Just Keep Going…
“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.”
Rainer Maria Rilke – Book of Hours, Love Poems to God (Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)
Just keep going…just keep going…these are the words that grab me today, speaking particularly to and of the heart. Whatever the changes, the stalls, the back up against the wall one more time story, the edging away from that wall, the vision of beyond and deep within, whatever the story…just keep going (even in your moment of collapse, be in it, go into it knowing you will cycle back up onto your feet and one day they will dance). Tom Cowan has a workshop for shamans that focuses on the spiritual practice of shapeshifting (no, you don’t fly over your ex’s house as a crow on a mission…). One of the elements of the workshop I appreciated probably the most details the 3 cauldrons of the soul. One in particular speaks today in this poem, in the one phrase: Just keep going. As one of the cauldrons Cowan details, the heart says “I act!” I respond. I go forth into the world from this amness (the cauldron of the belly or gut). And then: “I know” says the cauldron of the mind or, more accurately, the crown. But this knowing is not the knowing of logic. It is the knowing resonance with the Divine pattern of one’s life and of humanity in the grand eternal scheme of love. It’s an intuitive unfolding knowing into that daily reality as we “just keep going.”
And that’s my world lately. I wanted so many things to be accomplished by now and yet, the time hasn’t made room for those things to emerge. Other things are growing, emerging slowly. More precious, deeper knowings of purpose, of resonance, of acceptance of this path. When healing the amness layer of self, the heart cries out to act, to do, to express in the life what is brewing deep within. But timing can make the difference between a fractured movement and a whole flowing vision-in-motion.
On. With. It.
Spread the Love!
Inception (More Weird Courage)
I went to see Inception last night. And learned a few things. I learned that I’m sick of sitting anywhere but high up and a bit further back since the screens are so engulfing huge panoramic now. I feel like I can’t even see what’s happening. You have to have bigger eyes, spaced further apart just to catch all the detail. And therefore, a bigger head. (Beware…we may “evolve” with this trend…mua ha ha…maybe those aliens are from a loop in a dream we dreamed back when we were more evolved and and and we’re stuck at the second dream within the dream and they’re trying to get us out and and and. I’m kidding….?) I learned that you don’t necessarily have to be sure what the hell is going on in the plot to get some gold from it. Sounds like life sometimes, eh? What else? I learned I really appreciated Leonardo Di Caprio in this role. The suggestion of beginnings and what’s “real” always gets my attention but this was a major twisting path covering all that can be lost or gained in illusion. Or…”reality.” I loved the subconscious “people” in these dreams. The projections. They speak deeply to the truth that when we change things in our worlds, we stir up all kinds of reaction around us until we make peace with the choices we’re making. This affirms my personal growth tenet that insists on serious downtime in growth phases, taking the time to become aware of what internal backlash is kicking up a storm so we can go into that storm and heal the conflict without wreaking havoc in our actual daily lives. I didn’t honor that rule soon enough and it caused me some pretty nasty injury a few years back. As I sat there watching the dream morph and the parts play out, it blew me away how deeply they reach into the truth. When we believe we deserve to be destroyed, misunderstood or otherwise accused for making pivotal changes in our lives (or not showing those changes soon enough to suit the understanding of others), we tend to reap that belief. But I have always had some pretty intense existence issues. This movie hit on some amazing layers, reminding me of the power of shamanic work in healing dreams, memories and other traumatic projection-imprinting events. I want to see it again just to remember some of the lines that struck gold.
It’s so important to be aware of those projections within, to consider the possibilities – even the worst ones – in order to cultivate that courage to implement change, to create in love. What cures the worst projections? Self-acceptance, forgiveness, release from a fixation on right/wrong without losing a sense of what’s important and a huge dose of weird courage. Speaking of…
It makes me think of a very strange moment with my sister, Elizabeth. She has Down Syndrome and does fairly well these days unless someone disrupts her sense of reality with a wedding or an upside down salt shaker. But the last night she was here I joked (over her head) about her to mom, saying “watch out…she’s probably God’s emissary on a mission to show how we treat her. she’s going to have the most amazing reports on some of us. how we assumed so much. she probably understands everything we say and is restricted from showing it. I can hear her now with God ‘They were so full of it. Thinking I didn’t get it! And boy did I get a lot out of their guilt too!'” On that note, without previously showing any indication of having been slightly in tune with any of us (and having had her own conversation with an imaginary friend off and on there as we all talked with each other ’round my table), she looked up from her meal, straight at me with a grin, big bright eyes looking right into me and an emphatic “uh huh!” coming out of her chuckling mouth and then a pat on my shoulder. I was stunned. Looked away. Looked back at her. She was still grinning at me. Holy Shite. We all shuddered, eyes wide, total dead silence for a moment, then stepped back from our sense of things and pulled out the totems FAST.
