Wonder

Posted on September 19, 2010 by Deborah

Every other sentence rivets me. Every other sentence, and this is only a slight exaggeration, pleads with my pencil/pen to underline it. Abram’s elegant descriptions and brilliant syntheses could inspire my responses for days, maybe weeks.

What is it about his thinking?

His thoughts ring true. They make my bones sing with, “Ahhhhhhh yes.”

Here’s an example from p 292 in Becoming Animal – An Earthly Cosmology: “ We re-create civilization by tapping the primordial wellspring of culture, replenishing the practice of wonder that lies at the indigenous heart of all culture.”

Those few words…replenishing the practice of wonder…make me smile…I’ve been championing wonder for a long time now. Closely aligned with ecstatic experience, wonder animates my core and makes me want to engage with living more fully. I want to move toward the next unknown in order to experience more of what can’t be explained. And then I notice my funny human propensity to want to share “wonder stories” – these stories which are often beyond words. What’s a gal to do? If I’m lucky, I can sing poetry, dance story, paint the gestalt, giggle and wiggle and cry- face to face with another. But sometimes words are essential, as in this electronic blog where I can string them together. But these words hold worlds, so please read in, around and beyond them. They only appear to be linear and hard edged.

Why do I love wonder? An encounter with mystery always helps my ego relax its stranglehold on my intelligence, that intelligence alive in my body which I used to disdain as not being rational. Irrational knowing and inexplicable events make me ask how I can be in charge of my life when I’m not in control of it? How can I manifest intentions when there is no straight line between cause and consequence? Something much vaster than I can comprehend contributes to all the twists and turnings of living fully engaged, embracing both dark and light since they can’t exist without each other.

Awe and wonder inspire humility. Humility empowers me. Like a rudder, humility keeps me on course when the rapids are wild.

“Replenishing the practice of wonder” is an everyday practice. Instead of dismissing intuitive events as being just coincidence, I marvel.

How did I know my daughter was calling when the phone rang? Because I’d thought of her a few seconds before the first ring.

Why did I think about getting a flat tire and then a few hours later it happened?

How did I know I was going to bump into Tania at the farmers’ market?

These everyday wonders serve to remind me I’m never alone. I’m actually surrounded by a network of invisible relations all the time, relations who/which communicate with me if I’m open to receiving – like the energetic waves activating this electronic media…Real as real as can be but I don’t see them, I can’t grab them with my hands, but the right receptor can.

More wondrous occasions affect my life in more dramatic ways. Those experiences birth a new me, seeding bone deep truths that reframe everything about me. As I think about stories to share with you, I find they relate to different faculties: physical, mystical, emotional, spiritual, mental. Come back to “hear” more.

And in the meantime, let me hear from you. What are your experiences of wonder and how do you replenish your practice?

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Saying Good-bye

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Deborah

David Abram describes some of the qualities of an “oral frame of mind” in his new book, Becoming Animal – An Earthly Cosmology. ( p 269 ) One of them is knowing that. . .the ability of each thing or entity to influence the space around it may be viewed as the expressive power of that being. All things, in this sense, are potentially expressive; all things have the power of speech. Most, of course, do not speak in words…The body, itself, speaks.

We moderns would be so much more comfortable in our skins if we re-claimed this awareness. Let me continue my story about Mishka to illustrate what I mean.

Flash forward 15 years from my last post about the kitten, Mishka. An old guy now, ‘Mishk’ almost lost his life two years before “at the talons” of a giant raptor. His injuries compromise his jumping ability and he moves with a bit more care. He sleeps more during the day, but he is still the nighttime outdoorsman that he has always been.

In the Spring of 2009, I make the huge decision to move from my rural retreat center just north of Missoula, where I have lived for the past ten years of my thirty in Montana. I can’t imagine relocating Mishka, wedded as he is to his homeland. Somehow it seems easier to explain the move to the two dogs, though I don’t remember talking with them about it until later. Nevertheless, Mishka knows two months before our estimated departure.

