It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, …the glory of everything….
Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren, dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart.
She was in a class by herself.
It is not that often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White
During the past year, perhaps my greatest regret regarding the demise of my twenty year relationship is that I also lost my paddling partner.
No more of our paddling alone-together into remote wilderness.
There are not many people with whom you can share deep silence,
who can paddle on their left,
and adjust the camp stove’s Whisper Lite fuel system when you come home hungry.
Becky was master of all three.
And every time I realize this, these lines of Wilbur’s mourning of Charlotte come to mind.
I have to smile even as I feel the sadness.
No more paddling alone-together.
It’s a wonder the dreams haven’t started up again.
For years, I had this recurring dream about paddling up a river.
I believe the roots lie in an afternoon I spent, some forty years ago, with my best high school buddies.
Somehow, that day we managed to get our boat way up the river that formed Lake Decatur.
We were well past all our usual skiing routes.
We’d reached into the Sangamon itself. It was not a place anyone ever motored.
And we ourselves hadn’t really planned to go there. But something just kind of pulled us on.
Vivid in my memory is that the river possessed the most curious luminescent yellow light and the softest, deep silence, even as a bunch of teenagers picnicked and joked.
I dropped a line into the murky waters and pulled out the stubbiest brown catfish. We wondered if perhaps it weren’t an evolutionary fossil.
I resolved to return one day to those waters so full of mystery. But, I never did.
Instead, we graduated and scattered to the winds.
Some years later, the dreams began.
They came in a couple different versions: a gravelly put-in below the dam, an icy winter rendezvous at an 1840’s village – but always, there is the longing to return;
return to the far upstream, beyond all the usual routes.
To return to the Mystery.
And always in these dreams, I am thwarted by logistics.
The ice is too thick. The food runs out. Time’s too short. People don’t show up.
Then four years ago, in a nameless creek, off a lake formed by the Allagash River in Maine my paddling partner and I proceeded till the rocks would let us go no further.
There we sat, in the sun and silence and simply felt what that all was like.
Silence. No one else.
Well, maybe a moose.
Quiet, now. You’d hear the breath or soggy footstep first.
Silence. An insect buzz.
Suddenly, I realized, “This is the river of my dreams.”
I’d made it.
What a wonder it was to sit there wide awake in what had been a dream.
I made plans to go back the next summer, but logistics got too complicated.
And then, by the year after that, we had fallen all apart.
No more paddling partner.
No more access to the silent wilderness.
No more paddling on the river of my dreams.
I have sat many evenings in my backyard watching the trees, grieving this loss...
Now, the Garrison Institute, located on cliffs high above the Hudson River, is “conveniently located just one hour north of New York City”
and certainly not wilderness.
But most curiously – revolutionarily – I discovered there, in the midst of 170 people on retreat, that I hadn’t really been seeking wilderness at all.
Nor, had I been seeking isolation or even the river itself.
I had been seeking Silence.
I discovered there at Garrison that the Silence in the trees, on the wind, in the sky and lilac blossom, is the same Silence deep within the wilderness.
It is the same Silence (though I never called it that)
which has transfixed my attention these past few months right in my own backyard.
It’s the same Silence I have been sitting in and staring into with unseeing eyes.
The same Silence I have been sitting in and bemoaning my perceived regrets.
…if you want to wake up, you need to hang around awakened beings.
It can be awakened human beings, awakened trees, awakened mountains, awakened rivers…
When we expose ourselves to that awakeness, to that environment where spirit and matter are harmonized, it helps us to awaken.
Ultimately, that’s what satsang is.
That’s also what meditation really is…
When I sat and listened to Kwong [Roshi] talk at retreats, sometimes I was very interested so I would really be listening…It happened on one of those days I wasn’t listening quite as much…All of a sudden it was like smoke, that subtle stream of presence was sensed.
I knew, “That’s what he’s doing. It’s not about all this talk, talk, talk.” …that’s not what was going on…
for some reason, through no choice of his own or of any of us present, there was a magnification of something very subtle, very pervasive…
we think nothing is happening…
So I had missed it until that day and that one talk, when I experienced that subtle source, and it was just shining.
I saw it and sensed it, and then it was shining inside me, too…
I wouldn’t call this true awakening, but it was a foretaste of awakening: realizing the sacred presence. …
The old Taoists would call this “rectifying the chi.”…
That’s why scriptures have advised us to hang out with awakened beings.
The awakened one could be a human being, a tree being, a street-corner being. Expose yourself to them… and this rectification happens.
Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing
Or, as Wilbur might say, expose yourself to “the glory of everything”
including your own backyard.
You might just find that all those distractions and pollutions of the city are remarkably similar to thoughts in meditation.
In meditation we learn that thoughts do not have to be banished into the mental hinterland.
When thoughts are given permission to “just be” then you are freed to settle into the Silence that is there all along.
Life can be just like that too,
once your chi’s been rectified a bit.
Showing posts with label qigong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label qigong. Show all posts
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Fishing with Mystery
at some point in my life, fishing was a way of achieving a timelessness, especially fishing in rivers because rivers have a very timeless quality.
They're always flowing, flowing, flowing.
They're flowing down to the sea.
The clouds form, they float over the countryside, the rain falls, they fill up the ground, the springs…
The stream is kind of this immortal entity, at least in my mind…
and you kind of get swept up in this immortal cycle and kind of lose yourself.
Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it.
It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist.
James Prosek
On Speaking of Faith last Sunday Krista Tippett interviewed artist, trout fisherman, and something of a mystic, James Prosek. I loved the show.
I’ve written before about the limitations of naming.
Prosek probably shares this critcism, but he arrives there from such a different path it’s well worth walking with him for awhile:
When I was four or five years old, I would draw birds at the kitchen table.
As I finished each piece I asked my mother to write the names of the birds beneath the pictures…Somehow a picture wasn’t finished if the animal’s name wasn’t there.
When I learned to write, I scrawled the common and scientific names of each creature beneath my drawings myself— by example of Audubon, or any others who made paintings in the natural-history tradition.
At nine I developed a passion for trout and began to compile a list of all the diverse types…
As I painted trout through my late teens, major shifts in trout taxonomy were taking place… I began to understand that species were less static than the fathers of modern taxonomy… once believed.
That nature was static and classifiable was an idea perpetuated by the natural history museum (repository for dead nature), the zoo (repository for living nature), and the book (repository for thoughts and images related to nature).
These mediums were all distillations of nature, what individuals of authority deemed an appropriate cross section to present to the public.
None had adequately represented Nature—at once chaotic, multifarious, and interconnected…
I was conflicted—I loved the names that had first led me to recognize the existence of diversity… but as I learned more I wanted to throw away the names, step beyond those constraints, in order to preserve a sense of wonder that I had felt from an early age.
Such thoughts were the origin of the curvilinear lines in my present work….
The first paintings I did with lines emanating from creatures were meant to be imaginings of what God’s or Nature’s blueprint of a particular creature might look like. … The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath….
James Prosek, The Failure of Names
Such lines also bring to mind the Australian aboriginal Songlines.
During the Dreamtime, archetypal ancestral spirits are said to have wandered across the Earth creating and naming trees, rocks, waterholes, animals and other natural phenomena.
Their dreaming and journeying trails became the songlines, an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and serve as subtle tracks for navigation.
To me, Songlines seem an earthly version of the energy channels and flowing Qi that one becomes aware of through meditation and an illustration of the Taoist emphasis of the connection between macrocosm and microcosm.
That Prosek seems to have discovered similar lines and meanings really delights me.
Click Here, if you’d like to see a “The Myth of Order,” a video of Prosek’s art accompanied by his own narration.
It’s well worth the three minutes –just be patience for Krista Tippett’s face to disappear.
Or, Click Here to see a tattooed Buddha – another artist’s vision of the energy channels?
They're always flowing, flowing, flowing.
They're flowing down to the sea.
The clouds form, they float over the countryside, the rain falls, they fill up the ground, the springs…
The stream is kind of this immortal entity, at least in my mind…
and you kind of get swept up in this immortal cycle and kind of lose yourself.
Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it.
It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist.
James Prosek
On Speaking of Faith last Sunday Krista Tippett interviewed artist, trout fisherman, and something of a mystic, James Prosek. I loved the show.
I’ve written before about the limitations of naming.
Prosek probably shares this critcism, but he arrives there from such a different path it’s well worth walking with him for awhile:
When I was four or five years old, I would draw birds at the kitchen table.
As I finished each piece I asked my mother to write the names of the birds beneath the pictures…Somehow a picture wasn’t finished if the animal’s name wasn’t there.
When I learned to write, I scrawled the common and scientific names of each creature beneath my drawings myself— by example of Audubon, or any others who made paintings in the natural-history tradition.