Just when you’ve got it all figured out, the joke is what’s true…? Life is a trip…
Spread the Love!
Re-Member
“…the re-membering occurs when we begin to reassemble the parts of our inner knowing that we lost by taking the risks involved in being human. Birth into a human body is similar to taking an entire universe of information and consciousness, shoving it onto a microchip, and placing the particle containing all the wisdom inside a tiny human body that has no control over its own movements for a while…
That birth experience alone is enough to create forgetting. From that point on, our daily human experiences present enough shocks that we become aware of less and less of our inherent potential. How’s that for a Coyote trick? You have to learn to gain control over your growing baby body, then learn to deal with all the emotions of growing up and all the judgments of others who tell you something is right or wrong, no matter how you see it with your child’s eyes of wonder. We learn and adopt habits based upon the families we have and the cultures we grow up in. No wonder we forget! Then, later, we learn to drop everything we picked up that does not support us and reassemble all the beliefs that do help us remember who we are, why we are here, where we come from, and how it all works together. That’s some task! No wonder we are required to have an abundant sense of humor in order to survive that kind of cosmic joke!” Jamie Sams – Dancing The Dream, Pg. 152
Love is big enough to endure the shift, the dropping of all we picked up that does not support who we are, the reassembly of beliefs into a tapestry more suited to our ancient make-up of innocence and shadow.
Spread the Love!
Sacred Sit-In
I’m about to head off to class and have appreciated being able to actually breathe after my midterm. I read the reactions to the last post and sift through my own thoughts. I look at Sams’ statement here and it grabs me…
“The power of personal connection to the Creator and to spirituality is found in the individual who is willing to commit to life’s paths of initiation.” Jamie Sams – Dancing the Dream…
I’d say that the power of personal connection to the Creator and to spirituality is found in the individual who has decided to face his or her limitations and to simply enjoy the current “location” of development. Whether temporarily or permanently. So would Jamie Sams. But I felt it was worth noting. We are amazing conduits of Source whether we’re working hard at the “paths of initiation” or just unfolding into our days. But we tend to forget that.
It’s too easy to take a level of awareness in transformation and turn it into the next big standard/shovel burying us where we are because we’re not “there” yet. Every step is valid. And sometimes we really are victims and need to acknowledge and heal.
So, here’s to sacred sit-ins . . .
and sit-downs and lie-downs and.
Resting into a trust of our inherent capacity to grow whether we “commit” to it or not.
Spread the Love!
Sacred Path
“Our personal progress is a matter of free will. How deep we are willing to go to reach understanding depends ultimately upon our desire to become explorers. We can see ourselves as victims being tossed between bliss and despair, or we can look deeper and begin to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and actions. When we choose to change, refusing to become victims, we have chosen to see life from the eye of Eagle. The power of personal connection to the Creator and to spirituality is found in the individual who is willing to commit to life’s paths of initiation. When we acknowledge that we are spiritual beings who are willing to fight in the trenches of human self-empowerment, insisting on personal integrity, we have chosen to test ourselves by entering the paths of human initiation that lead to authentic wholeness.” Jamie Sams – Dancing the DREAM…
These wise words bolster me for the week and upcoming months of change. Sams’ insights speak to the heart of where I’ve been and where I’m going.
On. With. It.
Spread the Love!
