the heart map home

If you don’t know where you belong but have a sense of belonging, as I do, then is that enough of a place? I’m sometimes lost and looking for a community while all around it seems that there are people I know with families and children and grandchildren or if not that then places they visit with friends and stay a while. Then there’s me. Working. Sometimes saying I’m a working fool. But what I mean depends upon the day and how many stories I hear from all these people that are in different orbits than me. 

I sometimes feel as if I am spinning around my small life and everyone else is having a larger life. Relaxing more, communing more. All the things I long for and don’t seem to have in abundance. I could feel as if I did a bad job of making a life but the truth is different. Well, that’s the thing about truth, it is always different. It’s always different and it is what it is. 

I might feel as if everyone owns gravity and I’m just free floating. I have a friend that sees me this way. I think she does. Here I am free as can be and there she is saddled with her life and not feeling free. Now, I find that funny in a bittersweet kind of way because I see her as having a very full life; filled with people, children, relatives and friends too. Community involvement. Accomplishments in all important areas. She’s a great parent. I see her as belonging. And sometimes I see myself as someone that bounces against the earth’s atmosphere trying to get in. But then again, there are days I feel so much a part of everyone and everything, that my heart is full and joy wells up inside of me. I hardly know what to do with this sense of fullness. 

Why there are days that I feel so empty and alone; so out of it; and questioning why this and why that, I don’t know. How do some of the people I know manage to find so many spaces in their lives for great community activities and belonging? I have always been aware of the word ‘longing’ in belonging. A lot more than I’d wish. But then I have also felt belonging and I can hear in my friends that have all these places to go to and family and community the same things I feel on those days I feel alone. It is a strange thing and a wonder to me. 

Right now everything is good. I went through several layers of regret and envy and come to this moment where I feel perfect. I feel held by the world. I am even smiling at how often I get caught up in feeling that it’s a bit grandiose to say I feel held by the world but if I said I feel as though I belong to the earth that would also sound quite grand. And what I really mean is that I feel so lucky to have this feeling and to be safe here in the screen house hanging with Molly and writing this and knowing that as much as these friends of mine aren’t a deep and integrated part of my life as I used to wish for when I wished for community, they are that too. They are a part of my wider community.  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote about karass and granfalloon. Sometimes the same people can be both in your karass, your intimate soul community and they might sometimes also fit into your granfalloon or the group that you belong to.

On the days or in the hours I might feel alone I’ll find myself wondering if it’s because of choices I made; choices about how to relate to people and family. Or if I was not given instructions on how to create and hold the structure of family. More often than not I have found myself trying to reenter the earth’s atmosphere after realizing that the search for my karass was really closer to my home than I realized.  Whether it was a happy accident or not, I had a home. A solid community too.  Not as large as many I know but real. The truth, ever true but always evolving, is that deep connections, soul friends or family relationships are always evolving. 

If you were the person in charge of keeping the planets and stars in relationship to each other; dealing with forces like solar winds, gravity, magnetic pulls and stellar winds, can you imagine the magnificent talents it would take to keep everything in orbit and keeping a safe but relational distance? 

What we bring from our adventures with people and places, from the changing landscapes of our relationships and the unfamiliar places in our heart that, when we are brought to them, and remember that we were there once before, is a sense of connection. Some people I’m fortunate enough to know, and they are in my karass, bring me a real and live sense of what it’s like to feel belonging. To have your self and your sense of life deepened and heightened by these encounters is joy. It’s love. It’s a sweetness that touches you in all the spaces that felt empty. Today was quite a journey. It’s quite possible every day is a journey and I’m just not aware of the itinerary. But today was something special for me because I came home in several ways. When the world unfolds itself so that you can see all the layers and be a part of so many different places; and belong to all of them and recognize that they are always there but not all the time, that is treasure. That’s the pirate treasure I wanted as a kid. I still don’t have the map leading me there. But some of the elements that I know how to gather or become a part of help point me in the right direction. At least every now and then. 

More about resilience is available at the wild blue on Kindle at   http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i.

The mythical journey of the modern Odysseus is found at Conversations with Nic available at http://amzn.to/14jUNUs.

The bridge that is paradox

It seems like a paradox exists between hope and change.  Actually, it appears more like a rope bridge between the two – linked by cross pieces and knotted ropes holding it all together.  The connection strong but over a tenuous territory. Maybe it’s about hope and chance and luck has everything to do with it.  This is what an old friend told me once.  She is my mentor too.  So I listen.

