Learning to Crawl

I spent much of last week marveling at my two nieces.

Elisa is learning to crawl. She’s going to get there any day, and the Deacon and Deaconess have realized how quickly they will need to baby proof their house. During a short week’s visit I got to watch as she learned to clap – she had been working at it for awhile but finally got both hands to arrive in the same place at the same time – and to eat Cheerios with her hands. This is the first food she’s been able to mostly feed to herself.

The last time I saw Nora, she was fairly content to rest in the arms of whoever was holding her at the moment. Now she works to pick her head up, to squirm into a position she prefers. The muscles in her face are developing into wonderful expressions – the Deacon noted how she purses her lips often, as though she has appraised your baby handling skills and moderately disapproves.

Both girls work feverishly towards their next task, their next movement, their next little bit of independence. How quickly we give up as adults. How quickly we refocus on what comes quickly and easily, rather than what learning might bring us more independence, happiness or wisdom. How long has it been since I wanted anything as keenly as these two wonderful creatures want to develop and use their own strength, their own personalities?

Heretic Dream

I dreamed a woman I knew years ago was pregnant and wearing a black dress. We were standing in our old church, the one I grew up in, in a room used for gathering after the service. I had wanted to talk to her because I knew she was undergoing a kind of spiritual transformation. She had some kind of spiritual experience she couldn’t ignore, and this woman, who had always had a certain rigid religiosity about her, was finding Spirit and Mystery in a whole different way, one that didn’t jibe with the tenants of the church we were standing in. This hadn’t happened to her by choice. It had just happened. She was on a new path she couldn’t bring herself to turn back from.

In the dream I’d felt compelled to find her out of a sense that she must be helped and supported on this new path, and it seemed there were few in her life that were willing to do this. I didn’t particularly like her, or her family. But I knew what she was doing was absolutely the right thing. We spoke at some length about how her husband was leaving, even though she was pregnant with their third child, because he felt she was so in the wrong and could not support her new vision. I asked about her father, a man I knew in waking life as one of the most blindly and unpleasantly fundamentalist people I’d ever met. He hadn’t disowned her, she said. She was still his daughter, though of course, he disagreed vehemently with her. She was exhausted, she said; she took medication just to get to sleep. She had two other children to consider in addition to the new one she was carrying. 

Yesterday I was reading Monika Wikman, who writes that the word “heresy” has roots in the noun “hairesis,” the act of choosing. She says, “Me might again rethink heresy and see it as in the days of old, as our ability to choose, to embody our inner visions and knowing, including the ways we must carry our dissenting sense of the nature of the microcosm and macrocosm” (From Pregnant Darkness). 

I find myself wondering what new and interesting dissension my dream heretic is pregnant with, what inner vision it is that I will need to help bring forth, on the ground of what old order.

A Pig Stye to Play In

The Photographer’s Aunt Ruth, who died this week, ran her own business for years painting houses. He described how his Mom used to help when he was a kid, and sent him and his brother out back to play, where once or twice, too young to think anything of it, they decided it would be fun to play with the pigs, to imitate them, and wallowed around in the pig stye. Ruth looked out the window and howled with laughter. The smell was terrible on the drive home. It must have driven his poor mother nuts, washing the pig stye out of their clothes. 

He told me how Ruth stirred paint on the hood of her car, how she didn’t seem to care when it splashed over the sides and speckled her hood all different colors. When comments were made, she said, “Like it? I did it myself.” And at some point she took a paintbrush and ordinary house paint and repainted the whole thing. 

Last night, in the paint section of the hardware store, the Photographer broke into a goofy dance to the music coming through the store speakers for my amusement. I love the way his playful spirit expresses itself, serious one moment, utterly silly the next, with no warning, and just for the fun of it. There are people in our lives who teach us valuable skills, how to read, to cook, to drive, to balance a checkbook. I have Ruth to thank for giving the Photographer a pig stye to play in.

Rocks, River

 

Photo by Charles Sloan

At a meeting of my alchemy group, a friend who recently returned from a rafting trip told a story about some rapids she encountered. These particular rapids were quite dangerous, and it was the only place on the trip where the guides gave everyone the option to walk around the passage rather than riding through it.

