The Way of the Dream

God is Love -- A Pentecost Proclamation

2011-06-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

God is love, we say.

When I was a child, I was very confused by that assertion. My teachers believed in hell and in the Day of Judgment on which Christ, sitting on his throne in heaven, would separate good people from bad people and condemn the latter to an eternity of torture. There was no way I would ever be one of the good people, and so I was doomed. And what was loving about a God who would throw me into the fire as soon as I died? Perhaps he was righteous – certainly he was pure – but he was not loving by my way of reckoning it.

I was also confused by the fact that God’s love did not keep terrible things from happening. I and the people around me suffered, and God allowed this to happen. I decided that either God was a wimp or that he didn’t care all that much about what happened to me.

Little did I know that God was present in all the moments of my childhood as a goad to learning and to speaking the truth to myself and others. Little did I know that some of the very things that made me feel like a bad person were prompted by the whispers of God in my heart. Little did I know that, while the Day of Judgment is a metaphor and hell is not a literal place, a fiery reckoning is part of the walk with Jesus, every single day. This reckoning happens when we look dispassionately, with the eye of truth, on our daily antics, and strive to live as Christ's people in the world.

Now that I’m almost 60, I understand that God’s love is not, in the language of psychologist Carl Rogers, Unconditional Positive Regard. Yes, God accepts me where I am and never gives up on me. We wouldn’t still be in relationship if that were not true. But God’s love is fierce and demanding. It strips away everything I might dream or imagine about myself, down to my essence, and only then does it speak to me, and only to that essence. And then, in a still, small voice, that love begins to make demands.

God’s love feels to me sometimes like the lion’s love for its prey. Have you ever seen this on nature videos, how the lion takes the gazelle in its teeth, caressing it like a lover? God’s hunger for me is like that.

And God is relentless. God will not take no for an answer. God waits outside every door I close. Open the door a tiny crack and suddenly God is inside, working transformation on me.

I have discovered that I was made for this relationship. I was made for following the erratic promptings of the Holy One in my heart. I was made to sing praises and make thanksgivings. I was made to worship, and, in my own unique way, to serve. Living as I was created to live makes me happy as nothing else can.

God is love all right.

Practical Tools: Forgiving

2011-05-31T06:05:00.000-07:00

Today's post is a simple offering of tools. I hope you find it helpful.

Forgiving is central to our life with God in community. It is a difficult task, actually impossible without the help of our relationship with the Holy. How can making art help? Here's a concrete way.

The person who wrongs us takes something from us. They become indebted to us through the harm they have done. That's why we talk about retaliating as “getting even”.

What is the shape of the indebtedness? What does it look like? Perhaps it is as tangible as the TV they broke through carelessness. Often it is more nebulous: the lost sense of well being and safety; the innocence stolen; the self esteem destroyed. Write about, draw or paint the thing stolen. What did it mean and what does its loss mean? What does it look like, feel like, to you?

Forgiving is releasing the person who harmed us from their debt to us. Now that you have a concrete item or set of items representing the debt, think of some gesture or ritual that will allow you to release the person responsible. The gesture might be cutting the metaphorical string that binds the perpetrator of harm to the debt. The ritual might be that you hold the object up and saying three times, “(Name), I release you.”

It’s important in doing this ritual that you are ready to do it. That way it can be a truly meaningful act. Are you ready to let the other person walk away scott free? Are you ready to let go of him/her and that debt of theirs? God is witness; and your connection with the Holy will be what allows you to really cut the ties.

Even so, you may have to do it more than once. That's okay.

Here is what not to do: Do not throw away or tear up or in some other way get rid of the object representing the debt. Whether it’s the broken TV or the loss of innocence, self-esteem, or well being, you are now responsible for it. It’s now in your hands. What will you do? Maybe it needs to be grieved and let go. Maybe it needs to be repaired and restored. These are separate actions from forgiving. They are what you need to do with your object next.

A couple of other things that are separate issues from forgiveness: Are you in harm’s way with the person you have forgiven? It is not part of forgiveness to leave yourself open to future damage. Are you protecting that person from justice? Forgiving doesn’t mean lying or covering up wrongs. Instead it means seeing the transgressions clearly, admitting them forthrightly. You don’t have to be complicit in a crime in order to forgive. Neither do you have to stay in a dangerous situation.

I hope you’ll tell me about your experiences with forgiving and about how this exercise goes. Blessings on your journey.

Variation on a Theme

2009-08-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

In my dream I am with a little animal no bigger than the top joint of my finger, a cute little bunny-like creature with black furless ears that curl back over his shoulders. He hops into mischief at every turn, and I try to cage him -- for his safety and my peace of mind, I tell myself. But he is a shape shifter, and all my best efforts fail. He grows tiny and sneaks through the cracks or he grows large and pushes off the lids. By the end of the dream I am completely exhausted, and I realize it cannot be done. I climb into waking consciousness realizing I cannot contain him.

Later I find him again in the imaginal realm. He is sitting on the back of my living room sofa staring up toward the ceiling. He gathers himself, ready to spring away as I draw near.

I hold still. "Why must you be so hasty?" I ask. "I am only trying to keep you safe."

Suddenly roots grow from his feet, tearing apart my sofa and the floor beneath it -- muscle roots with long greedy tendrils. They thrust into the ground beneath my crawl space, plunging deep. A tree grows up from them, a great bark-knotted trunk pushing aside tables and lamps as it expands into the living room, growing branches that rip through my ceiling and the roof above and then divide and replicate in a million tiny fingers which each grows a leaf -- two or three leaves -- as I watch. A vast green canopy expands over my broken home.

I am speechless, gaping. It dawns on me that what I am seeing is very beautiful.

The leaves flutter, puff out a cloud of blue and yellow butterflies.

"Ok," I finally manage, "I guess you don't really need anybody to keep you safe."

The tree grows a pair of eyes, close to the ground. They glitter in the early morning light. They become great crystals. I see myself reflected in a thousand facets, and in each reflection I am anxious and worrying.

At first I am offended. But -- what can I say? "Yes," I acknowledge. "That is me."

The tree grows branches that reach for me. It's leaves fill the morning with wind song. I allow myself to be carried up into the bright dance of greens and blues, yellows and russets. I feel myself unraveling. Instinctively I reach to hold my atoms together. "Not again," I moan. Leaf songs soothe me. I grow blind with the chili pepper taste of sunlight on my tongue. I float into darkness and timelessness.

Later I am lying on my side on what is left of the floor in my living room. The tree is gone. The tiny shape shifter sits in front of me, where I can see him without moving.

"I don't get it," I tell him. "Are you saying I still cannot plan my life, tie anything down?"

He shows me movies, dozens of people making decisions. In each case something important that they could not know about happens just after they have chosen a course of action. In each case it would have been so much better -- for them or for the world -- had they not yet decided. In each case avenues are closed off, potentials snuffed out.

I groan. "That is the nature of human existence. That ALWAYS happens."

He watches me, nose twitching.

I sigh. Once again I give in. "Ok." And then, "How will I know?"

I will know. Suddenly that is the one thing I am most certain of: I will know.

My Shaman

2009-07-24T13:15:00.000-07:00

Recently I did a collage, a window to the inner realm. As it took shape I began to realize it was revealing to me a very special advocate alive in my soul -- someone brand new and yet as familiar as sunlight or a pine-scented breeze. In the image sits an elder, a gentle man leaning on a cane, eyes closed, listening intently to the voice of Spirit. He wears a headdress of feathers and roses. He is a Shaman. In the image his world is hearth fire and new life, microscopic seeds and darkness, a passageway into the depths of the psyche, and the far cold reach of northern mountain vastness.

This morning, longing to be with him, I reach into the imaginal realm. I find myself walking through a high alpine meadow, lush with blazing verdent grasses and wildflowers of every imaginable color, toward a one room log cabin squatting at the crest of a little hill. More grasses and flowers adorn the roof of this dwelling, which is sod over pine poles and which sports a dented, rust-spattered stove pipe puffing smoke gently into the sunrise. As I draw near I can see that a lovely grey Pendleton blanket covers the doorway. A gnarled hand draws it aside, and my Shaman steps out.

His hair is startlingly white, like Rosean's. He wears roses tucked behind an ear and a pink shirt with red polka dots, jarring to look at. He smiles as he draws in a breath of cool mountain air, smiles even more broadly as his gaze turns to me. I see he has his cane hooked over an arm and that he wears soft leather slippers and soft denim jeans.

He looks a question out of his gentle brown eyes. I realize we already know one another very well. It comes to me that I've always called him grandpa.

"I am sad today, grandpa," I tell him, speaking the words of the lump that is in my throat. "I miss my mum."

He nods. His face is all easy light, all kindness. "She has not done well by you, TF," he says. I realize he has always called me this: "TF". I think I might even remember why.

"I think I have missed her since I was very little," I tell him. "I am lonely with the missing of her. I don't fit anywhere. I am a wind howling at the edges of houses, lifting roof tiles and bits of siding, desperate to be inside."

He has been holding a pelt, a soft animal skin, white with brown highlights. He brushes it with his fingers and puts it down gently on the ground. It fills out as I watch, becoming a living rabbit, and instantly streaks off across the meadow, ears laid back and hindquarters pumping. Startled, I watch it's little cotton-swab tail disappear into a clump of bushes.

He chuckles softly. "You have a bit of the wolf in you this morning. You've scared my bunny." My eyebrows go up, but I don't ask. He puts his arm across my shoulders and draws me in against his side. I feel myself relax. "Walk with me a bit," he says.

Suddenly we are at the edge of a vast lake. White birds accompany us as we stroll near the shore line across wet sand full of puddles in which minnows swarm. Mist is rising from the surface of the water and my grief rises with it like oily black smoke. A voice in my heart whispers in time to our foot falls, "Letting go, letting go, letting go, all the way down." The tension in my throat eases a little.

We walk for a long time. Then we stop. My Shaman draws a circle around me in the sand with his cane. "You are beloved," he tells me, and steps back a step.

I feel myself dissolve, become one with the lake. I am fluid of many layers, many colors, many temperatures. Fish swim in my depths. Ducks and cormorants ride on my surface. I am water droplets skating down the air currents, reflecting light. I am tiny bits of breathing liquid in which small minnows swim. All life emerges from me. All life returns to me. I feel my arms and legs dissolve, my nose and face and ears fall away. My belly is everywhere. My eyes see from a thousand perspectives.

In my depths is a heartbeat. For a long time I listen to it without thinking. Then I realize it is the heartbeat of the Mother. It is the heartbeat of Motherly love. I feel it in me and through me. It is a part of me, as intrinsic to me as my own heartbeat, my own breath. "Love, love," it pulses, sending me nutrients along its pathways.

I am back again in a dream landscape from many years ago. A tall woman has grabbed me by the back of the neck and is pouring water into the top of my head. I look down at my chest and see the water sloshing around inside me, as though I were a glass container. "You are my aquarium," the tall woman tells me. I have been her aquarium. But something is required of me in this moment.

This is God. This is the Mother God. I belong to her completely, always have. "Yes," I pledge to her. "I am your aquarium. With your help."

Things swirl away in a cacophany of color. I come back to myself after many minutes, and I realize that I am once again at my Shaman's lake, and I am kneeling on the sand. He is standing near me, and when he sees I have come back to him he gives me a hand and pulls me to my feet. He pats me in mock solicitude. "Much better," he informs me.

At his cabin later we share a cup of tea and talk about how the afternoon thunder storms will build behind the mountains and water this little meadow on their way to the plains. From time to time I spy a rabbit nosing about in the grasses and I watch appreciatively until it disappears. Around the fourth time this happens I realize I can feel its heartbeat. I can feel its heartbeat while the rabbit is in the meadow, and I can feel it after the rabbit has disappeared. The rabbit's heartbeat courses through my blood. I know where the rabbit is. There is no separation between us, absolutely none at all.

My Shaman smiles at me beautifically and pats me on the back of the hand, spilling a bit of my tea.

The Feather Touch of Joy

2009-07-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

It comes to me softly, like the feather touch of joy. I have awakened in the deepest part of the night, body suddenly an oven. Moonlight silvers the leaves outside the bedroom window, making them skitter like minnows in a great black sea. I have emerged from some deep dream -- there is something -- something like a warm room.