He brings me a dead mouse. He hasn’t killed anything that I know about in several years. He was never much of a killer, having had little time to practice being a cat before coming to me. What he knows about stalking and pouncing, he’d learned from his step-sister, who’d died a year earlier. Three or four months older than he, she’d been on her own from a very young age and was adept at breaking mice in two by the time she came to me. She was the mouser not he, so his gift of dead mouse is unusual

Two days later on a glaringly bright sunny July day, he prances down the drive carrying a dead vole!

The next day, Mishka is out and about during another hot summer day, not napping on the couch in the cool, dark downstairs as he typically does.

Tail held high and yowling behind his clenched jaw, he brings me a struggling bird.

Several days later, I’m working inside and hear Mishka howling outside. I look out the big picture window bordering the dirt driveway and there he is staring at me… with a shit eating grin on his face. . .I swear. He’s standing with a black tailed squirrel between his front legs.

I go out and say out loud to him, “My golly, Mishka, you’re acting like a teenaged warrior. What’s going on? You sure don’t need me to feed you anymore, do you?” That last sentence feels wyrd, prophetic, an odd thought spilling through from out of nowhere but as soon as I hear it, I know it portends something. I kind of wish the words hadn’t come.

That night, Mishka asks to go out as he almost always does when the dogs are coming in after last pee. The next morning he isn’t on the porch railing waiting to come in for breakfast. At noon, I suddenly remember he hasn’t returned. I know he’s left home. Oddly, I feel relief. I know he’s informed me as clearly as if he’d spoken in my ear. “Hey, ‘Mom,’ I’ve made a decision. I’m staying here in the wild wood. I’m totally capable of feeding myself. I feel younger than I have in years. Don’t worry. It’s all good.”

And I haven’t worried and I haven’t grieved. I miss him, of course. I’m sorry I didn’t get to hug him good-bye as he ventured into the rest of his life without me. But I saw no point in worrying, grieving, or searching for him. He’d told me what he wanted to do.

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Naming Mishka

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Deborah

Mishka

Born under a trailer and sired by an unknown father, the tiny, yowling kitten tries to climb my pant leg. His caretaker says, “Oh look, the neediest kitten found you. You live alone. Take him.”

“Today?” I gasp. He’s only four weeks old, has been abruptly weaned. He’s so tiny I cup him in one hand.

“Right now,” she replies.

So this wee mewling being comes home with me and for the next few weeks I feed him from a tiny bottle. We bond deeply. For the longest time, he has no name. When my kids still lived at home, we always gave plenty of time to name choosing, often brainstorming for days and giggling over ridiculous ideas until the right name smacked us in the face.

This time, though, the naming is all up to me. I experiment with several that don’t work and then hunker down to wait. Several weeks later, out of thin – or is it thick – air, a word I’ve never heard before, never spoken, comes barreling out of the ethers. Immediately I know it’s THE one. Mishka.

This fuzz ball grows thick, long hair and weighs a lot by the time he is an adult. Many refer to him as a bear of a cat.

I learn years later that Mishka means “little bear” in some of the languages of eastern and central Europe.

I leave you to cogitate on this ordinary miracle and invite you re-member times in your own life when the eairth brought you a gift of knowing. I’d love to hear.

More about communicating with Mishka and the eairth next time.

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Remembering Mishka

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Deborah

September 11, 2010

Remembering Mishka

Last weekend a spark ignited in my bodymind. I need to “speak my peace” more publicly. Now that is not a new decision. I’ve been making it and remaking it for at least the last twenty-five years. But this time it feels different. Not only did people, place, experience and written words all conspire to launch my voice, but I can broadcast with blogging.

Notice that I began this blog last winter. Fits and starts obviously. Now I’m committing to writing more regularly. Seems effortless at the moment.

What is the difference? As I wrote the date above, I realized with a start that it is 9/11 today. If ever there was motivator it is that shared cultural grief…our governmental response to that horror, horrified me. Narrow view, fear mongered, Americocentric, blah blah blah…

But it is the planet’s call for restoring the indigenous voice, the indigenous wisdom in ALL  people alive today that powers my passion to express.

