Liminal Spaces

Liminal means threshold in Latin. 

Pic by A. Davey

In Celtic lore these spaces are "thin spaces," where the veil between the worlds is so gossamer thin that one world seeps into another. 

Liminal spaces are disorientating spaces.  In rituals around the world it is the middling space where you have moved on from what was before ~ orientation and normality and everydayness ~ into a space of disorientation.  Everything's flipped.  Alice is down the rabbithole and nothing is the same size anymore. 

In rituals, the disorientation is for a purpose.  Out the other side of the initiation, the participant comes changed from their experience.  They are back in the topside world once more, but everything has changed.  Or, at least, they have, and therefore the world looks different and they walk in it differently.  They have gone from orientation to disorientation to reorientation.  Order out of chaos.

Some of us find ourselves in these spaces on a physical level and on an ongoing basis ~ through chronic illness or trauma or both.  These are difficult spaces to hold.  You can easily lose track of any kind of meaning attached to your suffering or of any transformation coming from your experience.
 
But now the earth's climate is changing, and along with it monumental seismic cultural seizures happening around the world.  Now, we all find ourselves in this strange space, where it feels like everything is disorientated, everything shaking, everything falling apart.

This liminal space is where we are now.  It is anything but comfortable.

But amazing things come from this space.  It is the space of possibility.  It is the space where creative acts come out of necessity.  Amazing energy flows from out of this space.

And while it feels like everything is up for grabs and we seesaw between abject despair and furious hope, we need to remember that we are in the middle of the process.

The reorientation is still to come and none of us know what it will look like.  It may even, just possibly, be better than we could have hoped for.

This is the logo for the space that I am hoping to birth into being.  It is probably quite appropriate that I am swinging myself between abject despair and furious hope about its formation.

I do not even know if it is a viable space.  What I do know is that it is an idea that will not leave me alone.

I envision a space that involves relaxation and stimulation, where no matter how halt or infirm or on the edges you feel, that you feel welcome.  A space that explores ways of feeling more at home in discomfort, and creative ways to envision the future.  A space that has a swing inside.  For adults.

I am planning a newsletter to send out to anyone who wants to be kept in the loop on what's happening (which may be a little or may be a lot - I am trying to start this up with $1.71 in my bank account and 14 years of chronic fatigue syndrome under my belt :).

If you'd like to receive the newsletter, drop me a line at susieq777@dodo.com.au.

Empower Disaffected Teenagers, Rathern Than Control Them

For 16 years, Operation Newstart has been helping disaffected teenagers that are struggling at school by taking them out of said school for an entire term (bonus!)  Half of their time is then spent outdoors doing different physical activities that help build their self-esteem, while the other half is spent volunteering and pursuing vocational training.

Brayden Cartwright, who was interviewed on the ABC's PM, learnt through the program not only how to surf, but also how to envision a larger sense of future.  "School doesn't give you those opportunities to view other people's perspectives. You learn to work as a team.

"I didn't pay much attention [at school]; I didn't care too much.  I mean, depression and anxiety and a lot of stress weren't really helping.  I didn't know what I was going to do in life, where I was going to go.  I was just going to be a bum on the streets. So they really helped."

But unfortunately, now the Victoria Police - a major component in delivery of the program - has pulled out, stating that while it still wants to work with disengaged kids it is going to follow its own tack to do it.  This has been a big blow to Operation Newstart, effectively meaning that they needed to suspend their Bendigo and Frankston programs.  And now the Federal Government has withdrawn the $300,000 grant promised by the previous Labor Government to fill in the gaps left by the departure of the police in terms of delivery of the program, which puts in doubt the ability of the program to continue.  The Federal Government wishes instead to put that money towards its own method of tackling the problem of youth crime, which happens to be installing more CCTV cameras and better lighting.

Control, not empowerment.  Um, yeah, awesome idea.  Take teenagers who have plenty of reasons to feel alienated and disenfranchised because their culture is one cold, alienated and disenfranchised biatch herself, and doesn't support them in the ways they're screaming out for internally, where life is confusing and changing and they're scrabbling to keep up with it.  What better wise way to deal with those kids who are falling off the edges of everything by installing having even more electronic eyes to watch them from a distance and make them even more anxious and suspicious?  Awesome vision there.

