Creativity – Inspiration & Support – SoulPaths / the journey….

Making Peace with my Mother’s Paradoxes

Dear Mom,

You’re one of my angels now, nine years gone, cheering and challenging me from the spirit world after you blessed my vocation in our last real talk….but I’m still trying to make sense of your paradoxical legacy as I, in my turn, approach elderhood. Not only your legacy in my own life, but the legacy you left the nation through your contributions to the Heritage Foundation and Republican Party and the rest of your conservative causes.

I know you would never have wanted a man like the DT to become president – he would have horrified you – but his position as president-elect is nevertheless the outcome of many of the things you supported devotedly in your life. And I still, to this day, can’t figure out why. Why someone so profoundly spiritual as yourself – I’m not talking about your conservative Catholicism, but your incredible, compassionate, visionary spirituality – could have fallen so completely for a party that waves its collective middle finger in the face of all the virtues you taught by your lifelong example: reverence for the natural world and all its beings; compassion for all regardless of color, nationality, creed; strength that did not deny your femininity.

Propped by my desk now is the prayer by Max Ehrmann that hung over yours, and spoke to the values you demonstrated through your life…

Let me do my work each day; and if the darkened hours of despair
overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me
in the desolation of other times.

May I still remember the bright hours that found me walking over
the silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of a quiet
river, when a light glowed within me, and I promised my early God
to have courage amid the tempests of the changing years.

Spare me from bitterness and from the sharp passions of unguarded
moments. May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit.
Though the world knows me not, may my thoughts and actions be
such as shall keep me friendly with myself.

Lift up my eyes from the earth, and let me not forget the uses of the
stars. Forbid that I should judge others lest I condemn myself.
Let me not follow the clamor of the world, but walk calmly in my path.

Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am; and keep ever
burning before my vagrant steps the kindly light of hope.

And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within
sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for
life, and for time’s olden memories that are good and sweet; and
may the evening’s twilight find me gentle still.

I still remember when I came home from school crying because someone in my fourth-grade class had said I was communist, because we had family in Lithuania, then behind the Iron Curtain. I was raging, “I hate the Russians for what they’re doing to our people!” and you corrected me, saying that the Russians were victims of their government, and that it was the Soviets who were holding our people prisoner.

Thirty-some years later, I was asking your former parish priest, the saintly Father Tony Dranginis, of the Lithuanian community’s church, St. Alphonsus, to help a Russian refusenik friend to bring his wife and son to the U.S….he was appalled, saying, “Do you know what the Russians did to our people?” I quoted your words verbatim…and he had a change of heart, and sent me to the Lithuanian community’s immigration attorney. She made the same objection, I gave her the same response…and six months later Sasha was welcoming Tatiana and Sergei to the U.S.

Your compassionate teachings had more of an effect than you probably ever knew.But for all your parenting wisdom and visionary writings, you could be just as righteous an essayist as your media favorites, William Buckley, George Will, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter. And here I find myself choking on why? Why, always Why? How could you not see the hate, the arrogance, the meanness of these people?

I remember years ago, when you told me, “When I was young, I was just as liberal as you are. Then somebody took me aside and told me how things really are.” I’ve wondered for years who that person was, what sway they held over you, that they could turn you aside from the natural inclination of your own soul – the compassion to which you’ve returned since your passing, that shone out of you so many times as you cried over forests being razed and wrote impassioned letters to the editor about cruelty or neglect to animals. The compassion that led you to feed the birds, squirrels, raccoons (“poor Mrs. Raccoon, having to be a single mother and raise her babies alone!”), foxes, possums, cats, dogs….any animal that came your way knew it would receive a meal.

Part of it, I believe, was the church in which you grew up – as Baltimore’s Lithuanian community church, St. Alphonsus was deeply imbued with anti-communist and conservative Catholic ideology; to this day it is one of the centers of the Tridentine (Latin) Mass, which you swore to the end that you preferred to the modern vernacular version. Part was surely generational trauma – your parents and sister Olga fleeing Lithuania for their lives, just ahead of the Soviets in 1919. How many anti-communist pamphlets did I unearth among your papers, your uncountable issues of The Voice of the Martyrs chronicling the horrors of life under Soviet Russia? I vividly remember writing letters to my cousins in Lithuania, with you carefully schooling me to
remove any references to Christian holidays because they could cause our family to be sent to the gulags.