My friend looked at the rapids coming up and immediately knew, felt in her body, that she should walk, not ride. Later, she questioned her choice. Had she let fear dictate her actions? Was she simply a wimp for not choosing the rough water?

These particular rapids had been class two until 1965, when a heavy storm caused a landslide that washed boulders into the river and changed the landscape under the water. A boy scout leader expecting to lead his group through a simple and well known stretch of river died in the attempt. Another group of rafters with inadequate equipment and experience were sucked under, raft and all, and spit back out downstream, minus the raft. The guides were very respectful of this place and approached it with care. 

As my friend talked about the natural history of this river, these rapids, I felt great respect for her choice. I heard the voice of a a woman with a deep respect for the natural world, very atuned to the landscape beneath the surface, and the way water moved over it, very willing to feel into the world with her whole body and listen to what it wanted to tell her. I thought of the psychological metaphor implicit in the story of how the river had changed.

Sometimes things cause the inner landscape  to shift. Sometimes things don’t flow over us in the same way from year to year, and water that is innocuous and easy to navigate in one season rages in the next. It takes courage and wisdom to know when to dive in head first and when to respect something that has the power to suck us under and hold us away from light and air. There are gentle ways to inhabit both self and world, and though we may prefer the reckless heaviness of swinging a sledgehammer to crack open what every passage, maturity teaches us to use other tools as well.

Though as this woman talked about hiking around the passage, climbing over boulders on dry land, another friend asked, how do you know yours wasn’t the harder way?

Animal Growth, Plant Growth

Last week I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend. She lives in Japan but would be visiting the States for a convention, and as Los Angeles is considerably easier to get to, I took the opportunity to spend some time with her. As with all the best friendships, it was as though no time had passed, though it had been three years since we’d last been face to face. And though we live in vastly different cultures, on different continents, doing different kinds of work, as we talked we found that we both faced essentially the same core issue at this point in life: not enough time.

I’ve written before about the tension between wanting to live many lives and wanting simply to live one life well. There is also the awareness that our time here is finite and will ultimately run out. That’s been underscored for me lately by the birth of my two nieces, who grow and change so fast at their young age that I can hardly recognize them from one visit to the next. The time that acts on them also acts on me. It’s easy to forget that this is so when I see essentially the same face in the mirror each morning. But it’s why I suddenly feel old when some kid I used to babysit for gets married, or goes to college; suddenly I’m left wondering, what have I done with all this time that has passed?

My friend from Japan had done a great deal since the last time I saw her, at least in my view. She’d changed her career, moved to a new city, and essentially started a new life there, a more satisfying life in many ways. She’d also found a way to come back to the U.S., if only for a short visit, something she’s been wanting to do for a long time. To me, it seemed like a great deal of accomplishment for three years. To her, it seemed to fall drastically short. 

When we first come into this world, there are things we must learn and ways in which we must grow, fairly immediately, if we’re going to thrive. Growth at that age is animal growth, dynamic and physical. As adults, we grow more like plants, which don’t appear to move observed but are slowly, over time, stretching their leaves out towards the sun. It was easy to see this in my friend, how over the last three years, her branches had all grown so steadily in that direction. It takes others to see this kind of growth. It takes friends to encourage us to move, inch by inch, towards the light.

 

 

Promises to Nora June

During a family gathering a couple of years ago, I found myself talking with the Nurse and the Artist about baby names, and what they might name the children they hoped to have someday. 

Some time later, I had a vivid dream of sitting with them at their kitchen table. In my dream, the Artist was pregnant. They told me the baby was a boy, and they told me what his name, first and middle, would be. Back in waking life, I told them about the dream, and they replied, wow, that’s something – we were sitting at the kitchen table last night, talking about the possibility of naming a boy with those very names (though in their version, first and middle were reversed). 

Nearly a year later when I heard the Artist was pregnant, I wondered if the baby was a boy, and if so, if they would use the name. I thought about what a fun story it would make to tell the kid as he grew up, a little piece of family mythology. It’s amazing how quickly and easily we transfer our dreams onto the next generation, creating expectations for them even before they fully exist here with us.

