Wondering the Grand Canyon

This week I have literally stood on the edge of the world, my self just a miniscule particle-part of the vastness of time, force, beauty, death and life. Such a wonder, the Grand Canyon! It took 5 million years for what we see on the surface and 2 billion years of earth history at the bedrock. When you ponder time and the forces of change, eternity is evolution infinitum. 

When I last visited the Grand Canyon with Wally 10 years ago, his response was shocking! He stripped naked and stood on the edge with his arms open and his face lit from within.  The contrast of his uninhibited aliveness stirred a longing in me. It felt pure. I clearly did not share the same impulse, in fact, it was forgotten until I visited the Grand Canyon again with my sisters this week.  

Walking along the edge I felt waves of electric charges in my groin - fear, protective and contracted mixed with intensified awareness. It heightens the preciousness of being, of flesh, and also the fears of suffering pain that annihilates. It's a thrill - one that draws and repels like both sides of a magnet. 

My inner landscape of late has been more like a tropical jungle. It's easy to get wandered-off-lost and lose track of time and meaning in busy-ness. It's necessary to cut away at the overwhelming jungle-growth, to clear a way to see. I resist taking on more and instead shed the weight of stuff that slows me. I feel the need to get on with it before I'm too tired. What is it to pound the jungle to discover that the threshold I'm on is actually a gaping chasm! My toes grip the earth, vastness blasts my face! Ay, Dios!  - hold onto life by nail and toe and maybe fall? Or let go of fear and hope and fall into the Wonder and Mystery? What is it to die before dying and live this way? Isn't that the pattern in the Grand Canyon scheme of things? 

I'm feel the transforming forces all around me. Below my feet are miles of time and matter, invisible, intelligent, the ground of my being realized in new materiality, and above me a spaciousness as great and grand and unknowable. I make a turn and walk the rim in a new practice of living- an act of active surrender. 
 

Deep calls to deep - a psalm

Carve me deeply.
Make of me a canyon
where your life moves.
Let it be known
God was here,
is here still
in this scoured place,
purified for genesis,
seeding creation,
cycling through seasons,
making all things
new by ancient forces:
one a cataclysmic undoing 
the other
a steady, slow polishing.

Shape me by the tenacity of your constancy.
I cannot know yet
what glory a canyon can hold
but I rise to kiss the sky,
bow boughs to the waters edge,
sink roots to the drink from the source,
move in time
to an irresistible force
of alchemy
making of me 
an ark of God. 

Ava

Our little dog died during the night. Her name was Ava. We do not know the cause of her sudden death, possibly a poisonous bite. We tried everything to save her but she went quickly.

Yesterday she woke up with the exuberant energy of a girl on Christmas morning.  She played with the other larger dogs without fear. Although she was small, she thought she was big. For this reason we loved her, her confidence in the friendliness of the world gave her a  large and joyful presence.

Dogs can easily reveal things about us. How do we face the day? How easily do we go with the flow of what life brings us? They effortly teach us  to accept what it is to be fundamentally happy or just to simply be. A dog does not try to be beautiful, or intelligent or rich. A dog is simply happy to be in the present moment. Her only focus is what is in front of her nose, not in the past or in the future. She assumes that the world is generous and that everyone loves her. And why not!

When we choose to love, we do not know the whole story. We hope for more joy than sadness but there is always both. One must love bravely and when there is suffering pay it with gratitude. We do not have our little friend by our side but her love-lesson is always with us.

I want to be like Ava - small on the outside, big on the inside, eagerly ready to love again and again.

The ark...the inside story

I've been wondering about Noah's ark. It occurs to me that our home is an ark

of sorts during the tropical storms of the rainy seasons - Wally's ark! We head for the house when it rains. The dogs make a bee line, anxious to have an excuse to be inside. Even the varmints: mice, termites, ants and scorpions escape the wet wheedling their way inside. When there is a storm everything looks for shelter. Inside, we huddle together watching the light strobe, bracing for the thunder, feeling its rumble, listening to the wind and rain pound the windows and roof. Inside it is still and we wait. We sense the wild, destructive force of nature. Who knows how the storm will play?

God told Noah to bring all the animals into the ark - the opposites, male, female, wild, tame, clean, unclean, crawling, flying - and once inside they are locked in together. The differences between one human to another, between people and animals, between kinds of animals are mind boggling. So the ark becomes the place where humans and animals must do the messy work of living together.

It's not a children's story, and it's more than a story about a flood. It's a metaphor about living in relationships. That's the pattern I'm seeing in everything lately, that's why ecology feels so important. Learning to live locked in with differences, learning acceptance, being willing to change for the sake of survival...it's a veritable laboratory of relationships! 