Finding other risk-takers and wanting to join my voice with theirs, the imaginal cells in our urban, stewing-pot, northern-hemispheric culture, pull my pen to paper, my fingers to the keyboard.

It’s time to remember, or re-remember since we all used to know this, the planet is alive and our lives depend on her. We are embodied in an eairth, in it, not on it. We literally live on the bottom of an ocean of air, an air ocean bound to our planet in partnership with its watery twin. Imagine how carrying that truth in our bones would change our psychology.

As a creative person and mentor, I know unseen influences guide my behavior. All my decisions, feelings, expressions depend on the vastness guiding my body’s intelligence and imagination. I appreciate that my skin’s envelope is unsealed and love finding this affirming essay by Per Espen Stoknes’ “ Eairth’s Imagination: Rooting the Expressive Arts in the Elemental Creativity of the Biosphere.”

He writes: “. . .our brain, our whole bodies – from bones to balls- are wholly and fully inside the imagination of the world…No doubt that the brain – and my whole body – is highly active while participating in the image. But it is not alone in constructing it…We-literally- breathe the imagination. Images arise out of – not thin – but thick, pregnant air!…indeed, we are all swimming in a thick sea of images, continuously brought forth by the endless creativity of the air itself.”

Though I know written words, our abstract English alphabet especially, contribute to our modern disdain for more than human speech, written words also connect us, as in this very blog.

Reread Stoknes’ paragraph above and let it work its magic around your psyche. Come back soon to meet Mishka and see how his story illustrates this notion of reality.

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Considering Earth

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Deborah

Everything changes when earth becomes eairth.

Eairth, . . . what’s eairth you may be wondering.

I’m not sure who coined the word but David Abram describes eairth in his new book: Becoming Animal – an Earthly Cosmology. His colleague Per Espen Stoknes also writes about eairth in his essay: Eairth’s Imagination: Rooting the Expressive Arts in the Elemental Creativity of the Biosphere. ( www.wildethics.com.) .

“Listen” to what Abram has to say: “The air is not a random bunch of gases simply drawn to earth by the earth’s gravity, but an elixir generated by the soils, the oceans, and the numberless organisms that inhabit this world, each creature exchanging certain ingredients for others as it inhales and exhales, . . .all of us contributing to the composition of this phantasmagoric brew, circulating it steadily between us and nourishing ourselves on its magic, generating ourselves from its substance. It is as endemic to the earth as the sandstone beneath my boots. Perhaps we should add the letter i to our planet’s name, and call it “Eairth,” in order to remind outselves that the ‘air’ is entirely a part of the eairth, and the i, the I or self, is wholly immersed in that fluid element.

“The gilt-edged clouds overhead are not plunging westward as the planet rolls beneath them because they themselves are a part of the rolling Eairth. . . the clouds accompany the Eairth as it turns, their shapeshifting bodies drifting this way and that with the winds. And we, imbibing and strolling through that same air, do not then live on the eairth but in it. We are enfolded within it, permeated, carnally immersed in the depths of this breathing planet.”

And then Stoknes…He begins his essay with three statements: “First, we live in the imagination. Second, this imagi-nation, a nation of images, arises from the autonomy of the image. And thirdly, the place where this image-magic is finding place, is, quite simply the air.

“Taken together these three have the potential, I propose, to transform our relationships to art, the earth, the climate and to each other. It invokes a fundamental shift of worldview.”

When I first behaved as a psychotherapist, I realized that to continue in that practice I could neither hang my head in shame when a client didn’t progress nor take credit when a client succeeded in wholing themselves. I was a helpmate, surely, but the grander flux of this living world impacted our behaviors and influenced our decisions… an irrational mindset to take sole responsibility, as we modern, urban people typically do – to the detriment of our mental health..

Then when I claimed an identity as an artist, I realized the same paradigm applied. The imagery, color choices, brush strokes and mistakes pouring out of me were not mine alone. Therefore, I developed a small ritual before purposely creating something. I lit a candle…that small act embedded my psyche in the wonder of the myriad invisible forces guiding my hand and relieved my ego of its habitual litany of fears and complaints.

