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Shaken to the Core

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Today is the first day of the new year, 2013.

It is the Year of the Rising of the Feminine principle – a rising that is occurring in us all, in both women and men.

These past few weeks have been intense days of transformation.

On the Solstice, this past 21st of December, Terry Tempest Williams wrote,

“Today is the last day of the world”, so say the Mayans. I believe them. The world as we know it is ending. What has been peripheral will become central. What has been tolerable will be intolerable. And our own gifts held close, must now be freely given. May we meet the future’s penetrating gaze with honesty, courage, and a redefinition of love.”

These past few weeks have brought us events that I would say have focused the future’s penetrating gaze quite piercingly.

 

Shaken to the core

We’ve all been shaken to the core by the deaths of the children and their teachers in Newtown, and the death of the young woman from Delhi, so violently gang-raped. These are not singular occurrences. Intensely tragic, senseless, painful violence such as this continues to happen all over the world.

At the same time, it’s as if a part of us refuses to really look at what is happening. It can be painful to take in the details. It can feel like it will weaken us to sit down with each other, to listen, to open our hearts. It can make us feel as if we are weak, and that to ignore this makes us strong.

Right now, Canada’s Prime Minister Harper is unwilling to sit down with Chief Pence as she continues on her hunger strike. She is asking to be heard, to be listened to, and for her people and their treaties to be honored and respected. And right here in my own country, in the US, so many citizens are coming to feel that the only thing that gets our leaders’ attention is money and power.

Have these things and these ways been with us for a long time? Yes. Have they grown more intense? Seems so. Is the future’s gaze growing more penetrating? Resoundingly, Yes!

Are we paying attention? Are we listening? Are we looking? Are we stopping to feel, to really feel the depth of the grief and suffering that our actions as a species have caused?

We are witnessing the effects of our lives lived through the patriarchy, through cultural and societal institutions and structures that have hardened hearts, taught lessons of separation and domination, supported greed, and fostered fear and fundamentalism.

 

No longer tolerable

For whatever reason, and there are many, we’ve not only tolerated this, as a people we’ve continued to uphold it…until now.

Now, a way of future life is being shown to us and it is not pretty.

And, now, we are at a juncture. Something has shifted. Planets have aligned. Hearts have been opened. Perhaps, blinders have been removed. I know mine have.

We can face what we are seeing with fear, by arming ourselves, literally, or we can face it with, honesty, courage and love. 

We can sit down with those that are asking to be heard, those with wisdom, those who might have something wise to offer. We can realize there are many people suffering, people who perhaps have no way to cope with their loneliness, or people who’ve been so conditioned out of their capacity to feel that they don’t know what to do with the intensity of this world we now find ourselves in.

 

Redefinition of Love

Tempest Williams words ‘redefinition of love’ are crucial.

Love as we have known it has been fashioned by way of romanticisim. This love isn’t real love. It’s taken me a long, long time to discover this for myself. Love isn’t niceness and sweetness. Love isn’t trading something so that in exchange we will have safety and security.

What is love, truly?

What does true love do in the face of Newtown?

How does true love hold what happened in Delhi?

How might true love respond to the wars being waged?

How do we come to know this redefinition of love?

 

Jeff Foster recently shared,

“Waking up means clearly seeing beyond belief
It means fearlessly meeting life without protection
It means sinking into the deep acceptance inherent in the moment
It means letting go of all ideas of ourselves
Including the idea that we are ‘finished’ in some way.

We are never finished
and we are only ever Now.
This is the great knife edge of awakening.

It is easy to fall. I fell many times myself. I have seen many others fall. And I see them falling now.

There is great humility in realising
that we never knew a damn thing.

And that awakening was never about “me”.

 

Meeting life without protection

Some would say this is unwise. Some are advocating for more protection, more supposed security, more rigidity. And, what will this bring us? If I am the last one standing, have I won anything? What will I have saved myself from?

We are here. Somehow, we have gotten to this point. To know love, to redefine it, means none of this is about the ‘me’, the fearful part of each of us that fears connection, that feels separate, that wants to control to manage this fear. The ‘me’ wants the promise of safety, security, a promise that no amount of fire power or political maneuvering can ever bring.

We are all deeply, deeply hurt – more than we seem to understand – by what is happening in our world. I feel we now know just how intolerable what used to seem tolerable has become. The pain of what we are witnessing has become far greater than the pain of denial.

There is something greater than each of us alone. There is a deeper intelligence that runs through life itself. When we are afraid, when we are trying to figure it all out, we can’t hear this intelligence, we can’t feel it move us. But, when we stop to listen, when we sink ‘into the deep acceptance inherent in this moment’, love is here, love that is this intelligence.

 

Giving our Gifts

It is time to giving our gifts alongside our sisters and brothers. We do not have to, nor can we, do this alone. Many movements are springing up in response to these latest tragedies. People are coming together. And, whenever two or more are gathered…there is love.

