old man in a robe

Don (white hair, white beard, red and blue stripped robe, and glasses) is walking one of his “Min Pins” (a Chihuahua like creature) down the street. They saunter off the sidewalk as the dog explores the neighbor’s driveway. Don looks hesitant to leave the sidewalk but the dog is insistent. No one is ever up at that house, at this hour. They won’t disturb anyone. When the dog has relieved herself they turn and head back to Don's house.

It is cool out. And Don takes the dog for a walk in his robe with his shins exposed to the morning air. I am grateful for retired neighbors. Don and Susan are kind. They walk their dogs many times each day and are part of the hum of this place. They are part of what makes it a neighborhood. Binding us together in some strange way. They own three of those noisy beasts. When he walks all three at once we call ‘it’ the Hydra: the multi-headed beast of ancient Greece. When he stops to talk with us they yap and run about his legs tying him up in a great knot. He ignores the clamor and the chaos. It makes me laugh, a deep laugh of awe and wonder at the absurdity of this life. I am grateful for these simple pleasures: a retired neighbor, small dogs, quiet mornings, the sunrise to wake me.

obsessions

Yesterday, I had a small 12-step-style epiphany. The seed of an obesession had
been growing in my mind. I didn't want it there, but I had been indulging
it. Nurturing the obsession like a small seedling I wanted to grow. All of
a sudden I saw my indulgence and I was able to pray and ask that it be
removed. It was a very sudden shift in me. I felt a big deep easy
love that encompassed us all. Everything was okay and the obsession was
lifted. This is what the 12-steps have taught me. It doesn't always happen this
quickly, but it always happens if we pray for it.

forest floor

Yesterday, I hiked through the depth of the forest. I tried to keep my mind still. In the morning I had looked at my house and promised myself I would clean that afternoon. The floors were so dirty and the dust thick enough to see on the bookshelves and cupboards. When I walked in the forest and appreciated that forest floors never need cleaning. The forest doesn’t need to be tidied. It is beautiful in its chaos and clutter, in the scatter of leaves that fall and slowly decay, in the fallen wood and the sprouting fern, the drape of moss and spider web. The forest is becoming very cluttered now in spring, new growth, new color sprouting everywhere. Every inch of forest is coming alive.

And I appreciated the simple diversity of the forests. The inhabitants unabashedly living side by side, touching, intertwining with one another: Fern reaches tall to touch rose. Rose lives happily in the shade of fir tree. Fir tree stands stately beside Oak. Oak is covered in fluorescent green moss and has yet to sprout new leaves. And a poison oak vine climbs up the moss. Small finches rest and nest in every tree and shrub. A vole digs into the soil uprooting mushroom. Deer nests crush dead grass into beautiful hollows.

And everything is green now. Trillium and lily are emerging from the soft wet ground. Bunch grasses cover any open forest floor. Small blasts of color paint fruit tree and an occasional shrub. The forest is gaudy, showing off its thick new growth and cluttering every surface with abandon. In the face of all this abundance, I stay on the path where the brush has been cleared so that I can walk easily without getting caught or wet in all this new growth.

The paths have been groomed for me. These little traces of human order superimposed on the chaos of the forest. The paths are kept tidy to encourage us not to wander off. They are going to improve my favorite trail. Flourescent orange markers have been placed along the path indicating areas for ‘improvement:’ fill, widen, water bags, turnpike. Trees adjacent to the trail have been painted with a blue stripe and I worry that they will be cut. My favorite trail must be well used if it is receiving all this attention, but I rarely see anyone on it. It is very steep, I sweat and my heart pump hards to get me up to the top. I am alone on this trail, with my puppy, the forest and my God. The four of us have long conversations while I hike that trail.