I stumbled on an article the other day – The Red Scare and the Liturgy and Life Pamphlet Collection – that gave a deeper perspective: evidently good Catholics couldn’t enter or exit their parish churches without being accosted by ranks of anti-communist literature. And at St. Alphonsus, with its Lithuanian population still grieving families behind the Iron Curtain, that anticommunist message must have been particularly powerful….and amnesiac. I didn’t learn about Lithuania’s quisling government, or collaboration with the Nazis, until I was in my 20s, and was devastated by the information.

And you seemed to swallow it all in your devoted loyalty to Nixon, Reagan, Oliver North, the Bushes, your scorn for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic politicians across the board – “godless liberals.” Your conviction that only incitement by malcontent leaders with malign intent could twist “our fine black families” to engage in protest against the conditions of their lives. And yet you lived just blocks away from poor black neighborhoods in your Depression/WWII young womanhood in Union Square; you must have seen those conditions at least in passing. Or was your ethnic childhood so insular?

If anything emerges from my browsing through your writings, it is your innocence, your naivete, your allegiance to the patriarchal establishment, so conditioned that you couldn’t see the fusion of church and corporate interests. Working for Standard Oil in your younger days, you would have been in the thick of that paradigm, the rise of Christian Libertarianism. And surely there was an attraction (a crush?) to your hyperliterate conservative gurus; how many times did I hear you dreamily quoting William Buckley’s articles, savoring his turns of phrase like a fine wine?

You could have had no idea how it would all wind up; you died years before the rise of the Tea Party, when even Dad, staunch Republican that he was, abandoned the GOP and voted for Obama, not once but twice. “It’s a sin and a crime what the Republicans are doing,” he said. But even in his dying days my work for green businesses and the Earth was still anathema to him, your blessing clearly a misinterpretation on my part.

But always, you and I shared a deeper understanding. And I am heart-glad that, despite our differences, you saw that I was still coming from that spiritual/mystic place we shared…heading in different directions, but from the same point of origin.

Mom, as I’m reading the writing you left behind – years of letters to and from Aunt Olga and Dad, carefully stapled and filed in a box with cheery 1970’s flowers on the cover; years of Op-Eds, articles, and Letters to the Editor, carefully pasted in on fragile pages in big leather scrapbooks – I’m seeing some of the forces that shaped you, but so much remains a mystery. I’m glad that – even while you veered wildly between holding your political ground and cheering me on as a writer; asking me to review your outraged op-eds and saying you were proud of my work; borrowing books from your parish priest on bringing lost family members back to the Church and telling Dad that my husband’s and my Earth-based spirituality was no less real and valid than the fervent Catholicism you practiced – I never doubted your love for me. However reactionary your political and religious positions, you framed them from a place of heart and spirit, and even while you argued fiercely for the default masculine pronoun and derided feminist ideology, you were never any less than proud of being a woman, nor did you expect anything less than that as a woman, I would be strong and hold my own in a man’s world.

For all our differences, Mom, you’ll always be one of my heroes.

Findhorn Bound: Women’s Wisdom in Nairn

Leaving Edinburgh was not easy – in one day I’d seen enough to fall in love with the city’s glorious stone buildings, urban mountain, royal and postage-stamp gardens, and friendly people – but I took a great and shamelessly touristy thrill in riding a real British double-decker bus to the train station.

I’d been hoping to find a congenial – and informed – seatmate for the four-hour ScotRail ride to the North….and glory be, next to me settled a delightfully acerbic elder lady from Inverness, who’d been taking the North/South ride throughout her life. Together we entertained a young mother’s active toddler, while my companion shared her memories, gave history lessons about landmarks, clued me in to differences between British and American English, and dished gossip about the royal family and their Balmoral Castle, far over the snow-clad peaks of the Cairngorms to the east.

By the time we were approaching Inverness and passengers were lining up to use the lavatory, she was telling hilarious tales about the tourists who invariably couldn’t figure out how to close the compartment door. When my turn came, and I was equally baffled, she gestured with hands and eyes from her seat as other passengers hid their smiles. I followed her not-exactly unobtrusive pointing, and sure enough, there was the button, just as well-hidden as she’d warned. What a relief!

