This past week has been extraordinarily challenging for me. I survived it. I want to share what helped me survive.

In mid-February I wrote on and on late into the night because my mind would not be tamed. One of the several essays I wrote was about an experience earlier that week, the 14th, that was not much to tell, but wouldn’t leave me.

At the house in the bedroom the light of a sunset filtered through oaks and venetian blinds. I was just sitting on the edge of the bed, watching. My son came in, told me about something happening with the Olympics, and then left to return to the TV in the living room. He came again, plopped on the bed, petted the cat, more information about the Olympics, left again. Meanwhile, the deep orange and red sunfired clouds did not change. Time was clearly passing, son chatting and coming in and out, me responding, and time was stopped, the sunset not budging, the sky not growing darker. I had a deep experience of all the activity on earth, all the comings and goings, the violence, the births the deaths, the dances, the breakups, the big games, all contained in a bubble, and outside that bubble, complete stillness. Time racing along inside, time not existing without.

I sat on the bed with this deep understanding.

A lot has happened since then. Hard demeaning taxing confusing lonely stuff. Irritating stuff: things not working, people disappearing, things stuck--I was 30 minutes late for a 45 minute appointment after work today. You KNOW that’s frustrating.

This week I felt fear and appreciation for the lovely frenzy of life. And now and again in the frenzy that large stillness returns to me, and I am at peace.

The wind at dusk whispers.

cool against my face and arms.

The people at work are on a journey.

Surprise and a little fear on their transparent faces.

Awakening to sibling workers. That they can care about the minor traffic injuries of someone they’ve known a week, or how an employee’s infant children curl into his arms when he gets home at night. That they do care to do their best. That they do care about how their work affects others. That the numbers don’t count as much as putting their hearts into their work, and that the work is authentic.

So much harder, they already see, not to care. So much easier to be real. Oh, it’s some journey, isn’t it. The long windowed building not a ship of fools, but a ship of travellers.

I can still see him, the mockingbird atop one of those super tall light posts. He was frenzied, singing song after song at 78 RPM. I was eating lunch, car door open, in the parking lot. A mildly lit hour, the sun tempered by soft white white clouds.

There were the usual locals--the grackles squealing, the white-winged doves calling: who cooks 4 U? who? But it was the mockingbird who dominated this industrial avenue, mimicking calls of cardinals and Carolina wrens, repeating local inorganic noises like the bedeep bedeep bedeep warning of trucks backing up. He was singing so hard, every few seconds his breath, with the help of some flapping, seemed to elevate him a foot above the pole and float him back down, wings uplifted.

After work, I walked, and the woods in four days are transformed into a silky green bower, brown broad leaves matted to the damp earth at the basin of the canyon. In the adjacent neighborhood, I saw a peach-colored rose through the slats of a wood fence, a century plant--or relative--massive thing--each tendril over 4 feet long. The air smelled like fever, like immediacy. I saw a house of red brick with green shutters, pink azaleas and a magnolia in the front yard. A space that must have been created years ago by a lonely Louisianan.

But it’s the mockingbird I still see, crazed with spring passion, transformative joy.

Strange new world. I took on a temporary job because the work was concrete task-oriented. It would permit me to be among coworkers with minimal caretaking of people--something new for me.

Guess who is already supervising a team of 6 mostly men past middle-age doing work she herself has yet to perform? How did I get immersed so fast. Longer hours with the new responsibilities--and it took 1 hr 20 mins to get home yesterday evening because of traffic. It's hard not to be intimidated this morning: it's lightning and pouring outside. This journey has its amusing twists.

The people, though, seem good-hearted and intelligent, if rather preoccupied. I suspect I’m not the only one asking, how did I get here?

I already see I can’t leave my heart in a box up in the closet as I’d planned. Meanwhile, I am learning of the physics of the pendulum, the force of gravity and the intrusion of friction, the sexuality of seahorses and oysters, the locomotion of single-celled organisms.

The bright white Accord was stopped at the light. Its license plate said:

B HAPYY

and why not?

May you be at peace
may your heart remain open
may you awaken to the light of your own true nature
may you be healed
may you be a source of healing for all beings.


J. Borysenko
M. Slav-Borysenko

I was 13 when I received the Sacrament of Confirmation, where the Catholic church recognizes you as an adult. I received instruction at Our Lady of Fatima, a church we didn’t usually attend. There were a lot of kids there--almost all of whom I didn’t know--only a couple from my school. I was intimidated because there were boys. I wasn’t used to boys.

