphor points to the same thing: the way to be born is to trust the agonizing fusion making of light and gravity…the interplay of darkness and density, of amassing enough density for the blinding offering of supernovas and black holes. 

I can trust my own death, I’ve been in the ashes enough to trust they will eventually cover the shapes of invisible wings—I’ve had enough experience to believe and trust that I will fall into that hidden intimacy on the other side of my anguish.  But shatteringly new to my experience is to trust the wellbeing of my children to this chaos…this is an entirely different kind of dance of anguish for me now.  Our family’s life is undergoing a major transition, and in the middle of it, I know this is simply a crushing example of what has always been true:  I cannot protect my children from pain.  Their lives will be marked by changes and challenges and I can’t stop their own nebular confusion from happening.   To know that some of their pain will come at my own unwitting hands is an experience of inward poverty and powerlessness that I have no categories for.

All I can do is all I’ve ever done…face it.  To model for them the only way I know how to move into the anguish.  Not to run from it, to let the wave crest and break our hearts.  And eventually to work our way into a silent prayer of movement and trust, a hopeful defiance that is a radical dance of presence.

Somehow its this fusion work, this twirling amidst the anguishing compression of life that I believe is weaving together the real in this lifetime:  something weighty is becoming, a particular density of a tangible luminous body in service to this expanding universe.   

I have no idea what I am doing.  I am going entirely on trust and instinct here.  My only prayer is that it is a deep memory that moves me, a deep trust in the ancient alchemy that has and always will make light out of dust, and gravity from love.

THE PATH OF NO ARRIVAL

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time

Teilhard de Chardin

MS. TIPPETT: And also, that gets at the fact that [trauma is] not just cognitive, right? It’s not just a story that you could tell. I mean, it may eventually become a story, but that it’s body memory. It’s a neural net of memory. It’s not just about words that you can formulate.

DR. VAN DER KOLK: Yeah. It’s amazing to me what a hard time many people I know have with that. This is not about something you think or something you figure out. This is about your body, your organism, having been reset to interpret the world as a terrifying place and yourself as being unsafe. And it has nothing to do with cognition...

It was very striking in our yoga study because we see yoga as one important thing that helps people who’ve been traumatized because they get back into their bodies...what a hard time traumatized people had at that moment to just feel relaxed and safe and feel totally enveloped with goodness, how the sense of goodness and safety disappears out of your body, basically.

---

I wish I knew the names of the birds in my back yard.  I mean, of course I know the obvious ones: cardinals, bluejays, crows.  I mostly just know the songs, not the birds that sing them.  The songs are so familiar to me that I can immediately tell when there’s a stranger passing through: a shocking new song appears out of no where with a tone and resonance that is totally unfamiliar. I wish I knew who they were and where they were headed.

The mainstays—the ones I know so well that I almost tune out—surround me now.  I know them by their rhythms, by their mounting cadences and lilting melodies.  There's the loudest one, with its three phrases that end in an exclamation mark, “ti-ru-ru, ti-ra-ra, ti-re-re, preet!””   Then a ways off is the two syllable four phrase singer: “tee-u, tee-u, tee-u, tee-uuu”. This one I can mimic so well whistling that I can have conversations with them…a trick the boys find particularly amusing.   There’s the sing-songy, sad, nostalgic one, “pee-tuuu….pee-tuuu”  that sounds almost as if it’s a child calling out, looking for his friend that he lost.

There's the two I know: the morning dove, whose familiar tone surrounds me like a blanket with its warmth: “ghrroo, ghrroo, ghrrooo…” And then there’s the sloppy and somehow always comical arrival (usually with an accompaniment of feather flaps and rough landings) of the “caw…caw…CAW” of the crow, interrupting all the songs around it, in its show-stopping and endearing awkwardness.

I’ve heard these songs for years, but somehow I feel I never really listened, never realized how their songs weave into the tapestry of my living and are, at the very least, deserving of my delight and attention... if not my sincere gratitude. Not until lately, that is.

I'm struck by how quickly we remove ourselves from the belongingness of our bodies in this natural world.  How easily we escape into ambition, anxiety and to-do’s, conversations and ideas and thoughts.  As if by talking and thinking we somehow could supersede our place of gravitational belonging in the shapes and forms of this earth, the curve and weight of our flesh held by the fragile structure of bone and ligament that bonds us to everything else that will one day die back into this world.

I mean, let’s be real: our entire culture and orientation in the west is already horribly impaired in this department.  Most of our religions were founded on platonic metaphysics which split matter from spirit, the former being made to be something “of the flesh”, “bad”, “untrustworthy” and the latter becoming the goal reached when the former was escaped.  We’re already barely able to be here, to inhabit our own forms...but this capacity to flee goes in overdrive under stress, or under trauma.

Like the above excerpt of Krista Tippet's interview with trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk reveals, trauma does strange things to that EXIT trap-door out of our bodies: it turns it into a black hole, making it almost impossible to return to the physicality of our birthright of belonging.

The body —in the midst of trauma—is highly intelligent, it finds a way to cope: we “exit” ourselves.   During a trauma trigger then, the person’s body may still be there, but they have once more “left the building"--their body is transported, tricked by the protective instincts of the mind to believe they’re in the middle of the traumatic event again.  Ironically the only way to heal from this pattern is to return to the body, to find a way to inhabit our physicality once more, to re-wire the neuropathways, to re-solve the stress hormones that—during trauma—were not adequately discharged…to begin to return to sensation and to learn how to trust it.

Interestingly enough, the little of what I’ve dipped into of Gurdjieff’s approach to spiritual awakening has taught me that the importance of learning how to access this type of sensory awareness is critical to learning how to be present.  We are sent off with some type of manual labor job with an inner task: an intentional reminder/way to practice being present.  It may be, “pay attention to the place where two surfaces meet” (such as paper towel/window, paintbrush/wall, rake/ground).  Or it may be “locate and return to the sensation of your feet”.  The idea is to begin noticing how often we “exit the building” of our bodies while we work, and hopefully to begin re-training ourselves to stay here.

It is perhaps thanks to this training that I’ve been able to slowly locate myself back in the form of my body after a substantial trigger earlier this month and learn how to just stay with sensation.  While this was born out of necessity for my own healing, I’m curious how this work of healing trauma and the capacity to learn presence overlap.

Without the normal operation of a clear and linear narrative, a systematic progressive story to gain certainty from, the traumatized person has to learn how to trust sensation as a way to come back to the present moment, trust the body, trust the belonging of weight, the curve of shape, the feeling of sun, breeze…the vibration of perceived sound, of bird song, car passing, child laughing.  The sensation of feet on ground, the rhythm of a ball being tossed back and forth from one hand to another.

It is very humbling work to come back to the here and now.

I think perhaps this feels humiliating because we like to declare ourselves above the physicality of our world...of the laws of evolution, of slow time, of birth and decay that govern all things.  We want to be immortal, so we “time travel” to the past to construct who we are and dive ahead into the not-yet to imagine who we will be.   We think we can transcend this world of things living and dying, so we remove ourselves from the world of form.  Instead, we regret our choices and we worry about our future.  We build identity from the stories of "our story" we tell over and over again.  The fish gets bigger each time, and so does our ego’s attachment to each experience we accumulate, as if we could somehow unlock the secret of life’s direction out of the trinkets we collect on our travels. We rocket launch into a million possibilities of “could-be”, arching ourselves to try to see around the curve to quell the anxiety of not having a f'ing clue what comes next.

We panic, grasping at life as if it could be clenched like reigns or a whip and subdued.  We find security in external forms, bandaids placed hastily over the gaping caverns of our own souls—we try to satiate the it with nice things, nice events, nice homes, nice life-trajectories.   And it works...so long as we keep the distractions coming steadily enough to drown out the sound of our own voice asking the one question we keep running from.

 We travel back and forth between two non-realities, barely inhabiting the only reality there is, and wonder why we’re all exhausted, worn out, lost and terrified of standing still.  We try to carve meaning out of nothingness while the warm wood of the present sits untouched in our hands.

Let me be clear: It's not easy to come back to “just this.”    Inhabiting “just this” feels like failure in a way: like it’s not enough.  “Just this” goes against the grain of ambition, like the absence of a hook to hang the hat of our identities on.  It also carries the return to the terrifying sensation of powerlessness…of having to make peace with how not “in control” we actually are.   

Making peace with that sense of powerlessness has been a particularly difficult adjustment for me.  I have fought it to the limits of my own traumatized brain’s capacity to flee.  A few weeks ago, largely due to my own capacity to bypass my limitations, I had the closest thing to a two-by-four to the head someone who has experienced trauma can.  I have had to slow down…way down. 

I take only what is directly in front of me, one thing at a time. I have to sleep more.  Remember to eat.  Run.  Go outside and let the sun make freckles on my skin…let the magic of nature’s cocktail help to create the stabilizing hormones that were naturally designed to help me heal.  I'm remembering to read, not for work, or for school, but for the hunger in me.  To pray, not because it's "my practice" but because it is the way I breathe back into into my body...because it's the way home into the surrendered, naked stance of being that reconnects me to the family of belonging we all participate in.  In other words: I have to be here, be present.  No where else.

Learning to be here...
On the path of no arrival.

Now that my body is calling me back into itself I realize how adept I am at constructing "arrivals" out both life and my spirituality: checkpoints on my horizon to measure my own progress by, milestones by which to make sure I'm doing ok.  Linearity sneaks into our thinking and we perpetually throw our becoming into the future, not in the present where it's taking shape.

Bowing under the pressure of expectations, within and without, I've wasted so much energy building idealized versions of myself, being slave to a perfectionism that has relentlessly driven me in both life and learning. With the "about face" turns of my life changes this last year however, I am experiencing a cellular crash landing (the crow's awkward fluttering entrance comes to mind): a welcome of own humanity that is requiring a compassionate tenderness toward my own limitations and failures.  But it's not just about accepting the finiteness, the welcoming also includes a rooted appreciation and genuine curiosity of the unique song that sings itself out of my heart....what is the infinite that comes forth into the world from within me? what is this shape.that belongs in this broader world of becoming forms?  

I wonder what would happen if we ceased placing our hope at the end of our linear thinking and instead located it here, now, on the path of no arrival. As Cynthia Bourgeault likes to say: Hope is not in the future, it is rather, the "innermost point in us and in all things.  It is a quality of aliveness.  It does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome.  Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a  pulse of truth that sends us out." 

What would it look like to begin re-orienting our lives to live from that pulse of truth, to learn how to connect to the sensation of that deeper quality of aliveness?  Perhaps the first step is to simply come back to our bodies, to sensation, to notice how often we exit the building.

These days I'm taking the time to feel how my feet feel on this ground, and learning how to trust the steady rhythm of my own cadence, my own pace and stride.  To notice the way my arms swing when I walk, the unseen geometry I make with my hands when I talk.  To feel the sensation of the sound of my own voice asking my own questions and  letting out my own shocking song into the chorus of the birds with as much confidence as they do.  I'm re-orienting my vision to trust the perception of this world from my own heart, from the inside out.  And the amazing thing is that as I return to this body, to slowness, to attention: I am feeling myself come alive from within this broader net of belonging like a small bloom curling its pedals out under the influence of the sun.

Attention is the beginning of devotion, says Mary Oliver.

And I believe her.  The poets intuit this and live it.  They live in full attention, and I want to take the next several month's on this blog to explore how they ground us in this world,  reminding us of our belonging.

I want to keep learning how to be here…on the path of no arrival.  What a relief it is to not have to reach for an illusory ideal, or bend under the weight of anyone else’s expectation.  To simply eat the fruit of the wisdom of the elders around me and trust it will be metabolized in its own unique way in my own body.  To learn to see life with the eye of the poet and to recognize it as my own. To pay attention and build devotion.

To be here.
On the path of no arrival.

 

IN FIERI

“At every moment the vast and horrible Thing breaks in upon us through the crevices and invades our precarious dwelling-place, that Thing we try so hard to forget but which is always there,
separated form us only by thin dividing walls: fire, pestilence, earthquake, storm, the unleashing of dark moral forces, all of these sweep away ruthlessly, in an instant, what we had labored with mind and heart to build up and make beautiful…
therefore, lest I succumb to the temptation to curse the universe, and the Maker of the universe,
teach me to adore it by seeing you hidden within it. 
Say once again to me, Lord, those great and liberating wordsthe words which are at once revealing light and effective power: this is my Body.  In very truth, if only we will it to be so, the immense and somber Thing, the specter, the tempest—is you.  It is I, be not afraid. 
All the things in life that fill us with dread, all that filled your own heart with dismay in the garden of agony: all in the last resort, are the species…the matter, of one and the same sacrament.”

Teilhard de Chardin

When you’re in the midst of a storm—the house flattening or boat sinking kind—you’re in it.  It’s not the kind of thing you can sit back and watch from a distance.  You can’t excuse yourself from the deck to go below to “process.”  You can’t sit out front miles away from the tornado that’s coming to journal about your feelings.  This isn’t the moment to make sense out of the symbols and metaphors.  There are things to be done.  Survival kicks in.  You batten down the hatches, and lean in.  You do what needs to be done to protect your loved ones, knowing that waves will hit, winds will blow, and when its all said and done…things won’t quite be as they were before.  You pray for mercy.  Your voice trembles and doesn't sound like your own when you barely make out the words...

Teach me to adore the terror by seeing You hidden within it.

The storm is not the time to “find the meaning.”   The storm is simply the storm.

And when the winds settle, or the waters grow calm, you emerge to assess the damage, sort through the debree, and what can’t be salvaged.  You feel the searing truth of Rilke’s words

“Now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins.”

No one can do this work for you.

So, you get to work.  You reach out for help and accept the help of those who can support the work, because you need it.  You clean, clear, tear out, patch up, and try to build up again.  Your people become a vein system of life and oxygen, brining meals, picking up your kids, and coming to work with you, or just sit beside you when you’re between the things that need doing when one is trying to rebuild a new structure...when what existed has now been forced to change.  You mutter the words like a mantra, like a cord to something solid that might bring you comfort in the midst of so much uncertainty:

Teach me to adore this exhaustion by seeing You hidden within it.

This is still not the moment for meaning.

Even later, when you try to find the new normal in a structure that’s changed, that’s both familiar and foreign, and when you find the new pathways to get to where you know you need to go, it’s still not the moment for meaning.  It is just the moment for living in all the strangeness and beauty and sadness and hope without rushing to put a name to any of it.  And the chatter of friends is not really necessary, so you find your solitude and go into a gentle rhythm of routine.   Only a few know how to just be with you as you grieve what was and make room for the newness of what is, and know better than to clutter your solitude with the constraining shapes of words. You feel powerless in the face of what you can't fix, or repair, or make better.  In your anguish, and as you're held by your sacred few, you feel your body saying... 

Teach me to adore this grief by seeing You hidden within it.

You live on.   You feel the simplicity of things because it’s all you can do.

Like Rilke describes in "Onto a Vast Plain," you learn how to become the ground again…and are surprised at the new life that’s growing in you, just as you are when spring’s resilience bursts through the snow.   You become patient like a thing that is “ripened until it is real,” knowing that there is still a long time to go before you feel the reality of all of this change.   So you ripen.  You begin to move in a way that is no longer dictated by the external voice of "I should", but is instead trusting of a deeper wisdom within requiring more courage and faith: 

Teach me to adore the unknown by seeing You hidden within it.

Still there is no profound meaning to extract.  A storm is a storm.   Life moves us in unexpected ways: sometimes it flattens things we’ve built, it topples the trees on our beloved horizons, it changes structures we thought we’d live in forever.   It forces us to let go of what has been, and to take steps into what could be.  Sometimes it takes a great storm to shake our foundations in such a way that we can no longer ignore the things we try to bury, ignore, or pretend aren’t there. But the storms are just being storms.

