Category: General posts

A Valley Like This: Musings on Art in the Methow

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The barista is a soprano.  The Chamber Music festival is sold out a week in advance.  The neo-traditionalist funk band concert by the Duhks has a few seats left.  Shakespeare is coming to town, both Will himself, and a children’s production of As You Like It.  A 10 year old fourth grader playing Silvius showed me his first lines, and explained the plot with its gender disguises and love themes.

Mahattan?

No.  Twisp.  A town of 900 nestled in the North Cascade Mountains.

A relative newcomer here, I’m watching for openings in the culture stream, auditioning to read poems for the second annual Mother’s Day show called The Mother Experience Project.   I’m looking for an evening in April at the local playhouse to host a reading of William Stafford’s Methow River Poems, written nearly twenty years ago, half a dozen of which greet trekkers along the Methow River here.  There’s an art installation outside the Post Office, a defunct telephone booth that’s now a tiny “Art Library” where patrons can take or leave books.  I recently left a copy of my “first” book of poems, Elegy with A Glass of Whisky, that won the BOA Editions New Poetry America Prize in 2004.  There’s a copy for sale at the local bookshop, too, but I thought it would be fun to put it in the Art Library and see what happens.

I picked up my tickets for the Duhks at the Methow Arts Alliance, a tiny storefront along “The Courtyard” off Highway 20, between Poppie Jo Galleria, an ecclectic mix of women’s fashion, new and used furniture, and antiques, and Rey Emmanuel, the Cuban Mexican restaurant.  Their narrow office has windows on both sides and curtains dividing workspaces.  It’s chock full of boxes of supplies; the porch holds paintings of Methow Valley Super Heroes that will soon grace the fence line of the school where I work.  The Executive Director, Amanda Knox and I had a short but equally chock full conversation about poetry, art, and music.  One of their volunteers came in before I left; she’s involved in both the local salmon recovery project and the local arts.  Amanda and I had just been marveling at all there is to do here and the varied populace that fills the seats and halls–whether it’s the Merc Playhouse, a retrofitted hardware store, or the “Barn,” likewise repurposed as an art venue, the Community Center gymnasium, Confluence Gallery, or the Twisp River Pub, whether it’s a talk on grizzly bears, an art exhibit, “Trashin’ Fashion,” film, jazz, pop, an oratorio by a local composer based on journal entries of Boy Soldiers of the Civil War.  Not a seat in the house.

There is so much resonance in place.  Stafford said in his poem “A Valley Like This”

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened—
there was nothing, and then…

But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?

We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don’t watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.

Art is one of the ways that we can “help bring back the world.”  Whether this Valley is filled with snow or disappears in mist, it is always touching those who live here, its mornings and evenings a constant show that translates itself into pigment, sculpture, music, dance, poetry.  “We have to watch it and then look at each other.  Together we hold it close and carefully save it.”  Both the Valley and what it produces are gems that warrant our curation.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: RIP Danpo

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Today we said goodbye to our dear friend and life companion, Danpo. Danpy, as we called him, was a Tibetan Terrier just a few months shy of his 15th birthday. He spent the last year and a half living with congestive heart failure. Fortunately, there was medication that made the better part of that time fairly manageable for him. But like all living beings, his time eventually came to an end.

He was a great teacher, the way that all pets, certainly all animals, are great teachers. He lived every moment in the present. He found joy in the simple things. He gave and received love. And he left this life with grace and nobility.

One of the most challenging aspects of having a pet is the fact that they nearly always predecease us. They come into our care, usually, as helpless infants. Dogs grow quickly through the life stages, lapping us almost a decade to the year. Danpy came into the world the same year my partner’s fraternal twin grandchildren, today healthy adolescents still growing through their puppy stage with spurts in height, changes in their bodies and minds. While they still have six or seven decades to look forward to, adulthood, relationships, families of their own, Danpy, at their age, was a very old man with an old man’s illness and limitations.

We managed his illness the best we could. He got his pills twice a day, doses fluctuating to meet his symptoms. When he tired of cheese to disguise their medicine, we switched to liverwurst. When liverwurst failed, we switched to canned dog food. When the canned food finally ceased to help the medicine go down, when he turned his face from the pills that were keeping him alive, the message became clear. It was time for him to leave us.

It’s extremely difficult to make the decision to end a pet’s life. If we’d kept pushing the pills down his throat, he may have held on a little longer. But well before we got to this stage, we knew it was time to help him pass. An appointment was made, the final realizations faced, the tears and heartache endured.