Yesterday, Nora June made her entrance into the world. It was an unexpected kind of entrance to parents who had spent months actively preparing for a natural birth, and years more thinking about how they would start and shape their family. Nora was a breech baby, who, despite all efforts to get her to turn, remained staunchly in place, feet down. We all assured the parents, only half jokingly, that she knew how she wanted to come into the world, that she was simply insisting on doing this in her own way. It was a powerful reminder to us all. Forget the plans and expectations; this baby has her own reasons for being here and her own things to do. 

When my first niece, Elisa, was born, I made some promises to her about the support I will offer in this life she’s just starting to live. Already these two have different ways of coming into and being in the world, so I think different promises are in order. My promises to you, Nora June: I promise to always dream beautiful dreams for you. I promise to support you in finding your own way of moving through the world. I promise to read you your favorite stories over and over again, and to listen over and over to the stories you’ll love telling. I promise to teach you everything I can about this beautiful world we live in. I promise to remind your Dad of all the crazy and stupid things he did when he thinks something you want to do is crazy and stupid.

Rattlesnake Prayer Beads

A few years ago, the Artist made me a string of prayer beads. Near the end of the string, she included a single vertebra from the skeleton of a rattlesnake.

At the time, I was about to head out into the wilderness of New Mexico alone for awhile, and one of the fears that surfaced, as fears do at such times, was a fear of snakes. As the trip grew closer, I had vivid dreams, and when one night when I dreamed about a mongoose, the fear of snakes began to fade away.

In the last year, I’ve encountered more snakes than probably in my entire life prior to this point. One showed up in the parking lot outside my office building. Last month I encountered four on a three mile hike to the bottom of a small canyon and back. Another appeared in a dream and bit me, directly over the heart.

It’s said that working with snakes in the way that snake handlers do is about developing the ability to transform or neutralize poison. There’s a powerful magnetism in that idea for a would be healer/therapist, cultivating the ability to handle virulent stuff that would otherwise paralyze, inflame or kill a person, the way trauma and abuse tend to do. The catch is, to develop or discover this ability, one must at some point be bitten, and some don’t survive. It’s a mistake to brazenly tempt the snake, to ask for the bite out of egotism or  bravado. Best to cultivate a relationship, to handle the snake with respect and let the snake choose what it’s going to do.

There are many types of prayer, and many ways of praying. The rattlesnake prayer beads are for times when I know I’m going to be picking up a snake. They’re for prayers about wisdom and courage, and the ability to survive a poisonous bite. They’re for handling the old stuff, the dangerous, poisonous stuff that has caused wounds before, the stuff I can’t help but go back to, again and again, until I learn how to change its poison into something meaningful.

Photo by Timo Balk

A Dream About Atalanta

In my dream, I had a beautiful friend, a strong, independent woman who carried a pineapple with her, which, in the dream, was a symbol of strength and independence. A man who admired her and wanted to be with her took the pineapple and sliced it in half, thinking that he had to get rid of it before he could approach her. I was furious. My friend was distressed but tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing, she said. Perhaps he didn’t understand the significance.

I thought of the story of Atalanta, a strong, beautiful athlete who would only marry a man who could beat her in a foot race. But any man who raced and didn’t win would be beheaded. The suitor who finally won had to use trickery. He enlisted the help of Aphrodite, who gave him three golden apples with which to entice and distract Atalanta. It worked; each time he was in danger of being outrun, he rolled a golden apple towards his opponent. While she slowed down to pick them up, he won the race. But the resulting marriage ended in disaster.

I looked at my strong, beautiful friend. I looked at the man who had sliced her identity in half in an effort to get close to her. I wanted to tell my friend the Atalanta story so she could see for herself what was happening, how sometimes, what is most attractive in a person is also what is most frightening and dangerous, how easy it is to think that killing off something in the other person that seems bigger and more powerful than you will make things better. But that’s an ego fantasy. To be in true relationship means engaging the whole person and risking losing one’s head.

Markandeya

“Each person is a pilgrim in the dream of god and each slips in predictable and surprising ways. How else could it be? We ride on the breath of god and usually fail to know it until we fall from grace.”

