Stilling Stormy Waters

For the last couple of days, I’ve been living with fear. As usual, I’m frightened about something that is beyond my control, and the answer is prayer. I’m not the kind of person who just naturally turns to prayer, you know? I’m the kind of person who knows exactly what the right thing to do is in any given situation, and I’ll tell you about that, or yell at you about it, and get bossy and manipulative about making sure you do what I know is right, and resentful if you don’t. Sometimes, that’s how I can TELL I’m frightened – I get all controlling and I scream at people. I want to DO something, and it’s hard for me to remember that praying IS doing something. The only thing.

I’ve spent a lot of time returning to the Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change …” And breathing. One of the teachers in my life says ANYTHING I try to do consciously is fighting, and what I need to do is just, once an hour or so, when I remember, pay attention to my breath. Not DO anything about it – just pay attention to it. It does make tension drain out through my feet somewhere.

Another one of my teachers says to me (I need to hear it often): “I wish you could see this as part of the natural order of life, and not as stressful and catastrophic.” When I first started hearing it, I just wanted to shout, “You’re not LIVING with this!!! It is F***ing stressful and catastrophic!” But he DOES know. And he’s right. When I notice myself and say, “This is as stressful and catastrophic as you allow it to be,” the stressful and catastrophic drains away too.

I do an ocean meditation. I’m on the ocean. Sometimes in a bathing suit, sometimes not. Floating on my back. A starfish float, I think little kids call it, except that’s face-down and I’m face-up. On top of the ocean. If you’re going to float like that, you have to relax everything – once your body gets tense, things start sinking. So the meditation involves staying relaxed so I float on top of the ocean.

And the ocean varies. Sometimes it’s calm and blue and flat, like the Caribbean. Sometimes, it’s grey and there’s big swells taking me up and down. Sometimes, I’m aware of the things that live in the ocean. “That great Leviathan,that you made for the sport of it.” I know they’re down there below me; I know some of them are carnivorous; and the only thing to do is keep floating, and trust. Sometimes, my ocean is the North Atlantic in full storm, and it sucks me down underneath it. Even that’s okay. Sometimes, I need that.

Last week, on Wednesday, Ellie posted on silence at Meditation Matters. I’ve gone back and read it several times this weekend. I have a friend who was an English major: loves poetry and writes it, and loves Rumi the best. Ellie’s post includes this: The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, "Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being."

That’s a great line for someone who meditates and craves oceans.

I was thinking about it tonight, a little while ago, when I read it again. I thought, “I just need to remember to still the waters.” And then I remembered – that’s not MY job. There’s someone else who stills waters. There’s someone else who leads me beside still waters.

22 One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side of the lake.’ So they put out, ²³and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A gale swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. ²⁴They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. ²⁵He said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’ – Luke 18:22-25, NRSV

So, it’s MY job to let go of all this, pray, and let God handle it. To pray, to be calm and still like the waters, inside, and to be loving to others as I go through the night and the day.

Thanks, Ellie.

At the End of the Day: A Mirror of Questions

I stole these from Jan, who borrowed them from John O'Donohue (1953-2008). I just wrote the other day that I do a type of examen at the end of the day. I'm going to try answering these questions, in the examen and pondering them in meditation for a while. Thanks, Jan. And, by the way, she has a lovely picture on her post.

What dreams did I create last night?

What dreams did I create last night?

Where did my eyes linger today?

Where was I blind?

Where was I hurt without anyone noticing?

What did I learn today?

What did I read?

What new thoughts visited me?

What differences did I notice in those closest to me?

Whom did I neglect?

Where did I neglect myself?

What did I begin today that might endure?

How were my conversations?

What did I do today for the poor and excluded?

Did I remember the dead today?

Where could I have exposed myself to the risk of something different?

Where did I allow myself to receive love?

With whom today did I feel most myself?

What reached me today? How deep did it imprint?

Who saw me today?

What visitations had I from the past and from the future?

What did I avoid today?

From the evidence—why was I given this day?

Rocks. Lions, The Twelve Steps and Having Babies

There used to be a professional dance series every winter at the local university. One of the women I went to church with, faculty wife, would buy tickets and six or eight of us would go, and go somewhere expensive for pretty desserts after.

One time we had seats in about the second row of this really small theatre. We think about ballet as airborne, ethereal, delicate ... We saw sweat, and the muscles that tightened and clenched, nipples erect, heard the "thump" after she leapt and landed, and always the footfalls or the slide of her foot across the stage was audible. It wasn't ballet she was doing; but it's one of those, "You can never go back from knowing it's like this," moments.

She was very tall, too tall to be a ballerina in a company, blonde, slender, elegant. After the intermission, she was wearing a yellow leotard. Dandelion yellow. It was just her. She did this dance. She had no props, okay, just her and the music, but she made me see what she was doing so clearly.

