Quiet Day

 The sun rose over the eastern hills as John and I walked down to the mailbox on a Saturday morning, hoping to catch Sarah, the postwoman, on her rounds. It's our quiet day--always on Saturday. Before dawn today John set a fire in the living room fireplace where we sat in contemplation, a daily ritual, but on Saturday's we continue in the calm it instills by engaging only in those activities that bring us into the still center of each moment. Right now John is sitting on the couch reading "The Living Flame of Love," in his complete works of John of the Cross. He's facing the fireplace where the logs have burned down to coals. I think of Hopkins' sonnet in which just such coals "fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion."

It's good we have this weekly day of quiet, I think, remembering how the pain of the world wakes me almost every night around 2 A.M. and leaves me lying awake for hours, my heart filled with images of people around the world suffering from the pandemic, from wars, from poverty, from worry over the most basic of human needs and dangers: hunger, homelessness, violence, isolation...all too many to name. We've talked about it, John and I, how to spend those wakeful midnight moments and hours. We lean against the silence of night and pray. Last night I watched the stars behind the bare branches of the gigantic oak tree in the back yard. Points of light in darkness. It was as though each was a spirit of some person--an exhausted nurse on a COVID unit that I saw on yesterday's evening news, a frustrated politician, a caged child at the border. Kyrie eleison. Then the sense of presence--those whose lives have mingled for a while with mine--family, friends, teachers, all deeply loved and caring, supporting our poor injured world. I breathe those spirits of light, hoping with them, crying out with them for mercy. Often there are no words, only the breath of life. We cannot do this work alone. It is time to breathe for and with each other. 

Sometimes I write incantatory prayer/poems. Here is one that will soon be published in our local Quarterly, The Applegater. 

The incantation I want to share is entitled “Sheva” meaning in Hebrew “a fissure or wound—a house broken.” “El” means Divine Oneness, so EliSheva implies the coming together or paradox of opposites—a divine fissure or wound. It is EliSheva who speaks: 

My dear beloved,

Your times have become a tumult

Your house near collapse

Your habitation without air or water.

You are broken in the fissure of Elisheva.

I know you.

I am at the meeting place.

You know me.

You have been told of these times.

You have heard the whispers and felt the wings of that which comes.

I am the Oak 

On my branches perch the hawks

I am the Terebinth

See my red berries

See my coral colored burls

I tower above the People.

I am beauty and I am bitterness.

Break me open

Taste.

I am the fissure.

Ravaged.

Do This:

Cry out for those who cannot speak

Weep for those who have no eyes

Dig in earth for those who hunger

Plant the seed.

Feel This: 

Agony of the fawn who has eaten poison,

Silence of the bee from the abandoned hive, 

Ache of the child left on the rocks

Fear in the belly

Dark in the mind

Hold out your being like open hands.

Release it all.

© 2020 Christin Lore Weber

O EMMANUEL, COME

O EMMANUEL

GIVER OF A NEW LAW

TO ALL NATIONS

COME AND SAVE US

FOR YOU ARE OUR GOD

This morning I received three love letters from dear friends across the space and time of my life. They were more than Christmas cards; in fact they were not Christmas cards at all, must momentary impulses on the part of three separate people to shower me with the blessing of their hearts. To me, today, these friends came as Emmanuel. “God With Us.”

a virgin shall conceive

and bear a son

and his name shall be called

Emmanuel

^{Isaiah 7:14}

It really happened, my heart whispers. And it continues. Put all this together: There’s a new law. Jeshua tells his friends, “A new law I give to you. Love one another.” Love is not written in stone but in our hearts. Isn’t this the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy (11:19)where God says in him, “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.”

 The virgin has/IS an undivided heart. That heart conceives a divine child — God-With-Us — who brings this new law, Love.

Oh dear. Where are the words? As T.S. Eliot says: “Where shall the Word be found? Where shall the Word resound? Not here. There is not enough silence.” And now the music of Handel’s Messiah comes booming into my mind, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” And, yes they do. How can there be Emmanuel when the slaughter of children continues in Syria and elsewhere? How can there be peace on earth when stony hearts spread terror?

Yet, the world was no different that year in Bethlehem. It was likely not a silent night. Chances are there was no comfort for that virgin/mother in the cave behind the too full Inn. I suspect people were grumbling about Rome upping their taxes and taking their names. The shepherds probably were cold and trying to get a bit of sleep in shifts somewhere on the rocky earth. In  houses throughout the town other mothers tried to quiet their babies with lullabies, not knowing that in only a few weeks Herod’s soldiers would raid their homes and kill their sons. Into this Emmanuel would come.

Eliot was wrong.

