party favors

Last year when my brother-in-law Eric turned 40, he took some friends out to dinner and also gave them each a bag containing his Top 5 Favorite things (special cashmere socks, his favorite wine, a CD of his favorite drum solos, Sugar hand lotion, and I forget the 5th thing but maybe it had to do with donuts or bagels).

That inspired me to think, if I were turning 50 today, what favorite things would I give to the friends I'm having dinner with tonight?

For a party favor bag, a sturdy, snazzy and re-usable one like the ones they give customers at Lululemon (and which they might give you without charge when you go in and ask how much they cost to buy without having made a purchase). Then I'd put inside a magazine or a book. Some flowers, and some color. And some oolong tea from Teahouse Kuan Yin (my favorites are the flowery ones like the High Mountain Jin Xuan and Wen Shan Bao Zhong, and new favorite Shan Lin Xi)

I also thought about adding some of my favorite Maple Pecan cereal, but without the soy milk and spoonful of peanut butter it is an incomplete experience so I left it out this time.

crowded inner space

Chris invited me along with a bunch of other blogger friends to post "eight things about myself that you probably didn't know". Which sounds fun except that I'm thinking about so many things right now that it has turned out to be harder than I expected. Anyway, I've thought of one thing so far (and maybe you do already know this about me, and in any case it will be just another demonstration of how crowded it is in my inner space these days) which is that I am a big slob and kind of, sort of, a pack-rat. One way that this is obvious is that I have around 4000 emails floating around in my gmail account (I'm using 19% of my available space!) -- and that it doesn't bother me.

The other way that it's obvious is that I just tidied up the space around my side of the bed about a month ago when we had company -- but this is what it looks like today.

And this whole pile is of stuff I consider that I am actively reading (or re-reading). Most of the books have pens or pencils in them as bookmarks, since the way I like to read best is by marking and drawing and cross-referencing in the margins. Then, sometimes I like to give books I've marked up to friends as gifts -- sort of like a letter from me as well as a whole book to read. But maybe that's a different post.

Time now to take one or two of these, a pencil and a glass of wine, and go sit in the hot tub.

I think next time maybe I'll write about something I would like to know about me, and don't.

****
My friend Sheri came over to sit in the hot water with me, so instead of taking books we took two glasses of wine, and some chocolate, and talked about books we love -- including Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, and Emerson: the Mind on Fire, and Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World -- and listened to the robins sing.

art of hosting, storytime

Just back from 4 days in the embrace of the deep woods surrounding the Whidbey Institute, with Ashley and Chris and Jeff (and when are you going to go public with your blog, dear Sheri?) and more long-time and newly-discovered friends, for the Art of Hosting retreat.

I've got lots of stuff to share about it and will start with this, a reflection that came out of a storytime exercise, when we allowed ourselves to open into imagining our own lives with a mythic view. Here's my story of our time together:

Once upon a time, there was a heart wrapped in light and dark and colors, walking and sleeping in the wide world.

One day, she was invited into a circle of other hearts wrapped in light and dark and colors. She decided to say no thank you to the invitation because she thought that the cost to enter was too great.

Then she learned that some of the other hearts who would be present were hearts who’d already shared with her the memory of being all One Heart. And that reminded her that she already and always had more than enough to afford the cost of joining the circle.

And she changed her “no” to “yes”.

The circle was very bright, and light and dark. With the rhythms of poem and story, laughter and silence, breathing in and breathing out, the hearts began to remember everything, and to move in patterns of curiosity and courage and love.

Lucky hearts! To be held wide by soft-eyed heart defenders, tall deep trees, bird songs, moon and rock. All the languages of the world came in, feeling the welcome to be heard.

The circle of hearts grew such deep roots and such sky-tipped branches that the space in the middle opened its arms in every direction. In such a space the hearts grew ripe – full of seed and sweetness, tender and soft and succulent. Then some of the hearts broke open and the seeds spilled out. The patterns of curiosity and courage and love were very strong, and they caught the seeds and knitted the broken hearts.