My grief has awakened with me, strong in the early morning quiet. I watch it swell. Just so. It is hard work and it makes me feel brittle and tired. But behind it I can feel the prayers of my friends, a weaving of support and love like hands linked all around my soul.

That warm place. I feel it now like a small point of golden light, no bigger than my hope. I chase after it as I lie in the darkness, and suddenly I am inside.

It is not a room. It is somewhere apart from space. It is as though I am held by some mammoth person. I feel his arms around me -- it is a "he" -- protective and comforting. This shocks me back into my quiet nighttime bedroom. It is truly novel; I don't think it has ever happened to me before, not at least that I remember; that a man has held me in this way.

Amazed, I return to my imagination. I am leaning against a huge chest. Arms still hold me and the deep booming beat of a heart is in my ear. Tears leak from my eyes as I recognize that aspect of Father I never knew -- or knew before speech, before abandonment.

Revelation follows, in the way of such moments, in a cascading series of understandings. I realize that The Father can be warm rather than judgmental, that he can claim me as his own. Perhaps this is the attraction in God the Father -- an image of God I've never before appreciated. He stands in a different relationship with me. The Mother offers nurturing, life, dance, connection, the power of holy anger, home and a place to which to return. The Father offers understanding and forgiveness. Having a Father, I suddenly have a place to stand in community -- and that leaves me with much less to do, much less to prove. I have never felt shielded quite like this before.

Behind me a voice rumbles like thunder, "I am proud of you, and pleased with you."

This meets some need in me so basic that I can barely stand it. A hard knot inside me releases. I suddenly realize I am feeling very little -- the little kid in me wide-eyed and totally vulnerable. "If you are just a product of my wishful thinking," I say to the great force behind me, "I will kill you." I recognize the absurdity of this statement but can't think of anything else to promise.

I hear an ozone-creating boom of laughter. "Dream on, bucko," says the huge voice.

I have a feeling that much more will come. For now it is just enough to feel the arms around me and the beat of the heart. I think of my son Mike, how when he was very little he used to lean against me as though I were a deck chair, arms folded behind his head and legs crossed. He'd tell me stories as he reclined there.

I think of sitting in this warm place as though it were a deck chair. I think of leaning back, arms behind my head, and telling stories. Something about how totally comfortable I feel with that image makes me grin. I drift back to sleep from that warm place, that tickling feather touch of joy.

Messenger from the Void

2009-07-02T19:59:00.000-07:00

Raven watches me out of his sideways eye, which is black and ringed with gold like a wedding band around the abyss. Today he is Odin’s bird. I plunge into the Void through his dark vision.

There the blue ice ghosts of warriors swarm until I come among them, and then they draw aside to let me go further and alone. No light comes from anywhere. I have no sense of direction other than “on”. “Back” may be the same as “on” for all I know; the doorway seems to have vanished. I can see nothing, in any direction, except blackness. This is strangely restful.

I go “on” until I stop. Then I simply hang in space. No light, no sound – I think of Odin hanging on his tree -- nine days and nine nights until the Universe explodes. I float as though submerged in water. I am neither hot nor cold.

Suddenly light blossoms, gas-flame blue light which appears to be at some distance and which defines a horizon. It rises and cascades, eerie and silent like the Northern Lights. I watch, admiring the beauty. The light never changes color, but it ebbs and flows, dancing like flame.

I watch for a very long time. "I don't understand," I think, "what this has to say to me." Perhaps it has nothing to say to me. Perhaps I am nothing.

Slowly it dawns on me that this is no place for a human being. It is beautiful and restful but empty of human scale and connection. In a moment of extreme panic I realize I do not know the way out. I turn this way and that, but the same view greets me on every side. The icy horizon surrounds me. I try “swimming”, flailing my arms and legs to move through the void. Nothing seems to change. I can’t move that way. Or moving makes no difference, doesn’t get me anywhere.

It occurs I ought to will myself elsewhere. I open my eyes. Now I am out of the realm of imagination and back in the everyday world. But I realize my soul is still in the limbo of the Abyss. My grief seems to have been leached away, but I feel hollow and empty, not healthy. I walk about in the house, but can’t set my mind to any task. I am listless and restless. Everything seems pointless. My creativity has been Voided, as has my energy. I long for my tears.

I decide to call out to the energies of Psyche and beg them to release me. I return to the dark and empty place of my imagination. The Northern Light display has disappeared, and I am again in total darkness.

Hanging there, I reach out. “Raven,” I call first. There is no answer. Nothing changes. I call then for the Mother. Still there is no change. I plead with Coyote, with the Little People, with Baba Yaga the Great Witch. In all cases, nothing changes. These are not the gods of this place. They cannot set me free.

Finally I reach in a direction I haven't tried for a very long time. "Father," I whisper. Sorrow hits me like a silent tidal wave. It spews me out of soundless emptiness and into my studio. I take a breath. Sure enough, I am present once again to myself here and now. Reproachfully I look at the window ledge where Raven has been sitting while he watches me. He is gone. I remain very, very sad.

Church Signs

2009-06-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

Last week Rosean and I drove by a church sign that read:

WHY DIDN'T NOAH SWAT THE 2 MOSQUITOES?

Rosean laughed and amended it:

WHY DIDN'T NOAH SWAT THE 2 MOSQUITOES AS HE FLOATED DOWN THE WEST NILE?

What Noah didn't know (ah).

Friday and Saturday morning Rosean and I got up early and went out to Fossil Creek Reservoir with our coffees. (In case you ever need to know, Human Bean opens at 5 a.m.) With binoculars and a rather dated bird book we strolled to one of the bird blinds, sat a bit, strolled to the other blind, sat a bit more. We are not birders; we don't know anything about the culture and protocol of bird watching. We just witness all these little lives out at the Reservoir, each with its passions and trials, desires and attempts at fulfilment, births and endings. Yesterday two scarlet-eyed grebes called to each other in a way that caused my Scorpio partner to opine, "they want to get some." I was skeptical, but sure enough, soon they lifted their bodies and arched their necks in an elegant mating dance, a sort of side by side promenade across the surface of the water. We just loved this dance. We love all the dances, even the ones that make us sad.

I'm sure there are dozens of excellent sermons on the theme of Noah and the mosquitoes. After all, if we didn't have mosquitoes we wouldn't have swallows, those jewel-like darters. We wouldn't have the waterfowl who feast on larvae. In a terrible domino effect we'd lose entire ecosystems -- maybe the entire biosphere. Yet, in spite of our understanding of this fact, if it were entirely up to us we really would kill off all the mosquitoes. We'd have some rationale.

And, archetypally, the story of Noah really is wonderful. Imagine building a great hulking boat when you're living on a desert. Imagine waiting 40 years to be vindicated, 40 years before the waters rise. Imagine carrying the seeds of all future life with you on your ark, the craft shaped by your own hands and toil. And amongst the creatures is the mosquito. It works, you know?

But I think of all the little lives at the reservoir, and of the lives surrounding the reservoir in all the little (and not so little) houses, and of the lives in trees and at the edges of lawns. And I think, you know, we're Christian. We should put up one church sign and leave it until all the little plastic letters crumble and fall away, a sign like this:

CAN YOU EVEN F--ING BELIEVE THAT GOD WOULD PUT ON HUMAN FLESH AND LIVE AMONG US?

Or, as Saturday's Saint du Jour (St. Cyril of Alexandria) put it in the little daily meditation booklet Rosean and I read:

THE MOTHER OF GOD CONTAINED THE INFINITE GOD UNDER HER HEART, THE GOD WHOM NO SPACE CAN CONTAIN

Can you believe this message? It's the sort of fact that unravels your socks and sets your hair on fire so you have to get baptized just to put the flames out!

Silence and a Tiny Peace

2009-06-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

"They are dead to me," my mind whispers as I sit in my favorite chair looking out through every window on leaves and bits of sky. I think of a time I killed a cat with a shovel -- it had been hit by a car and too many things were outside lying on the pavement that should have been safely tucked away under fur and skin. It was night. I had the shovel with me, returning from gardening with a friend. It was a quick, merciful ending. And yet I feel anguish and guilt.

When I close my eyes I can still see the car round the corner in the dark, and the impact, the tiny body arcing, the massive blind machine moving on oblivious. Against the painful lump in my throat I weigh the moment after the fall of the shovel blade when there was only silence and a tiny peace.

For a few days now there have been moments when I haven't remembered that I am now an orphan. Laughing with friends, working on projects, I live into the moment and dream into the future. At other times I look at my hands and am shocked to find them large-veined and wrinkled, the hands of an aging woman. In those moments the grieving child looks out, puzzled, into my life. My own palms hold her broken heart, my own vibrating lullaby stills her fears.

"Dead," insists my knowledgeable wisdom, and the shovel blade comes down with a clank, cleaving the central chord, the tie that binds. And even the little kid sees how my true history is emerging now that the falsehoods have been severed from it. Love drove me, my own love, invisible because not mirrored. It is a huge-hearted thing, this love. It cherishes and supports, nourishes, sustains, reaches with understanding across almost any barrier. Almost.

There are some collisions that cannot be survived. There are some endings that are written into every possible future. Alone on the pavement in the night this is what I know.

Sitting in my favorite chair looking out at green, I remember once again and weep.

To Whom Do I Belong

2009-06-19T09:56:00.001-07:00

Grief has gotten into my joints like cold, and I am moving slowly, like a lizard before the sun has warmed the rocks. Every aching lift of arm can unleash a bout of tears. I carry myself gently, tenderly. I am a little surprised at the intensity of my feelings, a little unnerved -- yet bizarrely grateful. Most of the pain I suffered growing up was endured alone and in the dark; I'm not so used to sharing with family and friends, not so used to being cared for.

I am so thankful for Rosean, for Carrie, for my friends, for my friends' dogs, for my kids and grandkids. I belong to these people as they belong to me, and I am grateful.

Today the angel and the raven sit side by side on the window ledge of my studio. Soft, green-smelling air wafts in around them, mixes with the odor of turpentine. I finish my work, turn in that direction.

Raven's eye is lapis and deep as geyser water. She ruffles her iridescent feathers and croaks. I have an image of tree rings in a huge old stump, tiny dark green fir needles, humus, cool and deep. I am young, looking up through the cathedral of lodge pole pine at a lapis-colored sky. Puffy clouds silently glide by. For a long moment I lean in to the remembered whisper of wind in tree tops, the smell of sap, the underlying silence. Here is where my gut is grounded, where the umbilical chord of my soul is buried. Out of this place I came into the world of human relationships like a child raised by wolves.

Back in the studio, the angel's eyes are compassionate, even as fire dances around his/her head. I am comforted by the leap of flames, orange and gold and blue. Now I am a much younger child, and I look fearlessly at this heavenly messenger, asking, "whose child am I?"

Mother Earth claims me. My own particular forest and my own mountains claim me. Uri, the dark woolly god of buffalo claims me. Irene the goddess of peace and coyotes claims me. The queen of fairies claims me. Raven claims me. Jesus the Christ claims me. He is my brother. I am a child of God.

The Irreconcilable Difference

2009-06-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

I am wearing my Leo socks today in honor of the fact that, while I am sometimes vain and self-focused, I am also deeply, incredibly loving and generous, and often open to the Spirit. My Leo socks will hold my feet dear as I seek ways to hold myself dear and allow my friends to hold me dear on this day when I feel like a layer of my heart has become powder and is blowing away.

Yesterday I was disinherited. This was as inevitable as brush fires in California. Still, I was not prepared for the severing of ties with my parents, abrupt and final as it was after a short foray into truth telling. Both my mother and my father have spoken, and so I, along with my sister, am orphaned. Thank God for my sister.

Here's the thing I will always remember: I told my father that if this was the last time we would ever speak I needed him to know I love him. I told him the truth of my forgiveness and for just a few seconds I saw deep in his eyes the longing to believe and accept it. My poor dad.

He will deny that, of course. He will say I am completely crazy, delusional, brainwashed by "the feminists". I imagine he believes he has to say these things; I know in my heart he knows otherwise.