At nine I developed a passion for trout and began to compile a list of all the diverse types…
As I painted trout through my late teens, major shifts in trout taxonomy were taking place… I began to understand that species were less static than the fathers of modern taxonomy… once believed.
That nature was static and classifiable was an idea perpetuated by the natural history museum (repository for dead nature), the zoo (repository for living nature), and the book (repository for thoughts and images related to nature).
These mediums were all distillations of nature, what individuals of authority deemed an appropriate cross section to present to the public.
None had adequately represented Nature—at once chaotic, multifarious, and interconnected…
I was conflicted—I loved the names that had first led me to recognize the existence of diversity… but as I learned more I wanted to throw away the names, step beyond those constraints, in order to preserve a sense of wonder that I had felt from an early age.
Such thoughts were the origin of the curvilinear lines in my present work….
The first paintings I did with lines emanating from creatures were meant to be imaginings of what God’s or Nature’s blueprint of a particular creature might look like. … The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath….
James Prosek, The Failure of Names
Such lines also bring to mind the Australian aboriginal Songlines.
During the Dreamtime, archetypal ancestral spirits are said to have wandered across the Earth creating and naming trees, rocks, waterholes, animals and other natural phenomena.
Their dreaming and journeying trails became the songlines, an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and serve as subtle tracks for navigation.
To me, Songlines seem an earthly version of the energy channels and flowing Qi that one becomes aware of through meditation and an illustration of the Taoist emphasis of the connection between macrocosm and microcosm.
That Prosek seems to have discovered similar lines and meanings really delights me.
Click Here, if you’d like to see a “The Myth of Order,” a video of Prosek’s art accompanied by his own narration.
It’s well worth the three minutes –just be patience for Krista Tippett’s face to disappear.
Or, Click Here to see a tattooed Buddha – another artist’s vision of the energy channels?
Friday, May 16, 2008
Waking Up each Morning
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
Adrienne Rich, Power
Or to put this in another way and on another level:
It is necessary that the Current be attuned to the resources of the body and particularly the nervous system. While in the Current, I feel exaltation and a sense of well being that reaches well down into the outer organism, yet this does not change the fact that the Current is a powerful energy and does tax certain powers of endurance… The physical body is clearly the weakest link…
if the body is thought of as something like a ten ampere fuse, while from the transformer, just beyond, there is being delivered a current on the order of one hundred amperes at high potential. One is constantly under a pressure to use more than ten amperes and thus strain the fuse close to the point of burning out.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy.
And in yet a third manner, this from Eckhart Tolle:
Chi is the inner energy field of your body. It is the bridge between the outer you and the Source. It lies halfway between the manifested, the world of form, and the Unmanifested. Chi can be likened to a river or an energy stream. If you take the focus of your consciousness deeply into the inner body, you are tracing the course of this river back to its Source…
You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains for a while when you return to the manifested, the world of separate forms. This energy is much more vital than food….
…use your inner body as a portal through which you enter the Unmanifested, and keep that portal open so that you stay connected with the Source at all times. It makes no difference, as far as the inner body is concerned, whether your outer physical body is old or young, frail or strong. The inner body is timeless…
The Power of Now.
Most mornings, lately, I wake up with something of an elevator ride.
It begins from the ground floor of “Existence”- I guess.
No object. No thought. No dream. Still, there seems to be something to the Nothing, when I look back in time. A bit of light, something even though there’s nothing, it is certainly not empty.
A swoosh as if some elevator is rising, pulls “me” out of That pure being, into a tingling field of energy as simultaneously I regain the ability for thought and to notice what is going on.
The tingling energy of rather dingy light (I want to call it “golden” – but that’s too clean and clear) this electric tingling of dirty dish-water energy swells up and floods my physical body. Instantly, my physical body is racked by inner trembling and nausea, where previously body was just fine and resting quietly.
Now, I can notice that it’s morning and the bedroom is surrounding me.
The elevator ride is over, even as awareness of my inner body remains.
I lie there for a moment hoping things will settle, become less intense, before I venture reaching out a hand to Bennie.
He is such a happy fellow. By contrast, I am feeling fairly trashed.
The ride up into "awareness of..." is such an uncontrolled process and where I am deposited is so very disappointing.
It all ends up in an “Ugh” and nausea.
Becky and I used to laugh about a picture of me as a baby in my buggy, ca.1952.
We entitled it, “Patty, trapped in her body.”
We joked about the shock of incarnating and how I’d been blessed with one solid chunk of body. (“Ninety-fifth percentile in every grade school class and all of it was muscle, dense.”)
