my horoscope.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Amazingly enough, the good deeds you do in
the next 21 days could alone qualify you for a permanent exemption from
hell. It seems God has cooked up some imminent tests that will give you a
chance to garner some ridiculously sublime karma. What’s that you say?
You don’t believe in either God or hell? Well then, interpret the
opportunity this way: The good deeds you perform in the coming three
weeks could practically ensure that the sins you’ve committed thus far in
your life will not stain the world or be passed on as IOUs to the next
generation.

And 2 By Yeates

A Prayer for Old Age

GOD guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
0 what am I that I should not seem
For the song’s sake a fool?

I pray-for fashion’s word is out
And prayer comes round again
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Who Makes These Changes?

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.

Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

I Ask My Mother To Sing, Li-Young Lee

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.

Mother and daughter sing like young girls.

If my father were alive, he would play

his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,

nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch

the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers

running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;

how the waterlilies fill with rain

until they overturn, spilling water into water,

then rock back, and fill with more,

Both women have begun to cry.

But neither stops her song.

In A Dark Time, Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood–
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks–is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is–
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Kabir on Living Life

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks about is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something, it is not true.

from The Kabir Book, versions by Robert Bly

Turning points

The turning point that I turn to each time I think of the moment that most impacted my life is my family’s move to Wisconsin. I turn to it so frequently that I am sick of this event. Why did it impact me so that every other major event pales in comparison?

It is the summer of 1990. My last days in Bakersfield are a blur. I remember my empty room. The pink walls are the only thing left of me.  The room is empty of everything else. I remember my best friend, Kelly Thomas, blond haired and blue eyed just like me, so much so that it was assumed that we were sisters. She’s in my garage. She came over to give me a gift. It’s a framed picture of herself and a glass teddy bear with a red heart from her prized collection of glass animals. The bear was my favorite. She let me pick out the one I wanted from her collection. A glass menagerie that became tragic in a Tennessee Williams kind of way only with the departure of a best friend. I remember hugging her, thinking about the fate of a friendship between 9 year old girls separated by half a country (it was destined to die), and promising to write letters frequently.

There was a moving truck that my Dad drove cross-country. There were stories of that drive of which I only remember visions of fireflies that made the great planes seem as if the stars had fallen from the skies. There was the four-hour flight to the new state, of which I remember only that eternity had come and gone before the aircraft finally landed. Presently I am aware of the anxiety that my mother must have felt, the house has not sold, we have no place to live, we are going to be staying with the in-laws for an indefinite period of time. Then I was only aware of how foreign everything was. Green grass, green trees, and rolling hills. I knew brown desert and mountains or the golden sand and urban terrain of Santa Monica. And then there were the three blond boys who talked funny and were my cousins and expected friends.

We went to see the Great Circus Parade. My cousins, the K-boys, taught me how to draw chalk circles in the middle of the street for the horses to poop in. Whoever caught the poop in the circle won. My California mind could not conceive why you want to win the poop, but nevertheless the game was fun and so I participated, cheering when the impossibly large turds became my own. In my grandparents house I wrote in my diary. I don’t know anyone here. At the Circus Parade I saw a man ride a bicycle with one giant wheel and a mini one. I should be happy but I am not.

I should be happy, but I am not. It was in that moment, lying on my stomach on the floor of the loft that was my grandparent’s television room, that I tried to capture the sense that I had no one to talk to about what I was going through. I have always been quiet; I cannot remember a time when adults were not telling me, speak louder, I can’t hear you. But I had friends. I was not shy at school. I loved school. I cried on days when I was too sick to go. But here, in this foreign land of green grass and trees I was not happy and the only one who could understand me was my diary. Even there, my emotions remained a mystery.

At the time, that 9-year-old girl saw this move as an adventure. An adventure no one consulted her about going on, but it was an adventure nevertheless. The move was not bad, the events that followed were not horrible, my parents tried to do the best they could and, all in all, the move was probably about as pleasant as a move could be. But I was sad and sadness was not welcomed. We were all asked to swallow down our emotions for the sake of my father who wanted this more than anyone, and put on happy faces. With the words I should be happy, but I am not, I quietly shut my mouth and vowed never to speak of these feelings again.

I still wonder why I turn again and again to this move. People move all of the time, I have moved many times since then, each of the moves as significant as this one. I have had many turning points in my life that I find more interesting, or life changing or tragic and yet it is this sad little girl who comes back again and again telling me that she should be happy, but she is not.

Writing about this event, or I should say re-writing since it has been explored at different times, has shifted my perspective on it yet again. I was fighting to write about something different, but nothing came. This story, this turning point, requires me to revisit it again and again. Each time I learn something new.  In the past it has been the sorrow or the anger at being moved. I lived in California! How unfair it is that I had to move to Wisconsin!

In this re-telling, I was finally able to admit that my powerful feelings were avoided, or, to use psychological language, repressed. It is these feelings concealed in the choice that I made not to talk to my parents, brother, grandparents or cousins about the hard time I was having, that haunts me. It is the child who was not happy but made the world think she was that wants to have her story told. And so I will tell it.

