our own true size

Some more notes on Spring time, the season that corresponds to Wood and to Growth. This info is from deeply lively teacher Thea Elijah who offered a rich and lively seminar called Transforming the Spirit: A Five Element Perspective on Herbal Studies, combining both information-packed lecture and direct energetic transmission of knowledge.

Each of the phases/elements/seasons/organ systems pertains to a particular aspect of the human psyche-spirit. The aspect that belongs to the Liver and thus to Spring is the Hun, the Ethereal Soul.

Thea says this about Hun: (filtered through my own mind and hands, and I apologize for any mistakes...)

The Hun is the aspect of Spirit that is completely unfettered by time and space. It's utterly free and can go anywhere, because it is the power of imagination, of creativity. It's the part of us that allows us to be always larger than our circumstances. Because of the Hun's ability to go anywhere, we can know that our own true size is the Whole Universe.

Sometimes if we can't see the way ahead, we lose hope and put the Hun in a box of preconceived restriction.

First the Hun flies,

then it figures out where it's going.

Hope does not rest on seeing the future.

Hope must precede vision.

Moses was a prophet of the Wood element: someone who, in an external situation of slavery, refused to be a slave internally. The untameable part inside is the Hun, is Hope, is like a bird circling, waiting for opportunity. It's the one who sees the problem in the first place who can be the greatest visionary, the one with the greatest solution, the one with the greatest Hun. Their tendency to anger is a sign that their soul is acutely aware of fairness and how often it doesn't manifest, and their route back to alignment with Tao is to transform excessive or stuck anger into visionary creativity.

"Our deepest pathology is our only hope of redemption.

Photo by Pete Nuij on Unsplash

circling for a thousand years

Lindsey sent this yesterday:

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world
perhaps I can never achieve the last
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years
and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

~Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Robert Bly

Your Presence

Last weekend during Shabbat School, Rav Olivier, Bet Alef's wonderful French-American rabbinic intern, told this story about his favorite prayer (it’s my fave too!):

One Shabbat, everyone was in the synagogue waiting for the rabbi to begin the morning service. They waited and waited and waited, and finally decided to go ahead without him. Hours later, at the end of the service, the rabbi appeared. All the people rushed up to him, concerned! What had happened, where had he been?

That morning he'd gotten up and had begun to say the morning prayer as usual: Modeh* ani l'fanecha (I am thankful in Your Presence), melech chai v'kayyam, shehechezarta bi nishmati, b'chemlah. Rabah emunatecha (sublime power of life and eternity, who has restored my soul, with mercy. great is your faithfulness). But as he sang "modeh ani l'fanecha" he fell in so deeply he couldn't go on—only modeh ani l'fanecha — I am so grateful to be in Your Presence — over and over for hours.
*girls and women say "modah"

Lately modah ani l'fanecha has become the little song I sing in my mind as I do my work with people, especially during those times when we're quiet together--when I'm checking the pulses, or slipping needles into acupuncture points, or holding the warming moxa over the parts of the body-mind that are sore or sad or stressed.

pilgrimage & finger knitting

Last weekend Robert, Natan, and I zipped up to Vancouver (well, zipped up to the border, then crawled over that, then zipped up to the Massey tunnel, then inched through that...) for a dinner gathering first conceived of by master-manifestor Penny Scott. Penny had the idea a few months ago that it would be lovely to somehow gather together Ashley (then living in Texas), me (in Seattle), Caitlin (Bowen Island) and herself (North Vancouver). It sounded like "a good idea but who knows when that could happen" kind of dream. But now I know that things like that come together all the time, and easily, around Penny! And it was a lovely gathering, lots of sushi, wine, and funny stories.

A couple of days later my family and I tagged along with Ashley to Bowen Island to visit Chris and his children (Caitlin was visiting her mother in the city) in their sunny home full of paintings and drawings and things to play with. After chatting on the deck that overlooks the bay, surrounded by evergreen treetops, and after Aine taught Ashley and me to finger-knit with chunky yarn, we went on a perfect-blue-sky-spring-scented walk around one of the lakes, where Chris plucked licorice fern root for us to chew on, Natan and Finn ran ahead again and again to hide and jump out at us (Finn chose an exceptionally great hiding place, under the bridge like a little troll) and we talked about lots of things and no-things. Just weaving an elemental, sun and water and voice and eye-to-eye substrate of relation, to deepen friendships that have consisted in large part of electrons printing out thoughts on a screen. It turns out that more than a few blogger and Open Space friends have made the idyllic pilgrimage to Bowen to visit Chris and his family, which creates in my mind the image of a glowing criss-crossing of resonant tracks and footprints, a lively magnetic field being born of conversations and overlapping presences.

season of hope

Though it's not officially Spring quite yet, the peonies are poking their deep red stems through the ground and the cherry trees are blooming, and you can feel the sap waking and rising.