Even in and out of the raging the Word of Love is spoken, heard, found. Emmanuel. Go deep inside. The divine one is what you are. Emmanuel is your deepest being. Even in the body broken—Emmanuel. Even in the bombed city—Emmanuel. Even in the murdered child—Emmanuel.  In the refugee—Emmanuel. Deeper than the anger and fear of the terrorist—Emmanuel. May the stone dissolve to reveal the heart’s tender flesh. It’s the time for it to happen.

May you receive a word of love today, and may your heart be tender to receive.

Let the New Law come to all the nations and into every heart.  Let Divine Love come.

O EMMANUEL, COME

O RULER OF ALL NATIONS

O RULER OF ALL NATIONS

TRUE DESIRE OF OUR HEARTS

YOU ARE THE CORNERSTONE

BINDING ALL OF US

INTO A HOME FOR GOD

COME

FREE US

WHOM YOU HAVE FORMED FROM EARTH

My heart aches as I meditate on this antiphon. All the centuries of our tearing apart of this earthly home which is not so much a place for us as it is our very body. We are the body yearning. We are the body yearning for that alchemy, that binding, that element of Being, that Suprapersonal Light, that Transformer, that True Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world. 

We are the heart of the One. we are the mind of the One. We are the mouth through which the Word is spoken. We are the feet and the hands and the wombs. We are the wings. We are the cry, the song, the calling of whales. We are the seas. We are the mountains and rivers and lands. Why do we tear ourself apart? We are the woman on her knees weeping for her children. We are Rachel  and our children are the stars. We are the sky and we are the caves reaching to the center.  

How can I say it? The blood of God flows through us all. How can I find the words? Oh desired One, you do not come; you are already here, but we don’t see you, feel you, know you in our poor abused body. Our brother, Paul, could see when he questioned: Can I say to my hand, “I have no need of you?” Our sister, Mechtilde, knew when she wrote: "The day of my spiritual awakening was the day that I saw, and knew that I saw, all things in God and God in all things.” Our brother, Francis, recognized the kinship of all creatures in one living body—Brother Sun, Sister Moon, even Sister Death, because I can die and you can die and the Body of God remains.

O Ruler of all nations, O Holy One, O Cornerstone that unites us, touch our eyes and hearts to see who we really are. In all this vastness each is a reflection of the All. In loving anything we increase the One Eternal Love we are and have always been.

O RULER OF ALL NATIONS, COME

O RISING DAWN

O RISING DAWN

RADIANCE OF ETERNAL LIGHT

BRILLIANT SUN OF JUSTICE

COME

LIGHT UP THE DARKNESS

THAT HIDES OUR PATH TO LIFE

Today spiritual traditions meet and merge in the Rising Dawn. Medieval and modern Christians sing Winter Solstice songs. Stone Age peoples watch in the shadows of their henges for perfect alignment at dawn of the heavens with the earth. Today we check celestial positions of sun, moon and stars on a smart phone app. Or we meditate on the significance of this time and our personal connection to the universal however it is manifest, and today we feel a turning point. All the antiphons seem to be indicating this, though, the flicker of light in the most profound darkness, and today, the way it rises as the Sun of Justice.

In the shower this morning I found myself singing a verse from an Advent hymn I learned years and years ago. I must have been about 18. “People Look East.” It had been recorded by the Grailville Retreat Center in Loveland, OH.

Stars keep your watch though night is dim,

One more Light your bowl shall brim,

Even beyond the frosty weather,

Bright as sun and moon together.

People look east and sing today,

Love the Star is on the way.

I learned the O Antiphons first in Latin as Gregorian Chant. This one is O Oriens. (Translated as: O Rising, O Appearing, O Originating, O Daybreak, O Dawn, O Sunrise, O East.) This is the dawn of something wholly new, something original, Light beyond light in the mind, the heart, the soul, the spirit, the nations, the world, the universes, the entire cosmos. This is the dawn of a new consciousness, an enlightenment, a new way of being in which Light and Love are identical. It is right here for anyone to see—all we need is to look and receive. Or stay in darkness. It’s up to us.

O Rising Dawn, Come

Dawn at Casa Chiara

O KEY OF DAVID

AND SCEPTER OF THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL

YOU OPEN AND NO ONE SHUTS

YOU SHUT AND NO ONE OPENS.

COME

 DELIVER US FROM THE PRISONS THAT HOLD US

FOR WE ARE SEATED IN DARKNESS

OPPRESSED BY THE SHADOWS

OF DEATH.

