Blog Posts

Hollyhocks Insistence

9/10/2015

Nature is helpful and friendly. We know all about the other side of that story, the survival of the fittest—everything killing and eating everything else, the indifference of nature. But I’ve had so many experiences of nature being exceedingly personal and caring also—for instance the hollyhock that has taken over my front porch. For the past three years it comes up through the stones, each year growing larger. This year despite the plague of locusts that has invaded most of Taos— grasshoppers making lace of the leaves, it has taken over the entire porch.

I’ve suffered with ulcerative colitis for many years. I refuse the steroids and heavy-duty anti-inflammatory medicines that the doctors have to offer, opting for herbs and alternative therapies. So far I’ve managed to keep away from surgeons and despite this sometimes exhausting debility, I still have all my natural born parts and am not walking around with a colostomy bag.

I decided to see if there is any medicinal value to Hollyhock. The first site I came to on Google said Hollyhock is good for digestion and heals ulcers. I’d read this last year when the Hollyhock came up but didn’t do anything about it. The Googled site that came up this year actually explained how to infuse the flowers, in cold water.

It took three years for me to receive the message of this tenacious plant growing bigger and stronger, as if nature has been insisting to the point of shouting, “I’M HERE TO HELP YOU.”

I’ve been picking 5 or 6 flowers each morning (avoiding the ones that the huge bees are sucking from) and infusing them in water overnight. I drink the water from the previous day and toss the soaked flower into the ground to recycle. The infused water has a mild taste. I’m not sure how it is helping, but I am sure it contributes positively to all the other things I do to keep this body going.

Perhaps if we learn to treat nature as friendly, not something we have to dominate and control. If we treat her with the respect she deserves, paying attention to her myriad signs and subtle ways of communicating, she will be more friendly with us.

2 Comments

Trash Walk

3/7/2015

1 Comment

    I read an article by Anthony Doerr in Orion Magazine about walking. It reminded of what I realized this morning before Yoga: I haven’t been out walking for almost a week. Warm today, I headed out to walk across my road onto the mesa. But four steps onto the dirt, I realized the ground was still too wetly muddy. Not my favorite choice, I turned around to just walk along the pavement. Walking along the road is nowhere near as meditative as walking away from the road onto the pathways through sagebrush, but at least I’d get the exercise. Noticing the trash tossed out of cars to settle into the dirt and get tangled up in twigs and wire fence, I thought of David Sedaris telling about how he picks up trash from the side of the road where he lives in England. As I said, walking on the road is not as meditative. I wasn’t transforming the horrors of the world by doing Tonglen*—a Buddhist meditation wherein you consciously breathe in the pain, sorrow, and discord you encounter, transform it in your own being, and then breathe out light and goodness, sending it out to where the suffering is lodged. No I was just noticing trash. I didn’t even have any judgment about it or the people who created it. I guess meditation is working—noticing, noticing, trash.

    I walked about a mile and then turned around to walk back. When I got to the Smiths plastic bag I’d noticed on the way out, twisted around the twig, I picked it up. Then there was a Styrofoam cup so I put the cup into the bag. Now I was picking up trash at the side of the road, as I’ve seen people do from time to time. Cars whooshed past. Drivers almost always veer away from walkers on this road and I like to thank them by holding up my hand in a gesture of gratitude. But now my focus was on the ground looking for what to put in the bag I may have spared a bird from swallowing. When the bag was almost full I found another one, this time from the Dollar Store. A beer bottle went into that bag. Further along when the second bag was almost full I found an Albertsons bag. By the time I got to my house all three bags were full with paper cups, straws, Styrofoam pieces, liquor bottles, and weathered plastic. I tied them up and put them in the big Waste Management trash bin that serves the four condo units where I live. The bin is usually only half full each week at pick up day, something I admit I’m rather pleased about. I’ve had neighbors living here who would fill that bin up the first day of the trash week with no consideration for the other tenants for the rest of the week. Meditation doesn’t insure I don’t have gripes from time to time.

    I came in, washed my hands, and that was it. I noticed that I didn’t feel proud of myself for doing a good deed. I didn’t feel that I’d found my calling. I didn’t feel better or worse for this activity. I just did it. Meditation again—non-attachment, non-judgment, but not non-engagement.

