Category: Spirituality

Crickets

Saturday in August there’s a high pitched wheek of crickets and the lawn is patched with brown and I have the feeling everyone’s at brunch. I could head out for a bloody mary myself, or phone a friend. Something, though, is trying to be known. Even though it all feels familiar like I already know how the sun will set, and I already know the way the crow calls. I already know this day so I’d like a new one, please.

Sometimes it’s like this. Days hiccup drunkenly, skipping back in time. This one I’ve seen before. It happens near the end of things, and before the next; and it could go either way. Barefooted and unfettered, or silent and unmoored – it’s unwritten, unscripted, undone, and unimaginable. And in that unimagined way, it returns to a state that’s known. And so, an August day comes back, used before it starts.

Is there any comfort in that? The way the day unfolds like it always has? And when I hear nothing new, is that really all there is to hear? Beneath, beside, behind this day, is there another waiting?

Maybe that’s why September comes. To surprise us in spite of our August-y ways. But right now, here on this previous Saturday, I’m trying to listen.

What’s repeated and repeated and repeated? Something is trying to be known, and before the moon startles you again, the crickets stay.

On Puffy Shirts

One of my biggest struggles as a wise, intelligent, insightful, aware, caring, loving, experienced kickass adult, is to shut my big mouth before advice, counsel, and strategies topple out in the “AARGH, Matey!” of hearty intention, burying those I love in words as worthless as a chest of gold doubloons.

I know it’s human nature to give advice to people struggling – and sometimes the right words can be very healing. But in my experience, “advice” is a way to minimize ones own anxiety about treading in murky waters. We give advice either because we are not really present to the other person and are thinking about our own experience — assuming our experience is the same (it’s not); or we are entirely uncomfortable sitting with another’s pain; it hurts, it’s too big, it shivers our timbers and we want to steal it away from the ones we care about in all haste. Sometimes we make “the problem” the enemy and force it to walk the plank; other times we minimize the weight of it, and try to pack it all up and stow it efficiently away. In either case, we hope to move on swiftly in one blustery, sweeping, well-winded narrative.

But whether we rush in out of love or mindless habit or because we’ve been there, too, it can be a very dangerous adventure to embark upon. Rushing in to fix is a great way to imprint our own map of the world directly over the tiny, emerging text and lines of another’s discoveries. It’s a great way to eclipse any light that may be dawning over shadowy territory; a sure path directly toward the raging waters of misunderstanding; and of course, a proven way to completely halt another’s journey to whole new worlds.

It’s piracy, is what it is. It steals the very treasure from the depths of one’s unique experience. And while the sound of our own brilliant advice may leave us swaggering in our puffy shirts feeling like we are captain oh captain of all we purvey, the person we love is left kidnapped, stunned and lashed to the mast – and sometimes, deeply hurt by our ill-gotten gain. And they aren’t the only ones who suffer.

When we rush in to fix or rescue, we ourselves can end up lost at sea. We end up circling the same exact waters all of our days, living with nothing but our own ghostly bones of decay. Because stealing another’s story ironically leaves you no room to move forward from your own — if you don’t bear witness to the journey unfolding before you, nothing new can refresh you. You are stuck living the same old storyline, wandering for all eternity in the same old tatters, telling the same old salty tales, to the same old sorry shipmates.

I think the human soul was meant to be witnessed, not rescued. I think it was meant to be discovered, not kidnapped. I think it was meant to be seen, not buried. I think our souls are like the sea, the horizon, the stars. They are already beautiful — they just need to be noticed! Small, navigational suggestions can be useful, yes. But don’t go overboard. Bear witness to the great and creaking adventure before you; become a reflection that moves alongside, a vessel for knowing, a safe passage to new worlds. Witness those you love navigate their way to new understanding, and you’ll find a new way to navigate to love.

Wake

Sometimes sleep won’t leave the bedding of your brain, and every word rises only to find it self recalled, back to the comfort and curl of darkness. There are new words you long to think but each effort is quickly lulled and tucked under cover of an exhausted narrative. The one that says you’ve tried that before. There’s nothing you can do to change the way it’s always been. The way it always will be. The way things work. The one that says just five more minutes, disregarding all alarm.

The momentary stretch and reach, the fleeting light through your lids, the lifted weight of night – we know what that’s like; that soaring second when it’s entirely true that another life is waiting for you, and you’re heightened and heartened and here!

Where does that go, that fragile stretch of morning light? Can our newborn fist not open? Is our marrow made of ambien? In the raising of the sash, in the flutter of the lash, are we lit with possibility, or blinded by fear, or impossibly weary by what we think we already know?