The Wild Flesh
Clarissa Pinkola-Estes has been inspiring my world here again lately. This particular passage of truth nourishes, reminding me why it’s so vital to stay in touch with joyful in-skin, in-flesh awareness and what she beautifully refers to as “Joyous Body: Wild Flesh” in her book “Women Who…” The following is taken from page 200 of her epic work:
“In the instinctive psyche, the body is considered a sensor, an informational network, a messenger with myriad communication systems–cardiovascular, respiratory, skeletal, autonomic, as well as emotive and intuitive. In the imaginal world, the body is a powerful vehicle, a spirit who lives with us, a prayer of life in its own right. In fairy tales, as personified by magical objects that have superhuman qualities and abilities, the body is considered to have two sets of ears, one for hearing in the mundane world, the other for hearing the soul; two sets of eyes, one set for regular vision, another for far-seeing; two kinds of strength, the strength of the muscles and the invincible strength of soul. The list of twos about the body goes on…
…The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it. Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed. It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead.
The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperance, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling. It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising hope.
The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the press is fleshed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.
To confine the beauty and value of the body to anything less than this magnificence is to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation. To be thought ugly or unacceptable because one’s beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature. Women have good reason to refute psychological and physical standards that are injurious to spirit and which sever relationship with the wild soul. It is clear that the instinctive nature of women values body and spirit far more for their ability to be vital, responsive, and enduring than by any measure of appearance.”
—
We so often endure a spiritual tyranny of messages bombarding what could be the experience of wildness, of the unashamed, fearless flesh of skin and spirit. Media, historical decrees from decades gone but their crippling hum sometimes conjured by a familiar event…all of it stirring up the psyche, asking us to tune into the drumbeat below the myriad layers of possible attitudes about the body, about the body’s own intelligence, to tap into a rhythm of whole person acceptance, body, skin, warts, glow. All. Of. Self.
I’ve been aware lately, more than usual, of past messages that filtered through to me in particular. Long skirt for covering the “woman’s body” and no real clarity as to why, what was wrong with me that required I cover up? I saw a woman yesterday with her long skirt, her long braid, her chosen path, grey hairs streaking their own song of meaning. I struggled to accept it. Not her, but the cloaking uniform of adherence to creed, the inadvertant highlighting of her frame in the attempt to cover. I struggle, one part of me in the woods naked and the other part understanding, knowing why we choose our creeds, why we adhere to some religious views. No one path is all good, or all bad. But I wonder at the messages we swallow from such tender ages. What do we want and do we even know? Are our wants even our wants? Did that woman ever have a chance to know her own true desires or did the creeds form her like they sought to form me from a tender age? I have some distinct views on this posing as questions here. I’m trying hard to just dance around the bush. But the truth is, there’s no turning back for her or for me and yet our paths have gone long and winding differently down two opposing trails of meaning. Both are precious in their attempts to treasure what is vital.
So, what of it? I shook away my concern for her and walked away. Past the memories haunting and humming in my own body’s record of historical touch, growth, dance. The activities of my world write their own new stories on my being, even in and on my body, never erasing what was but scribing anew, the ink-jive of their words on the wellspring of soul whisper deep into every one of my fields, spilling seeds of newness, conjuring up that contrasting lush against the backdrop of a desert past.
This is what we can do with the magick of the wild flesh. We gift ourselves with sometimes polar pulses pounding out a new song, a life beyond ruins and into healing as we reach out into life with awareness, with an instinctive sense of our massive power to heal what we desire to heal within and beyond our own wild flesh. Bit by bit, layer by layer we undo the worst of the messages and incorporate those vibrations, those declarations most alive with truth, with awareness, forming -as best we can- desires in accord with the fearless (but wise) soul. Who am I beyond that fear that formed my reaction to life back there around the bend when I declared it my job to protect what was important to _____ (insert person’s name here or whatever applies)? How much has it woven itself into my being, doing, living? What if, what if we can transform motives into something that honors the wild flesh of humanity without fear, without indifference?
Spread the Love!
Seed
Your warmth whispers to the core nestled here and sometimes I fear will never shine me to the heights. . .
Days I drown in moist and soaking seep, permeating all the dreams asleep,
feeding notions of motion dancing in fleeting caresses warm, cool, cold, wet, frozen, hot, so hot…why do I know these that I do not know?
I do not know dark or light or sight but smell and taste and well, oh well, oh well, oh well…but still…this humming recognition of what I do not know bespeaks so much
straining, straining in my core is the knowing what is not known because somewhere back there on a hill I knew and grew taller for decades, surpassing the oldest man in town and sinking more deeply into all that buries me now, shelters and haunts of nothing else but darkest nourishing all around, fleeting sensations of warm,
warm,
warm echoes of radiance bringing me to green…but this, this is now, this burial shroud speaking back the glory clouds and birthing me to the death of this place, of this no face.
