one day it cracks them open

After talking today with a dear friend about his obviously powerful practice of kundalini yoga (a practice that awakens the energy lying like a serpent coiled at the base of spine, which then rises to enable the yogi's individual consciousness to merge with the Divine Consciousness), I remembered that my hero-friend Bill Mitchell practiced and taught a type of kundalini yoga for many years. I have had a sweet strong sense of Bill yesterday and today as a being who has suddenly shifted form, merged with the cosmos, gone super-nova, and become an intense radiance that has lit up the stars in our eyes... and now I recall a lovely comment that Chris wrote at Ashley's when a soul friend of theirs died a month ago at the solstice: "I have had this image with me all day of a star exploding, shedding layers and layers and seeding many new stars all around."

So many new stars.

I think that this star-burst/snake-uncoiling energy is an ecstatic one. An energy that takes us far beyond our ordinary sense of who we are, beyond where we think we end and the rest of the universe begins. A power that we experience at numinous times like these, when the veil floats aside for a moment and we are tossed high and low by the great winds of life and death. When we feel pinned through the heart to this present time; and when there's nothing left of us to be pinned, because we've already been dissolved into the fertile emptiness.

An energy to appreciate, and maybe, like my friends, to cultivate.

"Many myths...speak of a snake that glides, sinuous and silent, through the shimmering branches of the body-tree. Universally, the snake symbolizes the primordial creative energy of the cosmos in general and the life force within the body in particular. What we call ecstasy is the dance of the serpent through the tree of our consciousness.
--
"If you think of your body as a house, the serpentine force is the electricity that flows through all the rooms and lights them up. Seen with the inner eye, every living body appears luminous -- it shines, shimmers and scintillates, each cell a little star.
--
"Ecstasy is always a gift of grace. Its comings and goings cannot be controlled...Or, as Rumi puts it, "God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box."
~Jalaja Bonheim, PhD

Unmarked Boxes
Jalal al-din Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother's milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flower bed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.

Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, "Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines." Then the phantasm goes away.
You're back in the room.
I don't want to make any one fearful.
Hear what's behind what I say.

Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.
There's the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I'm only talking about them,

as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night.

dreaming bill

(Updated 2/15/07: There will be two memorial services for Bill at Bastyr University, one on Friday Feb. 23 at 5:30 pm in the chapel, moving to the fire circle on the hill above the herb garden at 6:30. The second will be the following day, Saturday Feb 24, a formal service in the chapel at 2 pm that will be webcast)

My spirit buddy and teacher, Dr. Bill Mitchell, died the night before last of a broken heart. His son Noah, aged 27, had died suddenly in the morning, and Bill died that night in his sleep. They both died of myocardial infarction ("heart attack").

Bill was one of the co-founders of the John Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine, where I went to medical school, which has since grown up to become Bastyr University.

For the first 15 or 16 years that I knew Bill, I really mostly just knew of him, and he didn't really know me. Like many of my school mates, I was in awe of his brilliance, his robust connection to the natural world, and his weirdness -- little realizing how weird I was going to turn out to be myself.

In 2002, when I started a two year stint as Assistant Dean in the Naturopathic Medicine department at Bastyr, one of my first and favorite assignments was to support Bill's teaching of a new elective course, the prototype for a series meant to embody and make explicit the part of Bastyr's mission statement that emphasizes education and services that "integrate mind, body, spirit and nature". I got to talk with him often on the phone and meet with him to create the syllabus and course requirements and other things he was not so interested in. He told me early on that "the syllabus can't really be created until after the course is over, because I won't know till then what Spirit's going to want me to say." Then we laughed for a long time and knew that we understood each other, and ever since then we have loved each other.

I last saw Bill a couple of months ago over lunch at a little restaurant near his office. He talked about an idea of leaving his practice to his daughter, who is also a naturopathic doctor, and maybe leaving this city where he had been for so many years, about going to a place where he could swim for hours in the warm ocean. Our last interaction, though, was by email, which turned out to be a pretty reliable way to keep very loose track of his moonbeam self. I had written him to describe a dream I'd had of him on New Year's Eve, where I had been so happy to run into him because I needed to ask him a question about Dr. Bastyr's practice. In my dream, he'd said, "well, that means Dr. Bastyr has something to tell you!" and pulled a large phone out his jacket, to connect me with Dr. Bastyr (who died in 1995). Then I woke up. Bill's email reply to me was "Wow what a great dream. Dr. Bastyr healed you. You knew you were being healed. He didn't say a lot. And he worked on your back and neck. Love and laughter in the new year. Bill"

Bill had ravishingly hard times in the past few years, enough to break a heart many times over. He was scoured out from the inside and became almost transparent; you could see the light shining straight through him. He let all the hardship pour through him like a great river, and he didn't hide from it or hide it from those of us who orbited him.

