Trying to take this series a little further.  What will emerge?

Made this for Theo's school auction:

  Visible and invisible help.  Friend I admire bought it.

Made this book for Dora's school auction:

It's all about what they learned when they became Native American tribe members and had to deal with the first white trader, increasing white settlement, and then forced relocation to reservation land.  Here's Dora's page.

Accounting for this life, again

Glacier lilies, late summer.

Enamel plate print, 8/11

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don't open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-Rumi

Sitting in circle this September morning I located myself again. The first things my teachers have said upon coming back together for yoga and meditation have been reminders to open, to be aware, to remember that going inside is a connection and not a withdrawal.

But then, they speak of fall and the time for going in with fondness, and an implication of being ready to rest, where I, allowed to whisper "wait" to summer, would continue to go out. I'd feel the spring of my feet off the diving board and slide into the light liquid lake water, surfacing to breathe in rhythm with the turning of my head; I'd go onto the windy mountain trail and walk, then sit, with the 20 kinds of wildflowers I have to look up in a book when I get home; I'd grip the racquet and tie my shoelaces firmly before tracing swooping patterns in the air at the tennis court, which radiates the mid-afternoon heat. So I am listening hard to make sense of what they say. They all say it is time.

The speckled deer grazing with two fawns in our yard, which is now fenced (how do they come to be here again?) says so. She looks at me from 10 feet away, and says so, frightened and yet fearless in the truth. She says so again.

As does the crowded school hallway, although the children are in their classrooms, it's the parents who don't want to leave who mill about, trying to capture with shaking fingers the wispy tips of hair their babes have cut for the start of school, these aging youngsters who have carelessly turned 8 and 9 over the summer or will soon, this weekend perhaps, or this Christmas, which will be here tomorrow.

The kitchen at 6:45 am and the brilliant harvest moon in a purple sky at 8:45 pm say so. I haven't seen the kitchen this early of the clock all summer, although if I had it wouldn't have required the ceiling lamp turned on.

The brown grass, waiting for rain. The pumpkins turning a bright, raucous orange in the garden. The raccoons in the plum tree at midnight (chased away by steve) and again at 2 am (chased away by me). A truly fruitless chase. For us, anyway. Ha! All of them say the same thing, once I listen.

Dora says so, telling me, the first day of school, that when I heard her room door open and close at 5:30 am she was getting those little battery-lit tea candles set up to meditate. Indeed!!

So I found myself, incredibly, resoundingly, fortuitously, in circle. I listened to my teacher say "feel the vibrations on your skin, feel gratitude for this, your body." I heard it, the opening, the sense of the goodness of the work irrespective of pleasure, pain, the ease of it or the difficulty...there it is stretched out like a cat with every life accounted for, how does she do it? Each life fully lived leads effortlessly to the next, says she. Purrr.

My Book. Or, a book. By Me.

Because I hope it won't be the last.

Todos Santos

The clean fire of spaciousness. Only myself, only here, only now. Putting my face to my shins, sitting in circle, in yoga, at dinner, at the fire pit. I am feeling my way through not belonging, belonging, being a wave, being part of the ocean.

Naming

This early morning I wake with that same feeling of unnamed dread I've had before, this time with words: there is a very great grief coming. At first it seems it could be attached to keenly experiencing the sequence of "last times of doing" in this house as it is, as we discuss our plans for rebuilding. I have not lost my very great attachment to things. A house is a big thing.

Quick leap to darker, wider reasons. In fact, a very great grief is here, can be here, every day, every moment. That disappointment, harm, even death may come to my children or others whom I love. The conflict I feel between anything I could possibly do and the great workings of the world--like the death of Bin Laden, the clash of belief and world view that caused the war machine to necessitate his death, the incredible focus and energy that was poured into readying men and materials for such an end. The death, indeed perhaps the life, of any girl and boy in Pakistan, the country in which I was born. In all countries and wrinkles that don't even belong to countries over the face of the earth. All the ways we misunderstand, misconstrue, misapprehend. All the mistakes I have made and will make. All the change that has already come and gone, always. Many of the poems I've learned by heart stream through my mind, watching woods fill up with snow, margaret's goldengrove unleaving, and especially the thrush's ecstatic song shared on the bleakest winter evening.

These are sorrows constantly in and of the world, from which I cannot protect myself or any child. There is no sufficient preparation. And yet. Sometimes I do feel joy instead. And neither the joy nor sorrow are my personal domain. They flow through all like an underground river. If I grieve more in winter did not Demeter before me? When I can't remember what it felt or smelled like to lift a sleeping baby...when I feel a widening distance from my 12 year old child, when I can't remember how to create or to whom I belong, it is winter inside.