The train station in Nairn was a mile’s stroll from the home of my AirBnB hostess, the “Swan Woman of Nairn”…healer, artist, photographer, Renaissance woman….and the evening that followed, of touring the town and gathering with her friends in an impromptu wise women’s circle, was magical.

My hostess asked as I was settling in for the night, “Would you like to come for a dip in the sea with me tomorrow morning?” I gasped – the winds that day had been frigid, and the next day’s temperature was predicted to drop into the 30s ! This was her normal practice, she added, smiling, and her guests often found it a profound experience. “No expectations, no pressure,” she added, and bade me goodnight.

Next morning dawned cloudy and as cold as expected, but we sallied out, she jogging ahead, I photographing as I moseyed along, soaking in the beauty of the place. She’d told me the stories of the swans nesting in the river…how she and a friend had saved a clutch of duck eggs from being swept away in a flood…and shared her wonder at seeing the tide coming into the River Nairn as if to meet her on her way to the ocean. I crossed the bridge, passed the trailer – caravan – park, and came to the dunes…and she came to meet me as I topped the hill.

IMG_20160416_041234208 — The dunes and sea, Moray Firth

“There are fishermen up the beach, so if you’d rather not undress, that’s fine,” she said tactfully, noting my pulled-down hat and hands tucked inside the sleeves of my thin Gore-tex jacket. “You can shelter here by the pier while I get ready and go in.” Teeth chattering, I nodded gratefully and watched in awe as she slipped out of her jogging suit and shoes, pinned up her hair, and walked serenely barefoot down the beach to the water’s edge. She lay down in the shallow surf, rose, and walked in to waist-height, dipped, emerged, and returned to dry land.

She smiled at my wide eyes and said, “It’s simple. When I lie down in the water, I feel my connection to the land, the water, and the air. I focus on that connection; the more connected I feel, the less I feel the cold.”

I closed my eyes and breathed in her words, remembering my husband’s experience at his third Lakota Sundance ceremony: offering his chest for piercing in giveaway as Traditional intercessor Elmer Running struggled to cut through his skin to insert an eagle’s talon, telling him, “Pray harder! Pray harder!” He hadn’t felt the pain, he said; he was lost in an trance of connection with cosmic Oneness. I’d gone half-expecting to witness macho stoicism or Spanish-Baroque grotesquery, the piety of pain, and there I found him describing transcendent ecstasy.

And here, halfway around the world, was this wisewoman, embracing a habit I’d read of stereotypical Englishmen of the old public-school military sort practicing – but driven not by sacrifice or macho discipline but that same transcendent connection.

Opening my eyes, I turned, walked down to the water, stooped down and held my hands in the receding ice-cold surf as my own homage to nature. A rogue wave rushed up, splashed around my galoshes and soaked my socks, and I laughed in surprise and delight.

And we went back to the house for breakfast.

To Stop Feeling Alone, Stop Being Alone

In a long-ago job, a manager once told our team – “I don’t want to hear about a problem unless you have a solution to offer.”

I’ve tried to take that as a guideline for blog posts: not to kvetch about an issue unless I can work my way through it to an answer…or at least a new perspective.

Lately, though, between rollercoaster headlines – the violent seesawing between hard-fought wins and losses for the environment, social justice, the economy, one humanitarian disaster after another – the death of my dad and the breaking up of the old homestead – I’m feeling stunned into silence. Have felt stunned into silence for months, for most of this year, truth to tell. Brief, glittering and profound phrases flicker randomly through my mind, but heavy-hearted, I feel exhausted at the mere thought of connecting them into a message to inspire thought, feeling, or action..

I’m not alone in this. I know that. Activist friends, writer friends have shared their own feelings of shocked and devastated wordlessness in response to the events of the day.

And I know with equal certainty that my spiritual exhaustion stems also – perhaps even more – from insufficient daily, purposeful, practice in engaging with nature. Just to hug a tree, to sit on a stone and feel the earth under my hands, to work in my garden and listen to the guidance of the plants, revives my energy. This depletion from the human excesses around me is a sure sign of “nature deficit disorder” in my life.

And just as suffering offers the lesson of compassion, this exhaustion reaffirms the source and inspiration of my creative energy.

