The Gap

Last night I had the occasion to hang out at my house with several 20-somethings, kids who were quite self-possessed, very cool, dressed in black, tattooed and working in the world of contemporary style and fashion — of which I am remarkably ignorant, even after 50+ years of life. So much of their world I have no idea about; so many crazy things go on in my own fair city!

For example, they traveled to my place via Uber. I didn’t know about this new ride industry, where through a phone app, you put in the address of where you are, click to request a ride and you can see how long it will take for an independent Uber driver to come pick you up. Cheaper than a cab, and way, way more cool. Brilliant, eh?

It's true; there is more happening in this world than I could ever wrap my brain around.

I certainly felt a gap, a gap about the size of the Grand Canyon, between my world and theirs. (And how strange to now be on the north rim of the gap!)

At the same time I felt a gap about the size a crack in the sidewalk, between my soul and theirs. I felt this strange yearning to really connect . . .  like, to connect for real. I wanted so much to sit in circle with them and ask them about what’s really in their hearts, what they fear, what they know. And I wanted to open myself to any questions they might have, about life and meaning. Somehow I felt that perhaps they too wanted to connect at a deeper level. Perhaps they are starving for elders to truly listen to them, to hear their hearts, though the yearning may be only semi-conscious, as mine was at their age.

But there is no structure for that connection to happen in 2014 where our villages have become re-stratified into self-chosen groupings based on affinity. It would be socially weird to share my depths with kids that live on the far south rim of this Grand Canyon. And so our worlds go on, not touching each other, even as something inside reaches out.

It makes me sad.

Yet, who’s to say that our souls aren’t connecting? Outside of space and time, beyond the reaches of our personalities?

Because if there is one thing I have come to know from my short half a century on this planet, there that is more Mystery happening in this world than I could ever wrap my brain around . . .  for who really knows how far our souls are able to jump?

Petting Bees

My sister and her husband live on ranch property on the shores of Bear Lake in northern Utah that has been in our family for four generations. She is raising her two kids, Wesley and Sylvia on this high desert cattle country land.

The landscape up at Bear Lake is beautiful, in a sort of harsh, intense way. There are rattlesnakes. It gets really cold in the winter. The sun burns skin quickly in the summer. There are ticks in spring and fall. The growing season is short. The economy is slow, and seasonal.

Last week, I was up at the ranch for a summer gathering with siblings and their children. One afternoon, Sylvia and I went on a walk down to the lake. Or rather, she rode her purple bike and I walked. The lake has been low in recent years and as a result, lots of vegetation has grown up on its shores; reedy plants and small trees and large patches of tall wavy green things with teensy yellow flowers that bees like.

Sylvia was ready to turn around and ride home once we got to the turn in the road that paralleled the lake shore, but I suggested we just go dip our toes in the water first. She hopped off her bike and walked straight toward the large patch of tall wavy green things that were between us and the lakeshore. I offered to plow a path through.

As I swam carefully through weeds taller than my head and saw all the bumble bees hovering around, I thought about a video on re-wilding [2:06] I had come upon several months ago while surfing the web.

We stood in the shallow water of the lake for a few minutes and then after we decided to start back, I said to Sylvia, “Hey did you know you can pet bees? I saw it in a video. This little, tiny girl, maybe two or three years old was petting a bee. It was really cool. The little girl wasn’t afraid at all!”  It must have caught her imagination because before I had finished my last sentence, she said “I want to try it!” and set about doing so.

Her first attempts were tentative, but soon lost her fear as she had success in touching the fuzzy soft backs of the big bumble bees who were busy gathering pollen and not bothered by small seven-year-old fingers gently stroking them. Enthusiastically she wandered about in the tall wavy green things, blonde braids shining in the warm sun, following the bees.

“You should try.” Sylvia remarked to me, wisely. I did try and found it a little unnerving, but possible. (But, interestingly, because my fingertips are calloused from climbing, I could not feel anything.)

I asked Sylvia how the bees responded to her petting them. They just went about their business and didn’t mind. I asked her what she learned from the experience of petting bees. “BEES ARE SAFE!!” was her immediate and enthusiastic reply. She could hardly wait to tell her mom and brother and dad that she had petted bees.