Tempest Williams offers that ‘And our own gifts held close, must now be freely given.’

And my friend, Filiz Telek from Brave New World, writes,

“I invite you to consider this: Whether we give or hold back our gifts unconditionally now is a matter of life or death for future generations. If it resonates, dig deeper. Begin today.”

For this is life was never about the ‘me’. It is about life. It is not my life, or your life, it is life.

This is the feminine in real life. This is the feminine principle waking up in us all, men and women.

 

And for you, dear woman,

 

Your femaleness is a gift in itself, and loving it is a radical act.

Loving yourself as a woman, loving your femaleness is vital.

Let yourself be shaken to the core. Let your heart break open. Let life in. Take yourself into life.

We are stronger than we think. Our hearts long to feel, to give, to serve. Our bodies know how to heal.

We must do this so that we reclaim love, so that we come to know the healing powers of the female body, so that we once again become lovers of life, givers of our gifts, a species that walks the earth with gratitude and wisdom. We must do this for all the world’s children.

 

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The Dawning of a New World, An Age of Understanding

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Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

 

This past Saturday, together with over sixty other dancers for the solstice. We danced and meditated, one following the other, throughout most of the day. Late in the afternoon, when we were dancing deep in the rhythm of chaos, the teacher played “The Age of Aquarius”, from the soundtrack of Hair. As soon as I heard the opening refrain and the words,

“When the Moon enters the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, the Peace will rule the planet and Love will steer the stars”,

I was transported back to my bedroom late in the ’60s. I could feel my young hippie self sitting on my bed, listening to this same song, looking out my window as I would do when I listened to music, and dreaming of what the day would be like when these words were true, when

“Harmony and understanding,
 Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation

Aquarius, Aquarius.”

With this winter solstice, the old world ended and a new one is beginning to dawn. We’ve entered the age of aquarius. It doesn’t mean we are all automatically liberated, or that we no longer believe illusion or only have harmony and understanding.

With this new world, we now have the possibility for these things, for this type of world. Who knows how this will come about, but I sense it will if we are open to deep listening and clear seeing, if we are willing to be shown something new, and if we are willing to stop running from ourselves and each other.

Everywhere, there will be the possibility to heal old wounds, to forgive and to make things right.

Everywhere, we are seeing signs of a new way, a way of the feminine to care for our world.

We’ve been preoccupied with consuming, with entertaining ourselves, with numbing out and pretending that the world we’ve created will last forever, with never ending fiscal growth and unlimited natural resources. We’ve ignored the deeper cries for healing and the cries of the earth herself as she’s experienced the pain of being cut up, torn apart, and decimated.

The way there, the way to this new world, can only be found right here. A door has opened. Possibilities for healing will present themselves over and over until we walk into them with the willingness to not turn away from what is right here.

This story caught my heart. I didn’t know all the details or the full history, yet the story resonated deeply. It’s about Chief Spence, a leader of  Ontario’s remote Attawapiskat First Nation, and her hunger strike. In reading about the hunger strike, I discovered that Chief Spence, the leader of northern Ontario’s remote Attawapiskat First Nation, was

“thrust into the international spotlight when she declared a state of emergency over the horrific conditions on the James Bay coast. As the Red Cross touched down with emergency aid, Prime Minister Stephen Harper lashed out against the community, and accused Chief Spence of financial mismanagement. He tried to put an end to the story by deposing the Chief and Council.

It was a serious miscalculation. Chief Spence not only defied the government, but took them to Federal Court where she won a resounding victory. The mishandling of the situation was a black eye for both Minister John Duncan and the Harper government. A little bit of diplomacy and a little bit of compassion would have gone a long way to resolving the crisis before it became an international embarrassment.

As Chief Spence said at the time, “When I declared an emergency, it wasn’t my intention to cause embarrassment to Canada and I didn’t plan this type of exposure. I just wanted to help my community.”

In Huffington Post, Canada, Charlie Angus, MP – Timmins-James Bay, wrote:

“On the day she started her strike, Parliamentarians were focused on getting home for the holidays. It hardly seemed like an auspicious time to begin such a drastic action. She walked up to Parliament Hill with only a handful of supporters. There was no media present. I met her at the Eternal Flame and presented her with some presents of friendship — wool socks, a candle and a tartan blanket. I asked her to reconsider her decision. She wasn’t budging. This was a serious business and she told me she wasn’t backing down.”

Chief Spence is asking for respect, for conversation, for honoring.

This is an opportunity for healing, deep healing in the land of North America. I am wise enough to know that there are many layers to this story. This situation is not black and white. What it is is an opportunity to heal; an opportunity to listen, to discover what we don’t yet know or understand; an opportunity for no more falsehoods or derisions, for harmony and understanding, and for trust abounding.