I imagine walking across this bridge as I would an Adirondack path.  Danger in each vibration and all that holds me to the world is a tenuous connection between rope and rock. Now I’m thinking, “What is a paradox after all?  A dock on either side of the abyss.”  Nothing in the middle making sense but when you come from one side to the other, how right, if unconsidered before.  What is a paradox?  A new partner, an unexpected guest, a friend’s revelation, a new friend after a personal holocaust when a moment before, it would seem, nothing would grow, as if salt on the ground at Nineveh? For all I know Nineveh is now an orchard where oranges bright as dice pulse pectin through their thick skin.  Oranges turn their colors in the night.  Imagine the desert illuminated by these juicy globes.  Who would have thought such sweet light would cast shadows on these wretched plains?

In the crevasse between left brain and right you’ll find the jump, the spilt milk of synapses, the positive charge of hope connecting through the gray matter, the knotted rope bridges within our skulls, to the other side, where the negatively charged chance waits; pausing at the edge, a hopeful caesura, which is the poet’s way of saying, “Stop – but don’t, stop.”

When Lynn was little, she was certain, as she came upon an abandoned lot surrounded by a metal fence in the Bronx, that she had discovered the Iron Curtain.  She also moved towards the wall when in bed to leave room for God, who was probably very tired and needed a place to rest his head.  And, she once told me about the time she ran home from school to check the oven to make sure God wasn’t dead because she was told that day that God was everywhere. Decades later, her stories give me hope in innocence; faith in what freedom from prejudice can bring – compassion, caring, simple worries about mighty beings.  Hope often seems tenuous when we ache for the tangible. The other night I felt my mother’s hands in mine.  It was completely unexpected.

Conversations with Nic available at  http://amzn.to/14jUNUs

 the wild blue is available at    http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i

the song of the earth

When I was growing up the word ‘pollution’ was something people actually heard. It didn’t put your mind asleep. You had to twist it around your head.  It forced meaning upon you. It’s totally different today. We’re shut down to words like pollution and cancer. Everyone in my family has died from cancer. These are big words meaning big things; entire eco-systems, our bodies’ immune system. 

     Entire regional ecosystems are in danger. It’s not just any longer about how many hectares or acres a tiger needs in order to be a tiger.  It’s not just about the curves in a river a salmon needs in order to be salmon.  Finally, in our lifetime, we’re seeing some dams taken down. We wait for the salmon to wiggle waggle up the river again.

     Today, we know that major dams, the largest constructions in the world, can cause seismic activity. We’re talking earthquakes. But the earth’s health is not even just about this sort of thing anymore either. It’s about how we’ve become threatened by our own existence. 

     Every day we hear about new extinctions.

     How do you talk about this enormous loss that all of us are facing?  Those that have little ones. Those that like to think about futures.  Like to think about the summer sun or kitchen gardens feeding families in Kenya.  The movement of people and animals. Rhythms.  Maybe the drumming of the caribou influencing our music.  We don’t really know how any of the subtle or even the strong rhythms transform or change the flow of the blood in our veins. What we do know, we know so well that we’re starting not to hear it. We know that mountains in Switzerland have to be covered to protect them from melting.  We know that bugs that have natural enemies are free to destroy because the cold that would suppress them no longer does. 

     We know that our opposable thumb is unopposable. 

     How do you talk about this and relate this to the loss of someone you love without making it seem like you’ve made too much of a leap and that people aren’t important?  When people rank priorities of life, we’re always at the top of the list. Do people have to be the most important? Of course they are to you. Those that love you; those that give you meaning, and gravity and ground. But what about all those other beings and bodies living on this planet that sustain all that you love? What do you know about that?  How close are you to it?  Is your ear to the ground? 

     Enki, in ancient Sumeria, the place that gave us writing, meant wisdom. Enki literally meant your ear to the ground. Can you hear the smooth turns a salmon makes up a winding river?  While in the belly, salmon eggs learn how to follow the river and to mind their way back to the open ocean.

