the starting point of anything that matters

Thank you to Danya Ruttenberg for linking to this beautiful speech, When the Wounded Emerge as Healers: The Study of Religion is Like a Labyrinth, given by Dr. Kimberly Potter, to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School:

...So, as long as I thought I could impart to you something oracular about the future—your future—something splendid or clever or wise, I never had this opportunity. That day did not come until all I could tell you about was the one thing that I truly can say I know, and that is the broken heart. Even if a broken heart does not lie in your past or present, it awaits you in your future, at some place, at some time when you will almost certainly be unprepared. But in myth, in ritual, and in theology, the broken heart is not a regrettable symptom of derailment, but is rather the starting point of anything that matters. As Laurette Séjourné describes the heart in ancient Mesoamerica: "The heart is the place of union where the luminous consciousness is made. . . . Human existence must reach out to transcend the world of forms that conceal the ultimate reality. This reality lives in the heart and must be set free at whatever cost. . . . Thus to reach one's heart, to possess oneself of it, means to penetrate into spiritual life. The operation is extremely painful, and that is why the heart is always represented as wounded, and why the drops of blood issuing from it are so significant that they alone are a sufficient symbol for it."

....

Looking deep into the religious traditions of the world, one learns that we need not fear these initiations, these times of breaking apart. The soul cannot grow or change without them. What the human ego or the human body experience as traumas, the soul instantly recognizes as opportunities to shed what is no longer needed. When the heart is broken, the soul is released from its prior constellations. It begins the ancient process of dissolution, dismemberment, and new life. The soul rushes toward rebirth. This is not a comfortable process. But it is a normal one.

In the words of Jalaja Bonheim: "[M]ake no mistake: those who tell us we can have whatever we want, be whoever we want to be, and have full control of our lives are merely playing into our desire to avoid the discomfort of feeling our vulnerability. True wholeness has nothing to do with getting what we want. Paradoxically, we achieve true wholeness only by embracing our fragility and sometimes our brokenness. Wholeness is a natural radiance of Love, and Love demands that we allow the destruction of our old self for the sake of the new. 'If anyone needs a head, the lover leaps up to offer his,' says the mystic and poet Kabir. Life did not intend for us to be inviolable, but to be used for fodder for its workings. We are meant to be chewed up and digested and transformed into the blood and sinews of the world."

The Torah portion that I'll be chanting from and giving a little talk on in June includes Moses telling the people "cut away the thickening around your heart" (literally: "circumsize the foreskin of your heart" "umal'tem et orlat l'vavechem") so I am thinking a lot about what it is to be open-hearted in this world that is so full, about the open heart and the broken heart and the heart that is somehow cut open, in analogy to the covenant of circumcision...I have a feeling that what blogging there is here in the next couple of months might be a lot of rumination on heart stuff...

spring tonic

Springtime is traditionally considered to be a good time to "cleanse the liver", or give it a nice restorative rest. One helpful practice is to choose not to eat foods that overstimulate the liver and gall bladder for at least a week or two -- fried and fatty foods, rich and sugary and salty foods, alcohol -- that is, those dark-of-winter holiday things that the bodymind craves for insulation and comfort when it's dark and cold and wet out for months on end. Not to mention dark.

As the sap begins to rise and the days grow lighter and muddier, our bodies begin to crave lightness, too, and to get the sludginess moving out. Eating bitter spring greens (dandelion, arugula, endive, chicory, mustard greens, and romaine lettuce is a little bit bitter too), which are little and tender and not so painfully bitter at this time of year, is a good way to gently stimulate liver secretion (bile production), which ferries out through the bowels many of the metabolic waste products the liver generates in its everyday intelligence.