    I’m curious to know if anyone else has had the experience of picking up trash at the side of the road and what that was like for you. Please share.

* Tonglen

1 Comment

Greatness in Humility

2/25/2015

1 Comment

“Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great”
Golda Meir

One thing that fascinates me about Downton Abbey, in addition to the gorgeous gowns and the starched perfection of human behavior, is the way we as an audience are subtly shown the breaking down of that structure of certainty; that pivotal point in history where aristocratic propriety slowly declines, soon to be shattered completely by the splitting of the atom.

I was born with a kind of lethargy accompanied by ever-present bellyaches. By the time of puberty I longed for more energy and at eighteen I learned of a medical doctor who for the flimsiest of excuses would provide his patients with prescriptions for diet pills—uppers. I was a slim young woman, clearly not in need of dieting, and a deep part of me wanted this physician, who had taken the Hippocratic oath to first do no harm, to take me under his wise wing and truly help me. Instead I settled for his quack prescription, took my pills and briefly enjoyed the excess of energy they falsely and dangerously provided. This was one experience that broke any trust or belief I might have had in the armature of our declining civilization.

As time went on I gravitated toward holistic healing modalities, always seeking to cure my bellyaches. This form of medicine felt more promising of relief and was at least more honest. I learned techniques like applied kinesiology, muscle testing, and also learned to trust my intuition and instincts. If I wake in the middle of the night with pain in my knee and the word glucosamine pops into my head, the following day I’ll be at the herbal store standing before the various formulas of glucosamine; muscle testing to see which one my body wants. Thus a bottle of glucosamine with MSM sits on my counter as the current experiment toward relief of suffering. The fact that the following night when I wake with pain in my knee and the word Chondroitin pops into my head, not MSM, reveals how inexact a method this is; and how costly it can become.

I have a friend who chose a career in Western medicine despite having grown up in China and having been exposed to Oriental forms of healing. He felt the allopathic approach a more viable accurate way to alleviate human suffering. He is a deeply compassionate man, a brilliant physician in the eyes of his peers, who faces and is broken daily in the E.R. by the tragedy of human suffering. He recently wrote me an email which if I could I would post in every medical office in the Western World. Because he admits to how little his brand of knowledge can really relieve human suffering. “Human life is a complexity beyond comprehension. People suffer in ways I cannot define, or name, or categorize, or cure. So after another 10 hours at work, I tell you that I do not know how to fix anything.”

At one time the scientific approach to medicine promised to save humanity from all disease. Now we find that is has not only not accomplished that impossible feat but may well create more suffering than it cures. Iatrogenic errors are among the highest causes of illness and death.

Regardless of our approach to healing, holistic or allopathic, we come face to face with the impossibility of fixing anything. The Buddha’s First Noble Truth is Life is Suffering. Life cannot be “fixed” because fixing is the absence of change and life is change, which, by the way, is the Second Noble Truth. And now it gets curiouser and curiouser. Because if life is suffering and life is change then logically it follows that suffering must also change. Can we alleviate suffering by fixing it? Isn’t that death? But even in death change does not stop. We used to sing a song as children, the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout. Perpetual ever-present motion is the nature of reality, from bacteria to galaxies.

Here at the threshold of these questions, is it possible to alleviate human suffering? We are humbly bowed to the mystery and majesty of what is Real. I am not a Budd”hist” but when I lift the Buddha’s teaching up from the “ism” I find a very compelling logic, a clue leading toward liberation from suffering. If we look with an untarnished eye we do see that all things arise and pass away. Even the British Empire that for a period of time the sun never set upon is now emptied of its power. The Buddha taught to stop, sit, and notice. Eventually you will see that suffering can come to an end. The Buddha showed that it is not tinkering with suffering that causes it to end but rather observing it closely and seeing that it does end.

Now, half a century after human mind once again stole fire from the gods, becoming godlike ourselves through the knowledge of the power exposed by splitting the atom we are at a profound place in earth’s time. We see the extinction of many sentient species on this planet; we see global climate disruptions and empires gaining and losing power. We are brought to our greatness; not the arrogance that arises through ego from knowing but the humility of not knowing. I personally have come to only one solution: Thank you. Thank you for this hand that moves this pen. Thank you for this mind that is able to string one word after another in some semblance of coherence, able to make a flimsy and meager garland to drift in multi-dimensional space, framing for one brief and sacred moment a possibility of meaning for any sentient being who might happen to stumble upon it.