It couldn’t get much darker. The year is about to tip, but we can’t see it yet. It was midnight when I woke and looked out the tall windows beside the bed at the shadows of trees. What is my prison? I wondered as I lay there wide awake. There would be no going back to sleep, not tonight. Tonight I’d be searching for the key to a prison so dark and filled with shadows it sometimes even seems to have no door.

“When is a key a scepter?” my mind inquired. It is a trickster, that mind of mine. “When is a key a You and not an It? the mind rambled on. (And to demonstrate the wonder I am in over all of this, I will tell you that it is now eleven minutes after two in the morning, and gazing into darkness as I’ve spent the time, these are all the words I yet have written.) Memory reminds me that almost fifty years ago I had a dream in which I chased a key down a street, and every time I bent to pick it up it moved on ahead of me as if leading me to something or somewhere else. Eventually I was in a poor section of the city. The key rolled up against a door and stayed. I picked it up and placed it in a lock. Turned it. Opened the door and found myself looking at my Self. “What is the door opened by the key? What is on the other side?”

In both the antiphon and in my youthful dream, “I” do not open the door. The antiphonal key is David. Note the key does not belong to David, it actually IS David. And by association and genealogy the Key is the One we invoke with COME: the same as was represented yesterday by the Sacred Tree, the Endless One with all the emanations. The Holy One in the Fire of Being whose name cannot be spoken except with innumerable adjectives.

The door to the prison is opened by the Key of David. The “David” within our souls, our relationships, our countries, our governments, our world—who/what is he? We need to know that or we won’t have the Key to the mystery of opening and closing. My mind teases me, “Why not call your new friend the Rabbi David? Ask him. He should know.” But my heart counsels me to go to the stories. The biblical stories reveal the qualities of the historical David, and each of those qualities are essential to the Key by which we are released from our prisons. The stories are many. Some of us know all of them, others know a few like the one in which he uses his slingshot to kill a giant. If David is the Key to our release from darkness and death, the stories tell me he is fully human, a paradox of glory and ambiguity.

David held opposites together. He was the child-shepherd/king,  mystic poet/warrior, beloved/betrayer.  This is the Key that opens the prison door, that tips the darkness towards the light, that unlocks the way through the shadow of death into the fullness of Life: the acceptance of all our contradictions. And the Key is on the inside. To be human is to be a paradox, and to accept that in the deepest night of our souls, of our nations, of our world, a time of death itself, we can, like David did, throw off our prisons like clothes become too small, and accepting what we are—the Light of God in the clay of earth—we can dance before the Tabernacle of the Great I AM.

This is the Key.

O Key of David, Come.

ROOT OF JESSE

O ROOT OF JESSE

YOU STAND AS A SIGN FOR ALL PEOPLE

BEFORE YOU ALL RULERS KEEP SILENT

FROM YOU EACH NATION SEEKS HELP

O COME

FREE US; DO NOT MAKE US WAIT.

The great urge is to get political about this antiphon, probably because it does actually sound political. It sounds like the Root of Jesse is somehow a source of help and freedom for all nations and their leaders. It is political, but it is also personal, and also cosmic. It is central to most spiritual traditions and an archetype of the collective unconscious of humanity. I was awake most of last night meditating on this, this sacred tree.   

I’m a dreamer and several weeks ago, before I was thinking about O Antiphons at all, I woke stunned by a dream of this tree. I stumbled into the Morning Room at Casa Chiara and, still reeling from what I can only call an encounter, I wrote the dream like this:

“I’m with a group of women, and we are entering into a deep forest by a large body of water. The mood is one of awe and discovery. The deeper we go, the more the canopy of trees covers the sun and the forest is cast into shadow. Through the shadows I see two overwhelming giant redwood trees—the biggest in the world. A person standing next to the larger one would seem the size of an embryo, or a bean, or a tiny river stone. I call out to the others and all of us attempt to move closer to the majestic trees. However the closer I get to the larger tree, the more dense the feel of it becomes—the less space there is around it—until I’m feeling crushed by the presence of the tree itself. It’s almost as though I am being weighed down “under” it, as though I am among its roots, part of it. I’ll be subsumed if I go farther, and yet the attraction and magnetism of the tree is profound.”

Most ancient cultures envisioned a “world tree” at the core of their spiritual life, of their cultural mythology. This image connected the earthly realm with the heavenly. It was the totem pole, the sacred oak, the Tree of Life in Eden, the tree of generations with Jesse as its root. The early Christians traced the genealogy of Jeshua (Jesus) back to Jesse, the grandfather of King David, and saw him as the flowering of that Root, the new World Tree that would reach out beyond a nation to include in its branches the “Others” or strangers then called Gentiles. Jeshua himself would be the Sacred Tree on which the opposites of the world would be reconciled. This is a lot to put my mind around. No wonder my dream stunned me.

