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Horror as the Foreground to Wonder

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Living, Dying, Grieving

This post isn’t full of the beautiful…at least not the surface beautiful. But stick with me…

This is my edge…

We’re all living, we’re all dying, we’re all grieving, we’re all transforming. It’s life’s nature, death’s nature.

Life as Mirror

Life is always dying and being reborn. To grasp this truth, to live in this truth is to be fully alive. To never take this life for granted. It’s beauty, it’s power, the fact that none of us know. Can we embrace this? Live it? Touch death as we live life? Touch life as we die? Be with each other in whatever stage we are in? Really be with each other…

I don’t know have any answers. None. No flowery words. No insights.

But what I want to do is share what some beautiful women are writing about grief, dying, illness, death and life… and how reading their words is impacting my heart.

Unconscious to the edge…

The fact is we are alive and we are dying. Some of us are closer to death. Some of us are dead while we live, unconscious to the edge we exist on. Who’s to say what it is to be fully alive?

Joseph Campbell wrote,

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about.”

In one of his segments with Bill Moyers, Campbell shared,

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.

There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it.

“…not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it.”

I write this post as a somewhat ‘healthy’ person, so I am seeing and writing through the eyes of someone who unconsciously, and perhaps somewhat consciously, tells herself she still has a fairly ‘long’ time to live. In reality, this is BS. I do not know how long I have to live. Even writing these words and saying them aloud to myself doesn’t even begin to cut through the normal denial that is here about death.

I do experience the absence of time, the eternity of which Campbell writes.

Where I have difficulty is in being with the ‘horrible’ nature of life, what my mind wants to fix, eliminate and avoid.

Campbell’s words “that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder” catch me.

Horror as a foreground of wonder.

My mind goes a little crazy wondering how you square this, square the horrors of this world with the mind’s concept of wonder. I notice that I write ‘wondering’ in the same sentence. To wonder…

In writing this, my mind fears it will sound as if I am romanticizing horror in some way, even wonders whether it is wise to include the word rapture and horror in the same post…

I recoil from the horrors of the world. I want to fix them. I want to save others. In reality, I don’t want to be with the horror itself. I don’t want to open to it.

As Campbell reminds me, the horror is the foreground to the real wonder of life, the awe-inducing wonder…

And yet, in those moments of life when the horrible knocked on my door, I did open the door. I opened to the horror, as much as I could. And in opening to it, I caught a glimpse of this wonder… the beauty in the darkness, the love in the horrible, the peace and silence that is always present all around this foreground of horror.

I do know Holy Is All There Is, yet my life, at least right now, is filled with days full of so much love and light. I can be content to sit in this ease, content to not open my heart to the horror…and it is here that I skim the shallow waters of life. Can I open to the rest of the wonder of life willingly, not just when it knocks, but now, of my own accord…

Krishnamurti said:

There must be no escape from it of any kind, no intellectual or explanatory justification – see the difficulty of this, for the mind is so cunning, so sharp to escape, because it does not know what to do with its violence. It is not capable of dealing with it – or it thinks it is not capable – therefore it escapes. Every form of escape, distraction, of movement away, sustains violence. If one realizes this, then the mind is confronted with the fact of `what is’ and nothing else.

The mind does not know what to do with its own violence…

This is my edge. This is the edge I recoil from…

I share words…

So I share others’ words, words that open me to this edge, words that help to open my eyes and heart…

In Pema‘s series, “Memory to Light“, she shares her experiences with grief, death, violence and life, leading up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Benita‘s new blog, The Useless Uterus or Chemo Brain Musings (she’s not yet sure what to call it) recounts her life as she moves through her days of chemo and healing.

Rhonda, a woman of 42 years who is dying from MS, is sharing her writing as she dies. Her writing is brilliant. Her words cut to the chase. And in responding, or attempting to respond by way of commenting, I found myself ‘trying’ to write to her, not quite sure how to share how her words have touched me. Perhaps it’s a mixture of things: partly that she is in the active stages of dying as I read her words, and perhaps because I don’t really know her. There’s an element of feeling like a watcher, reading her experience from this place of one who is ‘alive’ and not dying. My dear friend, Jeanne, is hosting these writings, offering a place for us to bear witness to Rhonda experiences and our own opening to how to be with…

And as we near this 10th anniversary of 9/11, Meg Worden shares her experience of 9/11, a day that was book-ended by her getting sober the day before, and conceiving her child two days after.

