taking care of the name

"We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can happen only if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure."
~Macrina Wiederkehr

I have felt lately as if I'm walking on the bottom of the river, and all the words and images are on the surface, in the light, where I can see them but not quite reach them right now. As I begin to describe what I'm seeing, I imagine they will seem to be separate fragments, and numerous, floating there on the surface -- but from down here they I know that they all send down filaments that criss-cross every which way, in time and space and meaning, way below the surface, and that's why this is such a long blog post instead of several separate ones.

((.)) This morning I spent a brief time holding the hand of a colleague and friend who last week was diagnosed with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. Six weeks ago she was still her radiant self: seeing clients, and writing, and immersed in her wide circle of friends and spiritual community, with no trace or hint of disease. From the outside she looks like she is sleeping. On the inside, I know that her brain has filled with little holes, like a sponge. On the deeper inside, I know that in a day or few, perhaps by the Solstice, she will have completely dissolved back into her radiant Self.
A message just came from the website her family and friends have been keeping, to tell her many circles that our friend "...left us just as the Solstice came to be this mid-morning of June 21, 2007. She is free now to move to another plane, her abiding spirit able to move to even greater heights. She had a smile on her face as she departed."
The last time we had coffee together was a few months ago, and we talked a lot about our mutual friend Bill, who died abruptly in January.

((,)) Last month, I phoned a friend to see if I could join him for a "bird-sit" the next morning, a pre-dawn meditation in the woods that he and some other friends had been doing -- being present and listening as the birds wake up in the morning. It turned out that he was in New York, called back because his twin brother had had some trouble breathing, been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, and then had a stroke while in the hospital. My friend's brother died less than a week later. They had just turned 41 in February.

((*)) In March, a cheer-ful and energetic woman whom I got to know while we were in Israel in 2004, was diagnosed with cancer in the gallbladder and liver, after having had many months of stomach pain, and after having lived through breast cancer 9 years ago. After extensive surgery, she was set to undergo follow-up radiation treatment when a routine CT showed that the cancer had already come back and grown more tumors in her abdomen. She manages to be devastated, deeply accepting of whatever comes next, and entirely open to miracles, all at once. She was at services two Shabbats ago, and looked great; you couldn't tell what was going on inside (the surface of the inside) if you didn't already know.

The stories aren't connected, except that each one is so intense, and abrupt, so peculiar, and life-threatening, or life-ending.

((')) Jack Ricchiuto writes in his beautiful new book, Conscious Becoming (which he wrote after an abrupt near-death experience of his own) (and which you can give as a wonderful gift to yourself or someone else, just by requesting the pdf version from Jack) : "When we are conscious, we love all the stories."

((-)) Almost a month ago was the holiday of Shavuot: the commemoration of revelation, of the people receiving the ten commandments (it turns out that a better translation would be the "ten utterances" or the "ten principles") at Mt. Sinai.

My sense of revelation right now: a moment fished out from the stream of light, a stream that could be -- and sometimes is -- a continuous dialogue, which lasts only as long as I am really listening.

Our rabbinic intern, Olivier, offered a traditional Shavuot night study session (well, we didn't stay up till the birds started singing, so it was not entirely traditional!) We talked a lot about the reverberation, the dance, between Descent and Ascent, the Yin and the Yang of creation and awakening. In the story of Sinai, the people (who are the Eternal in manifest, multivarious form) go up the mountain to meet the Mystery; the unmanifest Eternal comes down the mountain to meet the seekers/finders. Olivier says, "The universe wants this to happen, and it steps forth: God comes down" and we (all of us aspects of God), we go up. "But there is only so high we can go, while we live in bodies -- God has to come down." In our tradition, we also come back down, we don't stay on the mountaintop. For as long as we live in human form, we come down and go up and come down.

((~)) (I used these quotes from Jack and from Olivier in the "d'var Torah" (which means "Torah talk" and/or "Torah thing") that I gave recently at a Shabbat service celebrating the energies of the Divine Feminine. I've posted it at Ashley's generous forum, On the Wings of Curiosity.

Much later in the study session, we each drew a number from 1 to 10, our "utterance" to contemplate till next Shavuot. I picked number 3, which is the one that's translated "you shall not take the name of God in vain."

