Archive for April, 2010
Life Artist vs. Con Artist
Over the last several weeks I’ve been writing about the Life Artist Color Palette and how using its nine contexts (colors) creates an opportunity to generate creativity rather than reactivity in our lives.
As Life Artists we are also continually facing our creative nemesis, the Con Artist. We typically experience the reactivity of the Con Artist as negative self-talk, fears, limitations, or the voice of “reason”—and all these ways in which the Con Artist shows up hold us back from realizing ourselves and our potential in a more vital way.
In learning to use the Life Artist colors to awaken your Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences, you begin to see the Con Artist’s messages casting a shadow over your light. As you learn how to use these contexts in your everyday life, you will be better able to address what is being blocked within you.
Take a moment to turn your attention to your Con Artist and ask yourself how its messages influence your ability to access the energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms that express your authentic self.
Writing a Poem Is Heroic
Just as every poem is a hero’s journey, every moment of your life is so much the same. No matter how inconsequential it may seem, a poem requires great attention and bravery and humility to come into being. Like the hero, it must leave home, its safe and familiar mooring, to embark on a quest of discovery. Like the hero, the poem must face hardship, battle daunting foes both real and imagined, and like the hero, the poem must come home, redefining home and self in the process.
So you enact the very same journey in your life’s course, and this is why poems are woven into the cells of your heart, brain, and body. Coming into woman-or-manhood, you take your leave, you go adventuring, and you return home with the news of all that you learned along the way.
That is the poem at completion, and that is your perfect life, lived and savored and, as that marvelous mystic Shakespeare put it, rounded with a sleep.
Singing the Same Question
For a poet whose fidelity has been to the timeless voice of that underground stream in which all that is wiser than us sings, speaking of God has produced an interesting echo throughout the years: like singing the same question in different weather; first into the wind, then into a crowd, and now before and after the crash of ancient waves. All the while, critics have been reflexive in their reactions: leaning in, backing away, looking puzzled, getting angry.
Yet all along, speaking of God has simply been a vocation of question and praise: bearing witness to what is and inquiring into the intangible flow of being that lines everything. As Abraham Heschel says, “Poetry is to religion what analysis is to science… (and) Philosophy, enticed by the promise of the known, has often surrendered the treasures of higher incomprehension to poets and mystics.” Let me quickly say that there are fine scientists and ministers who are working poets of this higher incomprehension, who share the vocation of keeping what is essential useable and in view.
Nonetheless, we still have scientists and ministers and poets interested in power who push and pull at the Divine as if the secret of immortality is in one chalice that each feels sworn to protect but never use. All the while, the presence of the Divine remains plain and abundant. Like those before us, our minds harden and get in the way until our suffering breaks the ice of what we’ve been taught. Then, if blessed, our direct apprehension of life is restored, and we simply hold each other in the storm.
So God, the infinite bottled in the ten thousand things, is a restorative waiting to be released in small felt moments. This is why throughout the years I have said the word God in my poems less and less. Not because I believe in God less, but because I experience that totality we call God more. I started like a young fisherman singing of the ocean and its majesty from shore. But life has drawn me and thrown me into the vast deep and now, like a fish immersed in the sea, I’m the least able to see the water I live in; though it pumps nameless through my gills, keeping me alive.
It becomes ever more clear that, like a scientist of the mystical, the poet’s task is to detail life more than name it. The poet as healer is always called to find what is possible in the cracks of what is and offer it back to those who feel broken.
As evidence of how much we need each other, it’s often impossible to do this for oneself. So we squeeze the light from our wounds the way sap is squeezed from a tree and feed it to each other. This is another way to understand poetry: as the sap of truth and love squeezed from the bark of God’s tree. Though the human family only turns to this when all other forms of drink fail. Humbly, I wake today not very far from where I began more than half a century ago: worn to wonder and a quiet song.
The Creative Lifecycle
It’s a glorious spring day and I’m once again reminded of the beauty in the natural order of life blooming in its right time. As I watch nature effortlessly being true to itself and animals living by their instincts, I look to the Life Artist color palette to remind me of nature’s creative ease within me.
When we honor our Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences like seasons, we glean the wisdom that each one offers the whole. When we use the nine colors in the flow of the creative lifecycle, we are accessing Spirit’s colors of willingness, inspiration, and dreaming to encourage us to plant the seeds of our energy desires. We then follow with Heart’s colors of courage, vulnerability, and gratitude to nourish the seeds of our energy desires with deeper emotional meaning. As we deepen our emotional roots to our energy desires and nourish these roots through our emotional connection, our Minds are better able to direct our thoughts with its colors of curiosity, learning, and remembering.
When you look to nourish the seeds of your energy desires first rather than strategize or push for certain outcomes, you are working with your true nature to allow the creative lifecycle to guide you to your instinctive knowing. With that the outcomes of your life bloom from the rich soil of your Whole IQ.
For the Journey
I offer this poem for all of us who are frightened, unsure, confused, sorry, and sad, for all who lay awake in the middle of the night awash in anxiety, for anyone who is lonely and fearful. We are not in Chaos. We’re in the birth canal, and we’re moving, moving, moving in the direction of birth, toward something new and shining with possibility. It’s something worthy of our rising up and meeting it with love, compassion, and joy.
God’s Star House
You were right to worry about the journey
Becoming your raison d’etre. It was
For a time, for as long as it took you
To lose your possessions and pride,
Your smug self-confidence and that slick
So slithery way you had of blaming someone else.
It should have occurred to you long before now
That something was up when every time you
Spotted God’s star house and bee-lined up
The celestial drive, S/He was gone. Why
Would God play such games with you?
Are you so terrifying that God would run from you?
Congratulations! Every single thing you believed
Is wrong. Believed? I should have said suspected.
