Monthly Archives: June 2007

Dancing Threads

At five years old, my grandson can tell me about a dream he had the night before in ways I know he really dreamed it. He is close to the invisible world, the world of spirit, can speak of it as easily as he speaks of what happened to him at school that day. His imagination and intuition are clearly honed. Most young children can do this, if we hang close enough and listen.

The visible world in which we live and act, and the invisible world with which we interact each day, are really two aspects of the same energy, God-energy, set in motion with the same breath. Like two professional dancers who know how to allow one and then the other to shine, then to support, back and forth, effortless, the visible world and the invisible world interact with one another in seamless flow. They are one and the same energy, of the same source.

The natural immersion in things it takes to keep our visible world going – our career, our daily commitments – slowly tilts our focus and our comfort level in favor of the visible world, makes us less aware of invisible forces just beyond awareness. It’s difficult to hold the tension between the two so they can both be visible to us at the same moment, both shine and support, back and forth, in seamless energy. By the time we’re in our teens, the invisible world has lost its shine for us.

These two realities, however, go right on serving us without our notice. The invisible world of spirit holds the light, the sacred energy that releases anything bound. The visible world of matter holds the ground so spirit can impregnate all life forms. This frees up God-energy in them both. Together, they allow our human story to unfold.

Spirit longs to make its home in us, but this incurs a wound, a blow to the status quo. Like a mother, spirit patiently instructs. If our matter is supple and open, spirit moves in us with ease. If our matter is emotionally damaged and defended, there is resistance. Then the wounding is more marked, more pronounced, as a mother disciplines her child with love. Spirit has to create more space in us so the dance with matter can unfold with grace.

This is the history of our wounds, what looks to us like struggle and defeat. Our natural urge is to get away, to escape our wounds, but the only way to address and treat them is to allow spirit’s healing light to move within and have its way. We have to hold the light within with conscious intention and move into our wounds — to love the pain and brokenness out of them.

We have to hold whatever wounds us – our job, our relationship, a broken dream – and allow the light of spirit to dance around it, until we too can join the dance. Spirit sheds light: another way to see our wound — a needed insight, a way to even live with it in love. We have to take that light and dance around what wounds us until we see something in it that becomes the way through it. Only then can healing happen and the dance with spirit be fulfilled in us.

We have to consciously hold the light and dance, as if unaware of our wound’s crush; unaware of how our job, our relationship, our broken dream interferes with our openness to the light. We have to trust spirit’s word in us that what wounds us now is also in the mind of God and will be transformed in its own time. This leaves us free to focus on our dancing and not the wound. We know the final essence of whatever wounds us is good, because it, too, carries this God-energy.

The underworld is the theater of our wounding. It is a place of extremes – a place where we experience extreme dark and extreme light. We feel the crushing blow and we hear the voice of the transcendent, both present in the wounding. It is the birthing place of spirit within the matter of our body. It stokes the evolution of our unconscious matter into conscious spirit. It is the point at which we hold the tension between all opposites or metaphors. Use whatever language you prefer, it is the radiance of spirit burning through our human essence in a way that allows our matter to receive more light, more consciousness, more sacred energy.

Extreme light is that sudden illumination of the invisible golden world, the world of spirit; this changes us at our core. We carry that vision, that remembrance of our spiritual beginnings, with us for all our days. Extreme dark, from our human perspective, is trauma, a hurtful loss, a wounding experience that shatters our equilibrium. Both experiences touch us at a level we cannot escape. Both are life’s way of making space in us so spirit’s dance with matter can have more room.

It’s what we say to ourselves about our wound, not the wound itself that takes us down. Down we dive, into the darkness of our matter, fearful, with spirit right behind us in quick pursuit. We sit in darkness, disoriented, unconsoled, until we notice spirit’s presence next to us. Spirit’s healing light begins to light up that which we descended here to find — the truth our wound can teach us. It may be what we need to change, to accept, to forgive, in order to allow in a larger wisdom.

Life kneads us like unbaked bread until our compassion, our heart, rises from our animal nature and pours itself upon the world. This birthing is our spirituality – our recognition of us as spirit, an awareness that this same spirit in us is in all things. Our heart breaks wide to bow before the Thou we sense in all before us.

This insight does not make our wounding less a wound. It merely helps to make the process conscious, more of love. It offers yet another perspective from which to Yes our wholeness.  
It builds from our intention a holy link — one more thread of sacred energy that forms the eternal dance of spirit and matter.