I let go of my mom years ago. I was washing clothes one day and I imagined her standing at her washing machine and yearning for me as I was standing at mine and yearning for her. Despite everything, we were mother and daughter, loving one another deeply, and yet between us lay a truly irreconcilable difference.

The same difference reared its head yesterday. It is not going to go away. If my parents eventually try to bridge the chasm they just created, I hope I remember that truth telling doesn't just happen one time. It is ongoing, relentless -- devastating.

I am stripping the bed in the guest room, washing the sheets and the towels. The windows are open to dissipate my mother's strong perfume. The soft, rain-laced air is soothing on my swollen eyes.

Wealth Management

2009-06-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

The poet Mary Oliver is so dang cool! Here's a poem by her that a fellow EfMer offered as a prayer at one of our sessions.

Messenger by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird--
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work.

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Our work is loving the world. It seems to me this is primary work for all of us, not just for poets. Being absolutely gobsmacked by the beauty that surrounds us, that's the spiritual practice of gratitude -- which is relational -- which is healing.

For many of us these days there's a gnawing uncertainty at the back of our thoughts. The awareness of the precarious nature of financial well being has visited us. It has always been true that the security of the world is ephemeral. We've just, up until now, had a run of very good luck. Our country has managed to stay stable enough and peaceful enough to make us all wealthy. Lucky us.

But now the deeper reality is breaking through. As Jesus was fond of pointing out, wherever things are piled up, thieves can get in, and nature can take its course -- in spite of the very best security systems and insurance policies. "My soul," says the man with the bulging barns, "look at what we've piled up here. We're set. We can rejoice." But Death comes that very night and claims the man's soul, and what becomes of his full barns then?

Where is our true wealth? It is in the fall of water over stones, the scent of Russian olive trees in June, the flash of bird wing, the bright display of sunset in towering cumulus, the rumble of thunder heard from within a dry shelter. It is in community -- in those moments when friends delight in us, when somebody allows us to help them, when our softball team celebrates a good play. It is in the existence of our grandchildren, our children and our parents, our dogs with their soulful eyes and hopeful tails, our kitties purring in our laps, our friends. When a beautiful line of song lifts our hearts, when the momentary lapse of attention does not result in a twisted ankle, when the tense cashier offers a joke instead of a criticism, we are rich.

"Are my boots old, is my coat torn
Am I no longer young and still not half perfect. Let me"

Time to turn -- turn around -- time for metanoia. In the ancient practice of Gratitude we learn to see the world anew, alight with abundance. "Let me," really is a good prayer. Let me see what there is to celebrate. Let me remember to look. Let me "keep my mind on what matters."

The world longs to be loved. Cherishing her flamboyant displays and her secret hidden treasures is a spiritual work that has no parallel. It roots our souls to ground. We also long to be loved. When we find our place in a community that just thinks we're the cat's meow, we are free to express our deepest natures. This is also a spiritual work without equal.

So, let me. Let all of us. Let us do our work.

Inanna Dances

2009-06-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

It has been a long day of frustrating inner silence. The I Ching points, thumbs up, to a time of power and creativity. But all I feel is the continuation of waiting.

"Tell the stories," whispers the small child in my heart. What comes to mind instantly is a creation myth.

Inanna dances. God the sky woman, queen of heaven, dances. God dances in the void, the place of no thing, no sound, no being. Her hair flies out from her head. In no light, no sound, no being, Inanna dances.

God yearns. In the great dance, God yearns. From her guts a great yearning rises up. The yearning becomes a wind. The wind becomes a consort. Together they dance. Together they spin. Together they mate.

The wind becomes a serpent. Inanna bears forth an egg. The serpent wraps his body around it. In the void, the nothingness, the great dark empty, the serpent wraps himself around the egg, crooning.

When the egg hatches everything is born. Wind and rain, sky and sun, earth and waters -- all are born. Inanna separates air from water, day from night, earth from the deeps below the earth. The plants are born and cover the oceans and the earth. Trees are born. The fish and the crawling things are born. Through the waters and the land they swarm. Birds are born. The four legged creatures are born. With Inanna's help all find a place, a home. All are born. "Dance with one another," Inanna commands. "Dance life and death, day and night, struggle and respite." The great dance of creation begins. Men and women come out of a crouch and stride into the plains. Inanna gives them dances and they dance with her and one another.

Inanna dances creation into beginning. Creation dances. God dances with creation and through creation. The serpent wind of yearning dances with creation, through creation, with Inanna, with each of us. The serpent wind of yearning dances in each of our hearts.

Cosmic Pruning

2009-06-05T06:35:00.000-07:00

Rosean and I, on vacation, have been witnessing the devastating effects of the pine bark beetle on Colorado forest land. Whole mountainsides are rust colored and dying. The trees were overcrowded and weak with drought. They were not strong enough to withstand the beetle's invasion.

The overcrowding bit is at least partially our fault. We humans hate fire, and so we have not allowed the natural scourge of wildfire to thin our forests. We have also not thinned them ourselves through healthy, farsighted forestry plans. (Clear cutting timber is emphatically not such a plan.)

I have been thinking about scriptural parables of pruning and casting into the fire. Beetles are a natural thinning agency in the ongoing process of balancing the alpine ecosystem. From God's perspective everything is going just fine. There is an abundance of life amid the rust colored trees.

The question of how and when to "allow nature to take its course" is complex and fraught with emotional land mines. The issue arises everywhere -- even in our own bodies. Think about how the idea of "cure" has morphed over the past century due to the wonders of modern medicine -- which is an expensive and invasive practice.

Praising God's pruning as well as God's planting often requires we get out of our tiny human perspectives. Here's another area in which I need some Holy help.

Vocation

2009-06-02T05:41:00.000-07:00

Vocation at its deepest level is not, "Oh, boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new way to live and where no one, including me, understands what I'm doing." Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling."--Parker Palmer in Let Your Life Speak

The angel sits on the window sill. S/He is neither inside nor outside. S/He gives me to understand that this is the correct place for an angel -- on the threshold. Perfectly relaxed, yet burning like the Olympic torch, s/he gazes at me expectantly.

I am kneeling. My heart demands it. Weary knees and sleepy head and all, when I am kneeling my heart is open and clear. It speaks now. "I have planted what you have given me."

My brain is amazed by this statement. I never was entirely sure what the mission given me WAS, let alone if I had completed it.

"Well done," says the angel, dipping his/her fiery head.

I am not too surprised by this; I am often outside the loop a little when it comes to head understanding. In overheard conversations between friends, for instance, I might find myself delighted by the exchange created by a joke even though I don't "get" the joke, might not even have heard it. Following the flow of the relationship, delighting in the good humor, heart to heart, I am jolted when someone else equally on the periphery asks, "what did he say," and I suddenly realize I haven't a clue. I'm finding meaning in their affection for one another. Intuitive types are like that.

So I am prepared to simply bask in the angel's praise and let it go at that. I'll find out what I need to know later, if at all. I'll trust that some part of me -- my heart -- gets what it needs to get.

But s/he looks directly into my eyes and says, "It is important that you understand."

Busted. "But I don't," I admit. "I have not understood from the beginning."

The angel shows me an exchange I often have with the world. Someone -- a friend, a client, the writer of the book I'm currently reading -- gives me something. They hand me bits -- ideas, dreams, revelations, images. And I work with these bits. I find their roots, their imaginal significance, their natural connections with the larger world, their meaning, their worth, and the beginnings of how they might be developed. In other words, I plant them.

I do this all the time. I do this in all areas of my life. I see the way sunlight reflects on new green leaves; I plant that in a poem or a painting. I receive a bit of some one's life, I plant it in love, meaning and understanding. I hear a good story or bit of scripture, I plant it in an image or a sermon. For all these months I thought the angel was giving me a special Lenten task when s/he told me to plant what s/he gave me. Instead s/he was handing me on a silver platter an image of who I am.

Whatever you give me, I will plant. Of course. I am like that. That is what I do. That is what I have always done.

The angel settles back on the window ledge. "I think I'll just stay here for a few days and see what emerges," s/he says.

I nod absently, preoccupied for my search for a ceramic pot and a watering can.

A Place at the Elephant

2009-05-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-26T05:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-22T10:51:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-05T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Raven Blessing

2009-04-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

This morning an old friend croaks at me from the imaginal realm: Raven, brushing my hair with blue-black wings. She comes from The Void, and I feel the tendrils of that cold, dark country around her. She gazes at me; her eyes are a windless midnight surrounded by yellow rings. I gaze back, waiting.

She shows me first a dawn sky, a brush-full of light staining the horizon. I watch as individual things take form out of the darkness -- a process as sure and unchangeable as the turning of the globe itself.

She shows me next the carcass of an elk half buried in snow -- a creature who didn't make it through the winter night. It is half frozen, and vacant as an empty room. Raven will eat the meat. Where, I wonder, did the spirit go?

Third she leads me high into the heavens and shows me the line of daylight as it creeps across continents. City lights wink out one by one. It is a glorious, breath-taking sight. Daylight touches all of us impartially, every single day, with the miracle of its return.

Have I made it through the winter night? There are some things, vacant as an empty carcass, that will be left behind. They will be food for Raven. "My sister," I implore, "any hints about what is taking shape inside me? I am a planner; I would like to know."

She croaks a throaty call perfectly pitched to shatter my thinking. In the instant following I realize she has already given me my answer. What grows like daylight needs no help from me. Carcass and new life alike, it will be revealed and become manifest. Nobody stops the sunlight, and it falls on everyone alike.

As sure as darkness is, daylight is the gift of a turning world.

Gender Bending

2009-04-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

This morning as I lay half awake, tangled in a knot of blankets, the phrase "gender bending" came into my head. I love that phrase. It sounds like the mutter of thunder.

Gender bending. Picture a hot summer afternoon, still to the point of deadliness. Suddenly you hear thunder and glance reflexively toward the mountains. Tall piles of cloud have appeared. All at once a soft, cool breeze blows through.

I have always been a bit on the edge when it comes to gender identity. I remember a long talk I had with myself when I was in sixth grade. I had taken myself out to the edge of town where I could have some solitude. My inner turmoil was the result of the fact I had come to the realization that something a bit different was being demanded of me in the world of my peers. They were all starting to sort themselves according to sex, responding to the instinctual call of pubescence. This was confusing to me, as I couldn't really make up my mind whether I was essentially a boy or a girl. After much pondering I decided to choose neither.

In my twenties I enjoyed sometimes dressing in a very masculine way. It suited my inner guy. I found, as perhaps many of you have also, that breasts tend to get in the way of this portrayal. And I love my breasts.

The inner guy; the inner woman -- there is something very creative that goes along with fluidity. In Lander, Wyoming, I am ashamed to say, there is an incredibly racist and misogynous event held each year called the One Shot Antelope Hunt. It is awful. No women are allowed to enter, and losers have to dress as "squaws". Well, they may have changed that last bit, but the sentiment remains. My friend Dee wants one day to enter and wear, on the day of the hunt, an evening gown in camouflage orange. The only thing that stops him, he says, is all the men with guns. But his protest might work, where more "serious" efforts to stop the hunt or at least change its more terrible aspects have failed.

I am convinced that God loves gender bending. God loves anything that opens the cracks in stereotypical thinking. God really enjoys a good drag show, loves the sudden surprises, the pushing of portrayals to their most flamboyant extremes. God loves the delight of expression, of self-realization, of making manifest everything one is.

Gender bending. Thunder and the sudden arrival of gentle wind. The spirit moves -- Ruach.

Thanks, Harvey!

2009-04-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

It's gratifying to see that the movie Milk is so well received. It's a good movie. It reminds me of things I haven't thought about in a long time.

I was going to college in Oakland in the years when Harvey Milk was campaigning to be a city supervisor across the Bay. I remember his admonition to "come out of the closet and fight". It was tough back then to come out. It meant severed ties with family, being fired, ostracized, ridiculed . . . sometimes beat up . . . occasionally killed. It was tougher for the gay men than for us lesbians, but we were still, with good reason, afraid.