And all this, all this soaking speaking permeation is all
except
your warmth whispers and calls, stirs my need, all that is me and drowns my days
in night I would not know had I not known you once before.
jrk © 2006, 2010
Spread the Love!
New Year Naked
These songs resonate lately. Much roils and rumbles in my core, washing up on the shoreline of my thoughts, leaving me lost on where to begin, which detail do I pick up first and what do I do? It’s time for big change.
“We’re all lost. We’re all found. We’re all the same.
Just one heart beats in us, with different names.
Just one heart, with different names.
Hold me inside you…” (Vertical Horizon)
“…me, I figure as each breath goes by, I only own my mind.
The north is to south what the clock is to time
there’s east and there’s west and there’s eveywhere life
I know I was born and I know that I’ll die.
The in-between is mine, I am mine…
The full moon is looking for friends at high tide.
The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow’s denied…” (Pearl Jam)
AND this one line, over and over and over…
“Tidal waves don’t beg forgiveness, crashed and on their way…
Nature has its own religion, gospel from the land.
Father ruled by long division, young men they pretend.
Old men comprehend…” (Pearl Jam)
And this one…
“You can spend your whole life building something from nothing
one storm can come and blow it all away, build it anyway.” (Martina McBride)
The bold lines are the ones that ruthlessly dog me, nipping at the heels of my retreat from myself. When this kind of stash and crash of tides and words, songs and impressions haunt my world, I know life is trying to get through to me, pushing past the rationalizing and over-analyzing and doubt. But I’m hard-headed. I roll the eyes and throw my hands up in the air with frustration. There’s so damn much to climb still. Why should I check back in with myself? So, I purchased my Brezsny forecast. Love is on the ticket for me this year and just when I’ve declared I’m not going in that direction in my heart, made peace with life without the great big love, the one we all long for and some of us actually experience (I mean marriage/partnership/whatever you call it). There it is. Love, baby. Whatever. I’ve been getting the lovers card in tarot. Over and over and over. I think of union within, the much-needed marriage of opposing forces in my soul and and and. It keeps coming back down to my coming home to me. Everything else can come find me as I reach out to life in love as love for love love love. Including that grandest of loves love.
To top it off, someone keeps clicking on my la-loba posts. Over and over. Where is my la loba? I need the songs of the old woman, unearthing the bones and singing life into the wolfish best of me. Where is she? I feel her within and in my closest friendships. My mate, the woman-friend who is the air in the lungs, the man I would’ve married if she were a man spoke huge words of exhortatation to me yesterday. (Everyone should have such a friend. Wow. She’s the one I can tell all the nasty stuff and the great stuff too. She’s the witness of my sorrows and dreams. She’s the one who helps me brave the dating scene, shaking her head or giving a thumbs up at the prospective male suitors and oftentimes holding up a higher standard when I’m full of shite.) We sat and wept together over what life is showing us. They were good tears of healing. I should’ve felt like leaping tall buildings but something within me resists this last great push. (okay, on this current TRAIL…the last great push…and then the next and) I’m down. Not depressed. Pushed down by some tides and just sitting in the hermit’s cave. Brewing, humming. Somewhere there’s a song that sings every layer of restoration.
One book I’d rather never lose found me again. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet adds words to the brew:
“The girl and the woman, in their new, their own unfolding, will but in passing be imitators of masculine ways, good and bad, and repeaters of masculine professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions it will become apparent that women were only going through the profusion and vicissitude of those (often ridiculous) disguises in order to cleanse their own most characteristic nature of the distorting influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more confidently, must surely have become fundamentally riper people, more human people, than easygoing man, who is not pulled down below the surface of life by the weight of any fruit of his body, and who, presumptuous and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, borne its full time…will come to light when she will have stripped off the conventions of mere femininity in the mutations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching today will be surprised and struck by it. Some day…some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but only of life and existence: the feminine human being…This advance…will change the love experience, which is now full of error, will alter it from the ground up, reshape it into a relation that is meant to be of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and geintle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.”