Suffering, A Great Leveler

Carole Angier’s biography of Primo Levi, an Italian Holocaust survivor, tells a story of how Levi was so thirsty one day during his ordeal at Auschwitz, he broke off an icicle from a nearby tree. Before he could get it to his mouth, a guard knocked it from his hand. “Why?” Levi asked. “There is no why here,” the guard replied.

I’ve never suffered like Levi or Victor Frankl suffered. Mine has been the slow wearing away of my own expectations of what I thought my life would be until I am what life intends me to be. There must be something about horrific suffering that stretches a person beyond the boundaries of what we think of as being human, so as to allow their higher angel to step through.

That callused guard’s response to Levi echoes in my ears: “There is no why here.” Perhaps, a more appropriate response would have been, “There is no who here.” There is no I-Thou encounter, as Martin Buber says, when a human being is addressed as an It. Is this not the intention of death camps and inhumane violations to strip down the human spirit to its minimal animal nature? Otherwise, even the tormentor could not tolerate the reality of what they do.

The sacred is lost when the I-Thou is lost. Then there is suffering. For Buber, when the I-Thou is absent, evil is present. When a person’s humanness is annihilated, when they are treated as an It, they are leveled to the ground. Suffering is the leveler. Everything a person has counted on for identity, comfort, meaning, companionship is stripped away until all that is left is the self, the person, the encounter with one’s own essence. All else seems lost.

After sitting in the ashes of such annihilation for what must seem like endless agony, there must come a stirring, a movement — of light and sound and energy. New life emerges from the leveled ground, within the person, within their consciousness, within the field of their alternatives. I can sit here amidst the ruins of my life and ask “why?” Or, I can dig deep and enter that place inside myself that encounters “who?”

Vicktor Frankl speaks of this existential encounter with the self in Man’s Search For Meaning, his own experience while in the death camp. Prisoners who could not get past the “why?” died all around him. Frankl sought to connect with the sacred in everything he encountered, from the piece of bread in the morning to the threads of rug he lay on in the evening. Everything became a Thou for him, an opportunity to create a connection and meaning from the smallest life activity.

This alone empowered Frankl to out step the death that stalked him. He did not allow his suffering to define him. What defined him was his connection to anything, anyone in his day that got him in touch with his humanness, his own sacredness, and to his connection to the sacred in all things, even in those who sought to annihilate him. Everything became a Thou, an invitation to encounter, an invitation to live. His suffering cracked open his heart and enabled him to feel one with everything in life.

Suffering, in its most demonic form, freed Frankl to encounter the I-Thou, the sacred in life in ways we more protected, defended humans don’t. Moving into the suffering, feeling it, allowing it to pass through him, leveled him and allowed him to identify with the ground of his humanity, which is sacred energy. The sacred is not lost with annihilation, but strangely discovered.

We humans are too distracted by our activity in the outer topside world to pay attention to the emerging sacred other in all things. It takes a dip into the underground, a return to the primordial origin of our becoming to encounter this sacred energy and to re-identify with all of life. Suffering levels us enough to see that the sacred is not absent after leveling but profoundly present. Our suffering is a natural, necessary experience if we humans are to remember who we are.
 
Just as the rose bud must be shattered in order to release the full blossom within it, our heart must be shattered in order to release the compassion we need to consciously see ourselves as one with all life forms. When we forget this truth, when we begin to treat nature and one another as an It, we set in motion energies that unleash suffering, and ultimately, evil.

Whatever personal suffering we as individuals experience can be addressed, can be held and contained, only when we are willing to move into an altered state of consciousness, through our breathing. Our breathing helps to contain the suffering while we allow the work of spirit to unfold in us. As we breathe into our suffering, the pain is present but the suffering quiets.

Our breathing becomes a presence within us. We recognize it as not coming from us, but from the universe. Our breathing becomes a Thou and not an It, can move with us through our suffering. We are not alone. We are one with the forward movement of life that suffers and opens itself to the life-death-life cycle of all living things in order to experience the wholeness we remember only at the center.

There is a “who” present in my suffering – the “I AM” who calls me forth, who creates in me a song, a song of myself: I am light, I am dark, I am energy, I am life.

There is no “why” here.

Underworld Living

Balance is like grace:  We don’t know we need it until we don’t have it, or until it’s thrust upon us.  Without the right amount of sleep, play, food, imagination, order, or disorder, we get sick, disoriented, unable to function as we should. 

Most of us resist that part of balance we don’t understand. We go along without much thought. Then, like Alice, we fall through the rabbit’s hole into another realm of being. Everything is different, turned around, confused. We find ourselves having to deal with experiences and feelings that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, dark. We experience what the ancients called the underworld, that sudden adjustment experience or compensation that comes when we’ve stayed too long in the comfortable or familiar.

