The Wisdom of Not Knowing Everything

A day later than I promised, but I did it. I painted my dream and now I’ll tell its story.

For years – and years – I’ve been writing a book. I might call it, “ Memoirs of an Urban Wild Woman”- or I might not. In 2008, February 29^th I woke for the second time that day at 8:46 a.m. I had this dream in response to my request for inspiration in restarting the manuscript:

I’m in another place and time experiencing myself as a baby being born. I emerge from the uterine confines of warmth and darkness into a softly lit, shadow dappled world filled with warm hands tenderly holding, my ears swooning with the oooohs and aaaahs of enchanted human endearment accompanied by a symphony of meadow larks larking, chickadees twittering, bees buzzing, ravens warbling, snakes slithering, flames crackling, waters burbling, winds shooshing and caressing, grass blading, seeds popping, stalks stretching, leaves unfurling, buds blossoming, flowers perfuming, cats purring, beetles clicking, ants trailing, mice chittering, dog gamboling, mouth suckling, warmth guzzling, breath revealing, sweat informing, melted butter hands stroking my nakedness cradled in warm sensory surround.

“I have come home!”

Primal infant awareness of sheer joy prior to words, but I need those words now to describe the felt-sense of gratitude for the truth of my embodied connection. I am home.

If you were born in a high rise, clanging, blinding, measuring, weighing, calculating, sterilizing hospital, as I was, you had no chance to arrive home. Think about the ramifications.

From a different vantage point, Richards echoes this wisdom in the Epilogue – She is on Her Way which concludes his book Cosmosophia: “If we are to once again experience the cosmos as our womb, to participate meaningfully in the awesome event called the Universe, then we must simply walk outside, pause, and look at the shining stars, or see a child being born, or listen to a tree’s leaves rustling in the wind, and be amazed. Until we regain this capacity, no set of ideas can save us from ourselves.”

Imagine how differently we all would live if we remembered to wonder, simply wonder…

Ahhhhhh time to take my precious fingers away from the treasured keyboard, open the door and step outside.

Let me know how you relate to these ideas, this dream.

Thank you…

I am flooded with information, new connections and ideas. The internet is my athanor, the alchemical furnace that supports transformation. Everything, including this rainy day, conspires to make me feel like jumping out of my skin with excitement for this delicate, powerful experience of living.

As you know who follow this blog, I’m on fire because of the online art course, BIG, that I just completed. Luckily, the inspiration grows because of the Facebook tribe for all the BIG painters who have gone before me.

Hali has inspired me with her Art as Prayer project.  I intend to participate and maybe you’ll be drawn to do that too.

Then a video made by friends of another Fearless artist moved me with their artistic message for re-imagining our lives.

My own first attempt at presenting a slide show about Ecstatic Postures and mounting it on YouTube makes me laugh now that I have read the book, PresentationZen by Garr Reynolds. I can’t wait to redo the powerpoint with zen in mind!

And then, and then I’m powerfully inspired to create a new video to answer the question lodged in my soul: What is the ALL that I want to leave behind for my descendants?

Immediate answer: My love for living on this miraculous, mysterious, flourishing earth.

And then here comes Theodore Richards and his book Cosmosophia.

I began reading it two months ago and it is so full of deep thoughts and dense information, a global overview of religious traditions and early cosmologies that I stumbled and put it aside. I returned a few days ago and along about page 161 and Chapter Nine I started shouting Yes, Yes, YES. Dog eared page after page. I couldn’t keep up with writing notes to myself in the back. My book has actually changed shape with all those dog ears. I can’t imagine Kindle ever being so sensually gratifying!