As she straddled her bike to set off on the half mile dirt road back to the ranch, I asked her if she’d ever been stung by a bee. She replied that she had been stung just once — in the hollyhocks by the new chicken coop, about two weeks ago. She had just brushed by a flower and the bee stung her through her legging tights.

Learning to pet bees is not something we do very much. But it is an intimate and empowering experience; one that reminds us of our wild, original self. And another really cool thing is that wild children sense immediately what they need, and what is good for them.

Versimilitude

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ver·i·si·mil·i·tude [ver-uh-si-mil-i-tood, -tyood]

noun

1. the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability: The play lacked verisimilitude.

2. something, as an assertion, having merely the appearance of truth.

Origin: 1595–1605;  < Latin vērīsimilitūdō,  equivalent to vērī  (genitive singular of vērum  truth) + similitūdō similitude

Last summer on a women’s Wild Nature Retreat that I co-guided, a participant returned from her 48-hour solo fast on the land with the question “what is real?” reverberating in her body and soul.

 She questioned civilization, the social masks we wear, the asphalt and air-conditioned cubicles we comfortably live in. Her experience of fasting for two days and nights with only the bare minimum physical comforts, and nothing to DO, allowed her to have a meeting with what is real for her . . . something that could not be put into words, but only felt.

 For the past couple of months, I’ve been wrestling with what to do with the gift of my father’s Samick grand piano. I played piano from about three years old until I chose to study graphic design in my sophomore year of college. I grew up playing classical music on a 7-foot Steinway grand piano — the Mercedes of pianos — but didn’t realize my good fortune until I was forced to start shopping around because the grand piano I had been gifted was too large for my home.

 I’ve gone to big piano stores and small piano stores, playing and listening to uprights, baby grands and expensive pianos I can’t afford. And every time, I came home feeling depressed — my mind chasing its tail around the fact the nothing sounded as good as a piano that I can’t afford and won’t fit in my living room.

 But then an emotionally intelligent salesman — and a professional musician himself — suggested on a whim (on the third time I’d been into the place) that I take a look at the digital pianos: electronic gadgets that emit the recorded sound of a real piano.

 I would never have considered this option, except . . . these pianos sample from a $170,000 (yes, that is the correct number of 0’s) 9-foot concert grand piano. The bass and treble sound surprisingly full.  There are five different kinds of grand piano sounds you can choose from, with the touch of a button. You can change the tone from bright to muted. You can change the acoustics to mimic the sound of playing in a smaller room or a bigger hall or on a stage. You can plug in your iPad and download a free app that gives you access to a gazillion choices of sheet music in all genres, including the Hannon finger exercises. You can record your piano playing or play other high-quality un-compressed music files through its electronic sound system. It comes in shiny ebony black finish, and it fits into my living room.

THIS is an entirely different reality.

 So, is playing a digital piano merely verisimilitude? If the ear is there to hear it, the sound is not the same as real strings being hit by real hammers resonating within real wood.

What is real?

 Well, after leaving that piano store for the third time, presented with an entirely new reality, I found myself feeling excited. I felt excited about the possibilities of making music with a new tool, a new kind of instrument. I had been presented with new, uncharted territory that also made me look at my identity as a musician, and the cultural symbols of my upbringing. I could feel the excitement and lightness in my body as I unwound my own expectations and saw things from a new point of view.

I believe I am deeply connected, from age three, to the real sound of a Steinway grand piano, that this 'real' sound is embedded in my bones. So if I’m grounded in this ‘real’ sound, can I now explore music utilizing an electronic approximation of a piano and be OK with it? Or will I still pine for something that's not feasible in my life right now?

 Here’s what I've settled on as being real for me:

 Life is full of ‘compromises’ that we can make up a million stories about. We make the best choices we can, based on our limitations. Freedom comes from accepting our choices and making the best music we are able to with what we’ve got.

Courting the Ancient Feminine Part II: Paris

I had done an Internet search before we left to see if there were any Black Madonna statues in Paris, being familiar with the Black Madonnas that can be found around France and Northern Spain. There was one, in Notre Dame de Bonne Délivrance, in a wealthy suburb just northwest of Paris proper. I made my intentions to visit the Black Madonna in Paris, on this honeymoon trip to Europe.  And so it was.

BlackMadonnaParis

After two full days of walking our legs off visiting museums, catacombs and basillicas, I was to take the last morning to myself, for long Metro ride to Neuilly-sur-Siene to visit the Black Madonna of de Bonne Délivrance.