The underworld is a metaphor as old as the Sumerian myth of Inanna, as contemporary as Dorothy’s journey in “The Wizard of Oz” from the safety of Kansas into Oz and back home again. We visit the underworld often against our will, because we are part of a larger will, and because there are things worth learning we might otherwise choose to avoid. Call it the universe, life, fate, God, whatever metaphor you choose, a larger wisdom is at work in our becoming and knows better than we the balance it takes to become whole.

Our descent into the underworld takes many forms. It may visit us as a short funk or as an extended depression, an altered state of suspension in which we descend into the abyss and wander the darkness of old woundings. It might be a subtle shift of consciousness, a moment of visionary union with a loved one. It happens naturally as a descent into our night dreams where we encounter images and messages we don’t absorb in our topside or conscious world.

It may come as a temporary lapse of conscious control — a sudden change without warning in our behavior pattern, or an “out to lunch” experience for which we cannot account. It may be a fragmentary memory that pulls us away from the focused moment and sweeps us off in a flood of emotion. It comes sometimes with a troubling experience that shatters the peace in our family life or relationships. 

It’s a movement downward, an inward spiral, a walk on the edges of our otherwise ordered life. We go there without notice, without conscious choice, pulled there sometimes by faceless energies just beyond awareness. Far from the goal-directed, cerebral, doing of our topside world, the underworld is affect-laden, pre-verbal, being to the core.

Like a swimmer in an underground cave, we find the gold — the truth or experience that had evaded us in our conscious mind or living — and swim back to the surface, changed. We find ourselves reshuffled, shaken by the journey, spewed back into ordinary life with a deeper awareness. All the pieces that felt flung into the air, chaotic, float down in quiet patterns of newness and opportunity. Things look different. We are different.

This natural process of compensation, built into our humanness as a corrective experience, transforms and reshapes our choices and understandings. For my part, my funk, my revisiting old woundings, is a reminder I don’t want to go back there. I might otherwise forget and repeat old, dysfunctional patterns. My night dreams teach me something about myself and my journey I can’t hear on a conscious level. They salt my life with clarity and direction.

My intuitive gropings lead me into connections with the invisible world I could not make with my conscious mind. This expands my capacity to imagine and to enlarge on hidden gifts I would not otherwise dare to dream. My personal wounds release compassion for others and provide a mirror in which I can confront my character. This calls from me a more forgiving spirit.

The sudden falls from grace that erupt in my family life, my personal life, my world, force me to learn a deeper truth I would otherwise choose not to face. The best and worst in all of us is just that – in all of us. Learnings from the underworld are pearls of wisdom, untapped energy, sacred signals from uncounscious sources.

I am reminded of the biblical story of Lot’s Wife who looked back over her shoulder as she climbed from of the valley of destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt. Slipping into the underworld and returning with what James Hillman calls the salt from it — being able to look our dark, destructive energies in the face and transform these into energies of strength and wisdom — allows us to return to our topside world more alive, more connected with the earth, our inner resources, our deeper self.

We must avoid the natural urge to resist, as Lot’s wife did – resist leaving the known, cling to the familiar, spend our whole time in the underworld looking back over our shoulder at what we know to be true in the topside world — or we won’t be able to integrate what our wounds are trying to teach us. We need to cooperate, move into our wounding and through it, so the energy that was stored or repressed in our unconscious can be harnassed on a conscious level and add salt and passion to our life.

Rhythm is important. We cannot stay too long in the underworld, or go too long without revisiting it, or we lose the salt, the flavor, that our natural rhythms bring. Integrating what we learn from our wounds, from our set-backs, into our everyday living brings wisdom and a larger perspective from which to make better choices. Then, getting on with the tasks of living in the topside world stablizes and grounds our wisdom in healthy ways.

We too often see our underworld experiences as something to be avoided, or as bad things happening to good people, rather than as good opportunities to learn wisdom that comes from the other side of wholeness. Gifts we learn against our will that change our life, transforming and reshaping our journey.

Underworld

Within the darkness, we discover a light.

It is through our wounding that we move into our inner self, discover our resources, our character, our sacred essence, and, calling on that, release the healing capacity within.

Early Egyptians believed in a topside world and a bottom-side world, an underworld. The underworld is our occasional descent into darkness, chaos, confusion. These are difficult moments, often terrifying, usually life-altering.