I do know…

What is true, what makes tears come, what causes my heart to open is the raw desire to serve life, to know the sacredness of life, to honor it…and I must admit, I don’t know how to do this… and I know there is no how.

I am this life, both the horror and the wonder. When I cut myself off from one, I can’t know the other. When I cut myself off from one, I can’t know the totality of what I am…I can’t feel this totality…

And, you?

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Holy Is All There Is

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Buttering the Sky

Slipping
On my shoes,
Boiling water,

Toasting bread,

Buttering the sky:
That should be enough contact
With God in one day
To make anyone
Crazy.

~Hafiz

::

This morning, a foggy easy Sunday morning here in the city, Rachelle Mee-Chapman asked this question of her friends:

What feels like prayer to you today?

Such a rich and provocative question…

On Sundays…

While prayer is for each day and every day, today is Sunday.

On Sundays, dance is my usual form of prayer, the dance floor my church. There is no dance on Labor Day Sunday, though, as the big Sausalito art fair takes over the town.

So, today I write. The empty page is also my church, and writing another form of prayer.

Today, I sit in this warm and inviting cafe writing, and I consider her question.

Voices

I listen to voices sprinkling words through the air, trying to communicate as best they can what wants to be said.

I hear laughter.

I hear English and French.

I hear people who are hungry and thirsty, ordering nourishment for their bodies.

I hear people hungry and thirsty for more than food, perhaps communicating with each other to feed more than their bodies…to feed their souls.

Noticing

I’ve been noticing, just this week, how much I ‘think’ my life.

When I think my life, my body feels tight, constricted and stressed.

When I ‘think’ my life, I push and strive.

When I ‘think’ my life, it is just me by myself trying to carry the heavy load that I learned to carry. The load is indicative of something I have to do, somewhere I have to get, someone I have to be. It’s all some kind of illusion my mind keeps creating.

Life as Prayer

Rachelle’s question and Hafiz’s words bring me back to reality, the reality of Life simply unfolding…Life as Prayer.

I posted Rachelle’s question on my Facebook page, and Emily Silbert answered with this:

Today it was the mundane act of grocery shopping and stopping the automatic list-driven purchasing to get myself an orchid. i stopped and looked into it and it was holy, i was holy, the whole grocery store was holy.

Holy is right here, right now.

What if holy is all there is?

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Bear Witness to Her Words, to Her Life

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What does it mean to witness?

What is it to listen, deeply, to the voice of another speak something that must be spoken?

What is it to not flinch when hearing the truth that flows from another’s heart and soul?

Many, many women are writing their stores. And, many women are reading these stories. We are bearing witness to each other, to our lives, and yes, even our deaths.

My good friend, and writing partner, Jeanne Hewell-Chambers is sharing the writing of her friend Rhonda at her blog, the Barefoot Heart.

In Jeanne’s words:

“Rhonda is now in hospice, and though she doesn’t fear death, she does dread it a bit because she still has so much she wants to say. And there’s so much we need to hear. “Jeanne, they tell me to rest,” she said in a recent phone call with a tone that’s as close to whining as I’ve ever heard come from her lips. “Fuck that,” I said. “You can rest later. Now you write. And write. And write.””

As I writer, I know how it feels when I must write. And as a writer, I know how it is to have my words witnessed, read, and considered.

::

Take a moment to read Rhonda’s stories and, as Jeanne writes, “join me as we bear witness to her words, to her life.”

As Rhonda writes, “I write only truth.”

I imagine that when it comes time to die, one’s patience for anything that is not truth grows thin.

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Pierced

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Pierced

My heart is not my own. It belongs to a far greater force than a single human being.

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Dahlias, Feminine Flesh and Love – August’s Potpourri

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Dahlias in the Window

Good Morning!

This is a little August Potpourri post.