Another plant food/medicine we prescribe often as a a liver/bowel/blood tonic is radix Arctium lappa, or burdock root. For a liver cleanse regime, burdock root is used in fluid extract or tea form, but for everyday you can also find beautiful long burdock roots (gobo in Japanese) at an Asian grocery store like Uwajimaya, or a natural foods grocery like our Puget Consumers Coop, and include it in your exotic vegetable repetoire. Here is a Japanese recipe I like, which is not a "liver cleanse" recipe because of the oil, sugar, sake and soy sauce (hmm--that's pretty much everything that's in it)

Burdock or Carrot Kinpira (Kinpira Gobo or Ninjin) (adapted from Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art, by Shizuo Tsuji):

1 medium burdock root, or 3 medium carrots, (I usually include both and sometimes I add turnip or rutabaga or parsnip or some other rooty veg) peeled or very well-scrubbed
Oil for stir-frying
Cooking sake, a few TB
Soy sauce, a few TB
Sugar (I like brown sugar or sometimes honey in this recipe), 1 TB
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes or "Shichimi," Japanese "seven-spice mixture" which contains red pepper, roasted orange peel, yellow sesame seed, black sesame seed, Japanese pepper, seaweed, ginger, all ground up into sprinkles.
Sesame seeds and a scallion or two, sliced up, for garnish

Whittle the burdock into shavings, as if you were sharpening a huge pencil, and put the pieces in a bowl of water to keep them from turning too dark. I usually roll-cut them, but they are more delicate and not so chewy if you use the shaving method. I like them chewy. Cut the carrots, if using, into julienne or roll-cut them too. To roll-cut, you slice off a piece of the end, at an angle, then roll the vegetable a quarter turn or so, slice off another angled piece, etc. This makes for a lot of the tender & delicious inner-vegetable surface area to hit the hot oil when you get to the stir-fry step, but the pieces are more substantial and interesting than the eqivalent-sized regular slice.

Heat a frying pan over high heat and add a few TB of oil, swirl to coat the bottom and when it's hot and ripply, throw in the vegetables and stir-fry for a few minutes until they start to soften up. You might have to turn down the heat a little to prevent scorching, depending on how sticky your pan is.

Then add the sake, soy sauce, and sugar or honey, reduce heat to medium high, and stir-fry till the liquid is thick and almost all reduced. If it sticks and scorches, add a little more sake. Flavor to taste with the red pepper or seven-spice sprinkles.

I like to add a spoonful of not-ground-up sesame seeds and some finely sliced scallion on top. Oh, but in the batch that's pictured I also added mushrooms (tasted good, texture was just OK) and I was out of sesame seeds.

Good hot or at room temp, with a little sake (good drinking sake, not cheap cooking sake) or Japanese beer (another reason not to be doing a cleanse when you make this dish!)

time large and small

Caffeine is time's Viagra.

Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle columnist, in his Notes and Errata column this week called "Let's All Get ADD! What do coffee, cell phones, the Net, stress and sleep drugs have in common? You, silly" adds,

We equate deranged, caffeinated busyness with smarts, with success, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Just ask the yogis, the gurus, the healers of the past 5,000 years: It is actually when you calm the mind, clear things out, breathe deep and sleep deeper and clean out the toxins and the caffeine and the Ambien, that's when real wisdom, real intuition comes your way. The rest is just, well, noise. Happy delicious annoying caffeinated sexy fun infuriating obnoxious unstoppable noise, but still noise.

But not to worry. They'll soon develop a pill to block that, too.

The amazing and adorable Eric Francis, who is my favorite astrologer, and used to live on Vashon Island near Seattle, but now lives mostly in Paris and sometimes in Brussels, talks about time this week, too, in an essay on the coming lunar and solar eclipses:

A lunar eclipse presents a nice image of the concentration of time, which we can work with consciously. It begins as a Full Moon. Then, perhaps half an hour later, the Moon is dark; then half an hour after that, it is full again. It's as if we live a month of experience in two hours. But if you consider that the effects of the eclipse radiate out, it's more like we live through the energetic equivalent of a year in a day. Imagine if that actually happened, how disoriented you might feel: going to bed and waking up a year later.

In a sense, we get an antidote to 'speeding time' by pushing the concentration even further. An eclipse is like a massive homeopathic dose of time.

Read the rest of the Eclipse Trip here.

making up stories, and glass like light compressed

"Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine."
Rainer Maria Rilke
(as always, thank you to Joe at Panhala for sending out the perfect selection each morning)
(the archive of which is unfortuntately no longer public due to copyright complaints, but you can subscribe to the daily poem by sending a blank email to Panhala-subscribe at yahoogroups.com)

I have just lately been trying to pay attention to some of the stories I make up from moment to moment--most of the time, they are such passing thoughts and I never see them again. But if, as Rilke says, our true lives are in our imaginings, then by letting mine slip by without noting them I might be missing parts of my life!

