Not for the Fearful

On my parents’ refrigerator in my childhood home, there is a magnet: “Old Age is Not for the Fearful.” For me it spoke to my mother’s years of survival despite the faltering of her heart, my father’s stalwart volunteering in the blistering engine room of a WWII Liberty Ship…the unflinching ways in which they remained vital well into their 80s.

On my parents’ refrigerator in my childhood home, there is a magnet: “Old Age is Not for the Fearful.” For me it spoke to my mother’s years of survival despite the faltering of her heart,  my father’s stalwart volunteering in the blistering engine room of a WWII Liberty Ship…the unflinching ways in which they remained  vital well into their 80s.

As I pass the half-century mark, witnessing ever more alarming headlines in the news, navigating stormy economic seas as a solopreneur while contemplating the depths of a profound, evolving career change, I am seeing new levels of meaning in that simple magnet.

Never mind old age being not for the fearful – living is not for the fearful! Simply maintaining the strength to continue walking on the earth each day, throwing back the covers and getting out of bed, choosing not to numb out with shopping, pharmaceuticals or narcotics, television or computer games………

Simply staying alive.  Finding a reason to choose life each day.

A day came when any conceivable  reason was evading me, and I wrote to Deena Metzger – with whom I’d spent a week-long Healers’ Intensive last summer, and who has remained a profound inspiration in her deep and compassionate understanding of the spiritual and material challenges faced by our species, all beings, and the planet today…and the healing work required in response.

“Knowing what you know, experiencing what you experience with your depth of empathic attunement, how do you not despair?” I asked.

Her answer was a long time coming…a long time in which I continued reaching, stumbling, and hauling myself along, sometimes driven only by the sheer bullheaded conviction that this seemingly pointless struggle was, somehow, a self-birthing process. Maybe I was lodged in breech position and needed a turn of perspective to make the passage;  maybe I was – dared I hope? – stuck at the shoulders,  glimpsing the new life I sought but not yet able to emerge into it, needing one more heartbreaking “aha” to open up,  one more glorious, tearing, bug-eyed, bellowing push, one sudden slippery orgasmic rush to set me free, empowered and taking up my role  in the world.

Meanwhile it seemed there was little I could do beyond breathe, pray, and endure….trying to keep up the various aspects of my life in the best way I could.

Finally, Deena responded:  “Because I know that Spirit exists and that some of us are being guided and so we are doing what we are called to do and that has to be sufficient.  And because — I don’t want God to despair too. “

I have been contemplating her response for a month now: the assurance, the challenge (was I hearing the guidance and/or doing what I was called to do?), and – most mind-bendingly – the compassion for the Divine.

I’d heard them, all right, in my inner ear, the small senses of comfort, insight, the occasional nudges of direction, that came and passed almost too quickly to be caught. Did I seek them? Often. Did I listen? ….well….

And then there came, after a day of soul-searing headlines, the shift, in a wholly-unexpected download of insights….

The sun was just setting on a grey day. I was outside feeding my feral cat in a soft January drizzle, savoring the chilly-warm air while holding awareness of the climate change that caused it, tilting my face up to feel the raindrops while conscious of the Fukushima radiation they contained. Sensuously enjoying the moment while grieving the environmental catastrophe hidden within its  softness, loving and grieving the sleepy robins twittering in the bushes,  the dazed bee bumbling in search of a blossom, the pussywillows budding out of season. Aware that my own species, my own decisions, were hastening the beautiful death going on around me.

And suddenly they came, insights cascading like the rain – yes, we are slowly but surely ending this fragile beauty of life as we know it, and this is unimaginably grievous – and what hubris, to say that our species’ know-it-all arrogance is greater and more powerful than the planet, or the Divine process of ongoing creation!

The insights continued: we are among the family of embodied life forms of this planetary age; we are all mortal. There are elder species,  and there have been short-lived relations;  there have been mass extinctions before this, and there will be inconceivable life forms after this. Energy will take new shapes in matter; in the cosmic timeline, immanent Spirit is unendingly creative.  And that is the larger picture. But never for a minute think that this devalues the irretrievable preciousness of the creatures of this passing age, this  passing moment.

And the message came home: Never believe the mortality of  a physical body devalues our  individual role in the greater picture.  Every least choice we make, every step on our path, is a part of that cosmic awareness, for good or ill.  Each person, each being has a unique role to play as a physical embodiment of the Divine. The question is – how consciously do we choose to accept that connection and responsibility, with and for All That Is?

As the last light faded in the west, I stood there in the drizzle, raindrops streaming like tears down my upturned face, with all creation inviting me to step fearlessly into life.

Seeking Answers Beyond the Outrage

On the evening of 9/11/11, I watched the streaming video of theologian/activist Matthew Fox‘s 9/11 commemorative lecture at the First United Methodist Church in Boulder, CO, where he decried the loss of moral outrage – values wrapped in passion to sustain purposeful action over the long haul – in this couch-potato culture, addicted to immediate gratification. Quoting the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, he said, “Moral virtue is found not in the will, not in the intellect, but in the passions. That is what is missing in our culture.”

These passions weren’t the tantrums of the Tea Party, nor the hysteria that gripped the nation after 9/11, he said, but a balanced form of warriorship focused on protecting the earth and creating a just society, ensuring that the coming generations (of all beings, not just humans) would have a livable planet for their home.

“Warriorship” – that’s a loaded word. I should add that Dr. Fox warned also against militaristic “crackpot religions” of the sort espoused by presidential candidate Rick Perry and his allies, and on the Catholic side of the fence by Opus Dei and its confreres. He described these as aberrations gaining in influence because responsible Christians had lost touch with their moral outrage, allowed the passion of conscience to be made taboo, and so surrendered the inner fire that could drive change.

I sat listening to his words with deeply conflicted feelings. While working through an Independent Study for my Master’s, walking the four paths of Creation Spirituality as laid out in Dr. Fox’s primer, Original Blessing, I struggled with his affirmation of the value of anger as fuel for action against the powers of oppression and injustice.