Because hearts are like fruit, but they are not fruit.

Hearts can mend, to grow full and ripe and to break open again, and again. Some hearts stay hard all their lives, and some are soft, but they all break some time.

This heart learns in the end, and in the beginning and in the middle, that no cost is too great, to live in space shot through with the jeweled net patterns of curiosity, courage and love.

whooshclang online

Thomas!

chk chk!

autumn garden

Well! I wasn't "here" very much over the summer. A lot of my word energy over the past few months went into plain old talking, and all my writing energy has been going into taking notes in meetings and study groups and seminars, email letters and online conversations, curriculum creation and work projects, and the rare teeny tiny comment here or there or elsewhere.

But now it is autumn (here is a longer piece on autumn, which also includes some beautiful quotations I gathered from various places), and it's time to sort through what's been harvested from the seasons of overflowing abundance, culling and polishing that which is worth keeping, and letting go the rest. Autumn in the Taoist 5-Phases perspective is the season of beauty, and inspiration, of grief and letting go, and appreciation of what's precious.

Today I'm moved back into the blog realm to commemorate the passing a week ago of a sweet friend and colleague, Steve Habib Rose, who was a dear friend to hundreds of people around here, and all over the world.

Habib was also a devoted and masterful networker and neighbor. In January, some of his close friends convened a gathering to celebrate and honor Habib in a unique way -- by discussing in council our experiences of Habib's gifts and talents, as a way of helping him to discern next steps in finding his own right livelihood. Around 50 people came together for a potluck meal in the community center that evening, and then sat in a big circle to hear and share experiences of Habib's work in the world. So many people related stories of Habib helping them to find work or housing or community by listening to them with with exquisite kindness and attention over tea or lunch, and then introducing them to just the right person or organization, or giving them information or a place to sleep or some other valuable thing. In one story, Habib gave a friend a camera so that the friend could document his peace-mission trip to Iraq. Habib and his beloved wife Elaine got to sit and receive all the stories and appreciation. Then we broke into smaller groups to brainstorm and collate more connections and possibilities and suggestions for Habib's job search. I think that as a job search modality it was clarifying and affirming and somewhat helpful, but certainly the greater value of the evening was the opportunity to lovingly and fully celebrate a friend who has given so generously to so many people. Many of us saw friends that night whom we hadn't realized also knew Habib, he moved in so many circles.

There are many reflections being posted at WISERearth, in the discussion group called "Habib's Garden."

Habib grew up Jewish and then converted to being a Sufi Muslim as an adult (and his wife is Buddhist). He received the perfect Sufi name from his teacher: "Habib" means "friend" in Arabic.

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.

bee people

This is from my friend and colleague, Karen Stocker:

Dear Human Cousins,

You worry we may be disappearing.

You wonder if we've died, become lost or run away.

We give thanks you wonder! We like it when you Human People wonder.

Please wonder!...about our lives, our days, our ways of flying out and all the way home on any available breeze; our yellow pollen fuzz leggings and blur of glascene wings; our ancient intimacy with blossoms; the precise hexagonal wax of our edible hives; the amazing, thick, sweet medicinal translucence of honey; our dance vibrations languages and questioning antennas, our irresistably magnetizing queen, and faithful tender attentions to each of our precious jewel-like sleeping unborn; our reason for being bees.

Please wonder!...what is flight like in a tangle of satellite signals, cell phone fequencies, exhaust and high voltage wires? What does Life feel like without Her, without Them? What meaning can be made from the taste of sugar water and 'pollen substitute'? Can we be shipped by the thousands, thousands of miles in the chaos and din of metal eighteen wheelers? How many times can we land on the open petals of ancestrally welcoming flowers to find the heart we enter sprayed or engineered hostile?

Wonder Human Cousins, could you live like this? Released, would you come back?

with Respect and Love to our Human Cousins,

Bee People

Bumblebee on bramble, originally uploaded by SouthbankSteve.