Forgiveness will be necessary to make the connections. Fr. Richard Rohr says, "Forgiveness is the only way to free ourselves from the entrapment of the past. Nothing new happens without it."  He thinks that the first forgiveness we experience is to forgive reality itself for not meeting our needs. There are some things that can't be reconciled. We will have to find a way to live with them. It will mean holding together that gathering of contraries. Again, connection, the Divine Mystery that holds all things together - call it ark ecology. 

What happens in the ark doesn't stay in the ark. It seeds the earth.

Kind of interesting when you think about it: the ark was built to save the world. Maybe the work of living together with what is inside the ark, the relationships, is the real story of salvation.

after the ark, a rainbow...

Counter-culture

The first thing I managed to do after summer school was fall down the stairs. I bonked my head, back and elbow hard enough to be a gimp for a week. Not the form of rest I had in mind...

So much for my plans. Life happens and Who's to say that's not part of The Plan. I'm hinting of God of course. It seems that's the usual meeting place, when there's no control and no help in sight...."uh, hello, God (Higher Power, Universe, Life Force)  uh, it's me, uh, ...down here."

It doesn't have to be an accident. I hear it from all my friends, the insistent changes that come with aging.  The old bod doesn't get up and go like it used to. The cumulative effect of not enough exercise, or flossing, too many cocktails of diet coke and ibuprofen finally undercut the temple of God.  Or like yesterday, when the power was out for 10 hours and the temperature and humidity were 100 and big ants were cutting a highway from the ground to the 3rd story veranda where me and the dogs were panting and praying for a respite. We would have settled for a breeze but the wonder of those ants distracted us!

Seems like everyone I know is going through some version of unwelcome change.

Our society hasn't prepared us well for change or for the third part of age. We're being sold youth as the highest aim of desire. What an upside-down world! Please, let's be counter-culture!

As our bodies soften, why can't we accept that as a good thing? Years ago, a man that worked for me said that his sensation of being loved was getting smothered in big flabby arms and breasts because that's the way his mom, aunts and grandmothers were built. Our bodies are not ourselves. Our bodies are sacred to those who love us, to children, dogs and lovers, in ways we never think about because we see ourselves only with our own eyes -  and not just ourselves, but everything else too. We see the world as we see it, not as it truly is in it's magnificent, glorious LARGENESS.

Mimi is 16 - 112 dog years

This week I couldn't be productive, instead I was given the gift of being at home with my dogs on a scale that they crave. I used to think that ticks were a plague but now I see ticks as one-on-one time with each dog - connect as I dis-connect... ticks that is. Weird, heh? This small, humorous joy comes as joy often comes: in unexpected ways and places.

We need to slow down to experience the gratitude and wonder of being alive in this extraordinary world, to notice the minute and exquisite details in the ordinary. This is stuff that a retirement nest-egg can't give you.

I want to grow old together with my friends and savor these capstone years for what they are - a gift of age.


"Grow old with me, the best is yet to be..."

Counter-culture

School's end, begin again...

Today was the final day of summer school. Our theme was Ecology and Me! The week was full-isimo! The children were good, enthusiastic and sweet. This evening we had an awards ceremony with 100 children and their families attending. My heart felt full looking out at those eager faces, feeling the newness of connections that could last for years.

Lizzy, our yoga teacher, taught us a hand signal in class that encapsulates the week's teaching perfectly. For each of your hands put your index finger and thumb together (connection), now touch the points to form two eyes and touch the remaining fingers tip to tip (together). Turn it upside down and you have a heart (love).

Ecology is about how organisms are connected and it also deals with their environment. Isn't that the pattern of everything? Our micro and macro world is relational no matter the species. Another way to think about this symbolic gesture is see the world with the eyes of your heart and be amazed at the endless unfolding of connections. Maybe one day science will discover that all things are held together and have their very being and evolution by an invisible force. 

We could call that love.

For Love of the World

by Charlotte Tall Mountain

For the love of a tree

she went out on a limb.

For the love of the sea

she rocked the boat.

For the love of the earth

she dug deeper.

For the love of community,

she mended fences.

For the love of the stars,

she let her light shine.

For the love of spirit,

she nurtured her soul.

For the love of a good time,

she sowed seeds of happiness.

For the love of the goddess,

she drew down the moon.

For the love of nature,

she made compost.

For the love of a good meal,

she gave thanks.

For the love of family,

she reconciled differences.

For the love of creativity,

she entertained new possibilities.

For the love of her enemies,

she suspended judgement.

For the love of her self,

she acknowledged her worth.

And the world was richer for her.