"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye, which every young and ardent, sees the possible."

--Kierkegaard

“…although it is not visible to you, the apple tree is already developing its fruit buds deep within its tissue the summer prior to the year in which the bloom becomes visible. Starting in about mid-June, the fruit bud tissue starts its development and differentiation. The process is completed by late March, shortly before bloom.”

–The BackYard Orchardist

This is the power of Wood and the realm of Growth—the ability to envision the possible far into the future, and to plan and enact its realization. In the Chinese 5-Element system, Wood energy pertains especially to Spring, the season of Hope. This phase follows the cold, dark, quiet stillness of Winter, when a world of concentrated invisible life bursts and blossoms and unfurls into visibility—into tender leaf and flower, into new-born breath and heartbeat—intensely fresh and full of possibility.

Other gifts of Wood, whose organic home in the human body is the Liver and Gall Bladder, are suppleness and flexibility, discernment and decisiveness, initiative, motivation. Wood’s primary challenge arises when encountering immovable (or what just feel like immovable) obstacles to growth and desired action. The resulting stagnation of energy can result in feelings of frustration, irritability and anger, as well as bodily symptoms such as muscle spasm and cramping, headache, high blood pressure. Some important basic remedies for this kind of stagnation are playful and regular physical movement, and ample water intake to encourage circulation. And, paradoxically, the giving up of a certain kind of hope—the releasing of our attachment to a particular outcome, the letting go of the desire for reality to be other than it is.

During this season, imagine how we might strengthen and harmonize the gifts and power of the Wood element in ourselves and in the world. Some questions to consider are: How can I practice bending, without cracking, in the midst of the winds of change? How rooted am I, how flexible, how do I incorporate/embody healthy movement? How well do I stand up for my self? What is my vision of the best possible present and future, and what strategy can I create for living into that vision?

Czech statesman, playwright and poet Vaclav Havel said,

“Hope is a dimension of the soul…an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart…It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

mycelium & marbles

Last Monday's meeting turned out to be a good opportunity to re-connect with or meet like-hearted colleagues working in various aspects of health care. We only had time to just begin to hear about what people are doing and thinking and imagining, so what will be more interesting to me will be to see how the conversation is continued. 

An image I've absorbed from my friend, super-catalytic network weaver Susan Partnow, to describe these sorts of get-togethers is that they are akin to the fruiting bodies (otherwise known as "mushrooms") of the vast and singular mycelium noticing and becoming aware of themselves as One Self. Geographically distant individual mushrooms are the aboveground organs of intricate, fully entwined-into-the-earth, vast underground organisms.

Which cosmologically brilliant, mountain-man mushroom scientist Paul Stamets describes on his website as "the earth's internet"

So, all of us fruiting bodies have now seen each other and begun to sense that we're all doing varied aspects of one work. Part of our conversation was about how we can contribute to the larger conversation about health care, how we can "shift the cultural paradigm of healing". At this point, changing paradigms sounds lofty, and so much about changing someone else (Them, Out There). 

What I can do, maybe, is to practice paying attention to the world view I come from in my own work in my own small area, to continue to listen and speak up whenever the conversation arises, and at the same time to support as I can the work of colleagues who operate more at the state, federal and global levels. Again, drawn to the image of underground roots with their tiny, delicate, root hairs that can eventually penetrate, open, and change the structure of rock and cement.

Before going to Monday's meeting, I thought to bring my journal to take notes in, since my perimenopausal memory is more like a sieve than ever - but I couldn't find it. Like the elderly Lost Boy in the movie Hook who had literally lost his marbles (but who touchingly found them at the end!), losing my journal felt like losing my mind. Luckily, I had left it at a meeting at our friend Carolyne's apartment building (even though I was sure I had it when I left) and her kind neighbor found it and now I've got it back. 

More evidence for the way that aspects of our minds and hearts and selves live and move and pour together out in the wide world, and back into the wide world in "here". Zen teacher Joan Sutherland writes in the March 2005 issue of Shambhala Sun:

"Perhaps, after all, we shouldn't take our lives so personally, shouldn't think of them as the monologue of busy and insistent and separate selves. Perhaps we are made up of landscapes and events and memories and genetics; of the touch of those we hold dear, our oldest fears, the art that moves us, and those sorrows on the other side of the world that make us weep at the breakfast table. The astronomer Carl Sagan used to say that if you really want to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to start with the Big Bang."