Euthanizing a pet often feels like playing God. Who are we to make the decision to end a life? And yet, if we are sensitive and attentive to their subtle communications, our pets will often help us to know when the time has come. With his final vet appointment thirty-six hours away, this morning, Danpy’s symptoms worsened with heavy wheezing and labored breathing. My partner called the vet, and we took him in.

His passing was like his living. A little stubborn, in his own way and time. The intramuscular sedative was slow to work, and the final injection as well. We held his head, hands on his small chest and felt his heart beating, beating, beating, slow, fade and stop. He was at rest. We bundled him up like a papoose and carried him to the car, to his bed and set off for the two hour drive to the pet crematorium.

It’s early winter here. There are a few feet of snow on the deeply frozen ground. Burying an animal at home, interring Danpy up the hill by the family dog Chica who passed not long after they moved here, was not an option. The only truly suitable choice was to put him in the car and take him to be cremated.

It was a moody overcast day here in our valley. And it was a blessing to have the time to integrate the loss of our dear pet. We drove along the Methow River to just before where it meets the Columbia, and there we paused, where we have often stopped on the long drive from here to most everywhere. We took Danpy’s collar and walked down to the frozen edge of our river for a brief ceremony of goodbye.

We called in the elements and directions and commended the spirit of our beloved one to the air, water, land and fire. We thanked Panchamama our mother Earth and the great sky that holds everything in its grasp. We thanked the great river of the first people, and putting his collar around a river rock, we cast it out through the thin ice where it broke loose and fell into the current pulsing along, Methow to Columbia to the seas.

From there, we met the highway and drove the rest of the way to our destination. It was a quick and kind transaction. A bighearted man with a shaved head came out and lifted him from the car, bed, blanket and all. We kissed his furry head and said our final goodbyes.

There are those who might scoff at all of this love and grief and ceremony for an animal. But there are those of us who know that the great spirit inhabits every form of Being. There is no reason in denying its truth. If we attend to this life, then we will be met by the divine nature in everything that inhabits this world. And everything is our teacher.

The greatly beloved American poet Mary Oliver has said it so succinctly: To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal, to hold it against your heart as if your own life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Goodbye Mr. Danpy. Petit Prince. Little Noisette. Blacky. Petit chien. Buddy. Teacher. Friend. May I go as gracefully as you have gone, down the trail, over the snow, into the beyond.

danpy

How the Butter Spread: Why Expeditionary Learning Works

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This is more than a cute story. It shows the power of engaged learning! Pass it on!

Subhaga Crystal Bacon's avatarMVCS Kids

This is a story that I heard from one of our parents, but I loved it so much that I decided it was worth passing along.

Every Friday, our kids do a program called Locavores–it’s self explanatory. During the fall, as you will remember if you follow this blog, we did a lot of weekly food processing from things we had harvested locally: apples, pears, corn, squash, potatoes.  As we settle into winter, the food processing is also undergoing a change in season.  How do people preserve food to keep in the winter?  Our foodie teacher who has a lot of experience with cultured and fermented food did a short lesson last week on making butter.  In a way, it was a problematic lesson.  Nine kids, one mixer.  A lot of practice in patience and sharing!

But it turned out to be a phenomenally successful lesson, and here’s why.  The…

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Psychic Surgery

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For the last few years, I’ve been experiencing what, to work a metaphor, I’m going to call “symptoms” of a psychic wound from my childhood.  It’s a wound around sex and sexuality that has been deeply bound in psychic scar tissue.  This scar tissue has acted as a deadening agent, a protection from accidental re-injury or activation.  The last fifty years allowed a lot of scar tissue to accumulate, for the psychic body to develop a somatic relationship to the wound in which it has been as if asleep.

Then came awakening.  With awakening as consciousness came the slow awakening of many parts of myself, countless and previously unknown parts.  Some of these parts brought ecstatic enlightenment to my Being.  Some brought quiet joy. Others brought pain that radiated out from the essential wound of incarnation, of being in a body.  Some of these parts are small and mundane, others are large and consequential.

About two years after awakening as consciousness, I took a long and quite activating telecourse with Waking Down in Mutuality founder, Saniel Bonder called “Let’s Talk Sex.”  For me, the course opened the door to the way sex and sexuality have been shadow parts of my Being, parts that are acting on me without my awareness.  My Trillium Awakening teacher Sandra Glickman has said “we are governed by what we can’t see.”  How true that is.