1 Comment

Sesshin* (Touching the Heart-Mind)

2/6/2015

0 Comments

Yesterday, O Joy
Whose body is here sitting?
What matter that pain?

Today,
Why are we doing this anyway?

Tomorrow. No idea can foretell

* A period of intensive Zen meditation (zazen)

0 Comments

We're All Going To Die

1/31/2015

0 Comments

I ran into a meditation friend at the market today. We talked briefly about our last group meditation and then she said she had to get through her shopping and get home, because her boyfriend, a rancher in Colorado, was arriving soon with two seven day old piglets. They planned to keep them in the bathtub in her small casita. He felt it was too cold for them in Colorado and they’d have a better chance of survival here in Taos. She told me he had a special milk formula for them. She didn’t mention why their mother was not nurturing them, but smiled when she said he had become their mother—as caring and concerned for their well being. Even though, she added, by next year they will be killed. I remembered she’d told me her boyfriend was a butcher.

I found myself blurting out, “we’re all going to die.” Perhaps I felt free enough to say that to her knowing she is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practitioner. She agreed and added that we live as if we don’t acknowledge that.

In that short interchange I seemed to come to the answer of a kind of Koan I’ve grappled with most of my life. If we are going to die anyway, why spend any effort caring for this body, this life? I felt her boyfriend’s love and compassion and concern for the two little piglets, knowing he himself would eventually slaughter them. In that moment I was able to hold the dichotomy lightly in an open heart. Though I will die, nevertheless I care for and nurture this body with lovingkindness, to the best of my ability. This can be extrapolated exponentially to all areas of life which in truth is all arising and passing away.

Years ago a high school friend wrote a poem entitled “The Dichotomy of Alive.” I don’t remember the poem but I’ve never forgotten its title. It is a both/and mystery we all must open our hearts to if we are to live a conscious life.

0 Comments

"Spiritual Experiences"

1/14/2015

0 Comments

My friend invited me to the Unitarian Church service in which she was leading the discussion—“spiritual experiences.”

During the decade 1990’s I experienced many “spiritual experiences.” I was in the midst of a Hermetic initiation carried through by means of Gnostic sacraments and rituals. At that time I was pulled into a mythopoeic world that overlaid the life I’d been living. I heard disembodied voices giving me wise counsel (yes I am of sound mind), and experienced many deep dreams and visions that brought ancient wisdom to my contemporary condition of life. One time, speaking with a very wise woman friend late into the night, we both acknowledged that our faces began to look very different to each other. Though we sat cozily on her comfortable down sofa in the Beverly Hills, candlelight warming the atmosphere, we seemed to be transported to a time past, sitting outside our tents in the Sinai desert, camels shifting under the great night sky. We were both Sabras, born in Israel, and it seemed that something of our genetic heritage expanded our connection over a great swath of time.

As I was contemplating the subject of “spiritual experiences” the words from the Canticle of the Gnostic mass came to mind. “We are no more strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God.”

My otherworldly experiences at that time were like the entrance to a great mansion into which my initiation brought me. The Canticle that came to mind reminds me that I now dine at the banquet of that mansion, not a stranger or foreigner but an invited guest at the spiritual table. The simple remembrance of that prayer as I was contemplating the subject of “spiritual experience” is itself a spiritual experience. For I live as a spirit having a human experience. Every nuance of thought and synchronicity with the outside world informs me of that truth. If I were to cling to the importance of those startling experiences in the past as something special it would be as if I am still standing in the atrium of that great mansion with my coat on, neither moving further in nor departing the place. To paraphrase Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche I would be remaining in egotism.

“We are no more strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God.” I realize there are those who don’t believe in God. The Hebrew letters for GOD signify that which cannot be defined. To believe or disbelieve in an entity named God is again egotism because what is real is real, and what is not real is not real. What I believe or disbelieve is irrelevant. To say there is a banquet occurring within a mansion is of course an allegory, a metaphor, a signifying image to describe that which cannot be defined. Only those who have experienced such an opening can comprehend that. They don’t stand in the atrium of egoism but surrender their cloaks and enter into the mystery.