The morning was dark—from black thunder clouds that boomed and crashed outside the large French window of our postage-stamp-sized room, facing an inner courtyard.  Thunder, lightening, and then tropical-style pouring rain.

I could have bagged it, but I donned my dark pink rain jacket, armed with my husband’s iPhone (with address bookmarked in Google Maps), and to his dismay, marched out into the pouring rain.

I only had to go half a block, to the Metro station.

A quick 20 minutes later, I was at my stop. Emerging from the Metro, I followed the iPhone blinking blue dot along the streets of a very nice, well-kept and friendly-feeling neighborhood.

The storm had cleared and the sun was shining.

With ease, I found my destination — the Chateau de Neuilly, behind whose gates the chapel was housed. The large, black iron gate was open. I followed the signs for the Chapel de Bonne Délivrance, around the corner, along a well-kept gravel path. And there it was.

Inside the small chapel, it was cool and quiet. A nun, black as night, was gently moving around the alter, putting away accoutrements from the 11:00 am Monday morning mass, which I apparently had just missed. Two women were sitting silently in the pews.

And behind the alter was the Black Madonna, graceful in her flowing robes, with the child Jesus on her flung out hip.

I walked reverently up the side isle, standing behind a pillar, and took a couple of photos. Then sat in a middle pew and felt inside myself—what kind of feeling did I have here in this place?

Actually, immediately upon entering the space, I felt a very quiet gentleness. Walking near her, I was struck very strongly with the energy of utter and complete purity and innocence. The gentle sweetness of a young girl child. 

I was quite taken off guard. My idea of the Black Madonna was a strong and mysterious energy, something powerful yet hidden.

I sat on a pew in front of her and wondered at how long it had been since I had felt that unscathed sweetness in myself, that untainted purity of heart.

A long time.

I soaked it in and soaked it in, intending to have my bones remember it.

An elderly white nun, hunched over but walking briskly, motored to the back of the chapel and I could hear her carrying on a conversation with a patron, in musical and hushed French tones that echoed and reverberated soothingly throughout the space.

Within a half hour or so, the chapel was closing, as the sweet black nun told me in accented English, with the kindest of smiles.

I retraced the steps of my journey with a great peace in my heart. Here was an aspect of the Feminine that I had completely forgotten about, that perhaps I did not take seriously, because it wasn’t ‘strong.’ Yet in truth, there was an incredible strength, I discovered, in the purity of Her innocence.

You may notice that the photo I took of this Black Madonna is NOT the same statue as the Black Madonna in the blog where I’d found her first. Similar, but not the same. Another mystery never to be solved.

Courting the Ancient Feminine Part I: Greece

I recently was in Greece, on a honeymoon trip. We stayed for one night in a hotel near Athens that was (ostensibly) near the airport and (famously) near the ruins of an ancient Sanctuary of Artemis. I was pleased that I would have the time and opportunity to check out an ancient Greek temple. (I didn’t check out Wikipedia before I left, which would have been a good idea! )

Upon our arrival at the swank but deserted hotel near Athens, the lovely concierge told me that unfortunately, the Sanctuary of Artemis was closed for renovation, but the museum of the temple was open.

The next morning, when I had planned on visiting the temple, it was raining a light rain. I could have bagged it, but decided to go anyway. It was in walking distance and I was able to borrow a nice pink umbrella from the front desk, where the lovely concierge gave me directions to the temple, even though I couldn’t get in.

It was a beautiful walk, down a winding country road, in a light rain.

I followed the concierge’s walking directions until, around one bend, I could see a grove of larger trees that struck me as the place. A interpretive sign on the side of the road . . . in English, no less, let me know that this area was a wetlands, and sported a nice basic trail map. With that, I had enough information, and  so took a left, on a wet and grassy trail that seemed to lead toward the grove of trees.

Indeed it soon did.

I found myself on the back side of the sanctuary grounds, with a rather permanent-looking chain link fence between me and the ruins. (I’m sure these renovation projects take years . . . )

I’d had a small premonition about what happened next.

Neat stacks of plastic-wrapped and numbered stone blocks, and a large pile of cement bags stood at the far end of the fence. I saw a workman moving the cement bags.

