sacred advertisements and dionysian manifestos

A couple of random selections from my current favorite book, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings, by rock-star-astrologer "aspiring master of curiosity, sacred janitor and macho feminist" Rob Brezsny and the Beauty and Truth Laboratory:
"HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower."
"Dear Gorgeous Genius

While you and I are together here:
Your favorite phrase is flux gusto
The colors of your soul are sable vermilion, ivory and jade
Your magic talisman is a thousand-year-old Joshua tree whose flowers blossom
just one night each year and can only be pollinated by the yucca moth
Your holiest pain comes from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way
you'd like the world around you to change
Your soil of destiny is peat moss
Your mythic symbol is a treasure chest dislodged from its hiding place
in the earth by a flood
Your lucky number is 13 to the 13th power
Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics
A clutch of frog eggs from an unpolluted river is your auspicious hair-care product
The anonymous celebrity with whom you have most in common is the jester
who followed Buddha around and kept him loose
The question that perks you up when your routine becomes too rote is this:
What possesses the bar-tailed godwit to migrate annually from Alaska to New Zealand
by hitching rides on gale-force winds?"
Lots more, of all kinds, here.

global voices

From one of the originators of the very rich, illuminating, mind & heart-expanding Global Voices, which posts blog entries and photos drawn from dozens and dozens of blogs all over the world in order to "diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make those voices heard":
...I come out of my day's worth of research with a sense that Global Voices is working, in a deep, profound way. Two of our major goals when we started the project this past December: create a space for global conversation, and have an influence on the existing blogosphere, ensuring that blogs aren't just about US politics and technology. That blogs from 35+ countries and almost a dozen languages are pointing to us suggests that we're starting to create a global space; that Blogpulse thinks we're one of 200 of the most cited blogs suggests that we're starting to have that influence on the blogosphere. It's not unreasonable to image that we might be one of the hundred most cited blogs by the end of 2005, a goal that would probably have a truly transformative effect on the blogosphere as a whole.

Thanks to everyone who's linked to, read or been influenced by the links Global Voices has posted over the past six months. Please keep tuning in. We really do intend to change the world of blogging to make it more global, more interconnected and more diverse... and so far, we're doing it. --Ethan Zuckerman

sufi rock stars

In the latest issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine there is a short article about a hugely popular Indian-Pakistani-American rock band, Junoon, and one of their guitarists, Salman Ahmad. Ahmad was "the rock star" in a BBC documentary program called The Rock Star and The Mullahs, filmed in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, where public music has been banned and musicians harassed. A Sufi Muslim, Ahmad's question to the radically fundamentalist clerics: "Where in Islam does it say that music is forbidden?"

Here you can listen to some of Junoon's songs (I especially like "Taara Jala" and "Ghoom Taana") and hear why they were called "the U2 of Asia" by the NY Times.

knots of silk

This time of the summer is always teeny tiny spider time in my yard. Sometimes we find them in the house and toss them back outside.

Teeny spiders make me think of this breathtaking passage from David Abrams' The Spell of the Sensuous, as he describes being in a lushly mossy little cave, refuge from a tropical torrential downpour in a valley in Bali:

"Soon I was looking into a solid curtain of water, thin in some places, where the canyon's image flickered unsteadily, and thickly rushing in others. My senses were all but overcome by the wild beauty of the cascade and by the roar of sound, my body trembling inwardly at the weird sense of being sealed into my hiding place.

And then, in the midst of all this tumult, I noticed a small, delicate activity. Just in front of me, and only an inch or two to my side of the torrent, a spider was climbing a thin thread stretched across the mouth of the cave. As I watched, it anchored another thread to the top of the opening, then slipped back along the first thread and joined the two at a point about midway between the roof and the floor. I lost sight of the spider then, and for a while it seemed that it had vanished, thread and all, until my focus rediscovered it...Whenever I lost the correct focus, I waited to catch sight of the spinning arachnid, and then let its dancing form gradually draw each new knot of silk as it moved, weaving my gaze into the ever-deepening pattern.

