Archive for September, 2010
Poverty’s New Faces
In the week leading up to the Autmnal Equinox, a pair of articles got my attention. The first focused on the census and its finding that one in seven Americans now lives below the poverty line. One in seven! Does that number astonish you as much as it shocks me?
The second article focused on elders as the new poor. According to our elected leaders, the recession is now officially over, but somehow this good news isn’t reflected in the experiences of millions of out-of-work Americans in their fifties and sixties who can’t find jobs.
I have been in this position myself, and I ruefully recall a conversation with a friend who has worked for thirty years in human resources.
“Don’t think for a moment that ageism isn’t present in the workplace,” she said. “Think about it. When you’ve gone to interviews, what do the people who are interviewing you look like?”
I looked back on my experiences and realized that they had all been in their thirties and forties.. “People tend to hire people who look like them,” my friend said.
It’s hard news, the kind that fills me with shame and sadness. For all of our effort to become a more tolerant, compassionate people, we still sleepwalk with terrifying efficiency. Cultures that ignore elders do so at their peril. Perhaps that’s why, when we’re measured against the rest of the world, that we’re still free-falling in math, literature, and science. Our productivity and ingenuity have suffered. How could it be otherwise when we ignore an immense, talented pool of citizens?
One could say a lot about our country’s failed pact with its citizens, but I’m more interested in the tenuous pacts we negotiate every day with each other. When was the last time you stood up to support an elder, a mentor? How did you do that? What came of it? How do you feel about the fact that one in seven of your neighbors lives in poverty now? What are your solutions?
In this Week of the Banned Book, it’s appropriate and urgent to ask such questions. It’s even more important to start coming up with specific answers. I can’t be present, and I can’t be awake if I can’t rise to this challenge.
I Have Not Forgotten
any of you. Not the long friendship we
somehow broke into pieces so sharp we
couldn’t hold. Or the love we tried so
hard to mend though it splintered like
a fence we didn’t post. I’m still not
sure what we were keeping in or out.
I have not forgotten the tender place
in which we met, where everyone gets
to put down the lies they’ve been told
are true.
I don’t know where you are these days
but I burned the stories of our failure
along the way.
I hope you’ve been heard and held
since we were thrown so completely
into who we are.
The places we break don’t seem to heal
as much as wear smooth, until what we
thought was principle crumbles like a
wall.
Laughter
I write today in honor of my beloved Uncle Duke who passed away this week. My uncle’s greatest gift to me was laughter. We both have big laughs and when we’d laugh together, it was contagious. His nickname for me was “Rose”—Rambling Rose to be exact. He liked to say it with a swagger in his voice that let me know he recognized both my wild and delicate nature. It’s so rare that a person lets us know that we are seen for some unique and precious quality of our essence. My Uncle Duke was a special man who went through several big hardships in his life and always emerged gracefully. While I will miss him playing “Clare du Lune” on his piano and his amazing cooking, I will miss our laughter together the most, and of course the sound of his voice when he said, “You know what, Rose…”
Autumnal Equinox and Emotional Equanimity
Tonight at 11:09 p.m., the earth will not be tilted towards the sun but will be straight up and down on its axis, as it is every year on the autumnal equinox. This day, marking the end of summer and the dawn of autumn, brings equal night (equinox) to the entire world. I wonder if it might bring emotional equanimity, too.
Imagine that. Instead of arguing over the mosque in New York, what if those who have been screaming loudest placed a stone on the mosque foundation, then walked to Ground Zero and placed a stone there for a memorial that has yet to be built. Suppose they kept doing it, laying stones at one site, then the other, until both sites were built up, creating a physical agreement out of sweat and shared labor.
Sweat and shared labor dissolve anger pretty quickly. Want to know what you have in common with someone? Work hard beside her. Lend a hand when he is in need of help. Bend your back and just start doing what needs to be done. When you are tired and sore, maybe you will sit back and really look at each other. And then? Will you want to kill the person whose eyes you’re looking at, whose eyes are looking back at you?