By now it had stopped raining, and the sun had come out.

I walked along the fenceline (took a photo) and the man saw me. Obviously I was very interested in the structure . . . he beckoned me over, opened a heavy iron gate at the very back, and let me in. He led me a little way toward the structure near the large trees, saying in broken English (better than my Greek) that I could only go "to here because of camera". Security camera.

I paid attention to what I felt in this place. From some inside place, this is what I  sensed the place might have said to me:

“I am here. It matters to me not whether I’m being renovated. It matters to me not if you come visit me. I am about my own business.”

A strong, almost imperious Feminine energy. I liked this Artemis.

“Artemis was bathing in the woods when the hunter Actaeon stumbled across her, thus seeing her naked. He stopped and stared, amazed at her ravishing beauty. Discovering she had been seen, Artemis became angry and forbade Actaeon to speak. If he tried to speak, he would be changed into a stag, she warned. Upon hearing the call of his hunting party, he called out to them . . . and was immediately changed into a stag. He fled into the woods. Stopping briefly at a pond, Actaeon saw his reflection and moaned in fear, moments before the hounds of his own hunting party sprang upon him and tore him to pieces, as he raised his eyes to Mount Olympus.”  —Wikipedia, with my edits.

Messiness is More Helpful than Perfection

Perfection. Ahhh, me. I recently had occasion in a lovely women’s group I’ve been participating in the past four months, to come to a shattering realization of just how much of my life has been built around needing to be ‘perfect.’ From all the judgments and subtle ‘not good enoughs’ that mill around most of the time in my brain about myself and others, to the feelings of insecurity I have around people I admire, that voice of Perfection has been a relentless companion. (Though I plead less and less guilty, as my Observing Self is now watching this happen!) After that women’s group session, I picked up Marion Woodman’s "Addicted to Perfection” from my bookshelf. I had read this brilliant book some years ago, underlining, underlining! Now I opened the book to a part where she speaks of the split that occurs in many women (and men, but especially women) between their spirits and their bodies. Anorexia, bulimia, an obsession with outer beauty as defined by others, are all symptoms of a sub- or semi-conscious rejection of our own material, messy, painful, wonderful bodies.

I had read this book before, but now it took on new and greater meaning. (It’s fun how we spiral back around to re-realize things at deeper and deeper levels, isn’t it?)

In yearning for the spiritual, as some of us do, we take from our Judeo-Christian culture that to be spiritual means to reject our imperfect physical incarnation. Even if we consciously do not buy into Christian thought, it's remarkable how our unconscious self may have taken on these ideals. We split ourselves into parts and hide away those parts that are ugly to us. And in so doing, we limp along, unable to be fully, wholly (holy) ourselves.

Woodman speaks of how nature can help us heal this split.

She speaks of how, in healing ourselves, our bodies have to be prepared, be ready, to absorb the work we may do on our psyche. I take this to mean that we have to recognize and accept our bodies in order for the psyche to fully integrate its learning. She says that in (consciously) bringing our Spirit to nature,

“ . . . the psyche recognizes something of itself in the matter of nature. And the unconscious responds by becoming the perceived object [in nature]. What happens is in some sense a reciprocity in which conscious and unconscious, mind and matter, join to produce a third. That third is the meeting of body and spirit, bringing with it an act of joyous recognition."

For me, this profound insight re-affirms the power of nature to heal and whole us. By learning how to really see and feel the essence of a tree, for example, in all its imperfections (it seems that any tree of a certain age has some part of it dying or dead), that gap in our psyche that is created when we yearn for God— ”Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” — dissolves into just being who we are. Human. Alive right now. Working on perfection perhaps, but grounded in our humanity. That third thing, the integration of body and spirit, is when our true joy arises.

I went to the next women’s group meeting feeling slightly that I should apologize to everyone for being such a mess. But one wise woman in the group said, “Messiness is more helpful than perfection.”

Practices for the integration of spirit and body, of heaven and earth, can be this simple: stopping on the street to look deeply at a bug, or a small sprout growing through the cracks in the sidewalk.

Looking ”deeply” is the trick here. It’s seeing with your entire body, not just eyes and mind. It’s imagining you can feel what that bug or sprout is experiencing, having an empathic experience with that tiny being. You can do it in 30 seconds . . . but it’s often challenging to perceive with a clear and completely open beginner’s mind, the mind of a child.

