a post about nothing

I identified with guilt today, and discovered how easily the switch gets tripped by others, just a comment or two and I’m there…I’ve made the adjustment, the descent…and how easily I can use that as an excuse…so-and-so tripped my guilt button, it’s she/he who did it…deflect responsibility, right?…but then it isn’t really so-and-so’s fault, it’s me…my guilt button couldn’t be tripped if I didn’t allow it to be…

…but I did give myself a group hug when I became aware.

I’m back to my art stuff again, having finally embarked on a project I’ve felt overwhelmed by, a gift for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary which wouldn’t be so bad except their anniversary was last year. A painting, a montage of them, a sort of old-fashioned poster/painting. It is always so hard to start, to stare at the blankness and wonder where to begin. Once it has started though, the journey begins and I’m in a sort of trance, even when I’m doing something else, I can’t wait to be back to it again, the trance being very alluring…captivating in intensity. I forget about everything. It feels like I could disappear there…where is there?…it’s just….well, there. I’m also doing some work on some pictures I took of wading seagulls and a closeup of a crow drinking from a garden fountain (is a crow the same thing as a raven because I like the word raven better). Perhaps some words from Poe will be suitable.

Maybe the guilt and the judgment and such will get better with more awareness and maybe it won’t, but at least the group hug is there…which helps a lot

I’m left with some chronic pain as a result of my surgery back in May, which is reminding me right now of what the word chronic means…it may get better some day or it may not, just like all the other pains and ills, but I’ll keep hoping, praying, talking to it, dictating to it, cursing it, embracing it, crying because of it, and also accepting it. Physical pain is messy and emotional, and I think sometimes the emotion is the harder part…

And since I haven’t said it in a long while, thank you to those of you who stop by and visit and read and offer your comments and thoughts, and come back to do it all over again. I know I revisit the same themes over and over and over again…it not being so easy for me to just “make it so” when it comes to change. Your comments are valued, thought about, digested, mulled over, respected, and always appreciated. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

for God so loved the world…

“For Unity so loved Diversity,
all the worlds of form,
that it brought you a child of Unity,
fulfilled in all aspects of self,
so that whoever would have
the same confidence in their own fulfillment,
like the earth underneath supporting all,
would not fade with their form,
but continue, from world to world,
with and in the ever-living Life.”

_________________________
From “The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus”, by Neil Douglas-Klotz

awaken

I dreamed of you in those hazy moments of waking, a dream that seemed to be of celebration, joy, laughing, remembrance…but was it you? When I woke I wondered about you, wondered why you have always seemed so elusive, distant, hard to reach. I wondered if longing and aching and wishing are the inevitable results of my mind’s interpretations and if I would ever figure out the formula to transform these mere hints of connectedness into ecstatic union. I wondered if it is really all my own error in both perception, my ego’s desires and needs to expect you to be as it wants you to be rather than just as you are. A lifetime of seeking and devotion and sacrifice with little more than glances and whispers, being teased time and again, like a lover on the verge of oblivion who is abandoned moments before their venture into the void. I’ve knelt before you, confessed to you, bowed before you, raised my hands to you, sung songs to you, danced for you, surrendered to you, trusted in you blindly, had faith in you, prayed to you, screamed from my heart at you in frustration and anger…and yet you have coyly remained silent.

The wondering ceased, realization once again that within my mind there was nothing to be found, the moment was gone, I was back to my thoughts, back to the chase, back to the endless pursuit, moving wildly in every direction in the hope that one of them, just one, may lead to a brief moment…just one brief moment on which to sustain, to know, to feel, to experience, you.

penguins and karma

I’ve been watching the series, Planet Earth., on DVD. My jaw is pretty much constantly hanging open. Not only for the unbelievable hardships faced by most of the life on this planet just to eat and find water and avoid being eaten, but also for the portions of the program that describe what the people who filmed the series went through just to capture mere moments of footage. As an example, it took three years of watching and waiting the snow leopard to obtain clips of behaviors never before seen on film. These guys just sat and watched and waited in pretty horrendous conditions for three years waiting to capture this leopard on film. I find myself incredulous. Me, who at the mere thought of not having hot water and a bathroom and all the things my sorry constitution require for comfort for three long years, perched on a snowy, freezing, rocky mountainside, makes me wither and shiver and get cranky. These guys are either really dedicated and passionate, or just plain out of their mind.