You might find you have more in common than you realized. You might find common ground talking about children, elders, food, pets, childhood, sports, and hobbies. You might find it talking about the work you just did together, and work you may do later. You might find it by telling stories to each other, or by sharing poems. You might find it by sitting quietly, side by side, or stretching out on the cool grass and looking up at the stars. From their vantage point, you both look exactly the same. To the stars you look like specks of clay enduring a candle’s brief, magic spell in which you hold your shape until returning to eternity.
How many are up for spending their magical moment of Me hating and yelling? How many relish fear? Who wants to be angry and bitter, isolated and divisive, oppressive and bullying? Who is brain-addled enough to shout Me! I am! I!
Who is calm and peaceful enough to lie back on the grass, attuned to others, and enjoy the harvest moon rise tomorrow just above a bright Jupiter and a somewhat dimmer, blue speck, Uranus. What is your ritual made of, and just who do you want to be? Tonight is a good starting point.
For His Students (for Steve Severin)
I have come to tell you that your teacher
is gone. Much too soon. He was a good man
with a good heart and he was my friend. Every-
thing else grows like a branch from this strong
wood. He was a great teacher because he loved
you. Because he believed you are young horses
who not only can cross the stream but drink
from it. He would hold up a question like a
lantern, swing it ahead and shout, “What
do you see?” Then give it to one of you
and hurry you into your future, barking,
“Go! Bring back what you see!”
So how do you love a teacher who’s died?
You keep swinging questions like lanterns
in the dark. You tell the story of how he
surprised your mind into opening. You
keep the part of your soul that he intro-
duced to you awake. You challenge some-
one younger than you to care. You keep
his tradition of always saying thank you.
He was my friend. I loved him and I loved
how he never stopped looking for the roots
of life; though it was always more about look-
ing than finding. Our friend is gone. Much
too soon. His name was Steve. When he
talked about you, his heart was in his eyes.
Continuity of Love
This word “continuity” has stood out in my mind’s eye this week in many ways. The place I’ve been looking is where continuity meets true connection versus where it’s an investment in a habit or expectation of myself, or others, that supports my comfort, security, and validation in some way.
While it’s natural to desire the continuity that supports our comforts like having coffee or tea, or exercising in the morning to wake ourselves up, I was wondering about what wakes us up to the continuity of love. What inspires us to fall in love with our work, to feel the love that awakens the truth of who we are. Opening to the continuity of living in this love brings me to my knees.
While life is full of commitments and challenges, what is it to truly open yourself to give and receive the continuity of love?
Prodigies
Prodigies
I took some free time recently to look up prodigies on the Internet. Wow! There are youthful prodigies everywhere, doing everything!
I was prompted to do this after reading about Kieron Williamson, the British eight-year-old painting prodigy. Kieron began drawing at five and painting at six. Not long ago, at age eight, he exhibited 33 new paintings at his gallery. They all sold in half an hour for 150,000 pounds ($235,000.00). Did I already say wow!?
But it turns out that Kieron isn’t the only child prodigy among us. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Jackie Evancho, the ten-year-old opera sensation, Kim Ung-Yong, Ph.D. at fifteen and owner of the world’s highest IQ, Gregory Smith, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize at age twelve, and Akrit Jaswal, India’s seven-year-old surgeon and many others like them suggest that the evolved human is already here. It’s just that she and he aren’t me. Though these people and their accomplishments read like characters in David Sedaris’s fiction, they’re real, while the best prodigy-esque talent I might conjure would be gullibility, perhaps.
I wonder, were they always among us, like perfectly disguised and assimilated aliens who have been here for centuries? Did it take YouTube to expose them? Is there an age limit on prodigy status? Wikipedia says fifteen is the cut-off for a child prodigy, so what happens when your prodigy status ends at age sixteen?. What are they left with? Fifteen minutes of Warhol fame? Or is it like the Marines and Catholics—once they join, they’re members for life?