At the end of the instruction, we were given a slip of paper--a purple-inked ditto paper. We were to write the saint whose name we were taking on as a confirmation name. My mother had suggested it would be nice if I took her confirmation name--St Genevieve. Although I had already decided on Joan and didn’t know anything about this other saint, I decided to follow her wishes for me. I wrote Genevieve. I am certain I wrote Genevieve. I asked the girl next to me about the ‘i before e’ spelling rule because I wasn’t sure how to spell Genevieve. Then we handed them in.

I think it was the same night, we returned to the church--Saturday night. We were in dress clothes, but it seems we wore something on top--a purple satin choir gown? I remember the smell of the gowns and perfumes and colognes. Bishop Schexsnayder was there—way up there seated to the left of the altar--and at least a couple hundred of us to be confirmed. We were to process up to the altar, answer the doctrinal question his assistant would ask, then hand him the paper with the saint’s name.

The ceremony was more mundane than I expected--bright lights, kids giggling. The bishop listless. The sense we were being processed more than anything else.

Just before we walked up, we were each given our slips of paper. I opened mine. It read: Joan.

I walked up the aisle in line with the others, running through hypotheses of how I had a slip of paper saying Joan not Genevieve in my hand, even while I was anxious about knowing the answer to whatever doctrine question the bishop would ask. There was no one at this church that I knew, no one who knew my preference. Maybe Genevieve was not an approved saint--but then why not Theresa or Catherine? Why Joan? I wondered if St. Joan was looking out for me? But I never had any real sense of that. It felt more like a--hello!

I guess I still am running through hypotheses.

We stayed late after the ceremony because that same night, my baby sister was christened. As these things go, it wasn’t the slip of paper. She was the real miracle.

I write about this not because it’s the only time something like this happened, but it was the first I really noticed, experienced as out of the ordinary. Because I had a practical head on my shoulders, I figured it was a coincidence.

Other things happened over the years, and I let them too run by as anomalies. We get so much data every day--some pieces will link up in odd ways and we’ll notice them because of the links. Our little miracles.

But then some years back, stunned by a rather moving anomaly, I wrote it down. I decided a real scientist does not ignore the data that don’t make sense. A real scientist examines most closely the data that don’t make sense.

I sat above the limestone rocks, so like those in the Pedernales River. Water flowed over them and down, from one pool to the next. The sun filtered through trees beyond, and I watched light dance on water, hypnotic beauty. A shaft of light through the cleft of a tree, then the cleft caught the sun as the earth made its gradual motion. A ring of suns, of fire diamonds, each a broken sun, appeared in water flowing over rock. I gazed struck still by the sight.

Like God, the sun cannot be studied directly. It must be broken and reflected for our human eyes to watch without being dazzled and blinded. Even then, after a few minutes, my eyes ached from the light and moved toward the diffuse gentle reflection of bright sky across the water of the pool, more peacefully beautiful than the circle of circles of fire diamonds.

In order to see God, to be able to experience God, we look at the broken reflections in others, in the red of a cardinal, the cool face of a mountain cliff, the infinity of stars, desire so to be one with what we experience, so unaware that we are already of the whole, already joined with that we yearn for.

As the earth turned, the sun was whole again, and no longer broken into a form I could safely observe.



(This from last August.)

The passage of time is an illusion of the body. Just like traveling down a road doesn’t make one town on the road any more real or existent than another, neither is the present moment any more real or existent than the future or the past. The physical matter and energies of the past and of the future are all here right now. The whole time line is within the present. All of the universe.

Being in our body just permits us to experience and examine a little bit of the universe at a time.

We’re all travelers. We’re all just visiting.



(An excerpt from last year from Ignition!)

For some, the work itself is life’s joy and purpose.

For some, work is what enables joy and purpose in other arenas. It enables survival.

Both can be healthy paths.

The trouble comes when the work is not fulfilling--but then through habit becomes mistaken for what life is about. The original ideals become distant. Children are forgotten, their material needs met, but little else. Love is lost. It’s all about showing up at work. Value of self becomes wrapped up in how many extra hours are worked, how big the paycheck, what has been purchased. How necessary the pain of work is. The material self becomes disdainful about the spiritual, about ideals and ethics. Joy? A naive fantasy for the simple-minded.

Maybe we become confused. I know I am--both welcoming and dreading being plugged into the work force.

We forget our priorities--it’s as simple as that.

A bone empty walk. The stars distant and uninvolved. The animals and birds silent. The moon unavailable. No clouds to dress the sky. Humans detached, disconnected. And I felt only the shell of my love for the dogs that greeted me.

In the pursuit of truth--I’m posting this paragraph from last night. It is rare to spend an hour and a half outdoors in crisp clean weather, and walk back so empty.