I’ve often used the metaphor of a splinter in talking about psychic woundedness.  It’s as if early life events, conditions and patterns lodge in our Being, some of them quite deeply, and once their trajectory inward stops, and they come to rest, they begin a trajectory in the other direction, back out toward light propelled by the body’s psychic antibodies that form a pocket of pus around them, sometimes with swelling, irritation and pain until they work their way up to the surface level where they can potentially be removed.  Sometimes they shoot out on their own accord, like a birth.  Even if they come out on their own, they leave a trace of their passing, a trail, a residue of awareness.  But sometimes they are obstructed and require the assistance of a skilled practitioner.

My wound material has been under the skilled care of a team of practitioners.  I first spoke of the wound with my core teacher, Allan Morelock.  He’s both my spiritual GP and a highly skilled specialist. He held the revelations without judgment and offered a salve of love and acceptance.  The Let’s Talk Sex course community was a collective massage team that prodded around the wound awakening its field of feelings: pain, distress and confusion.  Over time, the confusion gave way to a pressure to acknowledge the nature of the wound, which for the first time in my life, I spoke to my Beloved partner, revealing the people, places and actions that caused the wound.  Since then, the scar tissue of the wound has softened, parts of it have been metabolized into my Being.

But the deeper parts have been more stubborn.  They have required a commitment from me, welcoming them forward.  I say it’s been a commitment from me, but of course, it’s not been me at all; it’s been the flow of Being, bringing around events and realizations, revelations that have created space around and shed light on what has been buried for so long.  It has brought me into the transmission field of teachers whose skills with healing are both mysterious and effective.  The Shamanic healers Cielle and Jeffrey Backstrom peeled away the layers of dead and decaying matter between the wound and its healing.  They’ve created the space for and called in those who are the wisdom keepers for my life.  These keepers have revealed some of the conditions that led to my wounding and as importantly the patterns that caused it to fester, darken and limit.  They’ve brought me to readiness for surgery.

Last night, I entered the operating theater via a Skype session that brought me face to face with the psychic surgeon, Allan Morelock.  There’s a way that being in the transmission of these deeply embodied spiritual teachers, Sandra, Cielle, Jeffrey, and Allan, slices through my resistance to exploration.  In their loving, laser-like gaze there is neither a need nor a place to hide. My relationship with these teachers, especially Allan who mid-wifed my awakening, is deep.  The trust is bedrock.  The loving care, the truth telling, are utterly reliable and inescapable.

Meeting Allan last night, entering his transmission field stripped me down to the deepest, ickiest place in my wound. Through conversation, we unpacked it and bathed it in light.  He guided me into a meditative state in which we could lift out each piece of the wound, both the “story” of what happened, and the ways in which the conditions and patterns of my life have caused it to fester over decades.  He held it all in the light of loving investigation, of forgiveness and release.  He drew the whole gaping wound out of my body, left a large, tender spaciousness in its place.  In the hours to follow, in recovery mode, I rested in the pain of healing.  I was exhausted with the work of Being more fully alive.

This morning, in meditation, the palliative care of body, mind and spirit, I rested in the ongoing healing of my wound.  I rested in awareness of its long history, our long relationship, the dance of accommodation.  I acknowledge the way that relationship is changing through the healing process.  Sandra Glickman has famously said “wounds formed in relationship can only be healed in relationship.”  And in my experience this is true of all healing.

There’s a way that the depth of wounding is matched by the length of healing.  What we bring in with us when we enter this fleshly experience of our Being, what we accumulate from the early days can take the rest of our days to integrate.  There’s a way in which being alive in this human body is the core wound of experience.  When we awaken as embodied consciousness, we enter into the dance of healing, of mediating the distance and dissonance of Being and Body, which are both one and separate.  Like Michelangelo’s iconic depiction of the outstretched fingers of God and Man, these bodies are a constant ache toward the eternal.

A Poem of Paradox

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Waiting for Snow

Tonight, I strip day’s clothes
by the heater, my skin
rough and dry as a reptile.
I close curtains against
creeping cold, and the spider
plant rustles like a cough
in my hands. Its tender
tendrils whisper feel me!
And I do.  With my whole body
I feel the weight of its bound
roots and the smell of dirt
dusty and brown. My arms
hold it to my chest, place
it on the coir mat by the door
and pour water into its lanky
leaves.  I pour and pour
as if it is my own thirst I slake.
It exhales a spring night
redolent of earth and rain.
I bow my face and breathe
such sweet fragrance
sleeping now in fist-tight
bulbs and roots awaiting Spring.