Teilhard had a view of suffering that was firmly rooted in his scientific lens. He didn’t sugar coat it.  He didn’t try to impose “meaning” by assigning the circumstances of our suffering to the arbitrary will of an omnipotent and distant God.   Teilhard was first and foremost a student of evolution. Change is the course of life, and sometimes life has no other way forward than through great upheaval.  The Storm is a storm. 

What it shatters, reveals, and opens up is all part of what we get to sort through and make sense out of.  What we choose to do with the wreckage, and how we decide to rebuild…that is our agency.  Our will to choose hope or despair. Our choice to participate in this unfolding, or “in fieri” as Teilhard says: the great process of becoming.  And through every step of it we can pray, as he did, “teach me to adore this by seeing You hidden within it.”

There’s been a great upheaval in my life.  It’s been painful, messy, shattering, and it’s been beautiful, surprising, and hopeful.  The existing structures have shifted and new structures are emerging …a slow work of trust that is not happening independently or in isolation. 

Dear evolutionaries…

I am--in every way--imperfectly trying to participate in this becoming by remaining committed to being truthful, honest, courageous and loving, even as my structures shift...especially as they do.  I have never been more certain of my own desire to continue to give my self away in the hopes of participating with all of you in something greater than ourselves, something we all form part of together…the greater whole we represent.   Yesterday, I ritualized my commitment and this threshold of change in my life with the "un-holy" sacraments of ink and needle.  It's my own way to mark this and remember (be membered to) this intention always:

Teach me to adore this process of becoming by seeing You in every aspect of it…the difficult changes, and the surprising hope.  Teach me to trust the joy and sadness, the loving and the letting go, death and birth, recognizing that all of it belongs in this great evolutionary unfolding.  This is our body...

In fieri. 

 

ADVENT AGENCY

I haven’t been paying attention. Christmas is Sunday and I feel confused by that fact.  Like we skipped a month in there somewhere, or I had amnesia.  This post is long, even for me.  So consider it your fair warning of my catching up from a couple months away.

My life has been a non-stop string of changes and challenges in the past couple months, which have only been put in perspective by the bigger shifts and challenges our country and world are facing.  There has been nothing stable about the ground on which our feet are planted…and my view has become equally impacted by the transience in my own life as well as the shifting scenery in our country.  A double dose of world-tilt and nausea. 

I remember how in ballet we were trained to find a still point to whip our heads around and find as we spun to keep ourselves from getting dizzy.  Your body turns, your head keeps still until the last possible moment when you whip around to find the point again before the rest of your body comes around full circle behind your still gaze.   The eyes are the last thing to leave the still point and the first to come back to it…while the world turns around you while you spin in graceful double and triple pirouettes.

I keep trying to find something still to fix my gaze on these days, and I can’t find it.  I’m beginning to realize that “still point” is going to be found from a different set of eyes than the ones that look out at all this change.  I’m realizing that it wont be my eyes at all that can find the still point now, but a different seeing altogether…and it's going to require a deeper kind of muscle memory: one that relies less on the way things look and relies more on a gut intuition that there’s more than meets the eye to all the chaos that surrounds our individual and collective lives right now.

How many of us are feeling this way, I wonder?  How many of us are looking for the still point, grasping at straws for something to stabilize the sense of dislocation…trying desperately to move through the motions of normalcy hoping it will start to feel that way long enough to keep the nausea at bay?

My body finally called the stop on my attempt to lose myself in work as a way to escape…and after a chest cold turned sinus infection, I am bed ridden with strict orders from doctor and family to stay put.  At least for one afternoon.  The timing is eerie: today is winter solstice.   A friend texted me to tell me that last night was the darkest night in 500 years…a lunar eclipse to boot.  Now comes the turn…slowly edging back toward life.  At least that’s what the seasons will do—they will always keep going, keep turning—their still-point is life itself.  

So while I lay here, and watch my world nauseatingly spin long enough to consider the reasons why, I suddenly thought about the Christmas story from this angle….what if Mary felt exactly like I do right now?  What if she was as nauseated and unsure as I am?

 What if she wasn’t as passively acquiescing as the male narrators of her story have made her out to be?  I mean, is it really so different to how we look back on traumatic events in our own lives from the comfort of hindsight?

We are very guilty as humans of a perpetual tendency to dress down the absolute chaos of what life in the past was really like, and fit the anguish of it all neatly into a sequential linearity tied up with a bow of clear outcomes.  We fill in all kinds of meaning and beautiful angelic messages into what was really just a shit-storm of uncertainty and small moments of courage that wind up defining our whole lives.

I recently came upon some old pictures of when I was in my late teens visiting refugee camps in Algeria.  One picture stopped me dead as my younger self seemed to look at me in a way that demanded I take immediate inventory of my life. Youth does that: the way we look at the world, with a mixture of hope and expectation, with a sense of purpose and the soft-animal-body belonging that hasn't yet been tarnished by cynicism or self-doubt.  What are you going to do? What will you do with this life? Those eyes seem to ask me from across dimensions.

So I’m wondering about Mary now, and what her eyes looked like as they asked those same questions, probably a little younger than mine in that picture. 

It doesn’t interest me whether it was an angel that came down and informed her of what was happening, or whether the circumstances that brought about the Incarnation were less angelic.   What matters to me is the moment of choice: the moment when she accepted her own agency in the matter.  That one moment that probably was much smaller than we’ve made it out to be.  

I imagine that moment which, in reality—like all moments, was simply timed between a steady heartbeat and an inaudible in breath and outbreath.  Life was absolutely ordinary in that moment everywhere around her, I guarantee it.  All around her, life was getting on with business as usual, things needed to get done, and the minutes were slipping by like they always do.  In that very moment someone in her village was dying, someone was being born and some couple was wildly making love.  The animals were being animals and shitting all over the place, and the sun was lighting up the dust, or maybe it was behind clouds…either way, the sun was there in the background in the scenery of life, like it always is.

Maybe even to an onlooker Mary looked like she just stopped to look out the window for a moment.  Maybe the angel appeared only to her.  Maybe the angel spoke in the sound of her own voice in her own head:  Mary.  Your life is at a crossroads.   You have a choice in the matter. What are you going to do?  What will you do?

And I imagine Mary—not like the male narrative version of her story--maybe seriously thinking through all her options and really feeling the weight of it all.  Maybe she had lived her whole life delighting her mother and father with how good she was, how perfectly she had met their expectations.   Maybe she had been a valued member of her community, and they expected her to follow the well-traveled route of generations of women before and after to—above all—fit in, get married, make babies, and do what is expected of you.  Maybe in this critical choice she realized that to do herself justice, she had to break the hearts of those she loved.   She’d have to bear their disappointment—and maybe some of her own as well—in order to bear the new life within her.   She probably realized she’d bear the judgment of society, and be misunderstood by most for most of her life. 

There were more than a few beats between the question and answer.  Any woman knows these identifications aren’t easily shed in the moment we’re faced with the choice to move out from under the heavy cloak we’re often more comfortable hiding behind.

 Maybe in that moment of choice she realized that to be true to herself, she had to connect to a larger intuition she’d always had deep within her.  An intuition that knows somehow our courage to step out in this way is inextricably connected to some part of Divinity becoming manifest.  Maybe in that moment of choice she realized there really was no choice after all, not if she was truly honest with herself.  It was a choice between life and pretending to live, and in that moment, the scales within her favored the living…even knowing that being alive in that way always comes at cost of great pain.

 Not that Mary knew the scope of it, mind you.  None of us ever do in the moment. I think all she had to go on in that moment was her own trembling voice, her own body and her deep spiritual intuition.  Whatever the angel was or was not saying, ultimately, it came down to her trusting her own gut. 

Before she could answer herself, she would have to first surmount her doubt of believing herself worthy of such a love, a love that offered her a part in a story so full of hope and beauty.   Everything must have been fighting against that small intuition in that moment: like all humans, Mary probably never believed herself worthy…not really.  Sure, she was headstrong, and perhaps always imagined that her life was meant to take on bigger dimensions, but in the moment? I promise you she was deeply tempted to take the easier and more well traveled path of minimizing the greatness that welled in her, to take the path of self-loathing and shame that would have created a much darker but more manageable narrative out of the events.   The choice that would have led her to take a much more believable storyline….something people could handle and make sense out of.  It also would have come at the small price of her very soul.

There is a connection there between what we believe about our worth and the way that belief yields the fruit of hope, picked later in a moment of wild courage and unpredictable circumstances.  And how—in the moments of real choice, of real courage—what we are really saying with our choice is that we believe something about the core of who we are that this world and the hardships of life may have almost stolen from us or tried to cover over. 

It is something that the eyes of our youth fiercely communicate:  you belong here, you are part of something bigger and you can trust the invitation your heart offers you with every beat to trust your own inner “still point”…you can trust that choice you knew deep down wasn’t a choice afterall.  Not if you wanted to be truly alive.  Not if you wanted to offer something good and true and lasting to this world.  Not if you want to help in whatever small you can with our “ordinary” choices.   And what do we know about the scope and effect of our small moments of courage, anyway?

So that was it.  The moment came, and somewhere between a bleating goat in the background and a man yelling something to another man down the road,  Mary said: ok.  I trust this.  I don’t know what it means.  I don’t know how it will end.  But I trust it.

I imagine that this moment began a circuitous rehearsal, and that over her lifetime she must have stared out the window thousands of times asking her the same questions: what have I gotten myself into? What will I do?  But that one first moment set the course of a lifetime of trying to learn how to trust and believe herself as part of something bigger, of learning to find her still point deep within herself rather than in the spinning world around her.

So yeah.  I don’t think Mary was as passive and acquiescing as we’ve made her out to be.  I don’t quite believe the ages of male narration of her story that have turned her inner conflict into a five minute exchange with an Angel.  I think Mary was equal parts scared shitless and awake enough to know the choice she had to make.   I think her world was spinning.  And I think that between one breath and the next she just chose to trust that somehow the events of her life would not be wasted or lived in isolation from a bigger story, and she chose to accept herself as playing part in a story that arched toward hope.  And that takes a lot courage…the kind of courage that incarnates Christ in this world.

By the way.  Don’t forget the other characters in the familiar story…there were psychotic power-hungry mad kings, there was a genocide of a whole generation of male children, and the world was in absolute chaos and filled with violence, fear and uncertainty.  Not unlike our own world today.

And while it might be tempting for us to believe ourselves as powerless in the face of what seems like an onslaught of terrible outcomes in our world lately that we thought we could stem the tide of, maybe we’re not as powerless as we believe.  Maybe all of our small moments of courage add up to a lot of things shifting.  And maybe one moment begets another bigger moment of courage. 

Maybe it begins with believing ourselves as capable to step out of the prescribed story lines like Mary did.  Maybe that one moment of choice is all it takes to begin a domino effect.  In Mary’s life, that domino effect gave her the tenacity to face being a refugee, running for their lives and surviving on nothing.  Maybe that one moment led to a lifetime of moments in which Mary found a way to stand up to the empire with her resiliency and hopeful belief …a belief that she instilled in the mind and heart of her young son.

Whatever the choice is you face in your life…be courageous, evolutionaries.  Trust the inner voice.  The voice that sounds like yours, but carries the weight of angelic power.  The deeper intuition you have to take leavefrom the ordinary and to believe yourself worthy of bearing divinity through the ways you step out…and you just might find the ways that your many moments of courage add up to a life capable of standing up to empire.

Back to my room.  Things are still spinning here.  But when I think about Mary’s courage, I’m filled with the deeper knowing that I’m not performing a play in isolation from the larger stage of life.  All of these moments are connected somehow.  I can feel the still point somewhere in my belly…and it is there that I can feel a deeper knowing. 

I don’t know what it means.  I don’t know where it will end.  But I trust it.

I leave you with these word of David Whyte as a Christmas gift.  I hope you can feel that still point in you even just for one moment this holiday season…and may that point be the revelation of your own courageous voice.  For whatever comes next will require each of us to begin perceiving reality from a deeper set of eyes.  

REVELATION MUST BE TERRIBLE

Revelation must be
terrible with no time left
to say goodbye.

Imagine that moment
staring at the still waters,
with only the brief tremor

of your body to say
you are leaving everything
and everyone you know behind.

Being far from home is hard, but you know,
at least we are all exiled together.
When you open your eyes to the world

you are on your own for
the first time.  No one is
even interested in saving you now

and the world steps in
to test the calm fluidity of your body
from moment to moment,

as if it believed you could join
its vibrant dance
of fire and calmness and final stillness.

As if you were meant to be exactly
where you are, as if,
like the dark branch of a desert river,

you could flow on without a speck
of guilt and everything
everywhere would still be just as it should be.

As if your place in the world mattered
and the world could
neither speak nor hear the fullness of

its own bitter and beautiful cry
without the deep well
of your body resonating in the echo.

Knowing that it takes only
that first, terrible
word to make the circle complete,

revelation must be terrible
knowing you can
never hide your voice again.

---David Whyte.

EXPRESSION

“It was said of Abba Agathon that for three years
he lived with a stone in his mouth...
until he had learned to keep silence.”

The Sayings of The Desert Fathers

Silence.  Its either the most welcoming or most terrifying concept for human beings.  The first time I went to a week long silent retreat I remember experiencing something close to a panic around day three.  Our days were locked into a rhythm of three double sit periods a day, punctuated by time alone, with breaks of alone time, sprinkled with more time alone on top.  During the meals we would sit together, and never speak…quietly lowering our gaze as we passed other people so as not to disturb their solitude.  It was probably the fourth day when silence really began to do its work on me: during dinner, while eating a salad and traveling to Oz and back between bites…I was passing the time lost in my own daydreams when I suddenly came back to earth and stared at the lettuce I was about to put in my mouth.

Really.  Stared. At. It.

It was a classic, barely-crunchy, mostly-translucent, more-white-than-green leaf of iceberg lettuce—what you would expect from a salad bar at a monastery.  But the light hit it just right at that exact moment, illuminating the little network of veins that made up this little leaf and it stopped me in my tracks mid fork lift.   Suddenly, I became aware of the history of this leaf: where it might have grown, the rain and water it received, the smell of the earth it came from, the effort of life to push through the soil and become, the hands who harvested it, the distance it traveled, the person who washed it and dumped into this container…the “whole picture” of the story of THIS particular vegetable that was about to become part of me. 

The realization that I was eating a product of the cosmos, a system of time, and a network of human hands hit me with a force that seemed to call out from the lettuce itself “LOOK at me!”...and the veil fell away from the necessity of the ordinary, revealing instead the sacredness of the communion of this mundane act we so casually call “eating”. 

Of course, I did what anyone would do.  I looked at my fellow retreatants like a crazed girl high on life: “Holy shit—do you guys SEE this lettuce?!!!” I more or less tried to telepathically communicate with my expression and looks.  Being far more seasoned than I, however, they didn’t even look up at me or notice this cosmically, life-altering, communion I was having with my salad.  It was brutally humbling.  Not given the option to tell everyone what an extraordinary insight I had experienced, the lettuce-revelation-cased-in-a-week-of-silence seemed to quietly ask me: is it enough for you to see this? Or is it only valuable to you if you talk about it?

For three more days my inability to express what had happened aged itself within me into a quiet posture of humility every time I raised my fork: maybe this is what was originally intended with the blessing of food.

In the absence of our usual modes of expression, my expression changed.   Rather than it being something I talked about, it became something I lived my way into.  Silence teaches us the difference, but we rarely listen: eager as we are to assume that the usual modes of communicating are the only way we can know each other or be known, terrified as we are to face the truth of the naked solitude of being. 

Under the guise of self-expression we allow ourselves to vomit all over each other, to justify reactiveness as self-empowerment, and to subject one another to rants of emotionality as if it were synonymous with intimacy.   Language has become mindless, unfiltered, and vapid.  Words have become un-weighted and thrown out as if they have no meaning, no correlation with the agency of action they represent. “I didn’t really mean that,” “ I was just venting” or “well, that was just locker room talk,”  we say.