Like waves on the ocean, like mushrooms popping out of the ground, at the same time particular and none other than the whole.

integral medicine, breakfast, and tzimtzum

On Monday morning, James O'Dea, who is the new president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, will be the guest at a breakfast gathering here in Seattle of healthcare practitioners drawn to know more about "integral medicine." IONS has just published a lovely-looking medical textbook called "Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine" — I can't comment on it yet, since I've only just looked at the Table of Contents, but there is an impressive roster of authors and editors, and a Foreword by Ken Wilber of the Integral Institute.

What's interesting to me about this meeting at the moment is the planning and coordination of it. I would have said that I was "helping to organize" the gathering since I am listed as one of the hosts, but actually I'm not helping very much, and am happy to watch from the fringe (I am, come to think of it, pretty comfortable on the fringe overall). 

At first, it sounded like a pretty simple breakfast meeting, of maybe 20 or so people, with Mr. O'Dea introducing some of the approaches to a new health care paradigm discussed in the book, and then facilitating some dialogue on how we are each incorporating those approaches in our own work, and about how we might work together to help "shift the culture of healthcare." We only started the planning a few weeks ago, so I was all for quickly choosing a place, thoughtfully crafting an invitation, sending it out to whomever we thought would like to come, and to expect that anyone who was really interested enough would show up...and that would be pretty much enough planning for it to be a great meeting (well, along with making sure that one of us, or some of us, would bring enough food!) — this reflects, I think, on how I have been forever imprinted by the principles of Open Space Technology. 

As it's turning out though, there were differing ideas amongst the six or so hosts of what exactly the purpose of the gathering was, the wording of the invitation, and who should be invited — and so it's become a very stressful process for some of my more detail-oriented colleagues. I feel both the impulse to say, "oh, for goodness sake, let's just do this and this and this! and then relax, it'll be fine!" as well as a little flick of guilt for being so la-di-da, and not helping with the detail control. My fallback response is to wonder, "how much do I care about this?", realize that I do truly think it'll be fine no matter what happens, and to take a giant step back from the fray (hmm — in only one sentence, I'm both "falling back" and "stepping back" — finding myself trying to emulate the universal principle, known in kabbalistic terminology as “tzimtzum,” in other areas of my life as well)

Anyway, there's been lots of interest, which is exciting. Around 40 people have said they're coming — nurses, visionaries, policy-influencers, physicians, teachers, and of course all of us are or have been patients, too.

If I figure out or find out what "integral medicine" is, I will let you know!

twinkles & sparkles

"Twinkles" is what our Japanese friend Kaori-chan* said for "twins" (her charming English also included "Mekeesko" for "Mexico," and that has become my preferred pronunciation too ;-))

In the past week I've gotten to have time with two good friends who seem quite different on superficial first glance but whom I now realize are "soul twinkles," including the way that both of them sparkle and fizz up a room. Last week deep and buoyant, easily-amazed Ashley was in town to visit, and today I got to have lunch with elf-friend Anne Stadler, as curious and playful and exuberant in her 70's as any 6-year old. It turns out that Ashley and I had tea, and then Anne and I had BBQ chicken and coleslaw, on different days in the same place: the great community living room (that is, a living room with a bookstore, restaurants, a farmers' market and a bakery),Third Place Commons, which Anne and her husband Dave helped to found.

I met both Ashley and Anne at the Practice of Peace last November, an extraordinary Open Space gathering (most all Open Space gatherings are extraordinary, according to those who have had lots of experience, but this one was especially special) that continues to ripple out into the world in good works and heartful connections. With both Ashley and Anne, I have the sensation of being held in very spacious embrace, able to bask in their radiant and warm wonder and joy, which relaxes and nourishes many of my little crimped corners and dried rootlets, and gives me modeling and support for the ongoing practice of remembering to pay deep attention to what Swami Omkar calls Adorable Presence, as well as to what Anne calls "the new We" (-- sounds like the same thing, to me).

When Ashley comes back through Seattle next month, I'll get to reconnect the two of them with one another and bask some more — just as good as a vacation in the sun.

(*in my admittedly limited understanding, in Japanese, adding -san onto the end of someone's name is an honorific and indicates respect; adding -chan is like a "cute-erific" and indicates affection and mostly you would use it with girls and women younger than yourself)