Olivier shared Rabbi Ted's teaching on this:
(It would be so much more charming and surprising and potent if you could hear Ted or Olivier tell it. In the meantime, you will have to settle for this paraphrase which is mixed with my own responses:)

It is only on the surface level that we would perceive that this should mean something as small as, "don't say 'God' as a swear word or curse."

Under the surface, on the inside, we remember the Self-name of God, the name that rumbles from the blazing bush in response to Moses' wondering who was speaking to him: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh ~~ I AM as I AM

If the name of God is I AM,
then who am I?
How can I take good care of this name?
In what ways do I use the name I AM unconsciously and what consequences does that generate? How often do I channel it into narrow pathways by the thought-less identifications I choose? Can I imagine I AM without bounds, without separation, without any identification at all?

((,)) I am filled with wonder and tears to read Chris' post, and all the keen and tender comments, on "Going to War at the Art of Hosting on the Art of Hosting" -- about clarity and surrender and collective shadow, about "fierce commitment to defend the territory of the open heart" and "the responsibility of love...never to push our adversary or interlocutor into a place they cannot go unless we are prepared and awake enough to go with them to guard their back."

((')) In a workshop over Mother's Day weekend, 5-element practitioner and Sufi healer Thea Elijah guided a classroom full of people in a practice of opening the heart and mind and body to whatever-it-is we conceive of as source (I am): First, let yourself trust the world to hold you, trust whatever- it- is you're sitting or standing or lying on to hold you up. It can help to widen your base (what Thea called "pyramid butt"). At the same time open the throat to awe and wonder (around the throat are many of the acupuncture points called the Window of the Sky points) -- that place in the throat that gets tight when we are very moved -- and open your mind and the crown of the head up to the Mystery and the "I don't know." Connected all the way Down, and all the way Up. With so much space going down and up, the heart space, the center of the body, can expand more easily. First, at the level of personal heart, at the front of the chest, where emotions are felt. Then let yourself go back, into the deep chambers of the heart, to the back of the body, the spine, which is our pillar of eternity, our connection to the Infinite. Then allow yourself to open past that, falling past eternity, and with the back body ("we are prepared and awake enough to go with them to guard their back") open, let yourself fill up from that source, which we can call by so many names ~ allah ~ elohim ~ deep love ~ I am ~ until you overflow into the group heart, the collective being.

((!)) During a summery, flowery, lunch on her deck, Anne asked me to describe that practice to her again. When I'd finished, she said that it reminds her of a sensation she often thinks of: when you are rafting down a river, with your feet pressed firmly at the front of the raft, and your arms lifted, chest open, feeling the current of the river through your back, holding you up, and carrying you on.

(cup of Anne's blooming heart tea)


((*)) On Saturday we attended the bar mitzvah of a friend's son, who in her apt words is "growing up beautiful and strong," including having healed from a brain injury from being kicked in the head last year by a group of kids who thought he shouldn't be in their neighborhood. He was magnificent, charming, genuine, funny (as my friend also said about her shining son in her little speech, "stylistically, there isn't anything more Jewish than the combination of intensity and humor").

Included in his service booklet, for the period of silent meditation, was this Rumi verse:

...Lo, I am with you always, means when you look for God
God is in the look in your eyes
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self
or things that have happened to you,
There is no need to go outside.

Be melting snow
Wash yourself of yourself.

A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.

Eating a fig on a sunny morning, I look at its curious form, the flower growing inside the skin. I think of my friends, and the look in their eyes, behind their eyes. It is very clear to me that whatever is happening on the surface, all of them are flowers growing perfectly on the inside, and so am I.

luminous edge, inside out, upside down, and backwards

Chris sat still for a while, as everyone moseyed out to chat in the lobby following Thomas' performance of Luminous Edge last night at Seattle Center. When he could speak again, he said with sparks of wonder lighting up each word, "Have you ever seen someone make art of what you do?" I thought (out loud), "it's like seeing yourself inside - out up there."

Chris writes more here about the intimate patterned dance of chaos and order, and the "process artist" practices of uncovering and understanding and supporting the natural patterns of human conversation and relationship and organization, and the way that Thomas (and Ashley, who was a matrix-deep collaborator in the creation of the show) illuminated it all in a deep and beautiful weave of sound and story and movement and image.

