blessing

everything is surprising

Uh oh it's dusty around here. Darn! I have just enough time and attention available to turn the lights on for a second and toss this on the table where I'll be able to find it later:

"'To recognize that everything is surprising is the first step toward recognizing that everything is a gift,' says Steindl-Rast"

quoted by Margaret Wheatley, in an excerpt sent by Nipun Mehta in the current Thought for the Week.

 

light pouring into a promise

 Another reminder of an ongoing exploration into what the process of ripening might be (from Irish poet and Stanford professor Eavan Boland, via Panhala) ~

Ceres Looks at the Morning
(excerpt)
I wake slowly. Already
my body is a twilight: Solid. Gold.
At the edge of a larger darkness. But outside
my window
a summer day is beginning. Apple trees
appear, one by one. Light is pouring
into the promise of fruit.
Beautiful morning
look at me as a daughter would
look: with that love and that curiosity:
as to what she came from.

And what she will become.

~ Eavan Boland ~
(The Lost Land)

new moon and mercury















a few dream seeds
shine in the upturned palm of my hand.

they tremble and hum
and start to sing,
and I can glimpse the dream
of the worlds they want to be.

first, long and delicate roots unfurl,
thirsty for the dark and the cold.
then tender leaf and vast clouds form,
deserts shimmer and pray,
mountains rise and oceans pour,
from each seed
that you've dreamed alive,

and breathless, countless, stars.

the seeds go back to sleep for now.
you dream them stronger
and sweeter,
you roll them to a finer polish
with your elegant fingers
and make them ready for the light.

I tuck their memory
into a soft and very quiet place
and wait
for the old spells to break
and the new magic
to spill in.


moon and mercury photo credit

beannacht, embraced by beauty

I learned from the Panhala poetry listserv of the recent and sudden passing of Irish theologian - poet - philosopher John O'Donohue, the author of many books including Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, and Beauty: The Invisible Embrace -- Rediscovering the True Sources of Compassion, Serenity, and Hope. And of the following favorite blessing, sent out by Joe of Panhala yesterday:


[Last Friday, Barbara Knight Katz, a member of Panhala, wrote to inform me that John O'Donohue had died unexpectedly. In Barbara's words, "John's life was a blessing to all of us who knew and loved him, and to all who love his poetry and wisdom." His life was a blessing; the world needs all the divinely mad Irishmen it can get....]


"I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding."
-- John O'Donohue
Beannacht
("Blessing")
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

~ John O'Donohue ~
(Echoes of Memory)


John O'Donohue's dear friend, fellow poet and lover of Ireland David Whyte, wrote a warm and sad and loving tribute to his friend, which finishes as, it should, with a poem:
...John was a love-letter to humanity from some address in the firmament we have yet to find and locate, though we may wander many a year looking or listening for it. He has gone home to that original address and cannot be spoken with except in the quiet cradle of the imagination that he dared to visit so often himself. As a way of sending a love letter in return, I wrote this poem for him a good few years ago. I hope it can still reach him now, wherever he is to be found and that he finds it as good a representation as he did when he lived and breathed. I remember the bright, surprised and amused intelligence in his eyes when I first read it to him, sitting by his fire in Connemara. It brings him back to me even as I read it now, as I hope it does for you.

Looking Out From Clare
For John O'Donohue

There’s a great spring in you
all bud and blossom
and March laughter
I’ve always loved.

Your face framed
against the bay
and the whisper
of some arriving joke
playing at the mouth,
your lightning raid
on the eternal
melting the serious line
to absurdity.

I look around and see
the last days of winter
broken away
for all those
listening or watching,
all come to life now
with the first pale sun on their face
for many a month,
remembering how to laugh.

But most of all I love
the heft and weight
and swing of that sea
behind it all, some other tide
racing toward the shore,
or receding to the calmness
where no light or laughter
lives for long.