Abram sums it up. “Since we are not the sole bearers of consciousness, we are no longer on top of things, with the crippling responsibility that that entails. We’re now accomplices in a vast and steadily unfolding mystery, and our actions have resonance only to the extent that they are awake to the other agencies around us, attuned and responsive to the upwelling creativity in the land itself.”

What a blessing.

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Hot Air

Posted on September 10, 2010 by Deborah
“Opposites” delight me. Success and failure, living and dying, scared and sacred. Not contradictions, not dualities but simply the one experience of being aware in my animal body. The ebb and flow of breath and tides, seasons and cycles, thirst quenched, emptiness filled and emptied again, desire for union sated, ecstasy remembered…
Take hot air ballooning. I won a balloon ride for two in a benefit auction. Thinking I would take a new friend, when that friendship fell apart, I simply waited to discover who else would be going with me. I had almost a year to decide. Within two months, my daughter called me one morning to say she had just experienced an amazing dream with a hot air balloon landing in her urban back yard. We both got in and traveled over the globe, touching down on lots of islands in the Pacific. She did not know consciously that a certificate for a balloon flight reposed in my desk drawer. But obviously, the “eairth” communicated with her psyche.
“Would you like to manifest that dream?” I smugly asked, knowing her response would be, “ Of course.”.
Imagine a scrunched up, long, maybe 150 feet long, “wudge” of what looks like colorful fabric lying pancake flat on the ground. A flimsy looking little basket is attached with ordinary cotton ropes to the flat fabric “wudge.” What looks to be an ordinary electric fan gets dragged from a van and positioned at one end of the fabric while two people lift up the edges to reveal an opening. Someone else turns on the fan. Ahhhhhhh, it’s an envelope of light weight fabric that ripples and flutters and rolls like waves before the pressure of the air. Within moments, the fabric begins to rise, to mound, to take the shape of a pregnant belly, all because the envelope traps this invisible substance we call air.
As the envelope rounds higher and higher, it begins to lift off the ground.
A man holds a long rope attached to the top of the balloon and leans with all his weight away from the lift to keep that trapped air on the ground long enough for us to clamber into the basket.
A low, low wall, our only protection from spillage – simple wicker and rattan, made as in days of old because it still seems more rugged and flexible than the best of our synthetics. But still, wicker and rattan lashed together. No parachutes, seats and seatbelts, no food service nor drinks offered, just gas tanks lashed to the sides, rubber hoses, loosely twined around the rattan arches, lead to the torches suspended at the balloon’s lower opening. Release compressed gas and it roars with fire, heating the air trapped by the cavernous bulbous envelope. We rise, so gently we hardly notice our air born status. In between the roars of a gaseous dragon, we float quietly skyward in our own small ship of fools.
Think about the danger…one tall man, the wall reaching no higher than his thigh, could easily spill out. He doesn’t have room to kneel and so asks if he can trade places with my daughter, who is nestled in a slightly higher corner. Though she is only 5”2”, the wall where he’d been standing still comes only pelvis high. We rise and fall, rise and fall, dancing with our companion balloon and making photo opportunities a continuous stream of clicks. 1500 feet we rise at our zenith. So here we are trusting our bodies to space and good fortune. Not even the finest of lines separate scared and sacred. I’m in awe…literally experiencing heaven on Eairth.
More about Eairth in a day or two – stay tuned and please respond with your own stories triggered by this one..
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One human tribe

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Deborah

03/06/10

Ok, World, I don’t yet know how to program this blog yet. And so I keep putting off writing for it which is just an excuse, isn’t it? So I add a new comment here today and tomorrow will let my friends know I’m doing this. Please contribute. I want this to be a place to weave the stories of our future history as tribe human on this small blue planet we call home.

Today, as Spring springs forth here in the Pacific northwest, flowers bloom, leaves pop and bees, literally, buzz, thank goodness.  I am reminded of the diversity of nature and wonder why don’t we humans embrace ourselves as a single tribe with many clans?

