hello, little teacher II

**Update to one of my personally favorite posts from 2011,
as the lessons from this little teacher continue to deepen ....

Karmapa Dream Flag via Wikimedia Commons

The American primitive painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) reported watching an inch-worm crawl up a twig and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach. “That’s me,” he said, “I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.”
- Robert Genn

_______________________Original post below______________________

As I was waking up with my unsettled, loose-end'ish feeling self and starting the day today, I was sitting at this desk when I noticed this tiny little worm. 

I noticed as s/he/'it' moved along that at times the surface of the desk seemed slippery and it

struggled for traction.

Sometimes the cracks made it turn and

go another way.

Sometimes it would topple over and get back up.

It went over the cracks, down the tiers of the edge of the desk and back up again several times.

What is going on here?

I curiously wondered.

maybe

we never know the consequences

..... of 'good' or 'bad' fortune:

_________________________________

From "The Path (What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life)"
by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, pp 79-80:

🙏🏼 here's to cultivating our inner farmer

to live with not knowing

HONESTY

is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.

…

HONESTY
In CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte & Many Rivers Press 2015

"....denying her wounds came from the same source as her power"

~Marie Curie

learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions.....

Solace ~David Whyte

is the art of asking the beautiful question, of ourselves, of our world or of one another, in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.

Solace is the beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated. When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. Solace is found in allowing the body’s innate wisdom to come to the fore, the part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing, to the birdsong in the tree above our heads, even as we are being told of death, each note an essence of morning and mourning; of the current of a life moving on, but somehow, also, and most beautifully, carrying, bearing, and even celebrating the life we have just lost. A life we could not see or appreciate until it was taken from us. To be consoled is to be invited onto the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not soothe falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into both life and death as an equal birthright.

Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind. Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.

To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it, we become useful and generous and compassionate and even amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light and then just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?

an invitation, not an answer......

Conversational Leadership

 What is the courageous conversation we are not having....

 

 'anything or anyone that

does not bring you alive

is too small for you'

    
Juicy!

gratitude taproot

taproot:  the main root of a plant, growing straight downward from the stem, usually stouter than the roots that grow laterally from it.

a selfish way to save the world: foundation of self esteem and gratitude taproot; meeting human needs, and

bringing your greatest gifts forward

...to become aerodynamic by supercharging natural strengths

a great talk on this concept by Giovanni Cavalieri:

 

step one: get your fundamental needs met

        step two: give your greatest gift

step three: receive the gift of a life well lived

step four: let the whole world receive the gift of

your life well lived

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

Let us rise up and be thankful

for if we didn't learn a lot today

at least we learned a little

and if we didn't learn a little

at least we didn't get sick

and if we got sick

at least we didn't die

so, let us all be thankful.

~ Buddha ~

colourful

Haruki Murakami's colourful expression in words..... sigh.

"Yet it was this pain, and this sense of being choked, that he needed. It was exactly what he had to acknowledge, what he had to confront. From now on, he had to make that cold core melt, bit by bit. It might take time, but it was what he had to do. But his own body heat wasn't enough to melt that frozen soil. He needed someone else's warmth."

"First things first. Build the station. A special station just for her. The kind of station where trains want to stop, even if they have no reason to do so. Imagine that kind of station, and give it actual color and shape. Write your name on the foundation with a nail, and breathe life into it. I know you have the power to do that. Don't forget - you're the one who swam across the freezing sea at night."

"It doesn't matter... it's just a physical phenomenon, no more. The spring on a wound watch gets steadily looser, the torque grows closer and closer to zero, until the gears stop altogether and the hands come to rest at a set position. Silence descends. Isn't that all it is?"

"It was a wonderful thing to be able to truly want someone like this - the feeling was so real, so overpowering. He hadn't felt this way in ages. Maybe he never had before. Not that everything about it was wonderful: his chest ached, he found it hard to breathe, and a fear, a dark oscillation, had hold of him. But now even that kind of ache had become an important part of the affection he felt. He didn't want to let that feeling slip from his grasp. Once lost, he might never happen across that warmth again. If he had to lose it, he would rather lose himself."

A one-mile stretch of Canada and US border

appearances can be deceiving

David Whyte COURAGE

is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstance, and perhaps, above all, to be seen to do it in public, to show courage; to be celebrated in story, rewarded with medals, given the accolade: but a look at its linguistic origins leads us in a more interior direction and toward its original template, the old Norman French, Coeur, or heart. 