It turned out that I often had occasion to weep in Bill's presence, for very varied reasons. He never minded, it was always OK with him. I know that it's OK with him, now, too. Leaning on his presence was like leaning on a mountain. And that's still true, too.

The soundtrack for my day yesterday, before I had heard about Bill, happened to be Joni Mitchell's Blue, and her song "A Case of You" has gotten woven now into the missing him that rises up today:

I remember
that time you told me
you said,
'love is touching souls'
surely
you've touched mine
Part of you
pours out of me
in these lines from time to time

You're in my blood
like holy wine

and from Hildegard von Bingen, one of Bill's patron saints
and about whom he was exceedingly knowledgeable:

I am the one whose praise echoes on high.
I adorn all the earth.
I am the breeze that nurtures all things green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams.
I am the rain coming from the dew
that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I am the yearning for good.

happy birthday, rabbi ted!

Yom huledet sameach, Rabbi Ted! Happy 65th birthday, with deep love and appreciation for the way you have been willing to enter the center of the fray all your life in order to offer the teachings of the one silence.

A birthday sort of poem, courtesy of Panhala:

Instructions

Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God.
Find god in rhododendrons and rocks,
passers-by, your cat.
Pare your beliefs, your absolutes.
Make it simple; make it clean.
No carry-on luggage allowed.
Examine all you have
with a loving and critical eye, then
throw away some more.
Repeat. Repeat.
Keep this and only this:
what your heart beats loudly for
what feels heavy and full in your gut.
There will only be one or two
things you will keep,
and they will fit lightly
in your pocket.

~ Sheri Hostetler ~

(A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry)

that last curving and impossible sliver of light

one of Saturn's moons
photo source

our moon's phase tonight: waning, 1% of full

FAITH
by David Whyte

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it the smallest entry.

Let this, then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

by David Whyte, from *Where Many Rivers Meet*

dangerous unselfishness

In a new book by University of Washington, Tacoma, professor Michael Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign, one of the 1300 sanitation workers on whose behalf Dr. King was there in Memphis, says of him: "King was like Moses. You can't keep treating people wrong, you gotta do right some time."

It was in Memphis on the eve of his assasination that he gave the prophetic "I've been to the mountaintop" speech, in which he declared, "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness." He explored the parable of the good Samaritan who helped the man along the road between Jerusalem and Jericho:

"But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the day of Jesus it came to be known as the 'Bloody Pass.'

…And so the first question that the Levite asked was, 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'

That's the question before you tonight. Not, 'If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?' The question is not, 'If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?' 'If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?' That's the question."

That speech, his last, ends like this:

"…Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Though the words are powerful to read (find the complete transcript here), it is immeasurably more powerful to actually hear him, which you can do from here, or hear and see him, which you can do here or here; to feel his deep, slow, deliberate, rhythmic voice, and his message, and his force of spirit, roll through you and carry you and hold you up.

"But Moses never got to the Promised Land, and I just couldn't understand it...Moses only got to see the Promised Land and to watch the others go there. Everyone else had been given their dream. It didn't seem fair to me.
"When I told this to my grandfather, he smiled. 'But Moses did get his dream,' he said. 'Moses was a leader, Neshume-le, and a leader always has a different dream from the others.'
"He reminded me of mitzvot, those human actions that help move things in the direction in which God is trying to move them. When a person does such an action, they become God's hands in the world. 'There are many mitzvot, but the greatest mitzvah of all is said to be the freeing of captives,' he told me. 'Moses's dream was for his people to be free. And so his reward was that he got to see that happen. Because he was a leader, his dream was different from the dreams of the people, Neshume-le.

"A real leader has the same dream that God has.'"

~My Grandfather's Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

winter and water

Yesterday I caught a brief, a really really brief, glimpse of the possibility that the light will remember to come back here.