The Sacred Tree, though, is even more than a human tribal or world genealogy. In the mystical Jewish Kabbalah it becomes the flowing of God into and through the created world. From Ein Soph, the divine emptiness, to Shekhinah, God among us, the tree’s branches are the energies or emanations of Being itself called the Sefirot. I recommend Daniel C. Matt’s book, The Essential Kabbalah, for meditations on each of these divine emanations, or as Matt says, “stages of God’s inner life, aspects of the divine personality…emerging from Ein Sof, the Endless.” They are the branches of the Sacred Tree and are:

1. Crown/Will/Nothingness,

2. Wisdom/Beginning,

3. Understanding/Womb,  

4. Love/Grace,

5. Power/Judgment,  

6. Beauty/Compassion,

7. Eternity/Prophecy,

8. Splendor/Prophecy,

9. Foundation/Covenant,

10. Presence/Kingdom/Communion/Queen.

Here is the sign before whom rulers keep silence and nations seek help. Personally we enter through the roots and are drawn upwards. God does not change as we ascend, but we do, and as we share in the higher emanations of Being our hearts are transformed and our spirits overflow. IF we are willing. IF we dare to be absorbed into the roots of the Sacred Tree, even though there’s fear in it of oblivion. It will not be oblivion for the person, the nation or the ruler. It will be presence, covenant, splendor, eternity, beauty and compassion, power of right judgment, love and grace, understanding, wisdom and union with the Unending One.

O Root of Jesse, Come.

O ADONAI, O ELOHIM

O ADONAI, O ELOHIM

LEADER OF ISRAEL’S HOUSE

WHO SPOKE YOUR NAME IN FIRE TO MOSES

AND UPON THE HOLY MOUNTAIN CARVED YOUR LOVE AS LAW

COME

AND WITH YOUR OUTSTRETCHED ARM

FREE US.

O Unspeakable,

O One containing everything

O Name without sound

O Great I AM,

You draw the majesty of all the gods into your One creative fire

Outside You nothing is.

Because we cannot say your name

We call you Adonai, the leadership, providence going forth,

We call you Elohim, the genesis, the ‘let it be’ of creation.

We drop the letters and sounds we can utter

Into the unutterable YHWH.

And we hear you in the fire,

We hear you in the thunder,

We hear you in the heartbeat,

I AM THAT I AM.

O Come!

(for further explanation of these Hebrew names see http://www.myredeemerlives.com/namesofgod/adonai-elohim.html )

O WISDOM

O WISDOM

WORD OF ETERNAL BEING

YOU REACH FROM ONE END OF EARTH TO THE OTHER

WITH PROVIDENCE AND TENDERNESS

COME AND TEACH US TO LIVE IN YOUR WAYS.

Each year I yearn for this day when at the hour of vespers we sing the first of the O Antiphons preceding Mary’s prayer in her pregnancy, the Magnificat. Each day the divine child she carries in her womb and in her heart is invoked by a different name leading up to December 23rd and the most popular verse, “O come, O come Emmanuel,” really the most paradoxical statement one can imagine because it would mean, “Come, God, who is already with us.”

In the past I wrote meditations each year as I contemplated these beautiful names of the Holy One. Then one year I slipped into the silence of awe. No more words. Until now. This morning I felt urged to delve once again into the antiphons hoping to discover there a meaning I might hold to in these present times. Whether we agree with the trajectory of these times or not, everywhere I look I hear whispers or cries of the heart. Uncertainty, ambiguity, ambivalence—all describe the heart that is aware. The whole earth is involved, from Washington to Aleppo, from the melting glaciers in the Himalayas to the flooding islands of the Pacific. Every focus of our human endeavors is affected, every discipline of thought, every tradition of belief. Where is Wisdom?

Wisdom is in the depths. We search for her, dig deep into the ground of being to unearth her jewels. Wisdom springs dancing from the Eternal, and Wisdom’s play is the spiral of creation, of universes evolving. Deep and Wide is Wisdom. Wisdom unites. Wisdom is ever compassionate and forgiving. Wisdom holds opposites in balance. When the humble and simple open the door of the heart, Wisdom enters.

Though Wisdom is not present in war of any kind, she is within the hearts of all who struggle, who strive, who mourn, who suffer violence, whose victimization results in acts of violence from which their own suffering increases. And Wisdom mourns, weeps for the suffering world while standing in the core of our carnage. Nothing that we do fails to penetrate the Divine Heart.

Our world stands in dire need of her. O Wisdom, Come.

