Mending the World

I’ve noticed a curious thing since Nelson Mandela’s death three days ago— astounding grace occurring for both my friends and myself. It’s the kind of grace that doesn’t necessarily make “things” better but rather opens the clouds of patterned oppression revealing insights of loving-kindness, generosity and acceptance—correcting course from obstructive thinking to open heartedness. It is as if all that love, patience, and compassion that lived in the one man, Nelson Mandela, was like a dandelion flower. When he passed from his worldly form all the little winged seedlings were cast abroad over the world.

I heard a speech that Nelson Mandela delivered in Britain right after his release from prison. With his deep soulful smile he said to the British people, “I love every one of you.” He wasn’t just saying I love you collectively as “a people” he was speaking into the heart of each individual. He was a true Bodhisattva.  In Judaism there is a principle called Tikun Olam—to mend the world. We are not obliged to complete the job, neither are we exempt from trying, from doing our part in making a better world. Nelson Mandela’s part in mending the world was very large.

Here is an idea to honor the legacy of Nelson Mandela. Decide for one day to look into the eyes of every person you encounter as if you are looking into the eyes of Nelson Mandela. See them as Bodhisattvas, as loving menders of the world, as one who through patience and loving-kindness can and has changed history for the betterment of thousands of people. Notice how you feel. I’m going to try that this week.

Let me know in the comments section below what, if anything occurred to you. I’m curious to know how letting your heart do the thinking might affect your life and your relations.

Find the Meaning, Mine the Pearl

Tonight is the first night of Hanukah. It comes very early this year, following a lunar not solar calendar. It won’t come this early for another 70,000 years. I wonder if human beings will still inhabit this planet in 70,000 years and if so will they be using this same calendar and method for measuring time?

The ritual for Hanukah, which comes at the darkest time of year, is to light candles for eight nights, increasing by one each night—first night one, second night two, third night three and so on up to eight points of light when the candelabra (called a Hanukiah) is brightly lit, signifying the return of the light. Whatever other stories are told about Jewish survival, this is a ritual to increase the light within ourselves at the darkest time of year.

I’ve felt the darkness so densely in my own being recently. Not just because of the extremely short days and the cold that my blood still hasn’t acclimatized to. (I live in Taos at 7,000 ft. above sea level, and I was born on the Mediterranean.) But also a darkness in my mood, in my emotions—a sinking sense of meaninglessness as strange Hieronymous Bosch images parade through my mind, like a dreamscape made of phantom thoughts signifying nothing of any true value.

I haven’t lit Hanukah candles for years but I feel the need this year to draw the light, day by day back into my heart. My prayer as I struggle to increase the light is this: If this waking world is a dream being dreamed by a great dreamer, as the aboriginal people of Australia believe, I ask the dreamer to find the meaning of this dream and mine the pearl of great price—the purpose of this life.

From Samhain to Resurrection

I wrote this poem about four years ago and read it yesterday at a poetry salon. We are approaching Halloween which in Gaelic tradition is called Samhain (pronounced Sow-in). It is a time of year, between the Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice when the veil between worlds is thought to be thin.

Leaning into shadows
Under one night sky
The veils between I and not I
Translucent

Now is time
To devote yourself
To Eternal Life

Stand from the steaming waters
Surrounded by snow
Raise right hand above
Commit Left hand below

I will chant an old theme
Come thou holy name, my name
Your name
Come rouse the dead
Who have not yet lived

Come Invite what’s been banned
From the banquet
Of life

Pull the pin from your throat
Cast forth the grenade of your voice
Leave behind what has made you small
Judgment, Fear, Denial

Now is the Time
Become great
Become dawn
Become awake

Songs of Freedom

In Robert Moss’ blog post about Mircea Eliade he quotes:

“Nothing, absolutely nothing, can sterilize spiritual creativity so long as a man is—and realizes himself to be—free. Only the loss of freedom, or of the consciousness of freedom, can sterilize a creative spirit.”

I hear Bob Marley’s voice singing:

“Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships…

But my hand was made strong
By the ‘and of the Almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly…

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.