Operation Newstart says that it is doing the work that governments should be doing when it comes to helping to cut youth crime.  I'm not so sure I agree with that statement.  I mean, I feel confused these days about what role I believe a government is meant to play ~ I have a left-wing heart but I'm in agreement with those on the right when it comes to the need for limits to government size, at least when it comes to the calibre of government we see in the dying days of the Western Empire.

A government's influence (which seems so often to translate into abuse of power and control) seems to me to grow in proportion to its distrust of its citzenry, compounding their resultant powerlessness and alienation.  We as a people are so routinely and regularly watched over, inspected, prodded and noiselessly threatened from afar that I don't even know if we even recognise half the time what that kind of environment has done to us. 

I tend to think of a government's function primarily as a large centre of administration of our money and resources, rather than it being the province of things like keeping crime under control.  The government should be a centralised place from which we can use our money in ways that will benefit us as a society.  For that to happen, a government needs to have a level of trust in its citizens, where it gives them free rein instead of smothering them under accountability standards and red tape.  Australia is so burdened by bureaucracy I reckon its edges must be starting to melt into the sea.

At this point in time anyway, governments are not good at operating in any other method other than the stock-standard old empire methods of control that alienates us all further.  It is exactly the same way that our economic system functions, to keep us in slavery to running the rat wheel instead of being able to put our best talents to use for the benefit of ourselves and other people, and to receive their talents in return.  Money is supposed to be a bridge between my talents and yours, not the seven-lane megahighway that shunts us all into the emergency lanes.  The elements that are meant to be tools for our empowerment have instead become the hammers that smash us over the head.

I was a disaffected and alienated teenager once, and she doesn't beat so far down beneath my chest even these days, and I know for a fact that what you need most as a teenager is a tiny bit of security when there's barely none, belief from the adults around you that it's okay to let go and experiment, and evidence that those same adults aren't really a bunch of rather stupid dicks.  Teenagers don't need much encouragement to think adults are dicks because that's part of the terrain that goes from being a child to becoming an adult.  Teenagerhood is all about breaking free.  Cultures other than ours have recognised this and initiations and rituals have been built into this time of life as par for the course ~ powerful, symbolic, culturally-embedded tools that helped teenagers move forward out of their comfort zones, learn to depend on themselves, take responsibility.  We might not agree with the methods of some of those rituals and rites, and some of them might seem dodgy to our modern day sensibilities, but they served useful purposes.  Ones that might have helped me feel less derailed myself, helped to encourage my own burgeoning sense of curiosity about the world, helped me to hone my risk-taking into stuff that might have been good instead of shagging guys when I was way too young for it and getting pissed every weekend because that was the only ritual going round that appealed to me.  Seems crazy and shortsighted to me now, even when I think back to that same teenager because she had such an intense desire to engage and understand the world, to be given a chance.  She couldn't have articulated it, but she was ripe for some ritual and ceremony and passage-riting, but unfortunately there were none for the taking in the culturally dead Australia of the 1980's.

And not much seems to have changed.  Which is why initiatives like Operation Newstart are such important ones, and why relying on the government to initiate enterprises which work, that create meaning, that give us a sense of being the writers of our own story, is not something we should hold our breaths for.  Because as far as I can see, the only language the Abbottoir Federal Government seems to speak is the usual one of control, fearmongering, and of adherence to the status quo.  The last thing they want is for people to be empowered.

We must do that ourselves.  Change has never, ever come from the top.  Not the sort we're all looking for, or need, anyway.  The sort of change that ... well, will change everything.

The Village

"Many adults who were traumatized as kids have never experienced their Self in consistent control. Such people (i.e. their dominant subselves) are skeptical that they have a gifted, reliable inner team-leader and a more serene and productive way of daily living available to them" - Peter Gerlach

I'm a hearty proponent of what Jung called Active Imagination and what this man here Peter calls Inner-Family Therapy.  While my inner skeptic still scoffs at the wankiness of all of this stuff, I've done enough work in this area to know that that is only one part of me, who is in my particular case covering for and trying to protect one of the parts of me that's, well, still a little fucked up.

