WINTER MEDITATION

I love the little altars created by the seasons. I came across this one on a recent walk beside the dirt road above my house. The road is no more than a rough track, grassy in summer and muddy and rutted most of the year. I like walking it because to one side up the mountain is dense forest and rhododendren thicket while stunning mountain vistas appear from time to time on the other. Then there are the momentary treasures, the tiny landscapes created by moss, rock and root,  a number of small rivulets trickling over miniature boulders making fairy waterfalls and little altars like the one above that offer feather and shell to the mystery of winter.

In my earlier life I moved fast, constantly on my way to somewhere else. I have always loved walking and hiking with destination in mind..goal, accomplishment, conquest. Now in old age I prefer to stroll, to savor what is at my feet as well as at eye level. Always the taskmaster voice in my head instructs me to pick up the pace for the sake of my health but a softer lovelier new voice encourages my dawdling, stopping, seeing, touching, listening, inhaling, even tasting the landscape of the present moment. When I let go of effort, I can briefly move into vertical time and become one with all that is seamless and beautiful. This to me is the truest form of prayer.

AN AUTUMN IDENTITY

My blog posts seem to be almost annual. As someone who writes every day this puzzles me but so do lots of things so I keep on living in the mystery of my own contradictions.

As I took my morning walk I was struck by the resonance between this stage of my life and the season.  Autumn is about finishing.  She is messy, flinging her seeds out at random.  She sends some to cling and some to be carried by others landing out in the wilds of the world. She makes one last colorful  display then dances out onto the wind to join the leaf litter, finally to become the humus of memory.

The field above my neighbor's house is glorious with goldenrod. Purple asters bloom on the borders, and the dogwoods, always early messengers, are already red and rust with bright red berries. The summer rains have left lingering green in the pastures, but my barn is filled and fragrant with bales of second cut hay. The woodshed is full and the garden is still bright with chard, kale and zinnias.

I live happily in the illusion that my fall preparations can prevent winter disaster.  It is the same with my advancing years.. the "autumn" preventions...vitamins, herbs, long walks, meditation and gym visits. Yet I feel an emptying, a release of illusions of mental and physical control over anything. With this comes a letting go of fear, a primitive radical trust in pure awareness and a beneficent Presence.

I have a strong desire to plunge into the reds and oranges, to roast pumpkins and bake apple pies. I love standing on my porch and breathing in the mountains.  I write crazy poems and take close up photographs of the rich browns in empty pods.  Nothing makes the sense that it used to. Like the dry stalks along the roadside, little that was important remains.  I want to dance as long as I can and then let go into the wind.    

 

ADVENT MUSINGS

It is the first Sunday in Advent, a season in the church calendar that is largely ignored by all the frantic pre-Christmas consuming and celebrating.  I have a tree up early this year, because I will be away for THE day and love the lights and baubles and smell of the Frasier fir.  Yet I love Advent, the season of waiting... season of trust in the inward and the unknown.  It is the time of darkness before the light returns at the Solstice and the birth of the divine child in all of us is declared once again.

Advent is a season that is pure metaphor. In the awareness it brings, it requires patience and the willingness to sit silent with mystery.  I have no idea what my life will bring forth next.  I have had losses and accomplishments, endured pain, inflicted pain on others, participated in both ugliness and beauty. What I see, looking back is that I was/am only a temporary vessel for Life (or Presence or God) to pass through. Every disappointment and failure has ultimately been redeemed, and I have no clue how that Grace happens; it just always does.  I can accept that I am not meant to know.  There is peace in that powerlessness.

I see more clearly these days that the "seasons" in the practice and tradition that I choose to follow are not rigid requirements and are not meant to indoctrinate me with literal "beliefs" but rather gentle gifts of space and time that invite me to participate, to let go of my mental gyrations and cravings for satisfaction now.  When I am quiet and allow myself to wait in complete confidence, I know that the gift is already given and will be birthed into awareness not in my needy ego time, but in Holy Time.

ON TRAVEL AND STAYING PUT

I will be spending the next couple of days preparing for a week at a much loved retreat center and visiting with old friends and old home territory on the way.  I am looking forward to the road trip up through the Shenandoah valley, the Pennsylvania countryside and all the beauty of the Eastern seaboard. Much of my life was spent in that landscape.. school and college, my children born there, dearest of friends made, sweet times and terrible losses through the years..a precious history.  Yet, when I lived in those places there was always an underlying restlessness, the yearning for something else that I have written of earlier.

