Archive for February, 2010
Sunday Snapshot: Olympic Closing Ceremonies
I’m watching the closing ceremonies, and I’m also just an hour home from a weekend of skiing in Tahoe. Being on skis this weekend gave me a wholly new perspective of what these Olympic athletes really do. And coming home to watch the highlights—complete with the tear-jerking highs and lows of the past 17 days—is a reminder of how sports tests people, and also bring out the best of the human spirit. Athletics test our physical strength, but there’s also something so beautiful and expansive and freeing about how our bodies move when we’re engaged in physical activity. Because I’m a huge fan of the Olympics, I want to take today to acknowledge some of the athletes who touched us during these games:
Georgian Nodar Kumaritashvili, ranked 44th in the world in luge, who died before the games even got underway.
Petra Majdic, the Slovenian cross-country skier who had to be helped to the podium with five broken ribs.
Joannie Rochette, whose mother died four days before she won bronze in women’s figure skating.
There are many many others. I’m touched by each athlete who overcomes adversity, whose dream is fulfilled, who has an emotional outburst after a stellar performance, who breaks down crying after an emotionally taxing loss.
Which stories have meant the most to you and why?
An Introduction to the Colors of Trust and Faith
In the Life Artist color palette, there are three Primary Colors—willingness, courage, and curiosity.
There are three colors that activate Trust —inspiration, vulnerability, and learning.
And finally, there are three colors that activate Faith—dreaming, gratitude, and remembering.
I’ve written about the three primary colors in my most recent posts, and today, before moving onto the colors of Trust and Faith, I want to provide some context for the role they play in cultivating your Life Artist awareness.
Similar to the Primary Colors, the colors of Trust and Faith provide pathways to engage your Whole IQ—your Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences. However, they also develop and ground your ability to see where you may be living in “blind trust,” or faking faith, or perhaps taking “leaps of faith” that generate more fear than thrill. As a Life Artist, when you learn to embody trust and faith, you are more fully expressed and less attached to certain outcomes as “proof” that your experiences is valid, or that your success is dependent upon an immediate answer from the powers that be.
The colors of Trust and Faith require a higher level of risk than the Primary Colors because, as we give and receive them, they require more transparency in our relationship to ourselves, others, and the Universal Intelligence.
Trust erodes when we unconsciously or consciously expect things from relationships. We can start betraying ourselves by forgetting to nourish our Spirit intelligence with inspiration; we can refuse to open our Heart intelligence with greater vulnerability for fear of getting hurt; we can disallow our Mind intelligence from sharing our learning because we might be judged or rejected.
The colors of Trust (inspiration, vulnerability, and learning) open up the channels for greater trust to flow, but trust doesn’t grow from having them flow freely with everyone! Trust requires discernment. It grows through understanding where we need to be accountable to ourselves and not expect a relationship, job, or place to fulfill us when it can’t. This may mean ending a relationship, or experiencing it for what it is to increase trust.
The colors of Faith (dreaming, gratitude, and remembering) are the most risky for a Life Artist because they attune our creative consciousness with that of the Universal Intelligence. When we seek to collaborate with the unseen forces, we must let go of attachment to outcome, or manifesting what we think we need. Dreaming, gratitude, and remembering are not about our ego dreams, saying a polite “thank-you,” or noticing how great our memory is or isn’t. These colors are about opening ourselves up to a deeper connection with the Universal Intelligence.
We open our Spirit intelligence up to the muse and the unknown with the color of dreaming—unplanned moments of being fully open and present to what wants to happen. When we are filled with an embodied sense of gratitude, it is not about what someone has done for you, but how your Heart intelligence is full from feeling how deeply something has served the evolution of consciousness on the planet. When your Mind intelligence is relaxed enough to engage the color of remembering, you experience a moment of inner and outer relatedness by bringing the fragmented parts of yourself back into greater wholeness.
While the colors of Trust are a grounding resource for healing and inspiring our earth-bound relationships, the colors of Faith provide a way to connect to the greater cosmic healing and inspiration that we can influence and receive from the collective consciousness through our individual awareness.
American Everyman, Joe Stack: He’s You. He’s Me.
The government doesn’t want us to read Joe Stack’s dying declaration. They moved quickly to suppress it, but their efforts proved futile, thanks to the Internet.
Stack’s musings aren’t the best or the worst in the literature of suicide notes. It’s not in a class with actor George Sanders’s “I’ve seen it all, done it all, and I’m bored,” but it is hard to look away or dismiss once you’ve read it. The statement is long, and that itself works against its effectiveness in our short attention span age. Of course, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence face the same problem nowadays.
But it’s a mistake to dismiss Stack’s pages as the ranting of a madman, the disjointed grumbling of a chronic loser so unlike the rest of us that we needn’t take it seriously. It’s a tragedy and unfortunate, yes, but come on! How many people are there running around like Joe Stack?