A potpourri is both

a mixture of flowers, herbs and spices used to scent one’s space and

a more generic mixture of things.

This post is both. We’ve got flowers, spice and…not sure it’s an herb, but then we get to mix it up however we want. I’m hoping this potourri scents your space and day with love and beauty.

The flowers… Dahlias in the window of the flower shop that’s just down the street from me. I love walking by to see what the latest arrangement is. And, I love capturing an image of both inside and outside, looking through the glass both ways.

::

I’m guest posting at 3Sisters, today:

The Mystery Robed in Clothes of Sacred Feminine Flesh

Representation

Humans use representations to make up, in their minds, what the world is like, how people behave and even how they should be and what they should do. We create images in our minds of how things are, and then we compare ourselves to those images, and more often than not, see how we don’t measure up.

There are so many representations of women in our world; so many archetypes; so many images and idols. How do we come to know ourselves anew, broken free of the gazillion ways women are represented in the manifested, constructed and imagined world?

Pin-ups & Centerfolds.

Rubens & Picasso.

Cosmo & Vogue.

Ms & Jezebel.

Mary & Qwan Yin.

Eve & Pandora.

Marilyn & Sophia.

Beyonce & Brittany.

Venus & Aphrodite.

Buffy & Xena.

Kali & Durga.

…continue reading at 3Sisters…

::

I’ll close with a reminder…

Do all of what you do with the great love that you are.

Many, many blessings to you.

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Discovering Love for Self is Sacred Work

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I’ve wanted self-love and fought self-loathing for most of my life. Both have been hard to experience, but for different reasons.

Self-loathing does its devious work undercover. I can’t say that I’ve ever really known, consciously, that I loathe myself; but, I can say that I’ve struggled with finding myself ‘deserving’. The self-loathing part was undercover; what showed on the surface was a lack of confidence and being afraid to show myself to the world. It was only fairly recently that I came to feel the stuck emotion of self-loathing. It had been buried deep down for a long, long time.

Self-love has always seemed out of reach. For me, affirmations never worked. It has always been much harder for me to love myself than to love others. And it wasn’t until I began to look at the deepest and darkest places within me that the light of love within began to really shine. It was then that I realized I could never really love another until I discovered what it was to love myself.

Doing the work to find true self-love can be daunting, yet it is sacred work. It is deep, soulful and compassionate work.

When Jenn Gibson, founder of Roots of She, asked me to contribute to her new e-course called Self-love Warriors, I felt called to add whatever I could to what she was creating. One of the greatest things about Jenn’s creation is that it can be experienced by yourself or in community, or both. Learning to love oneself isn’t easy, yet it is important work. I believe Jenn has created something that is going to help many of us deepen this sacred work.

In the course, I’m the break-out guide for the fourth week, honoring the sacred feminine. Coming to know, in a deeply profound way, that the sacred is within you is one of the most beautiful ways you can honor and love yourself, other women and all of life.

I am an affiliate for the Self-love Warrior course, meaning that when someone uses the link I’ve provided here to purchase Jenn’s course, I receive a percentage. That being said, I feel it’s going to be a great course. Whether you decide to join us or not, I hope you dive in and open yourself to the deep well of love inside your own heart.

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Prayer, Longing and the Earth

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Today, a friend sent me a link to this video by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and his article, Praying for the Earth. In it, Vaughan-Lee speaks of our need and about how our need is a way into prayer. It is truly beautiful. Watch it full screen, if you can.

PRAYER – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee from Working with Oneness on Vimeo.

During my time in Hana, I could feel the land, the ocean, the air and the fire that lies at the heart of the earth. The elements are strong there.

As I slept at night, the breezes blew across my face and the smell of rain filled my dreams. In the daytime, the fragrance of Frangiapani and the sight of dolphins playing just across the street from where I was writing awakened the pain in my heart, the pain that comes when one sees so many faces of beauty and feels its immediacy.

To remember the earth, is to know her soul, to know her aliveness and our connection to her.

To wake up to our bodies and the wisdom and aliveness within them is to awaken to the same aliveness and wisdom of the earth.