 

 

 

Equanimity for the Transient

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It’s a brilliantly cold day here today.  Up to a whopping 12 degrees with a wind chill of 7.  The sky is bright blue with hints of cloud spread around the edges, jet trails, mare’s tails, dry brush strokes of white that striate the blue.  It’s still technically morning, a few minutes to noon as I write this.  Morning, noon, night, hour, minute, month, year, all these abstract concepts that we lay upon our experience to try to rein it in, keep it in our “control.”  It is, of course, New Year’s eve, the last day of this construct known as 2014.

And even though it is a construct, a concept, it’s useful in its way.  We are not cut loose in timelessness, merged with the continuum of time and space.  We are here, somewhere, in these bodies that, like their sisters the plants, turn daily toward the sun for guidance, for nourishment, and then toward the dark for rest. And the days come and go and come and go, as the moments come and go and come and go, each one a realization: I am here.  I am this.  I am.

I am in a place of deeper translucence these days, a place of abiding joy, which has no opposite.  I was thinking earlier on my drive back from town, from yoga, coffee, groceries, about an article I read once about “The Happiest Man Alive.”  It was about a Buddhist monk, a Frenchman I think, who had spent the last twenty or so years of his life meditating about 20 minutes every day.  I remember envying him his happiness and at the same time considering the differences between living in the robe in a monastery and living in the myriad relationships of the wider world.  Today, the gap has all but disappeared.  Every life has its heavy lifting, even in the monastery.

I heard a story once from a Buddhist teacher of mine, who had herself, spent a few decades in the Thai Forest tradition.  It was about a monk in her order, a former US Marine, who had found his way from a tough youth to the military, and from the military to the war Southeast Asia, and from the war to the monastery.  There was in the order another monk who had a habit of sitting too close to the former Marine, usurping his space.  One day, at the end of his tether, the Marine called out the other monk–let’s take it outside, so to speak.  As they squared off in anger, the Marine monk suddenly stopped and looking at his raised fists dropped them into a namaskar mudra and a bow.  The monks embraced and went back to their meal.

It’s a good story, and one that speaks volumes about the challenges of being in one of these “meat suits,” this super sensitive bodymind with its millions of neurons and nerves firing non-stop day in and day out.  It’s about awareness and energy, about the need to embody what arises, to let it have its say and at the same time leaning into the way our own emotions, our anger, say, is ours alone, and the way what we encounter moment by moment is our teacher.

My teacher, Allan Morelock, says that equanimity is this realization.  That when we are in this moment with complete awareness, whatever the moment contains, whether pain or pleasure, that awareness is equanimity, and equanimity is joy, which has no opposite.  The mirror does not, as in the fairy tale, tell you whether you are beautiful or not.  It only reflects what is presented to it.  Where our conditioned experience meets the mirror, there can be a huge distance between subject and object.  Allan says they are one.  You are only as beautiful as you feel.  Coming to this truth requires us to relax into all the old stories, all the old patterns, resting in their deep discomfort.  After years of self judgment, denial, criticism, anger, bitterness, if we can rest in the truth of our woundedness, our vulnerability, then we can rest in our beauty, our innocence.

Wherever you are today, in balmy warmth or frigid cold, whether in pain or in ease, in community or in solitude, may you gaze into the mirror of your heart and find the truth of your beauty.  May you have joy in this moment and all the moments to come.

A poem for the Solstice

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Out of the Long Night

After a day of snow, sun.
In my small south facing room
great thumps of avalanche
from the roof.   Window
lights my face, lifts me up
to welcome the directions,
the elements.  Smoke from
the censor fragrant with myrrh,
frankincense.  I turn clockwise,
east to east while the pines
drip and the sky stands
still in all this turning.
Clouds mark the journey.

Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death’s dark shadows put to light
Rejoice, rejoice Emmanuel!

The words are seeds in memory
blooming this morning, small
bright shards in my heart, open,
open, to welcome the coming.

Rejoice.  Rejoice.  Rejoice.

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When the King Be Witnessed in His Power*

I’m weary of the fear
that turns us to killing
while the mist hangs
over the mountains.
Weary of the stream
of mindless endings,
unlike the river, who
travels to the sea.

