The Wisdom of Not Knowing Everything

The year of 2012 and now the first almost five months in 2013 have not found me being a regular blogger. I’m shocked really. But when you hear what I’ve experienced, you’ll appreciate why I didn’t want to write it all down.

A year ago right now, two people dear to me died. Those losses staggered me.  Then as summer unfolded it became clear that new money wasn’t flowing as quickly as I thought it would, my landlady didn’t want to put up with diminished payments, and when September arrived, I fell in the SeaTac airport on the way back from a myth symposium in CA and ruined my knee. It took weeks and weeks to heal. I limped around at my new part time job working at an art gallery, got laid off pretty quickly because of faltering sales, then was hired back on around Christmas time. The need to downsize and move became imperative, a deer ran into my car, totaling it, just when I needed it most for moving and carrying my art to the destination for a studio tour. Borrowing cars from friends and family for an entire month was nerve wracking, especially when my left foot was in agony. I broke my toe late one dark and rainy night by jamming it into a book filled box lying in a spot where it wouldn’t normally have been. The rains came and they came and they came adding to the general malaise of my disoriented state. For three weeks, I had no telephone, Ethernet or cable and I can tell you I felt realllllly sorry for myself.

But I don’t want you to. A brief “oh wow,” is all I need because despite the travail, I am lucky beyond measure. I have my wits still and good health for which I am grateful.  I’m surrounded by supportive friends and family and a sense of connection with the invisible mystery that carries my life forward.

AND

During that crazy time in Oct/Nov 2012, I continued to paint, inspired by the course called DEEP with Connie Hozvicka. Read my October post if you want to be reminded of that class. And as my own life was falling in shards around me, so was Connie’s and also a number of the other students. So in the fifth week of a six weeks course, we stopped. It was so perfect. I couldn’t have continued with the last assignments and the one I did finish may be the most important image of my painting career.

I want to share a little of that with you. Our last assignment was titled “ Just This.” I wasn’t even sure what it meant but I liked it. It chimed deeply within me. Just this. Just this. Now that, now this, and then this again. Oh yeah, JUST THIS. I am all of this…whatever this is. Connie’s directions were to use a large vertical sheet of paper and begin painting our feet. How are they right now? Move up to the head with the same question, then fill in the middle. Curious yes? But I loved it.

Here’s how I began.  I knew I’d start by “finger” painting but because I wanted to use acrylic, not tempera, I pulled on latex gloves, got my palette knife and a big sponge and plunged in. I knew I had to start with black – my head thought I was going to lay down black for the feet area, white for the head and red for the middle. That’s not what happened. Black was needed for both feet and head and the center demanded both red and white and yellow – I was making big sweeping motions for the center and suddenly realized I was drawing the infinity symbol, which also reminded me of butterfly wings.

What you see on the bottom is an expression of what I felt when I asked my feet to reveal their status to me. Shaking and quaking with no firm foundation.  I used the palette knife to carve zigs and zags and before I could say Jack Rabbit I could see fish shapes taking form and the suggestion of other critters. I began to darken in around them to reveal them a little bit more. Then I am reminded of the earthquakes which were happening just north of where I live. They seemed relevant and I had to paint the planet splitting in  two. A crack between worlds is opening up beneath me, my feet spanning the two sides.

 I am the bridge between everything.

Aren’t we all?

Oh golly, I didn’t mean to let so much time go by. Where has this month gone? How can you keep track of my ideas, when I don’t complete my thoughts? Silly me.

I ended the last post with a “come-on.” Stay tuned for that list of modern assumptions that may be our undoing: Here they are:

the world is inert
resources are for us to take
we humans are self-sufficient and stand alone
we humans are separate from nature
human health has no connection to a healthy environment
our brain lives only in our head
rationality is the only way of being that matters
our belly has no intelligence
ancestral myths are irrelevant, meaningless and false
community celebrations are trivial, unnecessary
we are in control and can invent a solution for every mess
reverence, humility and gratitude are not prized
dominating and winning are everything. . .

. . .these assumptions have now led to a perilous situation in which our life support system – the planet – has been brought to her proverbial knees.

But these assumptions are simply that. My son says, “You know what they say about assumptions, don’t you, Mom?  They make asses out of you and me.” So rather than be an ass, we can make fewer assumptions. But assumptions, like stereotypes, are sometimes useful, so we might still need a few. What might they be like?

If rationality is not the only way to be smart, what is? Perhaps our notions of the brain need changing. Imagine a brain in which both hemispheres rely on each other, acknowledge each other’s validity. That integrated brain would be very potent. Long before Ecstatic Wisdom Postures came into my life, I was following Jean Houston’s work, reading her book Mind Games to be exact and doing the exercises with a small group of psychotherapist friends. One particular experience riveted me. In active imagination, I experienced a gorilla from the right side of my brain reaching over to the left hemisphere to grab a banana – food for thought!  Literally and figuratively.