An occasional descent into this underworld forces us to look at things in a new way. We discover our wounds are openings into the invisible world of spirit. The more familiar we become with this natural cyclic process of descent and ascent, the more comfortable we become with the process of becoming whole.

Life prunes away those things in us that detour us from our essence.

Oh World, I Cannot Hold Thee Close Enough

“Hey, Mom!” my John called over the phone in full excitement. The connection was choppy, but I could hear the smile on his face.

“I used the money you gave me for my birthday to rent a bike. I’m calling you on my cell phone as I’m riding over the Golden Gate Bridge!”

John, in San Francisco with a friend for the first time, had just celebrated his 35th birthday. While his friend was attending a conference, John was biking San Francisco, soaking in the experience and, joyously, wanting to share the moment with me.

This is a child who, 35 years ago, suffered grand mal seizures with every fever. This is a child who, in grammar school, had a learning disability and was scape-goated by classmates. This is a child who, after years of my begging him to “just get through high school,” went on to get his masters in business. This is a child who, after wandering the maze of the corporate world, has just started his own small business.

The image of my John riding solo on a bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear, crisp morning, with the sun sparkling on those blue Bay waters, makes my heart sing. It is the perfect climactic metaphor for all those years I held my breath as he broke through yet another barrier to become the man he is today.

And while I was holding my breath, God’s breath was at work in John, in both his peak moments and in his bleak moments. This eternal breathing contained him long enough until he himself could come to the realization that the most important connection is his connection with John, with this divine energy in him, with nature, with life. No one woman, no one job was going to create the kind of meaning he needed, in both the chaos and the calm. 

John didn’t call to tell me where he was staying in San Francisco, where he ate, what he saw from his bike, but to let me know he was feeling fully alive and experiencing soul. Our conversation lasted three minutes at the most. He knew and I knew.

As Edna Saint Vincent Milay uttered in one of those moments, “Oh, World, I cannot hold thee close enough!”  All the pain and loss that goes with being human become, at those moments, harmonious background notes for the chords of joy pounding in us.

Then, when life looms heavy and nothing goes well, when we strain to make out the chords of  transformation at work in us, even on our knees, we sense ourselves connected to a larger whole. We are aware of God’s breathing in us from both sides of life’s up-and-down teeter-totter.

What nourishes me in both the highs and lows are the images and metaphors that provide spiritual energy. Just as the metaphor of John riding his bike solo over the Golden Gate Bridge brings healing to that place in me that grieves for the perfect childhood my children didn’t have, other metaphors heal other broken moments. I allow the metaphor to move deep into those dark places and open spaces for redemption and resolution.

Metaphors of healing abound in nature. Metaphors of steadfastness abound in relationships. Metaphors of bravery and integrity abound in our stories. We carry these in our soul. We can call on them when we need them. They allow us never to feel isolated, defeated, or singled out.

Synchronously, I was at Chastain Park the night before John called, third-row-center-seat, listening to Tony Bennett croon his “I left my heart in San . . . .” and filled with San Fran’s warm images. Next day, when the image of John riding over the bridge emerged out of those already uplifting images in my heart, I felt connected to a deep interior well that bathed my soul.

Abba

Just as my waterfall serves as a metaphor for me, for how I experience my God-energy, Jesus used the metaphor Abba, Pappa, to express his experience.

By describing my experience of God – the relationship we developed in secret on my waterfall – I have to use words that make it sound more concrete than it was. It was experiential. No one had to explain it to me. The God I heard about in church and the God I experienced on my waterfall were two separate entities. One, I heard about, learned about. The other, I knew. 
 
Jesus’ use of Abba for his encounter with God is also experiential. He used it to express how he experienced his God-energy, not to describe who God is. The distinction is important if we are going to understand Jesus’ interior life. Everything he said flowed from this. Jesus spoke in metaphor so as to evoke in the listener an experience of the truth he was trying to share.

Jesus used Abba as an address to God, explains Joachim Jeremias in his New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus, only in his prayer life. Otherwise, it was too intimate a term, purposely not used in the Judaism of his era. Jeremias shows, drawing on the Palestinian culture in Jesus’ day, how the use of Abba describes the special relationship that existed between father and son: a father took on his son as favored apprentice, shared intimate secrets, not shared with anyone else.    