Won’t you help to sing this song of freedom”

Our songs of freedom are sung through our creativity. Yesterday I sat at a small book fair table helping to promote the books published by Nighthawk Press, Including my soon to be published memoir, Love on the Brink of History. People came and looked but not many books were actually sold. Bonnie Lee Black and I talked about how more and more people are creating books even as there are fewer and fewer people who actually read books—a strange dichotomy. Some freedom emerges through the creative urge of humanity that simply hopes to be met by the witness/receiver. We have stories we must tell.

I sometimes have the image that all these books that don’t get sold or appreciated by the “merchant ships”—our current market driven world—will be a goldmine of understanding for those who inhabit this planet long after we have gone. Our stories are laying tracks for those who wonder what kind of world this was, back in what they called the first part of the 21st century.

We are the ancestors of future generations born from our species and/or future inhabitants of this planet who come from somewhere else. Despite the pirates now working to greedily claim the bounty of our planet and our freedom, we strive forward with “the consciousness of freedom” in our individual and humble ways, through our God given freedom—the creative spirit.

 

What do I love

In Robert Moss’ book “Active Dreaming” he presents a practice to define your personal truth. I’ve attempted below to answer the questions in the practice. It is a fun exercise. Try it. I expect if I answered these questions again at a different time the answers might be different.

1) What do I Love?

I love being warm. I know that because I don’t love being cold. I love a clean well-equipped, simple, stable shelter. I love feeling safe. I love the sun. I love my close friends and family. I love Annie, my doggy friend. I love when insects visit me, especially the praying mantis. I love comfortable furniture. I love turning on the faucet and having instant hot water and clean drinkable cold water. I love a good cup of Earl Grey tea. I love laughing with Lyn. I love comfortable shoes and clothes that also look good. I love sitting by a fire. I love communing with another person on deep levels. I love really good chicken soup. I love a penetrating poem. I love when I see a deeply created work of art and really understand it. I love having deep insights that feel like the light has just been turned on. I love my intuition. I love swimming in perfect temperature water (about 89º) when I can make the movement a meditation. I love dancing when my body feels fluid. I love when my body feels fluid. I love meditation when I really connect with my higher self. I love dreams when I do the same. I love a warm comfortable bed with down comforter and great pillows. I love feeling welcome. I love helping people in the perfect way at the exact moment – maybe just a word or a phone call or a suggestion or a ride. I love meeting angels when they randomly show up. I love being an angel when I randomly show up. I love cleanliness and organization. I love caring. I love fresh live water. I love clean simple food made with love. I love when I see someone put love into their work. I love to put love into my work. I love great design – I love Lesley’s design of my book, cover and interior. I love the Japanese building at the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Guggenheim in New York – I love spirals. I love Leonard Cohen’s music. I love great lyrics that are profound, well crafted and new with each hearing. I love movies and art that reaches deep. I love connecting with people who are deep.

What makes me happy?

All of the things that I love make me happy. But the most happiness I’ve ever felt was on the fourth day of my first Vipassana meditation training. I felt happiness rise up in me from nothing. And I knew that no thing could ever make me as happy as the happiness that already resides within my being. I need only quiet all the things that make me unhappy in order to experience it.

What does my heart long for?

My heart does not long for more than I already have. My heart is fed in the moments when I am simply grateful and appreciative.

What would I risk everything to defend?

To defend something implies there is a war – one has to defend what is being attacked. I attempt to remove myself from this kind of thinking and action at every level. Love truly does make the devil a non-entity. The risk in loving is to let go of all that is not love. This is not a risk for me for I do not want anything that is not love, therefore I do not have to defend it.

If my life ended today, what would I most regret not having done?

If my life ended today I would be quick to accept and move toward the transition and not cling to any regret. I’ve lived as fully as I could have under the weight of the baggage I came in with and I would be delighted to release whatever vestige of that baggage still remains and run freely home to my maker.

 

Sipapu Creative Pause

Charlotte, I miss you.  I look for you each time I go into the bathroom hoping, expecting to see you by my hairbrush.  You liked sitting on the magnetic charger for my electric toothbrush.  When you’d take your place there I’d just leave my toothbrush on the counter until you were finished recharging yourself with magneto energy.  You were showing me what I also must do now, at winter solstice 2012— recharge myself.