And then, abruptly, my vision snagged on a strange incongruity: another thread slanted across the web, neither radiating nor spiraling from the central juncture, violating the symmetry. As I followed it with my eyes, pondering its purpose in the overall pattern, I began to realize that it was on a different plane from the rest of the web, for the web slipped out of focus whenever this new line became clearer. I soon saw that it led to its own center, about twelve inches to the right of the first, another nexus of forces from which several threads stretched to the floor and ceiling. And then I saw that there was a different spider spinning this web...The two spiders spun independently of each other, but to my eyes they wove a single intersecting pattern. This widening of my gaze soon disclosed yet another spider spiraling in the cave's mouth, and suddenly I realized that there were many overlapping webs coming into being, radiating out at different rhythms from myriad centers poised--some higher, some lower, some minutely closer to my eyes and some farther--between the stone above and the stone below.

I sat stunned and mesmerized before this ever-complexifying expanse of living patterns upon patterns..."

This is the image that came to my mind also when Dan Leahy and I chatted recently about all the professional + personal networks of conversation and practice and collaboration and collective exploration that we know about or are involved with, and how we might imagine them visually or map them. Of the several models that we have played with--geodesic dome with glowing nodes, living cells in organic or organismic relationship, a fluid territorial map where any two or more spots can be become instantly contiguous, and others--I am drawn to Abrams' powerfully-related experience of the spider world, to see it as a metaphor for all of the many kinds of world-soul restoration work that's being done everywhere I look. I love the sense of incredibly complex beauty and order that arose from the independent spinning of each individual spider, overlapping (and intersecting?), each web originating from its own center and radiating outwards. I enjoy my own anthropomorphic interpretation, as an aspiring web-spinner, that we can relax into trust, and rely on each other to come from our own centers to create an inevitably perfect and "ever-complexifying expanse of living patterns..."

good birthday poem

Another from the wonderful Panhala listserv, poetry matched with photos of nature and a music clip:
There is No Going Back

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over the grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1993, I

angel jazz

My friend Brad took me to Dimitriou's Jazz Alley to hear the genius liquid-angel-jazz guitar playing of Stanley Jordan. Stanley uses an old and still relatively unusual technique called "touch" or "tapping," his hands on the neck of the guitar the whole time, touching the guitar strings with his fingers flat, so that his dynamics are as agile and intricate as they could be on a keyboard. His beautiful and lush arrangements incorporated separate melodic lines for right and left hands, making music that sounded like it was being created by two, or three, virtuoso guitarists. Along with his own jazz compositions, he also played pieces by Mozart, Debussy, Beethoven, as well as amazing renditions of O Holy Night, and Hava Nagila! His CD "Ragas", which includes musicians on sitar and tablas, playing Indian classical music--improvised within a form, just as jazz is--is gorgeous.

basil for breakfast

Chris W replied to my email this morning, saying,

"i have cooking metaphors coming to me. i think i'll write a poem:

isn't every cook
a culture of her own,
how she knows mushrooms,
how she knows salt,

the lifelong gathering
of living ingredients, each one
its own astounding self, each one
a culture of its own, yet
in her hands
an ingredient

(ingredient is not a beautiful word
until i decide to make it so
by imagining a sprig of seven basil leaves
in your hands)

the other day i met someone
who cooked with many of my ingredients
in a completely different way
because her living had taught her stories
about what comes before and what comes after
the time of cooking, stories
i had not lived or seen or been taught before

and i let myself be a dry sponge
in the curious clear waters of her ways
and, delight of delights,
she experienced me the same way:
(wow, yes, look what you do, look how:
a way that no one ever taught you, your own
accumulation of ways, so precise to yourself)
so we're bartering mentoring time
hanging out in one another's kitchens
not a moment too soon, as we are called
to do our thing at the big ceremonial feast
whose wild glow is visible in the night sky
over the next small ridge"