Today is the 80th birthday of Pope Francis. This coincidence made me sit up and take notice. This pope of simplicity and inclusion and gentle love was born on the day celebrating Wisdom. That makes bells ring in my head! Happy Birthday, Papa Francis!

(to wish him a Happy Birthday: PopeFrancis80@vatican.va)

Cosmic Church

The “church” to which I now belong is as extensive as the cosmos. It includes everything. It’s core is the Christ by whatever name we call that Self-outpouring of God. It is a Oneness in which “opposites” are experienced as participating in each other. It is an existence in which we know our true selves by listening (“I have called you by your name and you are Mine”). Each entity in creation is the Thou of God.

At the same time and in the same belonging, is found the Flaw. The Cosmos is not complete, and it is possible that its extension is infinite as the process of creation and destruction and re-creation—the spiral of Being. Everything is rising and falling simultaneously. Therefore each and every thing experiences the incompleteness, the wound, the openness of being to Being—the falling out of being to become greater Being. This cosmic vision underlies all the great spiritual traditions that continually try to form themselves into the bond we call “religion,” and of necessity, always fall short.

The contemplative mystic is one who lives in the vision of the Oneness, and simultaneously in the experience of incompleteness, flaw, wounded-being found everywhere — the wounded/crucified/risen Incarnate God—the Cosmic Process of Creation—the Mystical Body of Christ. 

Deep Silence

“When a deep silence covered all things and night was in the middle of its course, your all-powerful Word, O Holy One, leapt from heaven’s royal throne’ (Wis 18:14-15).

These are the sacred nights and days. Now is the moment that darkness is pierced by all-creating Light. Now begins the dance of the soul, the poem of the cosmos, the song of universal being. We are in the seasonal celebration of Eternal Being made manifest, of the Eternal Word made flesh, made blood and bone. This is the inner experience of the dark world, of the fragile human, when Divine Light suffuses the darkness, and leaps through our unknowing as the Word of life and truth, the Word that cannot be spoken but only lived.

John and I call 2015 the Year-of-Things-Falling-Apart. The siding on our house fell apart, the deck fell apart, the neighborhood seemed to fall apart when the marijuana growers moved in next door and across the road. Our quiet fell apart for three months as construction workers occupied our living space. The freezer fell apart, and so did the heater/air conditioner--all of it needing to be replaced. Beloved friends and family members became ill, some passed into eternity and our hearts fell apart for a time. All of this plus the earth herself, and the worlds we have established upon her, suffering from environmental illness and human wars and the increased spread of terror. Night surely seemed in the middle of its course. 

This afternoon, two days into 2016, John and I sit reading in the stillness of this mountain home. Sunlight suffuses the mossy green branches of the oaks in the back yard and reflects off the snow on Woodrat Mountain to the north. John's deep into deCaussade's classic on the sacrament of the present moment, and I'm studying Brueggemann's work on prophetic imagination that has me making associations with the upcoming national election. For a while he was reading a line from his book to me, followed by my reading a line from my book to him. Strange how that worked: it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that living in the Now results in prophetic action. I'm reminded of Eliot's line, "Where shall the word be found? Where shall the word resound?" He answers himself: "Not here. There is not enough silence." 

Ah. And where is silence? It must be...Yes...I remember now...it's in the moment. Prior to the questions. That is where the silence is. That is the 'where' from which the Eternal Word leaps. That is the moment before the crying out, before the chaos enters. That is the moment of pure being, the moment of truth, the prophetic moment in which the New is possible -- the new step, the new idea, the new choice, the new awareness, the New Year.

Reflections--The Mirror of Being

At sunset on the feast of Clare of Assisi (August 11) I sat in my chair in the living room and watched as this image appeared on the wall in front of me. The picture I painted years ago of the swirl of energy in the universe and in the human body-soul has lately come to resemble a Madonna and Child. It's what I see that for years I didn't see. In the reflection of sunset over her is the shadow of the ancient oak that graces our back yard, which to the Celtic people is the world tree, the core, the center of the universe and of Being-Itself. It holds us grounded. Around it we dance the dance of life.

I think, then, of a woman I saw on a street bench in Port Townsend last week. Her eyes stared into nothingness. Her face resembled browned parchment. She caressed that face over and over, her gnarled hand passing tenderly down from her hairline, curling around her chin, back up over her ear, through her hair to the top of her head and down again to her face in a kind of gentle infinity motion. Her presence stopped me in my tracks. What did I see in her?