We used to have these little business cards -- I think they were pink -- that read, "You have just been talking with a Lesbian." We passed them out after conversations with our wait people at restaurants, with passengers on buses, with shoppers on Telegraph Avenue, with strangers at the park -- where ever and whenever we could. Even though we were usually safely away before the cards were read, we thought it very risky. But the idea was that people didn't really know any lesbians; didn't know what they looked like or sounded like, what they thought about, what they cared for.

In those days a lot of women older than me divided themselves up into the roles of "butch" and "femme". They either dressed as men or they wore frills and makeup. Butches always partnered with femmes, never with other butches, and femmes never partnered with femmes. These women would assume these roles in the evenings, when they went out on the town. During the day they "passed".

We younger women thought we were so progressive with our easy movement between masculine and feminine roles. But we were just as closeted.

I remember when Harvey Milk was elected. I went to the Gay Freedom Day Parade that year and waved and cheered as he rode by. We were all elated. It felt so affirming to have somebody like us in public office. He still had the same message: "come out of the closet and fight."

I remember when he was killed. It was every bit as bad as when MLK was killed and when JFK was killed. We cried our hearts out.

I didn't come all the way out of the closet until 20 years later, when another gay man was killed: Matthew Shepard, age 19. We of the glbt community in Wyoming felt the cold hand of fear squeeze our hearts the day he was beaten and left tied to a fence to die. I finally decided that enough was enough. Terrifying as it was, in the months following that tragedy I kept finding myself witnessing in larger and larger gatherings to being a lesbian.

It is perhaps easier in 2009 to come out of the closet and fight. But it is still no walk in the park. Terrible crimes are perpetrated on the glbt community every day. Young gay men are still the population most at risk for suicide. Women loving women and men loving men still risk losing their families, their jobs, their faith communities and their homes.

I am still afraid every time I have to come out. My heart races; I sweat. I know that, every single time I do it, I risk ridicule, rejection or worse. I have a healthy fear of gay-hating groups, religious people who want to "love the sinner and hate the sin", political organizations who would blame the glbt community for societal ills. But I still have to come out. For the sake of my glbt brothers and sisters, I have to come out. For my own sanity, I have to come out. Scary and lonely as it sometimes is, I have to be out.

Here's to Harvey Milk, trail blazer for gay rights. And here's to each of us who reluctantly or enthusiastically, sooner or later, follow in his footsteps and come out of the closet and fight.

On Community

2009-04-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

Once, many many years ago, when I was young and isolated inside my own skull, I sat on a hillside above the ocean and felt miserable and bereft because I was so alone. I couldn't imagine a community in which I would fit -- couldn't fathom how I would ever find anyone who would like me.

That day, in my imagination, a large silver serpent came to me. She was huge, sensuous in her undulations, a cobra and deadly. I was afraid she would bite me. I thought I knew how that fantasy would go: death and eventual rebirth in some new, less anxious form. Instead she indicated that I should follow her.

She led me down the hillside through the tall grass. We sinuated through a stand of oak trees, across a scree slope, down a cliff face, to a beach teaming with people. On the beach she disappeared. I was left among the people, none of whom took any notice of me at all.

A little perplexed, I looked around. It took me a minute to see what I was meant to understand. Standing there on the sand I was suddenly aware that everyone was breathing in and breathing out at exactly the same time. Everyone, including me, was breathing in and breathing out in unison.

It had never occurred to me before that other people probably often felt just like me. We all, I realized, have our places of insecurity and isolation. Amazed, I followed the thought to its natural conclusion: meeting people there was something I could do, something natural to me. If everybody was like me, why, then, I could speak to them. We could have a relationship. People need to be reached in their tender places, I realized. They need to be touched and acknowledged, welcomed.

Coming back to ordinary time there on the hillside, I was relaxed and at peace. I began to enjoy my surroundings. A tiny cool breeze carried the smell of fish and seaweed along with the distant rhythm of surf from the ocean below. Light played through murmuring leaves above me, ran in waves across the pale grasses and danced off the scattering of bright orange poppies among them. A meadowlark shouted his distinctive hail.

After awhile I picked myself up and began the walk back to my car. No one was on the trail with me. I followed it's dusty length in a reverie, beginning to doubt my insight a little. Suddenly something moved almost right under my feet. A huge brown and gold snake had been sunbathing on the path. This was no imaginal beast; she was entirely, solidly in the three dimensional world. Startled by our sudden arrival in one another's world, we both nearly had heart failure. She slid quickly away into the grasses. I scurried off home, totally nonplussed by the synchronicity. I had learned to take such things very seriously.

So, I took my insight more seriously than I might have otherwise. Still it took me a long time to live into it. Now, looking back on the cobra's visit, I see that the wisdom she brought me was very serious indeed. In fact, though it worked slowly and over years, it was every bit as transformative as a venomous bite. Forced to her radical understanding of community by my own anxiety and pain, I am not released from the vision as it expands in ever more broadening ripples. There are places where all of us can meet one another. There are places where we are the same. Across the boundaries of class, the barriers of race, the divides of histories, religions, cultural understandings, sexual awarenesses, bodily abilities, gender orientations, and the fences raised by any other differences between us we belong to one another. Period.

And so I am reminded to pay attention to the ripples cast by the dropping of a stone of wisdom into the pool of spiritual understanding. We Americans tend to stop too soon. We learn the "can do" aspect of a lesson, applying it to the transformation of our personal psychology and our individual lives. We forget to let it play out into the realm of implications for all of us together. The further the ripples go the more scary and dangerous are the insights. At some point they begin to demand the world of us.

The Upstairs Room

2009-04-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

Today I am thinking about Jesus' disciples straggling in from wherever the explosion of his death and reported resurrection threw them. Like blind people, they grope their way toward one another, coalescing in community. They find an upstairs room with a door that locks and they just stay there -- together. Maybe they compare notes about Jesus' post-death appearances, seeking to grasp what happened through pinning down the particulars. Perhaps they just look at one another and shake their heads, saying things like, "Amazing. Who would have thought?" Likely they begin sentences they cannot finish, laugh helplessly, cry abruptly, and shrug. They just hang out. Everything is the same as before and yet everything is different. What sense can they make of what has happened? They need a whole new frame of reference: new wineskins for the new wine they've been given. There isn't much to say until that structure evolves.

True revelation seems always to need a time of incubation. Its immediate consequence is a feeling of dislocation. The world goes on as usual. People go to work, advocate for causes, pick their children up from school, play out their loves and competitions; and the receivers of the revelation feel like a curtain has been drawn between them and all these activities. They are suddenly strangers in their own lives. Not knowing what to say about this, they hope that they need say nothing.

And yet the urge to integrate the experience is also strong. They want to name and describe the revelation lest it disappear. They begin to search for people who have the experience to hear them, who can help them with words, who understand that what happened is real. No wonder the disciples sought one another out.

A wise mentor can be an invaluable asset in a situation like this. It's always a good idea, if you're on the receiving end of a revelation, to find somebody who can help you process it. It generally takes time. Contrary to popular belief, instant fully-formed insights are not usually the rule when divinity informs humanity.

The disciples eventually emerge from their room. They become a dynamic community in Jerusalem, a community that understands the revelation so well they can describe it in many different languages and can live it in such a way that everybody takes notice.

For now, let's hang out with them in their upper room, in the state of uncertainty and wordlessness, in incubation. In this way we'll be empty bowls to receive whatever the Holy has to give us. We'll grow it into something before we let it loose on the world.

Good Friday

2009-04-10T06:52:00.000-07:00

It's Good Friday. Today I'm wearing my "Leo" socks as a reminder of what is altogether too human and untransformed in me: the inner Roman Empire where Pax is a matter of human will and force.

Here's why I am an Episcopalian: the Eucharist unglues me. Since I first entered an Episcopal church when I was 19, it always has. This ritual works, symbolically, on every psychic level. In the immediate language of dreams it is the act of incorporating that which we would emulate, of "swallowing the leader". Then again, it is the sacrificial breaking open of the Godhead to become food for the people. Or, on the other hand, it is the shattering of divisive human egotism into the larger God-centered awareness. It is unity and abundance, the ever-flowing abundance of the Holy. It is the dance of humanity and divinity meeting and parting and meeting again.

These sentences only approximate the meaning of the Eucharist. At it's heart, like any good symbol, it is mystery. It is something to be lived into, understood, and even then not perfectly, through a lifetime of engaging it.

These days, for me, the Eucharist is about family. It is the blueprint of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the table at which all are welcome, the only table where I eat with people who are different from me in almost every way. Different races and ethnicities, socioeconomic strata, sexual orientations and gender identities, political affiliations, spiritual understandings -- we all eat bread and wine, elbow to elbow, at Christ's table. We divide up a common loaf of bread. We share a single cup of wine. Nobody gets more; nobody gets less. We're all in it together.

Good Friday, empty Friday: the male followers of Jesus scatter like leaves in a wind in the face of the death-by-torture of their Rabbi. The women, who as people of no account are flying under the radar, witness and mourn. It's all such a very public, so very demeaning tragedy -- for everybody. The Romans show their most brutish un-Pax-filled natures. The spiritual leaders of the Jews flamboyantly display their petty self-centeredness. The common people reveal the tendency of people everywhere to become with little provocation a mindless mob. Everybody is so very, very human. Re-enacting the story today I can find the bits of me that are like all of these characters.

Through all this walks Jesus, embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven. In everything he does he remains true to his larger vision of Pax, a Shalom with the heart of God. He sees everything with compassion, teaches where he can and submits where he cannot. He gives us a Way to go forward with one another and he remains true to that Way through torture and death.

Pax will never come to the Earth through human effort and force. It only arrives when we become open to the Shalom with the heart of God. By myself I am like all the characters in the Passion narrative: petty, abusive, blaming, judgmental, terrified, vindictive, and stupid. Fortunately I have a family that comes together over bread and wine to approximate a different understanding. Each faith tradition has a place like this, a place where we are family and our hearts become transparent to the heart of divinity. From these places Peace can be made. May God help us to recognize them in one anothers' Way.

Christian Loyalty

2009-04-06T05:44:00.000-07:00

I am a Christian. In this day and age that admission is not without cost. Nevertheless I confess: I have a relationship of discipleship with the enigmatic, powerful, demanding Christ of the New Testament of the Bible. I believe him to be God incarnate, and accept all the challenges to the way I live my life that that belief brings.

When I was younger I used to wonder if I would have become a disciple of Jesus had I been alive and met him in first century Palestine. He was a dirty anti-establishment peace monger, a fringe dweller who demanded everything of the people who followed him. He turned all the dearly-held beliefs of his society upside down. Simply, forcefully, he introduced a whole new understanding of God, one that didn't include special privileges for people of certain tribal affiliations or levels of affluence. He taught radical inclusion, even of the ritually unclean. He demanded his followers learn the way of forgiveness and that they break old ties to kin and state. He asked, in other words, a fundamental realignment of loyalty away from the concerns of "the world" and toward this kooky understanding he called "the kingdom of heaven".

Lately I have come to see that of course I would have followed this weirdo. I follow him now. That might be partially an accident of culture and upbringing, but it is also a much deeper matter. He speaks to me from the center of my heart, from the room in my psyche where I stand in the presence of the divine. Certainly he would have spoken to me from that place had I met him in the outer world.

The real question is how well am I doing in being his disciple now. That is a moment to moment issue between me and the weirdo. As I understand it today, the kingdom of heaven is a bond of mutual accountability and care between me and all else that is. I have learned over the years that the distinctions between "the world" and this other kingdom are always murky. I think I am choosing in one direction and discover later it's really the other. Or my reasons for doing something morph midstream. Often I'm pulled into some course of action or involvement with others against my own will. The realignment of loyalty is tricky. I've learned to go slowly, look for feedback that comes over time, and not to be too flapped about playing the part of the fool.

Being a fool for Christ -- there's something noble about that. But just being a darn fool -- that's another matter. Unfortunately, you have to risk the latter in order to arrive at the former.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday. With millions of people around the world I reenacted the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and then the passion of his crucifixion. I heard the stories of how Christ's disciples reeled away from the outrageous, horrible, affronting realization of what choosing the kingdom of heaven really means. Betrayal, denial, violence, running naked through the streets -- we all have trouble looking through that bright, bright window that is the cross.