It occurred to me too that if you build up enough bad karma in your lifetime, the worst punishment on earth (in a physical sense anyway), has got to be reincarnation as an emperor penguin. These poor creatures waddle 70 miles across the ice in Antarctica at what looks like about a quarter of an inch with every step (when all other life forms have long since left), straight into the hell of the freezing winter where the temperature reaches minus 70 degrees centigrade, to spend four months in total darkness, temperatures the human mind cannot conceive of, with no food or water, all to shelter one egg on their feet and hope that the little parcel actually hatches into a live bird at the end of it all. One false move, and the egg is dead and all that torment is for nothing. At the end of it, even if you do have a live chick, you have to hope that the female returns from the sea without having been eaten by a predator or having starved to death on her journey back to sea, to relieve you of your duty so you can march your 70 some-odd miles back to the sea, now near death yourself, and hope to find something to eat without yourself becoming a meal. And here I’ve been afraid for so many years of a place called hell that is outside of this planet? What was I thinking?

If you wake up one day and find yourself having been given the daunting challenge of life as an emperor penguin, perhaps you ought to just let the orca eat you straight away because it surely can’t get any worse to come back as something else. Unless you are the type of person who wishes to climb Mt. Everest. Maybe there is some eternal glory to be reaped if you can claim you led a successful life as an emperor penguin without wimping out to the mouth of the orca.

Are emperor penguins happy? Do they have some sort of antifreeze for blood? Why don’t their feet freeze? Do they bemoan their lot in life? As they bow their heads day after day after day in the darkness and the cold, and hold that egg on their feet, do they think about anything, or are they just pure instinct and survival? Do they hurt? Do they experience suffering, wishing for a circumstance other than the one they find themselves in? Do they dream of the sun, so far off in time and space? Do they really take turns rotating position on the outside of the group and the inside of the group so that you spend equal amounts of time on the perimeter where it is coldest and harshest, and the interior where it is warmest, or are there cheaters who try to stay in the middle all the time? Is there a justice system if you try to cheat? Is there some sort of policing of the time that is being spent in the different positions?

I don’t know, but I did find myself wrapped in a heavy blanket while watching them, wondering what they were thinking and feeling, hoping that there was something of joy inside of them to sustain them through those months.

Do emperor penguins suffer from seasonal affective disorder?

love be with you

One of the things I am fond of in the Catholic service is the the part of the Mass when you turn to the person seated next to you, shake his/her hand, and say, “Peace be with you”. If the person seated next to you is someone you are close to like a relative or a partner, you can offer them peace through a hug and/or a kiss. There is something lovely about offering peace to your neighbor and shaking his/her hand…something intangible I “feel” when doing so, a feeling not replicated in any Protestant church I have been to where greetings have generally felt stiff and insincere…as if…okay…the pastor is asking worshipers to be friendly so they will do so out of their Christian duty…but in Catholic Mass, I have always felt a sort of sincerity in the offering of peace, regardless of who I have been seated next to…I have felt genuine warmth and caring come through those handshakes and exchange of smiles and glances. It isn’t always this way, as there can be some hesitancy and wariness on the part of some. But when the connection happens it is unmistakable…it now occurs to me that in that genuine moment, when two people connect in sincere opening of their heart to one another, particularly in this case because it is a stranger…THAT is church…THAT is the holy, the sacred, the value, the joy. I think that is what is meant by “we are all one”…for in that momentary handshake and glance into this stranger’s eyes, there is a genuineness I have seen, a heartwarming moment of knowing and understanding, a sort of sharing with a stranger you don’t know and will never see again, just a shared moment of peace, of warmth…of common humanity.

i feel cloudy

I woke up today and I found myself feeling weary and tired and just plain sad. It didn’t help that the sky was gray, as if it was reflecting my mood back to me.

A friend who is going through an extremely painful time in his life needed an ear for a while and I started listening to his distress and felt myself taking his sadness on as my own. In our shared suffering I was floundering for what to say, unable to come up with anything I thought was particularly useful. I suppose this was partially due to his responses back to me which were so closed off as he was fairly determined to remain inside the sadness, and partly because I was so mired down in the muck of my own mood. I began to feel frustrated at my ineptness to comfort him in his pain, and my own helplessness to help just made me feel worse than I already did. I wanted so much to fix his pain, to come up with the right words that would take it all away and make him feel better, and in the process make me feel better. It reminded me of the time when I was a little girl and my best friend broke her arm and wouldn’t stop crying. All I wanted was for her to smile at me again. I did everything I could to make her laugh, every effort met with more tears. There was no fixing her arm, and there was no fixing my friend’s heart either. I felt more sadness over his pain than over my own. Did I so desperately wish to fix his pain for his sake at this point or for my own? His pain seemed so deep, so unreachable, and so hopeless that it was very hard for me to let him alone without feeling like I had made some progress in helping him.