We shoot off words in reaction to reactive words, we take to facebook to “express” our anger at the injustice we see happening in the world, we tweet and text without feeling words sound themselves out in the shape of our own voices…and what is this noise accomplishing, exactly?  Are we communicating something with the real hope of actual transformation, or are we talking at everyone, unconsciously elevating ourselves while judgmentally blanketing others as ignorant?

How much of our “expression” is really just dissipating energy before giving that energy (thoughts, ideas, words), an opportunity to root  deeply and form something truly new within us and in the world? What might happen if we carried a stone in our mouth like the desert father Abba Agathon until we learned the value what is worth expressing…and how?

Perhaps we can begin with simply considering the definition of “express”.  It comes from the latin expressare, which means to press (pressare) out (ex).   The Old French Expresser was utilized in late Middle English to mean to ‘press out, obtain by squeezing or wringing.’

Doesn’t exactly sound like an unfiltered process, does it? On the contrary, the definition denotes a process of harvesting something from deep within.  Expression, understood in this way, is far closer to what Rilke describes in his Letters to a Young Poet:

“Let your judgements follow their quiet, undisturbed evolution, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressured or hurried in any way.  It’s all about carrying to term and giving birth.  To let every impression and every seed of a feeling realize itself on its own, in the dark, in the unconveayble, the unconscious, beyond the reach of your understanding, and await with deep humilityand patience the hour when a new clarity is born…”

Perhaps this is why tears are such a sacred expression…a pressing out of this “not knowing” in a tender and vulnerable admission that can’t be explained in words.  Its not surprising, therefore, that expression has also come to mean the very look we carry on our face.    

At a friends house recently, I was frustratingly wrestling with my words and myself, teetering on the verge of tears when my friend looked at me and said gently: Brie, what if you didn’t have to explain yourself anymore…both to yourself and to everyone else?

Her words, weighted and slow…in the warm timber of her voice, became a lettuce-like-revelation, unlocking something within me.

How much of our lives are lived in the rut of creating and re-creating a narrative to make sense of things…the words of the story we tell ourselves over and over? How much of our talking is akin to blindly casting ropes out… as if we could contain the shape of life, as if we could know each other through the tethers and lassos of words? 

After all….is the real source of knowing one another measured by how many words we’ve shared, or stories we create, and narratives we build? 

Is not what is most deeply true about ourselves, what is most intimate, immediately reached and touched by a simple glance exchanged with a beloved?  Do we not find ourselves in the face of great love and great pain with an inability to explain or categorize into words what feels too deep to express?

Is not beauty that which ultimately leads us to silence?

I’d like to suggest that we all  try and hold a stone in our mouths—figuratively—for the next week…patiently learning how to contain the impulse to jump right in and say something, and instead begin to find our way to true expression: realizing that what really needs to be said will push its way out, like golden oil from an olive press, in time and in ways that don’t always require talking.    

What if we were to experiment with keeping silence for a period of time every day, just to discover and remember how much of our talking is really not expression at all?   

As Teilhard de Chardin urges us:

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.  We are impatient of being on the ways to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made passing through
some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.

And so it is with you;
Your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
Let them shape themselves, without undue haste. 
Don’t force them on, as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. 
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that God’s hand is leading your,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”

Keep your silence, evolutionaries. 

Allow your feelings, ideas and insights to be planted deep within.  Who knows what these seeds—given the time and patience to really take root—might grow into and be capable of one day expressing? 

CONSTRICTION

“Sit in your cell and it will teach you everything”
Abba Moses

It was hot.  Really hot.  I scrunched my body as tight as I could against the rock wall behind me and into the little bit of shade the boulders provided. 

Cynthia had sent us out into the Sonoran desert with very simple instructions: we were to find a spot, draw a circle around ourselves and sit there.  No books, no journal.  No “plan” for a meaningful affective experience.  Just sit for a morning and see what wisdom would offer us.  The Desert Fathers and Mothers had lived in similar harsh conditions, with the arid desert topography of rocky harsh landscapes and the silence of solitude.    They lived in small cave dwellings, or human-made lean-to’s with woven reeds for roofs.  The monastic “cell” represented the entire locale of their transformation: where they prayed, ate, slept, and worked…day in and day out.  “Sit in your cell…and it will teach you everything,” said Abba Moses. So in classic Cynthia fashion, we were out in one of her mischievous experiments to see what would happen when we accepted the constriction of one particular desert corner for a morning.

Of course being the aesthetically inclined ascetic that I am, I didn’t want just any little desert corner.  Oh no.  I had the brilliant idea of bouldering up the face of a cliff to a little ledge so that my “circle” would essentially be conveniently boundaried by the straight drop down and nothing but air.  Only problem was that I hadn’t judged the movement of the sun adequately, realizing a little too late that I’d be up in my little eagle’s nest baking in the full morning heat of the desert sun.

You just had to have a “cell” with a view, didn’t you? I muttered to myself.

A breeze kicked up almost in response to my complaint, and between that and draping a shirt between two rocks above me, I was able to keep my Scottish skin from being burned to a crisp or of being in any real danger of heatstroke. 

I wouldn’t say it was comfortable, but after a while I began to accept it…I was, after all in the desert.  This was not the place for comfort.

I sat there….and did…nothing.   For a while my brain did gymnastics across the rocks, picking all the spots I should have climbed to sit in.  I watched the crows circle and let my thoughts drift to Narnia and back in the space of a minute.  I watched other little colorful dots below—other students (my glasses had been left behind as superfluous decadence of metropolitan excess)—find their spot, draw their circles and sit .  After rating their spots I started connecting them in random geometric shapes in my mind…like stars, I tried to see how many constellations I could build from my birds-eye-view of their locations.  Eventually—and I have no idea how long the “eventually” was—I grew bored with my mind’s rambling and something in me sunk in deeper into myself…and I finally just…sat.

 I sat there, until I stopped thinking about how “well” I was doing the assignment of sitting.  I sat until my legs fell asleep and it no longer bothered me.  I sat there until I forgot that I was sitting there, and yet not for a second forgetting.  It was as if my interior attention eventually replicated my exterior, finally settling into my heart…and began really seeing.

 The desert cell is a place that strips away all that is unnecessary, returning us to our birthright in the raw gift of being.   After a while (once I had sunk beneath my mental chatter), I could sense myself as part of the whole landscape.  No longer separate as if all of creation were the revolving staged backdrop around the soliloquy of my life, I found my being as inextricable from the being around me.  As I let go of time, I could feel the great lumbering ancient age of the earth, the vastness of this journey of life in evolution, infinite, terrifying…the I AM of it all.   And when this realization threatened to engulf “me”, the tiny little me sitting on ledge in a cliff, I suddenly and simultaneously became aware of the intimacy….the Thou speaking itself with infinite tenderness in the rocks that seemed to want to cradle me from the steep drop below, in the crows that cawed to me like disapproving Spanish mothers, in the playfulness of the small little curious bugs that crawled over my leg...in the bead of sweat that—just then—made its way down the side of my face, as if the universe itself couldn’t hold back a caress. 

Vast and immanent.  Terrifying and tender.  The burning bush that doesn’t burn itself up.  An infinite love somehow is made more visible through all this particularity, like light shinning through the myriad of colors of the fragile glass of our finite realm. 

Ironically, the “lines” of my cell were precisely what allowed all the “lines” of division to drop out of my vision entirely.  I became the life of the desert and the desert life lived itself into me.  There was no longer a separation in my field of vision between the “cell” of my “self” and everything else either.  Between the “I” and “thou” was only pure intimacy—an ever present relationality, always available, an infinite well of being and belonging…of love itself.

I think of Teilhard, having been more or less exiled for years to the deserts of China…was there something about the solitude of his work in barren landscapes that allowed him to see the shape of life-in-evolution so clearly? To taste this relational Love-within-all things?  I read his words in The Spiritual Power of Matter and I know that somehow his exile in the forbidding landscapes were integral in what “had forever withdrawn his heart from all that is merely local or individual, all that is fragmentary, henceforth for him it alone in its totality would be his father and mother, his family…his unique, consuming passion.” 

What else but years in the desert and the quiet resignation to his “constriction” could have yielded what was purest in Teilhard's own becoming?  Wasn’t it the conscious acceptance of his“cell”—the way he yielded with love (again and again) to the anguishing challenges and limitations he endured in his life—the very fodder that ultimately produced the vision that could heal the ancient division he sought to reconcile between matter and spirit?

At the end of that week in the Sonoran, I did what we tend to do at the end of a time of revelation: nervously anticipate my crash landing back home and pre-emptively freak out.  I wailed in exasperation during a group discussion:  “Its fine and good to be out here experiencing this…but what about when we go home??? I really do want to sell everything and give it all away...But how do I do that when I’m a mom? When I am constrained by the relationships that depend on me???” Cynthia answered me gently:

“Whatever your external circumstances always be inwardly free.  And remember that you have agency…and your life is made by your choices.”

I didn’t like her answer at the time.  I mean, its not like I was going to choose to abandon my children and literally become a monk (although I’ve certainly had moments where I’ve threatened to do so).   And I certainly didn’t feel inwardly free, roiling as I was with my youthful passionate nature and the classic victimization that accompany a view of life as something that happens to you, instead of something you participate in and flow with…an endless and ever-present well of potentiality for new creation, new possibilities, change, and transformation.

But just as my cell on the cliff gave me a taste of an undivided heart and field of vision, over time the “cell” of my life offered insight to Cynthia’s words.  By slowly learning to accept the circumstances of my constrictions as a choice I am learning how to see the discomfort of the constriction as the very thing that began wearing down some of those internal divisions within me.  And as those divisions have worn down, I’ve discovered different ones that needed reconciling and thus the “walls” of my cell have shifted.

Like the edges of the round boulders softened by the sands of time, there is within each of us a work that is taking place everytime we consciously accept the constrictions of our present circumstances. We are not passive observes of the movie of life, but actively co-participants, co-chemists in the alchemy of transformation, always being given the option to accept what makes up the edges of the cell we will live into for this season.  It should therefore come as no surprise to us that what shapes each of our “cells” for a season will change as we become less divided ourselves.

What is the cell of your life right now?  The particular set of constrictions that you can choose to consciously accept as the ground of your transformation?

If you choose to accept your cell, evolutionary… remember that it’s a choice. Allow that choice to become what I'd like to think is a wager on Love.  Accept the constriction with gratitude as that which is keeping you awake, alert, and wearing down the lines of the division within your heart …until you yourself become undivided and can see everything, everything as an opportunity for transformation, for new possibilities, for more life.

Who knows what the womb of this cell will yield in your life...and in this world?

Sit in your cell.  It will teach you everything.

I’ll be right there with you, in a nearby cell.

(Or, above in a perch on a cliff… as the case may be.)

THE COST OF BLOOMING

...the flowers bend their bright bodies,
    and tip their fragrance to the air,
      and rise,
         their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
   gladly and lightly,
      and there it is again —
         beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
   Do you love this world?
      Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
         Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

...with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
      to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
         nothing, forever?

Mary Oliver

I have always loved Autumn..and not just because I was born on All Saints day. I’ve always loved the color change of the trees, and the curious paradox of the bounty of harvest as nature simultaneously lets go and prepares for its descent into winter.  Abundance and non-clinging together.  Interesting how those two things seems to be connected.

In the Jewish calendar, the fall is the beginning of the year…and frankly, that makes a lot of sense to me: the harvest of the year’s work seems to coincide not just in an agrarian way but in a spiritual one as well.  I seem to always find the fall as a time of great clarity of insight into the year’s work, while also relishing the chance to take inventory of what needs to be shed in order to make room for new life up ahead.  I find comfort in knowing that the season between the letting go and the growth  of what is new is separated by the quiet darkness of winter, that there’s time and a kind rhythm to these seasons.

This fall equinox marks a particular set of challenging releases for me.  Among them, the loss of my most beloved grandmother: Rosemary Ada McNiece.  Just like the seasons, we’ve known her time was on the horizon…but somehow the sharp edge of the transition, the startling finality of the line drawn “before” and “after” elucidated all the ways I feel myself on the precipice of the unknown, standing on the edge of “in between”.

I feel a little like Frodo Baggins, when he paused one last time with Sam at the edge of the Shire…taking in one last glance toward all that they had known before pressing onward into the unknown their journey.

When evolution beckons, when we finally stand at the edge of our "shire", there is always one last pause: we always have one final moment to decide if we really do want to press on into unfamiliar lands of adventure, or return to what is safe and comforting about what is known.

What urges some of us onward? What keeps us from turning back? 

What is this thing that calls some of us out of the grooves of life’s established order and into the deserts and “fierce landscapes”?

I’ve been digging into the Desert Fathers and Mothers at class, and consequently have been spending time again lately studying their words of wisdom.  There is something that has always drawn me about those who are willing to leave the comfort of the familiar behind and risk it all for the sake of the journey of becoming…and the Desert Fathers and Mothers were among the first to take Jesus’ evolutionary invitation seriously to “leave all things that you have.”

Desert life was no cakewalk: these were not communities that had a common building as we think of modern monasticism.  These were individuals who lived in caves or small human-made dwelling places, and although they were in contact with each other, they lived far enough away from each other so as to not be able to see another fellow monk (male or female) unless they made the journey to do so.   Their rhythm of life cycled through work and prayer and constant solitude—an arduous and demanding schedule for anyone, let alone in the middle of a desert.   The appeal to this lifestyle had to have been much deeper than any escapism…for could you really call this rigorous life of perpetual solitude an “escape”?  If anything it seems to be trading social and economic difficulties for challenges of physical and mental survival: something deeper was calling them onward.

So what exactly were they doing out there???

I spent some time studying the desert fathers and mothers writings in depth a couple of years ago by reading Thomas Merton’s Wisdom of the Desert and The Sayings of the Desert Fathers in preparation for a Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault on this very subject.  I began fully expecting to write them off as ascetics who hated the body and were borderline masochistic, but I was surprised to discover a deeply embodied approach to the Christian incarnation that yielding profound and timeless wisdom.  These were people who, in the face of the new Christianity-as-an-almost-state-religion, recognized that simply “belonging” to Christianity in a tribal-religious way was not in fact the same thing as “following” Jesus and becoming Christ.

They didn’t do what they did for the sake of identification; belonging to the newly minted “safe” Christianity represented a loss to them.  Somehow while the rest of Christian-dom went about building the beautiful gilded churches that towered in the cities and creating a hierarchy of bishops (male, of course) to run and organize the church, the early monastics stood in peaceful opposition, seeking instead to make their bodies the quiet locale of transformation.  They knew that such steady and committed work to change necessitated a movement away from the ease of an intellectual system of belief that didn’t require everything.

When I returned from my Grandmother’s funeral late wednesday night, I was shocked to discover that my cactus had bloomed.  I had named my cactus Amma Syncletica after a desert mother, so the poignancy of the bloom happening that day was not lost on me.  Even more poignant: the bloom only lasted 24hrs, reaching its apex sometime in the early morning hours the next day.  Luckily, (being an absurdly early riser that I am) I saw the bloom at its most open, beautiful and vulnerable expression, but I didn’t get a picture of it…and somehow that also feels important.

What if I had missed it??

I jokingly said to myself, “ If a cactus blooms in the desert did it still bloom?”

And it hit me. Hard.

Who or what do we seek to bloom for?  What kind of bloom are we creating with our lives?  Perhaps more importantly…what is the cost of a life’s bloom?

It seems strange that we think what is most beautiful, intimate, and precious about our lives comes without the quiet work of discipline and the patient bearing of the suffering that defines this finite realm.  Will we accept the constriction? Will we bloom even if it is not for the sake of being seen, praised, or rewarded?