I’m weary of the thread
of dead and deader.
The dread-nought
and juggernaut.  God
in the machine.  I’m weary.
I’m weary.  I’m weary.

 

from Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died”

Healing the Parts that Make Us Whole

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To heal, you must be willing to disrupt your equilibrium. To go deep into the unseen, unknown places, to allow the energy there to be stirred and released.

As part of my process of becoming a mentor in the spiritual tradition I follow, I am required to undergo six therapeutic sessions–typically these are psychological, sessions of “talk therapy.” Talk therapy has long since stopped being a mode that works for me, that gets into the depths of my shadow places, the parts that are in need of exploration and exposition. Years of yoga and various body-centered energetic healing modalities have unearthed and revealed into the light of recognition long festering patterns of behavior. So to meet my six session requirements, I requested and was given permission to work with a pair of Shamanic healers who teach in our lineage.

The question I’m pursuing is not important. Although it has a story or elements of story: a who, what, where and when, and likely has a why, I’m not really pursuing those. I’m no longer interested in the story per se. It’s more like a flavor, a residue. It’s like the splinters that remain after a large sliver is removed from the flesh.

I’ve worked with these two healers previously around this particular issue, and in both cases, they brought about huge shifts for me. Each time, we met in person in small groups that were working together for a longer period, once for a week and then for a weekend. The sessions I’m doing now are happening via Skype. They begin with prayer, with calling in the elements, the unseen guides that surround us at all times. There’s a short conversation about the issue being pursued, and then there’s a long period of energetic work in which I am more or less passive, sitting, eyes closed, breathing the circular breath used in rebirthing, and feeling into what is happening in my body.

A lot happened in my body. Painful contraction around my solar plexus. Heat. Cramping. More heat. Deep vibration. My teacher held me between two crystals, one at my crown and one beneath my feet, and my body was filled with expansion. I had to loosen my shoulders from their joints and let my arms hang out at an angle. I saw the Christ and Magdalen. I saw my father and waves of light that was more than light, a sort of deeply embodied incandescence. I was the hills and the snow and the ether that holds everything.

She told me that I would continue to integrate the healing. It might show up in my dreams. Might interrupt my sleep. Might make me vulnerable, raw, irritable. To ground myself, drink plenty of water, take hot baths. Walk consciously in the outdoors, breathing the cold air, feeling the earth beneath my feet. To ask for forgiveness. To know that I was healing.

In the last thirty six hours, I’ve manifested most of the side effects she noted. I feel a deep discomfort in my body, in my Being. And yet, as she pointed out, this is how I know that healing is happening.

We are always a process. Never a product. There is no end point, no completion, no perfection. As long as we inhabit these human bodies, we will continue to unfold. When we awaken into embodied consciousness, it is a second birth, a continual maturation that along with our being alive brings a deepening into what we are. All that has come before us going back to the primordial ooze is within us to be integrated. We are not separate from all that is or has ever been. The further I go, the deeper I go. It’s a folding as much as an unfolding. I fold more deeply into my parts as they unfold within me. I’m merging with every thread and fiber of my Being.

This is an essential process for anyone who sets out to guide others on their journey. It’s a shamanic process, this journeying. We must be familiar with the terrain and be willing to face its fearful aspects as well as its shining peaks. We must be willing to upset our own equilibrium, to lean into our own discomfort, to take everything we have been given and honor its gifts. Being is a powerful master. Are you willing to learn what it has to teach? In life, the poison is often also the antidote. Learning is homeopathic. A small dose will go a long way.

What’s the Value of a Community School Education?

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Rain + Kids =  Persistence

Subhaga Crystal Bacon's avatarMVCS Kids

It’s been a super rainy fall here in Twisp.  Many a day sees our kids come in wearing their Bogs and rain jackets, and this is a good thing because at least once a week they go off into the great outdoors to learn about nature IN nature.

The Community School prizes outdoor education.  It’s not about field trips in the old fashioned sense of the word, as in going to museums or performances, although those are always enriching.  No.  At MVCS, field trips are literally trips into the field, the place of study.  For us, this year, field is field. Our kids have spent many hours in rain and shine mapping, hoeing, planting, and tracking what they’ve planted where so that, in spring, they will be able to measure their success.

Historically, the MVCS has produced top notch scholars who go on to populate the honor roll at the public…

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