This process has become sorta precious to me.  I've seen in myself the changes that come.  I still have a so much understanding and sorting to do, but this type of process is like being my own therapist.  It's empowering.  I guess it's been a little helpful to me that I have had several people who I have practised this type of therapy with, both beautiful, gorgeous women who have provided a safe space for me to enter into this rather more different form of talk therapy and couch-lying.  But I don't think it's necessary to have anyone else but you along for this particular ride.  It's the best way I know to enter into myself and to listen to parts of me that are screaming without my ever knowing who they were before.  And changes come, too.  Not fast enough, that's a given.  But they do.  Changes come, and growth, and new parts discovered that I have not been conscious of before.  New ways of being in the world.

Maybe this whole area of subselves is the story in action of the operation of different parts of our brains in action, as Peter Gerlach hypothesises.   Not just the physical brain as a bunch of muscle and neurons.  The brain as narrative, the brain as story.  Just how I like it.

How about you?  Have you ever done any of this kind of work?  How did you find it?

Fragile Beings

Pic by Darren Wyn Rees under a CC attrib/sharealike licence)

It's easy to think that it's just you.  That you're the only one who is paranoid/insecure/jealous/fearful/depressed/not coping/socially inept.  But really, the further on I go the more obvious it is that these aren't only things that I struggle with at various times.  Everyone else around me is struggling to one degree or another.

Some days, it feels like we're a giant old-fashioned kettle, about to start squealing 

I guess humans at the end of an empire really don't have a whole lot of turning circles within which to be comfortable and expansive and giving to others, do they?  In an environment like this one, you gotta shore up yo shit for yoself.

Which is probably partly the reason why we're in the pickle we're in.

Birthing new ways of doing things is hard.  Even when it feels awfully natural, and you're coming from an unnatural space.  Even then it feels scary, like you're walking without seeing where you're going.  Which we are. 

But still, every time I get despondent that the very worst of human nature - the greed and the nastiness of small-minded people who give not a fuck for the earth they live on when it's profits they need, or the closed-mindedness of people who should know better - I remember what I keep forgetting:  that the aim isn't probably so much to be fighting what is already established.  That is crumbling to dust before our eyes.  The real aim, the real creative bearing-down, is in working out what's gonna come next when the dust of that shit clears and we're left just with each other.  If we are lucky.  And when I remember that, I turn and look at those who are already practising alternatives.  They're everywhere.  Often in non-Western countries.  We are as poor and blind and deaf as can be culturally speaking when it comes to wisdom.  Sometimes I get the feeling that we are almost ashamed and embarrassed to talk about such childish notions as beauty, or of justice, or of freedom.  It feels almost like we are so far gone down the jaundiced road of cynicism that to speak of those things is some sort of blasphemy.

Fuck that.  Those things be where it's at.  Where we're going.  Maybe, if we're lucky.

The jaundice is what happens when you're on the rat race wheel too much.  It's a symptom, that's all.

Here's to new paradigms as old certainties and status quos crumble.  Here's to spaces where beauty, justice and freedom are not naive pie-in-the-sky ideals but qualities we are able to practice more and more, as the time goes on. Here's to a space where our fragilities and vulnerabilities are shared, not shored away because the space where everyone was a danger, and to be hated, and threatening, has passed, and we have moved on to something more sustainable in every possible way.

Here's to a space where those who are first will then be last and those who are last will then be first.

The Conversation

This guy is rapidly becoming a hero of mine.  If we were only collectively to have one ongoing conversation, this in my opinion, would be the one that we need to continue to have.

The Occupy movement received its denigration at the time as being a movement that didn't know what it was on about.  But what it always seemed to me like was more of a container than a movement.  It was an empty container with a lot of questions.  That it was ridiculed only demonstrated the necessity of the question-asking and the discomfort of the people who didn't know what the answers were.

We have only just started having this conversation.  In other ways it's been going and unfolding in full force for the past 10 years.  It's been a privilege to experience it.  When I'm overwhelmed, and my despair is high at the Goliath/Davidness of the situation, still there is always that very small and fervent hope that continues to burn in the hope that love will win. 

Change

It's both enlightening and disturbing to realise how much we make our own reality.  It comes in over time, dripping in like raindrops on carved rock, via those big and little thoughts that are constantly moving across our minds like clouds.  We are free to accept or dismiss any one of them.  Except for when we've become chained.  Most times we are chained before we are old enough to know that we are.  And then we move into our lives feeling beholden to accept certain thoughts every time they come, though they torment us.  They have become like the monster Snow White must turn and fight off deep in the forest.