Two nights ago, I got to sit next to Ashley and her dad, Paul, and my friends Chris and Rick, for a talk by Paul Hawken who is on the lecture circuit with his latest book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, which I wrote a little about last month. You can read the beginning of the book in issue 43 of Ode magazine.

Paul Hawken speaks with warmth and a sweet sense of humor, and deep appreciation for all of the many ordinary (and the few celebrated and extraordinary) people who have been growing the roots and branches of this movement.

Since first hearing him speak at the bioneers conference in October, I have been thinking a lot about his conviction that

The environmental movement seems to have the upper leg because the house is burning down. Literally. So it is very easy for the environmental movement to turn to the social justice movement and say, yes I know how important your issues are, but the house is burning down. You should come and join us on the environmental bus. I think that it is upside down and backwards. Global warming is injustice. It is a type of colonialism. If we are going to be effective over the short time we have, we have to slow down, stop, and change the bus. I think the environmental movement has to get on the social justice bus.

Whatever we call that bus, I think the process artists have an important and useful role to play, perceiving and nourishing and connecting and integrating the deep patterns that are most restorative and regenerative and healthy for the human and more-than-human lifeworld.

Photos by Ashley and Thomas

one day it cracks them open

After talking today with a dear friend about his obviously powerful practice of kundalini yoga (a practice that awakens the energy lying like a serpent coiled at the base of spine, which then rises to enable the yogi's individual consciousness to merge with the Divine Consciousness), I remembered that my hero-friend Bill Mitchell practiced and taught a type of kundalini yoga for many years. I have had a sweet strong sense of Bill yesterday and today as a being who has suddenly shifted form, merged with the cosmos, gone super-nova, and become an intense radiance that has lit up the stars in our eyes... and now I recall a lovely comment that Chris wrote at Ashley's when a soul friend of theirs died a month ago at the solstice: "I have had this image with me all day of a star exploding, shedding layers and layers and seeding many new stars all around."

So many new stars.

I think that this star-burst/snake-uncoiling energy is an ecstatic one. An energy that takes us far beyond our ordinary sense of who we are, beyond where we think we end and the rest of the universe begins. A power that we experience at numinous times like these, when the veil floats aside for a moment and we are tossed high and low by the great winds of life and death. When we feel pinned through the heart to this present time; and when there's nothing left of us to be pinned, because we've already been dissolved into the fertile emptiness.

An energy to appreciate, and maybe, like my friends, to cultivate.

"Many myths...speak of a snake that glides, sinuous and silent, through the shimmering branches of the body-tree. Universally, the snake symbolizes the primordial creative energy of the cosmos in general and the life force within the body in particular. What we call ecstasy is the dance of the serpent through the tree of our consciousness.
--
"If you think of your body as a house, the serpentine force is the electricity that flows through all the rooms and lights them up. Seen with the inner eye, every living body appears luminous -- it shines, shimmers and scintillates, each cell a little star.
--
"Ecstasy is always a gift of grace. Its comings and goings cannot be controlled...Or, as Rumi puts it, "God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box."
~Jalaja Bonheim, PhD

Unmarked Boxes
Jalal al-din Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother's milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flower bed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.

Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, "Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines." Then the phantasm goes away.
You're back in the room.
I don't want to make any one fearful.
Hear what's behind what I say.

Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.
There's the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I'm only talking about them,

as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night.

the full of life is infinite

(For Thomas, whose seat I sat in when his travel plans conflicted with his tickets to see the Butoh troupe Sankai Juku on Tuesday, and thank you dear Ashley for the invitation to sit there!)

Lotus Leaves

"Inspired by the meeting with Mr. Riho Senba, the headmaster of the "koryushooukai" school of Ikebana (the art of Japanese flower arrangement)"

~from the program notes of Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors

The Kage of Kagemi is shadow
The light of contrast, the image in the mirror of water's surface
The mi is seeing and being seen
Some say Kagemi is the ancient origin of "mirror" (kagemi)
In light, the surface that reflects and is reflected, looked into and looking back
Surface beginning in the horizontal water plane and transforming to the perpendicular face
From an ambiguous and transient state to one clearly outlined
The right hand asks, the left hand answers
Once an imaginary sur-face is defined
~Amagatsu Ushio, Sankai Juku founder, Director, Choreographer and Designer.

The day after the performance, a friend who had also been there said that a difference between modern dance and butoh is that in modern dance the choreographer and dancer will observe a tree or water, and create movement that evokes tree or water; in butoh the dancer becomes tree, or water.