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

voices, songs

Sometimes there is too much to say, and all the ideas and words get piled up at the door -- so to free up the flow a bit, here are some as gleaming links, each deserving to be looked at close-up and in detail. (Update: and here is a much better clip of the amazing Discovery Channel program mentioned below -- this one a clip of a awesomely massive great white shark hurling its whole body out of the water to engulf a seal.)

My friend Karen described to me the other day what it felt like in the woods where she used to live, hearing the watery warbling songs of a type of thrush, each calling across the forest to the others, so that you could feel by the songs how deep the place was.

Here are some beautiful voices that are helping me feel how deep this place is:

Recovering Whole Mind: Jeff Aitken is posting rich excerpts from his doctoral dissertation on indigenous traditional knowledge and Open Space:

"My center of gravity has shifted. I feel that I am in the land, not on the land. These trees outside my window are my relatives, older relatives (chayyah, “sprouting beings”), who came here before my kind, and made it possible for my kind (m'dahber, “the talking beings”) to come forth, nurturing us with life giving breath (ruach), with fruits and nuts (pri ha'etz), with wood and leaves to build structures for warmth and comfort."

The One Voice Movement was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos this year to deliver their message: "Our destinies will no longer be ruled by extremists. We - Israelis, Palestinians and international supporters - will work ceaselessly to support our elected leaders in their efforts to end the conflict. We will stand up as OneVoice for conflict resolution and non-violent citizen action" via powerful videos of passionate voices in several languages.

Avaaz ("voice" or "song" in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Nepalese, Dari, Turkish, and Bosnian) "is a community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today. The aim of Avaaz.org is to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people shape global decisions. Avaaz.org members act for a more just and peaceful world and a globalisation with a human face." Their video, "Stop the Clash of Civilizations" is here.

The New Wilderness Project: "Through performances, workshops, and educational expeditions, New Wilderness Project is an exploration of wilderness and all of its social, cultural, artistic, and environmental implications. Our programs are designed to break down traditional barriers and create an open space where participants are encouraged to take a journey of discovery into difference, and otherness, toward the vital relationships that define social and ecological well-being."

KarmaTube, which is part of CharityFocus ("an experiment in the joy of giving"), "is a collection of short, "do something" videos coupled with simple actions that every viewer can take. Our mission is to spread the good. Thank you for your partnership in service."

Last link for today is to the stunning images in the Discovery Channel program "Planet Earth." The official website is fancy but pages seem to take a long time to load. Video clips of some of the most spectacular shots are easier to view on the Nature Conservancy site (and unlike the above video clips, I prefer to watch these ones without the voice-over track switched on!)

meeting space

We are just back from a few days visiting family in northern California, where I grew up and where my mom still lives.

If you peer very closely at this view of the Marin headlands, facing south towards San Francisco, you really can see the top of the Golden Gate bridge peeking up in the dip between the hills. One of the trailheads up to the headlands, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation area, begins just up the hill next to my elementary school (well, from the school you wind your way up the hill through a development of multi-million-dollar homes, then you get to the trail)

A special treat on Thursday was getting to meet with Jeff Aitken face to face for the first time, after a long while of being words-on-a-screen friends through the Open Space world community, and its warm loose confluence of bloggers connected in heart and soul if not in time and space.

Here we are at Caffee Puccini, one of Jeff's neighborhood favorites where we told stories and laughed and drank coffee with an opera soundtrack for a background.

Looking west from the trail, you are met by this view of the Pacific ocean.

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

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)

light one candle

Jan and Karen, two of our resident faeries, laid out a spiral (the Heart of Chartres pattern) in fragrant cedar boughs on the floor of our clinic's classroom, studded with smooth river rocks and sparkly marbles and tea-light candles. Then our friend Melissa, author of Exploring the Labyrinth: A Guide for Healing and Personal Growth, led a candlelit workshop, describing the way labyrinths were walked at times of transition and challenge, as contemplative practice, as moving prayer.

She suggested that this time between the Solstice and New Year's Day is like the subtle pause between the end of exhalation and the beginning of inhalation, a point of no-time time right before the effortless receiving of the new. We each made our way slowly or quickly to the center of the spiral, feeling as if we walking into the center of the earth, encouraged to bring questions for the new year, rather than a resolution or desire to change ourselves.