Waking up these days seems to be a small scale recapitulation of that incarnating.
Leave the Light, take on inhabitation of this dross, dross body.
I find it tedious.
I also think of Maharishi saying whenever we’d complain, “Something good is happening.”
But, I think Tolle has put it somewhat inaccurately.
It does make a difference what shape your body is in.
(Why else do people become vegetarians, especially while on spiritual retreat?)
Each morning's re-awakening leads me to all sorts of questions.
Why is my inner light so dingy? What inner alchemy is this?
Does the physical body pollute the inner? Or, does the subtle stir-up the gross?
I bet both sides can be to blame. So, which direction, out-to-in or in-to-out, is causing my particular malaise?
Is this dross of physical or psychological origin? What did I eat yesterday? What can I change today? Is this toxicity from this life? A past life?
…so many questions… I will stop here.
… Or, perhaps, I’d do well to rethink the fact I’m sleeping with a dog.
Oh! That is simply far too sad.
Bennie stays.
PostScript:
And now I see. The physical body is the fuel. The inner body is the flame.
The inner body doesn’t care what the physical is like: strong, weak, pure, impure.
It’s all fuel for the fire and It will burn the dross until all the fuel is gone.
Nothing gross (including Bennie) can pollute this fire.
But, you can sure generate a lot of smoke, shakes, nausea, and more.
As with tending any fire, you want a clean and controlled burn.
And tending to the fire is a skill we each must master for our selves.
As for The Poet, Merrell-Wolff, and Tolle, they are right on – each in their own way.
You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone ...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down
the upbreathing air.
Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” The Dream of a Common Language.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Guided Movements
Guided Movements, also called Spontaneous Qigong are part of my Taoist meditation practice. In the Sum Faht tradition, this practice is begun by standing, closing the eyes, and bowing to the four corners of the universe. Then, mentally, one requests guided movements. Next one waits for one’s internal energy to shift. You have to feel the energy or qi build until it is strong enough to move your limbs and body on its own accord. You must allow yourself to follow the energy, never rushing or anticipating. The mind must be kept out of the process.
Most Qigong practices or forms follow a specific pattern and sequence of movements. For example, in the Five Animal Play system movements of the deer, tiger, monkey, crane and bear are mimicked. Bone Marrow Cleansing or Eight Pieces of Silk Brocade will have other patterns of movement.
In spontaneous qigong the body may shake, gently sway, dance or reel, perform martial art moves, mimic any number of animals, or adopt a mudra-like pose. Movement can occur on one side of the body only, or be performed bilaterally. Whatever movement appears is deemed appropriate for that person at that moment given his or her own, unique physiological and psychological needs.
Often the effects of guided movements can feel very cathartic, allowing one to release deeply held emotions. Afterwards one may also feel relaxed and harmonious. The practice is one way to strengthen the body so that it can handle the flow of energy accessed in the deeper levels of sitting meditation.
The poet Rumi has written,
The spiritual path wrecks the body
And afterwards restores it to health.
It destroys the house to unearth the treasure,
And with that treasure builds it better than before.
Some schools of Taoism have emphasized the necessity of strengthening the body prior to instruction in meditation so that the fire and destruction, so beautifully described by Rumi, may be ameliorated if not avoided. A stronger body will also support a clearer psychology.
Most Qigong practices or forms follow a specific pattern and sequence of movements. For example, in the Five Animal Play system movements of the deer, tiger, monkey, crane and bear are mimicked. Bone Marrow Cleansing or Eight Pieces of Silk Brocade will have other patterns of movement.
In spontaneous qigong the body may shake, gently sway, dance or reel, perform martial art moves, mimic any number of animals, or adopt a mudra-like pose. Movement can occur on one side of the body only, or be performed bilaterally. Whatever movement appears is deemed appropriate for that person at that moment given his or her own, unique physiological and psychological needs.
Often the effects of guided movements can feel very cathartic, allowing one to release deeply held emotions. Afterwards one may also feel relaxed and harmonious. The practice is one way to strengthen the body so that it can handle the flow of energy accessed in the deeper levels of sitting meditation.
The poet Rumi has written,
The spiritual path wrecks the body
And afterwards restores it to health.
It destroys the house to unearth the treasure,
And with that treasure builds it better than before.
Some schools of Taoism have emphasized the necessity of strengthening the body prior to instruction in meditation so that the fire and destruction, so beautifully described by Rumi, may be ameliorated if not avoided. A stronger body will also support a clearer psychology.
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