What would nature be without the diversity of trees -spruce and pine, aspen and willow – none feeling excluded because they are not in the same family.  Think how different their lives are, some green all year and others all spikey and bare and skeletal in their beauty.

Other examples pop into my mind – petunia and rose of the flower tribe, different clans, each smelling delicious but oh so very different. The rose lives for years and years and petunia, in her fragility, dies off every season, yet we humans value both.

Belgian shepherd and collie of the canine tribe, similar noses and ears, but different clans, different temperments.

Ant and fly of the insect tribe but one flies the other does not, each are valuable, and have life experience that only a creepy-crawley and a winged one can have.

And wings do not a bird make.

My bones carry the memory of sweet surrender finding my clan – in England, dancing with Druids in a rainy, muddy field, two concentric circles, looking into each other’s eyes – most skins pale, most eyes blue – this is my clan AND my tribe – tears stream down my cheeks of coming home at last – a quality of common ground different from dancing in ceremony with my Native American friends, my Jewish friends, my African American friends. All these varieties of people rich and meaningful threads in the tapestry of my life, and yet I feel more rooted with those who know the sacred groves, the wells, the stones and trees of the land where my grandfather and his father walked. I belong on that land in a way I do not belong in this country of my birth. Even though I am native here, I am not native in the eyes of those whose lineage goes back thousands of years here.

That, too, needs healing as we are all people indigenous to this planet.

Enough thinking for now. I encourage you to think about your own indigenosity…how does your nativeness find a place in your bellymind, your heartsoul at this time of rebirth in the seasonal round? And I thank you in advance for responding.

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Creation Stories and the Sacrifice of Creation

Posted on January 1, 2010 by Deborah

January 1, 2010

Storynight in the storyhut – a mythic structure and transporter all by itself – bundled around the fire, full moon blue shadows on the canvas walls dancing with the yellow-orange flame flickers inside, singing home our ancestors and honoring the elements which nurture all life. . .  intergenerational. . .listening raptly, wrapped intently by drum beat carrying the river of images into bone, into belly. . .feeding the story with our insights, epiphanies, ponderings. . .oh my. . .what is better than that for the human soul?  Creation myths from around the world, oh my. . .Making something from nothing and the sacrifice of that which we hold dear to create a broader, deeper, more integral order of being.

Can we embrace the sacrifices we are being asked to make as humans today . . .to co-evolve a more meaningful human wholeness and to support continued life on the planet?

Sacrifice in our modern urban world tends to be rejected as something with which we don’t want to associate, as if it’s bad. . . too painful, too messy, destroying happiness, beauty and youth. No wonder we avoid sacrifice with definitions like this one from Websters’: to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief or end.

Yet haven’t we been taught the end justifies the means? What if the end was the ideal of an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just world? . . .the belief that humans might actually love living with and for each other, that they might participate fully, not just spectate, in the creative juice coursing through life itself. What if we humans remembered that there is nothing like ecstasy to revivify our love of living? What if the ego could relax its stranglehold on our psyches and find its role as a helpmate to spirit and side-by for the soul? What if we remembered that happiness is feeling embodied and in touch with the constant flow of this energy called living, a process not a product?

Oh my.

What do we need to sacrifice in order to experience living like that?. . .

Resources:

http://www.awakeningthedreamer.org

http://www.imaginalcellsinc.com

http://www.awakeningarts.com

http://www.mythsingers.com

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Honoring the earth’s spin

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Deborah

Winter Solstice seems to call for celebration – the light is returning, the light is returning. Daylight will last longer and longer. Hurray.

I feel sad to see the dark go, so it makes me  wonder about our relationship to the dark –

– the beauty, magnificence and mystery of the night and its depths. At summer Solstice, I don’t hear the same excitement for entering the dark cycle of the year. I don’t hear resounding hurrays for the dark’s  return.

We’re still singing our jubilation for the longest day of sunlight.

Shouldn’t we also be singing hallelujah for the day to shorten and the longer nights to return?

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