Can’t we have senior prodigies, too? We’re approaching something like critical mass with all of the talented, hanging-on, forever old people among us. My friend and mentor, George Hitchcock, who died on August 27th at ninety-six, was surely a prodigy of magical arts, and I’ve known many a woman and man in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who are prodigies of the grown vegetable and spirit horse. I know astrology prodigies and shaman prodigies. Maybe the name for all of these can be wisdom prodigies. Perhaps we can all practice in that way as we age, as we ripen in the process of making sense of our experience. As we wake up, if we do, maybe we’ll discover what we never knew—that we possess special gifts, that we are wisdom prodigies.
Breaking Bread
The giver is used up in the giving
as rain evaporates in what it helps
to grow. It is human to fear this, but
we can no more resist it than the pit
can resist becoming fruit.
When you listen, I release my song of
silence. When I see you, you release
your light waiting in the dark.
When you help me up, you absorb
part of my fall. But somehow it doesn’t
make you fall. This is the inoculation
of love.
As if it were a secret, I must confess:
the giver is used up in the giving as
the heart evaporates in
what it tries to hold.
Leaning into the Mystery
As my relationship with the Universal Intelligence, as I call it, or Source, grows stronger and stronger, I continue to realize how paradoxically small and yet significant I am—we all are. Our small selves want so much to control things and figure them out. Yet, the more I practice showing up and releasing my will to the breeze of the great Mystery, the more significantly I can impact my reality.
My favorite sandals were stolen last week at a lovely spa I visited while on vacation. The person who took them insisted they were hers. As I watched her walk out in my shoes, I didn’t want to make a scene and instead leaned into the acceptance that this was her karma to live out.
As it turned out, it was also my karma to live out. These sandals were sacred to me. They could have been any other pair of shoes and I wouldn’t have cared so much. What I realized as I reflected upon this experience is that I too often lean into the Mystery when it’s convenient for me because I’m afraid to stand up for what I know to be true, or to experience a loss of something sacred to me. In the past, I’ve allowed other “sacred” experiences be reduced to something less significant because of my willingness to accept, or because my fear of being inappropriate or hurt. In this case, I allowed leaning on the Mystery to be a crutch, and I realized a profound difference between leaning on the Mystery and leaning into the Mystery. I did let this woman walk away with my sandals, and in fact leaned on the Mystery rather than trusting my heartfelt conviction that this was not okay.
In trusting the Mystery and turning our experience over to it, we must not allow ourselves and our Truth be trampled in the process. Only when there’s alignment of personal Truth and being unattached to outcome can the healing and the magic begin. Otherwise the machinations of our desire to control look like Oz behind the curtain, and we live in a world in which we don’t truly understand our own significance in relationship to the Mystery.
Lean into, not on, and let go . . .
What Then?
What if you slept?
And what if,
In your sleep
You dreamed?
And what if,
In your dream,
You went to Heaven
And there plucked
A strange and
Beautiful flower?
And what if,
When you awoke,
You had the flower
In your hand?
Ah… what then?
—Coleridge
Like sunlight on a spider’s web, this small poem illumines a web of relationships between the inner world of spirit, presence, and dreams and the outer world of roots, wires, and pavement. Coleridge honors a timeless force that helps us withstand the press of existence; a force as compelling as gravity—the transformative force that turns the dream inside into a flower in the world. How does this happen? No one really knows. But he suggests that all realms are real and that part of our job as ethical beings has always been to bring what is inner out. “What then?” he says. What kind of life would be possible? What kind of connection waits between living things? He suggests in very few images that luminescence is a dynamic of life; that everything that lives shines from within and that this luminescence infuses the world with spirit. He suggests that luminescence is how spirit keeps touching us without being visible.
What, then, is our experience with the intuitive sequence of sleeping, dreaming, and bringing something back into the world? It’s all very human. Nothing odd about it. The call is not to isolate and judge the parts, but to understand the mysterious physics of the whole. We are not bereft when sleeping, we are en route. We are not untethered when dreaming, but mining the core. We are not out of order when bringing something back into the life of each other’s days, but breaking ground like a flower. The usefulness of these inward gestures depends on whether we hold them with the humility of not-knowing. Can we become students of this luminescent dynamic of life? Can we become apprentices in the art of going inward and bringing something beautiful and useful back into the world? Can we retrieve and share bits of wisdom from the other side like a beach comber adding his broken shell to the pile?
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