moleskine

I am in the habit of carrying around a blank book and using it to write down anything I might want again later (impressions, phone numbers, thoughts, dreams, notes from lectures and meetings and conversations, phrases I like, an occasional striking shape or contour) (but not appointments--those go on the calendar; and no grocery lists--those go on a scrap of paper destined inevitably to be lost somewhere after the produce section and before the cereal aisle).

I fill it up in the order of things received, till I get to the end, and then I get a new book that looks different from the previous one. I know which part of my life, which months, are in the yellow book with the calligraphy on it, which part is in the book with the red rubbery cover imprinted with a Chinese poem, which part is in the hardcover spiral notebook with the coffee stains on the front (and back). Etc. But my current book is a Moleskine journal, a black hardcover ("moleskine" oilcloth cover) that has a built-in accordion pocket in the back, a ribbon for a bookmark, and an attached stretchy band to go around the whole thing and keep all the collected loose scraps inside. It has graph paper pages (usually I like blank pages, and definitely don't like ruled pages, but have been enjoying the geometricness of these pages underneath my far-from-geometric jottings).

One book, full of a lot of different stuff, and yesterday I took to pasting Post-It flags throughout so that I could find things more easily. There are four colors of flags, and I found that I could shimmy all the pages into one of four arbitrary categories, pretty easily, though the groupings might only make sense to me!
Red: Rabbi Ted's teachings (Torah study, a class on the Kabbalistic wisdom of the alef-bet) and my Israel journal. Also, all of the Five-Element and Traditional Chinese Medicine notes I've taken in the past few months.
Yellow: Business/work plans, projects, musings.
Green: Everything that has to do with Bastyr & naturopathic medicine. Notes for the Determinants of Health course I'm teaching next quarter, conversations and meetings about Bastyr's vision/mission reworkings, meetings about the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine textbook that I'm peripherally involved with.
Blue: The wider conversations; collective exploration; notes from when Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute came up to Seattle and talked about his "five favorite large-group collaborative practices" (out of the dozens that he's familiar with, he finds the most effective to be World Cafe, Open Space Technology, Future Search, Dynamic Facilitation, and Citizen Deliberative Council); phone numbers such as those for Open Space friends Avner, Tova, (you could have their phone numbers, too, by seeing Israel on the Open Space world map!) and Chris; and most recently a preliminary mind-map for an Open Space for Giving and Receiving and Flourishing (a sprout seeded at the first such Giving Conference held in Chicago last year), that Ashley's begun to concoct. Dream and poetry fragments get this flag, too.

I like this book, a lot! I think my next one will be just like it (but maybe I'll get the Post-It flags with the purple and pink ones next time).

and then You are

And then You are like this:

A small bird decorated
With orange patches of light
Waving your wings near my window,

Encouraging me with all of existence's love--
To dance.

And then You are like this:

A cruel word that stabs me
From the mouth of a strange costume You wear;
A guise You had too long tricked me into thinking
Could be other--than You.

And then You are...

The firmament
That spins at the end of a string in Your hand
That You offer to mine saying,
"Did you drop this--surely
This is yours."
And then You are, O then You are:

The Beloved of every creature
Revealed with such grandeur--bursting
From each cell in my body,
I kneel, I laugh,
I weep, I sing,
I sing.

Hafiz, from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

essence prayer

Like a maker of rare perfume, Rabbi Ted distills the essence of traditional Jewish prayer to:
Bless (from the Barchu, the call to blessing)
You (from the typical blessingway that begins "blessed are You")
One (from the Shema, whose first phrase is the foundational declaration/recognition of Oneness)
Love (from the V'ahavta, the continuation of the Shema that begins "and you shall love your God")

In another reflection of the Shema ("Listen, O Israel/wrestler with God: the Eternal is our God; the Eternal is One") and in the same spirit of entering the deep-to-the-bones essence prayer, Jeff Aitken offers the practice of "...kissing mezuzah* and saying listen: there is only God--following Saniel Bonder."