I still struggle. As healing and transformative as I have found the teachings of Original Blessing,  the prophetic path of action to create change is profoundly challenging for me.

I grew up in a household filled with moral outrage: my mother, Helen Rizzo, was an essayist on conservative politics and spiritual matters. During my childhood, I longed to follow in her footsteps (I decided at age 4 that I would be a writer just like my mom; she warned me that it was not a lucrative career. Undaunted, I pursued it anyway).

We came to an early parting of the political ways, however, when the nuns at my parochial school urged our second-grade class to ask our parents to boycott iceberg lettuce and seedless grapes for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. My mother all but exploded at the thought: Cesar Chavez was a Communist; her daughter was being indoctrinated! While she was having harsh words with the nuns,  I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about: people were suffering and we could help them. What was wrong with that?

So I grew up a closet liberal in a conservative house, coming to see my mother’s political essays as increasingly at odds with the message of Jesus that I heard in the gospels.

My mother’s viewpoint certainly did not lack in moral outrage; however, her religio-political polemics only polarized her readers.  It was spiritual warfare for the soul of the nation, there was no middle ground; one either agreed or one didn’t…and if one didn’t, one was verbally flayed.

The most telling moment came in real-time, the day after I’d given birth to my son, and my mother and liberal Quaker mother-in-law had both come to help with the baby while I recovered. I should have known it was a mistake: both mothers were deeply values-driven, politically impassioned readers and thinkers. I awoke from a nap with my son to hear them in the kitchen – at the other end of our large apartment – in fierce debate, belaboring each other with snippets from their favorite pundits. I doubt either of them was even hearing the other; there was no effort at genuine communication in that Battle of the Quotes. I kept the bedroom door closed (expecting to see steam seeping under it any moment), nursed my baby, breathed deeply, and waited for the conflict to subside. Eventually they stopped, came to check on us rather sheepishly, and were painfully polite to each other for the remainder of their visit.

But as I sit with these memories, I see that there can be differences in the expression of moral outrage. Dr. Fox, in his 9/11 lecture, quoted medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas: “A trustworthy person is angry at the right people for the right reasons, expresses it in the appropriate manner for an appropriate length of time.” This, he has written elsewhere, is healthy anger, which can be used as fuel to drive creatively and productively toward a positive end…the polar opposite of destructive rage or self-consciously righteous venting.

I sit now contemplating the scrapbook of Mom’s political essays and letters to editors, remembering her readers’ responses: warm admiration from those who agreed, flames from those who didn’t. In a country – a world – where hate speech rules much of the political discourse, I emerged from my childhood with the conviction that such venting only adds to the problem; it wins no converts, achieves no unitive blossoming.

But when the ears of one side are closed to the views and values of the other, what does healthy anger – or healthy communication – look like?

Mom and I struggled with our spiritual and political differences as I matured and came out of my ideological closet. We never did come to a political understanding, but toward the end of her life she began to ask sincere questions about my faith and earth-based spiritual practice. To help her understand, I tapped into my memories of seeing her in tears at the sight of forests clear-cut for development.

It was an effective tactic – she did come to understand my passion for the earth – but at a certain point she called a halt. The reason was not a fear of heresy or apostasy, but a fear of her heart breaking – in the words of Melissa Etheridge, a fear “of crumbling.” Beyond the point of intellectual understanding, she could not move into conscious connection with the immanent Divine, clearly though she felt it. Below her doctrinaire conservatism lurked a profound, devastating, and unanswerable grief. And so she remained by choice on the surface, immersing in her Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, William F. Buckley and George Will, rarely leaving her house.

Even so, the right-wing rhetoric never claimed her soul; in her final decline after a fall and head injury, her spirituality radiated love. And on her deathbed, she gave me, her liberal panentheist daughter, her blessing: “I can see you have a vocation, though it’s not the one I would have chosen for you. I want you to follow your vocation.”

Building this conscious connection with Spirit and the Earth – seeking the Transcendent/Immanent Divine in my experience, supporting others in doing so for themselves, I say, is the focus of my Independent Studies toward my Master’s degree. And yet my Spirit/Earth connection, like my mother’s, is limited and manifested mainly through intellectual pursuits.

Oh yes, I do walk the woods, keep an organic garden, reduce/reuse/recycle, use green energy in my home to the greatest degree I can, sign petitions, write letters, and choose my clients for their level of conscience and social entrepreneurism.

But like my mother, at a certain point I become immobile, paralyzed by fear of my heart breaking. Aware that my ability to see, understand, communicate arises from hard-won personal clarity arising out of long inner wrestling. Having been devastated by hearing the scream of a tree being cut while I sat meditating in nearby sacred space, I shrink from opening my consciousness fully to the land. Knowing that I cannot spend half an hour in a bar without  picking up on the energy being shed by the drinkers, I avoid entering a highly charged direct-action protest atmosphere of slogans and counter-slogans, chants and counter-chants.

Remembering my mother’s withering condemnation of liberals, I limit my engagement in political arguments; I know from witnessing her – and from my own impulses  –  the desire to go for metaphorical blood. There’s a stimulation to be found in such debates, sure, but it’s (for me) a toxic energy that leaves me feeling sick at heart. It is not the clear, generative energy of which Dr. Fox writes.

So instead of engaging, I isolate, working to make my home a still haven of safety in a wildly careening world, while I immerse in, and share, the words of spiritual teachers urging a dynamic, engaged, and fiercely compassionate balance. I support the “99%” of Occupy Wall Street in all the ways I can, but have not visited the occupation sites.

I am not proud of this.

The memory arises of a time of similar paralysis as a child, tiptoeing into the ocean surf, fearful of moving beyond the painful  line of sharp shells, stones and sea glass to engage in the duck and dive of the deeper water, unwilling to give up and retreat.

I ask myself:  If I am afraid of fully letting down my shields against the pain of the world, how much more might others be, who have at risk a greater attachment to the things of the world, who have not experienced all things as inescapably alive, aware and sacred? Who are defensively immersing themselves in the voices of fear,  projection, and objectification that rule the airwaves?