If you happen to be a parent of a small child, lucky you! You have the opportunity to do this every day.

Perhaps taking 30 seconds every day to shift our attention in this way is actually a spiritual practice for integration that brings spontaneous joy.  Try it and see!

Wisdom of the Collective

Early this month (March 2013), I gave the opening keynote at the First Eco-Feminism Conference, “InSpirit: Reviving Our Communities, Our Spaces, Ourselves” put on by the Women’s Resource Center at the University of Utah. A task force of several women worked for a year to conceptualize and realize this conference, in response to their own questioning about what feminism is today and where it is going. In preparing for my talk, I loved wrestling with the question of “what is feminism now?” As the task force of women intuited, I also felt that ‘feminism’ had expanded in its definition and scope and was inextricably tied up with our relationship to the earth. Thus the term ‘eco-feminism.’

The talk that came out of me was my own story of coming into awareness and connection in my own life.  I found that my own story was indeed a story of this most current incarnation of feminism. Feminism for me, and I think for many, is now coming to be about the primordial energy of the Feminine; the receptive, creative, moving and magnetizing force of the universe which is expressed in all things — the Feminine that is relational and requires deep connection—with self, others, place and the earth.

It’s difficult to make an ‘ism’ out of something so big!

When we define the Feminine in this way, it does not polarize, but include. We move beyond victimization (acknowledging fully all that has been historically done and continues to be done to contain, control and subdue the Feminine) and into a more powerful place of acceptance and integration.

After I spoke, the entire audience and I gradually moved into a giant circle where we continued the conversation. The circle was somewhat ceremonial in that we used a talking piece, a big backbone of perhaps a cow or bull, and spoke sparingly but strongly from our hearts. It was a risky thing to attempt at a public gathering, but may I say, it has been a secret dream of mine for years!

I was completely blown away by the depth and wisdom of the group. People spoke of their own connections to nature. They spoke of their sadness at the losses of natural places and the hope and exquisite beauty of creation . . . of the amazingness of the moon! An 84-year-old woman spoke of her first circle, in 1965 in a consciousness-raising group. A woman sitting next to me, whose life is dedicated to spiritual consciousness, wept . . . she herself was born in 1965. A man spoke of his questions about evolution and the environmental movement. A young woman asked for the group’s blessing as she embarked upon her education in environmental law—with the intent of bringing the Feminine to her practice in a big way.

And for all the beautiful words, what I remember most powerfully was the energy of the group. There was a profound presence, a deep connection of heart amongst all 50 or 60 of us, all of us listening with our whole being, each of us feel each other’s true nature, each of us giving our attention and authentic caring.

I felt both my uniqueness and my utter embeddedness simultaneously. This is what it means to be in community. Communing-in-unity, while holding and respecting our diversity. This is how the greatest wisdom is accessed—the wisdom of the whole.

May our cultural swing toward the Feminine and the earth embrace the Masculine and all that we’ve created in the last 5000 years . . . and may we sit in circles and circles and circles together.

Breaking, Burning and the Grand Canyon

Fire

I re-connected with an old friend the other day. He is in the throes of internal and external break-downs— a dissolution of life as he knew it, and of himself as he knew himself to be. I recognize this place as a tender place, a terribly painful place and a deeply sacred place. I was very impressed with my friend’s wisdom amidst his feeling of complete disorientation: he knew he had to find a spiritual connection. He is, as he said, a very pragmatic aetheist, though he wished with all his might that he COULD believe in God. I could relate. I too in my life have felt that sense of an impossibly huge and yawning gap between me and “God”, whatever the heck that is. Or more accurately, I’ve felt too small for anything like God to give a damn about.

I’ve been slow to waking up to the pain of the world. I have had a relatively easy life, a decent childhood and not much trauma, compared to what many people experience. In my 30’s I remember thinking, and even saying to people, “what’s all this Buddhist stuff about ‘life is suffering’?” It seemed to me that if you were suffering, you simply weren’t paying attention to all the beauty and goodness everywhere in the world. Which, as I see now, was both true . . . and not true.

Then the middle of my life rolled around and somehow, I was plunged into suffering—suffering from the inside out like I had never experienced.