Looking into the Cascade mountain range from my backyard.

Well, that view is just a tiny bit telephotoed...

This is what I actually see from my backyard.










This is how the world usually looks around here these days -- including just a little while after the first photo.
(although earlier tonight it snowed, and it's still crystally and brilliant white)





And this is how it feels sometimes: windblown, dampish, and getting frayed around the edges (but in the meantime, the prayers are dissolving into the air and are carried off by the wind)
I rediscovered some elemental fragments I contributed to Wings, the community playground that my friend Ashley used to host at Easily Amazed

Here is the part that tells about where we are now:
Winter and Water. Black and deep blue. Kidney, Bladder, bones, ears. Death and the "end" of the cycle. Reflection, stillness, depth, silence. Wisdom and the will to live. Water is the reservoir of our lineage (genetic and spiritual), our generative potency. It is the seeds in the dark, cold, silent ground full of intensely concentrated essence of future. The archetype of the Sage. Water is adaptable, enduring, patient, flows according to where the way is open, goes around obstacles, stores our power. The source of our capacity for awe.In his teachings on the elements, my friend Paul adds this: Water is community. Gathering. Things coming together. Sense of holding on, with feeling. Water practices: holding every moment as precious; deep listening.
Little update: still all water, all the time, mostly the frozen kind -- the prayer flags stiff and unmoving as the snow fell; just tonight starting to melt and drip and run down the hills or be drawn up into sky or stem or trunk. Just like the water in the world, the water moving in us can be frozen stiff, can rush and flood, can drip and penetrate, can soak and nourish...how does the water within you flow these days?

sacred conversation

Peggy Holman recently posted a beautiful article called "Evolution, Process and Conversation: A Foundation for Conscious Evolutionary Agency" to the Open Space listserv, originally written for the Evolutionary Life e-magazine.

In it, she wonders/suggests:

"Could it be that consciousness is the latest evolutionary innovation that, when applied to conversation, catalyzes a new form of social system, the conscious co-creative collective, the radiant network of deep community? I believe that conscious conversation is the path to what Thich Nhat Hanh imagined when he said: "It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation." [Thich Nhat Hanh, "The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha" in Inquiring Mind, Vol 10, No.2, Spring 1994]

which reminds me of a teaching I read a couple of years ago -- a similar co-evolutionary idea in a different costume:

"'Messiah' in the original Hebrew is understood by the Kabbalists, quite astoundingly, to mean 'conversation'. Master Nachum of Chernobyl, mystic and philosopher, points out that the Hebrew word for messiah, Mashiach, can be understood as the Hebrew word Ma-siach -- Messiah, meaning 'from dialogue' or 'of conversation.' [Me'or Enayim, Parashat Pinchas] His assertion radically implies that the Messiah is potentially present in every human conversation -- every mutual act of voice-giving.

"All conversation is sacred. The ability to have an honest face-to-face talk in whihch both sides are true to themselves, vulnerable and powerful at the same time, is messianic. Simply put, sacred conversation is the vessel that receives the light of Messiah."

a radiant network

life awakens and is new

“Human breath is rooted in Divine breath, and Divine breath is inherent in human breath, reflecting the interdependent nature of the human and the Divine...

"Please ask yourself how long the breath of life that moves through you so freely at this very moment has been here. How long have these literal molecules circulated in one form or another in our world? …continue to breathe naturally and allow the question to touch your imagination lightly. There is no need to think of any particular answer...

"After you have considered how long your breath has been part of the world, extend your inquiry to include the molecules that make up your entire body. How long have these been around? How long has all of your body circulated around and around in our world, transforming from one form to another? Please engage this with your whole body and mind, allowing yourself to feel the question as it moves through every part of you...

"Remember, when the spirit or wind of creativity is brought to our tasks, and when we follow the example of the Creator and breathe life into what we undertake, life itself awakens and is new.”

Peter Levitt, Fingerpainting On the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom

Thank you to Meredith, for showing the way to this book full of incandescent sparks.

This photo is from a morning's showshoeing on Mt Werner in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where we have been for the past week.
May this new year be as fresh, and enlivening, and may our interdependence with one another and the Divine become ever clearer.

being a conduit

From Charity Focus' inspiration offering DailyGood quote of the day:

"Art condenses the experience we all have as human beings, and, by forming it, makes it significant. We all have an in-built need for harmony and the structures that create harmony. Basically, art is an affirmation of life."

