I never imagined that turning 47 would be as much fun as it was
Year: 2008
I awoke this morning
I awoke this morning
a poem flowing out of me
taking me from dreamland to morning light
An acknowledgement of all the Shadows
and the rightness of all the things I hide
A poem that wouldn’t end
because everything is part of it
A poem I couldn’t share, wouldn’t dare
for fear no one could understand but me.
A cat nuzzled me awake
Odor of an acrid litterbox
All perfect.
Before my feet touched the floor,
I realized
I am the poem I dreamed,
My life is the poem
written not for forty-seven years
But written from the first breath
I breathed,
the first body I owned.
Now there are billions
as much me as I am
living life in different circumstances
As I live life in mine.
All rage is mine, all love is mine,
all indifference and confusion mine.
I somersault naked off of water buffaloes behind the Taj Mahal,
And in Norfolk share the laughter.
I’m not alive
I’m life.
I’m awake.
What are you looking here for?
Julie has said all that needs to be said.
Sometimes it amazes me …
That so many people have yet to discover yerba mate. In Norfolk, Fair Grounds is the only place I know that serves it. Fortunately, it’s not so hard to get the yerba mate leaves. I’ve been brewing my own now since last fall. This weekend I bought a French press. It really makes a great difference… so much better than tea bags.
Mate, like hookah, is just one pleasure I can’t do without.
You think that…
I recently saw a video of Eckhart Tolle teaching at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. One of the stories he shared was of another teacher, Byron Katie, who was visiting some patients in a cancer ward. She stopped in a chatted with a very depressed woman who had a massive tumor on one of her legs. The prognosis wasn’t good; she was probably going to die.
Byron Katie asked her why she was so depressed and said, "I don’t see what the problem is."
Needless to say, that angered and depressed the patient even more. "Here," she said, throwing off the sheet, "Look! My right thigh is twice the size of my left!"
"Oh, " Byron Katie said, "Now I understand. The problem is that you think that your right thigh should be the same size as your left!"
And for the first time in months, the woman with the cancer laughed.
Isn’t it interesting how insignificant most problems shrink when viewed in just the light of the present moment without that odd imaging we call the "future?"
Journaling
I’ve kept a journal at several key times in my life, but never really threw myself into it until 1998, when I read The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. If you’ve never read the book, well, you should. I don’t want to go into my "frimmin‘" superlatives here, but The Artist’s Way is a book that truly changed my life. It’s largely a workbook, filled with exercises to do. Unlike other spiritual self-improvement workbooks,such as Brezhny’s Pronoia, these exercises aren’t meant to entertain you by reading about them… they are really meant to be done, and the more of them you do, the more you will discover about yourself and the more you open up to Isness.
The primary exercise of The Artists’s Way is journaling, specifically a style of journaling Cameron calls "morning pages," writing out exactly three pages by hand, at the very beginning of the day, keeping the pen moving… no censorship, no editing, no revision, no effort to record the previous day’s events. The only goals were complete honesty and stream-of-consciousness itself. Morning pages is essentially letting your soul "take a dump" just as your body does.
As for the other exercises, a group of friends and I regularly met to discuss them and do them. More often than not, though, I was the only one who did them, and (surprise!) I was the one who benefited most. The effects were tremendous. Really, the me of of 2007 2008 is pretty different from the me of 1998. The Artist’s Way had a part to play in that.
After a year or so, I began doing the morning pages less faithfully, and although I still journaled sporadically, when I started blogging, my private journaling virtually came to a standstill.
One of the reasons why I’ve been blogging less, is that I’ve started journaling again. My style of journaling now isn’t morning pages, per se, but it is just as uncensored and spontaneous. What I do now is carry my oh-so-trendy little Moleskine notebook with me almost everywhere I go. When waiting for someone or something, I have time to write a little. After a meal, I often have time to write a page or so. (Moleskine pages are pretty small). Sometimes I’ll make several little entries in a day. Other times, I’ll go several days between entries.
Is it dangerous to keep my most private thoughts and feelings in a concrete form where they could easily be read by others? Not really. Since I started journaling again, it’s been in Esperanto!
I’m not dead yet!
Seriously! I didn’t mean to take an unannounced month off from blogging… (usually I announce those things) and I was startled to realize it’s been a month since my last post. As the Romans said, tempus is a fugitive. 🙂
Besides keeping busy on my job, I’m working on a new and exciting Web project, I’ve started learning French (mais oui!), am continuing with learning Esperanto, and have embarked on the task of making some extensive changes to frimmin.com. My spiritual life isn’t dead either, but it’s not quite as easy to summarize in sentence or two.
But at any rate, rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated! I feel happy… I think I’ll go for a walk!
No-Mind and Love
I’m going through a book this year which I bought long ago and never read: The Old Hermit’s Almanac by Fr. Edward Hays. It’s an unconventional book of days, full of delightful fun and deep wisdom. Here’s part of today’s entry for January 15, Non-Spectator Day:
As the Zen masters say, "When you eat, eat; when you walk, walk." Living in the present moment as fully as possible helps satisfy the itch to monitor yourself and still be yourself. As in theater, so in life — the true artists are those who are so fully possessed by what they are doing that they have no time to watch themselves. When they forget to be possessed in this way and give into the temptation to observe their wonderful performance, then they usually stumble.
Practice today the virtue of self-forgetfulness, which is at the heart of making love — being totally engaged in what you are doing or in another person. Those who make love daily by self-forgetfulness find ectasy in celebrating the love they have been making day by day.
Demiurge
Sometimes I think I really must be mad for keeping this blog. Not just because I’m trying to write about what can’t be written, but to do it publicly! Yet, when I feel that no one can possibly understand what I’m saying, seems to be when people understand me best. It’s strange, but freeing. So here’s a teensy story about something I did recently and what I learned from it.
On New Year’s Eve, I happily cursed "God." (And happily told him I loved him too, but that’s another story.) What was interesting was the rightness I immediately felt about it. For I while, I considered this the union of opposites, yin and yang, action and rest, blessing and blasphemy. God encompasses all, nicht wahr? But the word Demiurge came to mind soon after.
What was the "God" I lost when I had the "empty holodeck" experience?
What was the "God" I wanted to be free of?
What was the "God" Meister Eckhart prayed God to destroy?
If there’s one useful concept from Gnosticism that applies to those on the path today, it might be the Demiurge, though not in a literalistic way as many of the Gnostics apparently did. Gnostics believed there was a false God, the Demiurge, who erroneously thought himself the Source of all, and who demanded worship and sacrifice. Christ came to show us the way to the Father and escape the Demiurge. There’s something to that… False gods are the greatest bane to humanity. All concepts of God tend to be Demiurge.
Cast off concepts of God, and what is left? Nothing that can be imagined, nothing that can be named, but only what is always there, all the time.
It’s easy to show (facetiously, at least) that atheists and monotheists and Zennists believe in exactly same true Creator.
Atheist: God doesn’t exist. (Nothing created the Universe)
Theist: What came before God? Nothing. (Nothing is the ultimate Source).
Zennist: Emptiness is the true nature of everything. (Nothing is ultimate reality.)
There something about that Nothing. Even atheists, monotheists, and Zen practitioners can see that Nothing or No-thing is the real Power, the real One, ever-present, and with all the power to make Everything appear. Images and forms, mental or physical, are not that.
The God who can be cursed
Is not the eternal God
(with apologies to Lao Tzu)
Resolution
Just one this year:
To be alive every day of my life.