We see what is in us to see. Clare wrote of gazing into the Mirror of Christ and discovering there her true self. I tried this and all I saw was the face of Christ. I felt disappointed; I expected to find my true self. Then one day that experience turned around completely topsy-turvy, completely inside-out. Had I ever seen myself except in a mirror? No. There's the physical mirror in the bathroom, of course, and it reflects my physical face, but there is also the mirror of another person's eyes. More than that, there is the mirror of the other person as an individual. More than that there is the mirror of the world, of the oak tree, of the bird and the river and the mountain and all the multitudinous things that fill the universe. I can see my Self only by reflection.

Several spiritual traditions have the saying: "I Am That." Back in the 1990's I was giving a talk to a large group of women and found myself saying, "I Am You," after which one woman stood right up from her chair and called out with an absolute kind of certainty, "You are NOT me!" (And now I admit to thinking, Thank God!) But now I also think that both of us were right.

We are the One and we are each the Many. It's a both/and. In the mirror of the Universe, of the tree, rock and cloud, and of a near infinity of others each of us can see that she is the Many, and in the mirror of Christ the Divine each disappears into the One.

This is earth. There's no escaping incarnation. There's no escaping time and space. But time is only time for a moment (as the poet, Eliot, says). We go in and out of time. Space, also, is ever and only space. Sometimes, looking into the mirror of anything--that photograph, for example--a single individual passes through into a wonderland of Oneness, an Infinite Wholeness that might be Christ as it was to Clare, or might be Krishna, or even (and I'm not being facetious) it might be a bag lady tracing infinity on her face as she sits at a street corner in my former hometown. And in that moment in and out of time I see! As another poet (Hopkins) cries out:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash 

I am all at once what Christ is,  'since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, 'patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond" 

Walking Stick

Take up your walking stick
And go out into the world
Shining.

...the old...lean on sticks or on each other. All mortals come to this.

         (Anne Carson in her introduction to "Herakles" in Grief Lessons.)

When people see me with my walking stick these days they ask what happened. A few have asked if the ironwood stick is a fashion statement, or if I actually need it. So I've been telling them, "I fell on my knees," and some of them wince. It's true that a month ago I did fall on my knees, then flat out on the concrete sidewalk leading up from the road to Casa Chiara. Often this leads to a discussion about care and watchfulness we need to practice as we age.

But one friend simply said, "Now you have fallen on your knees," repeating almost exactly what I'd said, but with far deeper meaning. We speak of falling on our knees before the sacred, the inexplicable, in an attitude or posture of existential wonder. We fall on our knees in humility, in recognition of the paradox of our being, the combination of mud and magnificence, of frailty and glory. We fall on our knees in grief over all we haven't understood, and in awe over what yet will come to be revealed.

Falling on my knees in such a physical way taught me something about spiritual falling that I hadn't considered until I was made aware of that larger dimension. I couldn't get up on my own. I couldn't walk on my own. I couldn't rise from a sitting position. I couldn't sit down once I was standing. In the space of a breath I lost my independence. To the rational mind all this appears obvious. Ask anyone. But when the fall actually happens the rational mind goes dark. The body expects to act as always and is surprised. We fall from pride. We fall from the illusion of independence. We fall from arrogance. We fall from self-centered inattention. We fall from anger and self-adulation and attempts to control. We fall, if we can see and accept it, out of our limited egos into love."

At every level of being life requires love and the help love gives. Falling teaches that. If John hadn't been across the road and seen me, and if he hadn't called our neighbor Cliff for help, I might still be lying there. The three of us leaned on each other.

In the myth even the strongest human ever to walk the earth falls. As Anne Carson explains in her introduction to her translation of Herakles by Euripides: "Herakles ... enters gloriously upright but is soon reduced to a huddled and broken form. His task in the last third of the play is to rise from this prostration, which he does with the help of Theseus. Euripides makes clear that Herakles exits at the end leaning on his friend...a new Heraklean posture...collaborative heroism."

"When I am weak, then I am strong," writes Paul of Tarsus. Why? Maybe in weakness, after the fall, my life-story disappears in the realization that I fabricated the whole thing. When I fall and am picked up and supported by love, the play ends. No more illusion. No more strength based on an invention that I am separate and sufficient unto myself. I am connected. I lean--upon my walking stick, upon my friend--whoever, in any moment, that turns out to be.

As Yellow Deepens To Brown

An email arrived this morning from my dear friend, Allison Scott--exquisite photographer, maker of greeting cards, tender soul. tinyurl.com/alicatcards. She always inspires me by choosing among her many works of art one that conveys a grace that is moving in my soul. This morning she has added a stanza from one of Wendell Berry's poems.

Did I believe that I had a clear mind? 
It was like the water of a river
flowing shallow over the ice. And now
that the rising water has broken the ice, I see what I thought
was the light is part of the darkness."