And I ask: Is  moral outrage the path I need to follow, or is it healing, open-hearted connection – taking the risk of letting down the shields? And if I am struggling to do so,  fearing the heartbreak of authentic connection with Spirit, the Earth, the People, how can I ask others to take that step?

Passage

Where have the words gone –
culture-encrusted
morphic hammers
nailing
consensual reality
over perception –
assigning meme, not meaning
to pure phenomenon

I sit in woodland
meditation silent
sucked – whoosh –
into a febrile vortex
Tumbled and mashed
in a transmuting maelstrom
of shamanic vision
ancestral mythos
childhood catechism
(cosmic vision/
creational dialogue
sweeping
out false dogma
in true heresy)
Subconsciously squishing
isolate microcosm
through an imaginal wormhole

Words have no place here
slippery acculturated
prisons of meaning
Crush them to Essence
surrender to formlessness
Dance with the nameless
dust of exploded stars
whirling to coalesce
into (inter)Being
(inter)Awareness
enLightenment

August 2011
(with thanks to Theodore Richards’ Cosmosophia for the inspiration)

Guest Post: God’s phone number….?

As I’ve been walking on this journey, I’ve been making magical connections and reconnections with friends on profound spiritual paths. Some are just finding their online voices; others already have established presences in print and online.

To celebrate them, their journeys, and their present work, I am opening SoulPaths to their guest posts.

My first guest is my friend Mare Cromwell, whom I’ve known for more than 20 years, and whom I consider one of my spiritual sisters.  She’s a published author, a blogger, and an absolutely amazing master gardener. Shortly after embarking upon a seven-year interspiritual quest which resulted in her book, If I Gave You God’s Phone Number, she took on an apprenticeship devoted to honoring and serving the Earth Mother. Our conversations now yield rich insights on connecting to Spirit in all creation.  As she celebrates the launch of her book in e-book form, I’m delighted to host her posting here.

So – here’s Mare!

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God’s phone number… Could it really exist?  Has it ever existed?

For seven years between 1995 and 2001, I interviewed close to 50 people about God’s phone number. The actual question was: “If I gave you God’s phone number, what would you do with it?” My book If I gave you God’s phone number….Searching for Spirituality in America came out in 2002.

It has been nine years since the book was published. I’m not certain where that time has gone. But I strongly suspect that for many there may be more of a need for that direct line to the Divine now compared with nine years ago.

These days the news is surreal with the debt crisis, climate change, earthquakes, etc.  I know that many people around me, strangers and friends, are praying and wishing they had a phone number to the Creator to buy food. To pay their rent or mortgage. To deal with a loved one’s health issue, etc.

Sadly, when I post the idea of calling God on the phone on various internet sites such as Reddit or other venues, most people trash the idea more quickly than mosquitoes get smacked. So it goes in our secular society where people can write knee-jerk comments without giving much thought. Sigh…

Truth be told, the concept of a phone number to God was not my original idea. There is an old song about calling God on the phone from the 30’s. I believe some churches still sing it.

But suppose there really was a direct connection to the Divine and we all had it? I truly believe that we’re all hardwired to have it from before we were born. But most of us have forgotten it. Even forgotten how to look for it. And thus many chase the nice cars and comfortable homes instead. That’s what our society teaches us to seek out – the income to have these items of comfort. (Please know that I’m not knocking a comfortable home. I love the comfort of my home. I just take issue with the mindset that that is the purpose of life.)

When I started my book in 1995, I did not know that I was working on a book. I was depressed and struggling to stave off the need for anti-depressants. At the time I was living out in the Maryland countryside working at a plant nursery and desperately seeking a path to healing. Just the year before I was helping to run an international environmental network.

On Father’s Day that summer, the elderly woman who was renting me a room reminded me to call my father that morning. And I, raised as a Catholic girl, had learned that God was the Ultimate Father. So on that Father’s Day morning I thought about calling God, the Father, on the phone shortly after my landlady left for church. I truly wanted some answers then.

The idea of calling God on the phone would not leave me that summer of ’95. It struck me that it would be a fascinating question to ask people. What would they do with God’s phone number?

Finally I surrendered to the niggling idea and purchased a tape recorder and it was dangerous to be near me after that. My landlady’s friends were targeted promptly. Then the children of friends. Then I progressed to seeking out a broad spectrum of folks from different belief systems, walks of life, etc.

I think most people had a hard time saying “No” to me.  I’m rather persistent in that way. More importantly, providing a safe, nonjudgmental space for people to share about who the Divine is for them opened up realms of deeply personal and powerful beliefs. I was humbled by the interviews. And it was fun.

I did 49 interviews with a wide set of people. Young, old, Christian, Jewish, agnostic. An Afghani Sufi who veritably glowed and spoke wisdom in every statement. A Death Row inmate. People who had no intention of ever using God’s phone number and those who clearly already had the number and used it every day. The interviews were relatively easy to conduct. Figuring out how to lace all of the stories together into a cohesive book was far more challenging.

Certainly some people had similar questions for God, should they actually get the Great Mystery on the phone. Some individuals had spiritual views that startled me. Most of the people in the book were not listed with their real names since I wanted them to be completely comfortable with what they shared. We live in a society that does not discuss religion or spirituality for fearing of offending someone. I wanted them to speak their truth without any inhibitions. And so they did.

One of the revelations from the interviews was that each of us has our own unique relationship with the Divine. There are many paths and we’re all manifestations of our own individual soul paths that color our Godspace as no other’s. This is a beautiful aspect of our beingness. No one is exactly like us or has the exact same relationship with the Divine as we do.

Where am I now in this process?

That’s a good question. ;~)

I’ve just uploaded the e-book version of the tome up on Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/3htd8a5) and Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/78721). Within weeks, it should be available at practically all e-book sources including Barnes & Noble, etc.

