glowing from the inside out

Patti's writings at 37Days always glow, full of truth and humor and love and insight. This one glows with special fire, and offers up with deep and breathtaking tenderness the essence of love and community and thankfulness.

This photo is by Hamed Saber

the full of life is infinite

(For Thomas, whose seat I sat in when his travel plans conflicted with his tickets to see the Butoh troupe Sankai Juku on Tuesday, and thank you dear Ashley for the invitation to sit there!)

Lotus Leaves

"Inspired by the meeting with Mr. Riho Senba, the headmaster of the "koryushooukai" school of Ikebana (the art of Japanese flower arrangement)"

~from the program notes of Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors

The Kage of Kagemi is shadow
The light of contrast, the image in the mirror of water's surface
The mi is seeing and being seen
Some say Kagemi is the ancient origin of "mirror" (kagemi)
In light, the surface that reflects and is reflected, looked into and looking back
Surface beginning in the horizontal water plane and transforming to the perpendicular face
From an ambiguous and transient state to one clearly outlined
The right hand asks, the left hand answers
Once an imaginary sur-face is defined
~Amagatsu Ushio, Sankai Juku founder, Director, Choreographer and Designer.

The day after the performance, a friend who had also been there said that a difference between modern dance and butoh is that in modern dance the choreographer and dancer will observe a tree or water, and create movement that evokes tree or water; in butoh the dancer becomes tree, or water.

The act of watching becomes a visceral act. Being lulled by the endlessly slow drift of an arm or a leg. In trance and then restless as bodies shift in complex patterns, none of it comprehensible to the mind. So much happens in the lift of the eyelids, in the shapes of the fingers carried like upturned claws or tipped in blood-red paint, in the expressionless mask broken suddenly open in hilarity or howl (which? or both?). Even the faint white clouds arising as the powdered bodies of the dancers quickly cross the stage contribute to the stunning scene. The final image felt too like waves falling, rising: the luminous leaves lowered down to the stage again (where they were at the beginning hovering just above the floor), the dancers reclining on the floor between the descended stems, then lying down as the lights dim. The tiny spotlights on hands rising above the surface of the leaves, fingers alive like birds or blossoms breaking bud.

I Wind in the Water Depths
II MANEBI -- two mirrors
III Echoing of gaze and return gaze
IV In the light by the waterside
V Infinite dialogue
VI Empty / Full
VII CHIRAL / ACHIRAL, Agitation and Sedimentation





Then, on Sunday my 16 year old son and I went to see BODIES: The Exhibition (choosing to go at probably the most crowded time possible), which he has wanted to see since it opened.

Like the intensely expressive. perfectly formed, dancers' bodies, these bodies were amazing, too -- impeccably, exquisitely dissected human cadavers (not without controversy, see here), preserved with a kind of silicone polymer that arrests decay and hardens the tissues. A number of the bodies are posed in athletic gestures, diving to dig a volleyball or poised to shoot a basketball or arm stretched overhead to serve a tennis ball. Others are simply seated or standing to display something particular such as the layers of the spinal cord, or muscle and joint layers. The most mind-boggling to me (having spent many hours during the first year of medical school in dissection lab and knowing how easy it is to do an awful job of it) were the entirely dissected-out, lifted from the rest of the body, nervous system and circulatory systems (arteries and veins). There are also displays of organs both healthy and diseased (no matter how many times I see it, it is always shocking to see lungs that are black from years of smoking, compared with normal lungs that are greyish pink with spots of black from pollution -- spots we've all got, so that "normal" and "healthy" might not be exactly the same thing...)

The choices of what to remove and what to leave were a little curious, I thought -- faces were dissected to remove most of the skin and connective tissue, but eyelids and lips and ears were left, and sometimes fingertips and genitalia, so that you did have a sense of the someone who wore this body at one time. By leaving those features, the bodies definitely looked like people, not just like generalized human specimens.

It is interesting to me that these actual viscera didn't have a visceral effect on me, fathoms away from the internal movement stirred by the living, moving butoh dancers' bodies.