She had a bag of rocks. She carried it or dragged it everywhere, and it bent her double trying to shift it. She hated the bag of rocks. And yet ... She'd put it down in a corner of the stage and move away from it, and all the time she was away she'd watch it, then go back and get it. She unpacked it and took out some or all of these rocks ... and then she put them back. They hampered everything she did: got in her way, slowed and bent her, hurt her sometimes. And she couldn't give them up.

There has to have been a transition I can't remember; I remember the ending. She squatted on the stage and her body strained hard and she reached between her legs with both hands and gave birth to this bag of rocks. The part I can't remember is how we knew it was inside her; it had been outside, but giving birth is unmistakable. I was in labour with Tom from two a.m. until they found out he was oxygen-deficient and did a section cuz the labour wouldn't progress, the cervix needs to open 10cm and mine never got past 6, even with the pitocyn drip they used from 9 a.m. to make the labour. I had hard contractions every three minutes from 9 a.m. when they started the drip til 8 or so when they said we have to do the C-section.

I have never done anything that was harder physically. It starts out being the kind of hurt your muscles GET from labour, from work. Carrying or pushing. I think now Lamaze breathing is a type of self-hypnosis -- it didn't work for me. It hurt more than I could have believed: full-intensity every three minutes, there wasn't time for me to get a normal breath in between and I was sweating and crying. Months later, the resident who'd been with me told me that there was something about the angles of the uterus and pelvic saddle bones. That baby would never have come out; I'da just kept doing that until one or both of us died, if it wasn't for the section, and I'd always have to have sections if I had another baby.

So somehow, this dancer convinced us she could give birth to this bag of rocks, and she did. After that she was able to treat it kindly or lovingly, and then walk away from it forever, and you could see in her posture that she WAS free, finally.

I've always thought of my own bag of rocks since then. The people-pleasing and the lies, mostly, for me -- they were a bag of rocks, heavy ones, I carried around all the time and they prevented me. And I couldn't leave them, and sometimes I was even aware, this is me putting another rock in my bag. And God gave me what I needed to put it down.

I did a course at Div College, we read St. Benedict’s Rule, and had to write out our own Rule of Life. “Shit,” I thought, “I don’t have one.” But I do. I had to learn, the hard way, the Twelve Steps, starting over 20 years ago. So in my daily life, I do things that St. Benedict would have recognized – I pray. I meet and talk and listen with others on the journey. I do something just like an examen. I read St., Francis of Assisi’s prayer, “God, make me a channel of your peace …” And I’ve been told that the way to get the things I want into my life is to LIVE that prayer.

One of the most important things, and hardest, was Confession. You know, Anglicans are kind of dry about confession. We do it all in a group in the service on Sunday morning, and no-one has to say anything out loud. There’s no private confession on Saturday evenings. That’s probably good – how would you STAY in a state of grace all through Saturday night?

Step Four is “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Step Five is “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Ugh. Step Six is “Became entirely willing to have God remove all these defects of character,” and Seven is “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”

Four and Five were very hard. There were things I was deeply ashamed of having done. And the person I was going to tell – well, people who were supposed to love me had this habit of going away and leaving me alone when I didn’t do what I was supposed to. I had to tell someone I love the worst things I’d done – I was very afraid of what would happen next. He’d go away. I knew HE wouldn’t, but that’s what had always happened and I couldn’t see past that. What was more frightening was knowing what would happen if I didn’t. I’d be the one who went away. I’d have stopped being honest with the one person in my life I’d committed to myself to be honest with … and I’d stop being able to face him if I wasn’t. And, I’d go back to the life I had before, when I acted like a good girl, and did what I was told, and wanted to explode all the time. I didn’t, mostly, I did other self-destructive things. On the first Sunday in Lent, last year, I did it. I gave it all up to him. And that’s when I got free of that bag of rocks. I was like a bunch of helium balloons, that someone had let go the string of.

On the Thursday, I met with my Parish Priest, and did “The Rite of Reconciliation of a Penitent”. Confession and Absolution. I’d told him – I’m not telling you what I DID – I’ve done that. When the time came to fill in the blank, I just said, “The things I gave up to Bob on Sunday night.” It was enough. Steps Six and Seven. Then there was making amends … That’s a story for another day.

I go back sometimes and look at my bag of rocks and pick it up, and sometimes I even carry around new rocks for a while, an experiment ... But way deep inside, where babies grow, I KNOW that bag of rocks is NOT me anymore, and I don't have to have it, and I know how to put them down if I do carry them. And I'm upright and free.

All right, having a baby is hard, hard work. It was awful when I was going through it, and I'll admit, I begged them to turn off the pitocyn, just for 10 minutes so I could stop crying and get a grip. They couldn't. Poor Steve, the resident, was almost in tears telling me he couldn't.

AND I GOT THE BABY AND I'D DO IT ALL AGAIN IN A HEARTBEAT. Your body forgets pain. I remember that it hurt that much and it is impossible to go down inside and make it hurt again like that so I can feel it. Women have more than one baby because your body forgets and the end results are worth everything you give for them. I remember the shame and fear I had before I told someone what I’d done and who I’d been. But they don’t hurt me inside any more. And feeling like this is worth what I did for it.