The way you surface
from those atmospheres
again and again,
your emergence seems to make
you a lover of horizons
but your visitation
of darkness shows.

Then away from you
I can see you only alone
on the strand
walking to the sea
on the north coast of Clare
toward the end
of an unendurable winter
taking your first swim
of the year.

The March scald
of cold ocean
even in May about to tighten
and bud you into spring.

You look across
to the mountains in Connemara
framing, only for now,
your horizon.

You look and look, and look,
beyond all looking.

David Whyte

everything reminds me of everything else

Actually, the title of this post ought to be: "everything reminds me of everything else, and then I forget what I came in here for." Or, "everything reminds me of everything else, and that's why I haven't been able to finish a blog post for such a long time."

It's like when you clean off one shelf or counter and then all of a sudden everything else looks so much worse and you end up cleaning everything, and not actually finishing the thing you were doing (writing) before.

This morning I had a middle-eastern/mediterranean kind of breakfast, with salad and olives and feta and oregano. I thought a ripe pear with some yogurt and honey would go nicely with the rest of my meal, except that we're out of both yogurt and honey. Which made me think of A Taste of Honey by Lizz Wright so I went to put that in the CD player, but I don't have it on CD, so I put a disc in my computer to burn and then (after I checked my email and tidied up my messy desk) went back in the kitchen to slice my pear. The juiciness of the pear reminded me of my lack of honey, which in turn reminded me of a post I read just recently (because I am also very behind on reading) by the chocolate lady that mentions "dark, winey, bamboo honey", which made me think of of agave syrup, because it's dark, and which I do have, so I put some in my tea (after putting the new CD in the CD player, and sweeping the floor), and it (the combination of "dark" and "honey") also reminded me of seeing a friend put honey in his coffee, which I haven't ever done. Thinking of him reminded me that we were joking the other day about a competition to see who could waste time most efficiently, and I suddenly noticed that my train of thought kept circling and looping me backwards, because going forwards feels a little bit like being perched on the the foggy brink of what might be a meandering slope but it might be a steep cliff and I am just on the verge of finding out which.

The train image reminded me of a book I want to read, called Night Train to Lisbon: A Novel, by Pascal Mercier, so I went on-line and put it in my shopping cart for later.

Ah! But what about that foggy brink? Just in the past few weeks (after months of tilling-the-ground work), the six months between January and June '08 have lit up with great potential, and probable intense challenge.

Two weeks ago, Dr. Church, the president of the university where I teach part-time, invited me to take on a role there as a "catalyst," to shine a light on the gap between "our walk" and "our talk" and to help bring together the people in the community who care about invoking and embodying the university's highest purpose (well, that's how I'm describing the role today -- I imagine the description will change as I begin to actually live in to it). Lucky for me I am going to be able to participate in an Art of Hosting and Convening Conversations that Matter training at the Whidbey Institute at the end of January. (I am so looking forward to asking Chris Corrigan the many questions that I've already started accumulating like little shiny suitcases ;-)) The training is great timing for me and so well-related to the theme of "radical hospitality" that Dr. Church shared with the university community when he first joined us two years ago. My initial agreement with the university is to do this work for six months and then in June we'll decide whether it's been good or not.

On the same day two weeks ago, the executive committee of Bet Alef's board of directors resigned in frustration and anger. Later in the week, I was invited, along with half a dozen other members, to join the remaining directors on an interim board (again, January through June). There is a great opportunity to become very clear about the essence and purpose of the organization, as well as a great challenge to understand honestly what has gone awry.

I have also been extending invitations, myself. For one, I've asked my young colleague Joshua Leahy (who is a naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist, like I am) to join my clinic, with the idea in the back of my mind (OK, maybe it's not exactly in the back) of cultivating him as a practitioner to take on some or a lot of my practice (by June, of course) should I end up working more for the university. We went to a day on "Mentoring: Tending the Interdependence Between Generations," another rich offering at the Whidbey Institute, and I'll post some of my notes from that one of these days -- depending on where my train of thought and I end up going in the next few months. Do wish me luck!

