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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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28
Dec 09

Holidays/ Holy Days

“Cooking has many functions, and only one of them is about feeding people,” writes British food writer Nigella Lawson.   Lawson’s wonderfully forgiving recipe for coq au vin was simmering on Christmas Eve.  I wanted to fill the house with a delicious and comforting smell for all kinds of reasons–including one Lawson herself provides in her cookbook Feast:  “When we go into a kitchen, indeed when we even just think about going into a kitchen, we are both creating and responding to an idea we hold about ourselves, about what kind of person we wish to be.”     The kind of person I wished to be on Christmas Eve was solid, enduring.   I wasn’t just wishing to create a Christmas-y atmosphere for my home-from-college daughter who passionately loves Christmas–I was trying to whip up a loving, cozy atmosphere that would protect me and everyone I cared about from the impermanence of life.  The serious nature of life–the way that people and times we have loved disappear and never return becomes terribly clear to me this time of year.

Julia Child once said that dining with family and friends is one of “life’s primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal.”   The older I get, the more I tackle the holidays like Scrooge on Christmas morning–as if cooking and candlelight and glasses raised in a toast can save me from the kind of vision that Gabriel Conroy had at the end of James Joyce’s story “The Dead:”  “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.   His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. ”

On Christmas morning, I found my daughter in the kitchen making pancakes, dressed in a skirt and jewelry and looking she thought (and I did, too) “a little like the wife in MadMen”  (minus the cigarette, thankfully).   Her retro outfit reminded me a little of very early memories of my mother, whom I especially miss at Christmas since she loved it so much.  I wondered if she had done what I do–making merry for her children’s sake.  “One by one they were all becoming shades,” reflected Gabriel Conroy. “Better to pass boldly into that other world in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”   Surely my mother who had lost her own mother my the time I was five must have known the truth of impermanence, yet she was always like a child herself at Christmas, overflowing with excitement and generosity, reminding us that life was full of  unforeseeable possibilities and magic.

In 2010, may we all open to life’s unexpected gifts and highest possbilities.