Richards begins and ends the book with the womb, many wombs actually. I find that riveting because they relate to an epiphany in my own life. I have written several books, though never published. I’ve begun the “same” book three times now and was looking for inspiration in the Spring of 2008. I asked for a dream. And I got one – a huge one that relates to being truly born on earth. I’ll share that story, maybe on Friday, because I feel the need to paint it, too. In the meantime, I want to share a bit of Richards’ thinking on the subject of womb because it relates. On page 36, he writes under this sub-heading:

Cosmosophia: The Compassionate Wisdom of the Cosmic Womb

In keeping with the oldest of the Wisdom Traditions…wisdom can be understood not so much as something that comes from humanity, but is embedded in the mysterious processes of the cosmos. Cosmic wisdom is the capacity of the Universe to experience itself as a coherent and compassionate whole – a womb – even as it gives birth to novelty. As I watch my infant daughter in her crib, I can see in her eyes a yearning both to learn and grow and to regain the sense of safety and nourishment she felt in the womb. The newness of the world into which she has been born…allows for new connections to be made. . .and at the same time, there is something lost in her departure from the intimacy of the womb. For the rest of her life, she will strive. . .to regain a felt sense of the world as her new womb…What we seek is not a return to the womb we have left but to embrace the metaphorical womb into which we have been born.

Imagine the world as a safe and nurturing womb for all of us. Delicious idea, isn’t it. Makes me want to dance, to feast, to celebrate.

Inspired by my new found love of painting BIG with poster paints, clunky brushes and beginner’s mind, I introduced a small group of women to large blank pieces of paper taped onto cardboard spread on the grass. I shared a few exercises to soften fear’s grip and to familiarize our hands and arms and backs and knees to this playful approach.

Then we held the Birthing Posture, remained in silence afterward and began painting how it feels to be me now. Ahhhhhh the color, the movement, the diversity…ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Dragon, web of life, cosmic grid, royal bird trees, phoenix rising, cosmic serpents coiling, flames reaching, frustration, exhilaration, all of it inspired deep contemplation and ebullient recognition.

The following day, three of us shared over coffee, delving into our dreams for the August posture ceremony which we thought was going to be another masked trance dance. Our vision grew quickly, focused more precisely. August will be a new ceremony based on the ancestral wisdom coming through our Ecstatic Posture practice and the planet’s call for human awakening. It will be mythic, it will embody the living world, it will animate our modern souls and kindle the fires of cultural evolvement. It will help us be the pebbles in the universal pond of wonder, composting our too tight cultural boxes into fertilizer for walking the edge, for stepping into the truth of our own grounded experience.

Two questions were posed by Shannon and Victoria that rivet me. If I knew, truly knew, I was an ancestor of the future, how/ who would I want to be?  What is the ALL that I have to give?

We think we know the title of the ceremony is EDGE, an acronym for something more. BUT we plan to meet again next week, maybe camp in the high country. Only spirit knows where that will take us.

I hope you’ll join us in Sequim,  WA, August 16th to 19th.

A milestone – my last painting is finished for BIG.

Painting The Blessing focused and calmed me as I prepared to contribute to my friend J’s Celebration of Life yesterday. And, you dear readers of this blog, don’t know yet that my former son in law passed away on Friday. It has been an amazing experience to be with my extended family and grandchildren – filled with perfection, grace, engagement, healing and courage. The Blessing is for them as well.

I taped four papers together so the painting is roughly 44” by 66”.  Taller than I am! I began the painting yesterday morning and returned to it after J’s ceremony. I finished it this morning. A week ago, I thought this final painting would somehow feature me as a tree, and I think that’s why I started it with blue vertical stripes. I simply squirted color on and then smeared it with a brush, because I knew I wanted to get as much of the white covered in color as quickly as I could.

But my soul, hands and arms, cried out for reds and oranges, so that came next. I don’t know how I had the wherewithal to capture it photographically, but I felt as if I had to. I knew from the beginning that this painting would take me on an unexpected journey and so it did. I wanted to know myself how I got from start to finish!

The miracle of how my son in law slipped out of his body and into the ethers moves  me deeply and I keep feeling the presence of otherwordly helpers – angels, dieties, spirits – Quickly I gave over to that imagery. I’ve painted angels only once before and that was nearly twenty years ago but I think this is who showed up – and it is both me and thee.