Entering into Holy Week, focal point of the Christian year, I will have plenty of opportunity to reflect on all these things. Thank God for the communities of faith with which I make this journey and for Christ himself, speaking from my heart.

A Hag Wearing Jeans

2009-04-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

This morning, sitting with my tea and my journal, I was visited in my imagination by a hag wearing faded jeans and a saggy grey sweat shirt. She was all over wrinkles, like the before pictures on the Weather Channel website.

I hate those images of wrinkle removal: the craggy face, exaggerated; the magic line, like a curtain dropping over reality, that transforms the face to youthful smoothness. The image, in maddening, boring repetition, etches itself on my psyche, one more form of subtle misogyny.

My heterosexual women friends have told me about the descent into invisibility that aging has brought them. No longer important in "the eye of the guy", as one woman put it, makes them feel worthless, like maybe it's their time to go out on the ice and die. I am assured that the most skilled and proficient career woman will feel this irrational tug. For me, a lesbian, "the eye of the guy" has been at best an irritant and at worst downright dangerous. Not being seen has always suited me just fine. And even so, I sometimes feel that aging diminishes me.

The hag, of course, would like to be called Sophia. "Hag" once meant wisdom instead of ugliness and invisibility. That this is a perspective from a long-ago time is attested to by our collective tales. In our stories and myths, what goddess hasn't hidden herself in some toothless old maid, to watch her people from secret vantage? Even Christ has taken the form of the helpless old widow. This could not happen if hags were attractive, held people's attention.

Sophia chuckles at me, daring me to quit projecting. Uncomfortably I remember the times I have smiled indulgently at collective wisdom as embodied in, for instance, the older women in my church. Then even more uncomfortably I think about the ways I am beginning to resemble those women. I'm just a teeny bit hard of hearing sometimes -- often because I think I know what someone is going to say before they actually say it. I ran into a door a couple of days ago -- gently, with a thud -- because I had expected it would be open and so didn't bother looking. I see paradigms I have longed to shed being broken open and discarded matter-of-factly by people a few years younger than me. That makes me unspeakably joyful. It also serves as warning that it is time for my leadership to take a different form.

Sophia nods, satisfied that now she has my attention. She reaches in the pocket of her jeans and removes a small vial. She prizes off the lid and pours a few drops of some liquid into her hand. Tucking the bottle under an arm she rubs her palms together, then comes at me hands outstretched. I close my eyes, expecting she will rub her ointment on my face.

Instead I feel her fingers against my heart. Small and cool, with that unmistakable sensation of another person's healing touch, they massage the oil in. And I remember -- my wisdom. I remember some of the hurts I have transformed through making them conscious, suffering them, allowing them to be healed; some of the projections I have reeled in and used as teachers; a few of the angers and resentments I have engaged and let go; one or two of the bumbling idiosyncrasies I have seen in myself and come to love. I discover in myself a valuable storehouse.

I can't tell you, just at this moment, what more to make of this vision. Sophia has wiped her palms on her jeans and is regarding me with eyes all a-twinkle. I am grateful that Wisdom treats me so gently. I am awed that she loves me with all the quiet certainly of a snowfall. I aspire to love all her children in just the same way. Impossible task for a little biased human -- I know. Yet still -- I can aspire.

The Old Woman

2009-03-31T14:37:00.000-07:00

In the middle of the forest, somewhere off the beaten track, hidden, there is a little hut. This is the place where the Old Woman lives.

The Old Woman is the friend of the forest. She cherishes and attends. She is always present in the shadows, part of the breath of trees perhaps, or the small heartbeats of birds. She watches from the mouths of squirrels' nests, from the eddies behind the speckled rocks in the creek, from the line between shadow and light along the stems of grasses, from the flash of the wing of a bird. Once in awhile you might catch a glimmer of her out of the corner of your eye -- but never for long, never in a way that makes you certain.

She is a weaver and a healer, gathering blossoms and seeds, combing the jackets of coyotes and rabbits for the fibers for her blankets. Her concoctions bring the fever that helps us shed outmoded beliefs, and the inner quiet that helps new understandings to grow.

In the numinous juncture where the forest of the world meets the forest of the heart, she is the guide. Look for her when the outer world has exhausted you, when your well is dry and your work no longer brings you meaning. Her hut will suddenly appear in a little clearing as day slides into evening. She will meet you there. Her fire will warm you; her meal will nourish you. She is the attendant of the releasing, the setting down. In the simple silence of her forest dwelling, if you are willing to be empty and in need of her, your wounds will be healed and insights will come. She is catalyst for transformation.

As she helps tear down and tear apart, as you weep the tears that have festered inside you, she is the terrible soul-scourging witch. Afterwards, in the feathery blanket of her nurturing arms, she is Mother and Granny.

Here is how you find her: get good and lost in the forest wilderness. Leave the trail or follow it until it disappears. Lose the words and identities that have guided your way. Loose your understandings. At the threshold of darkness her cabin will appear. No matter how fearsome she is, address her respectfully and do not be afraid to go inside.

Then, give it time. A healing season in the forest lasts until all vestiges of your old self have fallen to the ground, been covered over and snowed on, often many times. The achingly tender new growth comes through the detritus into piercing air, and it must be sheltered until it is strong enough to meet the world. Get used to not knowing, not having an address, having no answers to anybody's questions.

When the Old Woman is ready to release you, a path will find its way to her door. It will be a tiny thing, strewn with boulders and sudden cliff faces, but you will know it is meant for you, and you will take it. You will walk it one step at a time, lamenting the necessity to leave the forest even as you anticipate an undefined future. You will know by then not to form definitions too quickly, and how to listen to the quiet wisdom of your own soul.

In My Dream Last Night

2009-03-27T20:21:00.000-07:00

In my dream last night Rosean and I are with a young woman priest. We are all walking somewhere together, maybe at a mall. She tells us there is something she has known since before the beginning of time. Rosean wants her to tell us what that is. She is quiet. We wait. Then there is an interruption of some sort. People come and the priest talks to them. We continue walking, looking in shops, greeting friends. Rosean and I keep waiting for a moment when we can ask her again. There are too many distractions.

This is the sort of dream that begs for active imagination. In my imagination I can go back into the dream, dream the dream onward, maybe find out what I couldn’t learn last night. To do this I have to listen very carefully. My awake consciousness will want to take charge of the dream images, put words in everybody’s mouths instead of letting the characters speak out of their own integrity. The sign that I have set aside my usual conscious perspective and heard the truth of the dream will be that I learn something new.

I focus once again on the priest. She is short, dark eyed, with dark brown hair held back in a clip. She wears a grey skirt and powder blue blouse with a clerical collar, shoes with low heels. Her lipstick darkens her mouth to an earthy pottery color. She is serious, intent. Rosean and I walk one on each side of her. We are in an open plaza outside a number of small shops.

I stop and face her. “Please tell me”, I say, “what you know.”

She smiles sagely out of her deep brown eyes. “You know what I know,” she says.

I sigh. I hate these kinds of answers. I tell her I can’t think of a single thing I know since before the beginning of time. She looks a little nonplussed. Rosean and I both wait. We are not going to let her off the hook this time.

She looks at us both for a long moment, as though concerned that maybe we really don’t want to know what she has to tell us. We wait patiently. She nods and reaches in a large handbag she has been carrying. She pulls out a silver chalice and paten.

The chalice is etched with intricate designs. She hands it to me. When I touch it I know it is very ancient. As I look into it, it begins to fill with water. I watch the liquid reach the rim and spill over. As I stand there holding the cup, streams of water flow out in four directions, north, east, south, and west. I realize I do know this image. I have painted it, many years ago.

I set the chalice down on the ground. It continues to fountain.

The priest hands me the paten. As I hold it it expands. The plaza becomes a great plain stretching away to the horizon in all directions. Green grass waves. The streams from the chalice carve their way through the rich soil. There are tiny fish in the streams now. Little animals of all sorts come to drink and bathe. Miniature people scoop water into pots and take it away to their camp sites, bring their laundry to wash and their livestock to water

I am both holding the paten and standing on it with Rosean and the priest. I set it down, placing the chalice on it. The priest and I look at one another for a long silent moment.

I shrug. “I know this. But I don’t know what it means.”

“Yes you do,” she replies. “You know exactly what it means.” She taps me on the chest. “Know with your heart, my dear.”

I come to see that the image I have been given is a picture of divinity in its nurturing and sustaining capacity. The Holy is our ground of being and the nourishing water of our souls. It is central to all life, the most important thing. Everything moves and has it’s being in this great sustaining presence: The Tao, the Way of Things, the Source, God.

The priest is staring at me. When I finally look into her eyes once more she smiles at me. She smiles at Rosean, holding her eyes as well. She reaches out and takes each of us by the hand. “Feed my sheep,” she tells us. She squeezes our hands. Then she disappears.

I’m left with the image of her lipstick hanging by itself in the air like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

Child-rearing Grannies

2009-03-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

I lit a candle a couple of hours ago. There are several things I am not ready to think about right now, and the little light on my altar is my promise and my reminder.

Two of my grandkids that I don't get to see very often were here for a couple of days. Now they've left, I'm missing them. When they were here, I was stressed and tired. How do the Arapaho grannies do it, I wonder -- raise six or seven grandkids at a time all by themselves in their teeny houses? How do they stay sane?

I am by far not the wealthiest Anglo in the world, but even so I live in such rarefied air. I have a bedroom and an office/studio, and can spend long hours alone there. I can visit with friends without having to break up fights, wipe noses, watch what little hands and feet are getting into. I have clean water that comes right out of my tap. I don't have to worry about how to stretch the food or about how not paying the heat bill makes the babies cry. I have the treasure of being able to plot my own course through life.

I met several of the Arapaho grannies when I worked for a church on the border of the Wind River Indian Reservation. I knew them when they were feeling most vulnerable, when they were having to ask an Anglo for help to keep their little ones clothed and warm and fed, their need to ask an ongoing reminder of Anglo supremacy. None of us liked the roles we found ourselves in at those moments. Try as I might to be respectful, I was still the one holding the purse strings. Try as they might to remember their self esteem and their righteous anger, they were still the ones who had to ask.

There are so many situations like this around the world. Most people are forced to play the role of having nothing. A very few get to play the role of having a lot. There are no intrinsic differences between us; just the hard, cold reality of how these roles shape us in the most basic of ways.

So now that I have been reminded again of the luxury of my life, I have to ask myself how I am doing. Am I being a good steward of the resources I have been given? Am I being a good servant?

And have I yet come up with any good ideas that would change that horrid scenario where people of dignity and courage have to beg from others? Where the few have to suspiciously examine the guts of the lives of the many before a meager few dollars change hands? Where wealthy people of conscience feel like trash because they have the luxury of choice in respecting the person sitting with them, but that person doesn't?

I am extremely grateful not to be a full-time child-rearing granny. And to all the wise, steel-spined women I have met who are doing just that in the most adverse of situations, all I can say is -- thanks on behalf of the world that needs those kids. I hope we can together keep looking for ways of doing it better.

Coyote and the Trickster Christ

2009-03-20T06:47:00.000-07:00

A shadow stole through the mists of consciousness last night as I lay half asleep in the throes of sudden body temperature changes. Coyote, yellow-eyed and grinning, placed one wise, slender paw ahead of the other as he threaded his way across the inner landscape. He looked askance at me to let me know he was aware of me, and to show me some canny message of movement and silence.

In my mind's eye I watched his bobbing tail as he picked his way through the sagebrush, under an egg white moon. I did not have the feeling he wanted me to follow him. He had come, displayed himself, moved on.

When Rosean and I used to drive across Wyoming on our frequent long jaunts, Coyote would sometimes cross the road ahead of us. It was always wise to watch what happened next. Coyote is a devil to a planned-out existence. He likes to shake things up, unsettle what is firmly tied in place. He is the aspect of God that Clarissa Pinkola Estes speaks of in her little book The Faithful Gardener, "Though we think we are following the rightful map, God suddenly decides to lift up the road, placing it and us elsewhere."