Today on the way home from my friend Roger Nachman's studio (visit Roger's site and look at his glowingly beautiful glass art--such a "healing art") I drove past a few schools whose playgrounds were full of shouting and laughing and the running bodies of children let outside on a beautiful day--yes, today was actually a sunny day in Seattle ;-)

At one of the schools (on NW 80th, near Aurora, or maybe it was near Greenwood), on the edge of the sidewalk between the chain-link fence surrounding the playground, and the very trafficky city street, were a series of rectangular grass strips. One of the rectangles (just one!) was popping with many scattered white and yellow daffodils, and blue crocuses, a tiny patch of meadow in the city. In my imagination, I clearly saw a group of children and their teacher on a much colder day some months ago, carefully or haphazardly digging holes and dropping flower bulbs into them (or not--maybe just digging to dig) and then being thrilled to see their class project emerge from the ground like magic. I am always entirely thrilled to see something I've planted peek its tender new self out of the ground, and I'm so glad that the children there (or, in my imagination, anyway) got to have that feeling, too. And really glad for as many more signs of spring as I can find, or make up.

halfway up the mountain

Thoughtful and provocative new webl, Radical Torah: Sources for the Jewish Social Action Community, "features multiple takes on parshat hashavua (the weekly Torah portion), as seen through the lens of progressive religious and political viewpoints. The project seeks to create a resource of authentically Jewish responses to pertinent social justice issues, timed in accordance with their relevancy to the Jewish calendar."

From this week's parashah, Mishpatim, Danya Ruttenberg writes "Beyond Mysticism":

"...Right after the vision of God, Moses continues up the mountain, leaving his friends behind...He ascended higher up the mountain. Into a place not about visions, but about commandments. Into a place not about experiences, but rather, covenant. Moses, here, accepts his (and Israel's) half of the responsibility for a relationship with the Divine. It's not about getting something cool (theophany, mysticism) but rather agreeing to give something...Moses, after all, didn't just see God, he spoke to God "panim al panim," face to face. He didn't just have an experience of God, he had a relationship with God. And while theophany is fleeting, sometimes hard to control, a relationship is something more stable, lasting, and accessible at all times. Mystical experience is great, but it's only halfway up the mountain. Perhaps every now and again it's worth asking ourselves what we might be able to offer God, instead."

happy red fire dog year

Happy Red Fire Dog Year, the first day of the Lunar New Year 4704!

Donut, who is also known as Donut-Ponut (lying with her Hedgehog)

how the heart hardens

I have wrestled a bit with the part of the Moses-Pharoah-Exodus story where it says that "god hardened Pharoah's heart"--in that case, whose responsibility is it that the Egyptian people in the myth suffer through all those plagues? Whose choice was it, if Pharoah would have given in, but for his heart being hardened against his will?

So, I am happy to read this interpretation from a much more muscular wrestler than I am, Rabbi Arthur Waskow of The Shalom Center. This piece of his is posted at a new group blog, Radical Torah, "a weblog which features multiple takes on parshat hashavua (the weekly Torah portion), as seen through the lens of progressive religious and political viewpoints. The project seeks to create a resource of authentically Jewish responses to pertinent social justice issues, timed in accordance with their relevancy to the Jewish calendar."

Perhaps the greatest archetypal tale in all of human culture about addiction to top-down, unaccountable power is the story of Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus.

Now, today, we are seeing this tale lived out before our own eyes. The present government of the United States has become so addicted to its own power, so swept away by its own arrogance, that it is playing out the tale of Pharaoh.

And the US government is not alone: the present government of Iran is talking like Pharaoh; Al Qaeda acts like a mini-Pharaoh.

Pharaoh begins by hardening his own heart to the plight of the poor and powerless, and after a series of disasters (the "plagues") brought on by his own arrogance, his addiction takes over.

God – read "Reality" – takes over, and from then on it is God Who hardens his heart.

What is this like? — Use heroin once, twice, thrice – and you are making a free choice. But at some point the addiction takes over, Reality takes over, God takes over. Now it is the heroin that is doing you, not you doing heroin.

If you choose hard-heartedness so long you get addicted to it, at some point you are no longer choosing: God, Reality, is hardening your heart.