Wake, now. And if the dream begins to yawn, keep your eyes open just another breath or two. Before you sleep again, say the words you long for.

Creation

I woke with a gentle but urgent thought – I woke with something I needed to do, some kindness that needed offering, or some idea I needed to explore. I woke with a loose and blousy image; some new creation was tugging at a thread. Something I needed to know was trying to be known.

And then, while the gauze was still across my brain and my gaze was still soft, I sat down at my desk and checked the news.

Apparently, my airbag is a serial killer, salmon have been taking Lipitor, and a woman accidentally mailed her cat. Closer to home, my daughter was diagnosed with an anxious vagina and the peanut butter was gone from the mousetrap, (which, after day 4, should really be called a feeding station).

All of this astonishment before I even get to the real stuff, of Pakistan and poverty and cancer and cures and beheadings and bombs. The attention and gasp is all worn out by the time you even check your first email. That fleeting thought you had this morning is crowded out. Before you know the words you long to speak, or the dream you need wake from – you are swarmed by the news of dying bees.

And it’s essential, of course; those dying bees. But so is something else.
What’s close up, what’s within us, is so frequently swept away in a torrent of information and data from the outside world, that the universe that is you is drowned. Drowned in headlines and crushed by all the little bits from across the globe. The weight of it all, the power of the moving tide of media and markets takes us along, and soon we are so far away from that single thought – the one deep inside of us that needed to be known – that we know nothing, and nothing new is created.

Maybe that’s why we are all so weary. Even with headlines that make our hearts stop, we are weary because our own place in creation isn’t reflected in that raging world. Somehow, all the words we’ve heard before. Maybe when we long for original thought, it is our own that we are missing.

We are the creation that will and can change the world. But we must find time for the silence, and space for the tender truth of us to emerge.

Resurrection

My body left me in the corner of a dark basement before I was 6, and from that day forward, it was just a burden I had to carry, or a stranger that carried me.

I lugged it once to math class, where a tall man touched it, but I wasn’t there so I didn’t mind. I let it walk ahead of me in the Easter parade, because it was wrapped in pastels and called pretty. I gave it away, and let it be taken, because it was never mine to begin with.

All my life, I’ve watched it take me places I didn’t want to go.

When I was just 15, I watched as it got pregnant. I watched as it crossed a picket line, past a plastic doll impaled on a stick and a woman yelling “killer”. I watched as it searched for me in inappropriate places. In the arms of a married man, in a gay parade, and stitched into the folded lives of other people’s secrets.

As time passed, it learned to straighten its shoulders and lift its chin, but I stayed curled around its shame. I tried to kill it with cigarettes, and comfort it with cake. I called it disgusting, ugly, fat, lazy and useless, and hid it under blankets and books. Every so often I’d take it to the gym, and try to shape it to fit the curve of someone else’s hand, but that didn’t last; it wasn’t safe for us to be in the same room for long.

As I grow older and my soul returns, my body still limps a few steps behind. No longer young and sexy, it can’t carry me the way it used to. No longer ashamed, I won’t let it go where I can’t follow. So here it is, right next to me. But we still have our differences. I think I have forgiven what my body has not forgotten. It’s still out there in the world, stumbling through it all, sucking in its stomach, while I stay humble and here and fully at home. It’s been on it’s own for so long, it’s been so mistreated, it’s going to take a while to undo all the damage. But I hope to reclaim my body before I have to let it go for good. I hope it rises from the dead, is freed from the basement, and is saved by my own loving embrace.

Vernal Equinox

When you left
You carved a line in the center of
All my days and named them
Before and after.
Some days, I still count like that —
Stuck in the wish of before
And the yearn of after;

But in time the sun shifted and
On the tip of my finger
Spins a new world:
Before forgiveness,
Something must die.
And seconds after,
It’s spring.

Marching Orders

March is an untrustworthy month – you can count on nothing, except the rudeness of the clocks springing forward as we grieve our hour of sleep and shuffle through the halls of an amputated day. The apple tree is not reliable, nor is the greening of the grass. Even the shoots from the crocus are uncertain. Just when the air softens and you feel like your tennis shoes belong in the world again, you get an icy wakeup call and have to reenlist the boots. Just when the t-shirt forces you to confront your arm flab, you’re allowed to slip back into the long and sweatered sleeves of denial.