In his book The World Behind the World, Michael Meade tells the story of Markandeya, the first pilgrim, who wandered in the very beginning, as the world was being created. He slipped off the path, fell out of creation and into the void. Despite this inauspicious beginning, all turns out well for Markandeya; where he might have drowned in nothingness, he is scooped up and swallowed by Vishnu, and thus returns to creation. But no one can be the same after a face to face encounter with the void. From there on out, Markandeya lives with the knowledge of it, knowing what it feels like to swim in such uncertainty and blankness. 

The Sunday school teachers most of us grew up with would make a morality tale out of this – Don’t go for a walk or you might fall of the face of the Earth. Stay home where it’s safe. But the old stories tell it a bit differently. The whole point is to go for a walk and fall off the face of the Earth. As Michael Meade would say, the point is to get into the right kind of trouble.

Until recently, I would have said that the thing I enjoyed most about my neighborhood was that I felt safe going for walks by myself. There are always lots of people out, the streets are well lit, and it’s a good neighborhood, all in all. I’ve been walking here for over 8 years, and it wasn’t until recently that I fell off the face of the Earth a bit, getting robbed just a few blocks from home by some kids with a gun. There isn’t a lesson to be taken from this. It isn’t about not going for walks, or not doing so by myself, or not in this neighborhood. In any neighborhood, in any company, one can fall out of the familiar world and into a frightening void where kids have guns and know how to point them at people with confidence. It isn’t much of a trick to stop walking. It is a much better trick to live with knowledge of the void without leaving a piece of oneself drowning in it. 

Recently I spoke with  friend in the military who told me about how it felt when he had to point a loaded gun at another person, wondering if he would be required to shoot. He had stumbled into the same void I had, albeit from the opposite end of the gun barrel. I recognized his description of it all too well. I recognized too the symptoms of perhaps a bit of ongoing drowning on my part, a feeling of less than full awareness, a certain powerlessness or tiredness that creeps in all too easily.

In Michael Meade’s telling of the story, Markandeya walks differently after his fall. Knowledge of the thin veil that  separates creation from the void carries with it the possibility of a great and powerful awareness, but it also opens the door on emptiness and despair. For now, I’m still learning to walk with this new knowledge, this new balance.

Coniunctio

All shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

from “The Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot

Coniunctio is the alchemical process of combining elements that were previously separated. It is often conceptualized as union of opposites to form a third, sometimes symbolized by marriage, but Coniunctio can also involve more than two elements.

It was odd to work with my friends on Coniunctio images this week because it was the last of these gatherings. No sooner had we explored a process of coming together than we went our separate ways, home or otherwise, though people were reluctant to leave and lingered almost a full hour past the time we’d agreed to end.

With all three of the alchemical processes we experienced through the process of image making, there was a definite diversity of interpretations within the group. But nowhere was this truer than with Coniunctio. One friend centered her image on a union of natural and man made materials. Another focused on color and wove black and white materials together. A third focused on a quote from Jung about how “…life calls not for perfection but for completeness….”

In each of these processes I have found that certain materials speak to me strongly, demanding to be used. For Coniunctio, the loudest voice from the material table belonged to the magnets. I knew I had to use them and feature them prominently in my image. I wanted the piece to have a certain attractive quality, a certain gravity to it, as though it pulled everything around it toward the Coniunctio taking place at its center.

We are, by nature, drawn into Coniunctio. We form communities, relationships, families,  corporations — groups of all kinds, like this gathering of friends. We speak of these things as though they are discrete events, but a marriage, for instance, begins but does not end with the act of getting married. Relationship, Coniunctio, is a process that converts its original elements into something new, such that, even at the next Separatio or Mortificatio, the elements that enter these processes are not the same as the elements that entered the Coniunctio process. We are drawn to this transformation over and over again, always in flux, and always changing and being changed by one another.

Psychologists and philosophers have heated debates about this: Is there truly such a thing as an essential self? Or are we just the sum of the influences of culture, friends, and family? Ultimately, to me, this question is rather uninteresting, an I tend to think of if, perhaps a bit more lightheartedly, as the wave/particle dualism of the self. We are at once discrete and continuous.

Working with Coniunctio, I felt my continuous aspect was a bit more at the forefront of consciousness, and I am grateful to friends, both within this alchemical group and in other aspects of my life, for the ways in which they influence my world, for the continual Coniunctio we are all engaged in together.