I have a thing for women base players, and this … well … delicious … and the angelic masculine presence that surrounds and holds her:
I have a thing for women base players, and this … well … delicious … and the angelic masculine presence that surrounds and holds her:
There’s a mulberry tree here at Bhudeva
It has taught me both abundance and harshness
There have been years during which it overflowed with sweet fruit
There have been years during which young fruits were met with an early harsh frost that with one cold breath consumed the promise of sweetness of the year
I used to think that my life, this time of life, is like the life of the tree, cycling through the years, some sweet, some harsh
I am starting to think that my life, this lifetime, is more like the life of a single mulberry
That maybe, my season of potential sweetness has come and gone
When I was a tree, you were a promise of sweet fruit
And though many of my winters felt cold and frosty
If I look back honestly, I have to admit that your sweet potential has been around me for so long now
There were a few times when I felt your presence directly
Today, looking back, I recognize your constant, soft and clear presence
I recognize it in the mother-lovers you sent into my life
Women who came to me, endured storms with me and presenced you
But the winters were harsh
I’ve watched many mulberries, some grow, some die, some eaten
I’ve not encountered a mulberry that seemed to carry a burden of responsibility
I’ve not encountered a mulberry that seemed to carry guilt
Yet for a long time, long before I met mulberries, I felt guilty
Guilty for not being strong enough to withstand the cold biting winds
Guilty for not being smart enough to find a way to avoid the cold
I’ve not felt guilty for not meeting you
I’ve grown a bit older and I’ve been & seen a bit further
I’ve learned that my feelings carry not just me but also some truth
It seems that the world-winds didn’t just feel harsh
They were harsh and they are getting harsher
Harshness was teaching me to struggle but I wasn’t a good student
My body and soul resisted struggle
My heart hardened to shelter a delicate light that burns inside it
Now the storms are not just inside me, many others have seen and felt them
I’ve arrived at a valley that has a small cave that offers some protection from the stormy climate
There is more peace in me now that I am sheltered here
There is more aloneness in me now that I am sheltered here
There is more sadness in me as I witness the storms grow stronger and fiercer and crash into the lives of many others
There is more surrender in me and less struggle
I haven’t given up
I am giving in
This cave is small, I wanted and want to give you more
I feel that a spirit like yours requires more to live a purposeful and fulfilled life
I fear that I will not be able to give you the space and range I want to give you
I fear that you will become struggle … an enemy
So, I am digging and etching in stone … it is slow work … it requires and builds patience
I am trying to make the cave more beautiful, more spacious, more warm, more illuminated
I am curious to see if there is a chamber somewhere in here with a hopeful light
If at some point the spirit of this cave appeals to you, please make your feelings known to me
I do not know, I do not wonder, I do not pray, I do not hope
I wake up every day and look at the chisel and hammer and listen to sense if I feel invited to dig some more
When I feel invited, I try to move with grace
… and the winds blow and the chisel etches
No, I’ve not felt guilty for not meeting you
I have felt sad that our eyes have not met and our fingers have not touched
I have felt awe and fear from the intense passion with which your mother-lovers wanted to bring you forth
I have felt crushed by their disappointment, loss and their pain
I feel deep appreciation and love for your mother-lovers for finding, joining, trusting, tolerating and opening to me … and you
I feel trust in Great Mother Lover who sends her winds flowing around the planet trying to tune and hold everything together
I feel joy knowing you are out there
I feel peaceful knowing this is all so much bigger than you and I
and also … sad that we may have missed each other this time around
I used to love Sting … but we’ve grown apart over the past 10 or 15 years. I couldn’t listen to his last album from start to finish once. He doesn’t feel as present and hungry as he was when I was into him. And I’ve changed too …
Rufus Wainwright has been gravitating in and out my field of perception for some years (maybe the same time frame during which Stin ghas been gravitating out) … Today I caught a glimpse of him again.
First with this political statement:
Then with this sweet delicate cover:
Then THIS blew me away and brought me back to Sting:
And then I realized that this was part of something … and found this video (only the first half is edible because of audio/video quality) which reminded me of what I used to like about Sting:
This is another small reminder that I too am getting older!
Disclaimer: this post is a note to myself, it may change as memories and reflections from the event continue to move in me.