His name was Ishi. He is described as the ‘last of the Yahi Indians’. He worked his arrowheads from glass medicine bottles, 1912-1916. He died in 1916.

Today I discovered in my backpack the brochure from the Menil Collection in Houston. There mentioned was the sculptor of the glass arrowheads I have described here. I see the man bent over, intent on his last work, on the last statement of his tribe.

But there is this sense of him still working. That he died and did not die and will not die.

Long ago I dreamed of such a man, a sacred man bent over and working with metal, teaching me, welcoming my trespass. I expected that he was working on a ring of precious metal, and was disappointed to see instead a piece of flattened tin with holes. I didn't understand: tin to be used for a lantern that would shed patterned light.

I dreamed of him again in hand-to-hand combat. He and his opponent both bleeding and exhausted, but never dead. Love between him and his opponent.

Ishi’s poignant statement in glass is 90 years old: Love between him and us now living on the land where his people once thrived.

We received over three inches of rain in the night. Besides feeling the earth wet under your feet, you can tell something happened. The pyracantha’s glossy leaves and red berries are glistening. The live oaks are happy. How can I tell they are happy?

The ones in the yard, the ones across the street on the hill, their branches are stretched upward, open to the day. In just these few hours, there is new growth in fully mature trees, tender not-yet-hardened leaves shooting toward the sky. Joy opening upward.

How do we know when humans are happy? How does rain smell after a dry spell? What is our water? What is the difference between a day when we breathe in and breathe out, just like the days before, and a day after a rain? What’s it like to grow? How does stretching, does opening feel? How does sweet clean air feel against new skin?

Welcome spring. Happy happy equinox.

I am listening to a screech owl outside the balcony. It is not screeching, but doing its mellow thing, its vibrato, wavering note. What a companionable sound!

Do you remember singing? Finding your voice? I hope no one fussed at you or made fun. I hope you had time and privacy to experiment, to play with your sound, your noise. I remember at age 6 rocking on a swing alone in the back yard singing silent night and mockingbird over and over and over. The grass smelled very green. It’s good to have time to play. We learn through play. We live fully when we play.

I wonder how it feels to be a screech owl sitting on a branch in the middle of the night, giving voice to screech owl being.

This isn’t limbo. The rain is pretty dripping from the roof, the bird feeder swaying, marking the gentle irregular passage of time. The cell phone is still haywire, despite a couple hours spent Thursday with customer service, listening to ads with a backgound Shaft-like digital beat. Amazon.com seems to think I owe them something a customer representative wrote a month ago to throw away. Their software rejects my careful explanation. No two professionals have even close to similar stories about how COBRA works. I have eight books by the bed, one not even started for CEUs, one I first read in high school, the rest all in progress. My sock monkey’s eyes are permanently skeptical, gazing at me with woven empathy. Nothing fits together--it’s why I put down one book and pick up another. Is this the one? Nothing is fixed. The rain is so pretty. No, this isn’t limbo. I am waiting for nothing. This is life. I am here.

Three Times My Life Has Opened

Three times my life has opened.
Once, into darkness and rain.
Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and starts
to remember each time it enters into the act of love.
Once, to the fire that holds all.
These three were not different.
You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.
But outside my window all day a maple has stepped from her
leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping the
colored silks.
Neither are we different in what we know.
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays,
like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one
red leaf the snow releases in March.


Jane Hirshfield

The sun's tumultuous magnetic fields provide the fuel of flares. The sudden release of energy in a flare results from a process called reconnection, whereby oppositely directed magnetic field lines come together and partially annihilate each other.

Gordon D. Holman
The Mysterious Origins of Solar Flares
Scientific American
April, 2006

Job Training

Instructor stationary
at the head of the class
silent cars moving
in her one ear out her other
past glass windows beyond her
as she speaks
--and a big yellow truck says PENSKE--
and we listen or not
or watch the traffic through her head
dazed or alert.
Sun casts its rays
through my plexiglass aqua bottle
sparks white fire in water
and quavers against my name card.
Instructor says coolly: too vague--
this response merits a one.

high school choir
sings on the street
no effort
no planning
no practice
spontaneous eruption of
no words no sound
no moving of the lips
the director not directing
sunlight on his glasses
something silent
from the spirit
wondrous song

OK. So the last time I visited the photoblog with the fishes and turtle ‘flying in a blue dream’, there, in a clean bright pool of white, yellow and blue was a boy--maybe 7--under water, legs folded, thumbs to index fingers, in a little yogi lotus pose, breath escaping in tiny bubbles. Meditating.

Wow.

Finding this unfolding chain of photos felt like a friendly wordless conversation across cyberspace. Or maybe even more connected and personal than conversation. The internet offering some tangible experience of the collective unconscious.