The act of watching becomes a visceral act. Being lulled by the endlessly slow drift of an arm or a leg. In trance and then restless as bodies shift in complex patterns, none of it comprehensible to the mind. So much happens in the lift of the eyelids, in the shapes of the fingers carried like upturned claws or tipped in blood-red paint, in the expressionless mask broken suddenly open in hilarity or howl (which? or both?). Even the faint white clouds arising as the powdered bodies of the dancers quickly cross the stage contribute to the stunning scene. The final image felt too like waves falling, rising: the luminous leaves lowered down to the stage again (where they were at the beginning hovering just above the floor), the dancers reclining on the floor between the descended stems, then lying down as the lights dim. The tiny spotlights on hands rising above the surface of the leaves, fingers alive like birds or blossoms breaking bud.

I Wind in the Water Depths
II MANEBI -- two mirrors
III Echoing of gaze and return gaze
IV In the light by the waterside
V Infinite dialogue
VI Empty / Full
VII CHIRAL / ACHIRAL, Agitation and Sedimentation





Then, on Sunday my 16 year old son and I went to see BODIES: The Exhibition (choosing to go at probably the most crowded time possible), which he has wanted to see since it opened.

Like the intensely expressive. perfectly formed, dancers' bodies, these bodies were amazing, too -- impeccably, exquisitely dissected human cadavers (not without controversy, see here), preserved with a kind of silicone polymer that arrests decay and hardens the tissues. A number of the bodies are posed in athletic gestures, diving to dig a volleyball or poised to shoot a basketball or arm stretched overhead to serve a tennis ball. Others are simply seated or standing to display something particular such as the layers of the spinal cord, or muscle and joint layers. The most mind-boggling to me (having spent many hours during the first year of medical school in dissection lab and knowing how easy it is to do an awful job of it) were the entirely dissected-out, lifted from the rest of the body, nervous system and circulatory systems (arteries and veins). There are also displays of organs both healthy and diseased (no matter how many times I see it, it is always shocking to see lungs that are black from years of smoking, compared with normal lungs that are greyish pink with spots of black from pollution -- spots we've all got, so that "normal" and "healthy" might not be exactly the same thing...)

The choices of what to remove and what to leave were a little curious, I thought -- faces were dissected to remove most of the skin and connective tissue, but eyelids and lips and ears were left, and sometimes fingertips and genitalia, so that you did have a sense of the someone who wore this body at one time. By leaving those features, the bodies definitely looked like people, not just like generalized human specimens.

It is interesting to me that these actual viscera didn't have a visceral effect on me, fathoms away from the internal movement stirred by the living, moving butoh dancers' bodies.

Also interesting to me is that all of these bodies are Asian bodies like mine (except that all of the dancers and most of the cadaver specimens are male), so that the surface of what I was seeing was maybe a little bit more mirror-like for me than it might have been. At one point I heard a woman in the Bodies exhibition say something like, "well, he still looks like the chinaman that he was" and I turned around to stare, surprised to hear a term I haven't heard for decades, but I couldn't tell who had said it (it really was crowded there!). The warmth of the crowd and the buzz of conversation and exclamations, as we milled around the exhibits in our own self-organized choreography, generated a current of liveliness that both encompassed and contrasted with the formerly-alive. My son and I noticed and sometimes shared people's reactions of fascination, wonder, revulsion, wistfulness, reverence, and even a resistance to being amazed ("they're just dead bodies, what's the big deal?" ~overheard while standing in the line to get in)

Sankai Juku's Amagatsu-san points to: the surface that reflects and is reflected, looked into and looking back

"Kagemi" explores what happens behind mirrors, said founder and artistic director Ushio Amagatsu, speaking in Japanese through an interpreter by phone from Tokyo. The performance begins by using the surface of water as a mirror, he said. "It's real, but not real."

Seven scenes contrast life and death, ash and blood, sand and water. Knowing about death allows you to realize what kind of life you can live, Amagatsu said. "If you think about yourself, there's a beginning and an end, but the full of life is infinite." In other words, individual lives emerge and disappear, but human life is continuous.
~The Seattle Times

Not only human life, but just life, the one life, pouring through the exquisiteness of all of these individual forms; the more forms we see, the more we may see our self, looking back at us.

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.

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)