A Place at the Elephant

When I was little I had a book with stories from all around the world. One was a poem about seven blind men who set out to experience an elephant. Each came in contact with a different part of the elephant, and so each acquired a very different idea of what an elephant is like. They started to argue right away. The guy who found the elephant's tail says something like

Oh dear, you'll understand, I hope
The Elephant is very like a rope

to which the fellow who came across the elephant's leg replies

If you will please pardon me
The Elephant is very like a tree

I remember thinking that they were all very silly -- and that it is always very silly to think you know the whole story and to fight about your point of view.

As an adult I rediscovered the tale of the Seven Blind Men and the Elephant. It's a Sufi teaching story. In the Sufi story, the seven blind men go home after their experience of the elephant and each starts a Wisdom School in which they teach about Elephants. Each school attracts adherents. The adherents fight bitterly for the point of view of their respective schools -- hurting and even killing members of other schools. The elephant, meanwhile, is long gone.

There are a lot of levels at which this story works. One obvious point, though, is that, if you want to learn what an elephant is like, if you are blind, the best way is to find one and put your own hands on it. Then it's good to stay near it so you can keep learning. If you do this you will undoubtedly discover that elephants not only have a variety of very different parts but they also move around, make noise, eat, spray themselves, go swimming, have sex, have babies, and defecate.

A friend of mine is looking for a spiritual community. This caused me to want to define for myself what such a group of humans actually IS. At its best, I think, a spiritual community is a group of blind friends who go out together to form a relationship with an elephant. They might bring along some of the writings from the Seven Wisdom Schools on Elephants, but they will want to experience the elephant first hand -- and then they will want to talk about their experiences with one another -- and then go back and experience the elephant some more. The elephant will remain their focal point, present in their midst as it were.

Such an expedition has its hazards. Elephants are not tame beasts. Still, I have a happy little picture of them curled up together, elephant and humans alike, while everyone sleeps.

"If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas," the old saying goes. If you lie down with elephants, what do you get up with? More importantly, what do you get up with when you lie down with The Divine?

The Wisdom traditions say you get up with a terminal case of knowing we are all One -- i.e. of love. This love transforms your life, the life of your spiritual community, and the world. You don't necessarily have to look for big visible signs of this love, transformation being something that often happens quietly in the dark, but on the other hand the big splashy effects are often there.

A spiritual community will show the effects of being in relationship with The Holy. In some way it will be changed, and therefore it will change what is around it. It will, as it were, bring the qualities of the elephant into the world. As Jesus, the ever-practical spiritual guide says, "you'll know 'em by their fruits.

Here's to the life-long exploration at our fingertips. And here's to our good friends who smell a little like elephant.

Amor, Bane of Artists

Amor, plague of all artists, has visited me today. Thank God, he didn't come by way of powerful lust, nor even dream or imagination. He is squeezing the heart of a young friend of mine, who has fallen in love with a -- truly -- unattainable man. This guy is married, and a cad to boot. But Magda thinks the world of him, in her doe-eyed way.

So I sit her down and tell her the basic facts: that the Soul, in its sometimes questionable wisdom, wants her to see something that -- truly -- does not belong to this guy but instead belongs to her. "He's just a guy," I tell her. "What you are really in love with is some magificent hidden part of you, some priceless jewel, something you do not see in yourself. Instead you see it in him and love it there. He is not even what you imagine. There is just a little hook, a tiny bit of the jewel over there. You are the real possessor of it. You have to pull it back in, see it in yourself."

Of course she does not get this. In our culture of romantic love, love at first sight, love that must at all costs be consumated, this understanding is not common coin. Even, she tells me, if she got this, what good would it do her? Her feelings are still overpowering. She yearns for this guy with all her heart.

"You don't yearn for the guy," I remind her. "You yearn for whatever you are imagining him to be. You don't even know him. Feelings are just things. They can be suffered."

"Write endlessly in your journal," I tell her. "Especially, allow yourself to feel the grief and the anger that you cannot have what you want. Talk to me. Talk to all your other friends. Do not under any circumstances talk to (the guy) about it. Try to see what your love for him might be calling you to bring to birth in yourself."

She looks hurt. The world I am offering her is a cold place. She doesn't see how beautiful it will be when she recognizes her own truth burning in her own soul. She would much rather throw herself off a bridge. And yet I know this learning. I can stake my life on this learning. I know it with all the certainty of foolish failure as well as that of triumphant success.