Coyote magic runs through Rosean's and my lives in a strong river. We know that God laughs when we tell her our plans. We have learned over the years to find the joy in the moments we travel even as we grieve the shattering of expectations and connections.

Last night something different happened. Watching the retreating bushy tail, I was suddenly aware I was looking at a human face, a quiet presence of compassion and invitation. It was like my icon of the Compassionate Christ, how that icon would look if it came to life and realized itself beyond the foibles of the artist. Coyote was still trotting along, and yet from the same space the face was gazing at me. Gentled, embraced by those brown eyes, I lay quietly for a long time. Finally it dawned on me. "You are also the Trickster God," I said to this Christ who looked at me out of my heart.

Out of my heart he claimed me. "Who are you?" he whispered, as though it were a riddle to which he knew the answer that I must guess.

I found myself thinking of my qualities: determination and patience, arrogance, yearning for community, irritability, inarticulateness in some moments, eloquence in others, dead-on accurate intuition, flakiness. I thought of my compassionate heart -- and then of the abrupt coldness I can sometimes manifest. I remembered my quick mind -- and my absolute obtuseness in certain areas. I examined my desire to please people -- and my utter willingness to speak the truth when the chips are down. I looked in a thousand mirrors and saw the reflections of me at all my different ages. I thought I might have begun to form an answer out of all those and many more pieces.

"Who are you beyond all that?" he whispered.

I felt myself go completely still. I looked into darkness like soft felt. Thoughts swam away from me like fish. Feelings bloomed like flowers and disappeared. Going into matter until the atoms in my body were far enough apart that starlight shone through, I admired all the little universes. "Where is Laurie?" I wondered -- and then wondered who wondered. With that I snapped back into consciousness and found myself fully awake and lying in bed next to a deeply-snoring Rosean.

"What are you asking? What are you asking of me?" I addressed my memory of the Compassionate Trickster Christ, and saw again Coyote's most eloquent tail.

The whisper of a whisper reached me. I am not certain what he said. It was just that he had come, and had displayed himself -- and would shine in gentle compassion, once in awhile, from Laurie Gudim's eyes.

An Irish Temple

2009-03-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

Today, on St. Patrick's Feast Day, I am thinking with millions of other people about Ireland. Rosean and I visited the island ten years ago or so at the invitation of good friends. It is the only place I have ever been off the continent of North America.

On Ireland is one of the most powerful religious sites I have ever visited. It is called Newgrange, and it is 500 years older than the Great Pyramid in Gaza. Think about that for a moment. The Pyramid was built in 2500 BC. That means Newgrange was built long enough ago to be older than our entire Christian civilization, two and a half times.

In North America we have little connection to history like that. The indiginous peoples of this land lived lightly on it, leaving behind few traces. We do not dwell among our ancestors like Europeans do. This makes us all a bit deranged.

But that is a topic for another time. I want to tell you about Newgrange. Newgrange is called a magalithic passage tomb because of when it was built and because human remains were found in the inner chamber. No one knows what it's function really was -- burial site, temple, maybe both. The civilization that built it has passed entirely out of history. All we know about them is that the Celts, who were according to story the sixth race of peoples to settle Ireland, called them the Tuatha De Danann, children of the goddess, and ascribed to them godlike powers.

Newgrange is a covered passageway leading to a cross-shapped inner chamber. It was built entirely by humans, using huge stones piled atop one another and covered with earth. The mound covers an acre, the passageway alone being around 60 feet long. The inner chamber is 20 feet high. It has a corbelled roof so skillfully designed that it has suffered little damage in over 5,000 years.

The most remarkable feature of Newgrange, though, is the alignment of a structure called a roofbox, built above the entrance to the passageway. It is so calibrated that it lets in the light of the winter solstice sunrise. Just at dawn (actually, these days a couple of minutes after dawn, but 5,000 years ago just at dawn) the sun creeps down the passage and illuminates the inner chamber.

Rosean and I visited Newgrange one morning in a group with our friends, a guide, and fifteen or so other tourists. The finale of the tour is a re-enactment of the winter solstice event. After we had walked down the passage -- narrow enough in places that we brushed the walls -- and had stood in the chamber for awhile having the salient features pointed out to us, our guide turned off the lights. She had warned us she would do this, of course, and had explained the procedure for exiting the site quickly. Many people have a strong claustrophobic reaction to Newgrange. Even with the warning and explanation, it was unnerving. We were plunged into megalithic darkness.

In this darkness, we stood quietly for long seconds. My ears rang with the silence. Though bunched with all those other people, I felt profoundly alone. I imagined what it would have been like for the people who built this temple. Maybe they walked the passage by torchlight in the middle of the longest night of the year. Or maybe they went in days earlier, fasted and prayed. I imagined them coming away from their daily routines, gathering to worship God in this special place they had prepared.

Then light came creeping down the passage and into the chamber -- the orange light of sunrise. I felt my heart lift with a profound joy. Even though this light was not the actual sun, it spoke to me with force and power, of the return of growth after stagnation, the return of hope after despair, the return of life after death. I felt it in the very fiber of my being.

Thousands of people enter a lottery each year to try and win a spot at Newgrange for winter solstice dawn. The event is webcast and also shown on Irish TV. It speaks deeply to all of us.

Perhaps we are a dawn-loving animal, a solstice species. We are capable of living in darkness. We can endure long nights, both of the world and of the soul. But our hearts are tuned to the moment when light hits the sky. No matter how rough it gets, no matter how gut-wrenching, no matter how dire, we wait for the promise of the birth of the sun. We wait for the wheel of fate to turn. We live by the moment when the wheel does turn; it is the most important of all our moments. We meet God's promise there.

Friday the 13th, Part 2

2009-03-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

Today is Freya's day again. She came to me this morning, eyes full of leaves and sunlight, and asked me to tell you this tale.

When we lived in Lander, Wyoming, we had three huge blue spruce in our front yard. They towered over the lawn, keeping the grass green in the heat of summer, offering us shade and the fresh smell of sap beneath their prickly branches. One day a huge wind blew two of these leviathans over. They fell gently, side by side, together in their demise as they had been in life, missing by inches the neighbor's roof and leaving giant craters in our front lawn where once their roots had held fast to earth.

The next day, walking about among the suddenly vertical branches, most taller than our heads, we were heartbroken. These two great giants had been such good friends to us. We stood next to them, hands on their thick trunks, where the sap would no longer flow, and we grieved. The last moisture their spiky little needles knew was our tears.

Later our friend and priest, Ann, came over with her prayer book and her stole. Perceptive pastor, she had put together a liturgy for us and the trees. Rosean's daughter Al and a friend, visiting from Fort Collins, joined us in our ritual. There was a place for a eulogy in our ceremony, and we cried. We said our goodbyes and wished the tree spirits well in their return to union with their creator, and we cried some more.

Al's friend was quite mystified by this display. You could read it on her face. "These older women," said her eyebrows. "Wacky," agreed the tension of small muscles in her expressive lips. We didn't care; her presence was welcome anyway. Somewhere deep inside her, we were sure, in the place of Soul, her own roots were being watered.

In the place of Soul we greet our special trees by name. We climb up in them as soon as our small arms and legs are able, and they embrace us in a secret world of swaying limbs and sweeping vistas. We lean against their trunks in the shade to read. We bring our sweethearts to them, and later our children. We place our houses and our gardens under their spreading arms.

Whole ecosystems are born and die in the shelter of one single tree.

Freya tells me it is important that we all remember this. It is important that we give our hearts to our trees.

She knows it is a complicated issue. She realizes everyone must make their own personal ethical decisions based on the information they have been given. She would simply also like to point out -- well, dust bowls, for instance -- and maybe our problems with the ozone layer -- oh, and perhaps crippling drought -- those sorts of things, which in her view come about as the result of being out of communication with trees.

More importantly even than this, though, she would like to say: it makes us less than human when we do not love our trees.

Marionettes

2009-03-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time the Lord and the Lady came from the land of the gods to see how the humans were getting along in London town. They disguised themselves as a young man and woman and strolled about the cobbled streets. They had quite a lark, eating pastries and wearing fine clothing.

They came to the outdoor market, where hundreds of merchants were selling their wares: lush vegitables and savory pies, cloth from the Orient, spices and dyes. They came upon the stall of a craftsman. This man had put the simple joy of his spirit into the creation of two beautiful wooden dolls. He did it just for the hell of it, because he wanted to sing the beauty of human form into the wood and make a toy children would love. He had hinged the joints of the dolls at shoulder, hip, knee and elbow so their limbs moved. He'd given them wrists and ankles as well and also allowed them to bend at the waist. He had painted their merry faces and clothed them in bright and colorful attire.

The Lord and Lady were so delighted by the dolls that they dropped their human form immediately and entered the wooden creations. Ah, how fine it was to move the wood that had already been infused with joy. The Lady became the female doll and the Lord the male. In this shape they laughed. Their brightly colored clothing and their jolly faces inspired them to delighted exuberence. They danced and cavorted. People gathered from all across the market to watch.

After awhile, tiring of this game, the dieties left their wooden forms and became the young man and woman once again, back on the edge of the crowd where no one could see them. They continued on their way through the market.

The craftsman was thunderstruck. First his wooden dolls were animated, then they were still again. The people were joyful and then disappointed. People drifted back to their own stalls or over to other delightful sights at the market.

The dollmaker, though, closed his eyes and savored the moments his craft had come to life. He made strings for the dolls, attaching them by little metal loops to hands and feet. Tying the other ends of the strings to his fingers, he could make his creations move about once again. It was a jerky comical dance, especially compared to the dance of the Lord and Lady, which had, of course, been perfect. But it was a joyful dance nonetheless, and it delighted the children. Thus did we learn to make marionettes.

When we work with clay and paint, cloth and wood to invest our crafts with the exuberance of our spirits, we invite God in all God's forms to come and dance. Such moments of connection with the deities are precious and not oft repeated. They inspire us to joyful relationship. They inspire us to make something new.

Elijah and the Widow

2009-03-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

A story snuck into my consciousness on little spider's feet this morning. Right through the thin place between worlds it whispered. It's a Hebrew story, but there are similar tales in most spiritual traditions. It's about the relationship between us human beings and our prophets or our gods.

The prophet Elijah, so the tale goes, predicted a drought in the land in which he lived. God sent him into the desert to endure through this hard time, and he drank from a wadi and ate the food the ravens brought him.

When, after awhile, the wadi dried up, God came to Elijah again. "Go into the town of Zarephath," said God. "You'll find a widow there whom I have commanded to feed you."

Elijah went, and he found a widow at the gates gathering sticks. As was the custom, he asked her for a drink of water. When she brought it, he asked her for a little piece of bread as well.

Widows in Elijah's culture were the marginal people. Having no one to care for them, they had to rely on the kindness of their community for food. They were in essence beggars, and in lean times they were the first people to starve.

She told him she had no bread, only a bit of meal in a jar and some oil in a jug. She was, in fact, going home to cook this bit of food for herself and her son, and then, it being the last of their provisions, they would die.

So much, eh?, for God commanding her to feed the prophet. It doesn't seem she's heard this message. She is, in fact, in complete despair, at the end of her rope, without hope.

I met a woman a week or so ago who told me of a time in her life when she was without hope. "We all usually have a little hope hidden away somewhere," she told me. "To be without any hope at all is very different, very unusual. You know it when you are without hope." This widow is in that place. She is getting ready for herself and her child to end.

Elijah said to her, "Do not be afraid. Go ahead and do what you've planned, but first bring me a little cake of bread. When you've done that, make the cake for yourself and your son." Do not be afraid? Isn't the woman beyond fear? But there is only enough meal and oil for one cake, and yet he tells her to make two. "For the Lord God of Israel says the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth."

I can imagine the woman standing there on the edge, once again, of hope. How painful that must have been for her -- like heat coming into frozen toes or a little food hitting a long-empty belly. She would have fought against the return of sensation, angry at being called back into life for such a flimsy promise. And yet called she was.