So…to renew, get out each day, away from keyboard and screen; go out of the house and feel the rain on my face. Listen to the whispers of the ancestors, in all their faces and races and species, in the rustle of wind in the trees. Hug a tree, place my feet between her roots, and feel my own roots reaching into the earth.

To renew creative energy, renew connection to the conscious, living, interconnected creation. To stop feeling alone, stop *being* alone.

Taking the Risk of Sharing Our Stories

Four years ago, in the midst of studies towards my Master’s degree, I birthed the precursor of this blog on the free WordPress platform. What a journey has taken place between that time and this!

At the beginning, I had no idea of where the journey would take me. I only knew that I was waking up to the reality – not just the single, catechism-shattering experience that I’d had in childhood, but the everyday, sublime-and-mundane Reality — that we exist in a conscious cosmos.

And along with that awakening came the calling to, somehow, integrate and share both that experience and that Reality.

Thanks be for the circles, and friends, and teachers, who shook me free of the Catholic-schoolgirl impression that such an experience was bizarre and unique, and the Reality…well, theologically incorrect at best! It’s taken a long time for me to realize that that experience is both archetypal and universal, and that it genuinely reflects REALITY, the mystical core of both shamanism and religion, and the guiding ethos of this inter-aware, interdependent creation.

It’s a challenge to stay in that awareness, and to share the journey from a place of personal authenticity, seeking, and ongoing discovery, when the risks of vulnerability and spiritual self-revelation are terrifying. And a very humbling task indeed, in the knowledge that the personal discoveries that are cracking open one cage after another in my mind are the mystical equivalents of 1+1 and a-b-c. It’s a wild ride between “wow – this must be shared!” on one hand and “who do I think I am?”on the other.

I’m deeply grateful for – and challenged by – the teachers who have encouraged me, affirming that each person’s shared story validates the experience of others, and gives others the courage to share their own experience in turn.

Looking at the mess we’re in as a species – and the devastation we have wrought on this planet – the human journey is about waking up to recognize and choose to walk in Sacred relatedness with the nonhuman awarenesses and wisdom that surround us. This awakening and re-connection to our brother and sister beings, I believe, is the key that can ultimately save life on Earth.

So to affirm, and live, and share, the truth of Sacred inter-being, at whatever bare-beginning level one understands and experiences it, is no longer an option but a necessity.

This blog traces some of my own path, and the events and people whose work speaks most deeply to me. It is one step in the evolution of a project further exploring the experience of conscious connection to the Divine embodied in creation.

I invite your sharing of your journey in response!

Edgewalk

These images are part of an evolving series honoring the Standing People (trees) as their fallen forms return to the soil.

I’d gone to the woods seeking peace and guidance, with too many personal paths beckoning, too much spinning in my mind. Almost immediately I found myself drawn off the pathway by the forms of felled trees and boughs in a massive brush pile. As I clambered about, witnessing the wood meshing with fallen leaves and returning to mulch, totemic shapes, faces, portals began to emerge in the dance of light and dark, pattern and texture….

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Our Responsibility, Our Power

I shut down another conversation the other day on Facebook. Didn’t intend to do it…but my comment was one of those that are met with embarrassed averted eyes and even more embarrassed silences.

No, I wasn’t sharing the intimate details of my health, sex life, or bathroom habits. I wasn’t evangelizing or objecting to the exclusive holiday greeting “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Easter” or what have you (though I do object to such exclusivity, early and often).

So what taboo did I break in this supposedly taboo-free society? I responded to a friend’s posting of Elaine Boosler’s comment: “When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.”

I pointed out that even if women hold ourselves aloof from macho male militarism, as long as we are purchasing goods that are kept artificially cheap by American companies’ outsourcing to regions with lower standards of living, extracting fossil fuels, minerals, tropical woods and other resources from impoverished nations that are happy to sell off their virgin ecosystems for desperately needed cash, and employing workers in sweatshops at below-living wages, that we, the nonviolent women, are morally responsible for the militarism that protects the companies that provide these goods.

It’s the truth that nobody wants to acknowledge. It’s so much easier to blame somebody else – Extremists in Congress, the Military, the unchecked Corporations otherwise known as The Bigs – Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Agro, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big X – Big Y – Big Z – when the truth is that none of these powerful perceived villains would ever have gotten their power or grown to their cancerous size without our buy-in…our votes (or non-votes)…our taxes…our energy and dietary and health care choices…our “therapeutic” shopping…feeding them.