"Amor," I plead after she has left, "can't you take that barb back out of her heart? Don't you know there's no context for this unrequited love thing any more?"

He smiles at me. He has become over the years a dear, if difficult, friend. His still small voice blooms in the center of my head. "And what would she be then? Trouble waiting to happen. A deer in the hunter's sights. Next time she will not have you to help her out. And the man she falls in love with will not be quite so unavailable."

I feel my brows drawing together in Teutonic obstinance. I start to speak, but he forestalls me.

"You think too much sometimes," he advises. "Go paint something." And with that the bane of all artists is gone.

A Place that Embraces You

It's been a difficult week. I've been embroiled in turmoil of all sorts: doors shutting, resources failing, loved ones fighting. Perhaps as a result, this morning in my imagination I find myself in a realm of peace and solitude.

I am sitting in a quiet forest of aspens and lodgepole pine. Near me is a little spring, splashing over rocks on its way to join a creek somewhere nearby. Wind runs its fingers through the tree branches, and they talk to it in some foreign language, maybe elf. I smell pine sap and clean air. I watch the play of light and shadow. I feel the small stones in the humus I am sitting on.

In my soul a terrible sadness and tension unwinds like the spring of an old fashioned watch. The bleakness of knowing and grieving the places I cannot go recedes and calm enters. I relax into the bright stillness of this imaginary day.

When I was in high school I spent real days like this all the time. I'd pack an apple, a canteen, and a tablet of lined paper into a small canvas back pack, and pedal my bike north into Grand Teton National Park. It was 70 miles around the "Loop" as we called it -- out past Moose on the main highway to Moran Junction, then west on the Park road past Signal Mountain, then south past Jenny Lake, joining the main road at Moose again. I'd stop at some out of the way, unmarked spot in the lodgepole forest, hide my bike amid the trees, and walk a little ways until I found a nice place to sit and write a little, undisturbed by a single other soul except the animals who chanced by. Those days are burned into my memory with the deep imprint of that which feels like "home".

So I am home today in my imagination. Rooted in the earth of my own soul, I gaze at the familiar mountains beyond my copse. Adorned in glaciers and the tiny veins of snowmelt, they gaze back placidly. "Here," they say, "are a few million years of history growing into being in front of you." They are still growing, a couple of inches a year, as the block fault that begat them continues to slide -- worn down by winds and snow, they are yet still growing.

My friend Debra jokes when something is taking awhile to change, "it's going slowly -- as in 'slowly the ice age ended'." She says this about our work on the various "isms", like racism and heterosexism.

If there is a conclusion to be drawn, I think I'll let it pass today. It is enough for the moment to be here on native soil in the healing imaginal realm. Perhaps you have a place like this, a place of peace and familiarity, a place that embraces you and grounds you. Perhaps you would be willing to share.

First Thoughts on Being Color Blind

I am a little fish swimming in a sea of white privilege. I was made aware of this by participating this weekend in a two day anti-racism training. I would not ordinarily pay much attention to this on my own.

It's being color blind; there are certain things I simply do not see. When I opened my computer this morning an ad featuring a well-to-do black couple came up on my screen. Before this weekend I would have thought, "it's great that since Obama's election we have more people of color being represented in a positive light," if I thought anything about it at all. This morning I think, "what sort of message is being communicated here? The woman and man are both thin, small-nosed people. Her hair is straight, they are both well dressed, slick. They're conforming to a certain standard that has been set by the white world. They are not a challenge in any way to the status quo; they are a message of assimilation. How is this really different from having a white couple portrayed?"

And the thing is, I don't really know the answer to that question. Perhaps this sort of ad is celebrated in the black community. More probably the reaction is mixed. I would have to find some folks of black African descent in my social network and then ask them how they feel when seeing an ad like that. They would have to be willing to spend the time to inform me -- and risk the vulnerability.

As an introvert my natural tendency is to divide the world into two categories: what is familiar and what is dangerous. I tentatively and shyly approach what is familiar. What is dangerous I try to avoid.

Because I am white I can comfortably do this. I am not forced to learn someone else's culture simply in order to be able to survive. I don't have to know, for instance, the proper ways in some of our more common Hispanic ethnic groups to address an elder. I do not have to carefully attend to the nuances. I can be color blind.