I imagine her weeping bitterly as she went home to do as the prophet asked her, telling herself it made little difference really if she and her son had a final meal or not, but knowing that giving up the grain and the oil was not what she was afraid of. No, she was afraid of the hope.

And of course the little jar of meal did not empty and the jug of oil did not fail. But I'll bet you that woman thought each morning, "What if today is the day the Lord fails me? What if I do something wrong and the promise is rescinded?" Every single day for the rest of the time of drought that woman, getting up with hope, had to also bear fear. Perhaps often she was able to tuck it away and trust in God's goodness, but it would have been there in some measure so long as she hoped.

How does the meal replenish itself in the jar? It is a miracle, perhaps directly from the hand of God, perhaps through the agency of a new and different relationship between the woman and her community -- after all, she was housing a prophet. Abundance is often a matter of sharing, without any plotting or control. Perhaps everybody in the town of Zarephath got a little more willing to give their last cake away, and so everybody found they had enough, just barely, to go around.

How do we replenish our belief in our dreams in a time of scarcity and danger? We have to open ourselves to God and the prophets that come to us out of the desert. And we have to take on the double burden of hope and fear.

Whatever You Send Me, I Will Plant

2009-03-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I was up early, journaling. I hadn't had a dream the night before, so I was just sitting in the living room watching the color come into the sky. Suddenly, and it seemed a manifestation of the sunrise, I felt a presence in my imagination on my right. I looked there and beheld an angel -- this is what I knew him to be -- all shimmery like pavement in noonday heat. And, wouldn't you know it, his hair was on fire.

I have been feeling the economic crunch lately. Not enough income, too many expenses, ends that barely make it into the same county, let alone meet. I have been feeling all asea and rudderless, waiting with all my senses open for some understanding of how to proceed. This has left me just a tad sarcastic. I thought, "My own personal burning bush. How nice."

I am an Episcopalian; I am allowed to be irreverent. Yet sometimes I do wonder if some messenger of my soul won't one day, in the face of my grumpy self-centeredness, just up and disappear in a huff, leaving me with the anxiety, the obsessive compulsive behaviors, or the despair that comes as the result of being out of relationship with the psyche.

This messenger, though, was not a creature of emotion. He merely looked at me steadily until all my bluster and ill humor had cleared like cobwebs in a bright wind. Then he held out his hand.

Incongruously, for the heat he was putting out must have been immense, he cupped a tiny plant. In a little mound of dirt it sat, a spindly stem with four brand new leaves spreading hopefully toward air and sunlight. Instinctively I held out my hand. He carefully tipped the dirt and little rooted being onto my palm.

A seedling is a living thing, precious and unique. I thought about all the potted plants I have nurtured over the years: my huge thirty-five-year-old fern that needs to be transplanted again; the purple leaf shamrock given me by a friend from an era long past; the cactus that got frostbitten and grows like an hour glass; the vines that are threatening to take over the sitting room. What else would I do with a new little green sprig except plant it?

Suddenly it dawned on me that the angel was asking me a question and it wasn't about literal greenery. There must be hundreds of brand new little shoots, gifts of the Spirit, that come into being every single day and then wither away through lack of nourishment or get mowed down by the yang-clang of existence. They need somebody standing by with a pot and a watering can.

I made a pledge, and my whole heart went into it. The angel is just the messenger; I made the promise to God. "Whatever you send me, I will plant," I said.

This is my Lenten discipline. And all of you, my friends, can ask me how it's going.

The Sorrow of Demeter and the Trickster God

2009-02-27T12:22:00.000-08:00

My daughter isn't speaking to me again. Don't get me wrong; she answers the phone when I call. She hasn't moved away without telling me where she's going (like my son sometimes does). But she answers my questions in words of one syllable, and it seems she always has somewhere else to be after about five minutes. I haven't talked to that set of my grandkids in weeks. I know from this that there are volumes unspoken -- all the things she doesn't feel she can trust me to understand.

When she was little I used to dream of a time when I could talk to her woman to woman, a time when we would be friends. I once dreamed she would find her place in the world and glory in it and be able to share it with me. Instead she has drawn away from me, grown rigid with her insistence on our differences. The sorrow I feel is big -- and grey and dusty like ashes. This is Demeter's tale.

Remember how Demeter's daughter Persephone is bewitched and stolen away by the great god, Hades? She loses herself to the underworld, to the realm of the unconscious -- loses her connection to home and mom. My daughter does that; falling in love with first one then another stranger, leaving me over and over again for a vision as seductive as the Narcissus. I am powerless to stop her. Like Demeter, I cannot find her; she is no longer in my world.

I wander the earth, which I have made dusty with drought. Nothing grows; this suits me. I wander because I am restless, brokenhearted. Relationships with other people's children backfire when I try to make them immortal to suit my needs. Nothing works. Nothing is right.

Then I meet the Trickster God. In the Demeter story, this is Baubo, goddess of the body. Like a Venus of Willendorf, she is all breasts and hips, large and raucous, jolly and irreverent. Demeter -- the story goes -- looks into her womb. What Demeter sees there makes her laugh.

I meet the Trickster God. I look into her womb. What do I see there? The oven of life itself: puppies and kittens, gawky pelicans, smarmy little snakes, the first laborious line of poetry on a crisp new page, a brush full of color gently teasing a taut white canvas. I see a sunrise so angry it echos purple to the zenith of the sky. I see the place where stars are born. I see Wilson in all his fat-tummy, big-footed sleepiness.

This doesn't take away my sorrow. Instead it puts something else beside it. A tiny little seed sprouts fins and swims. I laugh. Then I am free to cry.

It's Lent -- The Monster Locked in the Bedroom

2009-02-25T13:21:00.000-08:00

My favorite "Lent" joke was one I first heard when I was around nineteen. It goes like this (from before the era of women priests):

A priest's wife wanted to get it on with her husband. She put on her most sexy nighty and went to him one evening to make her desires known. He looked at her aghast and said, "But honey -- it's Lent." Shocked, outraged, and indignant she replied, "to whom and for how long?!"

The hidden truth of this joke, and why it has stuck with me all these years, points beautifully to a wrong way of engaging in a spiritual discipline. Refraining from something -- denying one's self something -- is often sort of like lending it out. It comes back with interest at the end of the term. Whether it's the decision not to eat chocolate or the resolve not to engage in angry confrontations, giving something up without some deep soul-searching merely insures that it will come tearing out even stronger than it was before, once one lifts the ban. And if there is to be no lifting of the ban, it comes back anyway, ripping through all one's resolve in a blizzard of denial and double-talk.

We generally give up things that we've deemed unhealthy, or things that alarm us a little in their hold over us. It is a good thing to ask, when we give these things up, who are we giving them to -- and for how long.

A Sufi teaching story puts it this way. A man found an ugly ogre rampaging through his house. The clever fellow waited until the monster went into a small bedroom, then slammed the door. He leaned against it, exultant that he had solved the problem. There was just one difficulty -- he had forgotten to bring a key for the door's lock. He had to keep leaning against the door if he wanted the monster to remain inside.

He figured that if he just leaned against that door for long enough, the ogre would fall asleep or grow weak, and he'd be able to run and get the key. Instead the monster seemed to be growing stronger. The man, unable to leave his post for food or water, began to grow weaker. The longer the ogre was confined, the more angry he became. It was soon a matter of life and death. The man believed he would never be able to leave his post without being killed by the trapped monster.

The interesting thing is that the ogre was a prince who had magically been changed into a monster. He had been looking for the way back into his true form when the man had trapped him. Inside the little room he lost all sense of his humanity. He called out to the man in the enraged voice of a monster and the man responded in terror. If the man had confronted him face to face instead of locking him up, they could have talked together and together sought the solution to the ogre's problem.

Giving our addictions, our shameful behaviors, our overarching desires, to the little ego who wants to stuff them in a room somewhere usually winds up in disaster. Generally there is a bewitched prince -- something beautiful, honorable, protective of the Psyche -- hidden within them.

So, how does one talk to monsters in order to draw out the inner prince? Learning the answer to that question would be the right sort of spiritual discipline.

Soul Watering

2009-02-21T18:17:00.000-08:00

The little child who has often sought my lap in the house of my imagination has spoken with me. I was sitting at the kitchen table early in the morning once again when she took my head in tiny hands and looked into my eyes.

Small children in dreams are not the helpless innocents of waking life. They are in fact rather like angels -- time bombs, set to detonate no matter what, but often willing to have a few words with us first.

So, somewhat frightened, I looked back. Her eyes were dark like black river stones. "You must tell the stories," she demanded.

A friend of mine preached at my church several weeks ago, and in his sermon he demanded to know if we were a club or if we offered something "saving". I was deeply moved by that question, and couldn't figure out why. What a question! I have been wondering ever since, what is saving? What does that even mean? I heard my grandfather whisper in my head, "save your immortal soul. . ." and over time began to realize that soul-saving is in reality Soul-watering. What nourishes our hearts and sets us on a path of Meaning? What counters our despair and our addictions? What waters us?

The Soul is watered by many things. Relationship is huge, of course. I don't mean relationship with the people with whom one is already intimate. I mean relationship with sunrises -- an understanding that without our respectful and grateful presence, the sun would stop coming up. I mean relationship with the tree in the backyard that has finally gained some ascendancy over the neighbor's bushes -- the willingness to cast our fate with the fate of that rooted being. I mean relationship with the raccoon and the squirrel who search our trash bins and our bird feeders -- a humble acknowledgement that we have taken over their homes. I mean relationship with the scary stranger -- who yearns for community as much as do we.

In the moment of looking into the dream-child's eyes, I come to understand that the single most important thing, the central element of Soul-watering, is Story. Without our myths we are dead. Deity expresses Deity's self through our tales. We are not literal beings.

We need to wrestle with our myths as things that are true. There is a way in which -- yes -- Bear took off his bear suit and came to us in human form. True, Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds and became Queen of the Underworld. And don't we know that Tristan and Isolde still sail their little boat on some choppy sea! The Soul knows the reality of these things. The Soul savors them.

The child and I will have to work out the particulars of her mandate. I'm sure they will be interesting at the very least. Bards and mystics, novelists and playwrights, heroes and strange old women all have stories to tell.

Just Call Me Baba

2009-02-17T13:55:00.000-08:00

Wilson Aaron Kunze is two days and two hours old. He is my newest grandson. As did all my other grandbabies, he calls me into relationship by his existence. I am his Baba.

You've no doubt heard the standard grandparent disclaimer: "It's not the same as having children -- you can send grandkids home at the end of the day." I think this is a joke masking what is sometimes an uncomfortable inner reality: It's not the same at all. Grandkids project something different on grandparents than they do on parents -- and grandparents do the same with grandchildren. It seems archetypal. I am not only called into relationship, I am summoned to wisdom, understanding, and unconditional love. Something happens between me and these people who call me Baba. Something kicks in between us.

I don't know if Wilson is lucky or unlucky to have me as his Baba. I am not usually stellar at meeting the summons. I have my moments, thank God. But I also have my crotchety old lady moments, my "leave me alone or I will eat you" moments. I console myself with the idea that this aspect of grandparenting, too, has its archetypal aspect.

Wilson is too young to receive much more than the rudimentary aspects of my ocean of love for him. I can hold him in my arms and hum at him (I tell Rosean I never coo). I can wait for those magic moments when he opens his eyes for just an instant and gives me his newborn infant scowl. That's about it really. Oh, and I can give him a grandmotherly welcome.

Welcome into the world, Wilson Aaron Kunze. May your heart grow big and your arms grow wide. I am your Baba, and I love you.

Friday the Thirteenth

2009-02-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

Today is my favorite day -- Friday the 13th. This is not because I am macabre. I honor the day as the special holy day of a feminine aspect of deity. Friday is Freya's day in the old Germanic cultures, and 13 is her special number.

The ancient form of the fairy tale "Snow White" includes thirteen witches instead of four fairies. In that story twelve witches were invited to the birth celebration of the beautiful princess. There were only twelve gold plates, you see, so the king and queen put their heads together and decided simply not to invite one witch.