Those hardest-to-dismiss thoughts become deeply carved ruts in the road of our mind, where they harden into beliefs.  Our little carts fall into them and get jammed every time.  We've driven down these roads countless times before.  Sometimes, perversely, we even like to drive down them precisely because they are painful, and we want to punish ourselves for not being what we expect ourselves to be.  The ruts have become part of our story that we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Sometimes we find ourselves down the rutted roads not out of self-punishment but simply because we've driven down them so many times that it has become second nature.  Just like when we drive well-worn routes and then realise at the end of them that we have no conscious recollection of actually driving here.  Finding ourselves once again in these spaces can make us feel as helpless as a newborn, swamped by despair at how to change what feels unchangeable, that which we can barely see.  The despair comes out of spaces of frustration where we don't know what to do, how to change, how to stop, how to start, where parts of us are still weeping, and that need reconciling, healing, hearing, patting, soothing.  What we need is encouragement that we can turn off the rutted highway and forge a new road where there isn't yet one.

Surely it's the hardest work we do in our lives, forging new paths, though the benefits are amazing and the work is honourable.  But how do you get to where you want to go when you have never been there before?  How do you know what you need to carry with you that is going to help you get there?  Sometimes our dreams tell us, sometimes what comes off the end of the pencil as we doodle tell us.  Fairy tales tell us.  Images that come from a disparity of sources tell us (for me lately it's ravens).  It's a very foggy guessing that feels quite unreliable.  But we just start where we suspect we need to start, suspecting that to carve out this path maybe we are going to need a machete, and a hoe, and a ... what the hell?  What has this bloody raven got to do with anything?  And you shrug and start hacking away, and oftentimes you find, like a present some deeper part of you has wrapped up for yourself, answers and deeper understanding further along the path.  For me, I am thinking at the beginning of yet another path that getting to where I want to go is possibly going to involve some of this tool, and some of this tool. 

The hardest thoughts of all to diminish and dismiss are the ones that are tied to unconscious beliefs.  You know, those things that in the commonplace world of logic you know you don't want to believe, and in a sense you don't.  But in another deeper sense you do, which is why they keep appearing all the time.  Oftentimes they appear disguised as irritations we feel about others, things we are projecting onto them that are really what is hounding us on the inside.

Chances are those thoughts and neuroses are hooking their tails around something that lives in that shadowy realm of the unconscious, where all those dreams and images live, where we are like enormous icebergs and the unconscious is the part that is submerged.  Where we know not what we do - or if we do, we know not why we do.  Not clearly enough to see a clear path.

I've become pretty enamoured with sitting in the middle of the road until I see where I need to begin carving a new path.  One that leads to I barely know what.  But other parts of me know very well where those paths lead.  Being prepared to walk them is part of the conscious mind's work.  Believing that there is something magical at the end of those paths becomes easier now I've walked some of them before.  I get to see the trees light up in my own forest.  I get to meet characters that I have not known before me, who wish to help me when I return to the topside world.  How beautiful it is.

Believing I shall carve a path when it relates to the biggest monster in my arsenal is much harder.  And yet, all those other paths I have carved are related to this same monster.  It seems that he needs to be beaten by carving many paths, not just one.  And carving out the new path does not really get any easier, it just gets more hopeful that there may possibly be a resolution.

But still, all I can do is walk the path.  And keep my eyes open for the surprises.

Hell is empty, all the devils are here

Hell is empty;  all the devils are here.

~ William Shakespeare.

It's a funny sort of coincidence isn't it, considering the narcissism and self-absorption our culture encourages us to dwell in, that it has not yet become an acceptable idea in our Western cultures that your normal everyday Joe or Gina on the street - or you - have a deep, dark, nasty side.  A side that we may see occasionally, but flinch from.  Our shadow sides.

Even more so the idea that contained within that shadow side could be something scary, destructive, diabolical.  Sure, we like to examine the darker depths of those who we perceive as "monsters" or "animals".  Those people we examine under microscopes, horrified and compelled, at the levels that some humans can stoop to.

But just not us.  Or at least, not me.  Maybe you.  Maybe everyone I come into contact with, but certainly and definitely not me.