Part of me thinks I’m a little insane for having the e-book out since I still have unsold hard copies of it in my basement. This is a house that is about to go on the market and the books, actual heavy hard bound books printed on 100% recycled paper need to go. I really should be trying to sell the hard-copy version. (Oh yeah, hard cover copy plug here: http://www.tocallgod.net)

Oh, you mean… where am I really now in this process? You mean the process of life and God, and spirituality? That question…

That’s an even better question. ;~p

Stay tuned until the next book.

No, that’s not fair to say that. I need to share something. The short answer is that I’m astounded every week by spirit and Creator and magic and healing. My life is an amazing adventure that takes me down and picks me back up again and carries me even higher to feeling God. Feeling compassion. Learning humility. Carrying forth in kindness. Opening up to the mystery and wisdom of other great teachers.

I still choose a church of gardens and wildness. Earth Mother is as much a part of my life as my cat and the passionflower outside my front door that graces me with stunningness this summer. Hummingbirds sneak me messages of joy in the midst of my confusion.

Spirit is powerful and strong and I’m listening and learning. Everyday.

I still want answers but different ones now. The interesting thing is I’ve learned how to listen better, how to tune in to my inner Godspace to find many of the answers.

That’s the challenging part – listening.

That’s where I am.

So now it’s my turn to ask. Where are you?

And what would you do if someone…anyone…gave you God’s phone number?

The Activist “Uh-Oh”

I’ve been quite bemused by the silence that has fallen since I’ve been putting out the word about the last of my four Spirituality Conversation Circles, scheduled tomorrow. This one  focuses on the Via Transformativa: we’ll discuss how we experience the Divine in the call to act for change. As the description of the circle says –

Is there an issue in your life where you feel your inner wisdom/Spirit connection calls you to speak or work for change? How do you experience that call, and how do you maintain your Spirit connection in acting upon the call?

I’ll admit it – there are a lot of stories going on in my head right now. Where the conversations of the past three circles, on the Via Positiva (experiencing oneness with the Divine), the Via Negativa (finding the Divine in the dark night of the soul), and the Via Creativa (experiencing co-creation with the Divine) were all relatively inward-looking, this circle is distinctly outward-focused: how do we experience or manifest the Divine in our social/environmental activism?

The question appears to be based on the assumption that we’re all activists. And what if our activism at this moment is limited to petitions, or perhaps letters to the editor or blogs? What if it’s limited to picking up litter when we walk our dog, or using cloth napkins rather than paper, or gardening organically in our backyard?

What, exactly, does it mean to work for change?

Last year I went to Starhawk’s Earth Activist Training permaculture design certification intensive. On the curriculum, in addition to permaculture design, were magical activism and direct action, led by trainers accustomed to organizing and taking part in nonviolent resistance to social or environmental injustice.

I’ll confess, I was intimidated. Here I was, an armchair protestor – lots of petitions, some blogs, lots of sharing resources and choices at home and go-green talks offered to civic groups, but I wasn’t putting myself on the line at demonstrations and marches. In fact, I was quite honestly paralyzed at the thought. So what, exactly, was I doing there? I asked a couple of the trainers for their perspective.

Their answer is one that I’d like to share, as I prepare the house for – who knows how many? Any? – people attending tomorrow’s conversation circle.

Mahatma Gandhi’s quote springs to mind here: “Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it.” This was the gist of the answer I received from the trainers at EAT.

To offer a summary distilled by nearly 12 months intervening:

Perhaps your activism is voicing an alternate viewpoint to that of your company – speaking for change within the ranks. Risky? Certainly! But with strategy and care, you can create a gradual shift that may change the direction of the entire business. Start, for example, by recycling your own paper at work, then find a way to recycle your team’s, then your department’s. You may find unexpected allies and hidden resources along the way, until finally your company has a corporate recycling policy.

That’s just one example of the ways in which you can act on your values in the mainstream world: by first modeling, then fostering and supporting the change in your world. The EAT trainers shared others (including blog posts, letters to the editor, and petitions!): if you know an activist who does engage in demonstrations, you may choose to support by offering to care for his or her pets, write press releases, fundraise for transportation or legal aid if need be, and any number of other thoughtful, supportive, human  actions. All of these “count” as working for change, putting values into action.

“Each person participates to the extent he or she can,” one of the trainers told me. “Some choose always to remain in the background – and they’re just as necessary as the ones who make the news.”

It is so easy to feel paralyzed by the monolithic “Bigs” and their stranglehold on the culture, so easy to feel that our small personal actions make no difference, that they get swallowed up in the land-sea-air assault on the planet and the people (in indigenous terms, I understand,”the People” refers to all beings, human and otherwise). What good can a letter, or a petition, or a blog post, or pet care for a weekend, or a press release, or the voice of a freethinker in a team meeting, do?

(A thought arises: simply being human —  responding mindfully, thoughtfully, from the heart and soul, rather than reacting reflexively or with half your attention focused on something else —  is a vote for change in itself, in a world that attempts to drug us into a mindless stupor with a smorgasbord of addictions: work, entertainment, substances of various kinds. In some ways, I think, this may be the most significant vote for change, with the greatest possibility of evolving into something greater…)

It is precisely such small things – the flap of a butterfly’s wing in new physics terms, a stray spark in wildfire terms – that can grow to cause a deep  shift, both in oneself and in the culture.

“The people who are taking the risks, making the news, didn’t get there all at once,” one trainer told me. “It’s a long process of stretching your limits, gradually  finding the courage to do more.”

One other aspect of this conversation circle’s topic, I realize, may be raising concerns: experiencing the Divine in the call for change.  What does this mean?

Awhile back, I visited a universalist Franciscan nun in her hermitage (described in another blog post). In the guest bedroom where I’d be staying, directly across from the bed, was an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Having grown up Catholic, this image raised all kind of issues! I asked the Sister and she said, “Turn it to the wall if you want, it’s OK.”