*mezuzah is the tool of mindfulness affixed to Jewish doorways.
Here is an essay by Rabbi Laura Geller called "Being a Mezuzah"

the treasure of seed

The Three Taoist Treasures are Qi (energy), Jing (essence) and Shen (mind/spirit).

Jing is stored in the Kidneys and belongs to Water. This is some of what I learned from Thea about Jing:

Jing is Potential. Resource. Blueprint. Seed (see Chris Corrigan's telling of the Sky Goddess creation story: in it, Seed holds the roaring power of transformation, which can require deep endurance and sacrifice, and the prospect of that often evokes terror -- all Kidney/Water attributes).

Jing is "the thing you can't change about yourself", your individual uniqueness given through family, lineage, ancestry, everything that's come before. You can fight it or embrace it, but it's innate and it unfolds over time.

The transformation to virtue is from Fear, to Wisdom. The wise person is deeply attuned to the inevitable unfolding, to what is going to unfold/emerge from the seeds planted now, deeply attuned to the song whose opening notes are just starting to be sung.

We have two kinds of Jing: Original Jing, which is passed to us by our parents and all of the ancestors before; and Postnatal Jing, which we make from Kidney Yin (sleep) and Kidney Yang (from the energy of the Sun -- in the air we breathe, and in the food we eat). One of the main ways to deplete Jing is to be other than what we're meant to be, to deny our authentic nature. We are given quite enough Jing to realize our True Nature, but it uses up more Jing to be/do something other than that. "Are you going to will for yourself what Heaven's willed for you?"

Original Jing is irreplaceable. When we kick into "willpower" (effortful striving) to live our lives, it means we've surpassed the amount of Jing we acquired from eating, breathing and sleeping for that day, and we are squandering Original Jing. "It is OK to tap your Jing for immortality" -- for that which will live beyond you: your child who needs you in the middle of the night, your life's devotion; just be aware of what you're choosing to use it for. Teaching is a Jing activity, relying as it does on the ability to understand the authentic Nature of each student.

A "Jing crisis" will put you into what Dr. Ted Kaptchuk calls "existential vertigo": it's "looking into the pit" or looking at the night sky and feeling like you're falling in, it's "losing your place in Time". People in a Jing crisis will visit their home town or people who knew them "before they got lost", wondering "who am I now?"

Jing tonics and medicines can't replace Original Jing, but they can help us attune to our "Jing vibration" so that we will be more likely to move in accordance, and not squander.

cafe botz

My schedule at work got confused the other day, and instead of being blocked out after 4:30 for a meeting, I was blocked out for the whole day. Oops! Oh, well, might as well go home, sit in the sun on the deck, and have baklava with a cup of sweet, hot, turkish "mud coffee" scented with cardamom, which my "adopted kibbutz mother" Judy gave me as a reminder of Israel.

Here is my current favorite baklava recipe, which I have smushed together and modified from the recipes in Joan Nathan's Foods of Israel Today, and Gloria Kaufer Greene's The Jewish Holiday Cookbook.The parts of the recipes (in parentheses) are my helpful tips ;-)

Filling:
mix together & set aside:
4 cups (about a pound) of shelled and finely chopped--but not totally ground up--walnuts or combo of walnuts and/or pistachios and/or almonds (if you are chopping them in a food processor, do the almonds first since they're so much harder)
1/4 cup sugar (so far I like the organic freeze-dried sugar cane juice best--it has a brown-sugar taste)
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground allspice
1/4 tsp ground cloves

Pastry:
One box (one pound) of phyllo dough from the Greek or Middle Eastern grocery or the co-op. If it's frozen, let it thaw in the refrigerator overnight the day before you need it and then let it come to room temperature the day you're going to use it.
1-1/2 sticks butter, melted. Add a tsp of warm water to the melted butter and brush some on the bottom of a jelly-roll pan (10" by 15" by 1" pan); keep the rest warm/melted till you're ready to use it.