I have been--like many people of late--examining intuitive/metaphorical thinking and logical/concrete thinking styles. My short-form take on the discussion: two wings on one bird.

"The body is a device to calculate the astronomy of the spirit. Look through that astrolabe and become oceanic."

Rumi
from ‘be Melting Snow’

First, on my birthday, there was the frayed end of a rope and a thousand fish of many colors.

I visited the bookmarked photo a couple days later, but the picture had changed--a single large fish of yellow, blue and green.

Then, a couple days later, thousands more fish, swimming in all directions.

One gift from the sea after another. Given the photoblog is based in a landlocked country, even more quizzical.

Now, this morning, a turtle swimming in the deep blue and a link to rainbows.

This is beautiful:

http://www.missouriskies.org/rainbow/february_rainbow_2006.html


“The villagers say when a clay pitcher breaks, you see that the air inside it is the same as outside. Vimla...had broken her pitcher; she saw there were no insides and outsides. We are just shells of the same Absolute.”

Jasmine
Bharati Mukherjee

I finally laughed when the front office refused my five-dollar bill to correct an error I’d made on this month’s rent. They wanted a check.

In two days, 6 red flags had popped up regarding money. Some my fault, some not. Some big, some not. My mantra over the last few months--it’s about love, not money--was sorely kicked around. It scared me.

Now I think the flags are just a test of my conviction.

In school we were taught God is love. We were also taught unbaptized babies and well-behaved heathen were sent to limbo for eternity, not heaven. We were taught a person who missed Mass on Sunday and died before making it to confession would go to hell.

Even in second grade I could see that a loving God doesn’t send people to hell for missing Mass. These were incompatible teachings. I held on to the premise God is Love; I rejected the limbo and the stadium seats in hell for Mass-missers.

I’ve tried to stick with God is love in my freestyle fashion. Whenever I have focused on love, on light--the rest--including money--has fallen into place. Love is magnetic north and all the rest is distraction.

remember brooms?
before television and leafblowers?

remember when we used to sweep?
our driveways, our storefronts, our entries?
the natural percussion?
what a tender sound it made?

I haven’t read any more from Breath Sweeps Mind. Nonetheless, meditation has nudged its way into my life.

Yoga was cancelled at the last minute yesterday. By the time I got home it was dark. I went for a walk anyway, and thought I’d experiment with breathing. A walking meditation. I tried several combinations and kinds of breath before finding something that locked in--four sips through the nose inhale, flowing exhale. A nine pace plan--four paces in, five out. Around the curves, up and down the hills of Sundown Ridge.

I don’t know if it was last night’s specific beauty, or the meditative zone the breathing helped create. I know as the pattern broke toward the end of the walk, everything around me came into sharp focus.

The curving asphalt reflecting white light--the waxing moon and its shimmering ring. Clouds like scarves catching moonlight. A cottontail’s dark silhouette against the white-lit road. The junipers dark against the moonlit sky. Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades emerging. The gusty breeze creating white noise, pressing on me as I walked. A heat within me, yet my skin ice-cool to the touch.

A dream about substituting evidence--in front of God and everybody--is the first alert. Even in the dream you are telling yourself--wouldn’t the truth be much easier? Just face the consequences for the crime and be done with it instead of this complicated maneuvering?

You awake and think--you have been clear, honest of late, right? There is no crime, nothing to hide?

But your body tells you something different. Your brain and body are drenched with glue, barely functioning--and you have to dig deep to see what it is weighing you down so.

You are grieving.

You don’t want to grieve. You want to move on. So, this week you’ve posted cheerful blog messages. You’ve sent friendly emails. You’ve interacted with coworkers with awkward pleasantries when you just want to be left alone.

You’ve planted false evidence. And keeping up the front is such an exhausting effort.

But grief’s no crime. You can stop substituting the happy face for the truth. You can wear your times-are-hard face a while longer. That one will be clear. And chances are it’ll be easier to be with others, to look them in the eye. You will function more freely if you are not pretending so hard.

It is so much work to uphold the lie. So elegantly simple to be true.

It feels like a day at the beach. The breeze so mild and tender, the sun swathed in thin cloud.

There is the sensual perfume of agarita in bloom. Wrens complaining. I heard a mockingbird sing two different ringtones. There have been cardinals everywhere. I saw one pair passing seeds beak to beak. I saw a roadrunner hopping on the dry earth. Then I saw it stabbing violently with its beak into the fountain-like wild grasses. It caught a snake, writhing furiously to escape. The barn swallows are back, talking back and forth, clearly elated to find last year’s nest undisturbed.