We were only together two days, Christmas Eve and Christmas day.  When my son arrived for Christmas dinner about 4pm, you disappeared.  I thought you went into hiding, sensing another person in the house.  I put a sticky note on the mirror— Charlotte is my houseguest. Please let her be.  I doodled a little drawing of your round body, eight legs, and a smiling face, so anyone who read the note would know who you are.  Not that my son would have washed you down the sink or crushed you with a wadded up tissue.  But lest some friend or acquaintance drop by unexpectedly and need the bathroom and think he’d be doing me a favor by killing the spider in my bathroom, I wanted to be sure you’d be protected.  But you are wiser than to rely on sticky notes posted by a single sympathetic human.

I thought you’d reemerge when the house was clear of other people—in fact only my son who is not a spider killer.  But it’s been two days since you left and you are still gone.

I looked up spider totem wondering what wisdom says about you.  You are the balance between past and future.  Perhaps you only came for a short time to help me remember, in this phase I’ve been calling a “pause.”  I felt anticipation in the weeks before the solstice.  The popular mythologies about Mayan Calendars had seeped into my awareness.  Not that I for one minute expected the world to come to an end.  But just as we honor and invest hope in January 1^st, a new year, I felt a sense of newness coming at this time shift—a sense of a new time form, which has all the potential of being remade in a more conscious way.  “Webs remind us that we choose our own fate,” one site says of spider totems.  This pause in my life is the punctuation between all I’ve done in the past and what is to come.  The past is now the raw material and rotting mulch from which I will weave the choices for my future.

Spider woman in native cultures teaches humans how to weave their way from the spirit world.  She attaches a thread of her web to humans who remember they come from Great Spirit.  It is her gift of creative wisdom.  They float to the new world, climbing to safety through the Sipapu Pole, the womb of Mother Earth.

I hope you will forgive me Charlotte for not being very creative in naming you.  I loved reading Charlotte’s web to my children when they were little.  It’s the only anthropomorphic name I associate with your kind.  And I am in this pause period where creativity lies fallow.  I am gathering magneto energy for a new time form, a new fate, a new weaving.

One and Many

12-8-12 – The symmetry

 

Today the Goddess revealed herself

in all her manifestations

Avalokishteshvara, Tara

Quan Yin, Our Lady of Guadalupe

Mary and Magadalene

Shekinah

 

One and Many

She revealed

Her Majesty

Holy, Holy, Holy

 

No more fear

Fear is a dark hardness

that dissolves

 

No more worry

worry is wound up

in itself

 

She revealed the end

of all that.  She conveyed

All will be well

And all manor of thing

Will be well

 

 

Annie and the Blue Heron

I listened to Donna Eden talk about energy medicine this afternoon.  She’d healed herself from MS after the doctors had told her to get her affairs in order—she was going to die.  She started out by simply holding her leg and patiently being present with herself.  She began to see the energy her body was made of and realized she had the power to heal herself. (She was born with the gift of clairvoyance.)

I sat listless thinking about doing her energy routine to try to get my own energy going.  I’ve had next to no energy for a long time with another type of autoimmune dis-ease.  Tai chi/chi gong helps me maintain a life but lately I’ve felt my energy simply slipping away despite my practice.

But how do I even get started without energy.  Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a metaphor of courage and fortitude but courage and fortitude require some degree of energy.  It all feels impossible without some kind of help.  I need an “other” to help leverage some degree of movement to get started.

Annie’s been hanging out here this morning and now the clouds are clearing, the sun is shining, it is cold and windy, but the mud is dried.  I head outside to the laundry room and Annie gets excited—a walk.  No Annie, just the laundry.  But she insists—a walk. And before my enervated resistance can shut the idea down I realize she is the instant answer to my, as it were, prayer for help.