Wendell Berry, from BREAKING

Sunset of the Yellow Years

June, 2003 of the Yellow Years--photo by Krista Karels

This morning I awoke to a voice in my head yelling over and over at me: "I can't do this any more!"
"Do what?" I inquired. "And who IS this, anyhow?" Total Silence. I continued to lie there, not moving, not wanting to disturb this ... whatever it was ... this awfully uncomfortable thing inside me.
By this time in life I know what to do with the uncomfortable things. Observe. Gaze. DO NOT MOVE FROM THAT SPOT! Look it straight in the eyes (or, in this instance, listen to every vibration) until it yields up its secret truth. Something has pushed it from its comfort zone out to the edge of consciousness. Don't let it fall into obscurity. The temptation to think of something else--to forget--to avoid--to fight with someone/anyone--to grab the Kindle and click onto the latest book--to focus on anything but THIS which is so obviously overwhelming.

I kept my eyes closed. I knew what to do: go to that place where dreams arise. I'd been dreaming something, hadn't I? Yes.

I make my way through a complete dark.

The Way has no delineation.

The Yellow Years are gone.

I must leave this yellow house.

Ah. The house again. The deconstruction. The re-construction. The color of the paint. The whole thing is a metaphor for a powerful and essential personal transformation. Suddenly I'm aware that "this" which no longer can be done or be in charge is the "old me." I'm no longer in my "yellow years." They were beautiful years of roses and song and dancing. They were years of intense creativity--of writing all the books. They were the John Weber years of romance and dreams coming true. We found this house in those years, a sunshine house on a hill. The yellow years were a gift beyond words. But even the most beautiful that this world has to offer cannot be enough. What does sunshine do, after all, but penetrate the earth to transform what is living but unseen within and make it grow? 

John Weber became ill in 2003, just before the lovely picture of the yellow house was taken. He died in 2008, and the yellow began to fade. With John Sack I am beginning to find a deeper self I haven't yet completely come to know. It seemed to come upon me suddenly, the requirement I spoke of yesterday when I said the skin needed to be ripped from the house. Even then I hadn't awakened to the passing of the yellow years. I haven't wanted to let them go. But the new self in me was becoming claustrophobic in this yellow house. (Can you know what I mean? Have you experienced this? It's such a paradox, don't you think?) But yellow is but one color on the spectrum, while brown contains them all.

I read a poem the other day by Lisa Ciccarello that may also have contributed to the intensity that drives such experiences to the surface. Let me share it:

Here is how I control my heart: I string each thought one behind the next, like beads.  I wear the answers I am waiting to give. The jewelry becomes heavy as soil.  My long blink is a scream & a yes. There are things I have to say, but they do not yet know the questions they must ask. & a blink is no word; if they misunderstand— A heart is just soil. Ask anyone. A heartbeat is a blink. A long blink is a scream. A longer blink is sleep. All night I am screaming.

John Weber and I at sunset of the Yellow Years--taken by Krista Karels

Most Recent Book by Ciccarello

At Night

(Black Ocean Press, 2015)

House as Body

Casa Chiara House in 2004

When workers found rot in the siding they began by tearing off the skin. We could feel the shuttering of the house from inside. We agreed to trash the yellow. Wasn't the sunshine on the hill enough? When the house stood naked they ripped deeper. We could hear the power saws and drills. The house became a tooth under the dentist's drill. The house became a body in an operating room. I opened Pandora's box to empty music through the tunnels of my ears. Outside now the pounding reverberated through skin and bone to heart and mind. Our skin picked up vibrations like drums.

A day arrived in three weeks of this that I didn't recognize the house in its new skin awaiting paint. I couldn't choose. It wouldn't have mattered what color the paint might be. The color wheel spectrum gives us options now that only Dante imagined before while giving words to Paradiso. For some reason I still don't understand, the house no longer could be yellow. Green, perhaps? Like leaves, like moss, like grass before it turns. A swatch of green on new siding--but no. It appeared artificial on what had always been a living thing: this hermitage.

We turned the color wheel and both chose brown. We chose earth, the lightness of it, the dark. We chose brown, and still I woke in the middle of the night wondering, worrying--where would the sunshine be if the house were brown? Not brown, the swatches say: Briar. Khaki, Smokehouse. Virtual Taupe, Cobble. Sable. Down Home. Angora. Poised Taupe. Otter. Van Dyke.

Years ago when my dear friend and soul-sister, Alla Bozarth, asked me about my favorite color, I told her brown. "BROWN????" The decorations in her home were Russian Red and gold and black, intense blues, silver in some paintings on the wall, purple, mauve, a feast of color. Over the years I worked to make my imagination more colorful.