But what other choice do we have in our society, we ask? Surely we need oil to run our cars, warm our houses, make the uncountable numbers of plastic and resin and synthetic-fabric products that fill our homes and offices and hospitals and …well, you get the idea…our society is based on petroleum products! Surely we need coal to keep our lights on and our appliances and computers running – how can a few (hundred) mountaintops and valley ecosystems and species compare to the importance of keeping the power on? Surely we need industrial agriculture to feed our families – not to mention the hungry of the world, isn’t Monsanto solving the problem of world hunger with their genetic tinkering? And pharmaceuticals keep our symptoms at bay, and insurance pays for the rising costs of modern healthcare…well, some of them, anyway…

It all comes down to the core belief that we don’t really have any other options. We’re not in a position to argue – we just have to make the best of the godawful, toxic situation we’ve got, with the Bigs getting bigger every day, the planet getting more compromised every day, more ecosystems and species failing every day, while our balances of money – and hope – grow smaller every day.

And the popular solutions? Work! Shop! Eat! Watch television! Go to the movies or the casino! Pump up that flabby sixpack at the gym or on WII Fit! Invade another country on World of Warcraft! Ingest narcotic substances! Reality is a nightmare, so let’s go virtual, or numb out completely! And maybe before it all goes down, science will have found a way to get us off this planet to embrace mankind’s Destiny: despoiling other planets, having trashed our Mother Earth.

What a grim scenario…no wonder nobody wants to talk about it! With our eyes myopically fixed on the situation-as-it-is, our energy and our brainpower enmeshed in our jobs, we’re frantically scrabbling to save what we have, make small changes (sure, we say, I’m eco-conscious! I’ve swapped all my lightbulbs and I’m a real nut about recycling!). But God forbid we challenge any core certitudes (least of all our own) or consider making deep changes in our lives….

….because we can’t.…

But what if we do have other options? Maybe, as theologian Matthew Fox proposes in Original Blessing, this apparent hopelessness, this paralyzing “I can’t-ism” itself stems from a self-negating certitude* that needs challenging: the certitude that we, ourselves, are somehow insufficient, powerless, not capable of self-motivation, self-management, direct connection with the Divine. The certitude that we need others, more powerful, richer, more authoritative, more degreed, more ecclesiastically accredited, to employ us, direct us and control things for us. The certitude that we are isolated individuals who cannot change our own lives… much less our society…much less our world. The certitude that we, alone, personally need to control and drive any change we initiate, and that this is a crushing, impossible responsibility.

As Betty Friedan wrote – “Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.” Or rather, make that humans’ denigration of ourselves….

But what if we can come up with other solutions…or notice the solutions that already exist, right under our noses…solutions that might start with lightbulbs and recycling, sure, but go much, much deeper….? What if we start to believe that our imaginations, our intent, our love – not just our anger and frustration – can move mountains?

What if, when we (metaphorically) pray for rain, we start carrying umbrellas?

Awhile back I attended an afternoon symposium called Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream, and just recently trained as a facilitator. It’s a multimedia, interactive program developed by the Pachamama Alliance, bringing together the best of millenia-old indigenous wisdom with the most visionary concepts of the modern scientific worldview to create an environmentally sustainable, socially just, spiritually fulfilling culture on the Earth.

In one portion of the symposium, we gather together with others in our community to discuss and discover what we are already doing – and can do. We link up our ideas, campaigns, organizations. Most important, we discover that we are not alone…that there is a groundswell of likeminded people stirring at the grassroots level, group after group arising to save one aspect of the planet, or to care for one group of the People…and another…and another…

We watch Paul Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest” speech and realize that millions of such organizations are working today around the earth…as the Achuar people who initiated the Pachamama Alliance say, it is the spirit of the conscious planet taking action to protect herself, and her life forms…inspiring people to do the work that is needed, guiding them along the way to find the right connections and resources…

We. Are. Not. Alone.

I could quote Goethe at this point, about the Universe acting to support us once we commit ourselves…but instead, I’ll close this post with a story.