I finally had to realize there was no way for me to wave a magic wand for him, no way to be the savior or the hero…all I could do was simply care.

Sometimes we just need someone to vent to, to listen to the pain, to validate the grief, to be soothed and comforted in the sharing with someone else how much life can hurt and that we aren’t alone in it, to just be with us to get through the day, not to fix it for us but perhaps to carry the torch of hope and remembrance for us that this isn’t the way it is always going to be, and that our value and happiness aren’t dependent on the circumstances of living no matter how much it can seem that way when we are enveloped by the darkness.

Giving to him in his pain did help me in the loneliness I felt within the sadness…for just a moment I realized I could give to myself the same care I had given to him…

…my own heart, caring for itself, comforting itself……and yes, even loving itself.

Jane Elliott’s Eyes

How do you think it would feel if one day you showed up to work or to a party or went to an amusement park or some other activity, and you were treated with contempt because of your eye color? Based on a physical characteristic you have no control over, you are segregated into a special group, made to wear a collar that advertises your inferior status, and are then unfairly treated by those who have the superior eye color? Do you think you would fall into the role and feel less than equal to those with the superior eye color? If you were in the superior eye color group, do you think you would start to feel superior and therefore start treating the inferiors as less than equal to yourself?

A woman by the name of Jane Elliott wanted to find out. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ms. Elliott developed a blue eyes/brown eyes exercise for her third graders to explore racism in the context of a classroom full of white children. She divided the students into two groups on the basis of their eye color, and over the course of two days conducted an exercise where day one had students possessing blue eyes being superior to those with brown eyes. The students with blue eyes were told they were more intelligent than the students with brown eyes and were granted special classroom privileges. Ms. Elliott discovered that those in the superior group quickly began to oppress those in the inferior group, and those students in the inferior group quickly began to experience feelings of inferiority and fear. On the second day, the roles were reversed, Ms. Elliott telling students she had mixed up the groups, and the brown-eyed students were actually the ones who were superior. The children quickly reversed roles, with the brown-eyed students becoming the oppressors and the blue-eyed students becoming the oppressed.

Sometime in the 1970’s when I was in elementary school I remember watching a documentary made about Ms. Elliott and her exercise in racism, and I recall the impact it had on me just watching it. During the portion of the film where the brown-eyed students were told they were superior, I remember feeling a sort of satisfaction (along with my fellow brown-eyed friends) as we convinced ourselves we really were superior, and subsequent feelings of sadness and inferiority when the brown-eyed students were placed in the oppressed role. Interesting that just watching such the film could elicit feelings of such magnitude in myself and my fellow students. It was a lesson we would not forget.

Jane Elliott would learn her own lesson about intolerance and prejudice as she began to draw criticism for her exercise. She and her students found themselves victims of harassment, and eventually Elliott would leave her position as a teacher after losing support of her school district, and eventually she moved to a different community. She went on to become a diversity consultant, taking her blue eyes/brown eyes exercise to businesses and corporations, teaching them how easily these feelings of superiority and inferiority are brought about within groups of individuals.

If the mere mention of the superiority or inferiority of one group over another based on something as simple as eye color can bring about such intense feelings and oppressive behaviors within such a short period of time in a simple classroom exercise (the results of which were to be repeated over and over in adults as well), it is difficult to imagine the magnitude of the impact of societal oppression and prejudice occurring over years, and even generations, holding people back from self sufficiency, from their talents and gifts, from reaching for goals and fulfilling of dreams. Black or white, rich or poor, male or female, gay or not gay, brown eyes or blue eyes, it defies logic to see how it benefits anyone to oppress any group, sending them into learned helplessness and self loathing. For what? The satisfaction of being superior over another group because giving power to ignorance and fear is somehow working well for mankind, both historically and in the present? It seems adults haven’t come very far from the sandbox, incapable of accepting, sharing and tolerating. Unfortunately, as adults the stakes get higher and the weapons get scarier and the powerful get hungrier and the tentacles of intolerance grow tighter in their grip.

Maybe some folks could benefit from being locked up with Jane Elliott for a month or so.

being a bystander

I was in the fifth grade so I guess that would make me about 10 years old.