We’ve been exploring an understanding of love that is creative, abundant, and that flows…but Teilhard also describes Love as an energy that must be harnessed, indicating that energy in and of itself does not get the job done.  Teilhard tells us we have to learn how to focus it somehow, concentrating it like the beam into a laser.  The nature of love is not, apparently, diffuse—spreading itself any which way—but seems to invite us to the particular, to a specific container in which the transforming energy of love can be tended, clarified and unleashed into the world.

People often describe love as having two directions: “horizontal” love, and “vertical” love.  The horizontal love is the love between human beings and the created order, and the “vertical” love is the love between Divinity and the created order.  So, with this lens in place, monastics often get a lot of criticism: “They escaped the world! They refused the horizontal and chose the ease of living alone rather than the complexity of being in relationship!” These same critiques often are accompanied with critiques of the contemplative path in general as not serving to make people relationally attuned and accessible people who are concerned with action in the world, but rather people who prefer solitude, are emotionally closed off, etc.

I disagree.

On the surface, the “vertical and horizontal” framework sounds like a nice holistic picture that encompasses all directions… except that its base assumption is that God is above and not already in the midst of this created realm.

Oops.

Like the cactus in the desert knows, you have to reach beneath what is seen if you want to actually be of any use to the environment around you and serve your “neighbors”.  The roots extend far to hold and share water, that precious and desperately scarce resource…and like all trees, the systems of roots that connect it to others is below what appears on the surface as separateness.

That is what I think the early monastics were up to.  They dug deep so that humanity would continue to have access to the waters of wisdom.  They disciplined themselves because they somehow understood that love requires concentration, that there is a cost to the process of transitioning away from what is diffuse into becoming focused, and that blooming is not contingent on being seen, praised, or rewarded.

We’re going to explore some of their teachings in the coming weeks… so dig your roots in deep, evolutionaries.  Take an inventory of the leaves you need to release.   Are you willing to leave the comfort of the familiar behind and risk it all for the sake of the journey of becoming?

As Cynthia likes to say, "Good! It will only cost you everything."

Love (part 2)

“For one human being to love another:
that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks…
the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
Rilke

Last week we began exploring the nature of love as an evolutionary force and the ways in which we still might be—as Rilke suggests—turning love into a path of clinging and possession.   We discovered the ways in which we truncate love to signify a bond that ties two people to each other.  Like two magnetic poles, we think of love as this force of attraction that binds two people together, often collapsing into one singular unit…but is that the end-goal of love? or is there another way we might begin to comprehend the risk entailed in loving?

What does the dynamism of the Christian Trinity, as understood by the mystics, teach us about how love moves, creates and has the potential to be a force for evolution??

Like Rilke, Teilhard criticizes the conventionality we’ve turned love into:

“…the one must not absorb the other….Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops like the universe itself only by perpetual discovery. The only right love is that between couples whose passion leads them both, one through the other, to a higher possession of their being.” [i]

In another essay, Teilhard continues this thread of describing love:

“...the best test for gauging [love] would be to note how decisively it develops in the direction of a greater freedom of spirit. The more spiritual the affection, the less it sucks up into itself—and the stronger its impulse towards action.

…love stands as the threshold of another universe.” [ii]

Therefore the real test of love, Teilhard tells us, is the degree to which it does not stop at the connection, but rather compels us forward in the evolution of our own becoming. This evolutionary becoming inevitably results in an increased action, creativity, and love in the world. 

Far from remaining stymied at the “taming phase” that we read last week in The Little Prince,  what Teilhard describes is a love that propels the lovers outward via the force of the generativity that they share. Rather than understanding love between two people as mutual consumption, the couple energizes the other further into an energetic expansion, further into the world.

Teilhardian scholar Ilia Delio describes the love of human relationships in this Trinitarian way:

“Instead of two people looking at each other, love must become two people looking in the same direction…at a common point of becoming, ahead, in the future.”[1]

 As another illustration of the Trinity and why three seems to be essential to the flow of love is the way in which love tends to turn us outward, beyond our selves and each other. Beatrice Bruteau ponders that the true nature of love—and therefore the Trinity itself—as ecstatic, transcending the bond of two people toward each other, toward a common third outwardly:

The element of risk is present in self-abandoning love. This is where insideness turns into outsideness, where one relinquishes control. One gives being but one does not control how it is expressed, one does not know what form it will take, what will happen next, how it will turn out. To pass on the gift of life is to pass on the ability to give the gift of life, and what happens past that point is out of one’s hands. That is what makes it truly a gift of love. This is what I am calling “ecstasy,” the insideness turning into outsideness.[iii]

In The Little Prince, the “taming” phase and love’s possession is not the end goal either. After the prince tames the fox, it comes time for the prince to go. The fox cries, but proceeds to give the Little Prince a gift of the secret on how they will remain connected, uttering the most quoted words from the book:

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret:
It is only with the heart the one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

The fox gives the Little Prince the gift of seeing, perceiving not with the conventional external focus on what we are trying so desperately to cling to in the outer form, but the spiritual perception of his heart. In this transformed knowing, we see that the bonds of love are meant to evolve into a more subtle form, even to the point of being capable of continuing to grow and give life despite all distances or visible obstacles.

This becomes the central theme of the book, and in the end becomes the way the Prince demonstrates Love is stronger than death. Incidentally, this is the title of a book on the very same concept by Cynthia Bourgeault.

In it, Bourgeault describes the energy field between two people as the “body of hope:” a subtle but tangible energetic “third” something formed between two people who consciously cultivate it, which perpetually urges them onward into further becoming. This subtle body has an eternal quality to it and the capacity to endure and keep generating – even beyond death.

Perhaps what Antoine and Bourgeault are hinting at is that the nature of true love is that it will, by its very nature (as is evident in the cosmos itself) require us to “stop looking at each other,” and instead allow our love to precipitate a greater expansion in our field of vision:

With the bonds of love in place we are then meant to keep going, to stretch them and weave an entirely new possibility that remains forever part of our world.

We have a long way to go before we begin to understand the evolutionary power of love in human relationships. Perhaps we are mostly captivated by the taming of love, not in the power of what happens when we release, let go, or practice a stretching of it…and explore where the risk of love might take us.

We can recognize true love because its costly signature: it naturally invokes this kind of radical vulnerability, a generativity that urges each other’s evolution forward. It is a gaze that compels us to not just stand looking at each other our whole lives but allows us to look, one through the other, in a common direction, at the entirety and eternal nature of life itself.

 Love allows the tincture of the other’s particularity to become the lens through which we are enabled to see the world’s need, and turn outwardly to meet it.

 It is for this reason I believe we’re far more comfortable traveling the more established sentimental lines of how we understand love and make it about belonging to each other rather than propelling each other onward. Perhaps we’re so accustomed to running from ache – or pain of any kind – that we run away from love itself: refusing to give evolution the opportunity to draw us forward because we have yet to accept that ache of absence is how presence is established.

It’s easier to be lulled into turning in and walling ourselves off from the world, reducing our love into a nest away from the world rather than a force compelling us to stride further into the world.

Risk, evolutionaries.

Allow love to become more than a piece of glass you posses and hold tightly in the comfort of your pockets, instead becoming the lens through which you can perceive the entire cosmos around you. We are swimming in a relational field of creativity and more-ness…a dynamism called love.

What or whom you are attracted to is part of an evolutionary force that beckons you beyond the walls of what is safe and familiar.

Don't be afraid of the hurt...it’s part of the risk inherent in love’s evolutionary adventure as we continue to become.

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This post "Love" is an excerpt from my eBook "Longing, Loving, and Letting Go: The Trinity in the Evolution of our Lives," which is among the bonus material offered when you pre-order a copy of Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell's new book, "The Divine Dance." For more info click HERE

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[1] Ilia Delio, personal conversation, May, 2016.

[i] Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; New York 1969)

[ii] Teilhard de Chardin, On Love and Happiness, “The Evolution of Chastity” (London, Williams Collins Sons&Co, 1969), 12-13.

[iii] Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy, p.39

LOVE (part 1)

Of course I'll hurt you.  
Of course you'll hurt me.  
Of course we will hurt each other.  
But this is the very condition of existence.  To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter.  To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.

 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I sat on the sofa, my arms full with the tangle of my two sons’ tiny bodies…trying hard as hell to hide the fact that I was totally losing it.  My attempts at hiding my emotion failed, however, and my six year old looked up on me and said “Oh, is your heart bursting again? It’s ok, mama,” patting me on the leg in a sweet, reverse parenting moment.

We were watching the newly reimagined Netflix original version of The Little Prince …and needless to say it lived up to my own treasured esteem of this beautiful French story. While the above quote of the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is not from the book, it illustrates his powerful grasp on the nature of love, presence and the cost of true transformation that inspired this unforgettable classic.

We’ve been exploring the relationship between discomfort and evolution. Nowhere is this relationship more present than in love.

We all know that love requires risk, but this risk has been narrowed in our culture, reduced to the sentimentality that we’ve limited love to mean: the risk one takes in romantic love when attracted to someone else, of making their feelings known and becoming vulnerable with that other person. But if love is (as Teilhard describes) the physical structure of the universe, then it stands that the potential of what love can be (its corresponding risk and all) is as big as the cosmos itself. 

Risk, it seems, is not a one time deal in love.  

We, however, are habitual people who crave comfort...and risk is uncomfortable.  Risk is hard.  Risk is...well, scary.  And fear makes us do strange things: we become self-preservationists rather than evolutionaries. We slip into that part of our brain that keeps us in a survivalist mentality of fight or flight, and are therefore incapable of operating from that larger relational field of love the moves toward creativity.  In such a tug-of-war between comfort and discomfort, risk and fear, we often turn love (an energetic force bent toward more creativity, change and growth) into a possessive energy of clinging, resulting in stagnation.

This is part of what hurts about love: it only thrives insofar as we let it flow freely; it shrivels and dies when we try and posses each other with it.

It’s almost as if the connection-phase we experience among ourselves as human beings is like a beautiful flower that unexpectedly blooms with color; it is so beautiful that we want to keep it…so we either yank it from the ground (and therefore assure its demise) or even go so far as to pour plaster on it, thinking somehow we will preserve it from ever dying.  Perhaps this explains why becoming parents (whether biologically or otherwise) is often one of the most transformative thresholds in how we understand love. It is only when we love a vulnerable and dependent being that is constantly changing, even while we feel ourselves inextricably connected, that we begin to experience, often for the first time in our lives, a love that expects change and letting go as a part of the package.

But how do we do this? How do we love in a not-clinging way? Especially in our romantic relationships?

To begin, it requires that we pay attention to how we’ve shaped our human relationships and recognize that we have the power to change how we operate in them. It doesn’t require much for us to recognize that our culture equates love to mean a total collapsing of two people into one singular unit. Like the famous Jerry Maguire movie line, “you complete me,” we glorify the idea ideal that in the quest of love is somehow to merge with “other half”, our “soul mate” the person without which we are not whole. The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, however, has an entirely alternative take on romantic love: rather than thinking of lovers as completing each other, he describes the task of love as becoming a whole world unto one's self for the sake of the other, and love as “two solitudes that protect and greet one another.”[i]

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke criticizes how culture has limited our understanding of human love to mean a path of clinging and possession:

“Nothing describes loving less aptly than calling it a merging, surrendering and uniting with another person…it is a sublime occasion for the individual to mature…to become a world unto himself for the sake of someone else….”[ii]

Later Rilke complains further about how we have limited the power of love:

“No other area of human experience is so well-supplied with conventions: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, rafts and inflatable devices; the social approach to this question [of love] has managed to consider love a form of amusement, it must set it up as something frivolous, cheap, harmless and safe…”[iii]

 How have we turned love into an amusement or convention? Into something safe...predictable? Into clinging and possessing one another? 

Is the fullness of our human potential in love to be found in our sentimental understandings of what is “expected,” and has existed thus far…or is there a potential we have not yet explored in how love between people can aid evolution?

In the Little Prince, the fox calls the first phase of love a “taming”:

"I am looking for friends. What does that mean – tame?"
"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."
"To establish ties?"
"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."

This is how love begins in Teilhard’s “Law of complexity consciousness:” We move from attraction to connection. We identify the other as unique in all the world, with a mutual longing and need for each other. We turn toward the other, sustain the gaze of love, and form a deep bond. 

And this is where our sentimental understandings of love usually stop: the bonds of love understood as ties of belonging to another.

Of course there is a lifetime of challenges and growth as two people continue the steady work of vulnerability and the difficulty of navigating life’s turns and struggles. But is this the entirety of love’s potential – to bond two people to each other as they journey through life? Or is there another aspect to the risk of love that we’re missing?

...to be continued.

This post on Love is an excerpt from my eBook "Longing, Loving, and Letting Go: The Trinity in the Evolution of our Lives," which is among the bonus material offered when you pre-order a copy of Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell's new book, "The Divine Dance." For more info click HERE

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[ii] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, (Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 2011), 65-67.

[iii]Ibid.

UNCOMFORTABLE

A hurting world is around us, and we hide behind our freshly decorated walls,
and pretend it does not exist, or that we do not know what it is to hurt.  
We are challenged to come out and be without walls.
We are called to intentional, deliberate vulnerability.

The rule of the Northumbria Community

I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them…already noticing my palms starting to sweat, my discomfort becoming more and more apparent.

“What are your triggers?”  The therapist calmly asked me again.

I named them.  My throat closed in around a consonant….I had to say it twice to get it out. 
Shit, I thought, she’s going to notice all of this.

I had been through this before a million times, but it will likely never cease to amaze me how my body seems to have a will of its own when treading into trigger talk.

Trauma does interesting things to our brains.  Part of the path of healing involves learning how to rewire our brains from the associations created during the traumatic event.  I know rationally, that every businessman I see isn’t going to assault me…but my body has registered that one particular trigger in the part of my brain that alerts my endocrine system to go into hyper-vigilance.  This is part of life after an assault. 

She went on.

“What do you do to help yourself feel safe when you’re triggered?”

I’ve learned instinctively what to do to keep my body from going into hyper-vigilance: my prayer practices have gone a long way in helping me stay grounded and slow my heart rate (the Jesus prayer in particular setting a rhythm and tactile recitation in motion that has become a huge part of my life), but of particular interest have been the quirky physical things that help:

I’ve noticed a preference for scratchy wool blankets(which I could technically blame my Scottish heritage for), the feeling of isolated muscle exhaustion brought about by a pilates class led by a red-headed-cyborg (It’s just not natural to be that calm in those positions), and oddest of all…my new gloriously hard as hell,  you-could-have-just-slept-on-the-floor, mattress.

It turns out that all of these things are part of what therapists describe as keeping the body from disassociation.   In other words: by keeping the body slightly uncomfortable it prevents your mind from leaving the present moment and flying back into a flashback of a threat that is no longer happening.*   The slight physical discomfort allows us to create new patterns in our brains…in my case: rewiring the appearance of a stereotypical businessman (among other things) to not equate danger.

What is the relationship between discomfort and changing patterns of association and behavior?  

As awful as what has happened to me is (and while I certainly won’t stand by and allow sexual violence to continue to be dismissed, ignored, or covered up) I can honestly say that in some ways I’m grateful for what it has done in my life: I’m a different person now….more human somehow.

See, I’m a white, privileged, middle class woman.  I thought, as most of us in the white middle class privilege (WMCP) experience that something of this nature would never happen to me.  I also thought, as most in the WMCP, that the law would be on my side if it did…that I would be protected and the perpetrator dealt with.  The knights would show up, the dragon would be slain, and all would go back to “normal” as “happily ever after”.

I never could have anticipated what it is like to feel that kind of disorientation, fear, and powerlessness.  I never could have guessed what it would be like to feel the lack of empathy from lawyers with their probing and insensitive questions, and the bias from well-intentioned friends and family members unconsciously parroting the damaging scripts that our society perpetuates.  I wasn't protected, and I didn't feel safe.   