It's unsettling to know that people of color have to accommodate me in certain ways simply because I am white. It is sad to me that there is a built-in power dynamic in all my friendships with people who have been marginalized. I would rather not have that sort of privilege. Ignoring it, however, does not make it go away. Color blindness is never a cure for racism.

When I lived near the Wind River Indian Reservation and began to have friends who were Arapaho and Shoshoni, my two categories of "familiar" and "dangerous" expanded. I learned a multi-faceted way of seeing individuals within the context of their cultures. I am still like a bull in a china shop in those worlds; anywhere I put my foot something could break. My friends are always having to whisk the more fragile things out of my way. Simply put, I am not as adept at learning a second "language" as people who are the object of racism are forced to be.

I pray that God help me work on all the nuances and aspects of white privilege and racism I can, that my community support me in this work, that we all grow less color blind.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Reading something in an old issue of Parabola ("Inviting the Demon" by Judith Simmer-Brown, Summer, 1997) I come upon the line, "The motivation to integrate the shadow can never be in service to the ego." "A truth of definition," I think, "since the shadow is all psychic content to which the ego has objections." And I prepare to read on.

In my imagination something taps me on the shin. I look down and discover seven little demons encircling me. They come to about knee level, but they are red of eye and sharp of tooth, ugly and vengeful. My stomach clenches. The thing about these demons is that they are perfectly able, and would be perfectly willing, to tear me limb from limb. As I think about just how vulnerable I am to them, a lump forms in my throat and sweat beads at the edge of my forehead.

"All right," I whisper. "I'm sorry for being so cavalier."

They grin evilly. I see in their eyes the power to deeply wound others, to ruin my relationships, to cause devastating harm.

But then I realize I have been dealing with each of these little guys in an ongoing, day-in-and-day-out way. They plague me in unruly thoughts, unwise comments, and downright despicable behaviors. I try to keep them in sight, but they are good at winking out of view and attacking from the rear. Everyone else is much more aware of how they manifest in me than I am. (I know this to be true because I am much more aware of how they manifest in others than those others appear to be.)

So, this being an imagination, I decide to talk to them. "You are very scary," I tell them. "Have mercy."

This causes them to grow in stature and evil. They put their hands on my legs, pricking my skin with their talons.

I refuse to act and refuse to look away. "If you destroy me," I tell them, "you will have no one in which to live." They are, after all, all mine.

"Have mercy," they tell me. "You are very scary."

I look at them, at each of them. They are who they are. "But I don't WANT to be a lazy, impatient, possessive, hungry, jealous, lustful egotist," I say. There is a short silence in which they all wait, holding their collective breath. "But I am," I admit with a sigh.

"Sometimes that's bad, sometimes that's good. I can't always tell the difference."

Things relax. They regain their rightful size, and some are larger and fiercer than others, that's for sure.

Suddenly I notice there is an eighth demon standing among them. Unobtrusive, with a breast of golden feathers and lancet eyes, it stands there looking innocent. "You don't fool me for a second," I muse. "You look so meek and yet feel so dangerous, so destructive."

With a shock of recognition I realize it is the ego.

Out of Good Ideas

I am exasperated this morning. All my good ideas are like tiny flames in soggy wood. They sputter to life for awhile, create a lot of smoke, then sputter out again. I'd leave this metaphorical camp site for a metaphorical hotel room with a hot shower and big screen TV if I had any metaphorical money. Unfortunately I have staked my wad on this wilderness experience.

Something more is needed. I am morphing into a different creature. On the other hand perhaps those are some grand illusions, psychological slights of hand. If I were one of my kids I'd be telling myself, "get a job."

Raven croaks at me from the gloomy abyss. His eye is black as obsidian today. He shows me Odin, hanging from the Tree of Life: nine days and nine nights, body green with decay.

What ever happened to Lazarus after he was raised from the dead? We never hear of him again. Did he just return to life as usual, out there in Bethany? Did he follow Jesus? If so did he cower in fright with the rest of the disciples at Jesus' torture and crucifixion?

Or was he a kind of prophet to our doomed Lord? Did he take Jesus aside on that same occasion when Jesus visited Mary and Martha and had his feet anointed with oil? Did he tell Jesus, "Now this is what happens after you die. Here's the road you will be traveling, and here's how it ends."?