...

Even when Pharaoh's own advisers shriek at him, "You are destroying Egypt!" he can no longer turn back.

Pharaoh has so addicted himself to his own uncontrollable power that he can no longer make a free choice. Unfortunately, when people who have great power insulate themselves in arrogance, the disasters they create do not wound only themselves. They wound the whole society...

Read the rest here.

slow light

Hmmm. Not blogging for a few weeks is a tiny bit like not sending out holiday cards for the past 4 or 5 years (or maybe it is 6). The time has been so full, I wonder: where shall I start?

But that's too daunting. Instead, I'll just start here, and say that this morning the sky was clear--so rare in the past few months--and the sun was angled low in the sky like it is all winter, and casually brilliant. I so much appreciate days like today when none of my things-to-do are too precisely time-bound. How luxurious to roll very slowly along in the morning commute traffic, and not feel hurried. To be able to notice all of the trees growing on the freeway covers and be filled by the sunlight glinting on the mountains and the lake, and know that it will be fine with my friend Jana whether I arrive at her house at 9 or 9:30 or later.

By lunchtime it was raining again (though the chill was warmed by getting to have lunch with Rabbi Ted!)

And now, in the dark, I'm still full of the slow light of this morning.

This Pillar of Sun, taken in Maine by Lucy Orloski, is from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day site

floating past the bridges

"...You know how a good bass player is just there, in the music, not the main thing but just a continual presence. This dissertation is always there, no matter where I live or what I do for work or how I feel.

Okay, so I was working on my dissertation the other day, and I encountered a new reality. Stepped right through the filmiest of barriers to this other side.

I realized that I'm done. This dissertation is done."

Congratulations, Jeff! I'm so glad you're inviting us back to cross the rio-grandio with you again!

life is the only way to rise on wings

A lovely selection via Panhala, by Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska:

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

everything is waiting

My friend Bruce said something in an ImagineCascadia (more on that another time) email conversation that reminded me of this favorite poem by Whidbey Island poet David Whyte :

(I first got to hear David recite this in his wonderful and inimitable style during a conversational presentation that was recorded and is available as "A Change for the Better: Poetry & the Reimagination of Midlife"):

EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU
(After Derek Mahon)

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

NJ teasing the Pacific

sugared ice

The hummingbird feeder outside our dining room window had ice in it the other day! But only partially, and only till the afternoon. The hummingbirds who live in our neighborhood are the most audible birds around at this time of year, with their chp chp chp chp chp coming from various high-up places.

An Improbable Prayer

From Phelim McDermott, artistic co-director of Improbable, a theater company in the UK-- an open space manifesto from before he knew about "open space":

An Improbable Prayer.

We will say we don’t know when we don’t know.
We will say we are scared when we are scared.
We will not pretend everything is ok when it isn’t.
We will never ask a performer to do something we wouldn’t be prepared to do ourselves.
We love performers.
We believe they often know more than the director.
We love the audience.
We believe they often know more than either the performers or the director.
Anyone is free to leave at anytime.
It is better to leave than to be there and not really be present.
If someone leaves we will do it.
A comedy store joke in serious theatre is just as valuable as serious theatre at the comedy store.
We will never do something just to be different.
We will be prepared to be obvious.
When things get scary we will stay awake.
When things get scary we will look after each other not ourselves.
We will have a good time.
The audience see everything.

metaphorest walk

With the light and warmth of gathering around glowing embers on a dark winter day: I am grateful to see that Chris Weaver at metaphorest walk is blogging again.

preparing for liftoff

it is the night of la guadalupana
and each one of a trillion brown oak leaves
(now on the ground) turns
his leathered elder face in a light wind
to face the sky, eyelids closed beneath
the endless black branches of his mother
tree as she swings under the clouds,
each old face awaiting a kiss
from a snowflake, spiraling
downward from the unseen stars,
a gift

for a job well done

posted by chris weaver dec 11 2005

gratitude experiment

My friend Emma sent me the link to Stacey Robyn's very sweet Go Gratitude Experiment, a "journey together into the core of Gratitude," which begins with this brief flash video.