Also interesting to me is that all of these bodies are Asian bodies like mine (except that all of the dancers and most of the cadaver specimens are male), so that the surface of what I was seeing was maybe a little bit more mirror-like for me than it might have been. At one point I heard a woman in the Bodies exhibition say something like, "well, he still looks like the chinaman that he was" and I turned around to stare, surprised to hear a term I haven't heard for decades, but I couldn't tell who had said it (it really was crowded there!). The warmth of the crowd and the buzz of conversation and exclamations, as we milled around the exhibits in our own self-organized choreography, generated a current of liveliness that both encompassed and contrasted with the formerly-alive. My son and I noticed and sometimes shared people's reactions of fascination, wonder, revulsion, wistfulness, reverence, and even a resistance to being amazed ("they're just dead bodies, what's the big deal?" ~overheard while standing in the line to get in)

Sankai Juku's Amagatsu-san points to: the surface that reflects and is reflected, looked into and looking back

"Kagemi" explores what happens behind mirrors, said founder and artistic director Ushio Amagatsu, speaking in Japanese through an interpreter by phone from Tokyo. The performance begins by using the surface of water as a mirror, he said. "It's real, but not real."

Seven scenes contrast life and death, ash and blood, sand and water. Knowing about death allows you to realize what kind of life you can live, Amagatsu said. "If you think about yourself, there's a beginning and an end, but the full of life is infinite." In other words, individual lives emerge and disappear, but human life is continuous.
~The Seattle Times

Not only human life, but just life, the one life, pouring through the exquisiteness of all of these individual forms; the more forms we see, the more we may see our self, looking back at us.

Building a WISER Commons, Dec 1, 2006

My friends Jon and Tova Ramer of The Interra Project, along with WiserEarth and WiserBusiness (projects of the Natural Capital Institute) invite us all to a half day session on Friday, December 1st, 2006, to be kicked off with a presentation by Paul Hawken. The doors will open at 8:30 AM at Town Hall at 1119 8th Avenue, Seattle, 98101. The event is downstairs -- use the Seneca Street entrance.

Little update: here is the related SustainabilityCommons Wiki

- We are more together - (and you can see who else is attending here)
We are cooperating to create a Sustainability Commons. The Commons is a network of cooperators creating a common-pool resource of sustainability focused information and tools. The Commons is a "control-free zone" in which participants agree to create Public Goods used by all members of society. Paul Hawken will participate and present the WISER (World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility) framework for connecting the civil society, private and public sectors.

A Commons is not about forming one big umbrella. We are using enabling technologies to connect our umbrellas to enhance what each of us offers our constituencies; and to extend the reach of the information we are sharing.

Measurable outcomes include the quality, usefulness, and completeness of the information that each of us has access to and increasing the numbers of people viewing our shared information.

- We are open -
This half day session is strategic and will not focus on the technical details. Whatever technologies we utilize will be open and use a "creative commons license" or "copyleft" approach and be maintained for the public good.

Our goal for the session is to build upon the momentum to bring a Commons into form.

We will demonstrate WISER, an open source platform that enables private sector, civil society, and government to collaboratively address and solve social, economic and environmental problems.

"The world changes when networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what's possible."

- We think it is time and hope you can join us -
We recognize and appreciate the work you are doing and invite you to consider joining with us. Coming to the session does not commit you to any further participation. Table space will be provided so you can promote your work.

$10.00 covers the cost of Town Hall (& no one will be turned away)

- Please RSVP so we can prepare -
You can purchase tickets online at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/8542

If you plan to purchase a ticket at the door or if you have any questions please contact:
Jon Ramer (jramer@interraproject.org) (206) 972-7356
or Habib Rose (habib@connectexpress.com)

If you have a laptop bring it!

- The Interra Project -
The Interra Project’s mission is to empower a community based movement of citizen consumers by providing tools for a direct alignment between daily economic activities and our deepest human values. http://www.interraproject.org

- Wiser -
Wiser’s mission is to create a common language, collaborative tools, and a comprehensive, freely accessible, and transparent body of knowledge, enabling a transformation to a restorative economy. This powerful tool for social change encompasses the sister sites WiserEarth — connecting social and environmentally focused non-profits worldwide, and WiserBusiness — guiding companies of all sizes toward responsible business practices. http://www.wiserbusiness.org

The Interra Project and WiserBusiness are working to cohesively tie together networks in a way that makes conscious consumption and responsible business easily accessible and a systemic part of everyday life.

encounter with non-violence

"Encounter Point is an 85-minute feature documentary film that follows a former Israeli settler, a Palestinian ex-prisoner, a bereaved Israeli mother and a wounded Palestinian bereaved brother who risk their lives and public standing to promote a nonviolent end to the conflict. Their journeys lead them to the unlikeliest places to confront hatred within their communities. The film explores what drives them and thousands of other like-minded civilians to overcome anger and grief to work for grassroots solutions. It is a film about the everyday leaders in our midst."