Well, I thought maybe this would be my last post of 2007 but I didn't actually finish it till tonight, and so it's my first post of 2008 instead. May this year bring us all joy and health, inspiring challenges, and deep blessing.

Which reminds me! I meant to post this video that was shared on KarmaTube some time ago, but the beginning of a new year is a perfect time to watch and hear it again.


where do I love you from?

Today is my 49th birthday! Or, as a friend puts it, the beginning of my 50th year. I like that.

I suppose that there are numerologically significant things about this, the completion of seven cycles of seven years...but instead of investigating that, I want to write down this story I heard from my friends Michelle and Joel Levey, a story that's been keeping me company all day today: Michelle and Joel described a sweet and poignant visit to their friend M., to wish her a happy birthday. M. is elderly, and has Alzheimer's disease, and is in a full-care facility. They talked with a number of the residents, many of whom told Joel and Michelle they'd like to 'go home' now.

Their friend doesn't remember who Michelle and Joel are, but she remembers that they love each other. Michelle says, "instead of 'where do I know you from?' it's like, 'where do I love you from?'" They gave M. a card with a picture of Green Tara, a Buddhist embodiment of compassion. She didn't remember who it was, but kissed the image over and over, saying 'beautiful lady!'

Michelle and Joel talked about the importance of sincerely practicing now, while we 'still have our marbles'.

I think of it like this: when our marbles have rolled away, we'll have laid down such a deep matrix of love and willing presence, we'll be able to fall back and rest on that, our home base -- we'll already and always be 'home'.

photo source

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.


i've been waiting for this moment for all my life

Like "Pearls Before Breakfast", the Washington Post's article about an experiment to see what would happen when acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell performed anonymously as a busker in the Washington, DC Metro station during commute time (tiny video clip accompanies that article, and audio of the full performance is here), this video of art unfurling as a gift in a public space has been going around:



In an email conversation with some of the Beauty Dialoguers about the Washington Post article, Thomas wrote:
The curious relationship between time and beauty. . . How much nourishment of soul we lose when space and time are so deeply contracted around us.

The article brought up a memory of my own glorious street performing career. Mid-eighties in Seattle; I was without any money for a few weeks. Every day at lunch hour I'd go to an outdoor plaza at a downtown skyscraper. It was in front of a sweet little restaurant that had windows lining the courtyard where I would juggle for an hour. I remember it being really cold. I would wear fingerless gloves and just practice the hour away. I would make five or six bucks which I'd use for breakfast the next morning. After my fingers were frozen and my hour was up (and the lunchrush was over) someone from the restaurant would come out and invite me in where I would feast of the special of the day. The staff loved me. The folks on lunchbreak barely seemed to notice.
and Kara added:
As an artist, I am so grateful that our perception of when we allot time for beauty made its way into a mainstream newspaper.
There are people who seem to set a specific time for beauty, and assume that much money has to be spent for this appreciation to be valuable. I have had much luck selling humble prints in leisurely places where people are open to absorb as much beauty as they can, like on Hawaiian beaches (selling one print in the morning ensured my food for the day, so I could surf for the rest of it!;) or festivals.
I first saw this video of singing group Naturally7 (as well as the Joshua Bell article) at Patti Digh's 37Days, as part of her National Poetry Month Poemapalooza, and she got it from Sue Pelletier, (whose post includes another interesting video) and then a few days later I saw it again as the Video of the Week from KarmaTube. They accompanied it with these recommendations: "1) Experience your daily routine as if encountering it for the first time. What's new and different about today? 2) Send a note of gratitude to Naturally7, through the group's manager Birgit Kurth 3) Give way to joy."