I had so many questions to ask, and now they have dissipated.

The agarita, the birds, the snake, the sun, the breeze--answers without questions.

Montessori schools have a birthday ritual. When the boys were little, I’d go to the school to watch. In the middle of a small table, there was a candle burning. That was the sun. The birthday child held a globe. That was the earth. The child carried the globe around the candle. That was one year. Then all the children would examine a photo of the child at age one. Then the birthday child carried the earth around the sun again--and all would look at a picture of him at age two. And so on.

The kid’s face lit up—not just with the excitement of the birthday—but boggled by the tangible experience of holding the earth, of their own life meshing with the vastness and simple elegance of the workings of the sky.

That’s what I am doing today. I am going to carry our globe around the candle. A long hike—I’ve got a lot of revolutions to celebrate.

Ideally I don’t have a mind and a body. I have a self--or a bodymind--where it is all integrated.

Ideally, I don’t have a mind fighting body or a body fighting mind. I don’t have a body saying “I’m hungry” and a mind saying “Fat pig--you’d better not eat that.” Ideally I experience hunger and look for food that answers the needs of my body. All elegantly coordinated.

The brief times I worked with people in prison, I was most struck by the mind/body split. The denial of having been angry or hurt or having sexual feeling--and the crimes that had been committed that were evidence of anger, hurt, and sexual hunger run amok.

Ideally, my bodymind is my friend, my way to experience life fully. When I am friends with my self, I can live without undue hurt to others and without self punishment. I celebrate my self--my senses--that I can see and feel and smell and taste and hear. I celebrate my thoughts whether they are kind or evil or stupid or smart. They are there and I acknowledge them. I celebrate my dreams--the scary and the beautiful. I celebrate my sexuality. I celebrate my skin, my appetite, my confusion, the damaged, the broken, the healthy. I dance with myself.

I am kind to my self--and when there are hurts, I pay attention to them--I don’t push them back.

I want an observant self, not a shut-down self. A quiet self is a friend. A shut-down self is a prisoner. It is deadened; it is locked up waiting to escape in unaware ways.

I can be the most generous when I’m selfish. Most effective. When I am selfish in this way, I am least likely to hurt others because I am aware. When I am selfish, the light in me can burn most brightly.

I feel good. I am living closer to honesty than I have since I was 7. And for many reasons, it is harder to be your honest self as an adult than as a 7-year-old.

I feel good. I am learning seeking love and being love are the same thing.

And when times are tough and you can do neither, I learned love falls from the skies and from little girls in bookstores to help you along.

Correction:

OK. So much for romanticizing the plight of the suburban deer. As I walked today right at sunset, I made a point of noticing where those deer might go.

The neighborhood lies on the lip of a canyon. Those damn deer have miles of territory to wander.

Also I note now that spring has set in and the redbuds are in bloom, there are new grasses pushing up and fresh leaves on wild shrubs. The greenbelt is not ‘depleted’. Perhaps the deer--I saw another group exiting as I approached--come by because of the folks who toss corn from their apartment balcony.

I’d always assumed deer lived in this little greenbelt. I’m beginning to see they are wanderers.

I need to remember to think instead of react. But I can learn from errors too. If the deer have so many more options than I first noted, neither are we humans trapped in cubicles. We make our choices.

I keep forgetting that.

I was one among a dozen deer exiting the traffic-perimetered greenbelt for suburbia last night. It had been so hot, I was walking later than usual and so learned--this is when and where they go.

We all paused at a busy street, the herd uneasy. But it was a post-mating season one-antlered buck who was most unnerved, not sure whether to move forward or back, and my presence just complicated his options. I held still because I didn’t want to spook him into a collision with fate, but he darted forward anyway, and a car had to slow to a halt, and the buck turned around and gave up on suburbia, eyes dazed, trotting back to the narrow, food-depleted greenspace, the herd following him.

I continued to walk and thought of the buck. I thought of human men confined to cars and cubicles, but with genetic deep-seated memory of the wild. The restlessness and confusion deer and humans experience.

When I returned, there they were again, making another attempt to leave the little woods for the larger human space. But this time so dark I could not distinguish their shadowy shapes one from the other.

Last night the moon glowed like some bright and never before discovered jewel.

This morning, just after sunrise, Venus was so bright it blazed through the thin layer of pink cloud stretched in the east. Blazed in the daylight.

Yesterday, it was nearly 90 degrees here, breaking a record.

I watched a cardinal, red male, take a bath.

I watched my son stuff a goalie glove into a document sleeve as part of his high school portfolio.

The sky is the blue of periwinkle.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.

Rumi
from ‘where everything is music’