Monthly Archives: December 2011

Uncategorized — 4 Comments
30
Dec 11

Travel to the Center of the Universe in 2012

Happy New Year 2012!  I know this demarcation between one year and the next is quite arbitrary. But cultural conditioning or not, it feels natural at this time of year to think of the past year—or many years past—and make resolutions.  Don’t the holidays bring a poignant sense of time passing, of little ones becoming big ones, of loved ones coming and going?

And let’s not forget that impermanence can mean liberation from illness or some other oppression.  War end, Arab springs happen, graduations and other long-cherished hopes and dreams come true.  I always find myself thinking of notable global and personal events.  We’ll all be deluged with year-end wrap-ups whether we like it or not, so I want to offer a couple of private citizen year-end reflections.  Since I was a child I’ve longed to travel the world.  I think behind that wish there was a deeper wish to draw closer to the flame of life, to be at the center of life.  Certainly, this was behind my longing to move to New York City after college.   And here I am, many years after moving to New York, still with this longing.  This longing to—oh, what to call it, embrace reality–is always with me. I’m very aware at year’s end if I’ve been anywhere that made an impression on me.  This past year I saw the spires of Oxford, England, and the high desert in and around Joshua Tree, in California.  I was thinking about this, and feeling that familiar yearning to see more, when a very different kind of realization dawned on me.

When I am more centered, more concentrated, whether I am chopping vegetables or meditating, in a sense I have traveled light years from my usual state.  I am at the center of the universe.  “The laws governing the universe are here and act in us,” wrote Jeanne de Salzmann.  The great statesman, writer, and spiritual leader Vaclev Havel, who died this year wrote something similar: Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy. “

There is a movement towards entropy and a movement towards structure and unity, towards the center—not just “out there” in the cosmos but in us and in every moment.  As I was chopping vegetables today, I realized that every moment—every flash—in which my body, heart, and thoughts are together, collected, I am at the center of the universe in a sense.  I realized that the biggest trip I took this year—and the biggest trip I will ever take—are those flashes of centering, becoming collected, concentrated, open to what is.  The attention that allows this to happen is no small thing that lets a person thread a needle.  It is a means of cosmic transport.

The trick—and this may be the most important thing I’ve learned this year or any year—is that you can’t force your way onto this particular magic bus.  The only way on is to quiet down, relax, let go. So my New Year’s resolutions have to do with changing my behavior on the smallest scale, on changing my attitudes and postures so I can be open.

“The attitude we take, our inner and outer posture, is at the same time our aim and our way,” wrote Jeanne de Salzmann At every single moment, we slip into some conditioned posture, and this outer posture triggers a corresponding inner attitude.  We are enclosed in a subjective world of our own making.  We just can’t help it.  The organism is designed that way.   Except there flashes—sitting upright and at ease in meditation posture, perhaps, or relaxed and concentrated on a task, so that the thoughts, the feelings, and the body are one.  In those moments there can be a burst of freedom from the self-enclosure of our attitudes, a movement of opening to what is.    We all know those happy moments of coming together.  We could be chopping at a board in Provence or India as well in New York.

And those moments come in challenging times also. There are moments when we are forced to see how limited we are trapped by our conditioning, when we can see how barren and repetitive our thought is, going round and round, coming up with no knowledge that can save us. At such moments we can feel that all we are is just rags and ashes.  We can see how this mechanical conditioning, this grinding poverty of being, actually comes between us and the world as it is—and that moment can bring a new kind of hope.
How can we break out of our bubbles of conditioning and be open to that attention that travels to the center of the universe?   This much I know:  It cannot be forced.  It comes sometimes when I let go, when I relax and become quiet and still.  So this year, instead of pining to see India, I make a resolution to find more moments to be still, and allow the world to flow in.

P.S. Another small and happy development for my loyal readers: the email subscription bar is back!

Awakening / Awareness / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Waking Up — 14 Comments
24
Dec 11

Merry Christmas 2011

Merry Christmas!  So much to do and here I am again, sitting on my sofa, sipping coffee and watching the sky grow light.  Already it seems brighter to me.  This is my very flawed and subjective view, of course.  Yet it does seem brighter.  This body and heart came to me from the most ancient times, and it knows that a great shift has taken place: the sun is returning.