Conservatively, I’d estimate millions. Stack’s dying declaration is most fascinating because it sounds like so many people I know. At times he perfectly articulates the core position of the Tea Baggers, while at others he speaks clearly for those who wonder what happened to all that progressive hope and change we elected in 2008. Either way, millions sympathize. Maybe not with killing themselves by flying planes into buildings (yet) but with his key complaints, well, a lot of Americans are right there with him.
Like Stack, they’re frustrated and furious with our government. They’re convinced that elected officials from top to bottom, with very few exceptions (hang in there, Dennis Kucinich), do not care about them in the least, being bought slaves of their financial masters (banks, insurance, and drug companies). They don’t need polls or op-eds or what passes for journalism in the media to tell them that the middle-class is nearly extinct, that the wealth of the land writhes between the grubby paws of a greedy 5% of the population.
En masse, they’re beginning to wonder what it’s going to take to turn things around. The more time passes with no good faith answers and ideas, the more this smoldering citizen army drifts toward violent solutions.
Joe Stack reached that point of no return. Joe Stack, described by his ex-wife as a good, kind man, arrived, like anyone repeatedly abused and battered and ignored, at a point where he could contemplate and do the unthinkable. History tells us it will happen again, and in greater numbers, if we do not address the cause of the sickness.
That root cause is greed, which is itself as old as love and death. It’s critical that we face up to this. The time is coming when a Martin Luther King, Jr., of economic conditions will appear to articulate a vision of a more advanced, compassionate society and inspire a generation (or two) to move as one unstoppable mass. We’ve seen it in our lifetime in the Civil Rights Movement. We’ve seen it in the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We’ve seen it on thousands of occasions as men and women have come together to advance humanitarian causes. We will see it again, too, and it will be much more terrifying to the powers-that-be than planes flying into buildings.
As for Joe Stack, may he rest in a peace he could not find in his own country, and may every single one of us deeply ponder all of the people and conditions that prodded him to his end.
Here is a poem of mine that seems appropriate to this occasion.
Grateful
Be grateful that you live
Inside the head you do.
How many times have you
Gone sailing through
Your bed or favorite chair to
Wave a sign in the riot
Of traffic, Need Money, Please!
How many times have you
Suffered with the losers
Of war, or chafed and simmered
On a reservation, or brokered
The rescue of many from fear?
How many hours have you
Survived the lessons of gender
Change, or held your hero,
So splendid because of you?
Be grateful. Be father and mother,
Be teacher, sister, and brother
In all that you dream and do.
Against the day your ledger
Is opened up to you.
The Sublime Disturbance
As the wind makes a different song
through the same tree as its branches
break, God makes finer and finer music
through the wearing down of our will.
Sunday Snapshot: Chinese New Year
I confess to having missed last week’s blog post because of Valentine’s Day. Perhaps not the best excuse, but I’m increasingly feeling the importance of sacred time away from work, and especially away from the computer.
But another important event that kicked off last Sunday was Chinese New Year. It’s the year of the Tiger, and festivities in San Francisco’s Chinatown were in high gear yesterday. My partner and I did the Chinatown City Guides Walking Tour, and dancing dragons and loud fireworks were definitely the order of the day. But one of the highlights of the tour was Kong Chow Temple, located three steep stories up. Taoist temples are on the top story to be close to the heavens.
Inside was a woman in her eighties (at least) hand-crafting colorful paper into what seemed to be little houses. Another younger woman sat at her side writing single characters onto red ribbons. It’s interesting to try to make sense of what you think people are doing when you don’t know the custom or the language. The structures the older woman was creating were transferred almost immediately into a huge incinerator. A lot of work to be immediately burned, I thought. Our guide told us that people choose to burn things they think their ancestors need in the afterlife. This might be houses or cars or money, but in this case it seemed that this woman was fulfilling many requests for houses, presumably on the behalf of others. Another man was carting in plate-loads of incense from the balcony, dumping them onto the fire on top colorfully burning paper. The room smelled of incense and smoke, but the work being done inside the temple was methodical and singularly dedicated and mesmerizing to watch.
Thinking about spending a whole day (or who knows—maybe days or even months) creating something that’s solely about ritual, in this case burning the very thing your fingers are working fast and furious to create, gave me pause. Then, later in the tour, we stopped by the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, where I witnessed yet another elderly woman methodically working, this time rolling fortunes into soft cookies. The guide told us how this tiny little shop, with just a handful of people working, produces 8,000 cookies a day.
At the temple I’d felt a little bit floored by the notion of destroying what you create, and yet isn’t eating the very same thing? I consumed the fortune cookie maker’s cookies and got great pleasure, and similarly I imagine the person or people who ordered the paper houses to be burned felt content and satisfied at the result of their efforts. Food for thought: What kinds of rituals do you participate in or know about that are intriguing, mindful, eye-opening?