Prime Minister Harper represents much of the world that just ended, and he represents an aspect of ourselves that has been strongly conditioned to see the world through the lens of power over, and of domination and control. He represents an aspect of ourselves that just wants someone to take care of us, to make it all go away so we don’t have to feel. He is not the bad guy, yet his actions, like all of us, have, and continue to, wreak havoc on the planet. If he doesn’t listen, just as if we don’t listen to the Chief Spence within us, we will lose this opportunity, and all the opportunity this represents, to heal ourselves, and to heal what continues to keep us separate and afraid of each other.

If we continue to see good vs. bad, black vs. white, right vs. wrong, we will miss these opportunities, with this just being one of many. They will present themselves not only within our own psyches, but out there all over our planet.

For me as an American, just taking the time to look into this story, to discover what is happening in Canada, a very close neighbor to the north, is opening me to a larger world than simply my own country. I was just a visitor to Victoria Island, the same place where Chief Spence is holding her hunger strike. It is beautiful land.

For some time, I’ve known in my heart that the egregious things that have been done over the centuries to native peoples, and to those who were brought here to this land in the slave trade, and to numerous others, by the culture that has dominated the lands of North America, must be healed. This wounding is in the land, it is in our psyches, and it is in our bodies. It is easy to say, “It’s not my fault. I didn’t do this.” Yet, our silence shuts the door to healing.

I’m sharing this with you, today, on Christmas Eve. For me, Christ is the light within us all. His way is the way of love in action. It is through the darkness, that we discover the light. It is by acknowledging the wound, that we find our way to healing. It is through the cracks that the light makes itself known.

Chief Spence is vowing “to die unless the government started showing more respect for aboriginal treaties.” She is asking for the government to sit down and talk. In the old world, this would be a sign of weakness on the part of the government. In this new age, if peace is to guide the planet, sitting down with each other is strength. “A little bit of diplomacy and a little bit of compassion goes a long way”, both within ourselves, and between each other.

This is not necessarily going to be easy, yet we can find our way. This I do know.

As Naomi Klein wrote just today,

“During this season of light and magic, something truly magical is spreading. There are round dances by the dollar stores. There are drums drowning out muzak in shopping malls. There are eagle feathers upstaging the fake Santas. The people whose land our founders stole and whose culture they tried to stamp out are rising up, hungry for justice. Canada’s roots are showing. And these roots will make us all stand stronger.”

::

This is just one story. There are countless stories offering themselves to us for healing.

This is the new age, it is an invitation for us all to embody the feminine in real life, and this is the opportunity to discover a healthy masculine within each of us, a masculine that is protective and honoring rather than dominating and controlling.

Find the opportunities that are presenting themselves to you right now. Share stories. Inspire love in action. Bring awareness to places where there is darkness. Discover the strength inherent in simply sitting down together. It is here, out of this, that this new world can flourish.

::

Attribution Image by by virtel2 | Some rights reserved

 

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For What?

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For What?

These words have been rumbling around in my headspace for a few days now. I’ve been putting words and words and more words onto the page since the Newtown tragedy. Nothing I wrote felt like it would contribute to what was already being said. Until now. Until these two words… for what?

For what is all of this work with women?

For what are we finding our power?

For what are we wanting equality?

For what?

For what?

Maybe, just maybe, it’s all for…the children.

Yes, for the children. For ALL the world’s children.

For us, women and men, to heal whatever it is between us for the sake of the children.

I know this. I know this. And, my mind searches for answers to how to do this, for answers on why Friday’s tragedy happened. There are tons of people looking for answers, and many more readily providing them.

What my heart keeps going back to is this damn system, the system we live under. The patriarchy is rotten at its core. This rotten system conditions us all, women and men, to believe things about ourselves, our gender, and the masculine and feminine, that are rotten at their core. The system denies real beauty. It denies the love that is in our hearts. A system that puts us into a hierarchy, that parcels out value and privilege, that teaches us to fear and distrust each other does all of this in order to keep the system going, to keep the system alive. And it does this through each of us. We do it. We uphold the system.

This systemic upheaval, violence, and pain feeds the broken relationship between the genders, between men and women, between the masculine and feminine, within us and outside of us. And, it is destroying lives.

We, both women and men, must turn, together, side by side, to look at the system itself, to see it for what it is. We, both men and women, must have the courage to do this.

Men are not patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system that says men have the power. And, we all uphold by playing into the system to get our needs met, when we believe we are owed something, when we believe that it is only hard work that has gotten us what we have, when we believe we are better than others, when we believe we must fear and hate others, and when we are too afraid to turn to look at what we are all capable of doing even though it is right in front of our eyes.

 

So, I say this to myself:

I must realize that my privilege is not real.

I do not deserve anything simply because of who I am.

I am not entitled to anything simply because of my gender, or the color of my skin, or my sexual preference, or my religious beliefs.

And, when I question the system it does not mean I am blaming the ‘other’ for the ills of the world.