As I sit here early on my porch looking out at the mountains and mist in the cool August morning with the low sounds of doves and faint crow calls, I realize that I am finally home in spirit.   Folks have asked why I travel so little.  My answer is always, "I'm where I would go if I were going somewhere." In the years I have left I am satisfied, most of the time to go deep into this one place, this heart's home I have been blessed to find.  I have a theory that we carry a kind of home landscape in our hearts for all of our lives and when we find ourselves in it, it feels completely right. 

It is a privilege, in this crazy world, to be able to choose my life. I am blessed to be able to go on retreat and experience beauty and quiet and wonderful teaching so I look forward to packing the car and setting out.  It is not, however, the old search for new people, places and things to satisfy my craving for more of something new, shiny and better.  It is instead a revisiting of beloved people and places from my history and the chance to steep in teachings that I can bring home to enhance the days here, bringing me home to my center.  The question then becomes, how well do I inhabit this place, this life that have left?  I love that question!



  

   

RAM DASS WAS RIGHT

                                     

This forest where I live was once a temperate rainforest and seems to be returning to that state. Shower after shower of sometimes drippy, sometimes steady rain has been with us for days.  The mountains have disappeared in the distance, and clouds are in the treetops just down the hill.  Green is heavy everywhere. A damp chill in the air is feels nice after the brutal and unusual heat of the past weeks, but I find myself wishing for some Carolina blue and a sunshine relief from wetness and fog. What is here though is moisture that fills the water table and my pond, causes weak trees to fall and mud in the barn..mixed blessings.

While I have loved my adventures and my curiosity, I am finally bone weary of discontent, of wanting to be somewhere else, someone else, in some other time doing some new thing. In my seventieth year now, it seems a good idea, even an opportunity, to plant my contentment right where I am.  In adulthood, I have lived in six states, eleven houses, had a couple of husbands and untold numbers of dreams, notions and impulses, some followed to fruition and many more discarded. I have tried numerous paths to God, only to learn that just stopping where I am is where IT is.  

As I talk with friends I find that many of us have had this experience of lifelong chasing the next shiny thing into the daydream and losing much of our lives in the process.  I have stayed in this beloved place that I am married to for many years now, but the restlessness still aggravates. The seductive fantasy of a new love beckons.. a smaller more manageable property, a new medium for working with color, a new poetic form and on and on.  It has been fun but now seems fragmented and exhausting.

In some things I have been faithful and gone deep. Those times have been the source of real joy and learning.. loving what I have and knowing the fullness of enough.. looking around and really experiencing the grace that is my life.  In the years I have left, I want to cultivate the ability to surrender, to settle in, to look closely and clearly at what is in front of me now even the changes, even the losses.  I want to experience the essence that is only found in the stillness of here...

the rain, the drippy green, a sleepy dog and the fog..

DRINKING POISON

I often refer to watching the news by the title of this post.  I am torn between my addiction to knowing what is going on and my certain knowledge that the blah blah blah of the talking egos is not only bad for me but really awful for our country.  We are told to be very afraid, to detest folks who disagree with us and that we are really stupid people who have no capacity to understand complex issues.  I do think that watching and reading only one side of things is intellectually lazy and try to take in intelligent views of the other side of the political fence.  I need to remember that the operative word here is "intelligent" and that the reality show for ratings, whatever the political shade, no longer has no ethical boundaries and information gained there is always suspect. I really care that this wonderful land that I have lived and thrived in for almost seventy years is a good place for generations to come.  Sometimes the insistence on short term gratification seems overwhelming, and I just want to give up and let those who will live in it deal with it.  I have beloved friends and family members who seriously disagree on the way to accomplish a good future and I hope to continue to love and listen and learn so that I do not become a crabbed old crone who thinks she knows everything.   Also..will turn off the tv more often I hope.