From the artist's resume:

"I think about things that excite me: convoluted strata, the eroded and broken edges of cliffs, the constant interaction of the elements, the movement of boats on water…

I think about the object and its inner image; the activity of each and the play between the two and I try to be straightforward to remove unnecessary information.

For all the theorizing, formal and conceptual notions, the truth of the matter is that I see myself as a conduit. The titles come afterwards so that I don't impose myself on the work as it goes along. Then I leave it alone.

I have been saying the same thing all my working life. Just in different ways."

five micro stories

I was reading Chris' detailed, surprising and really interesting contribution to the "five things you might not know about me" story percolating around the blogworld. Then I got to the end and found that he'd handed me one of his five batons to carry on (though Chris, since you were tagged by Dan and two other friends, wouldn't you have 15 batons?) This is actually a combination of "you might not know" plus "I'm pretty sure you don't know" plus "maybe you do already know, I can't remember what I've said already":

1. My oldest boyfriend was (still is!) 30 years older than me. It was actually a pretty brief affair, and then we stayed friendly by letter. A few years later, after I was married, my husband and I got to visit with him and his lovely new wife when we were traveling through their part of the world. And then I got to reconnect with them again a couple of years ago after being out of touch for 15 years -- they are both still adorable.
One of the things I like best about being middle-aged is that there are friends you have loved for 20 or 30 or 40 years or more, and even if you have not seen them for many years there can still be such deep unchanged affection.

2. I have three sons, but usually I say that I have two, because our first little guy, Nadav, died at 12 weeks old of sudden infant death. While I am grateful to have had him for as long as we did, and am also grateful for my youngest who would not have been born without the loss of the first, and don't mind talking about him, I don't mention him much in public. My relationship with him continues in a very different form, a very interior form. His gradual appearance and swift disappearance from human form tenderized me forever and created the beginning of a gradual unfurling of the leaves of both my inner and outer life.

3. If it weren't poisonous, I would definitely be a smoker. I love the way smoke looks curling out of a cigarette, the drawing it in and blowing out. I don't actually even mind the smell so much, though my preferred cigarettes are filtered "kreteks" (Indonesian clove cigarettes) which have their own distinctive heavy-incense smell.

4. I have been to beautiful Indonesia, land of the kretek: after Robert and I got married we took almost all of our wedding gifts back to the stores, got money, and bought round-the-world tickets. We started in Los Angeles, spent a week in Hawaii, and then went to Asia for a year: Japan, China and Tibet, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, India and Nepal for from a few weeks to a few months in each country. Then about six more months spent partly on a kibbutz in the north of Israel, partly in Spain (my in-laws met us there for a whirlwind 4-star driving trip, so different from the way we'd been traveling! I hardly remember any of it, it was such a blur), then visiting friends in Paris and in London, and then back home.

5. The name I got from the Chinese side of my family (the other side being Japanese, by the way) is not our family's original name -- my grandfather bought the papers of someone named Lee to come to the US from China, but his family's name was really Kwan (or Quan depending on what system of transliteration you use). My husband's family changed their name, too, though only a generation before us -- his dad and uncles decided that "Eisikowitz" was too hard to spell (in fact I think I am spelling it wrong), and changed it to "Engel" (which hardly anyone spells correctly on the first try either!). If all that hadn't happened, instead of Lee-Engel, our last name would be Quan-Eisikowitz...has a different feel to it, doesn't it?

Here are some people I am very curious to know more about (curious, and not sure you will see this, so I am going to cheat and send you a note)(and please ignore this invitation if it doesn't sound fun to you): Andy, Meredith, Thomas, Jon. And Doug, I am curious to see what aspects of you would come through your very poetic style. And I am definitely looking forward to reading what Ashley will write! (already tagged by Chris)

no less amazed

I so love it when I read my own vague thoughts and feelings expressed in someone else's simple, true, gently precise words:

Incomplete Knowledge
~Jeffrey Harrison

I am of those whose knowledge will always be
incomplete, who know something about the world
but not a whole lot, who will forever confuse
steeplebush and meadowsweet
but know at least by the shape of the flower
that it has to be one or the other.