I am empty now and full, open to the unknown around today’s corner, ready for what emerges and yet not eager to step forth – waiting, gestating, wonder-ing. May we all remember how blessed we are to experience living each moment we are here.

Intense, these last two weeks. On Monday, April 9^th, I  birthed a baby of sorts: an online community called Dive IN. . .to the Wisdom of Ecstatic Postures at www.awakeningstorylines.ning.com.

On Saturday evening, April  14^th, a dear friend unexpectedly died. Unexpected in the sense that he was meant to fly to Arizona the next day to receive highly focused, utmost modern, technologically advanced chemotherapy in the hope of remission so that a few weeks down the line he could have heart surgery. His heart had other plans.

A few days later, I learned that my 45 year old former son-in-law is slipping toward the edge of the planet. He’s been surviving and thriving with extremely rare and dangerous cancer(s) for the last five years…he’s rebounded from near death at least three times during these five years but this crisis seems different somehow.

And I’ve dropped everything in order to spend time supporting family and friends.

Everything about living is called into question by times like these. And so I’ve gotten behind on my BIG art assignments.

This morning I changed that and I’m delirious with the unknown trajectory this Fearless Painting experience is taking me. Our assignment was to paint: How It Feels to Be Me. I knew I had to paint my current condition – grieving…

I am happy, astounded, filled with gratitude, joy!

Funny things to say when my focus for painting was allowing the grief to flow. But grieving turned into the joy of being alive at this moment and experiencing yet again the flow of painting freely – trusting trusting trusting and even in poster paint on ordinary paper the magic of texture, underlying layers, symbols and unexpected meaning began to appear.

I began at the bottom, knowing I had to smear in lots of darks with a big brush – black and several blues – the darks representing the unknown, the mystery, the fecundity beneath the surface of the most mundane acts – working on the floor I moved to the other end and kept dragging the scratchy brush along until it was devoid of black paint. All kinds of interesting textures showed up as well as the curves that ended up being a madonna’s cloak.

I kept an egg shape open for the face and simply painted everything else as fast as I could – whatever tumbled up and spilled out – remembering all our exercises, I was cognizant of scribbling, flowing, filling in shapes, the child – all of it and then I began to cry as I began to see the power manifesting, the power of truly expressing my grief and the power of joy to express truly my grief in the beauty of painted expression. Grief and joy for me have always been intimately connected and that kinship showed up here.

I am beyond any more words at the moment but thank you.

I was on the radio on Monday! And it corroborates the BIGNESS I’m feeling induced by the art class I’ve been chronicling of late.

I’m so pleased. Dr. Jeff Leinaweaver interviewed me on his new radio show  Gaialogue Radio,  hosted by Transformational Talk Radio. Here’s the link to Dr. Jeff’s page there.

http://www.transformationtalkradio.com/meet_shows.php?id=6150

If you scroll down you’ll find buttons for playing the show or downloading it. Soon, maybe I’ll figure out how to embed the talk here but I’m not sure if that’s even possible. We called the interview: Stories from an Urban Wild Woman.

That’s me! I’m reposting an illustration of me walking in the shoes of  both/and.

You can read the prior post about that here.

http://awakeningstorylines.com/2010/11/24/508/

( Please forgive the appearance of these links. My link button has not yet been repaired. I think they are working on it though.)

In the first two segments of the radio interview, Dr. Jeff encourages me to share the pivotal points in my growing up when I purposely boxed myself into living a “half-life” in order to find acceptance by the civilized, intellectual, cultural norms of the time. In the 1940’s and ‘50’s, I didn’t yet have the guts to reveal my deeper self. In fact, though I knew I was burying aspects of me, I may not have known what those aspects even were. But then I move to Montana in 1980 and everything changes, a major mask falls off and then another and another and voila, in 1992, during two months of solitude, I reclaim most of the parts I had jettisoned early on. I imagine my life story is similar for many, especially women and especially those born prior to women’s lib. I’d sure love to hear some of your stories of coming alive.