Annie moves into we’re going for a walk mode.  Her tail is wagging her body, and she’s making sounds that if she had the kind of mouth that could form words would be saying, “Come on Hannah, you said you need more energy.” So I get my Uggs on and wrap myself up against the wind and move listlessly out to the meadow behind my house, where there are a couple long man made ponds.  Annie is excited and she keeps checking up on me to make sure I’m keeping up with her.  We walk to the end of the first long pond and walk up the slope of the berm that contains it.  Annie’s found some luscious dried horseshit to roll in (I’m sure there is something homeopathic or healing about horse shit, because dogs always love to roll in it).

Suddenly I hear a splash and then a whoosh of air. I look up and see a great blue heron taking off for the other end of the pond.  I’ve never seen one here before. Annie sniffs around a bit while I do one of Donna Eden’s exercises (raising my hands to the sky and feeling that I am touching heaven).  Then we walk the trail toward the other end.  As we approach the heron’s hiding spot it takes off again away from us.

Here is what the “Medicine Cards” by Jamie Sams and David Carson says about Blue herons: “Heron medicine is the power of knowing the self by discovering its gifts and facing its challenges. It is the ability to accept all feelings and opinions without denying emotion or thought . . .

I know that my body is not independent of my feelings and thoughts.  The natural and spiritual worlds seem to be answering my conundrum about self-healing by telling me to go deeper inward.

Contemplation with Our Lady of Guadalupe

I haven’t believed in God for about ten years.  The whole idea baffles me.  I know prayers are answered.  I see that for other people and I experience it myself.  What is it that answers prayers?

About four years ago I was sitting in my hot tub out on the mesa, looking up at the vast dark velvet blanket of sky, pinholes of light–billions and billions–going on forever.  This vastness felt deeply personal.  I knew beyond doubt I belong to it; we are related; I am in it and it is in me.  But that recognition didn’t ignite any belief in God.  What “belief” is—something the mind creates, and the concept  “God” (also something the mind creates) both seem too small.

This last week I was gifted with a lucid dream.  I was shown how the cosmos is a jumble of chaos when the mind is so.  When the mind is a tangled morass of emotions, random thoughts, uncultivated feelings, uncultivated . . . The cosmos is also.

When the mind, psyche, comes to evenness, like turning a wild random plot of weeds into an artistic garden, the cosmos resonates with that artistry.  And then there is reciprocity—between my will and the cosmos’ response.

I want to hold the intent each day to settle my psyche.  To plant this intention earnestly in my heart, bringing it to a still point, allowing the cosmos to reflect and reciprocate.  I want this not just for my own benefit but for the safety and freedom of women everywhere.

 

Where are you now Tesla?

It’s warming up a bit here in Taos, New Mexico, though a friend just told me she heard a report that Arctic weather is on its way.  We have had a natural gas outage for days—something to do with rolling blackouts in Texas.  Interesting that our new governor, who is funded by Texas oil and gas interests, has the loss of Texas natural gas be her first state emergency.  And she can’t really explain the “natural” cause of it.  This could cause a panic reaction by the state legislature to approve drilling for natural gas in the state of New Mexico?  That is her stated agenda.  She wants to get rid of filmmaking, which brings jobs and creativity to the state, and replace it with arcane forms of greed and arrogance—money for the big guys.

I’m on propane and we have a full tank (shared among the four tenants of this casita complex), but a lot of people in town have been without hot water or heat.  A lot of businesses are closed.  The gas company has been working on restoring the main lines and they’ve called gas experts from all over the country to come and help.  They have to go to each house and business to turn the meters and pilot lights back on.  I’m feeling pretty grateful, basking in the luxury of hot water and a working stove.

Nature lets us know who really is boss.  And yet she is perfectly willing to play, when we play fair.  I can’t help but think of the arrogance imposed when J.P. Morgan destroyed Nicolas Tesla’s research because there was no place to put the meter.  The human race was poised, thanks to Tesla’s brilliant inventions, to have free power for all.  Imagine a world that doesn’t have to create wars and artificial crisis for the sake of survival.  Benjamin Franklin captured the power of nature for the betterment of humankind and nature was agreeable.  The gods of greed and arrogance pinch off that flow from heaven for personal gain.  As the British say, it’s just not cricket.