In one fell swoop I felt connected to the millions of women who have experienced this type of violence, to the collective pain-body of the feminine.   In one fell swoop I experienced a glimpse into what it is like for millions of Americans and immigrants in our country every day:  the law isn’t necessarily on your side if you don’t fit the bill, or can’t afford it (financially, emotionally, or otherwise).

 In one fell swoop, I toppled from my perch of “comfortable life” and became more united to all human beings who have been taken advantage of, violated, oppressed in any way.

Last week we explored how Teilhard talks about suffering as being the eye of the needle through which evolution mysteriously progresses through.   He also views suffering as containing within it a force that hast the potential to change us:

“Suffering holds hidden within it, in extreme intensity, the ascensional force of the world.  The whole point is to set this force free by making it conscious of what it signifies and of what it is capable… If all those who suffer in the world were to unite their sufferings so that the pain of the world should become one single grand act of consciousness…of unificiation, would not this be one of the most exalted forms in which the mysterious work of creation could be manifested to our eyes?”   (Teilhard, The Hymn of the Universe, 93-94)

 

Teilhard doesn’t excuse the causes of our suffering.  Not one bit.  Not even a little. 

But this perspective does help us to see that there is a mysterious connection between discomfort and change….and that somehow our suffering has the capacity to wake us up, to shake us out of our isolated thinking and further unite us to each other.

Trauma changed me.  It re-wired my brain to begin to understand myself in compassionate connection with the whole.  But that whole isn’t one big equal portion of suffering.  Yes, we all suffer.  But there is a very real disparity among the kinds of suffering and duration of trauma that exists between our races, ethnicities and income brackets in our country:

As a WMCP woman, my trauma event was an exception to the norm of my life.  I’ve also had the resources for therapy, the cyborg-led pilates class, and for the hard-as-floor-mattress.  I have had the communal, spiritual and emotional support I’ve needed in my recovery.

But who is asking:  “what are your triggers?”  and “what do you need to feel safe?” to the millions of black Americans and persons of color who are living in sustained trauma every day in our country?

 I was out in the mountains of North Carolina at a festival when the murder of Philando Castile and subsequent police shootings took place this summer.  I came into my room and caught my roommate Alicia’s agitated frustration as she spoke to the other two girls in the room:  “I can’t even call my grandmother to tell her I’m alright…that I’m ok,”  she said exasperatedly as she critiqued the absence of cell phone coverage in the area.  I was shocked.  This tiny glimpse of what its like to be a black American woman had never occurred to me:  after the latest in the long string of racial shootings, Alicia needed to reach out to her family to let them know that even though she was in the South and in the mountains of North Carolina, she was ok.  Not safe, mind you…because in order to feel safe one needs to know that there is no threat of immediate danger.  Alicia just wanted her grandmother to hear her voice, and for her to know that she was ok.

My own trauma has given me a visceral understanding of how my brain will register a lack of protection and control into a primal response to protect myself, and that is only after a single occurrence of trauma.  Sustained trauma at this collective level will result in even more collective triggers…triggers that we don’t see, can’t see because many of us in the WMCP experience not only don’t have them…we often are them.

Most of us in the WMCP experience aren’t at all opposed to  Black Lives Matter…myself included.   I have “supported” the movement in my own WMCP way:  I’ve liked and commented on the facebook posts, decried the injustice with everyone else whenever it comes up in conversation.  I’ve been horrified by the videos of the shootings and the new reports, like most WMCP.  But, like most, I’ve allowed my comfortable life to keep me disassociated from the traumatic reality presently facing millions of Americans.  Every day. 

I’ve chosen to disassociate and wrap myself in soft blankets and sleep on cushy mattresses:  I’ve not allowed the horror I’m witnessing to make sufficiently uncomfortable to want to change my own patterns of unconscious complicit behavior.

Teilhard is right about the potential unifying force of suffering, and in our case (the WMCP for most of whom a trauma event is the exception to the norm of our lives) suffering does carry within it a mysterious potential for unity:  it invites us to partner with those in sustained and constant suffering and to begin to place ourselves in the discomfort of being an outsider, to get involved in communities unlike our own, and to truly begin to understand that fighting for the rights of any community is fighting for the future of the whole community.

Modern day philosopher and social theorist Roberto Mangbeira Unger talked about this connection in an interfaith lecture series hosted by the Chautauqua Insititution in 2014, saying that he welcomes the social dislocation caused by civil disobedience and disruption because, “Without trauma there is no transformation.”

Discomfort seems to be a part of catalyzing change.  Why?  Because it forces us into the present moment, the only place from which we can create new narratives and break out of the old hard-wired realities.  It wakes us up enough to see and feel how we are connected, and how safety for one group is safety for all of us.   Discomfort breaks us out of the narcissism that lulls us into falsely thinking that we are separate from one another and has the potential to awaken us to the reality that we are an ecosystem…that we are all of us connected, and that there is no “I” only “we.”

On a recent Krista Tippett interview on her show “On Being,”  Mahzarin Banaji talked about the neurological relationship between biases and comfort.  When Krista asked her how she challenges her implicit biases, Banaji said: I don’t do things without questioning why I do them.  If something is comfortable or easy for me, I stop and ask “why?”

She followed this by describing how she loves American Football, but refuses to watch it anymore on account of her moral issue around the brain damage it is causing human beings just to keep us entertained.  She changed her patterns of behavior.

What is your version of soft blankets and cushy mattresses…the patterns you participate in daily that are easy and comfortable and keep you asleep?

What if we chose every day to not let the trauma happening in our world make us want to numb out and distract ourselves further with mindless entertainment and disassociate from the suffering around us?

I’m challenging myself to stop my patterns of comfortable denial.   My first step out of my comfort is not to just celebrate the diversity that does exist in my world but to intentionally place myself in communities where I am the minority...and to allow the relationships in that context to teach, shape and inform my understanding of how and where I can help.  An obvious route for this is, ironically, going to church.

Now, I haven’t belonged to a church or attended church regularly in a long time.  I’ve been very comfortable in my millennial none-but-mystically-inclined status of “always dating but never committed” church attendance, and toted my usual critiques of not feeling like I “fit” at any particular church.   But that has changed: church is no longer about what it does for me, or whether I like the liturgy and agree with the theology for that matter.  Church has ceased being about belonging to ideas, and quite simply become an opportunity to belong to humanity:  to partner with those for whom sustained trauma is not the exception to the norm, make their suffering my own, and live life together.

 All of us in the WMCP bracket can take one step out of our comfortable routines, consider where we are “numbing ourselves” or living in denial and compassionately explore how changing ourselves is the first step in changing the whole.

Stay alert, evolutionaries.  Find your scratchy wool and hard mattresses.  Sustain your discomfort long enough to let the present rewire you.  You want to participate in evolution?

Get uncomfortable.

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Want to challenge yourself further?

Take this Project Implicit test to discover some of your unconscious biases.  We can't begin to change until we acknowledge the gap between where we really are, and the kind of human beings we'd like to become.

*(not universal, based on extremity and amount of trauma incurred in a lifetime)

AWAKE

We are one,
after all, you and I,
together we suffer, together exist
and forever will recreate each other.

Teilhard de Chardin

I had long run out of English and Spanish swear words, so I had taken to inventing a bizarre combinations of both languages …an unholy Spanglish litany recited silently with every exhausting step.

Everything hurt.  Everything.   Muscles burned in my ankles (my ankles!) that I didn’t even know existed…to say nothing about the state of my calves. My shoulders ached under the weight of my pack, and I struggled to find some semblance of a center of gravity with the impossibly steep terrain.

You see, we were hiking in dune country. 

I actually love hiking.  Some adventure loving part of me kicks in and ignores my body’s usual complaints to take a break, strangely reveling in the primal sensation of being in nature and having everything I need on my back …but hiking in sand? This was some sort of bizarre torture created by the kinds of people who invent weird things like parasailing, or run with those weird shoes that look like socks with toes.  This was a cruel exercise of futility that defied logic.

As any of you who have partaken in this torturous activity know, you have to take impossibly small steps as you attempt the steep incline, and you have to move in zig zags…never straight up.  The only thing harder than hiking up a massive dune is the brain yoga required to quadruple your steps as you willfully increase the amount of hiking surface area in order to make it up to the top.

After two hours we hiked down to the beach to hike on the packed sand for a bit.  Relieved to not have the sting of dune grass slapping against my shins and reveling in evenness of the packed sand …I regained my adventurous spirit.

A large group of partying college kids ran up to me, “Hey! Will you take our picture?”  I climbed up on a huge log of driftwood and tried to give them the best shot of this night that most of them might not want to remember in the morning.  All the same, I was caught up in their infectious exuberance and smiled.

Long after we passed their party the smile stayed with me, feeling strangely as though I had picked up a souvenir while passing through their country.

One couple that we nearly had to step over in order to pass could have cared less if a whole army showed up, so lost were they in their own passion and love. I smiled.  Another souvenir. 

At one point we ran into a couple with—im not kidding—two dire wolves (or some frightening genetic experiment resulting in two dogs so large they literally were eye to eye with me as I stood).      Now, I’m not afraid of dogs, I like dogs.  But these dogs growled low, hunched down and showed me their teeth in a ways that didn’t say:  “excuse me stranger, kindly move past the spot my owners have claimed.”  No.  These dogs were saying: “ I can already taste your blood and the feel of your neck snapping in my jaw, little human.”

So I did what any person would do:  I took a step back.  And another…and one more…until…a wave rolled in at that precise moment, leaving me ankle deep in water and adding a few pounds of wetness to each foot.  I laughed.  Hard.  I didn’t care about the sloshing heavy feet.  All I felt was the adrenaline in my blood after facing whatever-the-hell-those-two-creatures were and the hilarity of having my primal instincts betray me.  Another souvenir.

The sun was starting to hang lower in the sky, bouncing off the water with blinding silver light. I never get tired of the ways the lakeshore colors play together: the turquoise of the water, the shades of beige of the sand, the blue sky, the green dune grass, and the dark pine trees further upland.  

 It didn’t matter to me at this point where we were going: this particular great camping spot of mythical lore that we had undergone this torture for.   I didn’t care anymore. 

No longer fighting against it, I became part of the landscape, and as I did, I was able to see myself as part of everyone and everything we passed.

We wound up arriving at our destination after 3 hours of hiking in the heat of summer only to find our spot taken.  Two massive dunes later, we set up tent in an “ok” spot, made a fire, ate, and collapsed in exhaustion only to wake up at 7, pack up, and start the long hike back.  

This wasn’t exactly a restful trip.  But rest isn’t always found in ease and comfort.

What is the solace of fierce landscapes (as author Belden Lane describes it)?  What is about being uncomfortable and facing the hardship of nature that wakes us up to its beauty and our belonging to the wholeness of things?

Teilhard de Chardin claims that matter and spirit are one, and that if we are to ever have the hope of becoming more unified as a human species, we have to stop splitting our field of vision and perpetuating the lie that we are isolated from each other.

But how?  How do we move into a bigger framework, seeing beyond our individual dramas and truly begin to think and see as a whole?  How do we combat divisive thinking when media outlets perpetuate the political polarization that elicits a knee jerk reaction to want to differentiate ourselves from the fear, bigotry and sectarianism that we see?

I’m not one of those people, we think proudly to ourselves. 

And so we continue to split the field, choosing to pitch our tent in our own version of what we believe to be true about our camp, while remaining blind to the ways we are all contributing to the colors of this great landscape we form together.

Just like my impossible hike, hardship and discomfort always carry an invitation: at a certain point there is a fork in the road and we are gifted with the choice to allow that difficulty to wake us up to a greater becoming, or to stick our heads in the sand and keep muttering our litany of self-righteousness, anger, self-pity or judgment.

Isolation is a myth that we’ve created and perpetuate, and perhaps the first step back into finding ourselves as belonging to one another is to wake up to broader system of relationships that we form part of in this cosmos, and to see how we are participants in the systems that shape our reality.

Abraham Heschel wrote: 

A religious person is one who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

If God isn’t “out there somewhere” but here, in us, as us, and moving through our creativity, exploration and efforts….then we need to stop projecting God apart from ourselves, and begin to experience God in complexity of our human experience:

 Does God burn in our muscles, and stick to our skin like sweat? Is God in the challenge of weight, density, gravity and effort? 

Does God sting with the slapping dune grass, constantly inviting us to stay awake with every cut? 

Does God sound like the laughter of the drunken college kids?  The soft murmurs of lovers?  The lapping waves that eagerly rush in to kiss and cover our ankles?

Is God the terror of recognizing our own fragility in the face of bared teeth, destruction and danger? 

Is God in the exhaustion at having to start over again when we thought life had offered us a reprieve?  In the packing up and leaving familiar ground as we are carried by the evolutionary impulse to keep going with courage into the unfamiliar unknown?

What if we held God and humanity in the same thought?  

I want my life to be marked by the capacity to suffer the harm done to others, to have my greatest passion be compassion, and my greatest strengths to be love and the defiance of despair.

Heschel’s words shine like a compass of stars in the night sky for me, pointing in the direction I want to keep journeying in: a journey marked by love, unity, and hopeful creativity.  Somehow I trust that the only way to arrive at that kind of holistic vision is through the fierce landscape of our lives, the hardship and pain that offers us the opportunity to begin to see and think differently.

Strap on your packs, evolutionaries.  In the coming weeks we will explore the relationship around how discomfort aids us in our evolution, giving us a chance to wake up to the wholeness of the cosmos around us.  

Do your muscles burn? Good.  That means you are moving, awake, alive.

What a privilege.

INTEGRITY

Yeshua answered,
“Stop lying.
Do not do what you hate,
because everything here lies open
before heaven.
Nothing hidden will remain secret,
for the veil will be stripped away from
all that lies concealed behind it.”

Logian 6, The Gospel of Thomas

 

“What the &%$ is this?!!!!”

I stared at the corner of our basement bedroom floor with total disbelief.

We had gotten possession of our house one week prior only to discover that the former owner still had a lot of furniture and items throughout the house.   When she finally hired someone to come in and remove it all I was gifted by an extraordinary surprise in the basement:  mold.   Clearly there had been extensive water damage that the inspectors had missed due to the excessive furniture the owner had cleverly used to hide it.

While we worked with our agent in trying to contact her, she had gone MIA.  After months of phone calls and emails to no avail, we made the most of it by roping off entire sections of the finished basement to keep our kids away from the mold.  As fate would have it, the pipes burst in our house 4 months later, flooding our entire basement and parts of the upstairs.  The whole downstairs was gutted, and gratefully, the mold was remediated and rotting wood dealt with.

There was an absence of integrity all around, both by the seller and in the structure of the house itself.

Whenever I think of the word “integrity” I tend to picture a building, or a solid structure.  

I’ll blame my Baptist childhood for that, thanks to a decade of singing “The wise man built his house upon a rock," but it is a correct use of the word integrity.  Integrity does not just define someone as trustworthy and honest, it can also describe a structure as sound, well constructed, and solid (with no hidden mold or rotting wood, for instance. ) 

The Latin root for the word integrity is integer…which interestingly enough is the same root both for Integrity (meaning intact) as well as the word “entirety” (meaning whole, undivided).  So while we culturally mostly use “integrity” to mean a person’s moral uprightness and honesty, a truer definition of it is “the state of being whole and undivided.”

As I look around at the polarizing divisions happening in our country it’s pretty clear that learning how to live a life of integrity is not just a nice moral goal, but an ethical responsibility.   Our political landscape has become an all out circus, both parties claiming to be trustworthy and full of integrity.   It’s easy enough (you would think) to look at our candidates and see some gaping discrepancies in those claims, and be totally baffled at how we got here.   

While it is always easier to point out the absence of integrity in politicians, integrity will become what will define us in this moment as a country: whether or not we will collectively move against ideologies of fear, sexism, racism, isolationism and policies that threaten our very evolution as a members of a global society.