I couldn’t quite do that, so before going to bed that night, I told Spirit that I didn’t like the feelings that the image brought up in me…and I asked for a dream that would help me to see Jesus simply as a messenger of the Divine, without the baggage.

I didn’t have a dream, exactly…but as I lay between sleep and waking, I saw a replay of things I’d done in my life, efforts to serve, and received the internal message: “You don’t have to believe in a Messenger to be his hands and feet in the world.”

That’s the message with which I’d like to close: that if we are indeed inseparably one with the Divine and with all creation, we are all capable of manifesting this cosmic oneness in our values and actions, becoming the hands and feet and voices of the Divine to tend and protect the Planet and the People.

So….how does that show up in your life?

Guest Post – The Mystery of Love

To honor the memory of my mother, Helen Joan Rizzo, this Mother’s Day, I am posting one of the many essays she wrote…this one was printed in the Catholic Review.

 THE MYSTERY OF LOVE

All through our lives, our greatest need – our greatest hunger – our greatest pain – is our desire for love. Not the natural, definable emotion we are most familiar with – like that of children for parents, married people for spouses, lovers for beloveds or devoted fans for their heroes, but the soul’s mute ache for, recognition of, communication with, and response from someone who speaks our soul-language.

The human spirit wanders through life for the most part lost and alone. We are essentially aliens in an alien world. Our routine relationships with others provide little more than superficial contact on a material plane. Even our most intimate alliances with relatives and friends fail most often to meet the depth of sharing we yearn for.

A great hunger for a deeper love haunts us all our lives. On rare occasions, a kindred soul or a sublime intellectual or cultural experience or a deep spiritual insight (and, oddly, even sometimes the acceptance of unavoidable suffering) may sound a chord within us which we somehow sense as familiar in a transcendental way. While it may bring brief enrichment, we soon realize that the feeling is gone and we are lost and alone and hungry again.

The ability of families and friendships and marriages to endure is not because perfect love is discovered, but rather because the imperfection of human love is instinctively recognized, accepted and accommodated.

Our human vulnerability is often exposed by the strength of even imperfect love. This can be illustrated by our stoical ability to maintain composure under truly heroic circumstances as long as we are not undone by love. During periods of mourning, for instance, we can bear grim, unrelenting grief for long stretches, but only let a compassionate loved one appear newly on the scene and our stoicism dissolves in a poignant outburst of tears and love for the deceased. During illnesses, we can present an enviable bravado even while enduring severe pain. But in the open-armed presence of one who knows and loves us in spite of our weaknesses, our bravado diminishes and we become childlike again in our need to be held and comforted. However, we sense somehow that we cannot long expect this sort of comfort – that sooner or later we must face our pain or sorrow alone.

The striving for but always failing to achieve the strange, inexpressible yearning within us has long saddened humanity and particularly intrigued philosophers and poets. Keats, in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” described the agony of the world’s inadequacy: “Here where men sit and hear each other groan;…Where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs.” Francis Thompson, in his “Hound of Heaven,” said “And now my heart is as a broken fount…Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever…From the dank thoughts that shiver…Upon the sighful branches of my mind.”

Still there seems to be embedded in the human spirit a strange magnetic phenomenon so profound that when or if something stirs the elusive memory, it hits us with such a shattering force that we can never forget the experience but we cannot reproduce it at will.

C.S. Lewis, in his book “Surprised by Joy,” described his first such experience by noting that for him “the memory…suddenly arose as if from a depth not of years but of centuries.” It was, he said, “a sensation of desire, but desire for what?” Before he could know that he desired, it was gone. “It had taken,” he wrote, “only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant by comparison.”

Perhaps it is that when we are born, we come trailing a dim recollection of God’s eternal love, and He lets it remain deep within us. Then, suddenly, when we are searching silently for we know not what, it stirs again as a reminder that He, who knit us together, is the source of all love and truth and beauty. Further, while our desire for perfect love is never satisfied in this life, He does give us the wondrously comforting recognition that those dearest to us are actually individual facets of His own immense love, just as we all are.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, “Love is a messenger from God saying that every human affection and every ecstasy of love is a spark from the great flame of love which is God.”

And from this, we can slowly come to perceive that what we are really enamored of is God Himself! We realize that He is the architect of the greatest geniuses of all time, and of the humblest saints – all that we find so appealing in our most cherished beloveds and most admired heroes is but a tiny glimmer of the supreme appeal of their Maker – and that He is the embodiment of all the loveable things we love in others.

The happiest ending to any love story, then, is the deepening mutual closeness of two people to the Source of all love – a closeness the world cannot match. The profoundest, truest fulfillment of all our human attachments can only be found in God, the hub of the wheel of eternal love.

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Learning to Let Go

During my husband’s years as a water pourer for sweatlodge, he had a statue on his altar of the “weeping buddha” –
a powerfully built yogi with his face buried in his hands. There were many stories about this traditional Balinese statue, from a meditation on the tragedy of war to a folk remedy for daily heartaches.  The statue went with him to the sweatlodge ceremonies he led, and was often the catalyst for deep healing. Upon his death, it passed into the hands of another water-pourer, and continued its impact.

As much pain as the statue expressed, somehow I also found it deeply comforting,  a reminder that the “dark night of the soul” is one aspect of the spiritual life. Not a pathology to be medicated, not an inescapable, eternal black hole, but one aspect  of life…a natural response to loss, transition, and the sufferings of the people, the beings of the earth, and the planet.

In Original Blessing, theologian Matthew Fox offers tools for navigating these dark times of the “via negativa” – letting go,  allowing silence and solitude, letting the pain be pain, trusting the darkness and the sense of falling as avenues to compassion and deeper wisdom and connection.

As I prepare for the second Spirituality Conversation Circle, on the Via Negativa (see Events), I find myself walking this path again. Or rather, becoming increasingly aware of the via negativa that our culture, and all the cultures of the world, are experiencing as environmental and social systems break down at an ever-increasing pace.