March kicks off a season of trickery, and can be appallingly inappropriate. You can be woken and told that your father died in the night. You can have a miscarriage, lose a job, read the news, and sit inside your stunned and wintered heart staring out a chirping window, watching bikes come out and play. Easter-purple hops brightly across the grimy snow. Down jackets rub elbows with wispy lemon scarves. Sun sinks into your skin but your bones are full of ice.

You think it’s here, and then it’s not. You believe it’s arrived, and then it’s gone. What you’ve known to be true melts, and before the world is righted again you find you are standing in some bunny-colored slip of a skirt in the middle of lumberjacked day stunned by how wrong you can be.

Some wear layers, but you can’t prepare for shit like this without losing something essential. Kids laugh while others drown; there aren’t enough layers in the world to make that right. The experience of being in this incongruous day is hard. But as time shortens, light arrives. The true call of March is standing in the both and the all. The true call of March is always here.

Eleven Prayers for My Own Wild Soul

My prayer is to soften our time together in the woods,
To open, allow and really listen to the voices that are not my own and not like mine,
And give them ample room to manifest
So they may grow mossy and green
In the wide or narrow spaces between us.
May I be softer, too, and land lightly on a humble branch
Choosing to enter the wilderness without my wicked shears
Deciding to follow, stand, or shelter
Without blazing trails or trampling all the holy ground
With my own wild and hungry child

My prayer is to let go of that which wasn’t meant for me,
And pile great degrees of literature, philosophy, theology, psychology and neuroscience,
And gather all the ice skates and ballet slippers and athletic gear and grand pianos and cellos,
And fold up celebrity and microphone and center stage
And place it all on massive floats,
Then push them out to sea with candles meant for others to light,
While I stand where I am with awe and respect
Bathed in the brilliant flame of another
Able to receive the generous gift of inspiration and learning and warmth
Because I finally dropped my own heavy robe of wishes.

My prayer is to be embodied,
Embraced, held, grounded inside the skin and bones where I was born and where I will die.
I want to follow the bend of my own desires to the nape of your neck,
And wake entwined by you,
But only I can nurture every organ with oxygen and kale
And strengthen all my limbs with sweat until I can dance again,
And lift small children and swing them in circles
And do yoga on my head when I’m 92 —
I want to care for my body as if it were bound to my soul
And not some secondary burden where pain lives,
Locked in all the joints of an immobile life.
I want to remember its flushing purpose and the miracle
Of thumbs and eyes and hearts.

My prayer is to lighten up and find my inner dapple,
To laugh and delight in the chuckle and the cheek
That crouches with a smile on its face inside
The small stuff of the ordinary day
Waiting for me to wind the handle and let it loose —
Popping all the weasels fearlessly!
And let me be okay with the way I clumsily arrive,
Springing briefly into shocking view,
Swaying back and forth with the glee that is my own tilty wit
And let me remember that when I disappear again inside my brightly painted tin
I’m just one crank away from rising – not far at all, really, and always ready to be summoned.
And finally, while I am here rummaging through the old neglected toy pile,
May I please stop being so suspicious of smiling adults, and instead ask them if they’d like to come out and play?

My prayer is to create,
Great or tiny works of art –
To show up at the altar of my one true heart
Before empty canvases and blank pages and long hours
And find god there, waiting for me to arrive —
To concentrate deeply by the shores of my own soul
Until all its astounding colors find their way up and out
By a grace that magically rises whenever
Creation is invited to stay.

My prayer is to move you,
To open the strangled box inside my throat
Where I’ve locked up all my jingles and jangles,
And sing my phenomenal solo;
The one I’ve practiced all my life, made from the notes collected along the way
A composition of yearning crescendo and soaring invitation —
A tune that is catchy and stays with you always,
or one that is new that you’ve never heard before, and especially one that
Turns you toward the music of your own awakening
And the lifted voices and choirs around you

My prayer is to be astonished,
To go bravely and frequently into the great unknown
Because I don’t know what I don’t know.
To drive to Boston, catch a flight to Borneo,
To walk down an alley without a map and just arrive.
To remember that if even one unexpected poppy can make my heart soar with joy
Imagine if I were to stumble across a field of rumors and find them all true!
I want to show up in all the unfamiliar rooms and gatherings of the world;
In the town where I live, in my own backyard gullies,
And on continents I can’t pronounce –
At the foot of a waterfall
In the dust of poverty
In places where my heart will be broken by a starving child
Or raised by an ancient wall
Or strengthened by an act of my own servitude —
Expanded by the gift of the undiscovered.