As I communed with the land of Hana, I became painfully aware of how much I need the earth, of how much I long to feel connected to her, to know her, to witness her, to hold her and to be held by her. Just writing these words causes the tears of love and longing to flow.

flowers along the trail

At home here in the city, it is harder to feel the land. I find places in which to do so when I can. Yet, I feel this need to go back to Hana and I know I can’t. I must be here where I live. So I ask myself, “What is this longing?” What is this great need I feel in my body and heart to be in communion with the earth and the elements, with the rhythm and feel of Hana?”

In Hana, the earth fed me with her fresh pineapple and mango. She held me as I swam in her waters and walked in her mud, mud sprinkled with delicate beauty. I found a joy and peace, a sensuality that is born from life touching me directly, in so many simple yet profound ways. I felt an organic connection with her. Gratitude flowed up and out of me toward her. Not the kind of gratitude that is a thought, or something I should do. I didn’t do it. It just came in response to her beauty and all she gives.

Perhaps my longing for the earth, for the land is an organic recognition of the connection of woman with the earth, and an understanding that she needs us as much as we need her. To honor her is to awaken her to her beauty, to her wildness and grandeur. And perhaps, it is a way to awaken women to what we have forgotten about womanhood.

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Muddy, Wet and Messy

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Happy Beach Feet

The Big 55

My time in Hana was a gift. A big, beautiful birthday gift to me. I turned 55. That makes it sound sort of like my odometer rolled over (do you watch yours when it nears repeated digits, too?).

I guess my odometer did roll over. I’ve traveled a lot of miles in my life.

Or maybe it’s a pedometer. You know, the kind that measures your mileage on foot. That would make more sense, since I have two of those.

Muddy

On Saturday, I hiked the two miles up the side of Haleakala, the dormant volcano on Maui, to Waimoku falls, which fall from 400 ft above.

Waimoku Falls

(insert cool waterfall shot)

Saturday morning was rainy on and off. The following evening we’d had a long steady rain, so the trail was exceedingly wet…and muddy. I forgot to bring my tennis shoes, so I was wearing my thongs. As I trudged up the hill, I could feel things getting more slippery along the way. I found myself trying to stay ‘clean’. Big smile, because after the fact, I can now see how futile this was!

At the top, just prior to the falls, you have to cross two parts of the creek/river. This didn’t sound like fun in thongs, so I took them off and proceeded barefoot, making sure to put the thongs back on across the way.

On my way back down the hill, I was still trying to walk in my thongs, but it was more slippery by now because the rain had been falling for a bit. Just as I was feeling frustrated with myself and the mud, a group of people going up the hill came into view. One of them was a teenaged girl. She was barefoot. She took one look at me and said, with a smile, “Why don’t you just take them off? I did.” I looked down at her feet and, sure enough, bare feet covered in mud.

muddy feet

I thought about it for a moment, and realized I’d been not fully present to everything around me because I was afraid of slipping and gettingdirty. Here I was in this glorious place and my attention was more on walking than on my surroundings. So I took them off and walked barefoot. The mud was warm and squishy. Why had I been avoiding this?

I felt connected. I was aware. I enjoyed it so much more. I had a deeper sensual experience through my feet.

It was so freeing because by taking off my shoes, I stepped right into what I had been trying to avoid…getting dirty. Suddenly there was nothing to avoid anymore. Why was I trying so hard to avoid the mud?

A similar thing had happened back in January as I hiked in Tilden park. The paths get very muddy there in the winter and spring months, and I would try to keep my running shoes from getting muddy. One day in particular, I was trying to get through a patch of mud and slipped right into it. Once I was dirty, it didn’t matter anymore. I felt lighter, more free and enjoyed the walk much more.

Wet

I had realized the same thing on my first full day in Hana. I was swimming at Hamoa beach. My towel and bag were on the sand. It began to rain quite hard. I noticed many of the people there rushing out of the water to get their things and carry them to a dryer place under the trees. I decided to get out and attempt to do the same. We were all trying to keep our stuff dry.