In an opening, I can change my position: it is an exchange, not a cartoon flat on the page in which I am pinned without escape by a gravity-bound weight. This is information, this is a window, an update on the world's grief, mirrored by me in microcosm, and I am alive to feel it. It's nebulous doom is true but not the end, sharpening as it does the countering love. Light.

Receiving...

Is the world speaking through us? Can it speak through the muffling distraction of material possessions, all of our talk, the news, the anguish of war, the cacophony of "entertainment?" A moment of remembering and discovery at the same time. Dissolve the edge between ourselves and that which we think is other. There is no room for trust or lack of trust.

Water skeeters feel the thought of the water, the life of the air, the wood, the water, water, water; they are not close and yet they know when another moves, when the trees move and shake their water to the ground and the whole still water quivers, like the flower petals, still, yet quivering with purity, with color, with white circling messages of love, release, opening, closing, opening. Inside the surface of the water, sky.

The mind is just another sensory organ. Without concentrating on an object, without any form of motive, influence, or compulsion, can my mind give full attention without any exclusion? Meaning is only in the mind. Openness is in everything else.

The Sacred Pause

Theo and Dora at preschool ages, 2005

I had a moment of insight and clarity after meditation class this morning. What a surprise, right? But I've been feeling so low I almost didn't go to class.

We are reading Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. She talks about our collective tendency in this culture to believe that we are deficient beings in need of fixing, which sets us up for a lifetime of trying too hard to be "perfect," and, inevitably, failing.

I know a place that gave respite from this delusional perspective. Montessori Country School, and the directors and teachers Patty, Karla, Sue, Meghan, Kasia, Liisa, Cindy, Lydia, Julie, Melissa and Emily. They created this completely rational and incredibly beautiful world within our crazy external reality that was based on a countercultural trust and belief in the true Buddha nature of our children. They did not need perfecting! They were not required to measure up to some external standard of learning or, more importantly, being.

They were treasured for their existence just as it was. They were welcomed without an assumption that they must change in order to belong. They were welcomed with the belief that wholeness and goodness and intelligence was their innate essence, and upon being shown a loving way to express that essence they would naturally fill an important place in the community. No one keeping score. No competition encouraged because every one is on his or her own path. No one had to "get ahead." There was time for it all. What a heartrending relief.

There is a tangible difference that any creature feels in being allowed to be. It's this allowance of the "sacred pause," which might happen anytime during an activity or between them, during which time one can sense the life streaming through, notice what one is experiencing, decide what one might do next. How many educational institutions allow this magic to happen? Certainly not very many traditional schools have built-in room for this kind of self-awareness.

We used to get it just being kids and having big chunks of time with nothing to do. Kids these days have precious little of that. And that is to all of us a far deeper loss than I want to consider. Nothing less than the building of a whole soul, navigating difficult moments, opening to the suffering and joy, learning to relate to the world outside, is happening during these moments. One could argue that this is the true education, because all future success depends on there being "fertile ground for wise action."

Ajahn Buddhadasa calls these interludes of natural or purposeful pausing "temporary nirvana." We touch the freedom that is possible in any moment when we are not grasping after our experience or resisting it. He writes that without such moments of pausing, " . . . living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us.

~Radical Acceptance

My children's preschool experience to me in looking back was full of so much of the spiritual feeling of safety and love and being held that I am beginning to understand from a more intellectual aspect now. How blessed we all were to receive it, even though we couldn't understand it fully.

Lotusland

Enough. These few words are enough.

If not these words, this breath.

If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life

we have refused

again and again

until now.

Until now.

~David Whyte

After fits and starts of planning, buckets of bad weather (another way of saying November and December), nearly total loss of my perspective and sense of humor, we went to Thailand.

There was sunshine.

There was time.

There were peaceful, quiet, smiling people.

There we were, together, far from home.

We made our wishes, and sent them off into the unknown.

What a gift to arrive in our own wholehearted presence.

Cry for the good, the bad, and both together.

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

Howard resented the ache in his heart. He resented equally the ache and the resentment itself. He resented his resentment because it was a sign of his own limitations of spirit and humility, no matter that he understood that such was each man's burden. He resented the ache because it was uninvited, seemed imposed, a sentence, and, despite the encouragement he gave himself each morning, it baffled him because it was there whether the day was good or bad, whether he witnessed major kindness or minor transgression, suffered sourceless grief or spontaneous joy.