kingdoms of resonance

Homeopathic medicines are infinitesimal and potentized dilutions made from just about any substance medicine-makers can get their hands on (including plant, mineral, animal, microbial materials) and some that they can't (moonlight, X-ray radiation). Just as with any medicine, there are commonalities amongst remedies that are derived from related substances. Categories such as the Plant, Mineral and Animal Kingdom remedies have some broadly distinguishing traits and patterns--and theory is that the patterns and themes of a particular substance are reflected in the physical symptoms, personality characteristics, the world-view, even the dreams, of a person who would benefit from the medicine made from that substance. I don't know what my homeopath friends would prescribe for me these days--in the past I've benefitted from two remedies that derive from sea creatures...but one is categorized as a mineral, because it's the shell that's potentized, and the other is categorized as an animal remedy. You can read some interesting notes about remedies made from sea animals here.

Bombay master homeopath and physician Rajan Sankaran has said that in this time of great extinction, the essence of the animals and plants that are disappearing is showing up more and more in human beings.

Another expression of the way humans and the "more-than-human" world reflect one another: one of the enchanting aspects of the world created by Philip Pullman in his series of books, called His Dark Materials, is that every human being there is born with a "daemon", an aspect of their soul who appears in animal form, inseparable from the person, their visible essence. (Another enchanting aspect is the two male angels who adore each other and have been together for eons.) The daemon plays with changing from animal to animal all through childhood, and then at puberty settles into the right stable form. Pullman says (in the interview linked to above) that a person can't choose what their daemon is; and for us here, who can't (usually!) see our own, we have to ask others who know us to tell us what ours is.

And then, there is our own internal resonance. A homeopath might match me to one aspect of this world, and in Pullman's world I might cleave to another aspect; in my own imagination, I feel most at home in the kingdom of the plants. And I'm pretty sure that if I were a plant, I would be a vine. One of those vines that climbs up things with curly tendrils towards the sun, and sprawls into all of the available space and slides between and into other plants, and flings out new growth when it's whacked back to the roots. Oh, and has flowers that attract hummingbirds!

The vines I have in my small yard: red honeysuckle, clematis (5 kinds), wisteria, two kiwis (a fuzzy male and smooth female), passionflower, jasmine, cardinal creeper (and usually I have annual morning glories and cup-and-saucers and sweet peas, but I didn't get around to planting them this year), and unfortunately there is also perennial morning glory (otherwise known as bindweed). And in the house I have two hoya carnosas (the photo at the top is the silhouette of one of my hoyas, when it was in my office).

Here is my friend and relation, the passionflower (Passiflora caerulea) out on the deck behind our house:

world o' books

Andy sent me this fun thing to do, a consideration of books in my life. Because the set of questions is being sent on from blog-person to blog-person, it's kind of like a chain letter, or a contagious virus; or like a game of tag. (I guess "technically" it's called a "meme" which is "an idea or behavior that spreads through a culture" and which seems to be related to "mimic" and to the French word for "same" which is "meme" with a little accent over the first "e" which I don't know how to type in Blogger-text.)

I think it is also an opportunity for rediscovery and praise, as well as a very good way to avoid tackling the piles of work spread all over the dining room table (I've even managed to accumulate a pile of stuff to do under my laptop).

How many books I've owned
I would be surprised if anyone I know who is over the age of 6 knows how many books they own. Just lots, and lots. Lots. Even after selling big boxfuls and giving piles away. I do love and appreciate the Public Library system, but I can't write in those books. Once I have a relationship with the ideas or fall in love with any of the phrases or passages, I want to have my own copy so that I can write back, in the margins.

Reading style
During spare moments, and at night. My husband and sons and I take our books with us when we go to restaurants, and if we're not talking, then we're reading. I always have a magazine or journal or article to read in my briefcase, and always take a book (sometimes just a blank book) when I'm carrying a backpack or purse. I also often read in the hottub. So, my books not only have handwriting and drawing in them, they often have water spots too (I don't do those things to books I borrowed, though, honest!)

The last book I bought
Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It by Thomas de Zengotita, on the recommendation of Toyce at the Integral Education Center. I haven't started it yet--it's in the "next" pile.