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made…

"This tiny, ruined, monastic fishing house in Cong, County Mayo, has been a place where, over the years, I have found the needed courage to both make and break promises: promises that have emboldened and promises that have imprisoned. The river flows strongly under its four square solidity, and three of its walls form a private shelter for necessary thought, the fourth wall is gone and looks down stream, where all our promises must flow. It is a structure that, all of its own, holds the courageous conversation between what is actually here and what has already gone." DW

perky

percolation:
seeping through an opening.

does the coffee bean have something to teach us about responding expansively to adversity?

unlike a carrot that starts out strong but then wilts
or an egg that starts out soft
then becomes hardened on the inside,
when heated in boiling water,

ground coffee beans become something

useful, tasty, even beautiful...

Into the fire of Life's mysteries I dance 

With the book of my heart wide open

I may find love

I may find pain

But only an open book can be written in

And I have stories to tell

~ 'Flamenco' by Kim McElroy 

further

In my previous post when I quoted Alan Watts saying that he wanted to

realize absolutely that

life and death are two sides of the same coin,

it struck a deep chord in me.


A 'radical acceptance of death'
can be a learned approach
to life,
as can clouding ones' perspective
with fear and ignorance.



At the time of my grandfather's death when I was eleven, innately I had no fear of what was occurring. Somehow I was very in touch with the
natural process of him passing,
including the months leading up to that afternoon,
after we had gotten the morning call
that the time was near.
yet at the end, I was excluded.
sent to sit in the waiting room by myself.


We all do the best we can,
and nurses do their jobs.
they (nor did I then) did not know how deeply I was
feeling this loss.
those weren't just tears
because he was gone.
I also lost part of my voice.
and I was cheated out of experiencing

that part of the grieving process

in the moment.

Untouched grief lies dormant,
and when it rises up
beckoning and then
demanding to be
seen and felt at last,
it is an opportunity for healing and forgiveness,
and reclaiming wholeness...


Back to realizing how life and death being
two sides of the same coin
 is vitally important in learning to embrace life,
and to live in possibility.

Aha!

Both are equally juicy, complex topics!

They are only as 'out there'
as we choose to keep them...

further 'food' for thought...

Though we live in a largely hands-off culture, especially when it comes to the actual process of dying, it is completely within our rights to organize our own

home funeral:

A noncommercial, family centered response to death that involves the family and its social community in the care and preparation of the body for burial or cremation, and/or in planning and carrying out related rituals or ceremonies, and/or in the burial or cremation itself.

There are also people
offering compassionate support

for the final transition process.

“I request that my body in death be buried, not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth so that flora and fauna can dine upon it just as I have dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson

Since our bodies have many toxins in them,
not to mention the added pollutants like formaldehyde and embalming agents in traditional preservation,

this woman presenting her mushroom burial suit
 takes the green burial a step further,

which for me is quite possibly an ultimate way of

leaving the world better than I found it...

♥

whereabouts unknown

what.do.you.want?

when some people are asked this question,
they are able to form a list with the greatest of ease.

i am not one of those people.
(unless it's in the context of ordering lunch, in which case, I know all too well what I want and how I want it! I'm one of 'those people' who often alters or substitutes {surprised?}, which of course is not what I am
talking about here.
think 'cloudy-er',
what-do-you-want-out-of-your-life'ier)

but i am becoming quite fond of

sitting with this question.

because it always leads me to the
warmer, *juicy-er* underbelly...

Our minds tend to lead us to believe that what we think/believe/feel we want is paramount, but in my experience, regularly asking the question with freshness is the container in which to listen for the essence, the underlying current, of what is actually going on in reality. Giving some space for the what's to breathe and stretch out... and taking a look at *that*

or simply being with that new shape

is what brings a clarity to the totality of it,
as it relates to your life,
allowing the natural response to its sister question
'what are you / do you want to be doing?' to arise.

There's also this idea Alan Watts presents in Cloud Hidden:

"We do not know what we want because we are only so dimly aware of

anything wantable.

We have taught ourselves to pursue such abstract and weakly perceived goals as happiness, love, goodness, service to others, fun, fame, fortune, power, peace, or God – but we have

more words than experience

for what we mean."

 

He goes on to list many things,

beautifully wantable...

"I want to spend time sitting still,

or walking slowly,

wondering at and feeling the basic sense of existence,

of being alive-dead,

of watching my breath,

of hearing all sounds in the air,

and of letting clouds and stars caress my eyes.