 

I ask myself:

Can I be adult enough to see that it is in the children’s best interest (and in all of our best interest) to be in conversation with you, to find some way out of this system, to heal this fear and distrust between us all?

I hope you will ask yourself, too.

 

A new time begins tomorrow, a time described here by Evo Morales, President of Bolivia to the UN General Assembly, 67th Session, 2012:

“…according to the Mayan Calendar the 21st of December marks the end of the time and the beginning of no-time. It is the end of the Macha & the beginning of the Pacha. It is the end of selfishness & the beginning of brotherhood. It is the end of individualism & the beginning of collectivism… the 21st of December this year. The scientists know very well that this marks the end of an anthropocentric life and the beginning of a biocentric life. It is the end of hatred & the beginning of love. The end of lies & the beginning of truth. It is the end of sadness & the beginning of joy. It is the end of division & the beginning of unity.”

 

 

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Loving Your Femaleness is a Radical Act

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Loving yourself as a woman is vital. Loving your femaleness in a system and culture that is hell bent on conditioning you to hate and fear your femaleness, is truly a radical act.

Yes, hating and fearing femaleness is at the heart of misogyny, and misogyny is at the heart of patriarchy.

In his incredibly revealing book, The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson writes:

“Misogyny plays a complex role in patriarchy. It fuels men’s sense of superiority, justifies male aggression against women, and works to keep women on the defensive and in their place. Misogyny is especially powerful in encouraging women to hate their own femaleness, an example of internalized oppression. The more women internalize misogynist images and attitudes, the harder it is to challenge male privilege or patriarchy as a system. In fact,women won’t tend to see patriarchy as even problematic since the essence of self-hatred is to focus on the self as the sole cause of misery, including the self-hatred.”  (italics mine) (pg 39)

It has taken me some time to understand and see that so much of my own self-loathing doesn’t come from me. It’s learned, and it’s reinforced over and over with the hate and fear filled images and sound bites that circulate each day.

I don’t buy magazines, nor do I have a television. I haven’t for some years. And, I can’t escape these images. Just the other day, I was driving behind a San Francisco city bus, and all across the end of the bus was an advertisement that was misogynistic at its core. Who makes the decisions in San Francisco to plaster the buses with images that continue to pass along these messages that hurt us all, women and men?

Before I proceed, I want to make it clear that Johnson, throughout the book keeps coming back to the point that Patriarchy is not men, but rather the system in which we live, the system that we’ve all inherited. Just using the word patriarchy can be divisive, yet when we all, women and men, begin to see how entangled we are within its web of beliefs and admonitions, we can begin to unravel this knot that causes us all to distrust each other, and most especially ourselves.

Patriarchy is hierarchy where men (fathers) are at the top, and the rest of life, women and children included, are beneath men. Within this structure, we cannot ever see each other on equal ground because the entire thing teaches us there is no equality. By definition, a hierarchy is a system where people and things are ranked, one above another. Wonder why we still don’t have parity after decades? We can’t and we won’t as long as we believe in and buy into this system.

Coming to love our femaleness…

The journey to know one’s true self, to know the soul, is a journey into the dark places where we’ve hidden the things we don’t want to feel or know, and for women, much of what we find here is this fear and hatred of our femaleness. Much of what we discover is that we’ve been taught to hate and fear this, and that others who also have been taught the same project this fear and hatred onto us. And, of course, we discover that we project this onto each other.

But what is waiting for us on the other side of these feelings that have been stuffed into the dark, is a light that knows differently. It is a light that is both beyond this world and at the very center of this world. It is the light of truth, the light of the sacred. But the only way out is through. The only way to the light is through the body, for the body is where we’ve stored all these messages and feelings that together create our internalized oppression.

As we go deeper into the body, we discover that what we are is not even gendered, and that what we are sees the body with the softest eyes of love, the most tender caress of compassion.

Some of my most healing moments have come through clearly seeing, hearing, and feeling the painful messages of my own internalized misogyny railing against the beautiful deep-feeling and sensual aspects of my womanhood. When I began to feel the pain I’ve caused myself, something cracked open. And with each time I can do this, my heart opens wider to my own beauty and worth.

As we go into the body and feel the things we haven’t wanted to feel, more of the soul can come down into the body. More of the light of the soul can enter the cells of this physical aspect of our being. Much like the tree trunk above that is hollow through its center, we, too, begin to feel new shoots of life spring forth form the rich soil of our own creative center. As we clear out, we breath deeper. With each in-breath, the soul comes in to vitalize our cells, and for a split second, with a body full of breath, we know the joy of the soul. And it is here we can feel the love return for our femaleness.

“In your deepest center, you are the stillpoint. You are the rhythm beyond stillness, the feeling beyond compassion, the sexual energy beyond celibacy, the life force beyond death, the vibration beyond inspiration. The moving center is within you.” ~ Gabrielle Roth

And, I would add, you are the life beyond gender. What you truly are is non-gendered, and when we know this deepest center, we behold the body with love, and hold it in love. We hold both men and women in love.