I am also still holding in my mind's hand the kavannot (intentions) that I brought with me on retreat.

Rabbi Ted encourages us to light each candle of Chanukkah for the illumination of a particular quality or intention, keeping in mind that the first candle is lit anew every night during the week-long holiday, and so on, and so we make our fondest wishes the first ones. The places and qualities I wished for the lights to illuminate: that field beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing. Faith in each soul's essential good. Willingness to listen for the call to prayer/action. The capacity for quick and whole-hearted connection. Willingness to take responsibility for what has heart and meaning (from Angeles Arrien’s Way of the Healer). A deeper remembering to bless and be blessed. To pay full attention, to slow down enough to notice the details.

One of my favorite image details is seeing several Israelis, including our friend and bus driver Ovad, turn their hand over, palm up, to cover their head during a blessing. Rabbi Ted explained that in some Jewish traditional cultures, if a man didn't have a head covering to use during a prayer, he covered his head with one hand, in which case it was important to do so in a way that wasn't just your ordinary, everyday, kind of hand-on-your-head.

Here is Ovad during Chanukkah in Tsfat, with me, and part of Helen, in the background.

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.

faint traces of a forgotten coherence

This lovely phrase, so full of wistful longing, comes from an essay by David Abram called The Eclipse of the Sensuous, and has felt just right to describe the scent of the trail I've been on all my life. (Rumi, again--hmm! can you tell this is the book that is currently next to my bed?)

A scholar loves, and lives on,

the marks of a pen. A sufi loves footprints!

He sees those and stalks his game. At first, he

sees the clues. After a time he can follow the scent.

To go guided by frangrance is a hundred times better

than following tracks. A person who is opening

to the divine is like a door to a sufi.

Seeking out those traces, peering into the space-between that at first connects the parts, until we re-member that the parts were never separate, after all.

My friend Jeff described a circle of friends coming together post-election, which sounded like my experience too: Bruce (wise explorer friend), and Dan, (court jester and convener extraordinaire), and I have gotten to hang out together a lot lately in the context of three distinct, but overlapping, conversation groups: one is focused on sustainability and business; another, with our friend David, is totally wide-ranging around the pivot topic of relationship-centered care; and the third is just called the "fellowship of the circle." It has no particular agenda, and so is the widest-ranging of all. Bruce and Dan and I are being the "bumblebees," as they're called in Open Space Technology, visiting different flowers (conversations and projects) and cross-pollinating. 

Lucky us, that a meeting of the "fellowship" was pre-scheduled for the day after the election. We came, one or a few at a time, up the garden path to Michelle and Joel's sanctuary-home near Greenlake, past the quiet pond and the bamboo and the sweet peach tree and welcoming buddha figures, in the middle of the bright-blue-sky, slightly surreal, afternoon. Sitting around a low table laid like an altar with piles of oranges and nuts and cookies, we went round the circle passing a palm-sized, heart-shaped, stone and took turns speaking, then spoke as we were moved to, and then around again with the stone at the end. In three hours we moved back and forth in and through bewilderment and grief and curiosity and fatigue and appreciation and faith. Teresa read to us the fable and showed us the beautiful pictures from Old Turtle and the Broken Truth. 

Carolyn talked about how we are all flickering between worlds, between the current popular paradigm and the ones we feel emerging, and how tiring it is, and how important it is that we can lend each other strength and go together. Joel inspired us with his story of going through the door of experience long ago into unshakeable faith in deep reality. We talked about edges and bridges and personal and collective practice, and Rumi's field: 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,/there is a field. I'll meet you there./When the soul lies down in that grass,/the world is too full to talk about./Ideas, language, even the phrase each other/doesn't make any sense.)

Michelle offered the image of "root shock"--a trauma to the roots that allows and encourages the production of blooms.

All of us felt deeply grateful for the good fortune to be able to come together, and left feeling connected at root and branch, and hopeful again.