     Every day another extinction.  Aldo Leopold said an intelligent tinkerer saves all the pieces.  We’re losing the pieces.  Rhythms are changing.  Some of the sounds that make up the song are disappearing.  Some of the movement in the river is stopped by dams and diverted waters. We should celebrate our differences. But we have to distinguish between difference and loss.  We know that the Earth has tremendous capabilities of renewal. Some people call wetland habitats the earth’s lungs.  If given a chance wetlands not only transform toxic wastes but thrive again and become open invitations to ducks flying overhead to rest during their migration.  Every being is a significant part of this world. Every living being, every body of water, every parcel of land. How do we learn how to hear what we’ve put into the background?  We need to start listening again.

the wild blue available at http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i

Sitting like a mountain

A mountain can be read like the Torah by a geologist. Each layer has meaning and the meaning builds upon the layer below it or speaks to the layer above and provides it countenance and relationship.  When everything feels too loose and nothing seems to be sustained by the eminence of its own weight or presence, think mountain.  The mountain in us that is still but storied. It speaks through its layers the way we do through our kin and kidding, our stretches and triumphs and the everyday, small journeys we accomplish in a world that notes everything except the quiet, difficult challenges we face moving from one place to another within.

What does it mean to be a mountain? Is it always about strength or about what remains after the great forces of the ground beneath shifted and shaped the land? The mountain rests on its legs, folded but not crossed, arms forming the strong sides but ready to move or roll or toss a tree down the side or create a river from new rain.

There’s times I’ve seen a mountain in me and times I’ve known that there’s no mountain within at all, just the scree is left or the place where the river washed out a path going down the mountain faster than it came out of the sky.  I don’t know why I don’t just accept these times as easily as I do the others; bow my head and be grateful for being safe and loved. There’s a struggle to feel like a mountain but that is a mythical mountain and not the real ones you see as the land rises toward the sky. Real mountains, no matter how they might be touched and worked by time and hands, have stories of strength; but also stories of enduring, of letting go, of washing out, of being frozen or broken or holy.

Today, feeling a bit afraid, not at all like I’d expect, I realize that there is comfort, if I let it come, in sitting like a mountain. There are no expectations, there is just the fact of it and that is enough for now.

Some of the voices in the song of the earth

Today, we know that major dams, the largest constructions in the world, can cause seismic activity. We’re talking earthquakes. But the earth’s health is not even just about this sort of thing anymore either. It’s about how we’ve become threatened by our own existence. 

     Every day we hear about new extinctions.

     How do you talk about this enormous loss that all of us are facing?  Those that have little ones. Those that like to think about futures.  Like to think about the summer sun or kitchen gardens feeding families in Kenya.  The movement of people and animals. Rhythms.  Maybe the drumming of the caribou influencing our music.  We don’t really know how any of the subtle or even the strong rhythms transform or change the flow of the blood in our veins. What we do know, we know so well that we’re starting not to hear it. We know that mountains in Switzerland have to be covered to protect them from melting.  We know that bugs that have natural enemies are free to destroy because the cold that would suppress them no longer does. 

     We know that our opposable thumb is unopposable. 

     How do you talk about this and relate this to the loss of someone you love without making it seem like you’ve made too much of a leap and that people aren’t important?  When people rank priorities of life, we’re always at the top of the list. Do people have to be the most important? Of course they are to you. Those that love you; those that give you meaning, and gravity and ground. But what about all those other beings and bodies living on this planet that sustain all that you love? What do you know about that?  How close are you to it?  Is your ear to the ground? 

     Enki, in ancient Sumeria, the place that gave us writing, meant wisdom. Enki literally meant your ear to the ground. Can you hear the smooth turns a salmon makes up a winding river?  While in the belly, salmon eggs learn how to follow the river and to mind their way back to the open ocean.

     Every day another extinction.  Aldo Leopold said an intelligent tinkerer saves all the pieces.  We’re losing the pieces.  Rhythms are changing.  Some of the sounds that make up the song are disappearing.  Some of the movement in the river is stopped by dams and diverted waters. We should celebrate our differences. But we have to distinguish between difference and loss.  We know that the Earth has tremendous capabilities of renewal. Some people call wetland habitats the earth’s lungs.  If given a chance wetlands not only transform toxic wastes but thrive again and become open invitations to ducks flying overhead to rest during their migration.  Every being is a significant part of this world. Every living being, every body of water, every parcel of land. How do we learn how to hear what we’ve put into the background?  We need to start listening again.

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