All that was triggered by the Inward/Outward message in my e-mail box this morning:

It's heavy to drag...

William Stafford

It's heavy to drag, this big sack of what
you should have done. And finally
you can't lift it any more.
Someone says, "Come on," and you
just look at them. Trees are waiting,
mountains. You never intended
that it should come to this.

But Now has arrived and is looking
straight at you, the way a lion does
when thinking it over, and anything
can happen. It's time for the cavalry
or maybe the Lone Ranger. But they
won't come. Maybe the music will
spill over and start it all again.
Maybe.

Source: The Way It Is, New & Selected Poems

I was gonna share that with a friend and say, "I know what this is," and it turned into this post. I never intended “that big sack of what I should have done” to come to what it was, and the Lone Ranger isn't gonna be able to rid me of what's inside me. But the Now can if I'm prepared to cooperate with it. And the lion looking at you thinking it over ... Lions have been important for me the last couple of years – two years ago, I listened to Bruce Cockburn alla time -- "Had another dream about the lions at the door and they weren't so frightening as they were the time before and I'm thinking about eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me." And now, lions and ecstasy are linked for me.

You’ve heard this before, if you’ve been hanging around, but it’s a new video and a live version.

God and The Tree Frogs and The Heartbeat

I posted a couple of days ago about quantum theology, and got some help. Thank you, Jan! Later this week, I’ll start reading the book.

There were a couple of conversations that prompted me to ask now. It’s funny how these things start. In one, we were on the phone; he was outside; and I could hear the tiny tree frogs, singing like crazy. When I said so, he said that he’d wondered how they could be so little and so loud, and listened and found that when all the little trees frogs are together, their croaking synchronizes, and you hear one big croak. And I thought, “The Tree Frogs’ Heartbeat.” That there is a place, way down deep inside, where all the tree frogs are part of a larger, collective Tree Frog life or purpose – and it’s that larger Heartbeat that they synchronize to.

Then he said that someone had discovered centuries ago that two pendulum clocks on the same shelf will synchronize their ticking within half-an-hour. That would be vibration through the board, that’s what my ancient physics lessons tell me. But it’s working its way into my thoughts on Heartbeat – clocks have Heartbeat.

I said I know from experience that when women live together, their monthly cycles synchronize, and if they live where they are touched by moonlight regularly, the cycles synchronize and become moon cycles. Another friend said a couple of days later, that was true of her and her college roommate – they’d get their periods at the same time. And the room they lived in was tiny – they would wake up some mornings and find they’d dreamed of the same things.

That friend who lives with the tree frogs did advanced graduate studies in linguistics. He’s told me before – language didn’t develop out of our need to communicate (many species communicate without language); it developed out of semantics. There are huge variants in human language. Most of us are most familiar with languages with a subject-verb-object agreement. The subject performs an action, and the verb agrees with it in gender and number. He was talking about languages that originated in Australia, where the verb agrees with the object of the action. We learn language so early and it is rooted in and reflects and shapes our cultural realities. I am struggling with how to construct a sentence using that kind of structure. The important part is – all human language has certain deep parallels of structure, no matter how different they appear in use.

I was off the intertubes for a few weeks, because I was struggling with my own black dog. There are family issues – Dad’s not in crisis any more; they’re managing the symptoms that were causing the crisis. There were internal issues. Fear. Stubbornness. There was part of my life I thought God wasn’t going to help with, so I was trying to run it myself. (That’s been working out just about as well as you might expect, and was a big part of the arrival of the black dog.) I’ve been praying, thinking, writing and meditating about God – why I’d think I’d HAVE to deal with this on my own. What in my understanding of the God I grew up with led to that? Where I’m just plain wrong, and where I can find passages in the Bible and elsewhere that show me how wrong I am.

I’m back to trying to focus on God as The Singleness, and that we are all necessary and beloved parts of The Singleness. I’d been counseled, in my meditation, to focus on my breathing, and I’ve been doing that. Going inside to the important thing, the basis of life. Trying to listen to it. I've been starting with breath, and moving to my own heartbeat.

What I’ve been trying to listen FOR is The Heartbeat of the Singleness. I believe there is one. The beating of the Sacred Heart of God, God who loves us all. I believe it might be possible to hear it. I believe The Singleness manifests different ways – in the synchronized croaking of the frogs; in the clocks on a shelf; the commonalities of our language; the mysterious synchronization of moon cycles, for example. When I’m listening, I listen for how this that I hear could be a manifestation of The Heartbeat. Where I live, I hear a lot of traffic, and even in that, I listen for The Heartbeat. The world is never silent.

It’s difficult to post this, you know? Difficult to reveal what’s going on inside, to get nekkid in front of strangers who might drop in because they googled “Tree Frogs”. In some ways, more difficult with the not-strangers. But I’ll tell you something – if this is crazy, it still feels better than dealing with that big ol’ black dog.