Moving to Wisconsin was not the traumatic event that I want to remember it as. It was not a life changing as moving to Santa Fe and exploring life on my own for the first time, or as important to me as my first kiss or the first time making love. It is not nearly as exciting as returning to California, finding myself at CalArts and Pacifica or falling head over heels in love. It is not as frightening as the time my Dad was arrested or my Mom had a miscarriage. Moving to Wisconsin is the fact. It is the silent girl who stands in the peripheries of my memories and waits for me to acknowledge her. She shows me memories of the move so that I will remember her, remember her silence and tell her that it’s over now. It is okay for you to speak.

If only…

“At this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking
transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a
mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the
open exchange of mutual self-esteem. Then, there would be a real New
Age.”

-Ken Wilber

Losing Control

Reflections on my experience in Tuesday Evening Process  Group.

Losing control can look many different ways. It can be yelling, screaming, hitting, crying. It can be letting vibrations move through your body. For me it was learning how to let the energy move as it wants to. On Tuesday it wanted to move very, very slowly.

The image for me was a locked door. I have all this energy in my pelvis. I get scared of it pretty easily. It’s a part of my body I have been disconnected from. We’re starting to develop a new relationship. But there’s that locked door. I really want to draw this – or collage it or something. Make the note. Make it happen. I digress. I think I took a solid hour of the 2 hr group time to stand in front of people rocking my pelvis. Feeling that part of my body, feeling all of the energy there.

People got bored. Angry. What are you doing? Say something! Give it to me! I was connected to myself. I was not in control of the energy. It did not want to be loud. I think it just wanted to be seen moving at it’s own pace. It was a very deep experience for me. And that is what I needed. To do it for me.

Words that came out. Please be patient with me. There is a lot of power here that I get very scared of. I know I can move it in “extreme” ways – but what about in real life? This might not look like very much, but a lot is happening for me. One person asked me to bring all of my energy. I felt the encouragement, but also the DON’T DO IT. If you can recieve my energy as it is, I will share it with you. If you can’t see me for who I am and respect that, I will not share it with you. I will protect myself and move away. Because I am doing this for me.

This brings me to thoughts about selfishness. Self-obsession. There is conflict between me and one of my friends for this reason. I learn about myself so that I can connect more deeply with the world around me. Be in service of life. I use my self-exploration to learn what others might be feeling, experiencing. The more I know about me, the more I know about how to be in relationship with others. She uses herself to remain seperate. To bring the attention of the room on her. She sees herself as a giver, but it is a selfish, manipulative act. It’s unconscious. It’s a tool to keep herself cut off from life. From feeling the things that life wants her to feel. I think these are major differences. The more I listen to myself, the less I want to be around people like her. There’s the feeling that I can be a good influence. Help her. Send love and compassion. It’s better if I protect myself. Know that I won’t be recieved the way I want to be recieved and step back. And that’s a form of losing control.

Things I learned that I want to hold on to. Losing control is simply letting energy move through you the way it wants to move. It might not look like what you imagine, or it might look exactly like what you imagined. What matters is that the ego consciousness can step aside and let something else move through without wanting to change it, control it. Sometimes it moves fast. Sometimes slow. I have flowers growing in my bedroom. Some of them explode open, some of them gradually unfold. They do what is exactly right for them in their own time. That is losing control. Surrendering to the natrual ebb and flow of things.

The Art of Inquiry

Selections/my commentary on The Art of Inquiry, Joseph Copin and Elizabeth Nelson. Not necessarily a “how-to” on research/scholarly writing, but there is lots and lots on how to be a more engaged researcher. Research what your soul calls you to, let the work reveal itself through you and whatnot. Suggestions on how to use moves rather than methodology.  Thoughts on the yin and yang of research. Actively pursuing a topic and being in the receptive frame. I think I’m being asked to be in a receptive place right now. It’s driving me a little crazy.

“Only the substantial person, the true individual who is strong enough to suffer the Self without being overwhelmed, can become a carrier of ideas and an advocate of the earth. This role demands ego stability, intellectual dedication, and psychological wisdom — a formidable combination of aptitudes” (47).

“The perspective of the psyche…provides the opportunity to develop a richer, deeper, and more imaginative mind simply by paying attention. As Jung would say, people become distinct personalities by virtue of the fact that they enter into psychological relationship with every aspect of life — and with life itself” (49).

Tall orders from you, Psyche. All you have to do is everything, all the time if you want to be a “whole” person. And I try. I really do. A richer, deeper, more imaginative mind. All you have to do is pay attention? Well, I think it requires a little more than that. You do have to do the work also, you have to participate.

More quotes:

“There exists an intimate connection between fleshy body and fluid perspective. Learning is rooted in lived experience, even when its full consummation urges the person towards the heights and breadth of intellectual understanding. People know what they know through sensation, intuition, and imagination working in concert with reason” (51).

Link between body and knoweldge. Tie this to theatre – bringing the fluid experience into the fleshy body. Allow the body to move, to feel, to learn what is going on through sensation. Tapping into intuition by listening to what the body needs. The body has wisdom if you’ll let it share it with you. Listen.

And least we forget:

“For people deeply engaged in the art of inquiry, Jung’s more inclusive definition of the psyche is fruitful. Among other things, it suggests that any work a person undertakes has as much psychic reality as the worker. It is an active, autonomous participant in its own development, with legitimate demands and desires, on the path of its own individuation. Though one may wish to control the creative process, it is only possible to guide its course. A more psychological approach is to treat the work as an autonomous partner by entering into a lively, dialectical relationship with it, fully prepared for the unexpected and the synchronistic. In the realm of psyche, all authors are co-authors” (55).