Being Here
Transcending down into
the ground of things is akin
to sweeping the leaves that cover
a path. There will always be more
leaves. And the heart of the journey,
the heart of our own awakening, is
to discover for ourselves that the
leaves are not the ground, and that
sweeping them aside will reveal a
path, and finally, that to fully live,
we must take the path and
continually sweep it.
Curiosity
Curiosity is the third primary color in the Life Artist’s Palette and is associated with Mind intelligence. We often believe that we are safest when our minds have the answer and things feel familiar and under control.
The truth is, however, that the mind is more than just a bundle of thoughts trying to figure things out so that we can feel safer, or more powerful. It’s more than just the negative chatter incessantly questioning and judging our own and others’ worth.
Because our culture is so mind-focused, Mind intelligence is the most misunderstood intelligence in our Whole IQ. Its gifts are often used objectively for analysis and keeping things within the logical realm of reason. The laurels of the mind, in the traditional sense of having a high IQ, garner attention and accolades. We are a culture that celebrates genius and accomplishment. And yet, as Malcolm Gladwell explores in his book, Outliers, genius minds often lack imagination and social skills.
Curiosity lays the foundation for our ongoing wonder about life, and as a context (which, as a reminder, is what all the colors are), it develops the mind’s ability to be okay with not having to be right or always having things be ordered and known. In the creative lifecycle, our energy desire (Spirit) builds momentum through our courage to act in a heartfelt manner on its behalf. When we bring the context of Curiosity to any given situation in our lives, we give ourselves permission to look at life again like a child.
Curiosity not only opens our minds to new ideas, it allows our thoughts to be more attuned to the other intelligences, and to be in service to the wholeness of who we are.
Take a moment to look at where your thoughts are rigid, judgmental, or opinionated. How is your Mind intelligence isolated from you Spirit, Heart, and Body intelligences? What would happen if you had willingness to let go of these thoughts and be curious? What would you have courage to feel if you let go of your expert story, or needing a plan, or needing to be right?
The primary colors of Willingness, Courage, and Curiosity work together to stimulate your creative consciousness and will ultimately increase the flow of new possibilities and outcomes in your life.
***Curiosity is the third of nine posts covering the nine colors of the Life Artist Palette. To brush up on the colors, see the graphic from Willingness.
The Mad Masculine
I finish reading an email from my friend Jeanne, who is wrapping up her third week as a volunteer medical person in Haiti, and turn to the news that a sixteen-year-old Turkish girl has been buried alive by her family for having boys as friends.
My nervous system suffers a disconnect.
In the wake of a horrible natural disaster, one overwhelmed woman somehow finds an inner strength and resolve to continue on, doing what must be done in conditions that are hellish, unimaginable, while elsewhere in the world men find it possible to bury a child alive, her lungs and stomach filling with soil.
Who are we? Of course, I want to applaud the woman, and I want to destroy the men. Though my spiritual practice counsels me that every life is precious, that killing is a terrible sin, I admit to a reservoir of rage that would happily roll out over the planet and extinguish every monster male who currently perpetrates violence against women. It would ravage the insane family members who murdered the child; it would reduce to cinders the fifty men who buried a girl up to her neck in a sports stadium, then hurled stones at her head until she died; it would sear the devils who use war as an excuse to rape and disfigure females; it would choke to death men who physically and emotionally abuse women in relationship.
What is their behavior? Hatred of the Divine Feminine? Fear of it? Do they black out, not knowing who they are or what they’re doing? Are they born malignant, or do they become that way? Are they simply evil?
How do we respond? Abuse-Poetry encourages women to write about their experiences. Poetry promotes healing even here, but if we aren’t going to kill them all, what do we do about the man-monsters themselves?
Man-Monster Poetry could be part of a solution. Resources could be dedicated to forcing perpetrators of the crimes I’ve mentioned here to participate in writing workshops. Encourage or prod them to write their stories and listen to victim stories.
All that’s clear is that something more needs to be done. Are we incapable of thinking of intelligent, compassionate solutions? We live in an entertainment culture that blunts the immediacy of human life. Imagine all the money spent on Super Bowl advertising. Imagine just one company taking its million-plus dollar fee for thirty seconds or a minute of TV time and instead pledging it to ending violence of any kind against women. Imagine every Super Bowl advertiser doing that. Would we survive as a culture, as humans? I’d like to know what you think. I’d like to hear what you feel.
Coming Out
While there is much to do
we are not here to do.
Under the want to problem-solve
is the need to being-solve.
Often, with full being
the problem goes away.
The seed being-solves its
darkness by blossoming.
The heart being-solves its
loneliness by loving what it meets.
The tea being-solves the water
by becoming tea.
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