Opening in selected cities in North America and the Middle East over the next few weeks, Encounter Point was made by a production team of young Israeli, Palestinian, North American and Brazilian women: Ronit Avni, Julia Bacha (co-writer and editor of Control Room, the award-winning documentary about Al-Jazeera), Nahanni Rous, and Joline Maklouf. Their production company, Just Vision, is a non-profit that works to "widen the influence of Palestinian and Israeli grassroots peace activists."

Encounter Point will screen here in Seattle at the Northwest Film Forum, December 5 at 7 pm and December 6 and 7 at 7 pm and 9 pm, at Cinema 1, 1515 12th Ave between Pike and Pine streets. Tickets available through brownpapertickets.com.

hanging out with awakened beings

"In ancient times, and probably today in a few places, the Taoist priest was called in if there was a problem in the village...he would trot off from his hermitage and go to the town and say something like, 'Give me a quiet place, give me a cabin, and leave me alone.' There he would sit down and open himself to the chi of the environment, to the energy. Now that's great compassion because when you open yourself to the environment, if it's out-of-kilter, you are going to feel the out-of-kilter in your own being. It's all going to happen inside just as it's happening outside. But if you have enough stability, if you have enough insight, nothing in you is going to be worried about that. It's not going to be a problem. It's not even going to make you suffer, but it will just happen: turbulence. Only when you've fully realized yourself, do you have the fearlessness to do that. Otherwise, if you open yourself up, you get totally lost.

"The Taoist priest would sit there in the cabin and just open himself to the chi, or the energy of the environment--feel it, experience it, and then open the chi to the light of his own consciousness...and the energy would start to rectify itself. The people in the village would start to feel better and get along for awhile.

"That's why scriptures have advised us to hang out with awakened beings. The awakened one could be a human being, a tree being, a street-corner being. Expose yourself to them. Don't worship them and put them on a pedestal. But expose yourself and this rectification happens; this harmonization happens because of their state of consciousness.

"But don't become dependent. You wake yourself up."
Adyashanti, emptiness dancing, pp 30-31
photo originally uploaded by *Micki*

"The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth...To some extent every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others.

And it is only as a result of her continual engagement with the animate powers that dwell beyond the human community that the traditional magician is able to alleviate many individual illnesses that arise within that community. The sorcerer derives her ability to cure ailments from her more continuous practice of "healing" or balancing the community's relation to the surrounding land...Only those persons who, by their everyday practice, are involved in monitoring and maintaining the relations between the human village and the animate landscape are able to appropriately diagnose, treat, and ultimately relieve personal ailments and illnesses arising within the village...The medicine person's primary allegiance, then, is not to the human commmunity, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded..."

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, pp 7-8
photo originally uploaded by David Pham/shapeshift

in the look in your eyes

Today's Word for the Day from Gratefulness.org:"To treat every human being as a shrine of God is to fulfill all religion."
~Bowl of Saki
Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
founder of the Sufi Order International

The Sufis also say:
"There are as many paths to God as there are breaths"
and
"When you look for God, God is in the look in your eyes"

steeped in the cups with the moon and the stars

Meredith pours three cups of tea so fresh and clear that you can see the stars inside looking back at you:

"The iris pond has flowered
Before the old temple;
I sell tea this evening
By the water's edge...

"People go looking far and wide
for the Buddha's enlightenment
but I just sip my tea
and my tea swallows me...

"Wakefully we drink tea
sipping from simple cups
holding the moon
and galaxies of stars...

And today mamster wrote about a new teahouse in town, called Remedy Teas ("Tea For Life"), which stocks close to 150 varieties of organic tea.

It's tea time right now! And pretty much all the time that you are not asleep.

Lovely photo above of Dragon Pearl jasmine tea and rooibos "redbush" tea
by Selva Morales under a Creative Commons License

precious metal is the mother of water

Autumn is Metal:
"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever-more wonders."

—Andrew Harvey, The Return of the Mother

And Winter is Water:
"This mind of endless effortless movement is what we strive to emulate in Aikido. Joining with, absorbing, surrounding, and protecting all that we encounter, regardless of the perceived adversity. Through our practice we come to embody the emotional understanding that we are very much the same as all of life. Each of us engaged in the inevitable journey back to the center of the universe, to die and be born again."

Senta Yamada sensei
founder of Kikusui Kai Aikido

Springtime is Wood:
"Too often we focus exclusively on the objectives, reacting to the failure of its immediacy with frustration and impatience. One wonders if the apple seed, too, experiences this frustration and sense of dashed hopes as it grows into a wooden stick that in no way resembles the apple it was promised it would become."