In a little while, my day will kick into high gear: my daughter will be baking and I will be cooking and then we are going with friends to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.  We will be making our own updated version of Christmas. And I am vowing to be especially mindful today, since yesterday’s last-minute shopping trip with the family triggered a brief but painful storm of raging ultra-sensitivity my daughter labels “crack baby.”  This is a kind of code that evolved from an observation made by a friend of mine who is a pediatrician.  As a young intern in a big New York City hospital, Amy noted that some babies seemed to invite holding and attention while others were so overwrought—and so in need of holding and care and attention– they pushed it away.  My friend observed something that most of us have noted in different ways:  love and peace and a spirit of generosity radiates and attracts more of the same.  Sadly, so does crabbiness and acting out or shutting down to protect our pain.

And yet, as Scrooge shows us, it is never too late to change.  As someone commented in reply to my last post, Scrooge had help seeing the impact of his deeds and his own death thanks to three apparitions and old Marley’s ghost.  He had really terrifying and convincing supernatural help:  “At this point the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook his chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon….”

Most of us don’t have such help.  Yet we still can catch ourselves at moments.  There is usually no clanking of chains and frightful sights, but we can feel ourselves contracting, slipping into the myriad inner and outer attitudes we have picked up over the years to protect ourselves…our own rusty old chains.  At moments—and I mean nanoseconds sometimes– we can stop before a reaction really takes over and allow the heart and mind to release and open.  In such a moment, we can rediscover in our own hearts and minds the spirit of this ancient holy time, which even before Christian times it was consecrated by giving gifts.  We can give the ultimate gift of our attention, acceptance, and love.  In any given moment, it is possible to embrace with our attention everything that is happening–the person or people before us, including ourselves, even when we are acting like crack babies.

We may not have the three Christmas ghosts, but we do have what the Buddhist wise men from the East call the three poisons of greed, aversion, and delusion.  Serously.  What if we received these spirits the way Scrooge received his three Christmas apparitions?  What if instead of trying to push these visitors away without various reactions, we treated them like messengers, really allowing ourselves to see what they have to reveal?  From long experience being befogged and whipsawed by these three visitors, I know that what hurts us can also be a deep of compassion and wisdom.  We worldly beings are a position to understand one another.  And, one moment at a time, we can change. Here is Scrooge on Christmas morning, encountering a man he had coldly rejected the day before for seeking money for the poor:

He [Scrooge] had not gone far, when, coming on toward him he beheld the portly gentleman who had walked into his counting house the day before, and said, ‘Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe?’  It sent a pang across his heart to think how the old gentleman would look upon him when they met, but he knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.

“My dear sir,” said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and taking the old gentleman by both his hands, ‘how do you do?  I hope you succeeded yesterday.  It was kind of you.  A merry Christmas to you sir!”

“Mr. Scrooge?”

“Yes,’ said Scrooge.  “That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you.  Allow me to ask your pardon.  And will you have the goodness—‘Here Scrooge whispered in his ear.”

“Lord bless me!’ cried the gentleman, as if his breath were taken away.  “My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?”

“If you please,” said Scrooge. “Not a farthing less.  A great may back payments are included in it, I assure you.  Will you do me that favor?”

“My dear sir,’ said the other, shaking hands with him.  “I don’t know what to say to such munifi—“

“Don’t say anything, please,” retorted Scrooge. “Come and see me.  Will you come and see me? ”

“I will!” cried the old gentleman.

In 1843, Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. He recreated the spirit of Christmas, showing us what goodwill, compassion, and generosity looked like in the images and dress of the day.  The very phrase “Merry Christmas” came from the book (and we all know what being a “scrooge” means).

May we all rediscover the spirit of Christmas  and keep it in our own way.   God bless us, everyone.

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Happiness / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Waking Up — 5 Comments
22
Dec 11

Winter Solstice 2011

Today is Winter Solstice.  As I write this, I’m having morning coffee, watching the sky change from dark to slate to a more luminous blue, glad as I am every year that the sun seems to be returning.  Modern educated woman that I am, there is something in my Nordic genes that makes me a little unsure every year that this great slow-spreading natural act of grace will happen:  the return of the sun.

And hope returns with it.  People speak of Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD, and I definitely have at least a touch of it (hence the big mug of coffee and early morning fumbling to light the Christmas tree lights in December).  Yet I have come to appreciate that I am also part of a greater natural cycle and that something precious would be lost if I sought to cut myself off any part of the process.  I am beginning to see that as we must make way for a greater whole—and this wholeness encompasses our connection to the earth, to our fellow beings, and the whole of ourselves.