-Paul Harding, Tinkers

Accurate Observation and Meticulous Grace

Today i had to ask myself, "What do I really need to do right now that would bring me greater well-being?" I answered myself by drawing.

What I've learned in Botanical Drawing class:

--Botanical Drawing is a demanding form of illustration

--I'm not sure I'm up to it

--I loved drawing this artichoke.

--I cannot trust my brain! At all!

The double spiral structure of parts of many plants (like the seeds of a sunflower) results in a complex set of intersections that is extremely difficult to freehand. Every time I used my stick to measure and rough in where the artichoke leaves would be, even the outer shape of the globe of it, I was surprised. It was in fact better to turn off my brain and let the eyes and hands work unimpeded.

What I learned today while waiting to hear the results of my dad's open-heart surgery:

--cultivating well-being while anxious is a demanding way to pass a day

--I was not sure I was up to it

--Drawing is a kind of meditation for me

--I cannot trust my brain! At all!

In meditation class we talked about a variation on the 5 basic precepts of Buddhism as guidelines to rely on when you are at a moment of choice. Intoxicants were a big part of this discussion (ahem, as a topic). Is meditation an intoxicant? Have I been distancing myself from the panic I ought to be feeling about this MAJOR surgery my dad is having? I gave in to the wild feelings I'd been holding at bay for several days and told myself many stories about possible outcomes and consequences. Did I learn anything from this. I think not.

What stays with me from our discussion is that you can't always think your way to a right choice, but you can almost always feel your way there.

Integrity is not just about following guidelines for morality. On a deeper level, it's about being true to yourself. If you are in touch with your heart and your deepest impulses, you will make choices that do not harm yourself or others. --James Baraz, Awakening Joy

I don't really have a conclusion, except thank goodness for botanical drawing.

Life is Suffering...

In meditation class this week we talked about suffering. What a relief it is to let go of denial, start at the beginning with your arm around your suffering. It's kind of a bad news/good news thing, so you have to stay with it through the process.

So why are you suffering right now? (Don't forget to ask with compassion.) We listened to a recording of a poem:

Rest in natural great peace this exhausted mind,

Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts

Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves

in the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

The poem is recited by one Sogyal Rinpoche, written by Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. The Tibetan-accented english, the gathering force of the background music, the weight of the words sinking into the open sky of mind, the poem repeatedly repeated...rest, of course we want to rest! Why can't we rest? Yes, beaten, yes neurotic, yes relentless, yes pounding. And yes, peace. We can rest. You can rest! Wanted it to keep going, wanted it to stop. It stopped.

When I looked at the cardboard cover of this little 3" cd, there are the two rinpoche (what's plural for rinpoche?? is it like fish?) laughing faces, smiling eyes, inclined toward one another. Good marketing. (I've been schooled in the devil's deals of western-style advertising). I better listen to that again, so I can have what they have, right? I say that with all sincerity. I am totally open to a revelation in whatever wrapping.

So what is my suffering right now? Summer passed. I thought often about posting but made the choice to be with the moment instead of sitting writing about it.

Now everything is still passing, again. We are here, in the school routine, my kids like the superhero you only see when he stops running, the angled light meaning the end of the gardening season--I want to be creating...what am I creating? All I'm doing is watching things pass away, and feeling sadness, feeling lost.

Diagnosis: Clearly I'm feeling a foolish attachment to the time that is forever swiftly fleeting.

Remedy: A moment in the evening to savor.

A musician (favorite song: We three kings) and a scientist (Doppler effect demonstrated in your living room), just for an hour or less on a fall evening, exploring possibilities of tone, of frequency, of being.

We ended meditation class by following our teacher in yoga nidra. I felt aware of very specific parts of me. How nice to take notice of my throat when it is healthy, and not just when it starts to hurt. How fascinating to feel a vibrating energy all up and down my shoulders, arms, fingers--almost like I could regulate involuntary bodily systems. Boy if I could the first thing I'd do would be to make my hair behave.

What if I could always remember that feeling after yoga nidra--of space when I'm compressed, of time when I'm rushed? Can I be conscious, forgiving, a witness to self, expanding? Simply and only animated earth, without expectations, only awareness. So life is suffering... and awareness can be, unexpectedly, joy. That's the good news! Hope you stayed long enough to get the good news.

Sound Living Sense

In a book I read over the summer I learned how to describe what it feels like I 've been missing for so much of my life. The book is "Cutting for Stone." In it a singular character is described: someone, though exceptionally dedicated, exotically beautiful, and especially lucky, who cannot progress in her field of nursing.