Rabbi Gerson Winkler

Summer is Fire:
"I am the joy of the desiring flesh
The days of my living
are summer days
The nights of my glory
outshine the blazing wavecaps of the heavens
at their floodtide
Mine is the confident hand shaping this world."

Kenneth Patchen

And this is Earth, sometimes called the season in-between the seasons, sometimes called Indian Summer, sometimes called the center and axis of the wheel as it turns:
"I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

make their skin wake up

I've posted a few of my rough notes from the Bioneers at the Easily Amazed Forum Schoolhouse, and it has been re-inspiring and re-stirring to read them over (except for the frustrating parts that I can't make out! I actually used to have very nice handwriting, before I spent a few too many years in school).

So far I've written up my notes from Paul Hawken's plenary address and James Hillman's, both of which are available as audio downloads from the Bioneers store. My latest addition, though, hasn't been available--I'm not sure if it didn't get taped, or it's just not listed yet in the store--but if it's "disappeared into thin air," or rather, resonating and reverberating still in the living air without its signal having been captured in electronic form, it might be appropriate...

So here are just a few para-phrases from that talk, which was a panel discussion between cultural ecologist and magician David Abram (author of the profoundly stirring The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World) and feminist thinker, poet and activist Susan Griffin on Changing the Language of Environmentalism (also, see Amy Lenzo's great notes, at The Beauty Dialogues):

Griffin: We need language that holds the grief of this moment--need to take back 'right to life/right to live'

Abram: We all have to be poets...to speak "as creatures luring people back into their bodies and making their skin wake up."
The Air is the Mystery for every oral culture--where the meaning is, where the voices of the ancestors still hang out.
Sometimes he spells it "E A I R T H" to remember that the air is part of the Earth, not separate from it.

multilayered multitasking

I don't multitask so much anymore--well, at least not when one of the things I'm doing (or supposed to be doing) involves listening to someone. Unless we're walking while talking. Or unless I'm taking notes, while listening. Anyway, during most of my waking hours, my doings do tend to be layered on top of each other in time. This became particularly obvious to me this morning when while in the shower I was 1) doing lunges (our shower is in a pretty long bathtub, and I have very short legs) 2) brushing my teeth and 3) singing my morning prayers very loudly (it seemed like good enunciation practice to have something shaped like a stick in my mouth while singing, and it was definitely entertaining) 4) too bad I didn't think to also put something delicious into the oven to bake!

Last weekend, my days were multilayered with a minumum of intention on my part--that synchronicity thing. I had decided to attend the Bioneers conference at the Marin Civic Center, in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is just up the highway from where I grew up and where my mom still lives. I've been considering attending the conference for years, since first reading about it in the Utne Reader, especially since I could combine it with a visit home. What finally tipped me into actually registering was the presence this year of Archeypal psychologist and writer James Hillman as one of the plenary speakers. Then a week or two after making my travel arrangements, I received a message inviting me to my 30th high school reunion, and of course it was scheduled for the same weekend when I was going to be there already. Both events were extraordinarily fun (the reunion surprisingly so) and my mind is still swimming with all of the conversations and presentations and the pleasure of time with family and friends.

Actually, I did do some advance planning so I could meet Beauty Dialogues blogger (and friend-o-Ashley) Amy Lenzo, who lives in the Bay Area and as it turned out was also attending the conference. We shared a wonderfully wide-ranging and breezy lunch hour under a willow studded with crows next to the lagoon at the conference. Amy's thoughtful and insightful comments on some of the Bioneers presentations are at her blog. I am going to transcribe some of my rough and lengthy notes at the Easily Amazed community forum, since I think they will be easier to organize and access there.

I am sorry that plans to meet up with Jeff Aitken fell through, so I have that to look forward to next visit!

word temple

I am sorry that I missed hearing about this poetry reading in Seattle earlier in the month. But I am very glad that Joe Riley, who created and administers the Panhala poetry subscription list, was there and since then has posted several poems by acclaimed and revered Palestinian poet Taha Muhammed Ali.

Ali's newest book, So What: New and Selected Poems (with a story) 1971-2005, was recently published by Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, WA. I love Copper Canyon's logo, which is composed of the Chinese characters for "word" and "temple".

Revenge
~ Taha Muhammad Ali ~

At times ... I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I'd rest at last
and if I were ready -
I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who'd put
his right hand over
the heart's place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they'd set -
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

Likewise ... I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn't bear his absence
and who his presents thrilled.

Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school...
asking about him
and sending him regards.

But if he turned
out to be on his own -
cut off like a branch from a tree -
without mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I'd add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness -
nor the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I'd be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street - as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

(Read by Taha Muhammad Ali and translated by Peter Cole,
St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, October 7, 2006)

Copper Canyon's logo

new sky

My practice partners and I have a new website, OneSkyWellness.com, and a new weblog to go along with it, here.

Our deep appreciation to my friend Jana Mochkatel and her team at Net-time who designed our site and logo.

Our great appreciation too, to Fred First of Fragments from Floyd, who so generously gave us permission to use his gorgeous photo, Transparent Green of Spring (at left, but see it enlarged here and in context, here) on our site.

We began our medical and health care practice a little over 6 years ago, as a not-for-profit called One Sky Medicine (which we now call "Old Sky.") In our idealism and naivete we made numerous excessively expensive business choices that compounded over time, and by the end of 2004 we decided to acknowledge all of the good intentions, hard work, tremendous struggle and tremendous contributions by so many (hundreds of) people (staff, administrators, board members, colleagues, our wonderful patients and community supporters), and to ask the board to cut our losses and go out of business.

A seed group of practitioners and staff, our bonds forged in that kind of heat that comes of hours and months and years of working together, playing and eating (a lot) together, living through difficulty, and becoming like familly to one another, decided after long discussions that we would stay in business together. Our form now is of independent practices joined in partnership, our overhead is much less than half of what it was, we're steadily paying off the debts, and most of our patients came along with us when we moved. We're grateful to all that has sustained us and brought us this far. It feels as if our transplanted roots have had a chance over this past 18 months or so to settle in and grow, and so now we have more energy to reach from the inside out and extend our tender stems & leaves into the wider world.

cross-posted at one sky wellness

loops, links, and thanks

The first weblog I heard about and started to read regularly was Chris Corrigan's parking lot. I am pretty sure that I found the way there via the flurry of connection and information that came out of the Practice of Peace conference in 2003, but it's a post of his in 2004 that I remember as one of my first "ways in" to the what blogs were about. That post referenced the (short and excellent) book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland which is now one of the dog-eared books on my bedstand. Chris has continued to be my favorite source for a huge array of great and diverse music, contemplation, books, articles, provoking questions & conversation, weblogs, and other stuff he finds or makes, and shares.

Some months ago, Chris added 37days ("what would you be doing today if you had 37 days to live?"), written by Patti Digh in Asheville, NC, to his recommended reads. Always beautiful, inspiring, surprising, always poignant, and so often hilarious, it's become one of my favorites, too. So, last month, Patti wrote that she would be coming here to Seattle to do some work with her business partner David Robinson, would be attending a poetry reading by David's friend Sam Magill, and invited any 37days readers in the area to come say hi and listen to Sam read from his new book "Fully Human."
Reading that post, written from 3000 miles away cluing me in to something just up the road from me, I realized that Sam is the same Sam that my friends David Matteson and Dan Leahy often talk about, the Sam who headed up the Fetzer Relationship-Centered Care project and who has been much influenced by the 5-Element philosophy he learned through Tai Sophia (which is where several of my mentor teachers were trained). Sam and I have a number of other mutual friends, but I had never gotten to meet him before.

I was so pleased for the opportunity to meet Patti, who is as funny and charming and generous as her writing, and to meet Sam, whose poetry is insightful and kind and wise, as well to meet more in their overlapping circles of friends and relations. And, to finally meet David M's wife Debbie, who, like David is full to the brim with very bright, very clear qi. It felt like when you are standing in a circle holding hands with people and then your circle opens up to join with other circles of people (or as David says, "cousins who haven't met yet").

So, Chris: I am sure I am not the only person whose mind and heart and web of relationships has been spectacularly expanded by your continual and open-handed sharing--it would be fascinating to see a map of your wide and deep connectedness (and if it were a map that could light up--it'd be blinding!) Big, on-going thanks, my friend.