Kissed by God

Here, deep in my soul.
Underneath the clothing I wear, underneath the skin and hair.
Is a place that shines love, that is loved, that is lovable.
There is a place inside of me that is all creative juice, spirit, and joy.
I dance from there. I dance with that spark in my partner.
I look for that spark.
I cruise for people willing to expose their vulnerable, beautiful spark.
Then, I remember it is there in each of us.
My searching excludes those who are still to frightened.
My searching excluses those who have forgotten.
My searching excludes my very self.
Until I dance with everyone.

burial shroud

cuddled even in death by love
holding your sacred possessions: shell and pot
carefully entombed in a basket, and
buried deep in the sand
until a looter: man, weather, wind, time
exposes you beautiful hair, your sacred pot and shell
once again

Saturday

Sleep in, make coffee, take the dog for a long walk in the woods. Children stirring, but still sleeping, the dog curled up on the couch. Say thanks. Remember this abundance, I have enough, I have so much more than enough. Breathe, smell the coffee brewing. Take the dog for a long walk in the woods.

practice, experience, action

My deepest fear is that there is no God. My deepest fear is that life is all illusion and I will awake someday and find myself alone. A hallucination I experienced when I was a teenager: I awoke and found that I was a satellite spinning in space. I awoke to a reality that was infinite solitude and infinite emptiness. In the hallucination I awoke from the dream of my life and found that all relationship, all creativity, all beauty, had been but a dream. This is my deepest fear: that there is no meaning and that life is but a dream from which I will awake some day to emptiness.

My deepest desire is for connection with God and other. I have glimmers of it, slight moments when I experience the deep flow of energy and life between us all. I call those experiences mystic experiences, experiences of God and the divine as manifest on earth. I experience them as stepping into the warm places in the ocean: those momentary, ephemeral, waves of warmth and surrender. I find them in the forest, on the dance floor, on the beach, or even in Nordstrom’s line if I am looking. The problem is most of the time I am not looking. Most of the time I am too attached to my life and my problems, and to the petty desires of the moment, that I don’t notice the warm spots.

This is the purpose of my religious and spiritual practice: to become awake enough that I experience the warm spots and then act on them. From our awareness of divine connection we are able to pull each other up when we drift into fear and despair. From these experiences of divine connection we move to social action for the greater good. It is a circle for me: practice, experience, action, practice, experience, action. When a cog falls out of the circle I become depleted. Energy flows out and I lose touch. I can fall back into fear and deep despair. I begin to imagine that my hallucination was real. Grace brings me back to the circle and balance. Grace, friends, and memory bring me back to practice, experience, and action.

meditations on forests and dance

My muscles have the delicious ache of dance and hiking. Allee, my pup, and I hiked deep into the MacDonald Forest yesterday. I love the silence and the noise of the forest. I listened to the prattle of bird and squirrel and then in the background came the roar of chain saw and the occasional thunder of a tree falling. Small motor sounds sound like death to me. I try to remain open hearted. I try to remember all the good uses of timber. I try to remember that each of us has different ways to enjoy the forest. When I lived in Hungry Horse, Montana, I would often awake to off road vehicles buzzing around my small cottage. It was the same high pitched motor sound. It also sounded like death.

I have a yoga student who rides off road motorcycles and likes to try to engage me into debates about trail usage. Is it unfair to covet silence and desire that the small engines stay far away so I can listen to the sound of the forest? I hike and I try to meditate. I turn my mind again and again to just being in the forest, to listening to its sounds, to seeing the trees, the patches of sunlight, the moss, the ferns, the flow of creek. I stop at the top of my trail, the turning point to heading back down hill and I observe the huge root ball of a toppled fir. Insect, plant, mammal, bird, fungus, all of them are thriving on this bit of slowly decaying root wood. In the midst of observation and silence, my mind wanders back to my life: to my relationships, work, and obligations. I struggle again and again to stay in the forest. I turn my attention over and over to the moment and the place where I am.

I have a favorite trail, one very few people know of. I go to this sacred place on special occasions. A few others must go there as the train remains open, but no one clears the fallen trees and you can see where I and a few other jump over them again and again. The trail is always blocked by an abundance of spider webs. I train myself to look at the air in front of my face. To search for the glistening dew on the small web strands or to notice the body of the spider floating there in mid air. As soon as my attention turns back to the distractions of my life, smack I walk face first into a web. Chills run down my spine as I brush it away, looking for the spider on my shoulders, hoping it is not in my hair. I know they run away if they can. I watch them flee when I break their webs purposefully. They scurry off to the corners and gather in the broken web quickly. They will set themselves on rebuilding the web before I return in a week or a month.