"She discovered that memorization ("by-hearting," as Matron called it) was of no help to her at the bedside, where she struggled to distinguish the trivial from the life-threatening. Oh yes, she could and did recite the names of the cranial nerves as a mantra to calm her own nerves. She could rattle off the composition of mistura carminativa...But what she couldn't do, and it annoyed her to see how effortlessly her fellow probationers could, was develop the one skill Matron said she lacked: Sound Nursing Sense."

Anyone might expect to be embarrassed by ways they acted as an adolescent, unsure of their social responses and unclear about who they were. Sporadically surfacing into and through my twenties and thirties I felt a vague and then increasingly sharp disappointment with choices I'd made. Who could be comfortable when a hollowness occupies your personal space, but how do you examine what is not there to see? And if it doesn't change as you get older, then you really feel stuck.

I had the perpetual feeling of coming up with a possible answer three days after the question was asked...so often simply having to cover a blank stare with some bluster or awkward silence, almost always only having a narrow literal interpretation. Why didn't I get it all the way other people did? Aha! Maybe because I lacked Sound Living Sense!

It might not seem like so much, what I was missing--but as Stephen Cope says, "a new freedom for well-considered and appropriate action is a very wonderful thing...we become free to claim actions that express who we really are." Who am I, really? When you don't have freedom to choose, the world really is a bewildering, blurry place.

Sound Nursing Sense is more important that knowledge, though knowledge only enhances it. Sound Nursing Sense is a quality that cannot be defined, yet is invaluable when present and noticeable when absent. To paraphrase Osler, a nurse with book knowledge but without Sound Nursing Sense is like a sailor at sea in a seaworthy vessel but without map, sextant, or compass.

EXACTLY SO. Parenting, of course, opened a whole new chapter of misguided responses, a whole new understanding of the words "hot button," a whole new ocean in which to be lost without navigation tools of any kind. Amazingly, now I'm finding a whole set of possible solutions. They knock me over! With their simplicity, purity, curiosity. Like the proverbial feather, they are weightless and quiet. Hear the bickering in the back seat and remember how lucky I am to have two healthy children. See three day's worth of dirty clothing on the floor and choose to feel grateful for the creativity in the incredible drawings they've made of a float plane, a vase of flowers, a bowl of fruit, a portrait of our family.

Why was that so hard before? Why couldn't I distinguish the trivial from the life-threatening? Not to mention life-affirming? Don't think I don't still pick a fight over a sock. Maybe the day I don't even care about that I'll know I'm truly enlightened.

Happily Ever...Now

All stories that end "happily ever after" should be amended to read "...and they lived happily IN THAT MOMENT." Leave them alone after that! Who knows what comes next? Write your own story, because NOW is the only moment in which you can be happy.

Channels

Yesterday my teacher pointed out the difference between having a list of things to do and inhabiting a place where your tasks are part of a meaningful living process. For a short time I left the home I've made to spend time in the home made by my parents, left my mom/spouse list behind for the daughter one, but I almost didn't recognize it. Then I came back and once again felt myself struggling to locate myself in my life.

After 10 days in the hospital and recovering from an infection and emergency surgery my 79 year old father was hard to recognize too. He is skirting the edges, not taking life for granted. He talked about different things, and in a different way. He talked more about people and relationships, and with more emotion than I've ever seen him show. He thanked me for coming to be with him and my mom. Missing home made me want to leave, but seeing this dramatic change demanded for me to stay and witness. I felt that one other intense time, when I had to hold on to a tiny being and then choose when to let go because it would be forever. Being a parent has forever changed the way I am a daughter.

Life does not feel solid and yet it feels so heavy at times. Words are light. There is so much in them, and in a body and mind. Books full of words are available to me. Stores full of clothing, furniture, ugly and beautiful things. Take take take then throw away. Pull in muscles with or without breathing. Travel with or without enjoying. Stay at home with or without hiding. Hide with or without caring. Care with or without voting. Leave with or without knowing you can return.

The difference appeared in the threads created in the grain of the wood between the knots in the yoga studio ceiling. Where I once saw smiles and then patience (described here), now I see channels. Some ways narrow, widen, narrow, go through. Some are closed off and become islands, gathering places where the density of growth allowed for a branch to shoot off in a new direction. We can make our patterns in the world: breathing with love, moving with acceptance, seeing with appreciation, locating with gratitude. It feels good to find this again, even though I am not beyond questioning it yet.