Inspired by Masaru Emoto's photos of water crystals, which he says are evidence of water taking on the shape of the intentions and energies poured into it, Stacey Robyn describes her vision of:

"... a wake of Gratitude rolling across our planet, re-connecting our water bodies to Love . Passed person to person, heartbeat by heartbeat, this wake would roll through our bodies - mostly water - to create a massive tide of change by simply focusing on Gratitude."

gratitude-water-crystal
masaru emoto

habitat jam

The government of Canada will be hosting the 3rd session of the United Nations World Urban Forum, in Vancouver from June 19-23, 2006, with the theme of "Our Future: Sustainable Cities -- Turning Ideas into Action.

As part of the preparations for the Forum, the Canadian government, IBM, and UN-HABITAT (the United Nations Human Settlement Programme) are sponsoring what they hope will be the largest internet conversation to date, the "Habitat Jam", beginning tomorrow, Dec. 1, through Dec. 3. Anyone who wants to add their voice is invited to participate, and input will be gathered and analyzed in order to influence the agenda of the Forum in June.

"The Habitat JAM is about adding your ideas into the global conversation about the future of our cities. It's about having your say on important issues that affect you. It's about building new global networks of people who wouldn't have connected before. It's about working together across the globe to find solutions to critical urban problems."

I think registration is still open, till 15:00 GMT (7 am here PST)

devotional moon

blue moon

Ready for Silence

The devotional moon looks into
the heart and is in the heart.

When the heart has a Friend like
you, the universe cannot contain

their pleasure. Anyone warmed
by sun feels courage coming in.

If grief arrives, you enjoy it.
Generosity: that's your hand in

my pocket giving your wealth away.
Yet you run from me like one

raised in the wild. Here comes
this strange creature: me, in a

hands-and-feet shape! The formless
tries to satisfy us with forms!

A transparent nakedness wearing
pure light says, Blessed are those

who put on gold brocade! You may
not see him, but Moses is alive,

in this town, and he still has his
staff! And there's water and thirst,

wherever and however water goes, and
the one who brings water. The morning

wind broke off a few branches in the
garden. No matter. When you feel

love inside you, you hear the
invitation to be cooked by God.

It's that creation the heart loves.
For three winter months the ground

keeps quiet. But each piece of earth
knows what's inside waiting: beans,

sugarcane, cypress, wildflowers. Then
the spring sun comes talking plants

into the open. Anyone who feels the
point of prayer bends down like

the first letter of pray. Anyone who
walks with his back to the sun is

following his shadow. Move into your
own quietness. This word-search poem

has found you, ready for silence.
- Jelaluddin Rumi

from the pure and beautiful exploration of mystery at whiskey river

language of the divine

From Rabbi Marc Gafni of Bayit Chadash("A new home for ancient souls"), in the Dec-Feb issue of What is Enlightenment? magazine:

"...The Zohar says that we are God's name--we're God's verbs, we're God's adjectives, we're even God's dangling modifiers. We're the language of the divine in the world, and in that way, we become the voice of the meshiach--the messiah. Anything less than the realization of that is called, in the inner mystical tradition, heresy. The core liberation teaching of Kabbalah is that to be a heretic is to believe that God does not need me, that I am not required to participate in the evolution of God. But enlightenment means we participate in divinity; we don't just submit to it by responding to the evil and suffering in the world with a traditional theology or a theodicy.The ultimate response to the suffering of the world is, like that of the Hebrew mystic, to cry in protest and to let that protest translate into action. I call this nondual humanism, which means that I participate in God's evolving self, now.

As the great nineteenth-century Hasidic master Nachman of Bratzlav implied, the most important thing in the world is to be willing to give up who you are for who you might become. He calls this process the giving up of pnini, which literally means "what is within." For Nachman, that means the old, familiar thing that comforts even when it no longer serves--and that can include our spirituality and religion, and even the very core way we understand our relationship to the divine ground of being..."

kaffeeklatsch with god

I Got Kin

Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.

Love
So God will think,

"Ahhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls.

Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.

Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.

~Hafiz
version translated by Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift

macchiato,

the contribution to last week's Photo Friday
(the challenge/theme was "Delicate")
from Andrea Scher of Superhero Designs

heavenward

Strive each day to make your life purer, richer, and more luminous.
You will subtly and imperceptibly lead all of creation heavenward.

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

from: Word for the Day, Gratefulness.org