Taken spring 2013 at my parents’ garden in Syracuse, New York.
Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them … one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us … an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace … loose conciousness.
-Paul Cezanne
Light did spread from corner to corner like a blanket above her. But it also touched in and out of tall trees like a thread.
Day was sharp, but the shadows were soft, and she liked the way they curved around into night.
There was a strange moistness to the air, a little like tears, that was sometimes warm and sometimes cold. She could not tell if it was winter or summer or something in between. But there was a murmur all around, of bees and trees, of showers and flowers, of tadpoles and tide pools and crinkly grass.
The murmur turned into a name. Spring!
–Jane Yolen, Eeny, Meeny, Miney Mole
I asked the zebra
Are you black with white stripes?
Or white with black stripes?
And the zebra asked me,
Or you good with bad habits?
Or are you bad with good habits?
Are you noisy with quiet times?
Or are you quiet with noisy times?
Are you happy with some sad days?
Or are you sad with some happy days?
Are you neat with some sloppy ways?
Or are you sloppy with some neat ways?
And on and on and on and on
And on and on he went.
I’ll never ask a zebra
About stripes
Again.–Shel Silverstein
“There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.”
– Nicole Krauss
Keiji, a long-time Zen student, approached his master and said: “I don’t see how there can be any enlightenment that sets you free once and for all. I think we just get ever greater glimpses of Buddha-nature, the vastness that is our true Reality. It’s an ever-expanding process.”
The master replied, “That may be what you think. But what is your experience, your experience right now?”
Keiji was confused, “My experience right now, Master?”
“Yes. Do you know yourself as Keiji, having ever-expanding experiences of Buddha-nature? Or do you know yourself as Buddha-nature, having the experience of Keiji?
A whole month passed without a post, though I’d thought about it. I’ve been immersed in some personal work and stepping out into new areas that feel exciting. The depression has abated. I feel a need to write but am doing so with interruptions by my little girl and husband every so many minutes, so this post will be less polished.
We’ve been camping twice and will go again soon for the last summer trip. In June we went to Pfeiffer Big Sur, and in July we camped at Prairie Creek Redwoods. Our next trip is to Calaveras Big Trees. We like big trees and rivers a lot, and we like the ocean some. Camping is uncomfortable and requires more work, but it’s also relaxing and restful. My body aches in the morning from the less-than-ideal sleeping arrangement, but the peace I feel compensates. I am bathed in Being, in nature, in the Mystery; living outdoors brings complete contact with the world that creates itself.
After exploring the Quaker Society of Friends, I talked with Hub about where I’m at and what Bean wants. She wants to go to church. Hub was raised Unitarian Universalist and I attended as one years ago. It’s the best fit as far as spiritual community goes. Bean loved it the first time we visited two years ago. The Quaker group only had children’s program once a month, and unfortunately the one time I brought her no one else with children came, and there was no program. I realized, too, that I need and enjoy the ritual of a service. The Quaker service was traditional silent meeting with socializing after. The UU service includes the usual ingredients of a service: hymns, readings, sharing of joys and concerns, a sermon. Hub isn’t a seeker and doesn’t have the same community needs, but we came to the conclusion that the UU church is good for me and Bean. I attended the UU Fellowship in Los Gatos the past two weeks; both Bean and I enjoyed it, and the members are very welcoming.
I had a pilot zazen session on the first Saturday in July. I got cold feet and cancelled on the one person who’d signed up; then another friend last minute showed up. As I set up the small altar on my coffee table, it felt right, like putting on a perfectly fitting outfit. I also reached agreement with Hub that I will go to Hazy Moon Zen Center a couple times a year to attend sesshin and meet with my teacher.
I’ve continued attending salons called Intimacy With Truth, led by a dear friend. They occur in a format similar to Honesty Salons but move into deeper exploration within and between ourselves. I’m learning to listen to, trust, and speak from my intuition and truth. I’m also sitting with the idea of becoming trained to facilitate Honesty Salons or becoming a Getting Real Coach with Dr. Campbell.
I’m re-reading and incorporating the practice that Eckhart Tolle’s books explore. One thing I appreciate about his work is that he echoes my favorite quote, a koan I have cherished for years:
The secret is within your self. – Hui-Neng
Tolle claims that he’s not teaching anything that we don’t already have within us. His work is guidance to excavating it.
In conjunction, I’ve started to explore the process of healing offered by Al-Anon meetings.
After years of thinking about it, I attended a mixed-media collage Meetup at Lori Krein Studios. I immersed myself in the process and enjoyed it, as well as enjoyed the other people who attended. I’ll be going back.
This encounter with collage at the studio prompted me to rearrange my art supplies so they are stored in the same room as my work desk. Proximity will probably inspire more play!
I gathered my many small pieces of art into a binder, and I was astonished at the variety and amount. Seeing them all together gave me a surge of excitement to make more. A friend has suggested I have my own art show at home; I’m not ready to do that yet, but I’m ready to show and share from the binder.
I enrolled in a November training to learn a process called SoulCollage and to facilitate in groups. SoulCollage is a creative, meditative process of exploring one’s inner wisdom in all the ways it manifests. It’s rooted in Jungian psychology.