I picture a man comfortable looking at long shadows. What is there left to do after you have been the poster boy for resurrection?

But Odin climbed down from the Tree and invented a gift for humanity: the first form of writing. And Jesus climbed down from the Tree and gave us everything: citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven and the Holy Spirit's cleansing wind.

I am out of good ideas. My "to do" list has only one thing on it: ART SHOW DEADLINE JUNE 1. I think I'll go paint something.

Raven settles down on my window ledge to watch.

Mother's Day

It's Mother's Day tomorrow. In honor of that event, which is really about the very successful move on the part of the greeting card industry to sell more stuff, I want to muse for a bit about a Shadowy aspect of being a mother.

I haven't met a single mother -- but there may be some out there somewhere -- who hasn't made the following promise: "I will raise my children in so much better ways than my mother raised me."

Why is it that we get into this sort of place? It's a grandiose vow. It assumes that our parents were benighted, stupid, unwilling or unable to exert themselves in the business of child rearing. We come to learn, as we try to live this vow out, that it really is a little over the top. We discover that we are equally as human as our parents were, and that, while we may not make exactly the same mistakes, we do pull some pretty big blunders. Oftentimes we have to admit that our children are actually less well adapted in some ways than we are. If that's the result of parenting skills, well, we really have to eat some crow.

But all of that is not the shadowy aspect of this issue. The shadowy aspect is that the whole way of thinking is about proving something. It's a dialogue with our mothers rather than anything having to do with our children. "I'm not going to let MY children do. . . (like you did)" is essentially a statement of accusation and resentment. It's a terrible basis from which to make well-thought-out responses to our children's needs.

My mother's way of trying to instill a change of behavior in her children was to brow-beat them with dogma. I swore I'd never do that to my children, and I didn't. I had reasonable conversations with them. I asked them questions about why they made the choices they did, and explained why I thought the choices could have been better. Only, when I was really disappointed and hurt, my father's communication style -- sarcastic innuendo -- would creep into the discussions.

My children didn't know they had been saved from dogmatic brow-beating. All they knew is that when I got mad I got mean. I'm sure my daughter promised never to do that to her children.

I think this dialogue with our mothers stems from our collective fantasy that parents really can "do it right". If you have a Good Mother, you have kids with a sense of self-esteem, inner resources, access to their native creativity and intellegence, and the ability to love generously. If you have a Bad Mother, well, you have the opposite. EVERY mother is TERRIFIED of being a bad mother.

Here's the reality. No matter how hard we work at it, no matter how creative, loving, and watchful we are, we are not ever going to be perfect parents. We will be wise in some ways and utterly stupid in others. We'll have days when we're at the top of our form, creative geniuses in child rearing. We'll have others when we feel like Satan has taken over our brains and green pea soup is spewing from our mouths. Worse -- we might not even recognize some of the pea soup moments.

We will not be able to protect our kids from the real dangers and pitfalls of growing up. Drug addictions, HIV/AIDS, gang involvement, pregnancy -- these are but a few of the things we can work hard to combat in dialogue with our children, but which are ultimately out of our control. There are so many many more.

My advise to all you working parents out there is to give up on the grandiose vows to your parents made out of resentment and hurt. Instead, pray a lot. Get the best help you can. Take yourself off the hook of thinking everything is all your fault. If you see something that alarms you, shout it from the rooftops and don't quit shouting until somebody believes you. And, well, pray a lot.

Happy Mother's Day.

Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch

Philip was definitely following the trickster God the day he found himself on the deserted road between Jerusalem and Gaza. What was he doing out there? Was the community in Jerusalem driving him just a bit crazy with its total love and sharing? The life style where everything is held in common used to do that to me sometimes when I lived in a vegetarian commune in college. Sometimes you just had to sneak out for a hamburger.

Philip was just a bit fey that day -- following a whim, blown by an angel. He could have been murdered or worse, out there all by himself on the road.