The last book I read
Hmm. I guess that means the last book I actually finished. There are many many books on the floor or on my desk or in one of my bags that I have read part of and then put down, either for a while, or for pretty much ever.

So, the last book that I read all the way through (and didn't even skip the boring parts because there weren't any) is called Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness, by Marc Ian Barasch. He explores the nature of human (and animal) compassion and altruism from the perspectives of neuroscience, spiritual teachings and practice, psychology, evolutionary theory, and through interviews with people who have forgiven unthinkably horrible crimes, and with people who have gone way out of their way for total strangers, wondering: what is the essence of compassion? Can it be learned? Is kindness counter-evolutionary, or the ultimate evolutionary force?

It's written in a personal style that in itself is elevating. Here's a bit:
"Something within us already conduces toward heartfulness, and its nature is to grow with the merest effort. Aldous Huxley, asked on his deathbed to sum up what he had learned in his eventful life, said, "It's embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder." And though I set out to write a more hardheaded, less softhearted (and perhaps les softheaded) book, I can onloy conclude the same.

People living in arid countries have found a simple method of collecting water. They spread out sheets of fabric at night and siphon off the dew that condenses on them each morning. Like moisture, love really is in the air. It will settle upon the thinnest reed, scintillate on a bare tip of grass, free for the taking. It is an elixir that can heal, drop by drop, all the sorrow and separation in the world. It changes pretty much everything."
Five books that mean a lot to me
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
Coming to Life: Traveling the Spiritual Path in Everyday Life, by Polly Berrien Berends
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, by David Abram
The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India, by Rodger Kamenetz
His Dark Materials (a trilogy that includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass), by Philip Pullman

I love the language and the ideas and the perspectives of all of these books so much, and don't think I can describe then well enough to even try.

(And these are the books I'm reading now--a new category that wasn't in the original recipe...)
Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy: Modern Herbal Medicine by Kerry Bone and Simon Mills
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Future Through Conversations that Matter, by Juanita Brown with David Isaacs
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, by Karen Armstrong
Consciousness & Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine, edited by Marilyn Schlitz and Tina Amorok with Marc S. Micozzi

Invite some more to play
I'll see if Open Space friends Ashley, Chris, Jeff and Michael, and new-to-blogging, long-time-friend, Brad, are interested--particularly, of course, I'd like to know what their "books that mean a lot to me" are, so that I can read them,too.

the lord god bird

Chris wrote quite a while ago (I have a lot to catch up on) about the re-discovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (who's been dubbed "Elvis") in Arkansas under the title "Never give up on anyone".

Because of his post, I noticed and read the little article in our local Audubon Society newsletter that pertained, called "If It Doesn't Want to Be Found, How Do We find It? And How Many More are Out There?". Dr. James Van Remsen, curator of ornithology at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, writes the following about trying to verify a sighting in the Pearl River swamp in Lousiana in 1999 (the last verified U.S. sighting, before the one this past April, was in the 1940's!):
"We conducted that search with the cocky attitude that, regardless of how wary, Ivory-billed Woodpeckers would make enough noise (calls, double-raps, or bark-scaling) that our black-belt field commandos would find them just by getting within earshot. That attitude comes from plenty of experience with other rare and hard-to-find birds. Hard to see, yes, but nonetheless always revealing themselves by sounds to those who tune in. However, if Arkansas Elvis is any indication, we could have missed dozens of birds in the Pearl. Elvis is not only incredibly wary, seldom allowing more than a glimpse before flying off not to be relocated, but astoundingly quiet. If our birds behave like this, finding them wil require the stealth skills of a turkey hunter...It is tempting and perhaps reasonable to speculate that the last Ivory-billeds, under intense hunting pressure from humans, survived only because of the behavioral changes required to regard humans as deadly. If ducks and turkeys can develop such behaviors seasonally, longer-lived and probably smarter big woodpeckers could get this way fast."

convergence

Wow. I began this post many weeks ago, and haven't had time to revisit it till now. Too much converging to fill my days to overflowing.