I am grateful that I can benefit from other people's sensitive antennae, and being alerted to what they've noticed reminds me to practice stopping, and sinking in, and sensing this and every moment full of the exuberance of the world -- which we, as part of that outpouring of creation, are so perfectly attuned to recognize, our senses matching exquisitely what there is for us to sense.
"If you really want to hear with penetration and find its associated pleasures, you must imagine you are waking up over and over again -- waking on your feet, becoming aware 'in media res.' "(in the midst of things)
~ Stephen Kuusisto, Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening
Thomas, by the way, is performing someplace warmer now -- in a few weeks he is presenting the world premiere of Luminous Edge, a show commissioned by the Seattle International Childrens Festival, tickets here.

journey of awakening

Today is the first day and tonight is the second night of Passover. Tonight we begin to count the Omer, the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot, the 49 stages between leaving the place of enslavement, and standing in the place of revelation.

Rabbi Ted's book, A Journey of Awakening: Kabbalistic Meditations on the Tree of Life (for some reason, this book is crazy expensive on Amazon -- but you can find it at many bookstores), is a guide through those 49 steps (with the encouragment to travel through them at any meaningful time during the year). He writes,
"The traditional Counting of the Omer includes the following blessing, recited in the evening (or during the ma'ariv, the evening worship service), followed by the counting itself. When you are practicing these meditations during the actual days between Passover and Shavuot, the meditations follow the blessing and the counting.

"Our blessings themselves become meditations when they flow with kavannah, with "intentionality" and "one-pointed attention." Savor the blessing. Let it speak through the Heart of your Inner Silence. Be receptive to the meanings it holds.

"The Blessing Preceding the Counting
Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheynu Melech ha-olam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu ahl s'firat ha'Omer. Blessed are You, Eternal One our God, Universal Creative Presence, Who sanctifies us with paths of holiness and gives us this path of counting the days of Omer.
The formula for Counting the 49 Days of the Omer Journey
Today is the ____ day, [comprising _____ weeks and ____ days] of the Omer."
Rabbi Ted's meditations for this time follow the flow of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with each of the seven weeks of the journey, and each of the seven days of each week, reflecting one of the lower seven of the ten universal energies (sefirot). The first week, and the first day of the week (which is tomorrow), correspond to Chesed (Lovingkindness).

There is much more explanation and guidance in the book. Here is a little bit of Rabbi Ted's suggested focus for the first day: "I step beyond the safe confines of my enslavements now. I am filled with exactly the energies I need as I begin my journey toward greater purpose and meaning. I welcome this deep Lovingkindness that naturally supports my growing."

And here is the poem-of-the-day from Panhala:

Passover

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .
and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
-Exodus 12: 7 & 13
They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.


little mirrors


My dear colleague Karen, who is the psychotherapist and resident artist in our practice, gave me this question yesterday evening, like one of the gifts--long strings of little mirrors, colored glass beads, a piece of an exotic pastry a client baked for her, pretty finds from the thrift store--that she leaves on my desk sometimes:
If someone could see into your heart, the deepest part of you, and really see what it is that you've been trying to do all this time, what is it that they would thank you for?
I am thanked for for that, I think. For being willing to look in the heart-part of people, and to appreciate and bless their particularness (which is their own genius) and for being a warm and kind and not-sticky place where people can glide and blow through and sidle up as themselves without any guilt or shame. I don't manage to do it all the time, but I am practicing.

Because of this practice, and by being both lucky and picky, I have surrounded myself with friends and relations who are good heart-seers too (which brings to mind jack/zen's Ecology of Friends post), and I do get to have reflected back to me in a way that feels just right, what it is that I think I'm doing. How healing, and therefore how on-goingly necessary, it is to be perceived as true by other people. And how hard it is sometimes to acknowledge that the loving reflection is true.