I see the television ads for antidepressants and drugs to boost antidepressants, and I wonder what would happen if we all actually admitted our hidden, socially-unacceptable (You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought) feelings of grief and loss as one species after another falls to extinction, whole regions of the world’s oceans are deadened with oil, radiation fills the air and waters of the planet.

But in this society, in this economy, popular wisdom says, we can’t afford to be incapacitated by such feelings…we are supposed to remain happy, positive, upbeat and perky! Don’t think about such things now…instead, medicate, immerse in virtual reality, shop more!

Does anyone else see the cognitive dissonance here? This is our planet, our home, our inheritance and our bequest to our children. No matter how corporatist we may be, we cannot deny our chemical, organic, and genetic ties to this miraculous spinning ball of fire, earth, water, air, and spirit, and the millions of beings (whether created or evolved) that share it with us. Does this planet mean so little to us that we cannot allow ourselves to admit, and grieve, its slow destruction at our hands?

Ah, but once we admit the grief and loss, the full (literally) earth-shattering tragedy of what is happening, how can we see daylight again? How can we not be incapacitated,  sucked into the black hole of despair, leading at best to paralysis, at worst, to the temptation to self-destruct?

In a dark time a few months ago, I wrote:

if the news were a movie
and i a child watching
i’d be asking mommy
can we go home now? i don’t want
to watch any more
…but it’s not…

The news is filled with people leaving the movie of their lives. Just the other day a woman told me on Facebook that suicide was an understandable option, given the state of the world. When I shared with her the words of a wise teacher — that we can give up, we can choose a way that avoids the issues, or we can take action — the woman reacted as if I were judging any way other than taking action.

I am in no position to judge. As I write, I have a dearly loved cat sleeping her way either to death or to recovery on my lap, and can only respect her process and support her as I can…the fourth of my cats to have faced this passage in two years. This is following the death of my husband in 2006 and the death of my mother in 2007.  All of these losses are compounded by the ongoing news of global environmental destruction and disaster.

These losses are not  unique to me – they are simply my particular experiences of the pain each person undergoes, my portion of the suffering of the cosmos described in Buddhism.

I have not considered “walking out of the theater” for many years, but in times of sheer emotional exhaustion, I have wanted simply to stop. I have spent nights crying, praying for help…and somehow, whether from an inner nudge, or a guide’s advice to go out and stand barefoot on the earth, or the call of a friend, or a book falling in front of me to be picked up…sometimes a simple distraction that takes all my attention and relieves the pain through work…the strength comes to pick up and go on. Every time, somehow or other, the strength does come.

Those are the easy shifts…the quick fixes, so to speak…but there’s a deeper level that they don’t touch. I have seen it happen again and again in myself and among my friends and animal companions;  I believe it is happening today in our culture and on this planet: that at some point in our lives, whether in regard to our physical, mental, or spiritual health, we find ourselves in a place of deciding whether we choose to live, what our life means to us, how deep the resources are that we must tap if we are to continue living. And – perhaps – choosing life at its most profound level – not “the good life” of endless distractions, but an essential life with purpose, vision and mission.  Life that serves an integral, creative, positive purpose in the greater scheme of things.

At a time like that, I am coming to believe there is no option other than to give up – that is, to let go what is not essential.  In Original Blessing, letting go is described as a key element of the via negativa:  Letting go of the illusion of control…the constant need to be busy-busy-busy, whether with work or entertainment…the need to source our identity based on money, things, status, or even relationships. To let go of stuff of all sorts that’s cluttering up our lives, our minds, our bodies, our souls, hiding the deepest, most essential core. To allow ourselves to be emptied, give up pretending to be anyone but who we are at the place of pure awareness and connection to all that is.

Such a time is happening now as I sit vigil, watching my cat negotiating her passage in dreamtime. She is not in pain, she needs nothing from me, she is simply in process, and inner guidance tells me that all is as it needs to be. I do not know what her final choice will be; I have no control here, there is nothing I need to do to fix things. I am alternately grieving over her,  giving thanks for her beautiful life, and listening to inner guidance, learning to let go and trust.

I don’t have answers… What I do have, what I cling to at this moment of loss and unknowing, is the example of teachers who have survived the dark nights and still maintained their hope and vision – if anything, deepening their vision by passing through the dark. These teachers aren’t superhuman beings who dwell on heights the rest of us will never reach, heights where they are untouched, unweakened by the soul-stopping weight of grief and pain. If anything, they are unequivocal about the grief they have experienced, the depth of their own falls into despair. And they are unequivocal about those times of grief being a crucible of growth, compassion, and deepened connection to Spirit and to other beings.

Dr. Fox again: ” The divine image [is] present in every being, indeed, every atom in the universe.  It is the “light in all things.”  It is also, with its incarnation in Jesus, the wounds in all things.  Divinity is both the light and the wounds in all things. ”



Welcome to the Real World

I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy, like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world, impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.

— Alan Watts, Nothingness

Most people would laugh at such a scientist. But as new science steadily addresses realities far beyond the reach of our so-called “common” sense –  I find myself wondering about the craziness of those padded slippers.

After all, what would you do if the theoretical science that formed the framework for your world view suddenly turned out to be visibly, tangibly verified by your everyday sensory experience? If, for example, instead of seeing a floor,  you saw a million swirling points of energy?

I suspect you might be just a little….well, freaked out.

Indigenous cultures have taught such concepts for millennia – for example, that we are all energy beings, and that we are all connected – but despite popular movies like What the Bleep and corroborating data from institutes such as HeartMath Research Center, modern society has a great deal of difficulty accepting the empirical reality of such concepts.

We’re deeply conditioned by our secular-materialist culture to believe that we are isolated individuals, that the boundaries of our minds do not extend past our skulls, that a solid floor is a solid floor, that…well, you get the idea. Even if we  subscribe to the belief that we are all connected, and that we can communicate energetically, a core of skepticism  may linger: without direct personal experience, how can we be sure? And we file the quantum concepts away in an agnostic cubbyhole.

