shedding and renewal and going slow in the year of the snake

In the twenty years since I started this blog, I’ve been collecting ideas and inspirations and occurrences I thought I might write about — making little mountains of post-its, and scribbling in chalk on a big blackboard in my home office, and starting a few evernote notes. But around 2009 (that’s also the year I joined facebook…), I have looked at my piles of notes once in a while, and shuffled them around into new piles — and then mostly put them back down.

Now, in this New Year of the Yin Wood Snake, maybe there is the possibility of shedding — social media? and renewal — of blogging here on my own site? (I will learn more about the Yin Wood Snake from a webinar tomorrow with teacher and practitioner of the Taoist divinatory arts, Yu Hua Meng, author of the long fascinating forecast linked right above.)

Speaking of shedding: here is Chris Corrigan — as always, super smart, thoughtful, and clear-eyed — on why it’s high time to “leave the enclosures” of FB, of so-called X, and the rest. Chris was one of my main early blogging inspirations, but he never got distracted away from it like I did, and has been sharing what he’s learning, and other beautiful things, for 22+ years!

And speaking of renewal: I’m remembering, I think, that it wasn’t considered good blogging practice to go back and edit old entries — but if I’m even remembering that right, I don’t care anyway. So I’ve started at the beginning of here, Nov. 2004, revising and updating formatting and photos, and replacing some of the now-defunct links. It is slow going, but very satisfying and nostalgic.

And, speaking of slow: when I mentioned to Meng that I’m healing from ankle surgery (more about that another time), she pointed out that being forced off my feet, having to go slow, is well-attuned with the Qi of the Snake. So…yay?

Here is a tiny bit from that 2025 Snake forecast, which I hope you’ll take your time reading:

2025 has a great potential for reflection, ripening, maturity, and awakening…Beware of preemptively lunging into anything this year because the chances of miscalculation are very high.

…Invest more in the stillness quality of the Snake and be very wary of sudden advances and reactivity…Reluctance is a quality that will actually become accessible this year. Reluctance is how we shift out of the hot qualities of growth, expansionism and aggression.

…The transition from Dragon to Snake is an invitation to mystery.

wosonos 2008 day three

I'm full! And haven't had sufficient time to digest yet. Luckily, Chris Corrigan has been his reliably and deeply thoughtful self and has posted a lot of fresh insights already.

Usually when I participate in any Open Space, there always seem to be some time slots when there isn't anything being offered that I would prefer to the pleasure of just hanging out for a while, but this one has had too many that I didn't want to miss. Yesterday I went to sessions in all four time slots: "Our feelings (not thinking) about the future and open space" (convened by Brian Bainbridge); "The possibilities for advancing the open space technosphere" (Kaliya Hamlin); "An open space arts building, what would it be like" (Phelim McDermott); Living in open space as a family (Chris, Caitlin, Aine and Finn). 

Brendan, Brian, Larry

Today though, I didn't go to any, but flapped around a bit and then had a lovely standing-up chat with Chris talking about the characteristics of what space is like when it's deep, his ongoing exploration of the twin dynamics of love & power, and playing with the beginnings of "a pattern language of faith."

More than working on things and getting things done (though that happened, too), open space is for me primarily about being with the people who've showed up, and sometimes (often) it doesn't really matter in the end what we talk about. Participating in convened sessions, sitting on the lawn at lunch, talking while doing very little aikido/tai qi movements, going for dinner with Jeff and Raffi and new friends Heidi, Michael, Brendan, Susan and James: all the same, all about little-by-little (but very quickly, actually) finding our common place in the group heart.

pals Lisa Heft and Chris Corrigan

art of hosting, after dinner

On the last evening of the Art of Hosting practice retreat, Ashley and I went up the little hill after dinner to snuggle heart to heart in the Whidbey Institute's cedar-scented sanctuary. I mentioned to her that if there weren't enough candles in there, I had two packs of 100 tealights each (Ikea! $2.99 per pack!) in the trunk of my car. There were plenty of big candles in the sanctuary, but when we went back down to the Thomas Berry hall, Ashley had an inspired idea to make a candle sculpture with the tealights.

Dumping 200 candles out on the floor and shuffling them like mah jong tiles turned out to be an irresistable attractor, and very quickly a little circle of playmates formed, making up all kinds of games before settling on an intricate configuration of tiny flames. Chris played some lovely aires and Andy recorded a little video on his amazing small camera (Thank you, Andy!)

In it you can see Teresa glowing, and hear and see Chris fluting.

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.

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.

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.

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.