This Having Been Earthly

Mo and I wandered down the road this morning to the mailbox to see if the proof for my new novel, The FarNear Journals had arrived. We went slowly. The road is steep and in places the stones skid on the dry and dusty way. Mo wanted the journey to be faster and pulled on the leash which was locked so I could more easily swing my walking stick. Leaves from the madrone had fallen and lay like old coins on the path. At the pace I walked I could see everything I passed--the tunnel webs of the brown recluse spiders who have been prolific this year in the long dry grass, the tough moss-green star thistle, holes marking the tunnels of ground squirrels, the curling bark of the young manzanita, clumps of mistletoe on branches of oak. What would it be like to travel the world this way, like a Russian pilgrim, the Jesus Prayer spiraling non-stop through mind and heart?

At the mailbox the road was quiet. Inside the box, a few letters, no book.

Making our way back up the hill, we stopped by the pear tree to admire the elegant Flemish Beauty and take a picture. During the past week I've been re-reading the poetry of Rilke, and on Saturday I ordered his Letters on Life, selections from over a thousand of those letters to friends, family and other poets. The pear made me think of a passage that struck me yesterday:

"The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense."

 But to have been

once, even though only once:

this having been earthly seems

lasting, beyond repeal.

All that we

can achieve here, is to recognize

ourselves completely

in what can be seen on earth

RANIER MARIA RILKE

DUINO ELEGIES (NR 9)

  

PENSIVE





Sunset at Bandon Dunes





 

Last time we visited Bandon By The Sea I was captured by the sunset. Moments arrive, unlike any others, when experience of being is unlimited, and whatever it is that I am seems to disappear into the immensity. Inside of that Close and Endless, or in the words of Marguerite Porete: the FarNear, the surf crashes on sand, gulls call, grasses sway, and the edges of what I call myself are gone.

 

Is not the whole point of life to live it fully?

To stretch myself from one end of it to the other,

Pulled taut by the tension of love

Tantalized by life’s beauty

Being both star and seed, planted

In ether and in earth?

 

-from my novel The FarNear Journals





A Jewel in the Eternal Crown

My dear sister, Liz, and me in 1972

Today marks the end to our family's year of mourning. Liz crossed into eternity on this day in 2012. My heart and soul are full of her. She seems to be everywhere. I think I will never stop saying Thank You for her life, her wisdom, and the courage she showed in her choice to remain with all of us for those many years of her battle with cancer. Such a beautiful one...an old soul.

DEEP TIME

I can't get my arms around the trees in the back yard. In my thirteen years of living here their growth from day to day was imperceptible, but I see it now. It isn't just because the screw for hanging the hammock has disappeared into the bark. (I need to mark it somehow so no future owner gets it in mind to aim a power saw at that spot.) I can actually see that the trunks are wider by a lot. I can see that the little evergreen, that defies its name and turns orange every year as though it is certainly dead, and then sprouts millions of delicate green needles, is easily twice the height it was that first May in 2000. I felt so bad over its "death" and thought we'd need to cut it down. It makes a person question the whole concept of death.

Nature in the yard is older, and so am I. The volunteer seedlings of 2000 are over twelve feet tall and will be taller come June. The biggest oak, though, is over four-hundred years rooted in that same spot. Its trunk widens, but it exercises a careful economy on its branches--just enough for leaves to catch the necessary sunlight. It is not a lush tree, growing as it does into thin soil and mountain rock.

Trees live in deep time. Not so deep as the time of stars, but far deeper than what I can know for my individual self. In my connections, though, to the entirety of human unfolding, my time is deeper even than my back yard oak. In what kind of seed do we begin? Were we present eternally in the desire of God for a cosmic Person--a form into which Infinite Being could pour Itself --- a cosmos that would unfold eternally because of its infinitude. Am I a conscious cell of that? An individual participant in that eternal unfolding?

It excites me to think so.

Is NOW too fast?

Transformation

It's hard to focus on the present moment, hard to stay in the I Am that only is real right now. This morning I wrote this to a friend:

"You seem to me to be a person who gives yourself completely to each manifestation of Divine Reality as you perceive it in the moment. The suffering, I think, comes from our attempts to understand and categorize those experiences--asking "what does it mean?" And my experience is that the meaning of the past experience changes with each new realization, and the present experience only yields its meaning in retrospect--right while the meaning is already transforming because of the new place we stand." It was a new articulation of a formerly hazy thought.

At first I almost deleted this photo. The speed of the car turned land and trees into visions of wind.  Nothing is solid. Halos appear. Fortunately I realized before I hit the delete key that this is actually a great picture to illustrate this morning's realization.

Today I am meeting with a dear group of friends to discuss the question: "Picture yourself 100 years from now. What piece of wisdom would you have for yourself today?" What will I share? Really, I don't know--but I do know that it has something to do with the question posed by this photograph and the articulation of something I didn't know I knew until I tried to share it with a friend.