“What Jesus wants to convey in the guise of an everyday simile is this: Just as a father talks to his son, just as he teaches him the letters of the Torah, just as he initiates him into the well-prepared secrets of his craft, just as he hides nothing from him and opens his heart to him as to no one else, so God has granted me knowledge of himself.” (Jeremias, 60)

Jesus expresses, with the use of this metaphor, Abba, that he finds God to be trustworthy. He bases his whole life on this relationship, this trust. He believed he had received everything he needed from God to deal with anything that came his way. It wasn’t the “Papa, take care of me!” of a dependent child. It was, “I can overcome the darkest of fears, for I know my father’s secrets and can use these in my own life.”

This trust, this relationship, allowed Jesus to remain open in times of terror and crisis; he could call on this power within. In remaining open, Jesus could learn from every experience, find the gold in them, allow them to stretch him into the person he was called to be. There was no retreating into his shell like a turtle with the first sign of threat. He stepped in and through it.

Jesus could respond to the threat, remain open from the start, as his father’s presence in him was greater than the darkness and fear in him. This presence in him gave him the assurance that, no matter what happens, Papa knows, for Papa is within. Jesus felt safe. Even in the face of death, he reminds Pilate that they can kill his body, but they can not rob Jesus of who he is.

Because of this trust, Jesus learned not to cling. “In my father’s house, there is enough.”  This allowed Jesus to be generous with himself, to hold nothing back, for there was more than enough to his father’s love. The metaphor of the eucharistic banquet colors all of Jesus interactions.

Everything, for him – no matter how much or how little in the way of money, possessions, power – were all gifts only temporarily entrusted to his care by a God who intended him to use them with those less fortunate, as God himself would do. Jesus saw this as God’s intention – to share everything, to free captives of any kind, to heal suffering – so it became his intention.

Jesus came to proclaim, to heal, to save people by reminding them they were more than their jobs, more than their riches, more than their religion. He knew his father wanted his people to be healed now, in their present circumstance, not in some distant future. That is what Jesus’ proclamation was all about, the rainbow color out of which he lived his life.

Because Jesus could experience, in his lifetime, the healing hand of God, he wanted others to experience this. This is Kingdom – God’s presence – spread out upon the earth, already among us, yet hidden to those with no spiritual eyes. Jesus’ relationship with God was so strong and so complete, he felt empowered to speak in God’s name, to do God’s work. It happened through Jesus. He became, at that point in time, the Center, the Stillpoint, divine energy incarnate.

Jesus lived his life out of this experience of God as Abba, Papa, in such a way that there was a slow whittling away of the person of Jesus until those around him could only see before them the God that Jesus proclaimed.

As my friend Bob has so beautifully said: “Upon reflection afterwards (after the death of Jesus), the community of his followers was unable to delineate clearly where Jesus left off and God began. In their recollection of him, to have seen Jesus was to have seen the God of their fathers. To have known him was to have known the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. To have been in his presence was to have been in the presence of the holy one of Israel.”

Whether we consider Jesus to be God’s son, to be God himself, to be a great prophet, or to be a man who experienced in his lifetime the person of God in such a way that when Jesus spoke, God spoke – Jesus’ entire life released into our universe a model of love and truth and beauty  we have never fully absorbed.

Creating New Possibilities

“We try to change the hand we’ve been dealt just by shuffling the cards,” Sheila said with a sigh. “It doesn’t work. I know now we have to deal from a new deck.”

Sheila is a woman who suffered much from childhood wounds. She attempted to carve out a life for herself in lots of different areas, but her wounds got in the way. Her relationships, her career, her life satisfaction always reflected the same dysfunctional patterns and dead ends. After several bad marriages, she was distraught to see her own negative patterns showing up in her children’s struggle to thrive. She entered therapy.

We are each dealt a hand from the deck of life. Our family, the country in which we are indoctrinated, the tradition and values we’re given – these all influence how we interface with and receive life. Our wounds put us on a path, deepen our capacity to experience, as well as offer clues as to how to out-step the narrowness of possibilities we’ve inherited.

Repeating old patterns, carting around the same old expectations, hiding behind the same old self-talk and perspectives that colored our life until now, will not change our story. We have to “deal from a new deck,” as Sheila says. We have to change the program, the self-talk, the possibilities. We have to have the courage to let go of the old deck.

We have to let the happiness in. We have to envision ourselves and our life in new ways, with new opportunities, in order for new energy to transform us into new possibilities. Coming to that place where we finally realize all we’ve done is cycle and recycle dysfunctional patterns gives us the message we cannot do this by ourselves.

We must engage a new helper or assistant who reports to us we have a number of other sets of cards in us we don’t know about. This new energy, this new helper, is sometimes a dream, sometimes a therapist, sometimes an epiphany, sometimes a twelve step program, sometimes an affair. It’s something that captivates us, creates interest in us, because this “helper” knows something we don’t.