I type that out and see the image of the two loves in Avatar (the movie, yes, i love it). She’s insisting he go, leave their world. She stands there on the root of an amazing tree and says “You have big heart….” (in explanation of why she didn’t leave him to be killed by the wilder animals of her forest) and then she gets in his face, opening her hand and pushing out in his direction “but STUPID! Stupid!” She meant that he did not see, that he did not know the earth or life without the egotistical reach of “knowledge,” that he did not value even those animals who had tried to kill him. I can relate to that reaction. I’d rather run and hide amongst the trees. But that stupid one is in me too. “I” get it all figured out and that knowledge piecemeals and divides my wise soul, strips the trees away and “experts” me to death. I just “know.” Haaaaaa….big heart but STUPID. But deeper words chase me, the parts of me not stupid perk up and listen.
The conversation of yesterday led me to the heart of the woods, to that part of me ancient. It’s time to build again. I find the pieces of the songs come together in that one Rilke spill. And he doesn’t leave the ground out. FROM THE GROUND…UP. The spiritual me is the grounded me, the citizen of earth…long exiled. When you’ve had deeply spiritual and even “mystical” experiences within Christianity and then walk away from almost all the parts that anchored you…where do you put the spiritual one within? I’ve shoved her in a corner, disgusted with the alternatives, the groupie gropings of masses finding so much “spirituality” like the latest trend or candy and spitting out “knowledge” without intimacy of the roots. Ohm ohm…no need to own just ohm ohm. But I don’t mince words or have some snobby nasty ideals. (forgive me, but i want to know people who can articulate why they believe what they believe and know why they embrace certain spiritual paths and if they don’t know then they don’t pretend to know or be expert) So I content myself with roiling in the corner, shoving that part of me into hiding. But friends find me and speak of Spirit while soulmates (there is not just ONE of those, by the way) haunt me with their truths. “Stay wild.” Relentless, that tide.
It’s time to assimilate, incorporate and let go. As we keep building on the solitude of our personal truths and needs, the internal rift heals, the outward manifestation reveals and somehow that spiritually mature human creature builds. The songs and their pieces form a tapestry of meaning, stripping away the fig leaves of my “knowledge,” guiding me to the tree of life.
On with it…
Spread the Love!
“A Thousand Yins and Yangs”
Thomas Moore, from his book, Dark Nights of the Soul, says:
“You may get to the point where you realize that if you want happiness, you have to accept profoundly and honestly the sadness that waits at every turn. Every decision for happiness will get you in trouble, and your occasional courageous forays into the dark will likely give you a taste of heaven. Opposites weave back and forth into each other, like a thousand yins and yangs interpenetrating.”
I’ve been pulling back and observing things lately. That includes observing my moods and waves of upset, of bliss. This has been a tumultuous time. My whole being is trying to find equilibrium in a new world. Everything is different. My children are responding differently to the divorce than they were even 6 months ago, responding differently to me, to our relationship. One of my sons is finally coming into a more expressive phase in his unfolding and the demands in general have gone from plenty to surreally plenty. The way I put myself out into the world around me has changed. And apparently this is my week for rage. The cauldron is turned upside down, further removal of stagnating stuff.
It’s a bit much. But I find Moore’s words right on time, right when I despaired of the thousand yins and yangs weaving back and forth in my own soul. The trick is not to despair. Not that it means eternal bliss. It just means you can be with yourself in more comprehensive acceptance and objectivity that does not lose the subjective soulful perspective of self. It can seem like a tangle ’til you pull back and take a long look.
I got this book of Moore’s earlier this year and had to put it down. The affirmation hurt too much. It haunted and confirmed things I had been second-guessing in my soul. Self-doubt melted on levels that required a tremendous level of adjustment. I suppose it was a bit much wine in wineskins fresh from the work of weaving new threads into the old layers, readying me for a versatility supreme. But I’m able to read it more these days in all that spare time I have so little of.
I like this perspective of what happens when we get so close to the interworkings of the soul:
But then a kind word, a reminder from a wise soul or the patterns of life’s changing tides pull us back, scoop us up and draw us out to a broader view and we see:
There’s a greater work going on in the fabric of our lives.
On…
with…
it…