I feel that meditative qualities are vital to gracefully inhabiting life. For this, we need to be able to recognize that we are at the door and that we have yet to walk into the room of meditation. For that to be possible we need to better discern between the door and the room, between sitting/mindfulness practices that seem to be popular and meditation itself. I feel that if we keep using the word meditation too loosely, we may forget there is a room to step into. Maybe if we spoke more of sitting (and set aside the fashionable spiritual halo of “meditation”) we could remember and grow towards dhyana.
Thank you to Satish and his co-founders for birthing and nurturing Shumacher College (whatever and wherever it is) in such a way that I, knowing very little of it, was welcome and embraced.
Thank you to Ivo & Lily and Lars & Robyn for wanting this and creating the conditions for it to happen.
Thank you to the organizers & volunteers who chose to create the gathering here (from my perspective: coming to me so that I may partake) and for providing the precious (and easy to overlook) life foundations (food, shelter, warmth) for the gathering.
Thank you to the participants who travelled and came here to be together and for together holding that shared sense of being which can’t be named.
Will I see you again?
Will there be a second date?
Will we get to come into a relationship where we act together in the world?
This post is an echo from a short interaction between Nora Bateson and I on Twitter:
Nora: The distraction of fighting for the meager leftovers after the wealthy corporate robbery of life, future, human rights and ecology while trillions in off shore accounts could be used for building a new way of life: #Refugees #permaculture #ecology #education #health #cleanenergy
Nora: The tone matters.The tone provides the logic of the arc of our communication. It forms the brackets that hold what is possible to say. Helping, caring, being tender, alert, gentle, humble…these tones add possibility where comptetion, meanness, and gotcha limit our conversation.
Me: yes … and should that not also apply to the subject matter of your previous message? wouldn’t alert gentleness be better for engaging, understanding and disarming the “robbers”?
Nora: …robbery seems a fairly fair way to describe the level of exploitation and extraction that has brought us to this ecological degradation and cruelty. Calling out institutions is not the same as dehumanizing groups of people. But i do see your point 🙂
I was born into my father’s world. I grew into his values, his patterns, his beliefs. Theoretically (though I don’t recall it ever really feeling quite like this) we started off like this:
For part of my life as an adult I was able to participate successfully in the kind of life I was raised to believe in. As I gradually transitioned into acting on my own in the world I felt, subtly, at first, that some ideas are out of alignment, that some actions are not yielding the results I expected.
But something inside me was simmering and coming closer to the surface. I felt increasingly out of alignment (between what was an inside me and what was expected of me externally). As my life progressed I felt increasingly in opposition to my father, our relationship looked more and more like this:
It was only a few years ago, in my early 40’s that a change consolidated in my perspective. I was nearing the age that my father was when he was dealing with me, a rebelling, depressed and suicidal teenager (the first memory that popped into my mind as I was reflecting on this post was a moment when I was around 19 or 20 where I experienced “defeating” my father with my depression – that he came [I brought him!?] to a point where he didn’t know how to help me). That affected me and I began to feel a curiosity and ultimately respect for the challenges that my father faced and for his efforts to meet them. It was around this time that I glimpsed a different perspective on the seemingly deep opposition I experienced with my father for so long. I shifted from a 2 dimensional perspective to a 3 dimensional one and saw us both in a spiral:
Regardless of how I feel about it or him, the fact is that I stand on my father’s shoulders. I started off in the world with the toolbox (the only one he had) he gave me and moved forward from there. The spiral told me a story of a continuum between my father and I. The “toolbox” has a surprise hidden in it – a powerful freedom: a freedom to turn itself upon itself – a freedom to examine the box itself, to question it, to reject it and if necessary to dismantle it and try something else. Not only are my father and I are on a continuum and we are facing in the same direction … and as we both move through life and get caught up in the illusion of a linear life (and forget about the spiral we are on) our feeling of alignment may fluctuate.
This sense of continuum evokes ease and softness in me. It makes it easier for me to relate to my father. It makes it possible for me to appreciate his views and the choices and actions they lead him to make. It makes it possible for me to accept there are some things in my life and consciousness that my father will not be able to understand (though he may get a sense that “there’s something there”, that there are some things I won’t be able to communicate to him and some things I shouldn’t even try. It makes it possible for me to relate to him softly. It reminds me that there is something deeper holding us together. It makes me appreciate the subtle dynamic of change in which we are embedded … and that all this extends not just to my father.