Honey Syrup:
1-1/2 cups water
1-1/2 cups sugar (I use the freeze-dried sugar cane juice here too)
1 cinnamon stick
2 whole cloves
a few cardamom pods
Juice & finely shredded zest of one lemon
1/2 cup honey
a few drops of rose water or orange blossom water (I like to use both!)

 Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
OK, now open the box of phyllo dough. There will be 18-25 very thin, tissue-paper-like sheets in the box. They are fragile and dry out easily (and if they dry out they become very aggravating to work with) so you have to keep them covered with a damp (but not wet) cloth between lifting off each new sheet and arranging it in the pan. They should be easy and fun to separate from one another and not stick together in a clumpy mess (and if they do, they are not salvageable. Toss them and get a new box)
Lay one sheet of phyllo on the buttered pan (it will overhang). Brush it lightly all over with the melted butter + water mixture. Lay a new sheet of phyllo on top of the that, and brush with the butter mixture. Repeat till you have 5 sheets in a buttered stack. Scatter about 2/3 cup of the nut filling over the whole thing. Stack two more sheets of phyllo on top, buttering each (some recipes say that you can skip buttering every third sheet but I think, why bother pretending there's a low-fat version?). Scatter another 2/3 cup of the filling on top. Repeat, sprinkling 2/3 cup filling on every two buttered sheets, till you've used up all the filling. Then keep stacking sheets and buttering them till you've used them all up or until you get bored (if you have left-over sheets, wrap them back up in plastic and they will still be usable for another few weeks). If you run out of butter, you can use oil.
Trim the edges that are overhanging (& put them in their own little buttered pan, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake till brown and crispy)(or discard them)
Then, score the baklava by cutting with a very sharp knife halfway down to the bottom of the pan. Cut diagonals both ways to make diamond shapes, or cut triangles or squares, whatever size you prefer.
Bake it in the upper half of the preheated oven for one hour. If the top gets too brown too fast, cover it with aluminum foil.
While the baklava is baking, combine all the syrup ingredients except for the flower water in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer gently, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Add the rose and/or orange blossom water.
When the baklava is done, it should be crisp and golden. Take it out of the oven and immediately pour the syrup over the top of it, and it will make a lovely hissy crackly sound. Cut all the rest of the way through where your scored lines are to separate the pieces. Let it rest uncovered or covered just loosely with aluminum foil for several hours or overnight before eating it, with strong black coffee or earl grey tea with lemon.

(thank you to the new israelity.com for the coffee in Israel link)

Turkish coffee photo originally uploaded by Joseph Robertson

our own true size

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

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

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

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

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

 First the Hun flies,
then it figures out where it's going.

Hope does not rest on seeing the future.

Hope must precede vision.

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

"Our deepest pathology is our only hope of redemption."

Your Presence

Last weekend during Shabbat School, Rav Olivier, Bet Alef's wonderful French-American rabbinic intern, told this story about his favorite prayer (and mine!):
One Shabbat, everyone was in the synagogue waiting for the rabbi to begin the morning service. They waited and waited and waited, and finally decided to go ahead without him. Hours later, at the end of the service, the rabbi appeared. All the people rushed up to him, concerned! What had happened, where had he been?

That morning he'd gotten up and had begun to say the morning prayer as usual: Modeh* ani l'fanecha (I am thankful in Your Presence), melech chai v'kayyam, shehechezarta bi nishmati, b'chemlah. Rabah emunatecha (sublime power of life and eternity, who has restored my soul, with mercy. great is your faithfulness). But as he sang "modeh ani l'fanecha" he fell in so deeply he couldn't go on--only modeh ani l'fanecha -- I am so grateful to be in Your Presence -- over and over for hours.
*girls and women say "modah"
Lately modah ani l'fanecha has become the little song I sing in my mind as I do my work with people, especially during those times when we're quiet together--when I'm checking the pulses, or slipping needles into acupuncture points, or holding the warming moxa over the parts of the body-mind that are sore or sad or stressed.