What would you be thanked for? Who is already thanking you, and are you able to breathe it all the way in? recent

the bliss of with

The Bliss Of With

I
You have come to me out of antiquities
We have loved one another for generations
We have loved one another for centuries

You teach me to trust the voice of my voices
You teach me to believe my own believings
You touch the palpability of my possibilities

Together we reflect what our mirrors conceal
Together we upgrade the sun in our meridians
We remain open night and day to transcendence

You are incompletely disguised as a mortal
You are the eternal stranger I have always known
I saw your wings this morning
I saw your wings this morning

by James Broughton (also known as Big Joy)

and who said in an interview:

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be. Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open. Wide open. Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite. Consciousness is the glory of creation. And remember Gertrude Stein’s comment, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing.”

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.

adorable presence

Prayer for Peace, by Swami Omkar of the Shanti Ashram in south India

Adorable presence,
Thou who are within and without,
above and below and all around,
Thou who art interpenetrating
every cell of my being,
Thou who art the eye of my eyes,
the ear of my ears,
the heart of my heart,
the mind of my mind,
the breath of my breath,
the life of my life,
the soul of my soul,
Bless us, dear God, to be aware of thy presence
now and here.
May we all be aware of thy presence
in the East and the West, in the North and the South.
May peace and good will abide among individuals,
communities, and nations.
This is my earnest prayer.May peace be unto all!


from God Makes the Rivers to Flow: Sacred LIterature of the World selected by Eknath Easwaran, founder of the Blue Mountain Meditation Center

unpacking the treasures

Rabbi Ted asked us on our last evening together in Israel to consider what our intangible "relics" would be -- something that we would especially treasure from our journey, other than the material things we bought or found or received. 

Some of us chose particular realizations, or insights inspired by favorite teachings. Many of us selected special sense impressions, memories, feelings, from amongst the brimming-over possiblities.

Mine is a collection of sounds. 

Pausing in the courtyard before entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, suddenly the great noon bells rang the air and the stones, and us. 

Later that day, gathered on a rooftop overlooking the four quarters of the Old City (Christian, Jewish, Arab, Armenian), we were entranced by the Muslim call to afternoon prayer flowing from several towers, each muezzin beginning and ending at his own pace, overlaid by the murmuring voices of my fellow travelers, discussing in twos and threes King David's vision of Jerusalem as a city of peace and justice. 

Yad Vashem: The soft music you hear even before you enter the Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial; and then the voices inside reading names and ages of some of the children, more than a million, who were murdered. 

Tsfat: The son of our host family in the holy city of Tsfat singing blessings like an angel, he and his friends, with their still-soprano voices, full-open-throated, completely unself-conscious.

Galili

At a nature reserve in the far north: the harsh squawking, like the sky rubbing squeakily against itself, of grey egrets rising by the dozens over swampy fields. 

Voices laughing, chanting, whispering, singing, raised in angry argument, insistence, confusion.

All calls to prayer.

journey of blessings

(thank you to Graham at Blogger support who found and deleted a single "div" code-thing that had completely changed the whole format of this blog--the basic template's been restored now, yay!)

This is one of the ways our visit to Israel feels to me: almost 30 of us passing slowly together (unexpectedly without our Rabbi for the first two days! more on that later) through a thick translucent membrane, mostly far from the face of the earth—a day and a night in the airport/ airplane/ airport/ airplane—we landed and emerged blinking into a different light, where sparks were thick in the air and deep on the ground.

Stirring up those microlights as we shuffled and danced through the streets and the hills and the desert, we breathed them in and out as we chanted and sang and laughed, ate them in our food, rinsed them through our hair. Marveled at their fierce/sweet dazzle in the eyes of the people we met. Then, now, out on the other side since yesterday afternoon, after an even thicker membrane, our own skin still glitters faintly even in the grey Seattle light.

Rabbi Ted describes the energy of blessing as "radical acceptance of the present moment," an embracing of just what is. In Jewish practice, there are special blessings, special words of appreciation, for every possible kind of event and experience, as well as an all-purpose blessing that is a big thank-you to the holy-one-of-being for the opportunity, the gift, of being alive in this moment right here. All meant to wake us us up to this amazing now.