First I’d like to get this out of the way: “Calling out institutions is not the same as dehumanizing groups of people” – that falls into the trap of humanizing institutions (which the robbers seem keen to do). Institutions do not have ears and are not listening … people (who participate in institutions or benefit from their existence) are listening. In my mind this is a conversation between people.
I agree, robbery is a fair way to describe where we are and how we got here. Most of the modern world as we know it is a result of a stack of crimes that we either committed or were committed on our behalf. But there is no changing that past, it is something we need to acknowledge, come to terms with and find ways to avoid in the future.
As I am on a continuum with my father, so is aware-We (who are having this conversation) on a continuum with robbing-We (our ancestral iterations that made the present world possible). The privilege of awakened & aware seeing, of being able to discover each other, of being able to converse and resonate together … all of it is possible because of past robberies.
My grandparents life was about surviving, my parents life was about achieving predictable stability and security … and me, I get to ask what I want to do, what do I believe in, what is in my heart! As I have come to understand, accept and appreciate my father’s place and his role in providing the foundations for my journey through this world, so, I believe, we need to come to to terms with the robbing that made this world possible. Looking at that past with judgement and disdain is like hating an older version of yourself. Disdain is a fundamental tool from the robber’s-toolbox: disdain towards another is a prerequisite for robbery.
Can we create a world of “Helping, caring, being tender, alert, gentle, humble” while resenting our past-collective-self?
I see the tragedy of the commons for manifesting around me, and though I do believe it doesn’t have to manifest, it seems that often it does.
This article pays respect to the work of Elinor Ostrom and cites her set of design principles for avoiding the tragedy of the commons:
- Clearly defined boundaries: members knew they were part of a group and what the group was about (e.g., fisherman with access to a bay or farmers managing an irrigation system)
- Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs: meant that members had to earn their benefits and couldn’t just appropriate them
- Collective choice arrangements: meant that group members had to agree upon decisions so nobody could be bossed around
- Monitoring (together with 5)
- Graduated sanctions: meant that disruptive self-serving behaviors could be detected and punished
- Fast and fair conflict resolution: meant that the group would not be torn apart by internal conflicts of interest
- Local autonomy: meant that the group had the elbow room to manage its own affairs
- Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance): meant that everything regulating the conduct of individuals within a given group also was needed to regulate conduct among groups in a multi group population
In the world as I know it that seems like a big ask and that these patterns the tragedy of the commons is bound to manifest. To me, this seems like a good map for an aspiring group or community.
Since I’ve been immersed in working with natural binders on our earthbag-cellar journey I’ve been in awe of and thinking a lot about the natural binders lime and clay.
Yesterday this image of chalk under an electron microscope appeared in my twitter feed and took my breath away:
I then searched for and found this image of clay under an electron microscope:
The rich geomtery of these water-loving natural materials seems to explain their amazing binding qualities.
It seems that the lime particle (chalk) is approximately three times larger than the clay particle!
“They told us our gods would outlive us, but they lied … this is not for our eyes”
… feeling tired … the deep kind …
I found this talk interesting and refreshing. It tallks about the shifting balance of power from the USA to China & India. If highlights the western bubble most western media is immersed in. It felt well informed and balanced and somewhat hopeful … though …
I believe that there was also something backwards-facing in the talk. From a geopolitical perspective it does seem like China & India are catching up and possible poised to shoot past the USA & Europe. However I believe that as western social infrastructure crumbles (systems of money, democracy, law, nation-states) the west is better poised to discover and create new social technologies that China & India are not even aware they may require. It may be that the space that china & India are growing into is a crumbling space. The measures and centers of powers, I believe, may be shifting. The growth and rise to power that Mahbubani presents may be apparent in the existing measures of power … but if those change …
Dear Ruth, thank you for this precious work, it is vital that this story be told, and for it to be told it is vital that it be available. While I understand your motivation for having it taken down, please don’t. Please let it live and ripple.
“How can we tackle the task of making good sense of this intuition of unity and wholeness?