I want to let go of anxiety and turn it into laughter, and realize absolutely that

life and death

are two sides of the same coin.

I want a companion who will, alternatively, melt into me and wrestle with me, obey me and object to me, admire me and then suddenly show that they can do so many things much better than I.
I want to sit at a typewriter, at certain times,
carefully and meticulously
putting into words what I feel-

the challenge being that it cannot really be put into words at all.

I want to be able to allay pain and sickness with the touch of my hands.
I want to make a fire of charcoal and burn cedar leaves or sandalwood, late in the evening, while listening or dancing to classical or rock music.

I want to see the reflection of light in glass and crystal, and lying on the ground, to look up at trees patterning a vivid blue sky. At night to go to sleep beneath them, and to wake just before dawn when the stars can still be seen through their branches.

….. earthy as it may be, this is a glimpse of my idea of heaven."

beautifully wantable because they are not things,

but rather experiences.

aaah, I completely connect with that...

I'd love to hear what *your* experience has been with that question.
What touches you as the heart of the matter?

♥

the grace of david whyte...

SOMETIMES

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

~ David Whyte ~

(Everything is Waiting for You)

The thought-provoking poet David Whyte considers
what we should be asking ourselves--
especially when we least want to
confront our own answers...

(gr)attitude

could it be, that...

gratitude

is actually a

sense of

heightened awareness of

our connection

to everything else ?

does Gratitude
*flow more freely*
when we break out of the

small, self-centered point of view

that gratitude arises from a feeling of

indebtedness,

and become aware

and appreciate

that through the
labors and intentions
and even the simple

existence

of an inconceivably large number of

people,

animals,

plants,

weather patterns,

chemical reactions, and other

nuanced occurrences,

we have been given the

miracle

that is our life?

i don't know.

but it seems to me that
there is

truth

in this
incredible

interconnectedness.

and it is my experience that
through active awareness,

gratitude can be

cultivated

into the attitude.

♥

you can't have something...

without nothing

.

without

space,

you couldn't have anything

solid

.

nothing

is what brings

something

into

*focus*

.

and

nothing is more

fertile

than

*emptiness*

.

~Alan Watts

And forevermore no discussion

about nothing will be complete without including

Seinfeld,

in my humble opinion,

a brilliant show about...

well, you can't have nothing

without something,

but what a hilarious way to

(en)lighten up about the

human experience of it all...

.

something and nothing

are inter-connected

 as Watts says,

in a marvelous system of

WIGGLES...

so go ahead,

dare to live

*your*

*unique*

shimmy-shake!

♥

'garden splendor'

Milan ~ a completely self-taught artist

born in Angeles City, Phillipines

"What lifts you into a higher perspective of your overall life, current situations and conditions aside,

and is there any imagery you connect with that

grounds you at the same time?"

in the spirit of living the questions,

for me what lifts and grounds me is

whatever touches

the loving as well as the suffering

in my heart,

awakening,

exciting,

lifting,

and soothing

spirit and soul,

connecting me to my higher power
and all other be-ings.

yoga!

poetry.

art.

humour.

nature,

being among it as well as

imagery like the piece above.

~   ~   ~

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence something that wants our love.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Simplici-Tea

Even though the dictionary lists easy as a synonym of simple, in my experience,

when it comes to living simply,

that has generally not been easy.

Yet at times I find I have that lurking belief that simplifying should be an easy process.

Now, cultivating simplicity....

that is a labor of love.

Still not easy,
but a more enjoyable approach
and purpose-oriented direction I am much more in tune with.

to cultivate:

to improve and prepare; to loosen or dig soil around...

to promote the growth of....

to nurture....

to form and refine...

to seek the acquaintance or goodwill of; make friends with...

...simply empowering ourselves to loosen or dig the soil around beliefs, in order to make room for improvements!

What do you think... Does one aspire to live simply, or is that an oxymoron?

here and now

In my previous rock wall post when I wrote about asking myself 'how did I get here', there truly was an element of wonder. Learning to climb that wall was something I did in the scope of my job/where I currently spend forty hours a week. I find myself working in a setting where sometimes I feel so far out of my element, yet other times I feel completely at home in this place where some of the harsh realities of our society are seen and dealt with.

I appreciate the lessons available when the lines between
work and play,
work and healing,
witnessing and speaking,
being and doing,
learning and leading,
are blurred...