We danced in silence last night. It is easier to remain in the moment during the dance. I danced and fell again and again into my body, touch, and the awareness of another body. I played with balance, with lift, with gravity. I didn’t worry about form. I didn’t worry about being seen. I melted into the dance and remained there, melting again and again and again. For some reason it is easier for me to melt into the dance than it is into the forest. My mind becomes distracted often in the forest. I must learn to take dance mind there. I want to be as aware of the heart beat, the pulse, the sweat of the forest as I am of my partner’s body. I want to be as aware of the world as I am of my dance partner’s body.

spring rains and gratitude

The spring rains return. It is wet here again. The state climatologist said that we’d have to have storms every other day for us to beat this drought. Perhaps my weekend ritual of putting my winter clothing away was all the rain dance we needed. Perhaps my intention to pull weeds and seed the lawn added to the potency of the rain dance. Or perhaps it was simply the arrival of spring break and a week of freedom from school and schedules that brought back the rain.

It is good rain that feeds the ground and the plants. I dreamed that it snowed, a deep covering of white on our lawn and thick ice on the road. I dreamed we were iced in and snowed in and I couldn’t get to any jobs. The ice and snow kept me from work, but it didn’t hurt the flowers. The ice stopped the push of my will but did not stop the beauty of earth's spring. In my dream the snow kept me still and doing the important work of art and dance. Spring and winter, stillness and joy, were happy side by side in my dream.

I sit here in my lovely tree house room and enjoy each drop of the rain. If I look carefully at the air I can see the drops falling toward the earth. A wet sheet, sometimes falling straight down, sometimes slightly blown to the side.

I feel clean this morning, as if the rain had washed my heart clean in the night. I cleared a couple disagreements with friends yesterday. I apologized for errors of speech and thus silenced a nagging voice in my head. There is still another hurdle to cross to be truly clean: a big announcement to make to some friends; a change in direction that will cause disappointment. I don’t want to cause disappointment. But I need to clean house and be true to myself and my family.

I am grateful for the spring rain that returns to bring mud and grit to my house. I am grateful for the spring rain that washes my heart clean while I dream. I am grateful for the cool air on my shoulders and that my sweaters weren't buried too deeply. I am grateful for the friend who took my boys for a night and left us in a quiet house where I can listen to the flow of traffic, the drip of rain and the song of birds. I am grateful to sit and enjoy the cherry blossoms, fir trees and the sheets of falling rain.

returning

I took an unexpected break from writing. I needed to regroup and recover myself. The winds of my life pulled me to far in too many directions. I have an abundance of rich and juicy opportunity in my life. I say yes too often and phew, I am blown away by it all.

So, I am saying no to some things and feeling a deep relief and a new opening. I can ground myself on the page again and begin to find words again. I begin a few words praise for the sunrise; gratitude for people who are willing dance and sing wildly and praise the divine within each other. The words flow from there. Ah yes, this is me. A page and a prayer, praise and gratitude. This morning I am grateful for a household that is still asleep on this wet spring break morning. This morning I am grateful that we can all take a week off and stay at home and rest and play and claim our household. This morning I am grateful that I don’t have to go to work at a corporation to pay my bills.

Emerson said “Money often costs too much.” Few of us remember this now. I didn’t even know it until I stepped out of the daily grind of academia. Yes, sometimes I still covet my neighbor’s goods: new cars, winter vacations to warm beaches, landscaped yards and the like. But the cost would be too great. I would have to give up precious time with my children. I would have to give up my art and my meditation. I would have to give up those things that fill my soul and feed me in a way money never could. I have learned that I would rather work for little or nothing, wear my old silly thriftstore clothing, and drive my old car than give up this work that feeds me so clearly and so deeply.

There is a deep shift happening in who I am. My heart and my stomach open. My mind takes a turn and I can feel the world around me change. I can’t find the right words to describe the change. It is as if the world became a little more alive. It feels as if I have stepped through the looking glass. Everything is just a little different than it used to be. I begin to expect magic to happen. I read a little quantum physics and I know that matter can be affected by mind and I begin to imagine that magic is real. The world has shifted.