It can be through the body that we come to see that the seemingly intractable nature of patriarchy is nothing more than something we’ve inherited and taught well to uphold.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We are all in this together and we have the creativity and capacity to change this. We humans can create a world so much more whole and loving than the culture in which we currently swim.

We can’t do this for each other, and we can’t even really know what each others experiences are like, but what we can do is walk this together, is hold each other with respect and compassion as we move into a new way of being in the world.

When we see the system for what it is, our relationship with it changes. We can stop participating in our own degradation and oppression.

At the end of all of this it is about relationship – with ourselves, and with each other. It is about connection and vulnerability. It is about seeing each other, and each gender, with these eyes of love.

None of us are unscathed by a system that ranks beings by worth and value, that doles out privilege as if it is inherently true. Deep at the heart of it all, and deep in our own hearts, we know that life itself does not measure, rate, and objectify.

 

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Solitude of Self

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I don’t want to convince you of anything.

I don’t want to make you understand how I see things.

I don’t want you to think I have something you don’t.

I don’t want to have to be something I am not in order for you to like me or believe in me.

I used to. When I am unconscious, I still do.

What I do want to be is in relationship with you, and to do that means we each must be who we really are.

How can relationship ever really happen when we are pretending?

 

Falsity breeds separation.

We’ve been well taught how to be something we are not. And, the invitation is always here to drop all of that and simply be what we are.

I used to think it would be lonely here in this solitude of self. I now know it is full and rich.

 

Rilke wrote this:

“And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”

 

May we be these ‘two solitudes who protect and border and greet each other’ – with ‘infinite gentleness and kindness’.

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Woman’s Tendrils of Wildness

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Somewhere, I learned to be careful rather than carefree. At some point, I learned to think rather than intuit or feel. Along the way, this girl’s wispy tendrils of wildness went way underground, deep down into the depths of the dark places where she learned to put away her very natural, very powerful, and very threatening erotic nature.

Carefulness is not a helpful strategy for a life well lived.

Thinking is good for many things (math, taxes, logic), yet when it runs the show we feel dead inside.

Living what is natural and organic to the soul is what unfolds a life that both sings and serves.

::

Woman’s erotic nature is powerful, yes; but threatening? Only to those who want to control and dominate life.  

The nature of the Feminine principle is the full cycle of creation, all the way around the circle from creation to destruction. For something new to come, something existing must die. This is threatening to those who want to pretend that they continually feed structures based on perpetual growth, never ending profits, unlimited and unsustainable consumption.

There is no such thing as perpetual growth without eventual decay. We know this in our bones and in our cells. When something grows wildly, feeding on itself to keep growing, it is cancerous and eventually leads to its own death.

We can pretend half of life’s cycle doesn’t exist, yet pretending doesn’t make it go away.

In the same way, we can pretend our erotic nature, our power as women, doesn’t exist. We can hide it away thinking we’re fooling everyone, especially ourselves, but this doesn’t make it go away.

Our erotic nature is nature. It doesn’t disappear; we just keep it down. Or, we share it in a small sliver of the way in which it is meant to be shared. Or we allow it out in acceptable ways – acceptable to those who want to control eros.

Keeping our nature down hurts us all, men and women, for no one is happy, truly happy, when life is being controlled, when our hearts our closed, and when our bodies are seen as objects rather than living, breathing creations.

But, the erotic is not simply for sexual pleasure – it is the force that animates all of life and eventually destroys it as well.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower   
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees   
Is my destroyer. ~ Dylan Thomas

Destruction eventually happens anyway. We all die. But while we are living, if we tuck our fullness and power away into the dark., the power to create, to love, to voice, to serve, we over and over again destroy our own capacity to be fully alive vibrant beings here to offer to life what we’ve been created to bring forth.

What does it really mean to serve life?

Just as the leaf doesn’t refuse to fall from the tree in autumn, so, too, must we let go of the need to hold on.

To make an offering of your life to life is to live.  Allowing what you really are to become, to flow, to die…while you are alive, is to serve.

And, by the way, it is here in the allowing that we rediscover and live these wispy tendrils of wildness, this eros and joy.

Image is Tendril: LicenseAttribution Some rights reserved by Hamed Saber

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Beauty Marks

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“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” -Thornton Wilder

Conscious of our treasures

The other day, I unexpectedly took care of my four-year old granddaughter for the day. The first thing we did after she arrived at my place was to put on our raincoats and head outside for a walk. The rain had just about finished, and as it was moving on out, left in its wake were beauty marks scattered across places in my neighborhood.

Just outside my place, the neighbor’s staircase always holds an organic display of bougainvillea blossoms that have fallen from the vine. The bright magenta color grabbed my granddaughter’s attention and her little hands just naturally reached out to pick a couple up. I noticed that after she looked at them, she tucked them into her raincoat pocket.