As I did, my friend is doing psychotherapy, where he is learning to feel fully the grief and pain that he necessarily suppressed while growing up as a tender human in this often harsh world. His heart is breaking, as did mine, and he is shedding many tears, as did I.

In A Return to Love, Marrianne Williamson writes, “We need to be in touch with our negative feelings, but only in order to release them and feel the love which lies beneath them.”

Williamson goes on to say “ But we need support in feeling our positive feelings just as much as we need support in feeling our negative ones. It is the experience of genuine emotion of any kind that the ego resists. We need support and permission [my emphasis] to feel our love, to feel our satisfaction and to feel our happiness.

Permission to feel satisfaction and happiness — to feel joy. It’s OK to relax and profoundly FEEL JOY in the body. What a radical and liberating concept. I was inspired to speak to my friend about the burning in my heart — this very visceral experience of love that is kindled by opening myself fully to the pain and suffering of the world. The Buddhists have a name for this practice: Tonglen. It is a emotional/physical act that one feels in the body, a literal sensation of burning in the center of the chest. In can start as a small spark, a feeling of compassion for another as we recognize a shared identity of our human condition.

Here’s the catch: one’s heart must necessarily BREAK before one is able to feel the burn.

It is critical to have support in feeling, nurturing, fanning oh-so-gently the new little flame of this kind of a larger love. My wise friend sensed this, not knowing fully where he was going or what he is seeking. Together, in a shared space of communion, we focused our attention on a spark of love in our hearts — and I saw for a moment, fire kindling in his eyes.

To be CONNECTED. To Self, to God and to others. This is a life of Spirit, a fundamental part of being fully human that we are craving today—in a new way. To jump the yawning gap and re-connect takes tenacity, courage and a willingness to fully feel emotional pain. A willingness to break and to burn. I’ve heard it said that standing on the edge of the gap, it seems one is being asked to jump across the Grand Canyon. But after one has jumped, and can look back, one sees the gap was no more than a crack in the sidewalk

Portal

2010-Hubble-Space-Telescope-Advent-Calendar-18

I’ve been feeling crazy stuff in my body and psyche this past week. I awoke last Friday feeling as grey as the weather, for no particular reason that I could put my finger on. In the afternoon, a friend told me the news of what had happened that morning at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and I felt a heartbreak grow in me so deep that all I could do was sit in silence and let tears roll down my cheeks. For days that heartbreak has persisted.

I had devoured a book by local spiritual teacher Clinton Brock the preceding week which opened me up to the idea that my spiritual evolution was not entirely up to me . . . that there are larger forces at work (like, God, for example) and that maybe I needed to surrender in some way; give up my Identity Project as spiritual athlete.

Then I picked up a book I’d had in my library for some time, The Grace in Dying by Kathleen Dowling Singh, and began reading her brilliant transpersonal perspective on how we are spiritually transformed as we die; that it is a natural and normal part of the human experience. At the moment of death, we come to know ourselves as immortal, divine consciousness that exists beyond our physical bodies. But before we come to that knowing, there is tremendous resistance and suffering, anguish and great grieving—and necessarily so. The ego does not so easily give up its life.

For days now, I’ve felt like something in me is dying.

I have been asking God/The Greater Force and Field of Life to burn away everything in me that is not Love. And my heart has been aching constantly, radiating down my arms. I've felt way too clearly the enormity of my smallness, that I am so mean to myself inside, of the myriads of ways I act from the mental ego and how closed off my heart is.

I’ve not been in the greatest mood, I’ll admit!

But I have had a sense that it is not entirely about me. That if I wait and fully feel what is going on, something will eventually shift. I noted that in the darkest moments of grief, when I sat meditating, feeling the heartbreak with my full attention, it would morph back and forth from grief, to love. From grief to love and back to grief and then to love again. Deep, open-hearted love.

And sometimes, while meditating, I would feel nothing, no connection. Nothing but my chattering mind, going on and on about this and that, trying to enroll me.

Yesterday I was able to catch some of the global celebration happening around the world via live feed on my computer. Our technology has taxed the resources of the earth, sped us up beyond our natural capacities AND it is connecting us in powerful, unprecedented ways. Watching and listening to the words of others who feel the transformation happening on the planet, I felt unified in a field of common knowing, the ‘noosphere’ that Teilhard de Chardin spoke of.