0 Comments

Raven Medicine Epiphany

1/3/2015

4 Comments

A wild rabbit has been nibbling at the weeds at my front porch. Soon, I thought, the meager winter fare will be gone, most of it buried under a few inches of snow. So I bought some Sweet Grass Timothy Hay for her and put it out in clumps. A friend sent me a quote about rabbits in a list of quotes on a site called Daily Zen, but the quote that snared me in that list was not the one about rabbits. During this Solstice season, with all the socializing and celebrations, I have done very little celebrating. I’ve spent the cold short days and long icy nights in hibernation with no verve for life, feeling lost from the world, wondering if I am coming to the end of my life or simply depressed. The quote that spoke to me was, “I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse." ~ Khaled Hosseini

Yes, I have felt this kind of unhappiness, deeply and privately—a sense that there is no future for me, and perhaps not even a future for the world. A sense that there is no recourse, nothing to be done, nothing to imagine doing. I tried to force myself to go to a night-before-New Year’s party but my inner voice shouted, “I don’t want to go to the party,” like an obstinate child. I quit trying to force her.

The following day, New Year’s Eve day, I decided to go to a restorative Yoga class. For this I had the energy to venture out of my solitary hibernation. The loading on of layers of clothing, bracing for 28˚, having to warm up the car, did not feel burdensome as had been attempting to go to that party.

During the final pose of the Yoga class, in which my body was riddled with pain, despite the long relaxing poses, breathing deeply and with awareness, I began to imagine I was dying. What if all this pain is cancer? What if, like a friend who recently found out she had stomach cancer and was dead in four days, I will be dead soon. If I find out this is cancer I will write my family and friends. I will tell them I simply don’t have the desire to fight, to suffer through chemo and doctors and hospitals. I am saying goodbye. I don’t mind dying. I don’t know what happens at death or after death. If I am simply in another dimension, the same dimension in which you will be when you die, then I’ll see you there. If I dissolve completely into non-existence, what is there to fear? I’m not afraid of non-existence. I bid you all farewell.

Coming out of my internal address I noticed the teacher talking about surrendering, dissolving, letting go, dying from our ideas of clinging to self. As the class ended, I felt renewed, reborn. It was subtle but there was definitely a shift from that “private unhappiness with no recourse.” I began to feel small buds of possibilities sprout in my being.

Driving home the sight of a large raven sitting on a fence post sent a wave of meaning through me. I wasn’t sure if this was an omen or just a raven, but it felt momentous. Though these birds live here in Northern New Mexico and I see them often, seeing this one here, now, on the post had a numinous quality to it. As I wondered if this bird were truly an omen, I noticed a road sign I’d never noticed before, despite driving past this corner almost daily—Raven Road. Robert Moss, the dream teacher says, “Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal.” It was the synchronicity that showed me the raven on the post was indeed the totemic medicine I’d imagined it might be.

Was it Einstein, or Ram Das, or an old Jewish proverb that said, “Either everything is meaningful or nothing is.” Coming through a period where meaning seemed to be frozen in extinction, I choose “everything is meaningful,” even these times of descent wherein no light can be found.
If nothing means anything one might simply say how could the sight of a raven on a fence post have any meaning? The bird is so common in this area. But seen from the perspective that everything has meaning, one might say, this area has abundant raven energy/medicine. This is a territory wherein “Introspection, Courage, Self-knowledge, Magic, Creation, Rebirth, Omens, transformation of challenges into blessings, rebirth without fear, renewal, comfort with self, honoring ancestors, connection to the Crone, divination, change in consciousness,”* is taking place. Ask anyone who has moved to Northern New Mexico from another kind of life and they will probably tell you these are all the qualities that called them to this place.

I live within the diffuse magnitude of these qualities, so when a single raven appears to me it is meaning showing me to come to a locus of attention to these attributes. As I return from the netherworld of private unhappiness these are the powers I return to and through.

I looked up the totemic meaning of Raven. “You are more powerful than you think you are. Believe and have faith!” ~ Raven
“If Raven has come visiting you . . . you are reminded that those around you are reflecting back at you the things you most have to learn about yourself.”*

The reflection I’ve been receiving for the past year is one of Death. I witness my 92-year-old parents at the end of their lives, my mother with dementia. I have been giving spiritual counsel to a friend in hospice, her mind as bright as ever, her body unable to speak or eat or move. My life has been steeped in the world of caregivers, and the dying process, with all its trials, fears, unpleasantness, bodily mess, as well as those moments of spiritual bliss.