pilgrimage & finger knitting

Last weekend we 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 we 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.

snow on mountains, bowen island
Originally uploaded by Christy Lee-Engel.

season of hope

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

 "If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye, which every young and ardent, sees the possible."--Kierkegaard
“…although it is not visible to you, the apple tree is already developing its fruit buds deep within its tissue the summer prior to the year in which the bloom becomes visible. Starting in about mid-June, the fruit bud tissue starts its development and differentiation. The process is completed by late March, shortly before bloom.” –The BackYard Orchardist

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

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

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

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

mycelium & marbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Perhaps, after all, we shouldn't take our lives so personally, shouldn't think of them as the monologue of busy and insistent and separate selves. Perhaps we are made up of landscapes and events and memories and genetics; of the touch of those we hold dear, our oldest fears, the art that moves us, and those sorrows on the other side of the world that make us weep at the breakfast table. The astronomer Carl Sagan used to say that if you really want to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to start with the Big Bang."
Like waves on the ocean, like mushrooms popping out of the ground, at the same time particular and none other than the whole.

integral medicine, breakfast, and tzimtzum

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

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

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

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

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

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

water and air

I have a bunch o' embryonic blog posts still in draft form, consisting of titles with a few lines, or maybe just a word or two, trying to grasp the threads of a thought or image as it sails by. Little weightless kernels, dots of concentrated color, waiting for...? a little heat, a little light, a bit of moisture? So far, they look like this: "shabbat in the city of air", "between that which is holy and that which is not yet holy", "morning in the pardes", "sarvodaya, awakening on behalf of all", "white flame, seeds and fruit", and "the gordian knot and the leap of faith"

Currently I feel perfectly suspended between winter (which is now, according to the dark and the chill) and spring (which is soon, ready to fling itself open the moment the time is right, according to the fat buds on the rhododendron and the red poking-out stems of paeonia). 



Between pared-down-to-the-essence deeply quiet hibernation, and the quickening vibration of the swelling seed coat about to split, the sprout longing to sproing and unfurl. I'm reminded of the Hanged One in the Tarot, about which Vicki Noble writes: 
"Think of a spider suspended by its own silken substance, yielding in trust to gravity. You are suspended in time, right now...It definitely means "stop action" and "allow" to happen."
I think that this time offers the possibility of learning to surrender a little more, to become more patient and open-handed.

The other thing that occurs to me is how useful it can be during these times of feeling "up in the air" to spend some part of it immersed comfortably in warm water...

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 embraces, 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 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)

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

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 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 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. (For a thoughtful and characteristically heartful post by Ashley on kavannot, see this from last summer.) 

 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. 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 Tzfat, with me, and part of Helen, in the background.

"all the planet is vibrating"

Astrologer friend Eric Francis quotes Enzo Boschi, head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute, who also said that the early morning earthquake yesterday off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, was so massive that it even disturbed the earth's rotation.
Sitting in the face, in the holy presence, of such devastation and suffering--geographically far, but nothing's so far that it doesn't shake us all--I have the same feeling as I did two weeks ago standing overwhelmed in the Hall of the Children at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in the hills of Jerusalem: there is no prayer big enough to hold it all, I have no response big enough. And yet, at the same time, even not-enough is essential. The International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent Societies is gratefully accepting donations here, which can be earmarked for earthquake/tidal wave disaster relief.

World Changing has a lot more information, including links to many, many organizations mobilizing disaster relief and reconstruction efforts, including Tsunami Help and ReliefWeb

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 can 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 killed. 
The son of our host family in the holy city of Tsfat singing blessings like an angel, full-open-throated, completely unself-conscious.
Tsfat
The harsh squawking, like the sky rubbing squeakily against itself, of grey egrets rising by the dozens over the swampy fields of the far north. 

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

All calls to prayer.
Tsfat

Galili

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 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.