For example, I’ve always held the belief that all beings, from stones to trees, from viruses to gorillas, from crickets to skunks, from krill to whales – and oh yes, also including humans – are sentient, thinking and feeling in their own unique way. These beliefs are woven into indigenous faith and practice around the world, in shamanic cultures from the Amazonian rainforest to the Siberian steppes.  And they’re core beliefs that I’ve held, and tried to act upon, since long before the days of my husband’s deep involvement in Traditional Native American practices.

But it wasn’t till this past weekend, when I was out following the guidance of a coach/nature mystic, that I received a firsthand experience of exactly what these beliefs mean in real life, outside the heady realm of cherished certitude. And I’ll admit – I was mind-boggled.

I was walking a path on sacred land near my home, and intentionally stopped to connect sensorially and at heart level with two trees along the way, as I’d been taught in the first class.  Connecting with each tree individually, I received very different impressions of personalities and attitudes toward humankind (or rather, human(un)kind in one case…passing two-leggeds had not been kind to that Standing One).

I responded politely to the input those trees were giving, and then stepped a little further down the path…and had the mind-boggling sense that every tree in the park was aware of me and assessing me – my intent, my attitude, my reasons for connecting and communicating with their two siblings.

Have you ever stood at a podium in front of a thousand psychics, all of them “reading” you? That’s roughly how this felt. I’d read old folk tales of people wandering into a forest and experiencing the spirit of the wood, panicking and fleeing – I’d never been able to understand such a reaction; forests had always felt like sanctuaries for me.

Now, however, I could understand. While the gaze of these uncountable trees was in no way hostile, it was wary, cautious, penetrating, evaluative…and overwhelming. I responded to the unspoken questions – “Who are you and what are you doing here? What do you want with us?” by explaining that I was a beginner trying to learn the right way of being in relationship with nonhuman beings, and asked them to ease up a little – they were scaring me! And they did. The contact broke, the sense of intense attention faded;  I could breathe again, and continued on my way.

I have been sitting with the aftershocks of that experience for the past week. Even though I’d hugged and talked (privately) to trees for years, even though I’d experienced individual trees as sentient beings in class as well as in the two conversations before the encounter with the entire forest, even though I’d had every reason to expect such a response from the forest as a whole,  the experience of trees en masse, as a crowd of individual personalities, was beyond any of my imaginings.

I remembered the response my husband used to give to such experiences: “Welcome to the Real World”....that is,  however much I believed in interbeing, the interconnection and sentience of all things, I couldn’t know this as reality until I stepped past my conditioning to experience it directly.

And the implications were staggering….

Imagine living in a world where energetic communication not just with other humans, but with every other being was not only possible, but also acknowledged fact…not a fantastical delusion to be treated with antipsychotic drugs, but the foundation of uncountable indigenous cultures. We know this to be the truth…and yet this real-world daily communication has been dismissed by this “enlightened” culture as pagan superstition.

Imagine living in a world in which plants, animals and humans consciously coexist in a delicate dance of balance that leaves their environment largely intact for millennia. We know that this also is true – it shows up in one account after another of intact indigenous cultures, even today.

Just sit with those images for a moment. Imagine being a consciously participating element of a living, communicating, mutually supportive environment, gaining wisdom from every other element.

Now picture our world, with humans isolated from all other beings by an assumption of superiority and dominion, exploiting or eradicating those other beings while we debate their level of sentience and dismiss what knowledge cannot be gleaned by instrumentation and metrics.

Is it any wonder that this culture is crazed and soul-starved? And what is there to be done about it?

I have only just completed my second lesson of the apprenticeship, so I am hardly the one to advise wholesale solutions. However, the old childhood rule for crossing the street does come to mind:

Stop.  Stop assuming, stop numbing out, stop objectifying…

Look. Try looking at everything around  you as a sentient being. What would it be like to get the perspective of an oak…a deer grazing in your garden…a polluted river?

Listen.  Next time you’re about to prune a tree, for example, tell the tree politely what you’re planning to do and why, then ask permission. And wait to see what you hear or sense inwardly.

If nothing else, ask – what if? Even if you already believe that we are all related and all beings are sentient in their own unique way, what if these trees, for example, are not simply standing passively in the earth, waiting to serve the purposes of humans, but are observing and participating in their environment in ways we can’t even imagine – and quite capable of communicating their perspective?

You may be familiar with the Gaia theory of a conscious, self-regulating planet. For many of us it ties in with the Earth-centered values we have carried for many years. Now take it a step further: what if that theory describes not only a living system of interacting organic and inorganic elements, but also a living system of interacting individual consciousnesses – consciousnesses with which we can communicate and interact to heal the wounds this world has suffered?

What if?

 

The Right to Own Our Mental Health

I heard it again at a recent Christmas party, as my girlfriends from high school were sharing the “whatever happened to…” of the last 30 years. Another friend had suicided, the second in our class of barely 30, and this one by an overdose of antidepressants.

I came home heavy-hearted. Not just at the tragedy of a life needlessly lost, but the means of her going: during the hormonal uproar of my 30s, I’d attempted the same thing. It took far too many appointments with far too many psychiatrists whipping out scrip pads the moment I sat down in their office, far too many descents into pharmaceutical hell, before I finally found people who would teach me to manage my turbulent thoughts and emotions, not manipulate my brain chemistry.

Evidently, my high-school friend had not been so blessed.

So what I am about to say is rather passionate – and there have been those who have told me it is uncompassionate. I hope not…from personal experience I have profound empathy toward women suffering in these circumstances….and a great deal of anger regarding what I see as destructive and disempowering patterns in addressing their suffering. And I am speaking specifically of some – many, I believe – women’s experience, based on my own history and that of women I know, not to imply that men have no mental health issues, but simply because I cannot represent their experience.

First of all, the physiological facts. Let’s face it – the environment in which we find ourselves is growing steadily more toxic, loaded with chemicals known to disrupt hormonal activity. Add this to the imbalances of the Basic American Diet (a.k.a. B.A.D.), high in chemicals and low in genuine nutrients, possible food allergies or sensitivities, along with the high stress of daily living (whether working at an outside job or inside the home), topped off with the hormonal ebbs and flows that a woman’s body normally undergoes during her childbearing and peri/menopausal years….