First, wholeness is a structure, and can be understood as such …
Second, the thing we call wholeness – the feeling, or the intuition, of what the wholeness is – always extends beyond the thing in question …
Third … somehow, any wholeness we want to poin to, or think about, seems to elude comprehension … words and concepts almost always fail to encompass if perfectly …
Fourth, there is too, the presence of unity … It is, also, somehow, at peace … it is exactly what it is, and nothing else.
Fifth, each wholeness contains and is composed of myriad other wholes …
Sixth, and finally, the idea of wholeness encompasses the idea of healing. When something is whole we consider it healed … Healing is making whole.”
Christopher Alexander – The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes teaching students to write and how much clarity and agreement there was between students about what constituted good writing (and how impossible is to define what “good writing” is) … and … wholeness anyone?
Jeff Bezos confirms:
“In a letter to shareholders, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos reveals that company employees ‘don’t do PowerPoint’ or any other slide-oriented presentations. Instead, ‘Amazonians’ create six-page narrative memos.
… the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what …
… While some are well thought-out and carefully crafted, others are poorly done and fall on the other end of the spectrum. Bezos notes that although it’s hard to pinpoint what differentiates a great memo from an average one, employees all have similar reactions when they read a great one.
… ‘They know it when they see it,’ he writes. ‘The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.'”
I made a few subtle changes in my practice since I last reviewed it. One of them was a decision to increase softness. And one way to do that was to drop the counting of breath lengths in most asana. This was a bit challenging to do at first. It created a new potential field for me to inhabit. Now every part of every breath became a conscious choice … I exhale as long as is right, I hold my breath for as long as is right … right for what? for my whole integrated experience … right for my body, right for my emotions, right for my energy, right for my quality of presence and right for my breath.
This “relaxation” of counting demanded more attention from me. Before I relied on established patterns via counting. Now more attention was required of me. There were places where my inhale got a bit shorter (which meant I was pushing a bit too much before), there were places where my exhale or the hold after the exhale got longer (which means I was under-performing). Every breath became an opportunity to enhance or to over-do.
Over the years I have tempered my tendency to over-do (I suppose that comes from years of practice on and off the mat). However there are a few “traps” in the practice where over-doing is … shall we say … inviting? It is in these that I realized with more profoundness something that I’ve known for a long time. Any pushing of the breath immediately creates a stress that echoes in everything that follows the pushing. And it takes only a small push to create a large and rapidly diminishing ripple effect.
My current “favorite trap” is in utkatasana (squats). I do 4 movements alternating between 2 full squats and 2 half squats with a breath of ~ 10.0.10.2. The “trap” is currently between the exhale and the pause after the exhale. If I over-do the exhale, the pause after it is fleeting and hard to hold. If I release the pause (skipping to the next inhale), the tension is eased and will continue to build up more subtly throughout the sequence. If I try to force the pause a tension is amplified and continues to build throughout the sequence, I become forceful and my pulse shoots up.
But, there is also an opposite feedback loop: if I exhale correctly (whatever the moment requires) and the movement is contained in the breath, I land in a soft pause, my concentration increases (it is an interesting experience of softening into sharpness) and I continue to flow with a sense of steadily increasing intensity. At the end my pulse is moderately increased and I feel energized and my attention is stable.
I realized that when I “fall into the trap” and push my exhale too far (creating a tension) and then also forcibly hold my breath (amplifying the tension) … that sequence is an “allergic response.” It is an excessive response to a small tension … and if unchecked, leads to a collapse of the breath. I wonder, if acknowledging this pattern and learning to approach the “trap” with care and attention will … resonate deeper inside me … in the field where my allergic response is triggered? Will soothing the small and local allergic response effect the larger global allergic response?
“Using Wertheimer’s definition of freedom, we may define the best environment for human life. It would be one which gives people the maximum chance to be free, one which actually allows them to be free … This is an environment which goes as far as possible in allowing people’s tendencies, their inner forces, to run loose, so that they can take care, by themselves, of their own development.
… This environment will be, by character and in structure, something far less ordered in the superficial sense than we architects may imagine. It will be more rambling, with a deeper kind of order than we have come to expect …
… This ease, this freedom, depends on configurations which are opposite from the conflict inducing configurations I have been describing earlier. Rather it depends in part on … configurations … which remove energy-wasting conflict from the environment … release human effort for more challenging tasks, for the freedom to be human.”
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life