The excitement was building as we were down to the final two of us who had survived the grueling evening of spelling in the annual bee hosted by my elementary school. The name of my opponent escapes me, but I remember looking out at the crowd of parents who had gathered to watch the spelling bee and feeling really excited that they were all there, giving their attention to us kids, especially at our school, on our turf, and at night. It made it more formal, more grown up, more “important” somehow.

Mr. Eatman turned to me and asked me to spell the word “vacuum”. I was elated. Such an easy word. No way I could lose now. After an evening of hard words, I couldn’t believe my luck. I smiled as I began to spell….vacuum….v-a-c-u-u-m…vacuum. I looked over at Mr. Eatman with a look of pride and satisfaction, only to see a look of disappointment on his face. He said he was sorry but that was an incorrect spelling and he dismissed me to my seat with my parents. He spelled the word vacuum for the audience….vacuum….v-a-c-c-u-u-m…vacuum. He had spelled it with two c’s. I was confused. Vacuum had two c’s? It couldn’t have two c’s. There were a few parents with quizzical looks on their faces, but no one said a word. No one said anything because if Mr. Eatman said vacuum had two c’s, it must have two c’s.

I took my seat with my parents, heart sinking, and felt the heat of embarrassment for having spelled such an easy word incorrectly. When we arrived home, confirmation of the spelling of the word came from Webster’s Dictionary, but there wasn’t much consolation in finding out I had been right and Mr. Eatman had been wrong. What difference did it make now? The bee was over, the parents had gone home, the moment was gone. About an hour later, the phone rang and it was Mr. Eatman on the line. He called to apologize as he had realized his error, and that I had indeed won the spelling bee. He told me to stop by the Principal’s office in the morning to collect my trophy. I tried to make him feel better by making it out to be no big deal. I felt badly for him because he felt so badly for what had happened. It was just a mistake, no big deal. He thanked me for being so understanding, I collected my trophy quietly in the morning, and that was the end of the story.

It’s interesting though how in a crowd of all those people, many of whom knew an error had been made, that not one single person attempted to voice a correction. They had all convinced themselves they must be wrong, and remained silent, a sort of group blend effect taking place. In the face of an apparent authority, in this case Mr. Eatman, no one wanted to stand out and take a chance on being wrong, or challenge that authority, but were rather content to let the error stand. In this case, the consequence was just an insignificant spelling bee decided in favor of the wrong child. No big deal.

Blending in with the group, being a bystander, seems to make people feel safer. Don’t get involved, stir the pot, make any noise … live quietly and in compliance and maybe no one will notice…

But then, what to do … just quietly ignore those who do get noticed and assume it will never be you who is labeled a suspected terrorist and therefore fall under the jurisdiction of the “Patriot Act”… assume it will never be you who is assaulted outside of your apartment with a dozen or so neighbors who have group blended and therefore do not come to your assistance … assume that it will never be you who because of your religious beliefs or lifestyle are singled out and taken away for nonconformity… assume that your assimilation and compliance are so complete that it is never you? As long as it is someone else, it’s okay? Who are all these “someone else’s” anyway? Today “someone else” is many things, mostly Middle Eastern. “Someone else” has also been Jewish, black, Muslim, Christian, female, gay, etc.

Maybe tomorrow “someone else” will be the person next door, or me, or you … and the consequence won’t be the insignificant outcome of a spelling bee.

…But then, a trip to the bookstore or the turning on of the television reveals far more compelling news to attract one’s attention … Brad and Angelina’s love troubles and subsequent reconciliation definitely deserve far more time and attention.

random bunches of flowers

…flowers make me smile…what nobler result of your existence could there possibly be than to make someone smile…i don’t have a favorite flower…whether it is a small bloom coming up from a weed in the concrete, or a vibrant, fragrant, proud rose that someone has carefully cultivated from beginning to end, i smile…i love how sensual the experience of a flower is, from the visual beauty, to the feel of the petals, to the fragrance of the bloom…i love how a flower is beautiful and life sustaining and…transient…i love that flowers are predictable and yet elusive, sometimes only blooming on a cycle of years and then gone in a matter of days…i love how flowers are just there, blooming in fullness even when no one cares or notices or pays attention…i love that flowers can be eaten and can also be poisonous…i love how flowers celebrate with us and mourn with us…constant in their display regardless of the occasion, serving to console and to uplift…i just know that flowers make me smile…