I think, I've actually forgotten about blogging these last few days... how could that've happened?!? I sense a turning beginning in myself...
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Friday, February 11, 2011
Began reading “Eat, Pray, Love” by Liz Gilbert, and I had to laugh at how similar our stories of awakening are, just a few pages into the book. The irrepressible impulse to survive and find meaning, truth, love, the bird-out-of-cage, flying-too-fast and rebounding-immediately-into-glass syndrome, even the moment of surrender down on the floor (hers in the bathroom in November, mine in the kitchen around Halloween) when we finally gave up the struggle and begged for mercy (she prayed to God for the first time, I confronted the choice between living or dying). And as far as I can tell, it happened in and around 2000 for both of us.
I turned 36 in 2000, my year of the dragon as well as the start of my 3rd Jupiter return. But I did not know, and would not have cared, had I known about the symbolism and significance of these landmarks in my life then. I felt at death’s door and every breath I took was one more breath that could push me over the threshold into oblivion, and relief I longed for. But I chose life, though I don’t know if it was that, or that I was finally out of everything that held me up until that moment, and grace slipped in at last.
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Saturday, February 12, 2011
During meditation this morning a line emerged: “Ride the wave.”, and I knew it to replace the mantra from the last meditation: “Let come, let go.” As images of what I ‘accidentally’ found on the net last night blinked across my inner screen—an ex with his wife and infant baby, the shock of suddenly recognizing that the grandfatherly looking man with spectacles and thin grey hair is the same one I loved not so many years ago. I knew then that I am to ‘ride the wave’’ of this remembrance and all that it brings up in me, that there’s nothing to let go or accept or heal, but simply ride it to the end of the wave, at least this one.
Feeling the call to study the Human Design System, having found the home study component this morning. Pebbles of truth are dropping like rain into the water of my awareness, and I am delighted and grateful for the resonance and the recognition I continue to receive from it. I believe I will ride this wave for a while too.
In HDS they speak of your Type as your vehicle in life, which immediately recalls for me (another pebble!) how often I dream of vehicles of various kinds, cars, buses, trains, boats. The one that sprung to mind was a most vivid one. I was driving a car on a very broad street but had to suddenly pull an U-ey for some reason. The car spun wildly and I could feel under my hands the steering wheel was not making contact with the road at all. But the man beside me in the passenger seat talked to me all the while, in a low, soothing voice, as if everything was fine and as it should be. There was a pile-up of bodies to the left by the side of the road, small children all dressed in blue, lying face down on top of each other. I knew they weren’t dead, just inert.
Then it came to me that these bodies are all the ‘unlived’ emotions that I’ve given birth to, but withheld from expression for whatever reason, so that they have remained infantile, immature, and dormant, in a slumbering heap all these years. They have yet to be acknowledged by me and allowed expression. Each of these emotions need to be allowed to ride the wave to its own conclusion, and live out the life it was meant to.
“The funny thing is that purpose is something you can enjoy but it doesn’t mean you have to do anything to get there... When you put the profile and your type together, you will begin to see that you’re not in charge! This is just rolling along, and as long as you are honoring your type, all these things are revealed for you. It’s like this knowledge itself: Yes, it’s wonderful to be able to understand how all these things work. And you go deeper and deeper. But the only important thing is to live out the basic of your type, then all the rest comes naturally for you.” ~ Human Design System
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Watched yet another great documentary of a great teacher, A Touch of Greatness, on a schoolteacher in New York named Albert Cullum, who taught grade school as well as college kids in the 50s and 60s. Instead of believing in what the majority of people, parents and teachers and society, believed about children, he chose to believe in the kids themselves. This in turn allowed the kids to believe in themselves. There is no greater gift a teacher, or anyone, can give a child, or adult for that matter. He took the lid off every activity of the school day, and let the energy of the moment and the people in that moment, his students in this case, live, grow, flow, and express itself. In play, theatre, dance, history lessons, English lessons, whatever the subject might be. And the students, as young as they were, from kindergarten to college, responded, wholeheartedly and wholebodily. Learning became a holistic experience beyond the lessons, beyond the classrooms.
Certainly he met with oppositions from the status quo, the community, his peers, the times, but he stood by his students and his truth. And heaven favoured and protected him too, it appeared, with the support and resources he needed, so that some of his projects took off with momentum greater than he expected or even intended. He just went along with it and rode the wave. His tool of assessment for his own work was: Am I having fun? If he wasn’t having fun, the kids weren’t either. And fun is always in the moment. You can’t ‘plan’ or ‘stage’ or ‘create’ fun, though we try to. For Mr. Cullum, the enjoyment of the present moment was the point, learning and educating were almost more of a by-product or a lucky outcome of having fun. That to me, is mindfulness in action. And it looked like sheer joy and heaven to me. It makes me want to put ‘having fun’ at the top of my list of criteria for any work I might want to attract or devote myself to. His work and his life was a walk of all the Zen talks I’ve ever heard.