We find it very hard, almost impossible, to believe that we could be capable of the same sorts of things as those people.  We scrabble to distance ourselves from them because we cannot bear to think about the alternative - that we are all capable of abhorrence.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the storyteller and Jungian analyst, talks about the predator, the part of our psyche which is unredeemable, which cannot listen to reason.  The demonic part of our souls.  Many of us in the nominally Christian West rail at that idea on several different levels.  Firstly, the Devil has been perceived via the childish abomination that is the Christian religion to be something outside of ourselves, some stupid caricature.  It all seems so childish.

But what if the demonic lives in here?  What if the Devil is a part of us all?  It would mean, yes, that we have to face and fight that which we are terrified of, which we almost cannot bear to admit lives in us.  But if the Devil is a part of us all, then for balance and hope's sake could we not also believe (and maybe even experience in oure more enlightened moments) that the God is in here too.  To help us.  Whether you see God/Devil as individual personages or as archetypes doesn't seem to make all that much difference in the outcomes of things, from where I'm seeing it today.  But then that's another story for another time :)

To face and do battle with these elements of our own psyches is, from where I'm sitting, turning into a matter of life and death.  Because if we do not face the dark elements of our own psyches, we will find it harder (or maybe even impossible) to face those same dark elements in the world.  And those dark elements are routinely and systematically destroying our earth, even in the face of climate change, for their own shortsighted ends.

As above, so below.  And as within, so without.  Those destructive forces that I see in my own soul, they threaten to overwhelm me, to destroy me, just like they are threatening in the outer world.  Those same forces are in you.  It is only by acknowledging them, facing them down, learning to not bow to them, learning to not be terrified in their presence - owning them - that I  learn, almost in disbelief, that these elements only have the power that I give them.  And that I can take that power away.  

It is where anger comes into its own.  It is an energy.  It fires itself slowly in your belly, into flame, into the energy that it takes to rouse yourself into productivity, into movement, out of torpor, out of stupor.

Growth Rhythms

I had a phone conversation last night with someone who presses all of my buttons.  I was tired at the end of a challenging day.  They began talking about their agnosticism, that they are an agnostic rather than an atheist like our Prime Minister, and usually I like those sorts of conversations but this one was cramping me up, being alcohol-fuelled from their end.  I find I need to forgive this person constantly and regularly for so spectacularly failing in life, failing me, that all of their conversations must be conducted from the neck of a bottle.  And needing to forgive myself that their attempts at connection make me feel this way.

If those expectations hadn't got in the way, as they sometimes do, I think my end of the conversation would have gone something along the lines that for me, the greatest evidence for the existence of God is in the awesome mechanics of cell duplication, in the world of nature, in the golden thread that occurs between humans who are turned to face each other.  That the best evidence is on the inside where it can't be proven, within communion.

But I don't talk that way to this person, and how could I say those things to them -- though I do know and readily understand that they respect my intelligence and opinions -- when my body, if I am turned to face them, incites headaches and stomach churning?  That I despise them for producing only this counterfeit communication, that talking with someone under the influence of secondary items feels like dealing in laundered money, or pirated DVDs, or looking at paintings that are forgeries?

So I guess I need to forgive myself for my lack of response.  I guess, after all, it turns out that I am not a continuously gushing fount of love and compassion.

I still do, however, feel inside, whether rightly or as some believe delusionally, that there is a godde who is a continuously gushing fount, connected to all.  It feels so often to me on the inside that this godde, she fills out the spaces where my own nerve endings are frayed, the golden thread connecting disconnection.  And so I guess I feel a little sad that I couldn't rise to the occasion past the hump of my disappointed expectations to have a moment's shimmer in that shared space where everyone lives, from my perception.

But not this time.  Sometimes my rightly-held and justified feelings rise up and cut the golden thread off at the pass.

Which is just the isness of it all.  The world is full of passes for us to be cut off at, or that we cut ourselves off at, and there is no shame in that, despite the reality-denying culture and my own soul's critic saying otherwise.  That culture neither understands nor respects laying fields fallow, or turning off the lights, or lying down to sleep that knits the ravelled sleeve of care.  And so how would it understand the rhythm and pace of humans, the way we work and heal, the way all that works?  Geez, that teenage culture has as its religion a god that plonks down a hell at the end of life to aid conformity and recalibrate the expectations while disallowing the space for them to be fulfilled.  Everything to be fulfilled by the end of life, like the clocking-off in a factory and the end of one little life, puny and glorious even with the aid of beeping things and pacemakers and pretense, still ending in a last gasp and rattles.