“Know that when Raven appears that magic is imminent. Raven is about rebirth, recovery, renewal, recycling and certainly reflection and healing. He signifies moving through transitions smoothly by casting light into the darkness.”*

Looking at end of life and the dying process I come to a personal renewal. I see the fear when one is not spiritually prepared for death. I know I must learn to prepare for it myself.

“If Raven is your Totem animal you have no fear of the dark, or the underworld and understand that there is a divine balance between the light and the dark. You find comfort in solitude and enjoy your own company. Raven seeks stillness and quiet, and prefers it to the constant onslaught of chatter and noise in our daily lives. You are wise and often are used as a messenger for others. The spirit world uses you as a bridge to the physical world to bring forth its messages.”*

When my friend in hospice asked me, “how do I die?” I didn’t really know how to answer. I replied, “I think you just have to let go.”
“When Raven comes flying in your dreams he is letting you know that a change of consciousness is imminent.” Is death a change of consciousness or the end of consciousness? I don’t know. But one thing I do know, we have no choice in the matter of dying; it is inevitable. So whatever it is, I’m confident that letting go to it is the royal road.

The sight of the raven returned me to “everything is meaningful,” even the dull private unhappiness that comes at the darkest coldest time of year—that small death that teaches us to prepare for the final death to which we all will go.

And what of the rabbit? I walked out onto the porch this morning, not noticing the rabbit munching on the sweet hay I’d put out for her. She took one hop when she saw me and then stopped. We watched each other for a full minute before she hopped away into the sage at the back of the yard. I felt a trust between us. I felt she knew I meant her no harm.

Rabbit “Reminds us to examine and utilize the tools we have within ourselves. Although our instincts are innate, they also need nurturing and development.”

Today, January 1, 2015 I woke up with a continued sense of renewal. I went to my altar, which had been neglected for some weeks now, and gave it attention. I lit the old candles to burn out the old year and lit new candles to welcome in the new. I set some intentions for the New Year—to bring my life back to a ceremonial context; to rally around focused intentions. As with the raven energy that is part of the character of the place where I live, my spirit can also be a diffuse ambiance of my life. And like the raven on the fence post my spirit can emerge from that atmosphere with laser attention/application.

Death falls toward the dissolution of manifest thingness. As I return to the living I come from that diffusion, non-expression, to the more explicit. Rabbit “may also indicate a need for more planning or to check those plans already set in motion.” No need for plans in death, but life requires that we relate to identifiable things. That we bring the diffuseness into focus.

Looking out the window now I catch a quick glimpse of two ravens riding the wind. I am aware of both the motion of wind with its boundary-less currents, and the discrete feathers, muscles, beaks of the ravens. I dance between the diffuseness and the distinct even as I move between the upper worlds and the netherworlds.

* Quotations about animal totems come from http://spirit-animals.com/raven/

4 Comments

Ancestors of the Future

9/17/2014

0 Comments

We are the ancestors of the future, holding out this little wild bouquet of humaneness, battered by the greed and soullessness of these dark times. We recognize one another by our efforts toward stillness, by our listening, seeing, and sensing, and by the arts born therefrom.

We find one another here in the matrix of technology – one of the holy and fragile things born of our time, as the juggernaut works its gears trying to gain its clanging, metallic, hard, limiting control.

This fellowship – we who feel these words, who say these word, who write these words, attempting through these lies to tell some fragment of truth, to keep some flame of wisdom alight while the hurricanes and volcanoes torrent - our mother sphere shuddering to shake herself free of the cancer this human species has been ravaged by – hatred, materialism, narcissism, arrogance.

We the healthy cells of the body of this species will keep on producing voluptuous spirit oxygen, spirit blood, for the sake of our progeny a thousand years hence, when the planet has transformed its geography, has settled into a new stability, has regenerated balance wherein new species might thrive from the remnants of we here now whose DNA will reform, grow new strands, and life will be renewed once again.

Le Chaim – To Life

0 Comments