Through her world of writing poetry, I was invited into the world of a teenager who experiences much emotional pain. It was at once an honor, humbling, eye-opening, sad, and hopeful. A powerful glimpse.

A woman next to me in a group spoke in one breath about the joys of growing up on a farm, and in the next breath with the same matter-of-fact tone about how there are only 4 siblings left out of the 6 now; 2 suicides.

As I stood in the doorway as instructed, observing an interaction on one of my first days, I was glad when the child assertively spoke to his boundaries being invaded, because he exposed my feeling of awkwardness that I was there without him knowing who I was or why I was there. When things are not right in our environment, it is the healthy response to speak to it. In an instant, he showed me that he was much less conditioned to hold back in this way than I was.

I became frazzled and distracted by the teenage girls who wouldn't stop talking when I was trying to facilitate the group. After my activity was done I found I was just going through the motions for a while because I was lost in the distraction/downward spiral of similar old feelings this stirred up. Eckhart Tolle refers to this as being stuck in a pain-body. They are just about us and are not based in the present reality.

"It's your world, kiddo, I'm just livin' in it."

My practice is to keep coming back to the wisdom of the way of the horse...
when a situation/stressor is past, they let go of what just happened and 'go back to grazing' so as to save their strength and energy for when they really need it, for survival. Letting go of the emotion and hanging onto the lesson.


So begins another week. I bring with me the reminder that though life is much larger than what we are currently experiencing, it's good to be experiencing it, warts and all.

"Since all things are naked, clear
and free from obscurations, there
is nothing to attain or realise.
The everyday practice is simply to
develop a complete acceptance and
openness to all situations and emotions.
And to all people ~ experiencing
everything totally without reservations
and blockages so that one never
withdraws or centralises onto oneself."
~ excerpted from a Maha Ati text translated by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

And so it is!

A Delicious Revolution

In the interest of completion and a pattern shift from letting things pile up, to creating space for fresh thoughts,

Some random ideas,

Each of which for me could be explored more in depth, and may be one day, but as I understand how the weight of seeing them in my drafts folder affects me (sends a subtle 'have to' message), I release them to the universe...

If there's an original thought out there, I could use it right now. ~ Bob Dylan

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

No matter what, you're either sitting, standing, or lying down ~ Byron Katie

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

Nocturne ~Jennifer K Sweeney

There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways 

along a rippling canal,
clean and unpeopled but for a musician

who plays a harp without strings.
The city has one chair 

where he sits by the broad strokes of water.
A lone streetlamp casts 

a blue arc of light.
A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.

The world filters through
his empty frame as he plucks the air.

Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don't.
That is the choice we are always making.

(I donned my apron rather than painting clothes this morning...)

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

'Answers' arise following relaxation, and are most often 'found' in what we are taught to understand as hindsight... hindsight is simply wisdom that arises naturally, post-pushing,

after surrendering of the ego's will to 'know', and allowing the channel to the Divine within to open.

(my thought after hearing Philip Glass describe his creative process as something like 'Have you ever stood in the fog and at first couldn't see a thing, but as you softened your gaze, the outline of a tree appears, and eventually you see the complete scene.')

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

If you consider the physiology similarities, fear can disguise itself as excitement.

I thought I was excited to go up in the boomlift, but as we lifted higher and higher off the ground, and further away from the base, I was actually more fearful than I had realized. My process of calming down and feeling safe involved first not giving over to the fear (I did not want to get down), then stopping where we were and asking questions to understand the equipment/situation.

Afterward I wondered whether this incongruency is connected with my mom's labor being induced when she gave birth to me. If so, then is my true nature somewhat of a physical thrill-seeker, just on my own terms (don't push me)? Or is it about control?

Maybe the excited feeling was real and the fearful feeling represented my conditioning in the world...

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

"...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

~Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters To a Young Poet

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

 "The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow." ~ Jim Hightower

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

"In fact, industrial farming and fast food operate hand in glove, very much like a vast conspiracy. Together they suppress variety, limit our choices, and manipulate our desires by getting us hooked on sugar and salt. What we are calling for is a revolution in public education --- a real Delicious Revolution. When the hearts and minds of our children are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with experience in the garden, sustainability will become the lens through which they see the world."

~ Alice Waters

~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~     ~

A person was continuously sending up the prayer to win the lottery...

One day the Lord finally said

'I'd really like to help you, my child, but could you meet me halfway and at least

buy a lottery ticket?'