For over 35 years, Parabola sought to bring this timeless wisdom contained in myth and all way and traditions to individuals.  These days, we aspire to bring this timeless wisdom to the burning issues of the day. Nature heals.  As we learn to let it be, as we expose what is hurt or in darkness to the light and the air of a greater awareness, it heals.

Nature can heal.  This is true on the level of the Earth, as the hard-working little team at Parabola is learning as we pull together our “Burning World” issue.   It is also true for human beings.   As we learn to practice a radical acceptance of the whole of ourselves, as we see and allow ourselves to be seen, we are healed.  As Christmas approaches, I find myself thinking of Scrooge, that “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching covetous old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”   As we come out of our closed and oyster-like isolation (I never did buy that “happy as a clam” business, did you?) we find a new life.   As Scrooge eyes were opened to the whole of his life by the three ghosts, he was healed.   He reconnected with life, with the light of wisdom and compassion. May we all.

I and others in this blog space have written before in this blog space about the extraordinary liberating experience of being seen and accepted just as we are—and not just by ourselves or by loved ones but by the great light behind the universe.  After an embarrassingly long number of years, it is dawning on me that this experience of being seen and accepted is not just a great timeless moment of liberation or salvation, but a gradual unfolding of the heart and mind that takes place over long period of time.  It seems that we must build up the muscle of heart, so that we hold more and more of what is always being given.   As counterintuitive as it sometimes seems, this opening to a greater light of awareness, this opening to the sublime, requires that we develop the capacity to hold—really hug—the wounded , abandoned, and wild little child within.

As I mentioned here before, I’ve been finding a lot of inspiration in Jane Eyre, that great Victorian wounded and wild child.  There comes a moment when Jane despairs of ever seeing Mr. Rochester again.  After an hour of prayer with St. John Rivers, she comes close to marrying the impassioned but cold and rigid religious idealist  and becoming a missionary in India.  She knows this will mean turning down her own fire and burying her own true nature.  She knows this decision will be what is called in these days a “spiritual bypass” – an attempt to transcend messy or uncomfortable parts of our nature.  She knows that St. Johns “nature was not changed by one hour of solemn prayer: it was only elevated.”   And yet..

“All men of talent, whether they be men of feeling or not, whether they be zealots, or aspirants, or despots—provided they only be sincere—have their sublime moments, when they subdue and rule.  I felt veneration for St. John—veneration so strong that its impetus thrust me at once to the point I had so long shunned.  I was tempted to cease struggling with him—to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own.”

To be fair to Jane, she didn’t just want to abandon the messy whole of herself, she was inspired by the zealot St. John to remember that life is brief and then comes the darkness of the unknown:  “life rolled together like a scroll—death’s gates opening showed eternity beyond:  it seemed, that for safety and bliss there, all here might be sacrificed in a second.”

But the voice of Mr. Rochester and her own deeper nature called, and she followed that voice.   Reader, in case you don’t know, she married Mr. Rochester and lived happily.  Yet they didn’t live a closed life. Both partners had a long but profound journey to acceptance of the whole:   “Jane! You think me, I dare say, an irreligious dog: but my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now.  He sees not as man sees, but far clearer:  judges not as man judges, but far more wisely. ”

It is Winter Solstice.  The light returns.  Trust nature.

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Presence / Seeing / Waking Up — 2 Comments
17
Dec 11

Manhattan Elevator Accident Parable

I was walking up Madison Avenue last week, when I was literally stopped in my tracks.  I came upon a dense crowd of onlookers and reporters, all of us held back by yellow police tape at the corner of 40th Street.  Fire trucks and police cars and television vans filled the street.  I asked a cameraman what was happening.  “Elevator accident,” he said, pointing to a stately old skyscraper.  “A woman was crushed to death.”

This was one of those terrible and awe-filled moments in New York when strangers make eye contact, when there is a suspension of the usual state of distraction and mutual isolation.   Briefly, a veil dropped and strangers were fellow passengers in the same boat, all of us riding the currents in a vast and unpredictable sea.  I called my husband many miles away (such is the world we live in) who supplied more details from the internet.  A 41-year-old woman was stepping into an elevator when it suddenly shot upward like a bullet.  More facts came out in the news the next day, that the ad exec fell forward and was only half inside when the elevator shot up, that the elevators were old and creaky, that two others were on the scene and watched helplessly, that the woman left behind many friends and loved ones.