But we will paint Casa Chiara Hermitage two shades of brown with white trim, and it will be as though wearing the simple, earthy garb of Francis and Clare. When I think that the house might disappear from view up on this hilltop, no longer the yellow landmark it once was, I remember that fifteen years ago I was not so comfortable with the yellow until it came to have a meaning beyond itself. Brown tones have that meaning for me already.

For all this, I realize I sound as though I'm making my "apologia." You're right. I'm not comfortable with any of this at all. All my life I've been in awe of people who build their own houses, choose the shape and size and form and colors they most like. I'll never do that! I proclaimed with (now I see) a rather arrogant and simplistic certainty. Be careful of such certainty. I've seen too often how certainty is toppled and crushed under the earthquake of reality. We fall back then into the all-inclusive brown, the humus of earth, the shadowland of self we call humility.

Under Construction

THREE PEOPLE AND A DOG

A leaf of the Madrone collects drops of rain these January days. It is a forest shell. I bend and snap the image up into my phone's camera during our walk along one of the trails near Casa Chiara. We've had a guest with us these days--a friend of John's from college years at Yale. Imagine over fifty years of stories, aspirations, loves and losses needing to be shared. I am filled up to the brim with all of it, the immensity, the endurance, the radiance, the laughter, and the tenderness (oh, the tenderness that a long life can bring towards all that is upon the earth.) Mo feels it, dear little Mo who keeps as close to our friend as possible. We all absorb each other's life like rain falling on thirsty souls. We drink each other in like moss drinks January rain, needing little else.

What is in us that cannot be said? "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for words," as the poet Wordsworth mused. But all three of us are writers, multiplying words in the never ending task of bringing form to the formless. There is so much love in us this day there can be no denying it, but no word can capture it either. There's a clue in the leaf that captures rain, in the moss that drinks.

All through my life I have been loved, and yet I am like moss in my yearning. There's so much of it, you'd think it hadn't already been fulfilled. The rain is right now falling! I remind myself. Why aren't I satisfied? Is the yearning a holdover from a former lifetime, one in which I was deprived of love? But this morning it came to me that my yearning is not my own alone. It is the yearning of Form for Essential Being/Existence. In each fragment of matter, even in me, is felt that yearning for incorporation into the Allness. It is the Love that grounds all love. The psalm came to me, “Like a deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for You my God. My soul is yearning for God, the God of my life; when can I enter and see the Face of God?”

This is a universal yearning; that of Form for the Formless/the Formless for an adequate and perfect Form. This is the Fire that rain can't quench. This is the Passion of the Spirit as well as of the material form. This is why nothing else satisfies. Even if mind insists (and rightly so) that the Divine Fullness is the heart and pulse of all form, of the micro and macrocosm, still even the most minute of forms longs for the realization IN ITSELF of that universal consciousness. This is the Fire in form that consumes the heart and trans-forms. “The whole universe groans in a great act of birthing,” says St. Paul. (Romans 8). It is the thirst of all creation for the life-giving rain.

We walk. Our voices form the words for stories, ideas, descriptions, and the words combine with the sounds of rain on leaves, and the songs of birds when the sun breaks through. We are all together a symphony of being. Each movement brings back the same theme, introduced/intensified/made more complex/combining complexities/weaving the tonal poem together/unifying/rising towards simplicity/made One in what we imagine as the Fullness of Love. A single Tone in which Being is Form and Form is Being in an Eternal Instant.

Such a mystery--because from the outside it looks like a walk in the woods. Three people and a dog.

Ocean Calling

Humans have deserted the beach, but the gulls seek out the sands for protection from the storm that has the surf crashing high, layer after layer. All I wanted was to stand there. It was my birthday. All I wanted was to dissolve into it...each water drop whether rain or mist from the waves. All I wanted was immensity to echo through my own waters of blood and tears, the fluids of spine and brain, of lymph -- Mostly we are water and air. Ocean flows through us all.
I take a deep breath and listen. "Be still and wait," my dear, dear sister told us all in the weeks before she passed from this world. She's been so close these past few weeks, and today she seemed to be walking the beach with me seeking out the smallest, most worn-to-a-circle stones.What did she hear in her stillness? Can you hear "round" as you pick up the stone? Can you touch sound? Is what we call God or Heaven simply a dissolving into everything? One could hardly do better than the swell and ebb of the ocean which I sometimes believe could be the nature of that Divine Silence that draws us, that Word out of the Infinite Silence of which the author of the Cloud of Unknowing speaks: "The drawing of that Love and the Voice of that Calling..."

Ebb and Flow

Liz's stones and seaweed

Rain