Just about two blocks into our walk, we came upon these gorgeous eucalyptus leaves dotted with raindrops. As I knelt down to take a picture or two, my granddaughter’s little fingers gravitated toward these really big water drops.

She began to play with one in particular and as she noticed the way it moved about but didn’t break and fall apart, she began to giggle. She found this fascinating as she kept playing with the water. When we decided to move on, again I noticed her put a few leaves into her pocket.

We headed on down to my favorite cafe to have breakfast and green juice. Once we arrived, she immediately looked around for the place she most wanted to sit. We were the only ones there, so she had her pick of the place. She picked these high stools that faced a fairly tall counter. And before we ordered, she told me she needed to put her ‘treasures’ on the counter. She carefully reached into her pocket and brought out these bits and pieces she’d discovered on our way there. She handled them with such care, almost reverence. After all, they were treasures. They were each given their own spot along the counter, laid out with what seemed to be great intentionality. Once she was done, we could go order our food.

In watching her, I was captivated by the intensity of her focus, and by the way she was in relationship with these ‘treasures’. As we ate breakfast, she kept admiring her treasures. And, I found as I ate breakfast, I kept admiring her.

Life choosing Life

As a child, I, too, had treasures. Certain things always caught my eye. Certain things caused me to feel great joy and excitement. Certain things found their way into my pockets. And, when I take a look, I notice that those same things are still my treasures. What fills the soul with wonder and delight seems to remain so through our years. Each soul is drawn to certain things and experiences that remind it of its nature, of the qualities that it loves about existence and life.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer wrote,

Beauty is the truth of this moment’s fullness, it “is what pulls us toward life. It is what calls to us when we are in despair, seduces us into opening again and again to the possibility of love and laughter. It is the physical manifestation of the Mystery- God, Spirit, the divine- that surrounds and beckons to us every day of our lives. It is life choosing life.

We can try to make ourselves love what we’ve been taught to love, but ultimately if it isn’t a true treasure of the heart, it cannot bring us alive like our true loves.

We handle our true treasures with reverence. Somehow, we cannot do otherwise without causing great sorrow and pain to the soul. We can pretend, but we always know somewhere inside that we are pretending.

Children can teach us how to be alive again.

I noticed what called to my granddaughter, what delighted her, what she chose to be treasures. Life choosing life.

You are no different. You are life choosing life. Some things call to you, things that might not call to me.

How are you with this?

Do you honor that call?

Do you choose those expressions of life that your soul is reaching for?

Or do you tell yourself there are other treasures you ‘should’ be wanting?

There is nothing even close to the feeling you feel when you honor your soul’s treasures, or when you notice the beauty marks left as an offering at your feet.

There is a ‘rightness’ that is not at all about it being right, but everything about aliveness, pure aliveness. It is what is pulling you toward life, seducing you to open again and again.

Beauty marks us, seducing us to open so it can leave the heart conscious of what it loves.

 

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Birthing isn’t logical or reasonable, nor is it necessarily practical.

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I am sharing something that I am excited about, and something vitally important to me, with someone I know.

He listens. Then, he says, “What you are saying is so abstract.” “What does this mean?” “What are the practical implications of this?” “How do we do this?”

None of his questions are wrong. He is seeing what I am saying from a practical viewpoint, a viewpoint that is about putting things into action. Yet, alongside his questions comes a feeling of frustration within me. I know this feeling well. His words take me back decades, back to when I was very young…

I am excited and want to share what I’m excited about with my parents. I try to say it in words. I try to share what I see and feel, and the complete joy of it all. And when I do, I am met with a look of tightness and almost a kind of disapproval. I can see they want me to calm down. They want me to package all of this joy into words and sentences that ‘make sense’, ways that are logical.

Then I hear these words, “That’s not logical.” and my heart drops to the ground.

The effect of these words on this little psyche is profound: the little voice dries up, the throat quivers, and the tongue becomes tied in knots. I’ve shut myself up tight and there’s no getting me to say another word. I go silent. There is a giving up that happens, a giving up because it feels, emphasis on feels, impossible to take this young one’s heart and soul’s fire and put it into logical words that adult people will get.

 

It is amazing how we can be taken back to old times so quickly, how the stories stuck in our bodies are coded with the time and place where the story unfolded.

As I sit with his questions, an ages-old fear comes up that there is someone on the other side of what I am going to share and they do not get it. They want me to put what I am saying in terms they understand, terms that are about doing, about how, about it being practical. They want me to take this abstract and make it practical. It feels like I come up against this hard wall on the other side, a very literal, very rational mind that doesn’t get it.

It’s like there is this big beautiful fullness and I fear that I don’t know how to get people to understand. Just feeling this makes me go mute and want to turn away.