I walked away from the awe-full scene, wondering what the woman had been thinking about as she rushed for the elevator.   Had she been musing about the holidays and about her work, as I had been?  I was walking to Grand Central  to go home after having lunch with the gifted David Hykes, singer of haunting harmonic mantras, who has volunteered to be Parabola’s music editor.  In the din of a loud restaurant, we spoke of the music of the spheres.  We spoke of the latest findings of physics—that reality at the deepest level may be made of vibrations, of music.  We agreed that at this level or resolution there is no separation between art, science, and religion.   Reality is one.  Truth is one.

I told David I once heard the great filmmaker Igmar Bergman said that music was the most human of all art forms.  We agreed that this was this was interesting thing about music, that it can be so human and yet so vast, so ultimate.  David broke out his laptop and via a special program showed me the beautiful, multi-colored mandala-like forms that chords make.  One of the thrilling things about the chords David can sing is that they are not separate from silence: he created a zone of resonating stillness around us in the midst of that loud restaurant.

I told David that Parabola want to make the same kind of sound, not just in concerts (though we hope to host David soon) but in images, stories, and poetry.   At its most sincere the practices of art and religion are not meant to be a means of distraction and escape but a means to make us instruments, however imperfect.  They are meant to open us and tune us so that we might see and hear and feel deep within us those underlying vibrations, that vibrant, moving deeper reality we all share.

I walked along along musing about all this, and then I came upon the accident.  Awe-full tragedy and reminder that we are surrounded by mystery—that Truth is always other than thought.  It is said that Gandhi, who died suddenly, died saying the name of God.  He spent his life praying and meditating, creating a resonant still point in the midst of the great trials and turmoil and sheer bustle of his life.  May we all find our way to that kind of double life, secular and sacred, deeply engaged in life, fighting injustice and suffering, yet at the same time set apart, in it but not completely of it, open and attuned to the finest and deepest vibrations, the music of the spheres.

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15
Dec 11

The Sun Over the House

Light plays a starring role in this dark season.  In the Christian tradition, light literally takes the form of a star.  This image of a star shining over a little barn, guiding shepherds and wise men to the divine child sleeping within has become a kind of resonating question or koan for me, thanks to an outspoken child of my own.

Many years ago, feeling that our Christmas in Brooklyn was missing something, I had the inspired idea of driving my daughter, husband, and mother-in-law up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and attend mass across the street at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.   The cathedral seemed to be full to the great doors with European tourists. The beautiful strains of Italian filled the air.  It was the very epicenter of Christmas in New York, and we managed seats close to the great alter.   A row of solemn-faced priests flanked the front of the church, ready to serve communion to the vast throng of faithful.  My tiny elderly mother-in-law, who was born and spent her childhood in the passionately Catholic island country of Malta, had gone to high school on a scholarship at St. Patrick’s and she sat with hands folded, looked radiant.  Not so my 8 or 9-year-old daughter.  She writhed unhappily in her seat.  She grimaced at the huge tortured crucifix hanging above us.

“Has anyone looked at this man?” she asked in a loud voice. “He doesn’t look very happy, and we’re supposed to follow this…”  Before she could continue this loud line of questioning in front of her grandmother, the priests, the international Catholic throng, coward Tracy pulled her out of the pew, grabbed her by the arm and kind of perp walked her over to an almost life-sized manger set up in a corner of the great cathedral.  Feeling as if I had to do something to instill a sense of occasion if nothing else (she had already told me she preferred nature to religion and would rather spend Christmas in Africa with the animals), I told her the story of the nativity.

“A star was over the manger?” she asked.  “This was the sign that he was the son of God?”  I nodded but I felt a little thrill, as if I knew that this idyllic Christmas exchange was unfolding a little too smoothly and falsely. “A star in a sun, Mommy,” she said in a resonating voice.  “This is like saying the sun is over my house, I must be divine.  Isn’t that a little, I don’t know, selfish?”

For years now, this non-rational question occasionally wells up inside:  “The sun is over my house, does this mean I’m divine?”   It has come to point towards that moment of calm and patient abiding—a moment of opening inside to truly see the beauty and mystery of the world and the miracle of life and of being part of it here and now.  It is a vibrating question that changes form and emphasis and doesn’t end in a simple yes: the light is divine and life is miraculous and how can I find that sleeping child within?

