White? Get acquainted with visceral awareness
A healing-awakening crisis? Listen for the Source-Song
From time to time, I have to listen up: my sense of being a secure “self” living “my” life unravels and dissolves as ink in water: a healing-awakening crisis.
An encounter with realities of daily life at unexplored levels. An encounter with tangles deep in my psyche. Like the outer world as we near the solstice, a time of maximum darkness.
In this current version, my mind has a mind of its own, spinning scenarios of one disaster after another in which no part of my life survives unscathed. No cues. No script. No landmarks. A profound stimulus to my prayer life, which languishes in “better times.”
I listen now for “the small Blue Deer.”* Her song, as I learned it, ordered the forces and forms of creation.
In her native language, she Is Kauyumari. She first entered my life through the music and art of her Wixaritari (Huichol) people, a small indigenous tribe living in the Sierra Madre mountains of central northwest Mexico. In the story as I heard it, the small Blue Deer sang out her mysterious song to draw all the gods near to their Source: “form and essence, light and dark, fullness and emptiness.”* Drawn together as they followed her song, the gods, who had lived “each to his own”* – spinning from one creative/sustaining/destructive act to another, much as my mind is doing this very day – settled into their places – “conscious, mysterious, and free.”* Order followed, an order where each of the gods took on the role they were meant to play.
I am grateful for Kauyumari’s calming, warming and alchemical fire as the somewhat arbitrary end of the year approaches.
I go quiet, go within, listen for her song within, the one that carries “all that is, and all that was, and all that will ever be.”*
It’s about really getting that I have a within. That I am not spread out all over the universe, yet have a place in it that is mine alone. Whatever it is I am here for, no one else can do/be it.
I find myself resisting a path I have taken in recent years of engaging in some well-crafted, structured self-assessment, and planning ahead. My email box is filled with hashtags for creative alignment and inspiration. I cheer their creators and subscribers along – there are so many wonderful doors to walk through. But for myself, I cringe at each new arrival, shiny with promise.
Instead I gather information about parts of my life – and my being – that I have ignored – how I have made certain choices, and how did they work out? What have been my patterns of choices? Did they bring me some of what I hoped? What about unexpected consequences?
I crave quiet.
I listen to my own voices. Some wise. Some foolish, aka human.
I am intent on discovering and claiming what wisdom I have integrated. Taken in. Digested. I am intent on discovering and claiming – even as I cringe from them – my limitations and even shame.
And I listen for the echoes of the Source-song within my voices,
even within the deep loneliness that I cannot solve.
*Language in quotes are lyrics from “The Blue Deer Is,” on the CD My God is a Tree, produced by Joby Baker and Scott Sheerin (2007).
The banner photo of the Blue Deer is a yarn painting I purchased through the Huichol Art Project, under the auspices of the Blue Deer Center, founded by Huichol elder and Plant Spirit Medicine healer Eliot Cowan.
How to sit in the dark
Insomnia taught me how to come fully alive in the night hours, how to sit in the dark.
Listen to the night-time traffic pattern, to the wind, to waves of feeling I sequestered during the day, to the ordinary.
Listen for a prompting, a question, a relaxation of muscle, intellect or heart.
Listen for Who might be listening for me.
Speak not with my tongue but some more subtle organ.
Here’s what I learned not to do: turn on a light, pick up a book, banish anxiety, get online, organize anything, expect answers. Distractions all.
Darkness is to sink into, like a seed held by soil without a tremor of urgency, the womb of time and space. Darkness, as Wendell Berry says, does its work.
These lessons of sitting in the dark strengthen me now, when so much of the shadow of the human psyche is abroad in me and in the world.
Darkness itself is sentient, full of knowing, and able to awaken, as we come into relationship with her.
As I wrestle with the sea changes in the US and around the world, I am more aware than ever of my own shadow being, and how vital it is for me to continue my “night-time” work, then bring it out as I engage with the daylight world.
While the days have begun to lengthen now,
may we be willing to continue laboring in the dark,
may we come to appreciate its value,
may we be resolute,
may we hold hands,
may we lift up one another as we stumble.
The morning after: a 21st century creation story
As I write and post this week, election results are unknown. Regardless of outcome, many challenges and opportunities await us. We will feel them with differing senses of urgency.
We wonder: are we, individually and collectively, up to what is being asked of us?
Here’s why my answer is, unequivocally, YES.
YES, even though we are tired and may wisely “unplug” to recuperate.
YES, even though the work to come is demanding, daunting, and unending, and I tremble in my bones.
BECAUSE from our deepest roots we are fashioned to create, and to create together.
We create as effortlessly as we breathe, as continuously as our hearts beat. We are forever engaged in materializing our feelings, thoughts, and ideas, our hopes, expectations, visions, and fears.
We shape the material world with our hands and with their extensions, tools and technologies of all kinds. We put foods and spices together and call it cooking. We put words together and call it story-telling, or news, or nonsense, or poetry. We put wood and stone and metal together and call it building. There is no end to this.
Sometimes just walking around my local super-market, I am overwhelmed at the number of products to choose from. In a kitchen store, I find a new gadget and wonder if someone woke up in the middle of the night seized with excitement about designing a cutting tool that turns a zucchini or a beet into lovely spirals with which to top a salad or frittata.
We filter what we see: we perceive selectively. We fill in blanks. Early in life we use the material that has been given to us – the gifts and limitations of our parents as caregivers, the security or the chaos of our circumstances – to create a story, a life, in which we have as much safety as we can construct. We include, we distort, we omit. We write in heroes and villains, friends, allies, and enemies.
As we grow up, we continue to elaborate on these stories. We live them. We project them more or less onto whatever landscapes, encounters, and personalities make up our days.
These are our personal creation stories: our family origins.
The smaller, the more fixed our stories, the more we live in a trance state, a default state defined by habit, the less freedom we have.
The same is true of our cultural stories, our group identities, our biases, our views of what is “normal” speech, body language, and behavior.
When we are lucky – we can join this kind of tribe: we begin to wake up and see how our stories have become unconscious and self-perpetuating mechanisms that drive our lives and our communities. We begin to question our habitual ways of responding to the world. We wake up to the ways our personal and cultural stories have become prisons. We break out (commonly with the help of others who live their lives outside of our story), and tell a new – and often bigger one, with previously unimagined possibilities. And then we can change the institutions and systems built on those old stories, and create together for the common good.
We listen attentively to one another’s stories. We take them in. Together we cry, together we laugh.
Can you catch the scent of freedom here? get hold of the thread of what it might mean to be a conscious creator of your own life, an artist of your soul? a collaborative architect of your community? an awakening builder of our world?
We are a growing tribe, on the move and gaining strength.
So take heart. Offer comfort and kind words. Receive solace. Share the Kleenex around if need be, in grief or in relief. Let us strengthen our personal resolve and our shared humanity.
Then: take one step. Start anywhere:
There is no better morning to wake up. Today: question just one perspective, break just one habit, open to just one new possibility.
No better morning to make something whole in yourself. Today: pick just one limitation that bugs you. Take your first few steps down a path that embraces both self-acceptance and self-improvement, so that this limitation is no longer an obstacle, just something that shapes you in a particular way, like a tree shaped by wind.
No better morning to practice. Today: be willing. Persist. Move with the movement of life.
No better moment to claim your place in the human tribe.
Photo credit: Up in Arms, by Linda Carmel, at Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough, NC