And by the way--Patti often recommends the book Art and Fear, too.

each flower containing reflections of all the others
Clematis Drops
by Steve Wall

reaching in three directions

Rabbi Tsurah August, a wonderful Renewal rabbi here in Seattle, sends this quote with her wishes for a sweet and good new year:

A PERSON REACHES IN THREE DIRECTIONS

A person reaches in three directions:
Inward, to oneself
Up, to the Eternal
Out, to others

The miracle of life
Is that in truly reaching
in any one direction,
one embraces all three.

by Hassidic master Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlov

days of awe and forgiveness

Below is an excerpt from this week's edition of Rob Breszny's Free Will Astrology Newsletter, always packed with nuggets of insight and delight. The message fits perfectly with the energies of this time, during the Jewish Days of Awe (the Yamim Noraim): forgiveness (S'lichot), creation (Rosh HaShanah), and atonement (Yom Kippur)):

"SUBTERRANEAN PRONOIA THERAPY

"Experiments and exercises in becoming a rebelliously kind, affably unpredictable, insanely poised Master of Supernal Mischief.

"Declare amnesty for the part of you that you don't love very well. Forgive that poor sucker. Hold its hand and take it out to dinner and a movie. Tactfully offer it a chance to make amends for the dumb things it has done.

"And then do a dramatic reading of this proclamation by the playwright Theodore Rubin: 'I must learn to love the fool in me—the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool.'"

touch the angel's hand

Letter to a Friend
~Fra Giovanni Giocondo

I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got, but there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven!

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see - and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look!

Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by the covering, cast them away as ugly, or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power.

Welcome it, grasp it, touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Our joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty - beneath its covering - that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.

Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.

And so, at this time, I greet you. Not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.

~written by Fra Giovanni Giocondo, priest and architect, to the Countess Allagio Aldobrandeschi in 1513

to be burned up with beauty

the lesson of the moth

i was talking to a moth

the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

Don Marquis, "archy and mehitabel", 1927

democracy requires visibility

"We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

"How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared."

Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line

song for the soul returning

My friend and teacher, Dr. Maureen O'Keefe z''l*, was the first Chair of the Counseling Department at Bastyr University, beginning when it was still a College. She taught solid counseling skills to a generation of medical students, but of all the courses she taught, my favorite by far was an Advanced Workshop in Esoteric Healing that she did over a weekend in a luxurious home right on the shore of Lake Sammamish. A few of the workshop syllabus items: Clearing Thoughtforms with the Soul Star; Singing and Chanting; Radiating Soul Energy in The Healing Process; Miasm, Constitutional Pictures, and the Personality Ray.

Maureen died peacefully in her sleep earlier this year, at her home in Colorado. On Sunday we'll be gathering together on campus to honor and remember her big deep laugh, x-ray insight, and all the amazing things she gave us and taught us.

As I read through my copies of poems and songs and prayers she gave us, I'm listening to a song that she loved, that we'll play on Sunday:

Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen (kd lang's version)

I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
Well, it goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Well, your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and cut your hair
And from your lips she drew Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Baby I've been here before
I've seen this room, and I've walked the floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
But I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Our love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who out-drew you
It's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not someone who's seen the light
It's a cold and broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallulujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

(these two verses that aren't in kd lang's version are my favorite verses:)

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Here is something else that was in the syllabus packet for Esoteric Healing:

Song for the Soul Returning
~David Wagoner

Without singing, without the binding of midnight,
Without leaping or rattling, you have come back
To lodge yourself in the deep fibers under my heart,
More closely woven than a salmonberry thicket.
I had struck the rocks in your name, but no one answered.
Left empty under the broken wings of Sun,
I had tasted and learned nothing. Now the creek no longer
Falters from stone to stone with a dead fishtailing
But bursts like the ledges of dawn, East Wind and West Wind
Meet on the hillside, and the softening earth
Spreads wide for my feet where they have never dared to go.
Out of the silent holts of willow and hazel, the wild horses,
Ears forward, come toward us, hearing your voice rise from my mouth.
My hands, whose craft had disappeared, search out each other
To shelter the warm world returning between them.

*z''l is an abbreviation for "zichrono/zichronah l'vracha"--"may his/her memory be for a blessing"

artful alternative to obsession

"...a temple is not an art gallery. It is not a place to view pictures but to venerate them. If we could understand this difference, we might grasp the contrast between the spirit and the soul of religion: the spirit seeks enlightenment while the soul seeks connection.

"To be in the presence of a sacred image is not to be instructed, to know something one didn't know before, but simply to be the receiver of a transforming radiance. The effect on the devotee can hardly be seen, measured, or explained, and yet veneration is the quintessential religious act.

"...The religious traditions can return us to a proper idea of what devotion, sainthood, and sacred image are all about. They teach us veneration, which is the artful alternative to obsession."

~Thomas Moore, The Soul's Religion

Thomas and Ashley's River Rock Buddha