In a few days it will be the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, Chanukah, or the Festival of Lights. The name is derived from a Hebrew word which means “to dedicate.” During Hanukkah, the Jewish people commemorate the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem and the “Miracle of The Oil”.  After the Temple had been won by the Maccabees from Antiochus IV Epiphanes, only a day’s worth of consecrated olive oil was left to to fuel the eternal flame. Miraculously, it remained burning for eight days, which was just enough time to make more of the oil.

What does it take to make more oil?  As an outsider, I think of the oil as conscious attention—that special quiet, dedicated attention that allows us to consecrate life one moment at a time, to make a temple of the body, heart, and mind, to let the light in.   The other night, I was trying to do assume a (for me) difficult posture in a sacred dance class and the teacher said “notice how patience can make you quick, can help you arrive on time.”  And I thought of the miracle of the oil.  Patience can make the light of attention expand—can make time and life seem to expand.  There is more to you and more to life than you could ever imagine.  May you experience the miracle of light this holiday season.  May the sun shine over your house.  May it light your way to the sacred space or the divine child within.

Awakening / Awareness / Christmas / Grace / Happiness — 6 Comments
04
Dec 11

Happy Medium

“I know no medium,” says Jane Eyre, speaking of the way she typically responds to people and events.  Like many of us in real life, this great fictional character finds herself reacting automatically, and either passively or aggressively.   “I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt.  I have always observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other.”

What does it mean to find the Middle Way?  Not in the sense of picking up a book on Buddhism or contacting a teacher, but in ourselves and in our lives.  There is always a draw to act, a restless wish to move, to create, to do something.  And there is also a wish to submit–and I’m not talking about depression or being a mouse or some unwholesome slavish quality here but to a wholesome impulse to be still and know a greater wholeness–to bear witness to greater life.

There are always two different currents operating in most of us–a push outward and a pull inward and upward, up out of this worldly mess.  Yet sometimes, when we sit down to meditate or walk in nature or otherwise try to be very aware of what is happening in the present moment, we can find an attitude and an attention that can embrace all the disparate parts of ourselves, including that irreconcilable push-pull.  Sometimes, we can be actively quiet inside–passively active, embracing and observing and delving into what we are like and what life is like.  This is the Middle Path:  it is that vibrant attention that can be medium–that can stay between those opposite pulls, that can unite our thoughts and feelings and sensations–parts that have so little in common they haven’t spoken to each other in years.

This is what I love about meditation.  I can sit down in the grumpiest, most preoccupied state of mind.  I can have a thousand things on my mind; my emotions can be just barely be on this side of overwhelm; and my body can be contracted like a spring, ready to bolt up and do something about all those dire predictions in my ears.  Yet if I can just manage to stay on the cushion for ten minutes or so there inevitable comes a shift, a kind of subtle gift of grace.  I’ve also heard it called a “movement of availability.”  What happens quite simply is that the surrounding stillness, the field of awareness that seems to draw close and surround a person when they meditate becomes more vibrant and interesting and alive than the turbulent thoughts, emotions, tensions and sensations that are usually entrance us (literally entrance us).  When this shift occurs, I become interested in myself in a new way–not taking my own side, arguing my own case–but seeing what I am like with the kind of acceptance the stillness itself seems to express.  You know what I mean.  Think of what it is like to be surrounded by tall trees.  There is a feeling of a grave but peaceful witness, as if we are being shown or fed something about what it can mean to practice patience and peaceful abiding.

I once heard that the Pali word “metta,” which means loving kindness or friendliness (a quality of the heart that supports the cultivation mindfulness) also refers to the sun and to sunshine.  The sun shines evenly on all things; it is not responsible for the clouds that drift by like thoughts passing through the mind.  The sun is naturally radiant; it refuses nothing and demands nothing.  What I’m calling medium or Middle Path awareness is just like that.  And not only is this awareness capable of embracing the disparate parts of ourselves–not passively submitting but humming with quiet interest.  It is also not separate from compassionate and friendly acceptance–and not separate from wisdom.  We discover in such moments that wisdom is not about words and thoughts but about connecting with a special energy that is inside and outside, an energy that brings acceptance, letting go, reconciliation.

In the sunlight of such awareness, we don’t care anymore (for a second) about what the ego cares about, about being right or looking good.  In that beautiful place of being radiantly medium, we would agree with Jane Eyre when she said:  “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”