I see images and visions. I see them often. They are beautiful. Beautiful images, and deeply intense feelings fill my heart. And yet, this world seems to have this logical, rational mindset that wants me to fit all of ‘this’ into a ‘how to do it in 10 easy steps’ world. And then I see it…

 

Kapow.

Bammo.

Hell yes.

The rational mind cannot fathom the irrational. It cannot understand that which is beyond the scope of what cannot be explained with reason and logic. It is like trying to fit the vastness of the heart into the tight structure of the rational mind. It cannot be done. The mind tries to know in the only terms it can grasp. It does this all the time, especially with the vastness that is the divine.

 

And, I see my own internal struggle with this same translation process. The heart is vast. It sees and feels things that cannot be proven, and cannot be put into words without losing the qualities of what we experience. I see the relationship. I see the richness on one side, then the strict structure on the other – the desire to take something multi-layered and condense it down to one.

The feminine, or yin, is multi-layered. It is feeling and knowing. It is rich and mysterious, dark and watery. It is intuitive. The masculine, or yang, relative to yin is straight and clearly defined. It is angular. It is logical. It is linear.

These are actually distinctions to try to help the rational mind understand the relationship between yin and yang…because it’s always about relationship. We can’t know one without the other. Something is only mysterious in relation to something that is clearly known and defined.

 

As I write this, I can feel, literally feel, life pulsing through my cells, images and visions in my mind’s eye, and emotions fluttering through me. None of this can be put into words without losing richness, texture, and fullness.

Words themselves are definitive. They define.

As a young one, I learned to shut down the feminine mystery, the vast symbolic realm where so many layers exist that it can only be represented through images, poetry, and symbols. I shut my own voice down. I knew the spigot well, and when things got tough, when I felt that old familiar feeling that I must turn something so profoundly beautiful into something logical and practical, I felt this familiar frustration and shut the spigot off. I became quiet. I squelched my voice. And, I gave up trying to paint when it became clear from teachers that they wanted something representational. They wanted things to look like ‘real life’ – whatever that is.

 

What is so remarkable about this moment, though, is feeling the spigot in my throat, feeling the place where I shut down because I’m feeling a sense that it’s not in terms the man will understand. I haven’t felt this so clearly before. I feel frustration at having to translate to get him to understand what I am saying and fear he will not understand.

In going back to this early experience, I see something clearly. I see old patterns, old beliefs, old messages that tell me I must make things ‘make sense’, must take the vastness that is my heart, take the multi-layered awareness that is my soul, and pare it all down to logical steps.

The struggle I feel within myself is the same struggle I see in the outer world. This finding our way to balance, a balance that brings the masculine tendencies so woven into our cultural institutions together with the under-represented feminine nature I share above, isn’t easy. What we struggle with within our own psyches, are the same things we struggle with as a collective.

 

Then I realize that perhaps that is why I am feeling such an urge to reclaim the artist in me. Sometimes things must be created with something other than words, with media that lends itself to many layers, rich textures, feeling states and mystery. So many people I know are trying to reclaim the artist within.

I have a sense many of us are seeing things in symbols and images, visions of a new way of being in the world, and perhaps even visions of a new world.

A new way is coming into being. It is being born, and many of us can see images of this new way. Many of us can feel this new way. Many of us know something in our bones that is not at all, or at least not yet, linear or logical.

Birthing isn’t logical or reasonable, nor is it necessarily practical.

 

It is time to fully re-member the artist within, to share what we see and feel, in whatever way we can. Yes, others may question it, but I also know that we all long to know the mystery, we all long to feel the depth of our humanity, and on some level perhaps we don’t want ten steps to this, or five reasons why.

Perhaps we just create and speak what we know, regardless of whether anyone listens or understands. Perhaps creation simply wants to happen, perhaps it is simply trusting the vision and putting it into form, regardless of the reception it receives.

So many women are writing, writing, and writing. So many are painting and dancing. So many are expressing their voices in ways that aren’t even close to logical and practical.

New worlds come into being through creative acts. The tender shoots of the new world come up through dark rich soil that’s been tilled and fed. Creation rises up out of the void in the belly. Creation comes into form by way of a dark, moist birth canal. It comes in contractions – messy contractions.

It is good for me to remember this when my voice feels tight, when I shy away from speaking because I don’t quite know how it will come out. Something does know what is longing to be created and voiced.

Maybe we say to each other, “Show me what you see. I am listening.”

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Do I really want that cup of coffee?

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Light up the Earth with your love and quiet joy.

This morning I’ve been writing since the early hours. Lately, over the past few weeks, I’ve been craving coffee, and giving into that craving more often than I’d like. This morning as I shifted to finished one project and got ready to move onto another, I had this very familiar urge to go out and grab a cup of coffee to bring back home.