For some, realizing they have another set of cards within from which they can create a new life is difficult; they’re clinging so tightly to the hand they’ve been dealt. Only as one learns to loosen the grip on one deck can one draw another deck from within. This means taking risks, allowing oneself to be loved even when it feels too scary, taking on new creative opportunities even though we don’t think we’ll be any good at them.

“I’m holding new cards,” Sheila smiled one afternoon. “My cards are different now than they’ve ever been. I have to be willing to play them in ways I’ve never allowed myself before.” Sheila has learned to open herself to new experiences — a loving relationship with a man who wants to cherish her, new friends, a thriving career. All this feels scary when we’ve never before experienced it. It feels foreign, unpredictable. 

We have to allow that part of us that is older and wiser than we are – our soul – to project on to the new cards whatever we need to create the kind of life that will open up those possibilities we haven’t “allowed” in our life before now. We have to pay attention to that other energy source – that spiritual helper – to allow it to show us what we really want, what is possible for us, what lies within. Our old wounds blind us to new possibilities. We ourselves block them by “just shuffling the cards,” by doing the same old things, responding the same old way, in each new experience offered us.

“I’ve got to start using my new cards – be open to my new relationship, my new creative energy, my new friends – if I want to grow,” Sheila reassured herself. She knew she had new opportunities, but, unless she activated and embraced them, they would only turn out like all the old opportunities she allowed to crash and burn in the past.

Sheila is creating a life. She’s trading in her tattered, used-up cards from her past and allowing in new energy, new cards. Her old cards have lost their freshness, their truth for her. She won’t be anxiety-free as the new energy enters her. New energy always brings anxiety at first, until the way we are becoming is the norm, the familiar, the way we are.  But she has a vision of herself in her new energy and she likes it. She wants it. She’s done the work up to now to be able to allow it.

Life is always trying to deal us a new hand, open up new possibilities, but we have a hard time trusting ourselves. We don’t think we can handle the new experiences this new way of being requires. The old cards, the old ways of being, are so familiar and safe. We know we would lose too much of what we think we have to hold on to. We’re afraid of the new woundings that come with new cards, think they will be too much for us.

Can we get the blessing without the wounding? Can the new cards come without any adjustment? Do possibilities come only in one flavor? Probably not. Creating a life comes through the birthing of something not-yet, something freshly imagined, deeply desired. In the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “There’s more between heaven and earth than men dream of.” There’s more to be experienced, more to be surprised by than we can dream.

Every Opening A Birth

I was 9 or 10 years old when I jumped headlong into soul. Another way you might say that — I was 9 or 10 years old when I was born.

My family had just moved to the country, to a suburb of Atlanta called Sandy Springs. Sandy Springs at that time consisted of a grocery store, a drug store, a hardware store and a filling station. It was wilderness on the edge of a growing city. We lived on 35 acres of land along the Chattahooche River that my grandmother bought when Atlanta was young. She offered some land for building a home to each of her five children.

My father chose a hill overlooking the lake. The land meant everything to him. He finally built a home and seduced my mother into moving the family.

There was tension in paradise. The more my father and my siblings and I grew to love the woods, the more my mother grew to hate them. She felt isolated; tired of driving the sixteen or so miles of country roads to and from Atlanta several times a day, angry my father chose to live his mother’s dream instead of hers.

My childhood was spent wandering the woods, making forts, and discovering my inner life. The silent presence of the woods and the whispering sirens of nature created in me a temple.

Whatever needs I couldn’t get met in my early life, I got them met a hundred fold in the experience of my waterfall. This lovely, natural sanctuary was a short distance from our home, near the lake. The Van I know was created at that time.

My waterfall was the kind of presence who knew exactly what I needed whether I was upset, excited, or just looking for someone to talk to. Just stepping on to her moist, mossy rocks opened up the closed places in me and released my soul to tell her everything.

I felt safe with her, felt cuddled by her warm rocks, bathed in the lullabies of her water music. Those whispering waters allowed me to access that delicate chord of oneness with all of life. From that experience, that early encounter with wholeness, I carried within an awareness, a resonance that zeroed in like a homing pigeon on experiences of wholeness throughout my life.

It seems God took the soul of that waterfall and placed that soul in me. With the matter and spirit of rock and water music, God created my essence. The hours I spent just sitting and listening in that sacred space allowed the slow wearing away in me of any resistance to what it was God wanted me to know. I knew God in an intimate way and God knew me.