Yes, that’s you, ever fearful, always uneasy,
Demands disguised as inquiry. Well, take a breather.
Lean against the bogus God box at the gaping mouth
Of the gravel drive and take a good look around.
Are you No-Bo-Where under the essence of a gigantic tear?
Now you’re face to face with something worthy of fear
Or indescribable joy. This much should be clear. When
You find God’s house, no metaphor you know will do.
The Waterbird Way
In speaking about the non-dependence of the mind, Dōgen says, “Coming, going, the waterbirds don’t leave a trace, don’t follow a path.” There are many ways to understand. Driven by our need to be seen, the mind can understand in the manner that a plow cuts the earth, overturning everything it encounters; leaving nothing as it was found. Or as Dōgen suggests, in our need to see, the mind can understand in the manner that a waterbird enters and leaves water; with no trace, no path. Both ways of understanding have an intense history and lineage.
But why does he call the waterbird way a non-dependent way? Perhaps because in our dependence on being seen, heard, approved, and recognized, we insert our presence over being present. We build roads to get from here to there and quickly make the road and its path the totality of our life over the life the road moves through. We do the same with dreams and ambitions. We create goals like roads to attain and achieve and quickly substitute the path-hacking effort through life for the life our effort opens us to.
Remembering
Remembering is what I refer to as the “highest” color in the Life Artist color palette—meaning that it takes a refined awareness to tune into it. As with all the color of Faith, it is somewhat defined by what it is not. When we are in tune with this color as a Life Artist, it’s not about remembering where we were a year ago, or what we need to do next week. Rather than being a function of our memory, remembering is a function of healing our wholeness.
When our Whole IQ is fragmented, we are disconnected from our Soul intelligence. As we start to remember the gifts that live within our unique energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms of our lives, we heal the internal splits and schisms in our consciousness that cultivate fears, anxieties, self-doubt, and other symptoms which obstruct our highest potential.
I often experience remembering as a spontaneous awakening that connects the dots in some specific way in my consciousness, supporting me to know something at a profound kinesthetic level rather than just in my head.
Our Souls hold the DNA of our unique karmic potential, and through remembering our wholeness we access a deeper meaning and passion in our lives. This does not require you to leap into the unknown hoping it will work out. Through the colors of dreaming, gratitude, and remembering, we are creating faith by facing the circumstances of our lives as human beings forging our own spiritual authority in collaboration with a benevolent Universe.
Taking time to deeply inquire into the nature of our Souls through the Life Artist color palette leads us to remembering the source of our originality and that it’s eternally inscribed within, waiting to be expressed more fully through the reconciliation of our Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences.
The Brain: A Poetry-Making Machine
I read this week, as you I’m sure many of you did, that the jobs bill is stalled by Congressional Republicans and the conservative democratic chair of the Senate Budget Committee.
These factions oppose using funds left over from the bank bailout to pay for what amounts to a stimulus package for us, average Americans. Their coded message to us: You aren’t important enough to worry about. Need your unemployment benefits extended? Too bad. Need your health insurance covered for another month? Sorry!
Those dear young souls of the far right are so angry they literally cannot see straight. One placard that appears at most of their rallies sums up, for me, the level of discourse and thought you can expect from them. It’s the sign that reads Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare! Think about that for a moment. Doesn’t it fit your definition of the Extreme Absurd?
It’s sad, and it’s dangerous. Many politicians kowtow to these goofballs, incorporating their schoolyard rhetoric into their own campaigns. One wonders. How far will we sink before we implode or miraculously rebound? And if we do come back, what will that take? Weigh in here with your opinion. Share the news you know. It’s what keeps us alive and moving on. Perhaps you may perform a kirtan first, a form of worship incorporating dancing and singing to enter into a state of bliss—the soul’s natural state.
And remember this insight, which comforts me from time to time. Freud said he did not discover the subconscious, poets did. He also said that your brain is a poetry-making machine.
Love Is As Love Does
This is the world of Grandma Minnie, the Brooklyn of my youth so full of unknown wonders and windows as far as I could see, out of which countless heads would lean and call for children I didn’t really know. But the open windows everywhere made me feel we were all connected, made me feel that each living room washed into the next. I would sit on the cement stoop and watch one drama waft into the street and mix with another two brick houses down and on up to the roof where pigeons would be pecking at something unseen. I loved that stoop. Grandma would always come out to sit with me. Just when I would be drifting away into all the unknown life, just as I felt the street turn to a clear stream that started in some other country, just as I was squinting to see where it would lead, Grandma would appear in her apron, her big warm forearms, hot from baking. She would sit beside me, drape me in those arms, and smile a smile that seemed to know what I was doing. How I loved those mornings. And how I loved Grandma…
Gratitude
We are all aware of the power of expressing gratitude and recognizing the abundance we receive and have on a daily basis. As the messenger of Heart intelligence and the second color of Faith in the Life Artist color palette, gratitude is about the wonder and joy we feel when our highest potential aligns with the highest good in the world.
Through the Soul’s Dream journey I guide, I have witnessed many people on the path of Intentional Transformation get out of their own way by healing and inspiring themselves first (by attending to their “personal cause”), and then moving on to their “world cause” of healing and inspiring others. People are filled with a deep sense of gratitude when they suddenly realize that their highest potential had been blocked by a belief, pattern, or role in their lives that was holding them back from living their lives in the unique meaning and passion of their Soul’s gifts.
The shift that can happen is living into the gratitude of having a purpose and relationships that are sustained from deeper truths rather than being grateful for all we have. When our Heart intelligence knows this capacity for gratitude, we foster faith that our consciousness is in continual evolution and that outcomes are not destinations that determine our worth, but rather pulse points for remembering who we truly are.
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