Amazing how human lives can be, when we allow the moment to give rise to itself.
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Be quiet. Stay still. Get out of the way, and let the artist work. How to do this for my inner artist? By being a silent and impartial observer in the room, not offering unwanted advice, direction, criticism, and opinion. The only feedback is my feelings, and only when asked for. This is what I’ve decided to do in my relationship and intercourse with other people, and this is what I can do for my creative self too.
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Sunday, February 13, 2011
Talked to M about my ‘new’ awareness, acknowledgement really, of my vulnerability. How I’ve taught myself to disguise it with bluff and bravado since I can remember, which wasn’t all that hard, because I had my mother’s toughness to copy from. Except I thought, I believed that I was truly tough like my mother, that I had inherited it from her, when I am really Sepia, a squid raised by a lobster. And I finally got tired, tired of the charade, tired of the physical and emotional exertion it took to maintain the smoke screen, tired of the self-deception. Going against yourself is exhausting work. And this is the first time in my life I’ve taken ‘time off’, and finally, to spend time getting to know myself, as they say one should with those one loves.
So it has taken this long
for the admission—
‘I feel
vulnerable’—
to pass my mind’s lips,
for me to turn around
and look at it with
love instead of disgust, to
reach out for its
small, cold hand.
I let my regret
and remorse
go.
Vulnerability
or, Sensitivity
or, Openness
or, One-Without-Boundary—
by whichever name—
is the child of my essence,
and my greatest treasure. And
like all real treasures and gifts,
it demands
special attention for
its special needs.
I am not immune to life, nor
do I want to be. Instead
of damming the river
with stronger, higher walls,
I shall become the river,
soft,
yielding,
full,
flowing
and hold nothing off
hold nothing back
miss
nothing.
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My Name
And what is my name, now,
that I am not any of these
things I thought I was,
these parts I’ve taken on
in the making of myself,
all the ways I’ve been
told that are my ways?
What
Is
My
Name?
Without a shadow of a doubt
I believed I was strong,
but it turned out
to be my mother’s shadow
looming behind me. Some
have admired my calm coolness,
just as many complained of the cold
aloofness that blew off my shoulders
and froze them where they stood.
I’ve been right
and wrong
about so much that
was me,
wasn’t me,
but mostly I was right
that I am all of these things,
and mostly I was wrong
that I am none of these things.
So my name is not
any that I’ve been given,
it is none
that I’ve given myself.
My name is
sometimes this,
sometimes that,
sometimes not.
My name
is,
and
is not.
p.s. haven't figured out how to indent in my blog yet, so my poems are all flushed left...
While watching the documentary “A Century of Quilts: America in Cloth”, I caught phrases that echoed in me: "It took on a life of its own… I became completely wrapped up in what I’m doing… It’s not like we suddenly discovered something, it’s that we fell in love with the traditional (quilts)… You begin the project but about half way through, you’re no longer in control… it will tell you when it’s finished…" And I thought, that’s the ‘allowing the flow to come through and manifest’ process of creating. At our best, we humanbeings do not create, or ‘make’ anything. We do our best when we step into the great river of Life just as we are, join in the flow, and simply allow it to come through us. Because what comes through and catches and stays with each of us is caught by the net of our life’s purpose (ideally that’s our conscious intention as well, because that means we’re not trying to catch something else that isn’t aligned with the purpose we came into this world with). And what we catch this way, in and with the flow of life, is what we can best work with, express through, interpret with our own filters, and bring to fruition of beauty, harmony, grace, abundance, and for the greatest good of all, uniquely stamped with each of our own ‘signature’. 
I sense that I am drawn to quilting now because it is very much a form of meditation, and that it presents itself as a natural medium for symbolizing, preserving, and passing on of messages from one generation to another, from the past to the future, from family to family, culture to culture. It is rich with layers of imagery, colour, texture, poetry, narrative, design, emotions, meaning… The linear designs of quilts also appeal to my old love of graphic design. In making an image graphic, as opposed to realistic or representational, the ‘flattening’ and ‘collapsing’ of the perspectives solidifies the essence of the image through simplification, and convey it to our senses much more immediately and focused in energy. And because its form is traditionally something we wrap ourselves in for warmth and comfort, it can’t help but invite you to touch it, caress it, connect with it. Whatever the design, it always feels like it came from Mom (or grandma), our first Goddess, with her loving attention, wisdom, and wish in every stitch—even those quilted by men.