I’ve emphasized boundaries in certain relationships by limiting what I can listen to and discuss. The immersion in repeated stories about the problems of people I love when I cannot do anything to help was contributing to the depression.
Lastly, I’m contemplating becoming a volunteer at a hospice. For many years (since the mid-1990s) I’ve felt a pull toward it, and in 2004 I took steps in a parallel direction by training to provide grief support to survivors. It was the Centre for Living With Dying. However, my father-in-law was dying of cancer at the time, and I just didn’t have the energy to serve. Since that time the Centre was bought by another social service provider, and it seems they don’t use volunteers any more. But hospice does.
The call to hospice coincides with the sad news that a friend — Jen Bulik-Lang — who is only 35 is dying of stage-IV lung cancer. She began feeling ill in October 2012, and it took awhile for professionals to come to the correct diagnosis at the end of January 2013. She’d been shopping in December for engagement rings with her boyfriend, Jeffrey Lang. She got aggressive treatment, and there was hope they eradicated it, but in mid-June she received news it had metastasized to her spinal fluid. My insides quicken with grief and love as I watch her live with this news. She chose to celebrate life, and she and Jeff got married in a marvelous wedding. I admire Jen for embracing what is and fully experiencing it as a transformation with the faith, as she says, “that [it] will benefit the highest good for all those concerned.”
So in all, the shift in my life is toward community and participating in healing myself, others, and the world. As I wrote that last sentence my self-talk was, “Boy, that sounds lofty and new-Agey, and grandiose.” And yet… The world is broken and insane and aches for love.
It is daffodil time, so the robins all cry,
For the sun’s a big daffodil up in the sky,
And when down the midnight the owl calls “to-whoo”!
Why, then the round moon is a daffodil too;
Now sheer to the bough-tops the sap starts to climb,
So, merry my masters, it’s daffodil time.–Clinton Scollard
Emotional Parentification
Emotional Parentification is when a child is given the responsibility of looking after the emotional and psychological needs of the parent and/or the other siblings.
This can include the case where the parent begins to confide in the child, discussing their problems and their issues, and using the child as a surrogate for a spouse or a therapist. This kind of emotional parentification is sometimes referred to as “emotional incest”.
Physical or Instrumental Parentification
Physical Parentification is when a child is given the responsibility of looking after the physical needs of the parent and/or the other siblings. This can include duties such as cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, paying bills, managing the household budget, getting kids ready for school, supervising homework, dispensing medications etc.
Physical parentification is different from assigning household chores to children, which is a normal and healthy practice. Assigning chores becomes dysfunctional when it reaches a level where the real parent abdicates their own responsibility for the care of the children, where the task assigned is beyond the developmental maturity of the child or where the assigned duties leave little or no time for the child to engage in normal childhood activities, play, peer friendships, schooling or sleep.
Adults parentified as children experience the following things:
Also of value: The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment
If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.
– Tom Robbins
Analysis has its peculiar scientific value, but the Spirit which passes from one person to another as a flame leaps from one coal to another grasps truth in its wholeness as a living thing united within itself. …Spiritual truth cannot be sharply defined like scientific truth. It exists on the dim edge of the unexplored region beyond the horizon of self-conscious thought. The language of the Spirit is symbolic and its suggestions are not so much facts as signs which point beyond themselves to the unseen ground of all existence. So inarticulate sometimes is the voice of the Spirit that it can be expressed only by a sigh, or even by complete silence.
-Howard Brinton
…over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! … There is a divine Abyss within us all, a holy Infinite Center, a Heart, a Life who speaks in us and through us to the world.
-Thomas R. Kelly, 1941
Faith and Practice, Religious Society of Friends (Quaker)
THE AFTERLIFE
They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals – eagles and leopards – and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
–Billy Collins
Accept indeterminacy as a principle, and you see your life in a new light, as a series of seemingly unrelated jewel-like stories within a dazzling setting of change and transformation. Recognize that you don’t know where you stand, and you will begin to watch where you put your feet. That’s when the path appears.
-John Cage
About the spiritual training of young, my view is a bit of the same. How you behave in your home is their spiritual upbringing. I think we have to be careful with all forms of ideological indoctrination, and that is what spiritual training is in children: the imposition of a set of abstract beliefs and ideals. Children will take these from of us, but I don’t think dogma serves anyone for long. After all, I was a very good Sunday School student, the star of my confirmation class, and yet I had my own spiritual crisis to resolve later in life. We all do.
I always remind myself that I’m not trying to raise a Buddhist child. I’m trying to raise a Buddhist mother, and it’s taking all my time! Not only my family, but also everyone everywhere will be served by my devoted discipline in my own training. Not because I’m self-important, but in recognition of the one true reality: no self. We are all interdependent, which means we are all one.
“Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, ‘my life’ is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don’t possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.”
-Ilchi Lee
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
-David Foster Wallace
Like some winter animal the moon licks
the salt of your hand,
Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac tree
From which a small wood-owl calls.-Johannes Bobrowski
This is the end of Art Every Day Month 2012. I really enjoyed it, and I’m proud of my work. Thank you for sharing it with me.
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
This is for Bean, who said when she saw it, “It looks like Christmas!”
Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.
-Larry Wilde
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world. I am circling around God, around ancient towers, and I have been circling for a thousand years. And I still don’t know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.
-Rainer Maria Rilke