THE NEW YEAR AND JOURNAL KEEPING

I like to begin with a fresh journal for the new year but this morning I realized that I have many blank pages left in the book I have been using.  I had made a journal in the fall that I love, a quiet rose brown cover, pale rose pages and decorative painted paper that suggests a rose garden.  I put it out for sale praying that no one would buy it so that I could use it for my winter mornings. It is still in my studio. this morning before dawn the path down the hill was dark and temps in the twenties so I decided to write a bit in the "old" journal begun in the fall.  I ended up writing my new year intentions in it and realized that I needed to just continue until I filled the pages and promised myself the rose journal in the spring. On the way to the barn I stopped and looked at the fresh book.  I turned to the back inside cover where I place the name of each book and saw that the title I had given it was "Quiet Waiting Journal." I knew immediately that the book was intended for my daughter not for me.  She is going through a time that will require much patience and she loves pink and roses.  Whatever she uses it for, the intention of "quiet waiting" is for her.

Many years ago a wise woman, Jan Lowry, suggested that I keep my journals as "letters to God".  I have done that, beginning early on "Dear God" and moving on through parental names to a more intimate and comfortable salutation these days.  I have poured my inner world onto the pages, pleading, raging, thanking and laughing mostly at my ridiculous dramas and self-told tales.  I have worked through divorces, brain tumors and IRS audits, upheavals and joyful moves.  I have worked out plans and poems on those pages. Because they are letters, I am surrendering my life's gifts and detritus over and over to a greater power and presence than my little theatrical ego.  I am so grateful for this "divine therapy" that joins my other practices of Centering Prayer and the Twelve Steps.

Not everyone writes or wants to.  I do not have a rule about writing every day and sometimes things are so painful that they have to be written about in retrospect.  I will send the rose journal to my daughter for her "quiet waiting" period and she can do with it what feels right, even if it is only to have it around.  What is clear however, is that my plans and notions of what will be right and my need for "freshness" in the new year have nothing to do with what needs to happen and I am most blessed when I am open and move at the pace of guidance.  When I can do that I learn.

Silence

Coming up from the barn this morning I paused on the studio porch to look out at the intense green of my neighbor's pasture and the shapes of budding trees in the cold spring fog. In that pause I encountered the silence underlying all the sense impressions of chill and woodsmoke and greening spring. I love sitting in meditation because it allows me to rest in that fertile stillness but am aware that it is available always and that my life is a dance that is constantly emerging from it, sometimes difficult and sometimes graceful. It is my source and the source of all that is. I trip over words for it...God, The Great Mystery, The Divine. I treasure its ineffable quality. It is available so easily to children who do not have the annoying boundaries of reason and fact and intellect.  I can remember being a weird kid sitting in the tops of trees and lying under bushes on sweet warm days just being. I was a dreamy careless child, often late, losing and tripping over things. I still love to just wander and let my mind go. I forget to return calls, check email, buy eggs. I have a routine with the animals and fortunately do not forget them. I love just hanging out in my life so I guess I am emerging today as a dreamy, careless old woman but what a lovely gift those few minutes of unplanned meditation in the spring mist this morning.

Stopping By Woods

with a bow to Robert Frost..This morning silent snow falling as I walked up the hill from the barn. I stopped and looked out on the grayscale landscape, white hills punctuated by the various dark and darker shapes of buildings, trees and stone walls.  Something is so deeply beautiful in the lack of color. We live in a world of stunning visual stimulation. From bright clothes to HDTV, our eyes and brains are occupied constantly in a riot of red and yellow and green.  I love color. I love playing with it, living in it and the celebration of the senses that it provokes, but something in my soul is soothed and healed by the quiet monochromatic world that a snowy morning creates. I love music and the sound of voices, but the falling snow on a path in the woods is a prayer call to silence. Here in the mountains each season offers its messages. Spring brings the rising of energy, summer the steady lush growing, autumn the brilliant dance of gratitude.  Winter tells me to go inward and abide in what I experience as "the silence under silence" the ineffable ever present pure love that is experienced when my mind is at rest. When I stand on the snowy path I am reminded.

Soul Needs and Consequences

This morning I was looking at pictures on Facebook of a group of dearest old friends at a Christmas gathering and feeling love accompanied by a bleak sadness that I am not with them. I have always told my children that our lives are the result of our choices and I do believe that but, here alone on this mountain with ten inches of snow and many animals to feed, it is easy to feel pangs of loneliness and self pity. There is always a certain amount of fear before I start down the hill on ice cleats or, as today, snowshoes. I ask myself what a sixty eight year old woman is doing living alone in this life that can be cold and hard and even dangerous. The answer always is the beauty of this place and the mountain light. I cannot seem to live without those two things neither of which I can touch or capture but are necessities for the life of my soul.