When the rain subsided, we went  back to the beach, laid it all out again and went back in the water. Sure enough, back came the rain. Here I was in the water all wet, and I was worried about keeping my stuff dry. I thought about it and realized there was nothing in my stuff that couldn’t get wet. So I gave up trying. I continued to swim and it was quite an amazing experience being in the warm pouring rain while swimming in the warm ocean.

Water, water everywhere.

When I did decide to return to my bungalow, I gathered my things and put on my hat and it began to rain again. My hat was dripping wet, my cover up was dripping wet. My towel was dripping wet. I was dripping wet. Everything was wet. There was no longer anything to keep dry, and it was incredibly liberating. Nothing was getting hurt by getting wet.

In both cases, I let go and relaxed more deeply and immediately into my surroundings. I was more in tune with the sensual nature of the experience itself, and not surprisingly, with my own sensual nature. Without the worrying brain spinning fast, I was available to notice and feel what was immediately present…and the most noticeable thing was freedom, with a gentle joy following closely behind freedom’s feet.

Messy

I’ve been contemplating this in my life and wondered how often I hold back on doing things completely for fear of getting wet or muddy (either literally or metaphorically).

Where do I fear jumping in because it might get messy?

How much less awareness is available when much of my awareness is focused on my worry or fears?

I can now feel how liberating it would be to let go this way in everyday life.

Most of our fears are not really fears of immediate danger. They’re more like fears of avoiding things we’ve been conditioned to fear experiencing…like getting too muddy or getting our things wet, lost, broken, stolen, etc.

Avoiding messiness is avoiding life.

The joy I felt when I let go into what I was already immersed in was so much more real than what I had feared.

Life is in the mud, in the wet, in the full-on contact with all that we’re swimming in. When I am in avoidance, I am not living.

Yes, a good pair of pants might get stained. Or not. But,

rediscovering this place of joy is priceless.

p.s.

the mud washed off.

my pants cleaned up.

i dried out.

pedicure is still mighty fine.

I am changed by it all.

…

and, you?

I’d love to know about a time when you let it all go, when you realized it was futile to keep avoiding what you were obviously swimming in…

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Delicacy of Life

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Unspeakable Beauty

The innermost places of the heart are unspeakably beautiful.

I’ve wondered what is like to travel there, to taste the utmost delicacy of life.

This woman’s protective shield has allowed her to not feel the pain that might

deliver her to the threshold of this most honest place.

Until now.

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Unreasonable

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Frangiapani, Hamoa Beach, Hana

As I settle more deeply into my time here in Hana, I feel the softness of this land bringing out the soft, supple places in my body and heart. My soul responds to the beauty and fragrance of this Frangiapani, collected on my walk this morning. There was no clear sunrise, but rather a cloudy and warm drizzly beginning to this day.

I can feel the pull of this place, a pull that tugs at the core of my body, pulling me down into Her. When I arrived and realized I had been called here, that this place had called me, this pull made itself known.

In some ways, it’s like the pull you feel on your whole body as you stand in a wave being drawn back to the ocean. The pull of the tide is mighty.

This pull feels like it’s pulling me down into this place, whatever this ‘place’ is. I don’t know. Yet I know the feeling as it pulls not only on my body, but on my heart as well.

And, sometimes, She’s not gentle at all. As I exited the surf the other day, a wave with a punch lifted me up and tossed me down without warning. I landed on the side of my head. I felt woozy. I felt disoriented and had to sit to collect myself. I remembered a good healthy respect for nature that I had forgotten.

As I walked the beach this morning, one thing was very clear. No matter how much I try to make up a strong strand of meaning in my life, I could clearly see, there is no meaning…at least not one that I might make up. Oh, yes, I will still try to make it up, ’cause that’s what minds do.

Yet in this place of tropical bird calls and sweet Frangiapani spread out across the ground, I find when I simply be in my body and open my senses to every layer of experience that presents itself, I know no meaning.

In feeling the pull to this place, I know no meaning, but I listen and witness. I am opening. There’s a softness in this opening, a palpable tenderness. I also am aware of my fear of my own power, a power I see all around me, in the waves crashing against the shore and in the volcano on whose base I am sleeping.

The feminine is mysterious. She’s contradiction. She’s unreasonable. And, so am I.

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