Three Holy Things

Always have God before your eyes wherever you go.

Whatever you are doing, have the testimony of holy scripture to hand.

Wherever you are living, do not be in a hurry to move away.

               -Abba Anthony of the Desert

This morning John quoted a line from a book he received from his former classmate, Richard John Frielander. "In the Eastern confession of the Christian way Sacred Tradition rules theology and practice the way the Pope directs the Catholic Church and the Bible sets the bounds for Protestants." So now, John said, we just need to find out what Sacred Tradition means. Our recent desert pilgrimage calls us to delve more deeply into those traditions which place the human soul in the “marrow of flame” at the living center of God.

At St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery John bought The Book of the Elders, a compilation of “sayings” of the desert Fathers (Abbas) and Mothers (Ammas). And I was attracted by an icon the monk told me was St. Mary of the Desert, but who, on research, turned out to be Amma Syncletike. 

Both of these women were fifth century desert mothers, but Syncletike’s life more closely resembles that of Santa Chiara to whom our home is dedicated. Divine attraction is always accurate even if we are blind at first to where it leads.

These treasures remained in a bag in the back seat of the car until we arrived home.

A week later, in Prescott, AZ, we happened into the Old Sage Bookshop, and I was led to a book titled Marrow of Flame: Poems of the Spiritual Journey, by Dorothy Walters. I’d never heard of her, but I picked the book up anyway. Opening it at random, I read:

Something inside me

constantly bleeds towards God.

That’s why I keep writing

slipping messages under the door.

Well, that hit home! So I turned it over and discovered it was published by Hohm Press: John’s publisher. I read half of Dorothy’s poems that evening. The next day was the day I met Regina who spoke of Dorothy as “the real thing.” A true Amma. An elder, already in her eighties, she writes of the presence of the Divine Beloved within the human soul. She transcends religious structures. Now that I’ve returned to Casa Chiara, I’ve visited her blog and come to know her better. The traditions continue to be lived out in solitary hearts, in the direct communication of human with divine.

Whatever you look at, see God.

Whatever you do, act from God’s Word in your heart.

Wherever you are, BE.

Holy Thursday at Zion

Into Zion National Park

We've satiated ourselves on beauty. This is truly a HOLY week for us; everywhere we look--Holy. Breathing Holy in, breathing out Holy. So much beauty I want to tell you all at once and my fingers catch fire, my breath becomes sparks of light. What do we do when the boundaries disappear and we are the mountain, are the coral colored sand, are the hawks, the antelopes, the wind? 

I've wandered in the eyes of at least three magnificent women these past two days. I finally got to meet Regina Sara Ryan and I want to meet her again and again over whatever life remains. We sat outside with John and Mo at the Wild Iris Coffee Shop in Prescott, AZ, and spoke of wonder and writing (she's the editor for Hohm Press where John's Yearning For The Father was published). She and I discovered we had walked similar paths in life. Synchronicities began to appear, and then the urge to share every book, every person, every place and way and song that has held meaning.

The other two women I spoke with only briefly. One in a trading post somewhere past Cameron on the way to Zion. She came rushing in to tell the owner that she knew she was late but her electricity had gone out, and then she began enumerating a flurry of other things that had gone wrong that morning, but I couldn't focus on words because I was so caught up in the most amazing eyes I have ever seen. They were silver blue with violet rings around the iris which made them gleam as if light shone on brightly polished silver underneath the purest of mountain streams. I had to tell her: "I know you had a flurry of troubles this morning, but you also have the most amazing eyes I have ever seen." She grinned. "I have my father's eyes," she said. Then I paid for a Zion sweatshirt, and she was gone. Don't you wonder about such chance meetings and the ripples they cause? I can still feel those ripples from her eyes.

Then I met a Navajo woman named Sally. She was selling homemade jewelry by the side of the road. Some of it I could have put together myself with stones and beads from Fire Mountain in Grants Pass. I really wanted to buy something from her. Then I glimpsed a primitive turquoise necklace, two long strands of green stones shot through with brown, each stone separated from the next by those tiny Navajo seed beads that have a specific name but I can't recall it at the moment. I picked it up. 

"Grandma made that," she said.

Immediately I thought of the Grandmothers, those wise women from various traditions and communities. Perhaps you've heard of them. I once leafed through a book containing their stories and photographs of their old and beautiful faces. I think of these elder women as the ground that keeps our world from spinning off into chaos. I think of them as weavers who create patterns by which our world can live. Of course I bought the necklace because it was sacred to me. And I will wear it as sacred beads, as connection to the Grandmothers and to earth.

"What is your grandmother's name?"

"Julia." Ah, yes. The jewel. 

Sally

The beauty of the women, the beauty of the earth. How can I not be grateful to belong to such a sacred community as this? All through Zion my heart beat an earth rhythm, the golden earth reflected the sun, each moment fell into the one before as into the eternal