I often wonder how we are each made with such different soul-needs. I have friends who thrive on contact and constant interaction with others, have good marriages to dear deep friends, give service to those who need what they can do.  They live in cities and neighborhoods and thrive on the closeness with friends and neighbors. I have done some of that happily in the past but am absolutely unable to make that choice today. There is some grief, however with the loss of that laughing and touching and loving that comes in daily contact with old friends and family who know my history and can be completely trusted with my unadorned self. I do have wonderful companions here in the mountains, most of whom moved here with the same passion and need for natural beauty and a preponderance of solitude.  I treasure them as well. We support each other through through the tough weather, whether it be physical or emotional. My choices have always had losses and blessings. I cling to the promise that my 12 step program gives me that I "will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it." I do know that I only truly have today and what I choose to cultivate in it. That will always color what adventures in love and life I have in the future. So sending love to my dear ones from all parts of my life, I will put on the longjohns and snowshoes and go off to continue living my (cold) mountain day.

     

A Holy Wandering

Reading a book by Rabbi Rami Shipiro on Ecclesiastes as a lesson in impermanence and how to live wisely in the flow of ever changing life where nothing stands still and nothing is guaranteed.  The title of this post is a quote from her book and challenges us to make of our lives "a holy wandering". I am reminded of my difficulty hiking with friends who plunge up hill and down at a great pace, never lingering to see what is beside the trail or wandering off to explore what is hidden. My damaged lungs from years of cigarettes force me to pause and breathe. I consequently tend to meander, stopping and starting.. noticing, wondering and wandering off track. Hiking with a group, I pretty quickly feel guilty for holding others up, lagging behind and being a burden. In my life I try to honor that pause and notice what is around me. "Try" is the operative word as it is so hard to do in our Calvinistic culture. The travelers ahead do not have to be flesh and blood folks.  I can conjure voices that tell me to hurry, to get-it-done, to accomplish everything on my list and then make a new list..and no one is really here at all. That urgency to get life under control, to get where I am going, so futile.  I am not going anywhere really except to the end of my life in this particular costume. I really want to wander, to loiter, to observe and explore each rich moment that I am allotted. That, I think, is what is meant by "practice".  

Long months since my last post.  I tell myself that this winter will be different. I will keep this journal to chronicle life here in the mountains as it is for an old woman who has finally found her home on this earth.  This morning I stood in the dark on my deck looking at the almost full moon shining below on the pond.  It is cold, that silent cold with no wind, deep and lovely.  I love being awake before the world starts its activity.  Even here in the country, the cars and trucks begin early on the road below.  As a child I felt so powerful waking and going outdoors before dawn..it was safe then in my Louisiana neighborhood for a little girl to wander in the early dark. Amazingly, after many unsafe places in my life, that sense of protected freedom is present here alone on this mountain in my old age.

Tomorrow is Solstice and a full moon.  Strange that the return of the light and the season of winter are simultaneous.  Mirroring nature, it always seems that our inner light is lit in the darkest times of  life.
Christmas and Solstice celebrations are the annual upwellings in which we humans try impossibly to express that return of of hope and love in the middle of challenges and difficulties. I have so often found that a loving Presence is holding my twisting and turnings in a kind of amused radiance. In the early morning dark and silence, I am most aware that I am never alone, always loved and held by the Great Mystery. What an adventure and a comfort.