My prayer is to keep my mind off the reservation,
And thunder across open fields with buffalo and bonfires
Hunting far and wide for our native land —
For places where we are interested in one another
And in stars
And grief
And rituals of joy and communion
And to live unembarrassed by this fierce loyalty to the precious tribe of the soul —
To wear my tattered skins and feathers even in saloons and cities,
Even in the crush and call of comfort and progress
Even when I am pushed to the margins by careless claims
And named dangerous, or primitive, or unsustainable.

My prayer is to live by the sea with apple orchards and birds
With rolling hillsides, and old stone walls,
And twisted branches and peonies.
And with just the smell of the ocean,
And my bare feet in the June grass
And my hands in the dirt —
Hold all of god’s great glory in my own simple garden,
And after a long day kneeling on this heavenly earth
May I carry it back beneath my nails
Where it will rise like tiny moons at the end of it all.

My prayer is for a cup of tea,
Brought to me quietly while I write
Made from a kettle we share,
In a kitchen we clean,
In a world that is generous and kind.

My prayer is to love you,
And let that be enough.

Dogma

Someone asked me if I go to church and I do not, unless you count the pew that is my dog Gilligan, where several times a day I must show up and be present, even though I’m very busy with my own lofty concerns, and often resent the stinky interruption. He’s no saint, but he’s still one of the best spiritual teachers I’ve ever had. At this very moment he’s curled and farting by my side (teaching me tolerance, I’m sure), but throughout the day, regular as a monks chant, he’ll let me know in no uncertain terms that he requires my full, undivided attention. He’s always reminding me of what exists outside my own head, in the great wide world of birds and love.

And while I often search for places to experience the glory of the world beyond my puny human boundaries, I did not expect to find it in this noisy, snorting animal. I did not expect to find myself expanded, challenged, lifted, humbled and saved by this round-bellied bat-clown of a dog. For that matter, I did not expect a dog.

He arrived as I imagine many of our spiritual gifts do; not by education, donation, tithe, pilgrimage, angel, tradition, or conversion; nor by beseeching the great breeder in the sky on bended knee. He arrived because I invited him. From the very first day I met him he looked me straight in the eye and said “choose, it’s up to you.” And so I did. And so it was.
Now, WHY I chose to let him in my life, I often wonder. As a writer I crave wide, empty swaths of time — massive volumes of uninterrupted, absolute silence. I’m also not particularly “a dog person”. Cats are more my style, as they tend to be happy hanging out with the dirty dishes until the time has come for a nod in their general direction. One can’t help but wonder if there is such a thing as divine intervention, and I suppose you could say there is – as my daughter is the most divine being I know, and she definitely intervened in the arrival of this dog in my life.

But in any event, he’s here. And as all spiritual teachers know, the journey begins with commitment, but must be followed by discipline. If I ignore either, I suffer – along with my carpet, the occasional roll of toilet paper, and my shoes. And like all spiritual relationships, you can’t just phone it in. Gilligan knows exactly when I’m tossing the ball impatiently, just calling myself a member of global church of dog ownership, and when I’m seriously devout in a starting a rousing chorus of catch and come here. He knows when I am walking with intention, and when I’m shuffling absently through the motions. Either way, he does his part. It’s up to me to do mine. And every time I do, our bond strengthens.

What makes him the most terrific spiritual guide is that he is a reflection of the best and worst of my own humanity. When I find myself resenting him, along with all the vet bills, nail clipping, silly interruptions, endless care taking, and inconvenient walking – (and not just on icy Christmas days or muddy Easters, mind you!) — I’ll find his eyes following me, begging for resolution. He quietly demands that we move forward and not get stuck in the gloom. He reminds me to surrender and stop resisting. To open the next few moments to possibility, and drop the surety of self. He forgives instantly, and I learn slowly. But together, we are finding our way.

Of all the things I’ve learned from him, being present is the greatest. Of all the gifts he’s given me, love is the finest. And what we’ve learned together is that showing up and saying yes – choosing – is the start of every holy thing that ever was.

Altar

“Altar”

Integrity lives, only once it’s found its true continent –
Once all the places you have claimed are unclaimed,
And every language you once spoke is unspoken,
And the face you cannot see is seen
In the eyes of a foreign shore.

When what you have lost you crossed oceans to find
Living in a stripe against the sky,
When there’s no final edge to fall from,
Just an endless, rounded rise.

When ancient ritual is carried back to your own holy altar,
When every piece you gathered along the way is sacred,
And even scraps are buried on bended knee,
Then, light the candle in the center of your one true home.

For once the fragments of the life that you have chosen
Are placed in circles ‘round the flame
What you didn’t choose remains as spark and wonder
Rising to the great unclaimed, where you will meet again.