The culture expects a return on its investment like a Baby Boomer in the property market while denying the required rhythms of growth, just like its version of a god expects a return on his white-bearded hydroponic investment, a paying up of a perfect life lived under fluorescent lights, out of the rain, the coming of night and the rising of the sun afterwards, followed by the descent of the light, the coming of the velvet dark, the rising again of the golden sun of the morning.

The reality, I suspect, is somewhere a little more comfy than divide and conquer strategies.  A place for us to breathe in time with the rhythm of the earth's breath.  Beautiful, and messy, just how we yearn.

It Ain't Easy ...

... getting clean.

Sometimes you don't even notice it till it's upon you.  Or part of you notices it, other parts are numb to it or in denial.  The old tapes, the old demons, the old patterns.  They jump on the back of something opportunistic and before you know it they've rushed at you and stolen your breath, their teeth bared, kid's nightmare teeth, stealing your thunder.  If you didn't know any better you'd stay right there in their jaws, believing the landscape.

The still small voice that is in the silence, that is in the midst of all music, that golden thread, you can't see it at these times.  All you can hear is the deafening roar of the old school, the feelings-without-words, the numbness, the powerlessness that is life-as-you-knew-it.  

It could almost fool you that it's real.

There's nothing to it but to go through it.  You resist this with every ounce of you, even though you know there is no other way.  There is no god coming to take it away;  the only way is right through the centre of it.

It would never make a Hollywood movie.   Or a Pente sermon.

But out the other side, if you can tear your eyes away from the giant jaws, there is peace out that other side.  There is right action and peace and space.  You know it.  You've been there before.

All it takes is mindfulness and courage.  

The more you sit in the middle of your own worst nightmares, the more you begin to understand the oneness of everything, the paper tigerness of your worst fears, the freedom that lies out the other side.  A chink, a crack to walk through, out through the other side.

Part of you doesn't even believe it's going to happen.  Part of you knows that of course it will.

Very little is linear round here :)  

Non-Duality

- When right and wrong are united, I experience compassion.

- When love and hate are united, I experience forgiveness.

- When good and bad are united, I experience non-judgment.

- When male and female are united, I experience balance.

- When hope and despair are united, I experience trust.

- When Heaven and earth are united, I experience peace,and joy.

And when I see that, I can enjoy this world around me far MORE than when I used to fear it as "evil"...!

~ Dena

Nice one :)

The Glittering Net That Enfolds the Universe

Modern science speaks to us of an extraordinary range of interrelations. Ecologists know that a tree burning in the Amazon rain forest alters in some way the air breathed by a citizen of Paris, and that the trembling of a butterfly's wing in Yucatan affects the life of a fern in the Hebrides. Biologists are beginning to uncover the fantastic and complex dance of genes that creates personality and identity, a dance that stretches far into the past and shows that each so-called "identity" is composed of a swirl of different influences. Physicists have introduced us to the world of the quantum particle, a world astonishingly like that described by Buddha in his image of the glittering net that unfolds across the universe. Just like the jewels in the net, all particles exist potentially as different combinations of other particles.

So when we really look at ourselves, then, and the things around us that we took to be so solid, so stable, and so lasting, we find that they have no more reality than a dream ...

Impermanence has already revealed to us many truths, but it has a final treasure still in its keeping, one that lies largely hidden from us, unsuspected and unrecognized, yet most intimately our own.

The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious, something in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something in fact we can depend on, that does survive what we call death?

Allowing these questions to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on them, we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift in the way we view everything. With continued contemplation and practice in letting go, we come to uncover in ourselves "something" we cannot name or describe or conceptualize, "something" that we begin to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world. The narrow desires and distractions to which our obsessive grasping onto permanence has condemned us begin to dissolve and fall away.

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

++++

What maketh thee of this? I find it resonates so strongly within me. Perhaps the most disturbing concept to the Western mind is the statement about nothing being "real". We may tend to skip to the notion that he therefore means that nothing exists. I'm not so sure that Sogyal means that - although if he does (and I can understand the conclusion reached), this is where I perhaps begin to depart in my own thinking from Tibetan thought.

