Archive for August, 2010
The way we practice
The earth spins on its axis drifting through the dark, seeming to go nowhere as it inches its way around the sun. What if this is the way of things? What if every heart spins on its story? What if every mind spins on its best guess of how this all goes together? What if the very cells—in stone, bird, fish or camel—spin on their little nodes of life force inching things to heal and grow? What if history circles our constant possibility, always there within us though untouchable? What if our particular lives spin on the axis we call spirit, each of us inching our way through the dark around God? What if love is the way we practice spinning about each other until the holiness of things appears?
It’s the middle of the day and you come running. Seeing the light on your face softens me. I realize that while I spin around all that can’t be seen, you feed everything living. You take me to the blue bird house where six of the smallest birds I’ve ever seen are quivering—their seed-like beaks gaping for food. Just below the surface, everything is threaded and true.
True Balance
We often see balance in our lives through the ways we handle the scheduling of our time: work vs. time with family, exercise, or chilling out. Too often we search for space in our schedule to do something we’ve always wanted to do and then just wait for room to appear in our busy lives.
This balancing act with time and juggling ongoing to-do lists, however, leaves us even more exhausted. One remedy I’ve discovered is looking at my life through the balance of giving and receiving. It’s allowed me to see different possibilities and experience greater flow in my life.
The balance of receiving and giving is not a perfectly measured art form. It can take a while to understand it and to cultivate it. What anyone can see quite easily, however, is that when you’re willing to receive energy, feelings, thought, and form which inspire you, you’re much more likely to be filled with energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms to give. I recently took a two-week vacation that made it easy for me to remember this true sense of balance and yet it takes awareness to implement this awareness at home.
In my work with the Mandala and guiding people to experience their Soul’s Dream, I’ve seen many great givers and not-so-stellar receivers. I’ve seen how often people collapse under the weight of giving, whether it’s providing, completing a duty, or performing some role to be liked. True balance and honoring the flow of receiving and giving is a step toward greater authenticity because it requires us to become present to what is true for us and to determine boundaries that are not about time or scheduling, but rather about the exchange of the energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms in our lives.
When we’re in the “zone,” receiving and giving can feel indistinguishable, and when we’re not, we’re gasping for that deep, fulfilling breath that comes with connection to ourselves, others, and the world.
Take a moment to reflect on the balance of receiving and giving in your own life. What are the energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms that you need to receive and how would receiving them shape the ways in which you give?
Pay Attention
An older woman fell outside a coffee shop in Jacksonville, Oregon, today. She’d fallen just a few minutes before my friend and I arrived. We came around the corner chattering about the old brick buildings that would most likely collapse in an earthquake, and we were moving at such a brisk clip that the scene on the street didn’t register right away.
The woman was sitting up on the sidewalk, her legs straight out before her. A young woman crouched at her left side, supporting the injured person who leaned into her. Someone else pressed a towel and icepack to the back of the old woman’s head.
I was so much in my masculine, going, going, that I stepped right over the woman’s legs and took two steps on before a brainvoice said, Whoa! What did you just do?
I stopped. My friend, more present than I’d been, had already stopped and was looking down at the fallen person with compassion and sympathy. I bent forward, my features softening, as I tuned into what was happening at sidewalk level. I saw that the towel was bloodstained. I heard the injured woman speak, and that was good. I noted that three people kneeled around her, so I held my space and concentrated on sending calm, healing energy to her.
But I was embarrassed. Every day my lack of awareness startles me. How could I miss for one moment the spectacle of a woman injured on the street right in front of me? How can I miss so many things?
But I do. Every day. I walk on by, drive along, or push my way through a crowd. Sometimes I’m acting aggressive, and other times I’m just oblivious. As hard as I practice toward being awake and aware, I slip back over and over again.
The difference between now and years ago is this: I take note. I review my actions, and I practice all the more. By doing so, I believe that I will step over the fallen less and less until the day comes when I’ll be the fallen and the comforter all at once. That’s the glory I’m going for. How about you?
What I Really Want to Say
If what I have can help,
you can have it.
Why?
We are carriers
not owners. As soon as we
think we own, we start longing
to receive. And everything
stops flowing.
How?
Whatever it might be,
if it’s stuck, we can take it
apart and build something
together.
Are you ready?
To be as loving as the hole
that receives the nail?
Is that too harsh?
Then, as the shell that hides
the minnow from the eel.
Let’s give it all away
and marvel at how
there’s always
more to give.
Why leave home?
Driving through downtown Ashland, Oregon, the other day, I was startled to witness a couple of gangs of young bucks, their antlers still soft and fuzzy, cruising Main Street. I’m used to seeing deer in town because we’re situated in an alpine valley hugged close on all sides by mountains. The deer and other critters virtually live in our yards, and local motorists are always on the lookout for deer on the streets. Usually, though, one spots does, not bucks, or a small group of does with one or two young bucks. Why were all those teen bucks hanging out together?
“They’re coming into their first mating season,” my outdoorsy, thirteen-year-old daughter informed me. “They stick together until they find females, then they split up.”