I carry that waterfall within me today. It continues to nurture and to inform me. It creates in me a safety that nothing outside of me can dismantle. It serves as container for all the experiences entering my psyche, a holy place within where I can sort out feelings and reflections. It defines me. It forms the center of my personality. 

Our life is a page of possibility until we write on it, flesh it out, create our own personal myth. It takes time to listen, to be ready, to not make mindless moves until the energy stirs within, before the light emerges from the darkness, before the whisper rises out of the silence.

Like Michelangelo, we sit before the formless clay of our life and wait until it speaks. Only then do we know who or what wants to take form. Creating a life is a dialogue, a joint effort. We are artists, standing before the empty canvas of our life, struggling, trying things out, until the image hidden there emerges. Only then can the image move through us and tell a story, our story.

My waterfall experience became for me a paradigm for how to process information, how to access soul. It has also served to help me determine the quality of different relationships throughout my life. If I felt as safe and as alive with someone as I felt sitting on my waterfall, I knew this was a healthy, supportive, peaceful relationship. These anchor my life.

I consciously create myself one day at a time from the root of this one life circumstance: I lived in the woods as a child and was mothered by a waterfall. This colors my spirituality and the way I relate to the world. It is the rainbow color that set me on the path to creating my own rainbow out of the experiences of my life.

Other colors emerge and present themselves to me in continual flow. This was true, particularly, at significant stages of development in my life, moments of creation and re-creation, not always pleasant. I add these new colors to the base color of my waterfall experience. The external circumstances and focus of my life change as I add new color, new dimension, but the base color that directs and informs my becoming is always present.

Life is often hectic, confusing, demanding, as well as profound and meaningful and delicious. We create ourselves anew each day out of the colors of the moment.

Soul’s Sweet Sensation

My son John was a senior in high school. We were having the family over to celebrate the monthly birthdays that occur in our large family. My parents, my brothers and sister, their children and mine were all talking about what we imagined was coming up for each of us.

John broke in, enthusiastically, “When I graduate from college, I’m going to drive off in a Porsche.”

“Yeah, right,” my brothers said. “Don’t count on it, John,” the rest of us piped in.

John looked all of us in the eye and responded, “I’m talking about my dreams.”

I’ve never forgotten that. It’s so easy to squash young people’s dreams, to trivialize and discount what stirs their soul. How many soul-bashing experiences do you remember in your young years? when others pooh-poohed something deep and wonderful in you? when you were enjoying something near and dear and someone sucked the joy from it?

I remember when I was thirteen and James Dean was killed driving his silver Porsche. My girl friend and I languished in one another’s tears and stories of his young, disgruntled life. We enjoyed the permission to feel. It was grand. When I turned fifty, one of my lifelong friends gave me a pair of James Dean earrings, which I playfully wore to my fiftieth birthday party.

My dad teased me unmercifully when I spent the summer of my eighth grade crying over Gone With The Wind, as I had closeted myself away with the book and delighted in every image and  emotion stirred in me. “Rhett! Oh, Ashley!” my dad would drone as he passed my adolescent hideaway. I knew he delighted in my youth, my fantasy. I didn’t take it personally. You know when you’re being put down, criticized, demeaned. In that instance, it was playful.

I asked my mother recently how she had felt about my dreamer bent as a child, as she has always been so practical. She said she had secretly enjoyed that part of me, but that she had worried it might set me up to be too soft. Now in her 80s, she can enjoy that softness in me and in herself. She trusts it more. We share on levels now we never could.

The life of soul is soft, yet as solid as the eternity to which it binds us. Soul adds depth and texture to our otherwise routine life. It is our venture into images and sounds and feelings that color all our musings. We need to encourage it in children, to protect it in our youth. It can save us from becoming a callused world; it can add reflection to a reactionary culture.

Soul isn’t sentimental; it is feeling. It places value. It oils our connections. My early inclinations toward a large imagination opened me to wider paths of soul. This provided me with eyes I could not inherit from my family or my culture. It held my hand as I walked beyond my own parents to become a child of the universe. It sweetened my life.

How do we protect soul in our young? By listening to and delighting in them. By enjoying what stirs their imaginings, the creative way they see their world. By allowing what our children say about what they think or see or feel to take us on a journey, to open up a window in us that has been closed by practicality or jaded disinterest. We acknowledge their soul guide this way.

To encourage a child’s interior life encourages their openness to the sacred. That’s why we encourage small children to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. It softens their heart to mystery, to believing in a non-physical reality they cannot see. It fosters in them a sense of reverence. It gives permission to their soul to wander, to dream, to discover the personal story inside themselves that will unleash their unique gifts.