But when it comes to discerning our own personal integrity the dissonance, division, “mold”  (or hidden rot like we explored last week) is harder to see and identify.  The reason for this is frustratingly simple in theory but much trickier to re-orient in practice: 

We tend to approach the concept of integrity from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. 

Our western, ambitious roll-up-your-sleeves and work hard culture has taught us to keep a strong external game:  look good, be put together, belong to the right kinds of groups, proceed through life in the expected trajectory and in the right sequential order.

Integrity, therefore, while still carrying its benchmark definition of honesty and truthfulness, has culturally become coopted to mean fitting in, of belonging to a particular set of rules and systems of thought….which is particularly true in political or religious contexts. 

We desperately want to do the right thing, but the right thing becomes ever more elusive as we flounder between the expectations of “our tribe” (which often includes our family’s expectations of us) and our own interior instincts.

If our lives are so highly driven by the desire to belong and externally fit in (particularly to specific political or religious contexts)

...is it even possible to live a life of integrity? What will we do when our conscience or instincts begin to speak up within us?  What if those instincts are evolution calling us to more...to an option that wasn’t on the prescribed “this is what we expect you to do” hand-out?

Will we just keep piling up the furniture, throw a carpet over it and pretend there isn’t an internal discrepancy? 

Like a single out of tune instrument in the whole orchestra, that little part of us that we are trying to cover over, hide, or ignore will create an internal friction: a nagging dissonance capable of disrupting the entire unity of the symphony of our lives.  You might think you can fool yourself by just beckoning the horn and rhythm section to up the ante and play louder…but the cohesive whole has been compromised, and eventually there will be a reckoning: either the one instrument will slowly make all the instruments go out tune, or the cacophony will slowly grow within you until you have no choice to stop moving the baton and address the internal dissonance one instrument at a time until you locate its source.

There are many references of Jesus addressing integrity as the act of aligning our interior landscape with our external actions and vice versa…but my favorite has to be from the above Gospel of Thomas quote.

 “Stop lying. Do not do what you hate!”

What is most shocking about this Logion is that Jesus doesn’t say:  
“Just try harder to fit the prescribed version of your life that your (parents, religious institution, societal framework) want for you!!!!!!"

Nope. 

Jesus pairs the request to stop lying with doing something that you KNOW deep down you hate doing.

Elsewhere in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says,

“When you are able to make two become one,
the inside like the outside,
And the outside like the inside,
The higher like the lower,
So that a man is no longer male,
And a woman, female,
But male and female
Become a single whole…
Then you will enter in.”

Now, this isn’t to mean we are on a path to become asexual amorphous blobs…but rather the challenge is toward becoming undivided:  the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, to become a single whole.  

Not surprisingly, the more we "tune" our inside to our outside and vice versa, the less we will identify with the external assigned roles or gage our integrity by the expectations set on us by societal or religious institutions.  The more we "tune" our inside to our outside and vice versa, the more we will discovery that integrity is an interior alignment as an undivided whole to the undivided WHOLE cosmos. 

Integrity becomes less about belonging to the pack, and more about becoming as sensitive as a tuning fork: capable of noticing not only where there is interior dissonance, but societal, economic, and environmental dissonance as well. 

Jesus modeled this well: as an evolutionary revolutionary he lived a life of total commitment to that kind of radical integrity and continually called people’s attention to where things were out of tune and creating false divisions.

Jesus didn’t at all fit the moral expectations of his religious culture but rather aligned with the marginalized, the poor, those whose voices were dismissed, silenced and ignored by the society of his time.  For that very reason he earned the nickname “Ihidaya," which we’ve incorrectly translated to mean “the single one” (as in celibate), when in fact its meaning is much closer to: “the single-hearted one” or…the “undivided one.” 

Mystic paleontologist and priest, Teilhard de Chardin, believed that evolution was on a path of convergence: that we are slowly becoming a unified whole.  Our world sure doesn’t seem to be on the path toward unity at the moment, but when we scale back and consider the very real technological advances and globalization that have occurred in the last 30 years we can see it:  in the midst of all this friction, we are becoming more and more interconnected...

The invitation before us is to leave behind our nationalistic identifications in favor of identifying ourselves as planetary. 

The invitation before us to trust in what science is showing us:  there is no action done in isolation without consequence to the whole, there is no “I”…only “We.” 

And if we have the eyes to see it and the ears to tune ourselves to that kind of radical holistic frequency, the invitation before us is to participate in the advancement of evolution itself by having the courage to trust that little voice in us calling us toward a possibility we haven't even dreamt of yet.

We must begin to see ourselves as active players in this great unfolding symphony and therefore recognize the very real responsibility we have to notice what is out of tune in ourselves so that we actively help tune the whole. 

How are you lying to yourself? 

In what ways are you equating integrity with an external societal or religious pressure to fit in? With the pressure to keep things as they are and not disrupt the “norm”?

What if having integrity means trusting that little evolutionary voice calling us toward something more than what is “expected” and has been prescribed?

Tune yourselves, evolutionaries… Stop lying.  Do not do what you hate.  Move toward integrity.  The more we become undivided ourselves, the more we will better serve this world in becoming undivided.

LETTING GO

“To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go”

Mary Oliver

“What do you mean one of our trees fell???”

 I was on the phone with Steve, totally incredulous.  I mean yes, there had been some gusts of wind tuesday evening while I visited my parents, but I could hardly believe they could be capable of literally uprooting one of our trees.

But when I got home, sure enough…there it was.  One of the last remaining vestiges of the apple orchard this neighborhood colonized long ago lay toppled over, 20+ feet long.   I fought the urge to cry as I ran my hand down that great living thing, this wooden symbol of the struggle between life and death:  half of it had gone sick, infested by some bug and no longer bore leaves, but the other half of it appeared to be thriving, even bearing the beginnings of small, green apples.

 I sunk my hands into the rotted roots and wondered at all that was still actively alive in all this dying: little bugs (no doubt culpable for the tree's demise) had carved hieroglyphic like patterns in the wood and scattered to hide as I traced over their art carvings; the bright leaves and soft bending branches were seemingly ignorant of their fate, green as ever, swaying in the wind…as though nothing was wrong.

We are evolutionarily disposed to hate what is dead or dying. Our brains are hardwired to fight or flee from what reminds us of death, and we’ve certainly created an anesthetized culture to create as much mental separation from the normal, gruesome path that nature must take toward decay.   So, most of us live in denial.  We prefer denial...focusing only on that half-living part, instead of acknowledging the full picture of what we'd rather not acknowledge to ourselves.  We're so busy running from death that rarely do realize just how normal dying is in the family of things in constant change.

It feels cruel to me even now as I look out at it from the upstairs window: like watching a beached whale and being incapable of saving it, I feel a little revolted that I’m not out there pouring water on the exposed roots, as if that would somehow stave off the inevitable.

 Do all these leaves even know their trunk has been uprooted?, I wonder.

They don't panic.  They don't condemn me or the universe with reproaches of what could or should have been.  Still they dance and sway in the breeze,  still they offer their brightest green, still they welcome the birds to come and perch, still the leaves seem to softly shush me: Child, don't you see? This is the way of everything.

The tension of the whole universe exists between living and dying, striving and letting, pushing and yielding.  Right in the heart of all things is that familiar wrenching friction, the tipping point of all becoming: the agony of letting go of what has been in order to make room for what could be.

I remember while birthing my son Rowan, how intense the transition was, how utterly broken apart I felt, how I was certain I was dying, and that I couldn’t possibly have the strength for another contraction.  And there in the tension of it all came the awareness: the more I was able to try and relax into the contractions, to let this agony have its way, the sooner my son would be in my arms.  But STILL I fought it…my primal brain was on stun, I wanted the pain to end, and don’t we all?

Teilhard often talks about the complexity of suffering and he gets plenty of flack for it.  He claimed that this great riot of creativity we are part of in evolution seems to proceed no other way than through pain and suffering.  People believe him to make trite and callused statements about human suffering, but I hardly think that a man who served as a stretcher bearer during World War I would have an ambivalent attitude about the horror of human pain.

“We are realizing that within the vast process of arrangement from which life emerges, every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.    One cannot progress in being without paying a mysterious tribute of tears…”(Teilhard, Activation of Energy, 247)

In other words: there is no other way forward in the creative chaos of evolution than to accept our paths themselves as necessarily tripping us up, bowing us uncomfortably around sharp angled bends, breaking us open into new plateaus, forcing us out of the familiar and narrow stories we’ve memorized and clutch at like mantras, saying:

“But, my life is supposed to look like this."

How do we know that we are not ourselves, while doubled over in pain, birthing a new possible reality into our world?  How do we know that we ourselves aren’t being birthed every time life squeezes in around us, pressing all the former options and fluid out of our lungs until we’re forced to take in a painfully sharp breath of air?

The lines that precede the above quote by Mary Oliver’s poem “Black Waterwoods” are as follows:

Every year
Everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning none of us will ever know.

What makes something topple?  Give way?  Go in this direction rather than that direction?  

Who the hell knows?  

I look at that tree and believe it really could have gone either way: it's thriving side might have fooled us yet... it might have gone on hiding its dying secrets for the duration of my children's lives, OR it might have fallen on our house the day after tomorrow.  But it fell on that day and in that way.

The more we travel this evolutionary path, the more the old dying structures of our lives might begin to topple and exposed what was rotting slowly beneath our awareness.  And here's the thing (and the sage words of my mother): you didn't cause it, and you couldn't have stopped it.

The only thing left to do is have the courage to accept it.

To carve our way slowly into gratitude and make a beautiful mark out of our pain.

To honor the complexity of life and death, and accept them as the same doorway.

To yield before change in hope and in trust.

To recognize that this great solid thing in your world is only going to be transfigured, never lost.   

To understand that that particular tree, which has grown so long in you, is only changing from wood to heat, and that both are serving the one gift freely given:  life in its own life turning, making room for more life in a new way.

Be courageous, evolutionaries.  We cannot imagine what might be awaiting us beyond the pain of loss...and we're not supposed to.  Life does not proceed from "known" to "known."  But whatever awaits us on the other side of that hard current of surrender, it's worth the cost of letting go.

RHYTHM & BLUES

I see my life in terms of music.
Albert Einstein

I first started writing music it on my dad’s acoustic guitar before I bought my own (1969 Gibson Hummingbird) when I was 16.    I listened to Radiohead, Wilco, Mazzy Star, Fleetwood Mac and Neil Young.  My music was decidedly folky and guitar driven, even when it leaned toward more of a folk-rock vibe.  

I understood that particular musical landscape, largely inherited from my mother’s 1970’s musical taste: the rounded rhythm of the acoustic guitar, the rich fullness of the drums, the crunchy Crazy Horse electric guitar tone.  

That kind of music came naturally to me and in my early 20’s I did what all 20 year olds do:  I cloaked myself in its identity with its stylistic preferences, evidenced in my production choices and even the way I dressed or carried myself on stage.

Of course, the years went on and even though I had shed the “singer songwriter” persona, I still hung on to my musical preferences both in how I sang as vocalist for work and with the kind of music I listened to.  I didn’t realize it at a time, but I had set internal categories for what type of music I considered more “evolved/conscious” than others, undoubtedly placing anything that fell within my preferred category as elite or superior to other musical genres.

Last year, however, everything changed.

While overseas last summer I experienced a traumatic assault and, like an earthquake on a fault line, my world shifted beneath my feet,  re-ordering my reality completely.  Like most who undergo this type of violence, I couldn’t make sense of it cognitively.  I was confused, ashamed, I downplayed it…I cut it off from me and tried to separate myself from it.  

Walking the streets of Amsterdam, however, my body seemed to have a life of its own and knew what it needed:  rhythm.

The body knows what most of us have forgotten:  when we undergo trauma the first step to healing is through vibration.  Vibration and movement intrinsically connect us back with our bodies, unlocking and relaxing the “fight or flight” trigger that has established itself in our brain during traumatic events. *

I walked, and as I walked I instinctively searched through my phone for music that felt right and landed on “Little Dragon”, an alternative R&B electronic band that my band-mate (Dan) had recommended.   As the low end bass thundered in my ears and Yukimi Nagano’s voice maneuvered around the syncopated beats like an agile hummingbird, something clicked into place.  Suddenly, a genre that I had never connected with, that had always appeared as artificial or shallow, became as real and natural to me as the breaths that were keeping rhythm with my heart…the blood pumping in my veins…my feet hitting the pavement.

R&B as a genre was born in the 1940’s, and while at first the genre was essentially the “blues,” it later evolved to also include rock and roll, gospel and soul.  The R&B we know today is an even greater amalgam that also includes hip-hop, pop, and funk.  Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Mariah Carey are among the most famous R&B artists that most people have heard of and enjoyed.

It has evolved quite a bit since its origins but R&B remains distinctly syncopated, naturally evokes movement, and traditionally orients itself around the soulful themes of the experience of pain and the quest for freedom and joy.

Sometimes I wonder about how these new genres are born: driven by an evolutionary instinct and the right conditions of a particular time, human beings erupt with a brand new combination.  Can you image if they had heard: “nah…man.  Just stick to blues, ditch the funk and soul stuff you’re adding into it….you’re really ruiningit by combining it with all that other stuff.”  Maybe they did hear negative feedback.  But my sense is that the genre thrived because we human beings are meant to combine and give birth to new possibilities.

Teilhard de Chardin faced this combination-phobia from others in his life: deeply in love with science and theology, Teilhard insisted that matter and spirit were not to be split into the Aristotelian boxes, but were rather “two faces of the same substance.”  Teilhard also insisted that evolution was converging, in the process of becoming more unified and more complex.   He was an evolutionary revolutionary: able to see the relationship between two frameworks that appeared separate.

It’s so easy, isn’t it?  We try to stuff ourselves into neat little separated ideas about what we should do with our lives or who we are, and unknowingly give into another insidious aspect of identification.   The truth of our true identity is far more fluid, flexible and evolving: 

We are all of us in the process of becoming, and that process of becoming is always toward MORE life, more CONNECTION, and NEW combinations of creative possibility. 

As I child I confronted this reality right away when I realized that I was neither Spanish nor American, but somehow both.  Born in the states, my family moved to Spain when I was 8months old.  My first 12 years were spent in Spanish public schools, more at home in Spanish than in English, and having to prove my American birth to my friends by showing them my passport.  My world-view was immediately informed by my not “belonging” into one box of nationality, and this no doubt set the stage for what has been a life long quest to see things as “both/and” instead of “either/or.”

Lately, I’ve been aware that my “threads” are in the midst of being knotted together into a new configuration.  These days I’m often told that I need to decide if I want to be a theologian (and get my appropriate degrees) or an artist.  I’m told to pick between being an academic or a folksy, autobiographical writer.  Be a mystical contemplative or be in the music industry.  Be the full-time mother who is able to create meaningful experiences for her kids or the mad-scientist creative who often forgets to take food out of the oven in time.

It’s not just others who try to separate us into boxes: we tend to do that to ourselves too, don’t we? We identify with a particular job or interest and make that our entire identity, cutting it apart from the fluidity of belonging and relationship with the rest of our lives.   

But what if we could see all of our passions/interests/activities/relationships as related to each other?  As threads that are asking to be woven together in the expression of our very lives? 

What if the paths we travel are in the service of unification and complexification (as Teilhard described) and therefore we’re being invited to hold our lives in concert as a whole, allowing new things to be combined in us every day?

When I came home from that fated trip last year, I wrote 15 electronic/pop/R&B songs.   They are the basis for a new album I’m working on with my band Avila.  I’ve never sung so many “baby’s/babes/or bae’s” in my life, but I’ve also never felt such a rush at moving my voice around in a range I’ve never sung in before, and phrasings that maneuvered around the beats with such playfulness.  I’ve never enjoyed reaching into such depths lyrically, that also were utterly free from being obsessed with trying to be poignant.   I’ve never written music that can be understood from so many different perspectives, and therefore is utterly inclusive.  It has been one of the most joyful ventures I’ve ever participated in, and one of the best collaborations with my band-mate Dan I’ve ever had the privilege of participating in.