This is what I know. We are evolving as a species, waking up to who we really are: immortal divine consciousness, one with the whole process of creation . . . we ARE the process of creation, becoming aware of itself.

At this moment, the heartache and fear and tears are gone. I feel myself to be in a quiet space of limbo, a waiting room that is clean and empty. Waiting now for birth.

I write this for you, dear reader, who is on this journey with me, in your own unique way. We all have a purpose, a special role to play in the new world that is dawning. Creating beauty, inventing something, being Love, making peace in small or big ways—the possibilities for cooperation and co-creating are endless. Now is the time for right action. We are now consciously choosing our future together.

Go Team!!

A Different Way of Knowing

Lately I’ve been thinking about a different way of knowing. Different from the one I learned so well in school—the knowing ‘about’ things; their names, where they are located, and theories of how they work. Interestingly, this collection of data as knowledge for all these years seems to be using up my available RAM. I’ve been thinking about a different way of knowing—one reason is because I realize I’m forgetting stuff. I forget who came to my first wedding in 1996 . . . like, totally have no memory of that person being at that eventful celebration. I forget what I walked into the bedroom to do or get. I forget where I set things down. The way of knowing that is remembering names and places is not as strong as it was in younger years.

I’ve been thinking about a different way of knowing since returning from St. George last month where I led a daylong experiential workshop in Snow Canyon, holding a container for a group of folks who wanted to go deeper into their own knowing. With the help of ceremony, wild nature, a day without the 'to do' list, and a community of like mind, we dipped into this other way of knowing together.

I’ve been thinking about a different way of knowing because of my friend Kaye Whitefeather Robinson, who has been showing me petroglyphs all over the place in and around St. George. Her stories about these ancient symbols in stone come from both a passed-down knowledge of Native elders, and from her own inner sense. She trusts that sense without being attached to it, a sense that comes alive when she shares with others.

I have read, in Primal Mind by Jamake Highwater (1981), that “primal peoples come to know a thing by being it for a time.”

By being it.

When I was younger (in my 20’s), I would sit and vision into who I wanted to become next. I remember I would sit still and go deep inside and listen to what my soul really wanted. I would then feel myself being it. It tended to be fairly specific and felt quite natural, quite innocent. This was before I ‘knew’ about manifestation and the energetic dynamics of creativity; before I had names and theories for any of this process. Oddly, I seem to be less able to vision in this way than I used to.

A dear friend told me at lunch last week how, in starting his new business, that he had a very hard time believing he was worth the money he decided he should charge, based on the market. So for a year, he faked it. He just pretended that he was worth the money—for a year. Eventually,  he said, he began to believe it. This friend is a man who runs his non-profit consulting business from his heart and gut . . . from a different way of knowing. With great effort and love, he has grown into knowing his authentic self, and gives THIS authenticity to his clients. His business is going gang-busters.

About a month ago, I was very upset by a story my father told me which I immediately recognized as the influence of his younger brother, my uncle. I have felt this uncle to be of a very negative, even demonic influence for the past several years in my family and this story was the straw that broke the camels’ back. In a swirl of rage and love, I confronted my father (who has been diagnosed with dementia and is easily influenced—an important detail) and poured out all my concerns and caring. He seemed to “wake up” and we connected on a deeper level than we ever have. A break-through conversation! Later that evening, far away from my father, I drank two beers, put Led Zepplin and then Blue Man Group on the stereo really loud and danced. I danced as the Hindu goddess Durga, the mother of the universe, supreme power of the Supreme Being, the power behind the creation, preservation and destruction of the world. I WAS Durga, for a time. I whirled and swirled, yelled and sang, and let my body/mind do what it wanted, with all my might. I banished false stories, I banished ignorance, I banished demons of all kinds from myself and from the family.  I felt the joy and power of this ancient, powerful feminine coursing through me. Since that dance, my uncle’s influence has ceased (perhaps for other reasons as well, but who knows what my being Durga did?).

This different way of knowing has to do with letting myself go, like a child playing make-believe with all her heart. It has to do with listening, listening, listening. When I am deeply connected to nature, I know things from within this different way of knowing—in my body and beyond words.

I am practicing this different way of knowing daily; learning to trust it, to embody it, and to be a voice for it in this culture.

I think you also know about this different way of knowing. How does it manifest for you?