Playfulness is important in developing soul. How else can we stand before an unseen God and experience that presence, in a wild flower, in a puffy white cloud, in the hush of a quiet evening? Enlarging the imagination enlarges one’s capacity to believe in life, to believe in unseen realities that make life only more rich, to step beyond the veil that separates us from transcendent energies and revelations of the spirit.

Children get the wholeness at the Center much more easily than adults. We have to jump on every chance we have with them to encourage this connection with the sacred. They see it in a Robin’s egg or a turtle’s nest or story they watch on video. We adults are usually the culprits that knock this capacity out of them, by minimizing their enthusiasm or little dreams and pleasures. 

Which brings me back to my John in high school with his Porsche fantasy. John has always had a large interior life. As an adult, he’s learning how to channel this into a full, productive outer life. He moves in both worlds easily – the inner and the outer – and his heart just grows the larger for it. 

This past winter John dropped by the house to do a heavy chore I could not tackle without his help. He drove up in a new, leased black BMW convertible.

“Wow!” I said.  
 
 “I got my Porsche,” he smiled.

Stir What You Have

“May I have more sugar for my coffee, please,” shouts a man sitting on a barstool at a local coffee shop. The chatty waitress behind the counter is involved with another customer, more attentive to her own needs than to her restless customers.

Irritated by the distraction from her idle banter, the waitress scans the line of empty sugar containers on the counter and shouts back, “Stir what you have.”

Our waitress, as metaphor, shows up in all those places we least expect her:  in our dreams, in our prayer, in our efforts to fill a void with something or someone outside ourselves. She shouts back that emphatic No and leaves us scrambling to refocus on and rediscover what we do have.

The point? We have everything we need to have a satisfying life.

We are wired, as human beings, to know what is best for us and to be able to pull exactly that from within ourselves. No new romance, no new house, no plastic surgery, no piece of furniture or new job is going to satisfy the longing for safety and satisfaction that haunts us at our core.

If I continue to look for more and more outside myself to fill my longing, I diminish, discount and ultimately starve that creative, nurturing, eternal source within. If I project on to others what is creative, romantic, intelligent in myself, I lose touch with my own ability to meet crucial personal needs of safety, sanity and soul.

Following the lead of soul in ourselves will lead us to what it is we really want, to be alive in the moment, in all our moments. To embrace our life circumstances and to experience aliveness in them fills us with the vitality, the adventure and the sacredness we long for. We come to know what satisfies us, what is enough for us, what makes our heart sing. We can give it to ourselves.

One of my clients reminds herself this way: “Get back inside and quit giving away your power!”
We project outside that which we most need to connect with inside ourselves. We project our creative gifts on to another person and then see them as god or goddess. Only later, after we have seen through the projection, we realize that what we admired most about them was something longing to be recognized and developed in ourselves. Already ours.

We look for safety in another person’s love, in financial success, in more and more of whatever we think will make us safe. You are safe, the old witch/waitress taunts back at us, because it’s all there, already within you. Claim it as yours –your creativity, your intelligence and imagination – and you’ll never again fear that someone or something can rob you of that feeling of safe.

It takes a long time to realize our real gifts. Not many of us got the kind of mirroring we needed from our parents. Not that our parents didn’t love us, but they probably didn’t get it from their own parents. We come to recognize our own gifts through other’s response to us.

Throughout my life, I fell in love over and over with the same man, never realizing that what I loved in these different men was some unknown I loved in myself. I was drawn to the books I loved because they reflected back to me my own untapped wisdom. I didn’t recognize this for a long time. Over and over, I fell in love, was drawn to, my own soul.

This is not to say that our relationships with others, our love experiences, our knowledge gained, the wisdom given us by others, is not important. It is. We are not meant, as human beings, to be alone. It’s only when we keep looking for someone or something outside of us to fill what we can only fill for ourselves that we run on empty and keep coming back to the same starting place.

Recognizing the witch/waitress/eternal essence that speaks in our night dreams, that calls from our prayer-place, that shoots us down when we invest in something or someone at our own expense, comes as we come to love ourselves, our bodies, our personal story. Startling at first, she points to those places we give away to someone else that which is really us, then shows us, laughing, how to reclaim our pearls.   

We live an abundant lifestyle. We live in an abundant environment with magnificent animals and exquisite specimens of nature. We keep thinking there is more to have. It’s the more of it that we misread. The more, indeed, is within. What we have is more than enough.