Don't ask me the difference between
a pitch pine and a red, or even a Jeffrey,
though I know it's a pine, not a spruce or tamarack
(a.k.a. hackmatack, but what's a larch?).
The difference between a sycamore
and a plane tree? It's beyond me.

I've never had a real grip on
Japanese painting—the different periods and styles.
I don't even know that much about Dutch—
Vermeer of course, Rembrandt sure,
but could I distinguish a De Hooch from a Steen?
Do I even know how to pronounce their names?

I know next to nothing about what goes on
under the hood of a car, though I try to hide that fact
in the presence of mechanics. Herakleitus
(am I spelling that right?) said something
about how we hide our ignorance,
but I can't remember exactly what it was.

Birds, music, fishing, history, it's appalling
how limited my knowledge is.
I'm not even going to begin to list
all the books I haven't read.
I'm the antithesis of a Renaissance man,
spread so thin I hardly exist.

I have a friend who knows what seems like
close to everything. Certainly everything in the woods.
He was explaining to me the difference
between steeplebush and meadowsweet
(which I understood at the time but didn't retain,
as if it were the theory of relativity),

when I looked up and saw a jet whose trail
of fine white cloud kept disappearing, reappearing,
and disappearing again, and I asked why,
and, holding the meadowsweet in one hand
and the steeplebush in the other, he explained it.
And he wasn't bullshitting, either—he knew.

I'm not sure I even understand what it means
to know that much. Does all that knowledge
add up to some encompassing wisdom,
something beyond the sum of the names
and data, vast and unknowable? Unknowable
at least to me: I will never be like my friend.

I misplace facts as easily as my glasses,
so the world seems blurred for a while—
but then I find them, put them on, and go outside
to greet the ten thousand things (is that a Buddhist
or Taoist expression?), no less amazed
for my not being able to keep them straight.

(Today's selection at Poetry Daily)

sleep and snow and melting into

I think that I got enough sleep last night for the first time in ages! I went to bed at 7:00 last night -- then around 7:30 the "Seattle Christmas Ship" docked at Matthews Beach (half a mile downhill from our house) and the Bellevue Chamber Chorus (through mighty loudspeakers) serenaded everyone for miles around with Christmas carols for 20 minutes before going on to their next stop along Lake Washington. So, I went to sleep at around 7:51, and didn't wake up till 8:30 this morning. Ahh! Satisfying my mammalian hibernation compulsion.

Plus, things have been very full lately. On Friday morning I went downtown to the "Building a WISER Sustainability Commons," which was inspiring and exciting & about which I will write later. Then went home for an hour, baked cookies for our office building's (the Seattle Healing Arts Center) holiday gala, and then with my 11-year old and his friend went to the fancy party which mixed tuxedos and string quartets and champagne with Cuban soul music and potluck desserts and little kids playing with surgical masks and an astrologer colleague dressed all in dazzing white including some kind of big ruff of snowy fur around his neck. Last year there were 400 guests, and I think this year there might have been more!

But I didn't stay too late because yesterday morning I had to get up early to catch the 9 am ferry to Whidbey Island, to join in a day-long workshop with poet David Whyte at the Whidbey Institute / Chinook Learning Center. Though last week's snow has pretty much disappeared from Seattle, there is still lots of snow and ice covering the fields and rooftops and driveways of South Whidbey, about a half an hour's drive and a 15 minute ferry ride away.

I am still mulling over the day's rich conversation, replete with stories and poetry and quiet time on that magnificent land, and will write more about that later, too.

In the meantime I'll just note that David Whyte has a beautiful new book of poetry out, called River Flow: New and Selected Poems 1984-2007. While I was paging through the book on the ferry ride home, I stopped at a favorite one, an unflinching and elemental poem called "Self-Portrait," from Fire in the Earth.

There is a very popular New Age-type poem that you can find quoted on coffee cups and greeting cards and such, called "The Invitation," that begins: "It doesn't interest me to know what you do for a living/ I want to know what you ache for/ and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing..." I first saw it on a scrap of paper under the glass tabletop of the neighborhood teashop and liked it very much. A few years later I read David's poem and loved it very much, and was surprised to see the identical structure, so I looked for the website of the author of "The Invitation" and learned that she wrote it after a writing workshop with David where he gave them his poem as a writing exercise template. Here is the piercing original:

SELF-PORTRAIT
~David Whyte

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned,
if you can know despair or see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes,
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

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.