Moving into winter and that feeling of being on an edge. I rake the dry leaves behind the house and stack wood, make applesauce and soups for the freezer, make grain mixes in big galvanized garbage cans for the farm animals. An instinct to gather and store that feels powerful and primitive.
In spite of the activity I experience a slow drawing inward toward the luminous silence of my winter soul. I love the season of Advent, the waiting for the birth of the Divine Child. This is not the conventional spirit with its reenactment of the birth in the manger..although I am delighted by the wonderful motley crew of our Sunday school children playing Mary, Joseph and the sheep, especially the sheep. This is the seasonal rebirth that is an indestructible hope contained in Holy Silence.
I am old now or at the leading edge of old age at least. I will be 67 this month and no longer able to pretend that I could, by just going to the gym more regularly, bring my body back into youthful control. That is over. I am forced to learn to love the wrinkles, spots and droops or spend precious time being dissatisfied with my physical self. My mental abilities seem to hold so far but I do lose thoughts and keys from time to time.
Yet, there is a fresh and pure consciousness that longs to be reborn in me in this season. I can get caught up in lists and gifts and menu anxiety, or I can welcome it by cultivating silence and pure awareness. I do this last in meditation but also in pausing as I climb the hill to the house and really looking out into the woods now bare and open or by stopping work in the kitchen to savor the brilliant orange of a squash as well as savoring its taste.
I have always found it difficult to slow down and have searched lifelong for practices that could help. All the drugs in the world could not do it. All the success in the world could not do it. All leisure in the world could not do it and this last surprised me. I find now that the simplicity of silence, regular chores done with attention, pausing to notice... these help me to wait for the birth of that Divine Child within in this season.

Winter Sunday

"In the bleak midwinter" is the first line of a familiar Anglican hymn, perfectly descriptive of this afternoon. It is a blustery day, deep cold and clouded over. The hymn is about the birth of Jesus.. the obvious metaphor of the Light of Christ breaking through the stripped down times when the world is colorless and bitter. As I begin to write this, the winter afternoon sun comes from behind the cloud cover and lights up the bare trunks and branches outside my window. They turn to brilliant gold, then dull back to gray and brown as the clouds return. Daily life, clouds, hymns, everything is a reflection of everything else. Is it all metaphor and illusion and a great cosmic joke?

I really think that the God in us is entertained when we play with images and ideas, when we see the illumination in daily things, when we feel filled with joy by something small. I look at my Shelties sleeping on the rag rug at my feet. They are never far from each other or from me. I feel in my own body the aliveness of their breathing, the lifting of their soft sable coats in rhythm and the little sighs of contentment. If I even begin to stand they will be instantly alert, up and ready to join me wherever I go. I read once that if you have Shelties, you will never again go into the bathroom alone. Very true and one of those divine jokes I think. The sun is doing its Light of Christ thing again. How very loved we are.

Post Time Irritation

It bugs me that the time of my posts is always four hours earlier than when I really wrote it.

Baking As Muse

I woke too early this morning, the result of going to bed too early trying to keep warm last night. Today we celebrate the life of a good man and a wonderful friend with an outdoor tribute and an indoor potluck wake. I baked a chocolate cake in a chilly kitchen, trying to pretend that "room temperature" for the butter and eggs was not 58 degrees. Thankfully the dogs and cat decided to go back to sleep so I had the house to myself and could just enjoy the pleasure of gathering and measuring and mixing, thoroughly enjoying my new stand mixer... a replacement for the forty year old one that finally gave up two weeks ago. I remember my second husband's first wife (I called her my stepwife) telling me that she cooked all night on the night after her mother died. I can understand that. Making something to nourish or just to give pleasure like this dark sexy chocolate cake I just made is so intimate. I am a strange feminist, cranky in my independence and insistant on equal respect, but I most enjoy getting completely involved in domestic tasks... cooking, handspinning, quilting and house tending. My daughter is the same, though she winces at comparisons to me. She is the ultimate urban woman and only endures the country and mountain visits out of love that I appreciate. She has a law degree, a super responsible job in academe but loves to bake and to create welcome and beauty in her home. She will marry this spring and is choosing a traditional wedding even though she and her intended are in their forties and very contemporary in their attitudes toward sharing tasks. It is wonderful we have choices and can create a blended life, from scratch to high tech, from picture albums to Facebook, from knitted sweaters to fleece made from soda bottles. It is all this crazy mixed up life and watching it with a little distance from myself and others is great fun.

First Morning

Cold sunrise over the mountains promising a bright day. The trees are still bare.. a period of waiting, hoping for little signs, warm spots of earth that show green and the tops of shoots. The sky these days is an intense blue but begins each morning pale with pink edges. The graphics formed by bare limbs and twigs frame cutouts of faded grassy pasture, rusty tin of the neighbor barn roof. Yesterday a purple crocus bud by the studio. Today, bitter cold and north wind. Spits of snow have dusted the leaves in the woods outside the window. This last of winter is a slow time teaching me patience and gratitude for warm rooms, soup, good bread and my woodstove.