None of the witches was evil. Witches were healers and midwifes in the culture of the original Snow White story. The thirteenth witch was not a bad soul. She was overlooked, in fact, because she seemed to be the least powerful of all the witches, the least worthy of honor. She was a quiet, unassuming healer.

She did not act out of revenge to curse the princess, either. No, this sleep of 100 year is simply what happens when one ignores the thirteenth witch. It is very dangerous to ignore the thirteenth witch. It can cause dire consequences that last a very long time.

Twelve is a common number signifying completeness. Three sets of four, or four sets of three, it symbolizes a sort of completeness that comes from a diversified, well articulated consciousness. The number crops up cross-culturally as the total of things. Think of the twelve tribes of Israel or the twelve directions of Native American spirituality.

What, then, is symbolized by thirteen? It is one beyond the completeness. It is the symbol of newness -- new beginnings, a new paradigm, new birth, new growth. Twelve is static and complete. Thirteen is dynamic and unbalanced. Twelve is made up of all sorts of other numbers: twos, threes, fours. Thirteen is a prime number, only divisible by itself and one.

You can see why the failure to invite the thirteenth witch throws the Snow White kingdom into slumber. The kingdom had failed to invite the new dynamic, the catalyst for change. This is a very bad thing, especially at a birth. Let this be a warning to you -- don't use the gold plates if there aren't enough. Use pottery. Just make sure all the witches are invited.

Freya is the Norse goddess of life. Thirteen is her favorite number because of its catalytic properties. Life always needs the unbalance of the thing beyond completeness, the new thing, the wrench in the works. There is no life without this chaotic element. There is only stasis -- sleep.

How, then, will I honor Freya's Day of the Number 13? What I should do is find something that scares me absolutely out of my wits and then makes me laugh. What better way to honor that aspect of God that is newness and the electric force of life?

These things are hard to engineer, though. My inner ear can't take amusement park rides anymore and horror movies have never been my favorite adventure.

I think what I will do instead is perhaps even more risky. I'll light a little candle on my altar and I'll pray. I'll say to that Freya aspect of God, "surprise me."

Yikes! I'm terrified just thinking about it!

Old Women and Rivers

2009-02-10T09:12:00.000-08:00

At the table in the kitchen of the big house in the dream I shared with you in an earlier blog sits an old woman with very large hands. The table is large and white. We are drinking tea and smiling. It is in the early hours of the morning. We don't speak; we simply sit together. I admire her hands as she holds her cup warming gnarled fingers which are expressive and expansive.

Today I have a lump in my throat. I'm not sure what it is -- anxiety, sadness, things unexpressed that coil there waiting to be born. I look at her, wanting to talk, not sure how to begin, what I will say.

She cocks her head, which I now notice is wrapped in a bright scarf of reds, blues, yellows and oranges. She is listening. I listen also. In the distance I hear water and the sharp call of a bird. It sounds like a brook is burbling along out there somewhere. I am plunged into memories of brooks I have walked beside, streams I have fished in, rivers I have loved. Once when I was young I cut a reed from beside a small creek and lay on my stomach in the mosses using it as a straw to sip the ice cold water. Once when I was fishing in a quiet river pool a family of baby martins ran across my boot top as they played. Once I fell in a river, and when I surfaced saw the huge, alarmed eyes of my then-small children who were crouched at water's edge watching where I had disappeared. Fat old rivers, fast racing alpine streams, dilatory creeks snaking through willow wallows, tricklets of newborn spring water -- image after image flashes through my memory.

My friend Paul likes to find the source of rivers. He comes to them where they are still quite young, babies really, little streams struggling through boulder fields in the bosom of some mountain. He follows them back to their birthplace. Some are born in high lakes bordered by glaciers. Others seem to emerge from the rocks themselves, gradually forming from a multitude of trickles into something with a bed and a direction. Still others emerge from alpine springs. Paul likes to look at the tiny place of origin, and likes to imagine the river as it is further along, authoritative, capable, carving out valleys, carrying huge boats on its back, fertilizing farm lands.

When I reach this point in my thinking I suddenly remember my companion at the kitchen table of my imagination. I turn my attention back there, yearning once more to ask something, I don't know what. The old woman has gotten up during my reverie and left. A younger woman wearing an apron is plunking down a mixing bowl, and a child has wandered in, eyes crusted with sleep, to demand silently to be picked up onto my lap and held.

I feel a bit sad, off balance, frustrated with everything I do not know. I lean my chin against the head of the small one in my lap and sigh. Sometimes there are no words, I guess. Sometimes there is just the waiting.

Then I notice that the old woman has left her brightly-colored scarf in a disorderly heap in the middle of the table. I pick it up, and the child and I examine it quietly. It comes to me that I could put it on. Will I? What would that mean?

Every Morning a New Arrival

2009-02-06T11:20:00.000-08:00

I have on my altar, leaning up against a driftwood statue of a pelican, this quote from Rumi:

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. . .Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

The pelican is one of my totems. She is the consort of the great ocean, always carressing the undulating waves, finding riches in the hidden world between them. Sailing the air in perpetual discovery -- each day a new arrival -- so I imagine. I imagine the ocean offering her secret treasures that she carries home with her in her pouch, setting them on a window ledge to catch the evening light.

And so am I, pelican to the Soul, in thrall to her exquisite beauty, lifting treasures to my little window ledge at the edge of her vast reaches. Every morning a new arrival.

It is difficult to be grateful for some of these treasures. When I feel bad, it's as though the sun is obscured by fog. Everything is grey. To think highly of a meanness of spirit or of a depression seems so counterproductive. Seldom do I say to God, "thank you so much for making me sad today." Joy on the other hand has such a rare and exquisite beauty. It is like a prism to sunlight, casting rainbows everywhere.

The ocean in her moodiness throws up fog and storm and high winds and sunlight alike. Surprisingly, being counterproductive is often a good thing. Counter to productivity is degeneration, unmaking, decomposition. Decomposition returns things to the earth. It is earth-making -- Humus-making -- Humility-making -- Making of openness and empty places where new things can come to be.

If I can embrace my sadness or my anger as one of the ocean's treasures, I become Psyche's voice of Pathos. I become the foghorn sounding through the mists. I am fogbound, but am not myself the fog. I can then guide the large ships through the dangerous waters to safe harbor. "Oh my God, I'm so depressed," I moan. "Oh when will this terrible fog ever lift?" I howl. And the ships, following my voice, come safely home.

On Watercolor Pencils

2009-02-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

Play is a process involving risk. We become so vulnerable when we play. We step beyond the limits of our persona masks. Anything could happen.

Play teaches us. It frees the mind from the limits of the ordinary into deep creative currents.

I have been playing with my new watercolor pencils. I got them with a gift certificate from a friend to whom I will be forever grateful. A little gift certificate to the local art store can be like a free pass on a ride through the Magic Kingdom. Shelf upon shelf laden with glorious things -- creamy papers, richly pigmented paints, soft brushes, fascinating gadgets, markers that blossom in their bins like flowers, rainbows of pencils, stacks of intriguing boxes, pallettes of all varieties and light boxes and easils -- await the caress of eye and hand.

I wandered through the aisles exploring each thing, delighted that one of them would be mine to keep. After the joy of touching and trying, I would get to choose something, something gloriously impractical. Playfulness would extend into the days and weeks ahead.

I chose the watercolor pencils. I liked the idea of drawing with paint. I was also reminded of the watercolor coloring books I had as a kid -- the magic of transforming little dots on a page into a wash of color.

I took them home and arranged them like a bouquet in a mason jar. Then came the time when I could use them. I drew soft lines of pigment along the bumpy surface of watercolor paper, trying different colors side by side and on top of one another. I wound up with a colored pencil drawing. I brushed water over it, and the magic began. A vibrant painting emerged. I did another drawing, fooled around, seeing what mixed well. I tried a few blottings with tissues and cotton. I tried another painting by soaking a sheet of paper in water and then drawing on it. This time thick lines of color appeared. Brush blending and tissue blotting produced all sorts of cool effects.

A few days later I took the pencils for a drive. Stopping here and there, I found myself rendering drawings of scenes around me: intense pinks and oranges became a sunrise with green sky below, a wash of purple with yellow highlights became a field of snow, blue melting into grey-green became sky and distant hillsides. I drew grasses -- more purple and yellow -- and trees -- reds and greens -- and lichen covered boulders -- oranges, blues, pinks.

The desire to render gave way to the urge to language. THIS exuberance of brush explodes at the base of THIS tree, which carries the fireworks, puff, puff, puff, in the lines of groupings of pine needles. The eye leaps from limb to limb, celebrating each burst, until it lands in the soft expanse of sky. A thought, a suggestion, I filed it away like a sentence scribbled on a notecard.

My inner little kid is happy as a lark. My crusty old ego is relaxed and a little more welcoming. Who knows what will come our way now that we are opened to seeing it. All of my internal people look forward together to the next time we can play with the pencils.

Pleasant Intruders

2009-01-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago I had a dream in which I was lying in bed and sensed intruders had come into the house. I waited tensely, not too frightened, and, sure enough, the door swung open and there stood a young African American couple and another black woman, all in their 20s. I learned they were stranded. Their car had broken down. The two women were sisters. Without hesitation I invited them to stay with me.

This simple little dream is packed with information. My first association to the young family was that they seemed Obama-like. In my dream group, we all mused on the sense of hope and new possibility that Barack Obama has already brought into the White House in the ten days since his inauguration. My inner house, too, is infused with this new spirit. Inspite of numbing economic crisis and climate change disasters, I feel more relaxed and open to the possibility that things might go right.

At an even more personal level, the young family represents something emerging into consciousness from the depths of the psyche. I give it a home in me. What is it? I'm not sure yet. These people are strangers; I'll have to get to know them.

Since moving to Fort Collins from our home in Wyoming, I have not known how to describe my work in the world. Once I was a psychotherapist, but I have been moving away from the language and assumptions of psychotherapy for years. I am an artist. That not only defines my work but also my attitudes toward life and the world. I see the world as a place of beauty and mystery, elements of which I am forever seeking to language. I love the liturgy of the Episcopal Church and delight in innovative places, images, and words that help us live even deeper into the meaning of the rituals of my tradition. But I am also a mystic, and have an unshakable belief in the rightness of the many paths to relationship with The Holy expressed in the world's spiritual traditions.

And there is something more, something evolving. It's spiritual in nature, and it is as yet undefined. The young black family of my dream may represent this new thing.

Beyond talking about them, The Way of the Dream urges talking with them in the process Jung called Active Imagination. To do this, I go back into the dream. I dream it on. What happens next? What do the characters have to tell me? Active Imagination relies on my ability to refrain from putting my own thoughts into the mouths of the characters. I have to listen deeply, let them materialize and have their own perspectives. The sign of success is when they say things that utterly surprise me.

I have dreamed the dream onward already in the past day or so. I've learned that I have a large two story home with many rooms. The young family has occupied a few rooms down the hall from me. Their car is an old 50's vehicle with fins -- totally inefficient. They love it but are exasperated by it. It will take awhile to fix.

This morning I slip back into the dream. There is no one in the bedrooms on the 2nd floor of my house. I go downstairs and find everyone in the kitchen. It seems the family has grown; now there are children running about and an old wise woman sitting at the kitchen table. The kitchen is large and overflowing with life and energy. Fabric in bright colors has been hung about the walls. Lots of things are cooking on the stove. I walk around bemused, and the young woman and her sister laugh at me and sit me down at the table where I am out of the way of their activity. They are feeding us all, they tell me. But there is more. I'll find out what it is soon, they say. Meanwhile I must be patient.

I find a young child has crawled into my lap and is looking at me out of liquid brown eyes. She is laughing, and I notice her little square lower front teeth. I hold her on my lap while we watch the bustle about the room.

I can move out of the dream again to analyse its elements. Each has symbolic significance that resonates deeply. I can paint or draw bits of the dream -- the bright fabrics appeal to me, and I'm already wondering how they would work as banners for Easter or Pentecost.

I will both analyse and paint.

The main message, though, seems to be, "wait." Big things are happening in my inner kitchen. Brewing things are finally on the stove. My inner house is full of life, and I need to get to know the people who have come to me to cast their lot with mine.