Last week I went on a two-day retreat with a very wise and unassuming holy woman. I was struggling with my own forms of confusion and “I can’t-ism” – moving from work with one Teacher to seek a stronger connection to the Light within. In our conversations, she urged me to ask for inner guidance, and listen not only with my mind but also with my heart and body…to sit in “eyeball to eyeball” conversation with Spirit, however I experienced Spirit, and seek the inner voice, not in desperation or begging or presumptive problem-solving, but in silence.

After our conversation, she sent me to seek and follow inner guidance for the day – whether to sit indoors and read, meditate, and journal, or go outside to walk the grounds and connect with the Earth for grounding and direction.

So I went outside, asking for direction, noting the springs that arose from the ground and cut across the fields toward a wetland at the bottom of the property. Drawn to follow them, I stood at the bank of a small stream, barely a foot wide, and felt led to step over it, onto a small island completely surrounded by small separate streams. Ahead of me, two trees called to my attention. I approached, and between the trees found a pile of rusted metal junk, and felt the inner calling to remove it.

“How?” I asked, and the inner leading directed me back to the house…where my hostess was talking with her neighbor, a farmer who had been working for years on cleaning up and restoring the wetland. He was delighted to provide a wheelbarrow and practical advice for the job. My hostess provided work gloves and boots, and thus supplied, I had the pile cleared within a couple of hours, receiving further guidance in every quandary.

The message was clear: ask for guidance and it would come, step by step…if I consciously remained focused and aware. Whether I chose to say it came from God, Goddess, the Earth, the Universe, the Unified Field, what have you, the guidance came. I was not alone – guided by the Divine, the Earth, and helped by the People, and I could create a change. Yes, a small change…but a change, a beginning.

I believe that this is the key to real and lasting change, not on behalf of the planet, but in partnership with Spirit, the People, and the sentient Earth….and that each of us is capable of that partnership.

And I would like to invite your stories of similar experiences, if you are willing. If you feel called to share, please add them in the Comments below, or email them to me at phila @ soulpathsthejourney.org. Together we can create an empowering affirmation of partnership that goes beyond our individual abilities.

Thank you!

______________

* Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe, NM. Bear & Company, 1983) p. 120

Beatitudes for the Weird

Click the image to learn about the work of http://blessedaretheweird.com in affirming those of us who obstinately refuse to fit the cookie-cutter.

As my husband’s teacher used to say – Give thanks that you’re weird. Look at the alternative – normality, a.k.a. death.

Dancing with Spirit

I was deeply saddened to hear today of the passing of Gabrielle Roth, meditative dancer/artist/musician/shaman/healer. Although I never had an opportunity to participate in one of her classes, I’ve been awed by her videos and her philosophy of retrieving our souls, our humanity through the metaphor of dance.

When I was a child, I used to dance. Not the usual little-girl structured dance experience, though my parents did send me to ballet and tap classes in response to my kindergarten dreams of being a ballerina. Like poorly fitting toe-slippers, between chronic respiratory issues and two (apparent) left feet the lessons didn’t get far…but somewhere, somehow, some vestiges of the dreams and the lessons did remain.

Who knows where the record came from, like a fairy godmother, with the wild cover image of a woman and man in abandoned dance beside a bonfire. I can see my mother buying it – she loved the minor keys of Eastern European folk music. The title of the album was Dance, Gypsy, Dance … and for me, that was the gateway to dancing my little heart out. “Two Guitars,” I remember, was my favorite, slowly leading up to an apparently endless climax in which I’d spin and spin till the piece ended and I collapsed on the sofa, my consciousness floating as I watched the room spin around me. There was never any hesitation in those steps, those flowing arm gestures; my body knew exactly what the music suggested.

Somehow in the early years I must have convinced myself that Mom and Dad couldn’t see me, that my dancing was in my own little world where the music and I were one and pure instinct and delight dictated the steps. Come seventh grade, though, and the thought of dancing to the music of the day – which we’d now call classic rock, but which seemed discordant, chaotic, and (in that church hall) deafening – I was petrified; the idea was about as attractive as the prospect of a pop-final exam. My best friend tried to teach me the steps, but I was hopeless. I could manage swaying to the rhythm, stepping (sort of) to the beat, but that was pretty much it. Immerse and surrender to….that?? Show my ecstatic soul there?? Impossible. And so I became convinced that I had no rhythm and couldn’t dance…a conviction that lasted almost twenty years of marriage to a husband who loved to dance.