What has occurred in my life ushered in by a traumatic experience is a new fusion, a new creation, a new possibility brought about by a particular combination.  

No one piece is my identity—as we’ve been exploring with this concept of identification—rather, my true identity can hold the wholeness of all of these pieces of my life concert.  As a result, I don’t have to take any one piece with so much weighted pressure or seriousness but can fluidly move between threads as they continue to weave their way together.  R&B, theology, art, contemplation, motherhood, cosmology, love, anguish, longing…each particular having a conversation with each other, forming the larger dialogue of my outpouring life.

What boxes have you been told to choose between? What if you could see each part of your life as belonging in the mystery of your becoming and the larger evolutionary thread running through our lives?

Carry on, evolutionaries.  Make. Combine.  Explore.
You never know.  You might be creating a brand new genre that’s never been created before.

______________________________________________________________________________

* If you want to dig deeper on the relationship between vibration and trauma, I highly recommend Bessel Van Der Kolk's book, "The Body Keeps the Score" 

REST & RHYTHM

"Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood. 
We are a rhythm machine, that is what we are."
Mickey Hart

"Only when the heart is pure are we in harmony with the real, in tune with reality,
able to hear its voice, detect its dynamism, and truly 'speak' its truth,
having become adequate to the movement of Being...
the Rhythm of Being."
Raimon Panikkar

“Mama, I found the beat!”

My son Søren, age 6, has really gotten into drumming lately.  He’s always been into rhythm, but during our week in Maine he took to drumming like a fish to water and now everywhere we go he picks up the patterns of bird chirps, machinery, or music.  It’s become a bit of a game between us, and his face lights up as he keeps time on his thigh with the rhythm of whatever he’s hearing.  Watching his little hand move up and down I see how naturally his up-stroke keeps time with the down-stroke.

Rhythm is the pattern of relationship between the beat and the spaces between them.

The down beat only exists in relationship to the "up-beat" or rest between hits.  My friend and chant-composer Darlene has often said: “the quality of your out breath is determined by the quality of your in-breath!”  But how often do we consider the  “rest” or the “in-breath” as equal in value and space as our productivity, work, or "out-breath"?  

Lately, I’ve been realizing that my “rest” space is off balance with the down stroke pace of my work and projects.  So I’ve taken the last few days to really slow down, and mind my “in-breath” in the rhythm of my life.  Restraining my productivity and work, however, took enough effort for me to begin to be alerted to one aspect of where I had been “leaking” energy.

One of the most critical ways we get identified (that concept we’ve been exploring of the internal attachments to self-image) is in our work.

It’s so easy, isn’t it? 
I mean, many of us love what we do…we care deeply about it, and feel a deep sense of responsibility to show up and do the best of our ability with it.   This is especially the case for those of us who work for nonprofits , churches, or other organizations that are seeking to make a difference in our world.  The pay is not why most of us signed up for this type of work, and the work feels important…critical…urgent, often in very real and tangible ways. 

Culturally we slip into identification with what we do as unconsciously as breathing:  our first question when meeting new people is often, “What do you do?”, and we ask our children “what do you want to be when you grow up?” planting the early seeds for identifying with the vocational role they might one day take on.

Our western ambition-oriented society trains us to be “off balance," especially here in the U.S: we are obsessed with productivity and in identifying with what we do .

While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with being productive, it is when our ego identifies with it that our life-rhythm gets thrown out of whack:  dominated by this personality-asserting need to perform and prove a false sense of self, we get stressed out and soon burn out.   Our vision becomes myopic and we lose our capacity to zoom out and get the perspective that we need to keep the day to day in check.  Not only do we lose perspective, we lose the ability to see the whole web of relationships that sustain our "being" altogether.

When we identify, we stop seeing the bigger picture and cut ourselves off from the reciprocal flow of energy that is always available to us in the present moment.

The most illuminating opportunities to notice identification in my life have been at Cynthia Bourgeult's Wisdom Schools during the daily work periods of “conscious labor”:  every day groups are set about the property to do simple tasks (cleaning windows, raking leaves, kitchen work, etc) all the while remembering an interior task to help us develop our inner observer ( “Find your feet”, “use your tool in the other hand”, etc).    This inner task observation is reinforced by what is known in Gurdjieff Work as the Dragon:  one person is given the task to call “Stop” to encourage remembrance during regular intervals of the work and to call the end of the work period. 

You’ll be working along, likely having forgotten your inner task and lost in some reverie when suddenly you hear “STOP”.   In mid window swipe, weed pull, or with armfuls of leaves you stop in place and freeze, invited to remember the inner task, notice how you might have gotten identified or fallen "asleep" and come back to full presence attention.

Once when I was in a music group,  the Dragon called a freeze stop when I was leaning forward, taking notes trying to catch everything the chant leader was saying, one hand in mid-raise about to ask what I'm sure I thought was a very insightful question.  There, as I sat frozen in my awkward position my body gave away how I had unknowingly slipped into one of my most familiar identifications: "See what a good star-student I am?" my eager posture was saying, "Don't you notice how bright and curious I am? Aren't I special?"  Our gestures reveal identification right away: a tense jaw, inner constriction, an overly eager or assertive posture...when we stop and pay attention to our body-language we will learn a great deal about how and when we're getting hooked on needing to assert a false sense of self.

The most challenging of all “Stops," however, is called the final stop: when you are told to put your tools down whether the job is finished or not.    It almost always happens that the final stop is called when someone in the group is just about to finish tying up a bag of leaves, or clean that last little window pane.

You would be amazed at the amount of internal frustration that emerges when we are told to put our tools down:

there in that moment of being asked to walk away from our work, our obsession with productivity and perfectionism comes out in full force.   Whether in our inner exasperation at leaving a job unfinished, or the sudden swelling of interior pride because we did "so well", our compulsion to identify is completely exposed for the tyrant it is as we're reminded that we are more than what we are doing or how “perfectly” we do it.

How do you respect the "rest" spaces between the down strokes of your life?

   I don’t mean a vacation to the Bahamas…I mean: how often do you really “put the tool down”?  Whether that tool is your computer, your important position at work, your weights, or your musical instrument...how often do you remember that what you do isn't your true identity?

Whether you're a religious-none or not....how could “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy" be a helpful concept to practice? Not as a day that simply signifies religious ritual, but perhaps as a day designed to be a “STOP” exercise meant to restore a balanced rhythm in our addiction to productivity and our identification with it?

Let’s try to remember today that our value and worth doesn’t come from what we do and how we perform…and see if we can’t begin to taste that deeper self that is deeply interconnected with all reality, capable of drawing deeply from the inspiration and reciprocal energy that is always available to us and all around us.

Set your phone timer to be your "Dragon" today with a few reminders to "Stop" as a reminder that your identity is not found in what you do for a living or how productive you are.  Remember: Life is rhythm, the out-breath requires the in-breath…and you can’t keep the beat if you don’t respect the rest.

INDIVIDUAL

The measure of the pattern's growing and its fast becoming
are all determined by a Master Weaver
and yet the Master Weaver does not weave alone;
For all are master who in that shape are weaving.
The threads, the colours and the constitution of the its myriad parts
are those, who being many now are one.
Peter Spink

My stomach has been in knots for days, like most of our country, over this most recent devastating act of hate and violence in Orlando.  Facebook is riddled with long emotional posts and incendiary commentaries on the attack, everyone wanting to say something or speak up in some way. Media outlets dissect every angle, get more interviews, peel back more information. They refer to the perpetrator as a : "mentally unstable, terrorist-ideology-subscribing individual."

While “Mentally unstable” being the qualifying buffer by which we protect ourselves from seeing our own insanity, and “terrorist ideology” seemingly protects us from recognizing our own sectarianism, I would suggest that the word “individual” gives us the eyes to see and understand what occurred in Orlando as deeply connected to ourselves, offering us a pathway of non-violent action that begins with our own interior landscape, here and now.

It is curious how we’ve co-opted the meaning of individual to mean: single, separate, or a particular person.  The word originally stems from the latin: in (not) and dividuus( divisible). 

In other words, the meaning of individual is: an undivided whole.

The truth of how we assert our sense of self, however, is anything but “undivided."

We begin by understanding our selves in differentiation.  This binary mechanism is a very normal part of our development: the formation of the ego and creating personality is all part of that healthy trajectory that allows us to function in the world.   Unfortunately for most of us, our development remains arrested at this level and we stay hooked on our personalities.

Pause for a minute and see if you can (without judgement) gently identify some of the many “I’s” that are floating around in you right now.   Who are all those “I’s” that assert themselves?  Can you find the “I” that reacts? The "I" that strives for approval? The "I" that tries to manipulate the outcome or control the circumstances?

This is a simple exercise of self-observation, but if you’ve never turned inwardly in this way, it can be a bit disconcerting:  what do you mean there are many “I’s”? aren’t all my emotions and thoughts part of me?  Aren’t all my opinions important and my preferences part of what makes me unique?

Well, yes and no.  They are part of us, sure, but they are operating from the external structure of personality that tends to pit us up against each other.  “I am me, because I am not you”.   “I like this, because I don’t like that.” The formation of personality is part of our development, but as is becoming abundantly clear in our world:  

if we don’t learn how to understand our sense of self beyond the tyranny of personality, and develop a perception that operates from unity rather than from differentiation, we’ll only continue to increase the cycle of divisiveness and violence that so plagues us.

Not long ago I went to the GRAM museum exhibit honoring the work of my friend, Sally England, a master macramé weaver who has gained national attention and a world-wide following for her incredible work.  As I stood in front of piece after piece I was struck by the relationship of the knots and the string, and how she deftly created a balance in her patterns: a riot of particulars in the interconnected whole of each tapestry.

Imagine though that you are a knot in one of Sally’s pieces….and you take such pride in your particular shape over and against the shape of the knot next to you that you truly begin to think yourself as separate.   You might think yourself isolated and decide that the knot to your left makes no sense because it is so different from you.  So you set about your life of “better knot-living” over that of your neighbor.   You might so love your particular knot-life that you spend your whole existence allowing each thread of your configuration to take a turn at telling you how excellent you are…how very decent you are, how much better you are than "the other knots,"  and thus continue to be reinforced that the only reality IS your knot-reality.

This "knot-life" is the consciousness with which most of us live our lives : whether we identify with our sexuality, religion, politics; whether we are liberal, conservative, mystics or activists...Whenever we live from identification, we are in “knot-life” mode. 

 When we become so obsessed with our own story (our own constructed sense of self) we become knots that have forgotten that our true identity lies in the fluid rope that connects us to everything and everyone. So even when we think we're not harming anyone, when we are "knot-life" we are perpetuating the false notion that we are separate from each other, that the "other" is someone we need to "correct," that violent behavior is something that happens because "that knot over there" is nuts, not because the fear and violence in our own hearts is feeding the fear and violence in the whole tapestry.

We are not individuals.  Humanity is individual.

Together we form an undivided whole, along with all the rest of the created order (seen and unseen).  We are knots in a tapestry of inter-being:  Interconnected in ways we are only just beginning to understand in quantum physics, and urgently need to awaken to socially and spiritually.

I would venture to suggest that rather than lobbing one more charged emotional statement at one another on Facebook, we respond to what happened in Orlando by committing ourselves to working every day at unifying our own inner divisiveness and growing in our capacity to see ourselves as deeply interconnected.

It begins here, now, with each of us asking:

Can I begin self observation today through some form of spiritual practice, meditation, or self-exploration? 

Can I observe my own inner violence in the myriad of personality “I”s that seek to run the program over and against something or someone else? 

Can I commit to taking some time to develop more of a unified “string theory” view of this great tapestry we are all part? 

Let’s wake up to the undivided whole tapestry we form, and weave ourselves together in response to all violence, beginning with our selves.  There is no asserted egoic self that stands isolated from whole.  There is no “deranged perpetrator” that is separate from our own anger and confusion, no loss of life that is not the loss of our own life.  There is no love that isn't part of the one love that binds us all. 

There is no “I”…only “We”.

SEA LEGS

"To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
       You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
       You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
       You must go by the way of dispossession.."
 T.S.Eliot

I am out with Cynthia Bourgeault this week for one of her wisdom schools, this time a first time ever “in-gathering” in her hometown of Stonington, Maine; a quaint fishing village as hearty and weathered as the driftwood on the rocky beaches.

 This may be a town that vacationers come to in the mild months, but the locals are stout sea-people and they live a rhythm of life known only to those that commune with the ocean: out at 3 am (no matter the conditions) and back with their hauls at 2 pm at the earliest, a grueling “dual citizenship” orientation of life that is grounded as much on the ocean as it is on land.

Watching the lobstermen yesterday morning, I marveled how easily they move about on deck, seeming to locate their center of gravity with a fluidity and flexibility that comes from decades of experience on the water.  I don’t have that kind of experience, and I can queasily recall one particular sea-leg intensive on a ship when I was kid crossing the Baltic Sea in the midst of a terrible storm.  Needless to say we were fairly bruised and nauseated when we finally made it off that boat, and the rolling sensation remained for days, long after we made it to land.  I think we all bent over and kissed the dry land when docked… composing arias for the gift of solid ground and appreciating the more predictable sensation and weight of gravity of our “land legs”.

When the seemingly "solid" ground beneath us gives way, we become desperate for something to tether us to “familiar land”, don't we?

We cling to our own narratives and stories to orient ourselves and to give us a sense of meaning in our lives.  We grip our history, our traditions, our institutions and take pride in how we hang on to them, using words like “foundational,” “steadfast,” and “immutable.”

For all of our claims at scientific knowledge, however, we're ironically forgetful of the fact that even what appears solid to us (our bodies, the ground, the table I’m sitting at) isn’t "solid" at all.  

At the quantum level—and at the meta-level of deep time—everything is in motion and in the process of becoming through evolution.   

It is understandable, therefore, that we are a regularly a little nauseated and wobbly, running into each other and trying to find a way to steady ourselves.  So, we medicate the symptom rather than understand the reason behind our "sea sickness." We look for things to tether ourselves to, something seemingly we can "stand" on…an “object” we can become the subject of, or as Gurdjieff would describe it:  an identification.

Identification is any time we act out of a need to establish or assert a sense of who we are in the world.  While pop culture clearly praises this trait, Gurdjieff is adamant that it is a major block to our spiritual development, and surefire way to muck up whatever we are doing in the world.  Rather than touching upon the fluid sense of true selfhood that comes from experiencing personhood, a word which stems from the latin "personare" (meaning: the whole resounding through the part), we become stuck in the smaller self of personality, which is run by the tyranny of the ego.  So while we think we're out there establishing our identity in the world and doing all sorts of good things, we're actually just slaves to the drama of competitiveness, insecurity and anxiety that our binary mind creates.

Our authentic selfhood is like a boat that is meant to be in the expansive, fluid and dynamic freedom of the ocean, but we keep launching ropes and tying knots to tether ourselves to the dock, defining ourselves in the smallness of a pier of our own making.

It reminds me a little of the movie “Contact” starring Jodie Foster.  In the futuristic sci-fi movie, aliens make contact with earth, and send a handy map to construct a spherical space ship that could take Jody Foster’s character, Dr.Ellie to the furthest corners of the universe to meet them.   Everything was going swimmingly until the humans noticed that the aliens seemed to have forgotten a seat for Ellie to sit in. 

(Stupid, aliens.  Don’t you realize we need seats to sit in and harnesses to keep us safe?)

Sidestepping the apparent oversight of the aliens, the humans built a sturdy looking seat with proper harnesses that would keep Dr.Ellie “safe” during the journey.