Instead he met an incongruous carriage, a most strange and mind-boggling entourage. Imagine it with me. Perhaps there was an umbrella to keep the esteemed occupant from the sun. Maybe a few servants sat about with fans made of palm fronds. The esteemed one -- womanly in appearance -- might have been dressed in flowing robes of luscious color, might have been adorned with gold jewelry of flawless perfection, might have worn just a touch of exotic scent, might have spoken in a rich soprano. The entire entourage would have had skin the color of figs. The esteemed one would have been a guy, castrated. We don't know how, when, how he felt about it. But it would have put him on the fringes of his culture -- valuable to the royalty he served, but a freak nonetheless.

Philip, cosmopolitan as he was, might have seen people like this Ethiopian before, but would he have ever spent time with them in lengthy conversation? He was a Jew. He probably would have been taught that such folk were dirty. I can imagine his tolerance extending to, say, a civil smile as he passed them in the street -- an acceptance of their strange culinary practices and spiritual rituals -- fine so long as Philip didn't have to have anything at all to do with them.

That particular day, nudged by his fey angel, Philip came up alongside the carriage. He recognized the language being spoken by the esteemed occupant, and he recognized that a passage was being read with which he was familiar: Isaiah, for heaven's sake! Incredulous, he asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?"

At this juncture the Ethiopian could have become offended. A bearded, less-than-tidy Jew was trotting along beside his carriage, sandals flapping, and dared to eavesdrop on what he was doing. But the esteemed one had just come from a very heartbreaking time in Jerusalem. He had come all the way from Ethiopia to hear the scholars talk about the Hebrew scripture, which he had found somehow in his homeland and embraced passionately. But no one would talk to him. He was ritually unclean, doubly, maybe triply so. And the most essential element of his uncleanliness was that he had been castrated. You just can't do much about that.

So, instead of shooing Philip off, he said plaintively to the nosy intruder, "How CAN I? No one will teach me."

In this statement Philip heard all the frustration and longing of the outcast. His heart went out to the esteemed carriage rider, and he said, "I will teach you."

The Ethiopian invited Philip up into his carriage. Philip relinquished his plans, his distaste at things unclean, and any sort of misgivings he might have had about riding in carriages with strangers who are going God only knows where on deserted highways. Up he hopped. When he hopped down again it was to perform a baptism.

The miracle of the day unfolded. Ethiopian and Philip together invoked the profound symbolism of cleansing and being made new, of death and new birth. A powerful new understanding of who and whose each of them were was born.

Where will your road lead you today, I wonder? And who do you suppose you'll encounter on it? Wherever you go and whatever you do, may the God of eunuchs and fey Jews bless your journey.

Irene

On the wide sweep of empty prairie land, where the wind blows silence into the deepest recesses of the soul and the cloud shadows sail like clipper ships across the sagebrush-dotted hills, a goddess lives whose name is Irene. Irene is tall and silver haired. She wears gingham skirts, jeans with suspenders, long sleeved blouses, hiking boots. She walks about in dry washes and across the crests of hills, on mysterious errands that involve plant bits and staring down prairie dog holes. Her long hair wisps free from the tie at the back of her neck. In her footsteps little green shoots spring up.

Irene is the bunched spring and fall to earth of antelope running. She is the deer's TV-antenna ears and the sharp bark of the fox. She is the placid amble of buffalo, the sparkle of light on frosted grass, the sudden splash of black-eyed Susan in the midst of grey-green sage in July. Above all she is the cry of coyotes at sunset: "I-r-eee-ne," they say, back and forth, calling each other in many voices. "I-r-eee-ne, Ireee-nnnne, yip, yip, Ireee-ee-ne."

Why is this manifestation of God the one to whom they sing? Her name means peace. She holds the intricate weave of life-giving-life and life-giving-death that is the ever-changing surface of the prairie. She watches the entire dance out of her copper blue eyes, sometimes tapping her foot in rhythm. She is the high wail of strong wind. She is the silence behind every burst of meadowlark song. She carols joy at all matings and tranquility at all endings. She loves each tiny seed and awkward newborn, every old bull lazing in the sun. Sooner or later she is the last refuge of all of us. She is our welcome home.

If you have not been to the prairie to sing to Irene with the coyotes, you must go soon. Her silence will shake the tension out of your sinews even as her wind plays an other-worldly music in your bones. She will pry your fingers off the things you care most about and give you a vision of your place in the cosmos. She will cradle you with the rare certainty that your name is known forever. And whether you return or not from your walk out into the waterless places, the strange song of the coyotes will heal you: Irene. Peace. Irene.