Oh, there were hints…college courses in ballet and modern dance, a summer Jazzercise program, a course in bellydance at the Y, a workshop titled Rhythm is the Cure with Alessandra Belloni, teacher of the ancient Italian trance-dance tradition of tarantelle. In each of these classes, I’d feel the tug of …. some …. long-ago memory aching to cut loose, but couldn’t quite connect with it.

Then there came the ritual circle of Lammas in 2010, when I finally surrendered to rhythm, trance-dancing by the bonfire for who knows how long, as my husband’s spirit came to tell me that I had reclaimed, with his blessing, the gift of dance I had surrendered years ago.

But it wasn’t until two years later, in a Cosmic Celebration with the Creation Spirituality Communities, that I fully reconnected with the exuberant, tireless, intuitive child-self who had whirled herself into trance. Then I realized that, as Matthew Fox writes:

Dance is an ancient way to pray:… in many African languages the word for “dance” is the same as the word for “breath”which is the same as the word for “spirit” (as it is in Hebrew) .

When I heard Gabrielle Roth’s words in the video below, however, it all came into perspective: the depth of surrender, the passionate abandon….and the feeling that long-lost parts of myself were, through that surrender, gravitating back into the whole…..

Relax, Surrender, and Remember: If You Don’t Do Your Dance, Who Will?

[youtube=http://youtu.be/Olvrx29aptY]

This next video comes about as close as anything I’ve found to consciously replicating the experience of dancing in ecstasy:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/8cYYzcTzm6Y]

Finally, a video to honor Gabrielle Roth, who blessed so many lives with her teaching to reclaim the human soul through dance:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/hBt7GuSPtyc]

Muse

how
do i know
what i mean
till i see
what i say
quoth
the quixotic
artist provocateur

catch
an image
a word
a dream
thumbprinted
with truth
to ride
like a pegasus
like a dragon
like a phoenix
(like a fish)
to revelation
absorbing
the essence
of
life
death
sex
birth

shamanically
dis-integrating
to zero
point
(like a 10-foot mackerel
surrounded by cats
in a feeding frenzy
on the living room floor)

chaotic
shapeshifter
truth
emerging
remorselessly
from wreckage
like a beachball
rocketing out
from
downthrusting
child hands
plunging naked
as a cliff-diver
from a despairing
precipice
to scrape
bacteria
from abyssal stones
probing
vents
to the planetary
core

flaming
out
clothed
in lava
raining
slithering
down to

halt
crystallized
black
and
clear
and
sharp
as dakinis’
knives

–August 2012

(with appreciation to quixotic artist-provocateur M. Richard Kirstel (1936-2007), who relentlessly pursued truth in art, who taught his students that “dark is art,” and “space is a place with a fish in it,” and from whose wisdom I stole the first 13 words of this poem.)

Grandmother Tree

These photographs memorialize a grandmother tree, a tulip poplar that stood near the chapel of All Saints Convent in Catonsville, MD. She was taken down in January 2012 due to advanced decay; most of her wood has gone to warm the disadvantaged in Baltimore. The more spectacular pieces – I believe – were taken by a local artist to serve as playground props (yes, they were that big).

Her colors, patterns, and energy – days after the cutting – were still passionate…vibrant…fiercely present. I can envision that spirit bringing warmth and beauty to the places and people who benefit by her bequest.

Let me do my work each day; and if the darkened hours of despair overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me in the desolation of other times.

May I still remember the bright hours that found me walking over the silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of a quiet river, when a light glowed within me, and I promised my early God to have courage amid the tempests of the changing years.

Spare me from bitterness and from the sharp passions of unguarded moments. May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit. Though the world knows me not, may my thoughts and actions be such as shall keep me friendly with myself.

Lift up my eyes from the earth, and let me not forget the uses of the stars. Forbid that I should judge others lest I condemn myself. Let me not follow the clamor of the world, but walk calmly in my path.

Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am; and keep ever burning before my vagrant steps the kindly light of hope.

And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life, and for time’s olden memories that are good and sweet; and may the evening’s twilight find me gentle still.