And a head connected to the body – imagine that! The vast, beyond-reason intelligence housed in our gut could be mixing and mingling with our rational selves to provide a much larger set of perceptions from which to make decisions.

The South American prophecy of the eagle and the condor sheds light on the new assumptions we’re being asked to embrace. This prophecy says that cultures run in 500 year cycles – or thereabout – and that around the time of Columbus, the paradigm of the eagle took precedence over that of the condor. The condor represents a spiritual, intuitive, heart centered and creatively connected way of living. The eagle represents an intellectual, rational, analytical, technological and scientific way of living which, though rich in many respects, also supports domination and disconnection from nature. The prophecy suggests that this is the time when the eagle and the condor must fly in the same sky for the human species to save itself. I think of it as the eagle and condor flying as side-bys in the same sky of mind.  Mind refers to a whole brain that communicates with the body as well as the invisible intelligence surrounding our bodies.

The notion of a whole body/mind shakes the foundations of psychology. What will be considered normal when ordinary folks routinely converse with both the world of matter and the world of spirit simultaneously? Can we learn to think of it as normal to experience ravens giving us messages, trees talking, ancestors filling a room with their presence and synchronicities affirming our intentions?

Ecstatic Postures, because they come from our ancestors all around the globe, remind us that we are all indigenous. Ecstatic Postures help us access the earth honoring wisdom in our DNA. They show us how to begin taking personal responsibility for nurturing reciprocity with the “other”, manifesting a culture of “wild ethics.” Read David Abram’s Becoming Animal – An Earthly Cosmology.

Evolution and the planet call to us humans to get comfortable with these expanded capacities as modern, urban humans. This is not “woo-woo” but evolution revealing itself. Those of us who have practiced Postures for a long time are in the forefront of this awakening.  We need to support each others knowing and way of walking in the world because we are the imaginal cells of a profound evolutionary shift in human capacity. Our Posture practice hones our ability to stand tall and speak with legitimate authority as to what it’s like to have eagle and condor flying together in our own minds, to be walking our talk as compassionate, connected and whole humans. The resistance to such profound change is monumental and the current cultural paradigm’s immune system is rallying. If we support each other, inspire each other, and energize our community, Ecstatic Wisdom Postures just might offer the tipping point for humanity’s coming of age.

Imagine that!

Could we who practice Ecstatic Wisdom Postures be the imaginal cells of cultural transformation?

Imaginal cells – have you heard of them? I attended an Earth and Spirit conference in Oregon in 1989 and heard the biologist, Elizabet Sahtouris speak. She described imaginal cells, the cells which carry the butterfly blueprint to the caterpillar.  When the caterpillar first notices those butterfly cells gathering, s/he becomes a voracious eater.  Consuming everything in sight the caterpillar eventually becomes so bloated s/he stiffens and weaves the cocoon around itself.

Metaphorically, doesn’t this sound like our current cultural need to gobble up goods?

When those first imaginal cells appear, the caterpillar’s immune system immediately kills them.  But as more imaginal cells show up, the immune system can no longer fight them off and the cocoon is made – that’s when caterpillar soup begins bubbling and that little living being is neither here nor there…another fine metaphor to help us grasp why our contemporary culture seems amorphous and incoherent.

Though our technologically savvy, consuming oriented, modern cultures are brilliant in many respects, we humans suffer from a host of debilitating symptoms new to the planet.  A few of those disorienting symptoms are: alienation, numbness, raging fear, depression, fatigue syndromes, meaninglessness, anxiety, helplessness, addictions, addictions, and more addictions.

This is the first time in human history when we have actually been aware that we can destroy our entire planetary home. This is an unprecedented human awareness with which to deal.

No wonder we go shopping.

Ecstatic Wisdom Postures provide direct experience with the sacred; personal awe and communal wonder dance – truly good medicine don’t you think? Experiencing the divine in everyday life is an antidote to some of our modern ignorance, our impotency, and a catalyst for the imaginal cells in the human evolutionary butterfly to gather with wit and wisdom.

We humans can transform ourselves. We’ve done it countless times before during our two legged history to achieve the fully functioning rational minds and scientific technological savvy we enjoy today.

Along that evolutionary way, however, we have had to diminish our intuitive and spiritual capacities, forget our ability to dream while awake. We’ve adopted a set of modern assumptions about how life works that may be our undoing.

Let this new image I’ve painted, get your imagination stirred up and tune in next time to read more about our assumptions. The painting is called: Intrepid Together.

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 http://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.

https://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.