(Which brings to mind a movie I was meaning to see, called Short Cut to Nirvana --do watch the trailer!--about the mammoth Kumbh Mela festival, a convergence of 70 million people at the place where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers converge, every 12 years. Well, and, that's just it: big convergence, not quite enough time to get to everything I've been meaning to get to, and every single thought and conversation reminding me of something or someone interesting and/or important.)

Alternately, I have felt for the past few months as if I am carrying around, or wearing, a big heap of threads and fuzzy strings. They're multicolored, bright and dark, a little tangled where their unraveled edges catch, and weaving themselves into strange patterns and textures when I'm not watching. Lately I've gotten to toss some of them into the center of various circles of comrades, colleagues & friends, and then I always find myself coming home with even more than I started with!

Some of the streams/threads:
Business: dissolving one and creating another one, all at the same time; the dozens (maybe hundreds!) of practical and logistical details (because we're also moving our practice location), as well as all the karmic and energetic ties we leave, and the new ones we generate.

Teaching, learning: & their relationship to hosting and inviting, to opening space for passion and responsibility in the midst of a very linear, accreditation-shaped curriculum; the notion of integral education; the "teacher formation" work originated by Parker Palmer.

Opening space for giving, receiving, flourishing (and teaching and learning...) (link to be invented soon) and the Open Space Practices that Michael & Chris are languaging & polishing

Torah: learning to read Hebrew, along with the mystical interpretations of each letter, experiencing more and more Rabbi Ted's intersection of mystical (the path of perceiving underlying radical inclusiveness) and prophetic (the call to social justice mandated by that perception) Judaism and the community that has grown, and continues to grow, around that intersection.

Medicine: working with the area of the "determinants of health"--those conditions that allow for optimal health to be realized (or not)-- because it's only partially useful to alleviate/palliate someone's anxiety or exhaustion or insomnia or neck pain when it springs from their reaction to the current state of our culture and of the world (and sometimes it's actually suppressive to do that.) Even with "natural" methods rather than anti-depressants. How, instead, to vitalize that reaction to support participation in healing of society & culture, and ecological healing?

And these are some of the books I'm reading, which somehow also seem to be converging (though I have no idea how, yet...)
Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search of the Soul of Kindness by Marc Ian Barasch
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Towards an Undivided Life by Parker Palmer
Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
and re-reading: The Four-Fold Way by Angeles Arrien

OK. Time to fill the hummingbird feeder and deadhead the rosebush. Or, take a nap!

leaves as pages in a secret text

Here is another Edward Hirsch poem, courtesy of the wonderful poetry subscription list Panhala, which I learned about thanks to Andy.

Poet, essayist, literary critic, English professor, Edward Hirsch is currently president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and is the author of two of my favorite books, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, and The Demon and The Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration
I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage--silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of mysteries.

(From Lay Back the Darkness)


uncertainty

We couldn't tell if it was a fire in the hills
Or the hills themselves on fire, smoky yet
Incandescent, too far away to comprehend.
And all this time we were traveling toward
Something vaguely burning in the distance --
A shadow on the horizon, a fault line --
A blue and cloudy peak which never seemed
To recede or get closer as we approached.
And that was all we knew about it
As we stood by the window in a waning light
Or touched and moved away from each other
And turned back to our books. But it remained
Even so, like the thought of a coal fading
On the upper left-hand side of our chests,
A destination that we bore within ourselves.
And there were those -- were they the lucky ones? --
Who were unaware of rushing toward it.
And the blaze awaited them, too.

Edward Hirsch
from Earthly Measures (Knopf, 1994)

that which connects

I sat in the hot tub in our rainy backyard the other morning, with my computer wrapped in two towels against the drizzle, and listened to an a conversation between philosopher Ken Wilber of the Integral Institute and Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi (grandfather of the neo-Hassidic Jewish Renewal movement). You can download here it from Integral Naked if you become a subscriber (the first month of subscription is free!).

At one point Wilber says: "Buber talked about the I-Thou relationship--and the Big Mystery is that hyphen."