The truth is that all – yes, all – of these factors can affect the mind, and are rarely if ever looked at in an initial psychological workup (or often in the average medical exam).

That’s not even touching on the silencing wounds that women may experience in the family, in school and in church, wounds that cannot be verbalized because they go to the level of profound feelings of shame and unworthiness – even unworthiness of life. How many women, suffering these wounds, succeed only in describing the most superficial emotional symptoms, and feel ashamed even of admitting those? And how many psychiatrists, running on a ticking clock, diagnose only on the basis of those superficial symptoms, and miss the core of the problem completely?

That was certainly my experience….and from talking with other women, I know I was not alone in this (though I certainly believed I was at the time).

Instead of an exploration into all the factors that might be causing a woman’s suffering,  however, she receives a new diagnostic identity (“clinically depressed,” “bipolar,” “depression/anxiety disorder,” or what have you), a scrip pad is whipped out and the latest drug is prescribed for the perceived pathology… sometimes, theoretically, to dial down the symptoms until she can learn to do it herself through therapy.

More often, however, therapy is severely limited or left out of the equation entirely, based on insurance restrictions: it’s costly and uncertain, dependent on the therapist’s skill and the patient’s willingness to heal. Now, so far from empowering the patient to take any personal, active ownership of her own mental health,  supplementary drugs (with side effects including suicidal ideation even in adults) are being promoted in case the original antidepressant doesn’t solve the problem!

And with the message being subliminally repeated again and again – doctors and drugs make you better, your experience is chemically based or pathological, you are sick and we have the cure – there is nothing to suggest, instead, that the client has control of her mind, that she can choose her thoughts, that she can imagine more than one interpretation to an incident or a conversation, that she can reframe and heal from past or present traumas, that she can own her feelings and perceptions and intuitions and deep wisdom,  that her mind is her sacred territory and not a chemist’s test tube. In fact, the very people who claim to be helping her are, instead, leading her deeper into disempowerment and dependency.

As James Hillman points out in The Myth of Analysis, the roots of this pattern go back to the beginning of psychiatry as a science, back in 1817, when psychiatric pioneer Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol equated visions with hallucinations, thus effectively placing matters of soul on a par with pathology. The pattern, driven by the rationalist French Enlightenment, continues to influence psychiatry even now…and while psychospiritual therapy is gaining ground, psychopathology and psychopharmacology still have a firm grip on insurance payouts.

All of this, of course, is light-years from Jung’s view that the patient held the keys to his or her own process, that s/he had the intuitions and connection to Spirit/Source necessary to effect healing from within; the therapist’s role was to support the work. Or even from the Buddhist technique of contemplative therapy, using meditation as a tool to become aware of and rein in rogue thoughts and emotions. Both of these are facilitated approaches; both place a high value on the client’s own inner awareness and guidance system.

I’m not saying I  believe the brain can’t have organic or chemical disorders; certainly the boundary between physiological, psychological and spiritual affects appears to be very porous: autism is being linked to environmental toxins and extreme depressions to postnatal hormones; thoughts are known to affect brain chemistry;  and psychologists from C.G. Jung to Dr.  Maureen B. Roberts have reported remarkable results in treating schizophrenia without anti-psychotic medications. For this reason, I believe that chemical treatment as the default  serves the insurers’ and pharmaceutical companies’ bottom lines at the expense of the client’s true healing.

And frighteningly, as Big Pharma gains an ever-tighter stranglehold on health freedoms, this default appears likely to become more the norm, not less.

I fired my last psychiatrist for that pharmaceutical default, and was blessed – and driven – in pursuing healing on my terms. My late husband’s work with an international men’s organization led me to a women’s personal growth community that provided my first taste of Jungian deep-process work. From there I went on to experience healing insights through Earth-based spirituality, shamanic paths, Five Elements acupuncture, Reiki, mystic spiritual traditions,  diet and supplement changes, and have been blessed with the help of rare and wise healers and teachers all along the way …..it’s been a long and continuing mind/body/spirit path, with plenty of twists and turns and switchbacks and heights and depths and detours.

I’m recognizing now that that ongoing experience has not only been a life-saving process of personal healing, but also a process of claiming my mind and soul, my right to my life and self-determination, from a grossly dysfunctional culture that cynically fosters a half-life of profitably marketable distractions, addictions and dependencies rather than placing a value on personal awareness, aliveness, and inward and outward responsibility.

It’s a process necessary and unique for each of us…not just a self-indulgent exercise in achieving  personal wholeness, but a culture-saving process that makes it possible for us to take an effective role in healing our society and our world.

If we do not recognize the patterns that bind us psychologically, how can we work to change them, or recognize the impacts (good or ill) of the patterns that guide other cultures? If we’re not awake to our culture’s (and our own) blind addictions and dependency on outward solutions and outward scapegoats, how can we stand for responsibility in ourselves, our communities, our nation, or our planet?

Looking from this perspective, my friend’s death is not just a tragedy for herself, her family, and all who knew her – but also for the world. And the conditions that led to her death – her death, and that of how many others? –  represent the grossest possible social injustice.

Deep questions for a bright morning

Pondering questions springing from a disconcerting conversation last night (trying to phrase these in the most open-ended manner possible):

  • Does the overlap between  new theories of quantum science and ancient metaphysical and shamanic principles  lead you to a perspective focused on personal desires, intention and goals, and/or to a mystical experience of awe, wonder, relatedness?
  • What point on the spectrum of and/or resonates as a personal place of balance?
  • What is the impact of that point on personal consciousness and action? On others, human and nonhuman? On the planet?
  • How does this experience shape personal choices regarding responsibility and action?

Comments, thoughts, insights invited!

(As a p.s. – Thank you, Angela Blueskies, for your beautiful and profound meditation on these questions! )