I have to: I love coffee…especially Blue Bottle coffee served here in San Francisco. I love it, but my body does not. When I operate out of habit, I drink it. When I am conscious enough to consider what I am doing to my body, I don’t. I stop myself from doing this seemingly very average thing that so many people do because I know drinking coffee makes my body feel bad.

This isn’t to say that coffee is bad or good. There are a ton of studies that have been done on coffee – some say it is helpful, some say it is harmful. I know others who love coffee and their bodies have no issues with drinking it. I am not one of them. For whatever reason, my body doesn’t like it.

So, back to this morning, I didn’t step out for that cup. Instead, I made another cup of green tea. My body breathed a sigh of relief – a subtle sigh, for sometimes the body’s indicators are somewhat subtle. I have to be paying attention. And, I know I must pay attention to my body. In fact, just before moving onto that next project, I read this quote by Paul Hawken:

No matter what we do to nature—when we cease doing it, within a nanosecond, nature starts to regenerate. And WE are nature.

In reading these words, I realized this thing I go through, trying to become much more conscious about how I treat my body, what foods I put into it and the movement I make sure it enjoys, is no different than what I must do to become more conscious of how I mistreat the earth.

Habit and habitual responses can be hard to break, especially when we are addicted to them. We may not be addicted to the substance – I don’t drink coffee enough to have a headache when I don’t – yet, we are addicted to the habitual choices, and corresponding feelings, we get from making and acting on those choices. I love stepping outside in the early morning and walking the twenty minutes or so to get my coffee. I love the café and the people in it, and in the morning I love chatting with them. I love the routine. It’s important for me to see what I love about it, because perhaps I can separate out what I love and the things that support me and my well-being from the parts of this habit that do know support my well-being.

The same is true for the habits I have, and the corresponding choices I make, that contain actions that are ultimately harmful to the earth. Can I see where my actions are causing damage to the earth? Might there be things I do habitually, things I love and enjoy but also harm my body, others, and/or the earth, that I can untangle so that the harm to my body, and to the earth ends?

Habits sometimes come down to not wanting to feel, and sometimes it’s just about habitual stuff we do because we aren’t conscious. Can I learn to do without the plethora of choice I’ve become accustomed to? Yes, of course. Absolutely. I am not, nor have I ever been, entitled to have whatever I want. That’s a big one. Just because I ‘want’ it, does not mean it is best for the whole for me to take it…whether it’s the whole of my body or the whole of life. And, who is the ‘wanter’ anyway? It seems to me, the wanter wants to want more than it wants to get. I have to admit, sometimes just getting that cup of Blue Bottle is much better than drinking it.

For me though, the big reminder here comes from Hawkins’ wisdom that life regenerates and renews, and we are life. As soon as we stop the actions that cause damage, nature begins to renew itself and our bodies do the same. Our bodies are intricately connected to the earth. The earth feeds us, supports us, and provides for us. When we nourish our bodies, we nourish her; when we nourish her, we nourish ourselves.

Habit. Awareness. Choice. It’s in my hands. It’s in your hands. It’s in our hands.

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Retreat with Amy Kessel & me: Coming Back to Center

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I want to let you, my lovely friends, know about something that’s happening next month. I’ll be attending, and offering a session, at a beautiful retreat in Port Townsend, Washington. Led by my friend and colleague Amy Kessel, the Coming Back to Center retreat is a small group retreat for women (at the most, 12 of us) during the time of year that naturally draws us inward, even though the demands of the time can take us further and further out of ourselves.

For Amy, a retreat is:

“the palpable relief of switching to “off” for a period of time so I can access the parts of me I rarely experience while I’m  “on”, and so I can fall in love with those parts once again.  A retreat recharges my vitality, my creativity and my sense of wellbeing.  Retreating produces a shift in mindset that spreads outward to the edges of my life, bringing me back to center, where I belong.

I answer the call when I’m hungry for soul connection.  Retreating from the world enables us to tap into spirit, to truth, to our deepest source of strength and wisdom.  We all – every one of us – need this connection in order to thrive.” 

Just the images from the site speak to my body – I immediately feel everything just relax a bit as I imagine and feel the sense of peace, solitude, and stillness that will come during this weekend.

And, I will be leading a movement segment. While I could call it dance, it is not dance as many of us know it. Really, it’s an opportunity to let the body move and make itself known as the doorway into wholeness, wisdom, and the here and now. When you come to know the body as a vessel of knowing it can completely change your relationship with life itself.

Take a moment to listen to a short conversation that Amy and I had about the retreat. At the end, you’ll hear that she welcomes you to get in touch with her if you have any questions or thoughts about the retreat, even if you know you cannot come.

Of course, I’d love to meet any of you who feel this might be right for you. It’s going to be a beautiful, full and rich long weekend.

[audio:https://unabashedlyfemale.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/AmyKessel.mp3|titles=Interview with Amy Kessel]

http://www.amykessel.com/coming-back-to-center/

Amy (at) AmyKessel (.) com

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