That made sense, and thus relieved, my imagination traveled to thoughts of leaving home. Not so many months ago, those purposefully strolling bucks lay cuddled up against their mothers in the shade of some backyard glen. But now they’d left home to satisfy a biological contract.
And you and I—why did we leave home? Why do we leave home? Do we leave because we’re curious? Stupid? Ungrateful? Reckless? Hungry and thirsting for adventure? In a way, leaving home contradicts our herd instinct. We like safety, regularity, routine. Don’t we? Or do we desire constant change, the stimulation of danger and the unknown? At this point in our evolution, it’s surely a bit of both for most of us.
No matter how we describe it, we leave home to find ourselves and to claim our independence. Whether the experience turns out good or bad, we do it because we want to. We leave to find ourselves, and we return to share the new, the more complete people we’ve become. We come back to share the news.
Leave-takings and homecomings…sadness and celebration, the unknown and the remembered place. Much of our inner debate is consumed with these matters, and then one day, perhaps, we understand that we never really leave home at all. Home is inside us, and no matter where we go, no matter where or what or who we call of associate with home, they’re really all add-ons to the perpetual home within.
Funny that those adolescent bucks led me to think about home. I’m grateful to them, and surely to the hearth and home that is still burning and holding sacred space in my heart.
Write a poem or journal entry about home, or leaving it, or returning. If you feel like sharing, please send it along.
Why am I the only one crying?
I met a woman who had loved Mozart her whole life. We were at a large dinner party. She sat next to me and quietly said, “You know, I have a Jewish background, but I go sometimes to their church. It’s so somber that it makes me cry. I’ve lost two teenage girls, you know. I look around and no one even moves. Their Lord died two thousand years ago. Why am I the only one crying?” She stared off past my salad and then offered, “It’s why I love Mozart, because under all his skill, the one chord he returns to keeps saying, ‘Why am I the only one crying?’”
Is this woundedness or aliveness? It is surely an example of having very little left between your heart and life. While some think this makes us weak, I believe it is what we are put here for: to wear away and love away everything in between. Much depends on what we do with such a sensibility. Clearly, the weight of feeling and perception with nowhere to go with it is the burden of being a watcher. It can be lonely and debilitating. But when we can give voice to and share what rises through us, it joins us. Ultimately, what we do with the waterfall of our sensitivities matters. That the woman who loves Mozart dared to break through her polite conversation with a stranger to speak of the tenderness of being alive keeps that unexpected feeling from festering into a wound. Between us, it stays alive. Between us, it helps us live.
In truth, aliveness and woundedness are ever-changing states that we move through like wakefulness and sleep. And it seems that the practice of honest expression is necessary to move from sleep to wakefulness and from woundedness to aliveness. Being human, we are constantly slipping from one to the other. Repeatedly the cost of not expressing who we are turns out to be woundedness. Not surfacing who we are and what we feel results in self-echo, dividedness, isolation. If allowed to fester, wounds can’t heal. Then we risk imploding. On the other side, the gifts of expressing who we are manifest in our aliveness. Such commitment to the flow of presence results in connection, wholeness, and membership in the Universal Ground of Being. And when everything comes alive, wounds given to air can heal. Then we risk falling in love with everything.
Heroes
Who is your hero? Do you have a new one every day? Have you had just one for as long as you can remember, or do you have many? Is your hero real or a fictional character?
What do heroes really do for us? Do they delude us with unreasonable expectations, distract us from the real world where prosaic things plod along as they are? Maybe they’re sensational emotional filler, like cotton candy in place of a warm, nourishing meal.
Or maybe they’re the most important role models we’ll ever know. Hasn’t everyone at times felt this? Gee, I wish I was . . . instead of me. This can be a healthy fantasy because there are times when you need to take a wee vacation from yourself. Imagining being someone else is a convenient and inexpensive way to do that.
But it’s nothing to build a practice on. Heroes are mirrors of the compassion, humility, and greatness inside each of us. Heroes are archetypes that measure the span of years each of us has to travel across before we morph into something else.
Today, I’m honoring everyday heroes: the firefighters who keep busy this time of year in the west, and public school teachers who are beginning to look ahead to the fast-approaching first day of school. I’m also thinking of the father I know who took a day off from work to hang out with his twelve-year-old daughter, and my friend who was laid off from his bakery job last week. He sweetened a lot of people’s lives over the last fourteen years.
Who are your heroes? Make a list. Talk to some. Write to one. Connect, connect! We have good and valuable stories to share with each other.
2 poems by Robert McDowell
Robert read two of his poems during Saturday’s class:
400 Apples
The Sheep That Feeds You
To Be and Belong
Let go your want for greatness
and feel the tool that’s in your hand.
Let go your fear of emptiness
and receive the wave still reaching
from the beginning.
It only wants to enliven you
the way a candle fills an entire room.
Let the web of living things
entangle you.
Only stars are free
and they are so lonely.
Curse what you will
but give thanks
that everything alive
wants something from you.
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