Of course, as she takes off Ellie is being violently jerked and jarred in her seat, the struggling structure making a deafening noise.  First as a viewer you think “yeah, I mean she’s traveling at lightspeed in an alien ship…so that’s probably not going to feel good and be super jarring.”  But as she’s getting her ass kicked by seat’s tremors, she suddenly notices that a necklace she had brought with her is floating peacefully next to her face, suspended in air.    Ellie immediately un-straps herself to the seat and in relief floats up within the sphere, utterly safe and comfortable in the fluid microgravitational force created by the spherical space ship.

(Stupid humans.  Don’t you realize the aliens had a leg up on you in aeronautics?)

We are moving into “uncharted” territory as human beings right now:  technology and life are evolving at the speed of light, institutional forms of religion are giving birth to much more fluid forms,  and the pace of change is making us desperate to cling to anything that gives us a sense of solidity, belonging, or identity.  With all this whiplash, it’s not wonder we try to make sturdy little seats for ourselves and strap into something we can use to create a false (and ultimately jarring) seat belt.

Whether in our day-to day lives, as well as on a meta-scale in evolution, what we need now is not to hang on to our identity tethers or construct another familiar structure, but rather develop capacity to trust a different orientation all together.

Cynthia described the transition that we are in the midst of religion as “finding our sea legs”: moving from a static God and cosmology, to a dynamic, evolutionary and relational paradigm.    In this constant moving evolution, the only unchanging principle is change itself…and rather than looking for “solid” things to tether ourselves to, we ourselves need to become inwardly dynamic and fluid so that we can move with evolution.

How do we work to create inner fluidity so that we don’t tether ourselves and entrench into old ways of thinking that create (as the Contact movie illustration) unnecessary jarring and nausea? 

How do we develop spiritual sea-legs and stop tying ourselves to the dock?  

On a practical level it begins with an honest inventory of our identifications: the many “tethers” we use to establish or assert a sense of who we are in the world, both individually and collectively.

What do I identify myself with?  In other words, how do I create an identity and tether out of what I do....or with an institution, cause, or ideology I belong to?

Observe yourself today and see how often we cast outside of ourselves and try to rope ourselves to “solid ground” for a false sense of security in identification.  A tell tale sign that we’ve roped ourselves in is when we catch ourselves using or thinking in terms such as "I am a person who...", or any time that we become inwardly insistent that things need to proceed in a certain way.

Keep those knees bent and your joints flexible, sea voyagers….if we’re going to learn how to understand ourselves beyond the tyranny of personality and permit evolution to move us beyond our addiction to familiar forms,  we’re going to have to reorient our gravitational center and find a new way of standing to our feet in this world:

with the fluid flexibility of un-identified spiritual sea-legs.

 Then, and only then, will we be ready to break out together into the freedom of uncharted waters of potentiality.

ATTENTION

“The whole of life lies in the verb seeing...To be more is to be more united.” 
Teilhard de Chardin

“…Listen,
Maybe such devotion in which one holds the world
in the clasp of attention, isn’t the perfect prayer,
but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,
is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,
but of pure submission.  Tell me, what else could beauty be for?”
Mary Oliver

It would have been easy for me to miss her.  After a hectic morning of getting the kids off to school, followed by a flustered freak-out at the lopsided equation of the mountain of work before me and the shortened week, I sat at my dining room table with my laptop out, my attention as scattered as the LEGOS all over my floor.

But then….something, some presence brought my attention into coherence. 

I looked up and there in my back yard was a beautiful deer, her long graceful legs cautiously moving until she stood directly before my window.

I had the urge to jump up and grab my phone to take a picture (for what, exactly? To prove it had happened??) but I couldn’t move.  I was enraptured by her gaze and presence.  It felt to me as though she was offering me something: an exchange began to take place, and as I returned her gaze I realized we were entering into a deeper dimension of presence…two species of life on this planet sharing a deeper communion: our being.

I was reminded of this passage of Teilhard’s at the opening of the prologue in his magnum opus, “The Human Phenomenon”:

 “One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing—if not ultimately, at least essentially. To be more is to be more united—and this sums up and is the very conclusion of the work to follow… But unity grows…. only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision.”

 It seems that this evolutionary path of convergence that we’ve been exploring—the  work of attraction, frustration and creation—also entails another necessary ingredient to develop an increase of consciousness: attention. 

Attention, the handmaid of presence, is the first step for learning how to more fully inhabit the “now”, allowing for a more embodied capacity for a deeper kind of vision, a more energizing relationship with what we are doing and whomever we're with.

While we think we know what we mean by “attention”, the question is:

do we know how to wield our attention?   

When we think of the word “attention” it often conjures up images of a teacher yelling, “Pay attention!” in class when we were caught passing notes, our heads whipping around, our eyes gluing themselves to the black board.  “Attention” is something that we relate to work or learning, and yet most of us still operate with our “attention" firmly switched to “passive” mode.  We work on something until something grabs our attention.  We scroll through posts on social media until we see something flashy and say,  “oh, that caught my attention.” 

Even the phrase “pay attention” connotes a definition of attention as something burdensome that costs you, that you have to “hand over”.  And while this moves us into a more active practice of “Attention” (indicating that we have the power to control it), the Spanish use of attention is closer to how I understand this spiritual capacity.  In Spanish we say: “prestando atencion”, which means “lend your attention” or “loan your attention”. 

The act of lending your attention indicates that your attention is never something that leaves you, but rather an activating force you bestow on something, therefore placing you into an energetic relationship of exchange with that which you are offering your full self to.

Perhaps the single most useful tool that I’ve learned in the last several years has come at the hands of Cynthia Bourgeault’s teaching of this Gurdjieff based understanding of “Attention”:

"Energy flows where attention goes.”

I remember Cynthia sharing with us how she taught the concept of attention to her grandson by telling him his attention was like a flashlight in his heart, a laser beam of light that he could direct and turn on and energize whatever the light was pointing at. 

Long after the deer moved on this morning, the exchange that had occurred stayed with me.  No longer scattered, my attention remained recollected within me, and like a beam shining out of my heart I was able to enter into the requirements of my day with a focused presence that not only energized my work but in turn energized me.

According to Teilhard unity grows in accordance with this deeper form of seeing.   We can infer that what he is describing is a capacity of what some describe as "heart perception," a vision that perceives from the whole rather than out of constant differentiation.  Or as T.S.Eliot describes in East Coker of his Four Quartets,

"We must be still and still moving
into another intensity for a further union,
a deeper communion."

 The ability to be agents of unity capable of a deeper communion can only begin with a transition to "another intensity" of an inner unity that results in coherent seeing: a gathered attention, the fruit of which is presence.  

Contemporary sufi teacher, Kabir Helminski, sums it up this way:

"Whoever makes all cares into one care, the care for simply being present, will be relieved of all care by that Presence which is the creative power."

What if we began to understand our attention as a truly creative power that we can wield in service to unity and evolution? 

Can you hold the world, “in the clasp of attention” as Mary Oliver describes…entering into a heartful exchange of energizing presence with whatever is on your plate today?

Here’s a little video I made with the above quote from Mary Oliver’s poem “Terns”.   I realized that even this simple menial act of preparing food and eating can be energized by attention.  

What will you loan your energizing force of attention to today?

THE LAW OF THREE

“Suffering holds hidden within it, in extreme intensity, the ascensional force of the world."
Teilhard de Chardin

“It’s all about carrying to term and giving birth.  To let every impression and every seed of a feeling realize itself on its own, in the dark…beyond the reach of your understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour when a new clarity is born…”
Rilke

It was Trinity Sunday last week.  Yep. I didn't know there even was such a thing, but I’ve been paying a bit more attention to the Christian liturgical calendar lately and marking the journey in my own ways.

Traditionally, the Trinity is taught and understood as a self-enclosed community of God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Most understand it somewhat as a theological speculation on the inner life of God, an abstraction created to make sense of Christ’s divinity and humanity, and so its no wonder that Karl Rahner made the statement that if the Trinity were to drop out of our religious lexicon, no one would even notice.

I’m actually pretty fond of this particular Christian doctrine, however, and many of the mystical writers that I’m a fan of (ancient and contemporary) are too:  Bonaventure, Teilhard, Panikkar, Beatrice Bruteau and current wisdom teacher Cynthia Bourgeault all have interesting things to say about the Trinity.  Rather than viewing the Trinity as three persons, they view the Trinity as dynamic functions of a relational God-in-the-midst-of-the-cosmos.

When seen through the light of evolution and colored by the insights of some of the aforementioned theologians and scholars, the Trinity is no longer simply a theological speculation on the inner life of God; it becomes a dynamic mandala of God’s ongoing creativity in an evolving universe. It becomes, in fact the evolutionary principle. 

Threeness, creativity, and evolution are joined at the hip.

How?

 If the physical structure of the universe is love , then attraction, frustration, and creativity are all a natural cycle of a universe in motion both at a meta-scale, and in moment-to-moment occurrences. 

You could think of it this way; in every circumstance there is a triadic structure at play: a yearning force, an opposing force, and a reconciling force, and these three forces work together to create something new.

What I am describing is a universal principle of change and transformation first articulated George Ivan Gurdjieff’s “Law of Three.”

Gurdjieff (1866-1949), although still not widely known in theological conversation, was an Armenian-born Wisdom teacher who developed a system of spiritual transformation (commonly known as “The Work”) in which the Law of Three was a centerpiece.   The Law of Three, or “The Law of World Creation” as he called it, stipulates that “Every phenomenon, on whatever scale (from subatomic to cosmic) and in whatever world, springs from the interaction of three forces: the first active, the second passive, and the third neutralizing.” The new arising from this interaction will in turn form a new triad by which the process continues in its course of creativity.

In other words:  resistance, frustration, and opposition are the essential path by which new creation happens. 

Like the collision of flint that makes a spark, it seems that creativity rests on this principle of friction, and perhaps instead of running to immediately diffuse all tension in our lives, we’re invited to learn how to hold it long enough to allow more being to emerge. 

But tension isn’t easy to bear…and anything that entails suffering isn’t something we tend to get excited about as humans.

Sixteenth century German mystic Jacob Boehme wrote a reflection in which he describes the “compression from nothing into something” of God as being mediated through the reconciling point of anguish.  You can feel the meaning of the word in saying it, can’t you?  Anguish.

 It conjures up memories for me of being in Ballet with my Russian born ballet teacher, Olga.  She used make us sit with our backs to the wall, and our arms stretched above us hanging on to the bars, while she would push her heels against our ankles until our legs were painfully stretched open into a perfect 180 degree split.  It was Anguish. She kept us pinned, one after the other, for what felt like an eternity.  If we dared to utter a single complaint to our torturer she'd keep us there longer, smiling all the while and saying with her thick accent, “You will do nothing in ballet if you cannot endure this.”

She was right, of course.  All the hours on the floor stretching and at the bar perfecting form are all the unseen moments of anguish that result in the graceful beauty that takes your breath away as you watch seasoned dancers pirouette and leap through the air, seemingly impervious to gravity.

Teilhard described suffering as “the ascentional force of the world”.  In other words: friction, frustration, and suffering can be thought of as an energetic compression, an occurrence that happens in the process of a converging evolution.  I mean, really....what do we know about how much it hurts to bloom? Or what it costs to grow a pine needle? 

We certainly know that the birth of a human being entails some pretty excruciating anguish, so why would the evolution of our consciousness be any different?

Smack dab in the center of the pressure you’re under at work, the unresolved issue in your relationship, or even in the daily grind of menial tasks is a progression that begins with anguish:  the yearning for something, the energy that seems to push against it…and if we’re patient enough to bear the tension, a third force will arise that will set the seeming impasse into motion.

Hang in there, dancer-in-training.  Don’t run from the next experience of constriction.  Something new is being formed in you through every compression, and if you can patiently ground yourself in the midst of the friction, allowing that threefold tension to do its work, you might just give birth to something you never could have anticipated or imagined.

PATTERNS

“In the traffic of our days
may we attend to each thing
so that patterns are revealed
amidst the offerings of chance…”
Rilke

I LOVE patterns.  Not on my clothes so much, or on my sofa….more like in biology, geometry, and music.  Before sitting down to write this post I was eating broccoli and wondering at how many different biological forms resemble those tiny little broccoli heads.  Taking the florets individually they could easily be the same shape as algae, or some species of bacteria, or a flower.   I sit there and wonder, "How long did evolution struggle to perfect this little broccoli floret?  And why do certain things look so similar or seem to be based on the same pattern? Like the inside of an orange and muscle tissue, for instance.  Veins and river systems.  Or a walnut and a human brain..."
I could go on….and I usually do, until I realize the milk is burning on the oven, or I’m late to pick up my son from school.

Remember drawing “connect the dots” images when you were a kid?
My son Søren went through a phase of those and it reminded me of the thrill we feel at seeing a shape emerge out of so many random dots and lines.  It’s the same thrill I feel when I write a song.  It’s the thrill of making connections, a relationship between beats of rhythm, and a fluid ligament of a melody.  It’s the same thrill I feel whenever I begin to notice a pattern anywhere:

Things are more related than we realize…there’s a connection and coherence between what seems so disparate and isolated if we have the eyes to recognize it.

These days it seems like a greater shape is taking place among all the rise of “religious none” data and empty pews.   More and more of my friends are going to the church of “none” on Sundays, aka, a walk in a nature preserve, brunch with a loved one, a quiet morning at home with their families.  Meanwhile, Churches are freaking out thinking that the whole world is going to hell ( and they mean literally).  

It is my belief that the underlying reason why we are leaving the church is not an absence of our spiritual capacity, but static and outdated dogma of Christianity’s religious paradigm that has, in some critical ways, become incompatible to our very humanity.   

Teilhard de Chardin was already noticing this incompatibility back in 1950:

We are surrounded by a certain sort of pessimists who continually tell us that our world is foundering in atheism.  But should we not rather say that what it is suffering from is unsatisfied theism?...are you quite sure that what they are rejecting is not simply the image of a God who is too insignificant to nourish in us this concern to survive and super-live to which the need to worship may ultimately be reduced?[i] 

So… no, friend.  If you are finding yourself more attracted to a walk in a forest with your dogs on Sunday morning over sitting in a pew, there is nothing wrong with you spiritually.   More likely:

We are unsatisfied theists, growing like yeast and rising something new in this world, unwilling to fake and compromise our truest longing to find meaning and wholeness in a larger coherent whole we can call God.

After all…connecting the dots what religion was meant to do in the first place;  religion stems from the latin, “re-ligare,” meaning: to bind together into a whole what seemed separate and isolated.   Sadly, religion has gotten sidetracked in this work and more often than not seems to enforce sectarianism and exclusion.

If church isn’t creating that kind of inner-connectivity anymore, follow your nose to what does feed your capacity to see and taste an inner re-binding to the "whole" of things.   Be forewarned however that if your goal is true transformation, it will require some work and commitment on your part: most authentic spiritual paths insist that some type of meditative daily practice is a non-negotiable. 

But to begin, pick up books on the mystics* from whichever tradition you hail from, and see if you’re not surprised to discover voices of wisdom who point toward a more expansive understanding of reality.  Get into your body in ways that allow you some freedom from the tyranny of the mind.  Discover ways to, as Rilke says, “Go inside yourself.”  Just as he also challenges us,

“If your every day seems poor, do not indict it; indict yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon its riches…”

Find the poets, landscapes, mystics, and current wisdom voices that clarify for you this capacity to see the greater shape of things, and commit to setting time aside to be fed by them.  (Yes, you DO have time…we make time for what matters to us.) Begin outlining a healthy rhythm for your week and create a pattern of dipping into whatever nurtures that deeper being in you with enough regularity to sustain you.

Make a pattern to see the bigger pattern. 

It’s all about patterns.  See what I mean?.

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*looking for reading material on the mystics or the contemplative approach to life?  Check out my newly added resources list in the contemplation page!

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy, p.239-240)