But then, in the very same breath, I do begin to wonder to myself whether he and I are not simply looking at the same thing from different sides of the mountain perhaps. I do think here, when he refers to things not being real he is speaking about the appearance of things. That things do not exist simply within their own little containers, separate to everything else. Indeed, the container we look at contains more space than it does anything else. This I can subscribe to. This is trippy. And truly, nothing stays the same, ever. Not even me. Thank God :)

Pic: Nirolo

The Truth in the Inward Parts

My son-in-law, Alan, says in his book, Journey into Christ, 'Our identity is hidden, even from ourselves ... The doctrine that we are made after the image of God proclaims that the human being is fundamentally a mystery, a free spirit. The creative artist is one who carries within him the wound of transcendence. He is the sign that human beings are more than they are.'

... A real problem for most of us is that this 'more than we think we are' is not necessarily recognized as good. It is difficult for most of us to recognize, accept, and affirm those large areas of ourselves which are not compatible with the image of ourselves we would like to project or which the world has taught us we ought to project. Jesus was very clear about these projections, referring to those who projected them as 'whited sepulchres,' clean and white without, and full of dead bones and decay within.

Madeleine L'Engle - Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

A favourite saying is, "God helps those who help themselves." I think the phrase can be understood correctly, but in most practical situations it is pure heresy. Scripture clearly says God helps those who trust in God, not those who help themselves.

We need to be told that so strongly because of our entire "do it yourself" orientation. As educated people, as Americans, our orientation is to do it. It takes applying the brakes, turning off our own power and allowing Another.

What the lordship of Jesus means is that first we come to him, first we put things into his hands. Our doing must proceed from our being. Our being is "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3).

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p.77

I have been pondering this idea all day today, gleaning its comfort. I have become so much more aware in the last year or two how deep I go. How much there is in me that is just patently impossible for me to know. Like Paul, I am frustrated at the depths to which I do that which I do not want to do, and do not do that which I do want to.

Thinking about this today, reading those words from L'Engle this afternoon, I thought for the first time really about how these deep parts must also commune with God. God does not commune simply with my mind and my heart, the conscious elements of me. There are parts of me groaning in prayer. Just as there are animals living their entire existence, only recently discovered, so far down in the ocean that it was commonly believed nothing would or could exist down there. God is speaking to the deep, deep calling to deep, without me even being aware. That is so comforting to me. The depths of my soul scare me just as much as they thrill me with their deep deep knowings and their strange dark beauty.

I mentioned to my friend a few days ago how it felt to me as if the seasons were about to begin transitioning from summer into autumn. The most subtle of feelings, the very beginning, like it feels when I know the very second my period is beginning. Autumn is not even palpable on the air yet, certainly not manifested into a smell. But just evident this evening, as I noticed the sun going down just a little earlier than usual. The sun was a beautiful golden ball of light. I let it seep into my soul. I could feel, for a moment, the urge to hang onto the light. But it is the way of things that the light must die. I must share it with my northern friends too :) (There is also a tinge of melancholy attached to summer now, this one being so full of destruction. This season I am not sorry to see the end of summer).

My friend mentioned to me, in the striking way that female friends have with each other, that I am in the process of transition. I am transitioning, my friend assured me with the conviction of one who can see. It's just that I can't see it yet, she said.

I agree. How weird it is this agreeing, down deep, down where the knowing is and the blood starts. I can't see it at all. I have no real idea what it entails. But it is coming. A turning. In accordance with the seasons, as the leaves will begin to twist and turn their ways off the trees. Just as the leaves become their real, true colour in autumn, I pray also, with fervency, that this autumn I will become just that little bit more like myself. Or putting it another way, I look forward in my turning to becoming just a little bit more like Christ. Whatever that looks like.

I'm b-a-a-a-a-c-k

I couldn't resist posting at my favourite blogging time, Saturday morning, seeing I missed last week. Hey, everyone! Good to see ya!! I missed ya :)

This week has been very interesting. I spent a reasonable swathe of it feeling empty, along with some moments of clarity, of creativity (I feel closer to the concept of being able to write a short story, for example - did you know that for the past seven months the only fiction I have written is a couple of poems? This week I also did some journalling and made a crap collage :) But the main feeling of this past week has been a feeling of emptiness. One of those times where you can't enfold yourself into the presence of God because he is standing one step away, calling to you to walk a step towards him.

Lucy describes well how emptiness is not a bad thing. Making way for the Lord, and all that. A fitting feeling to have at the time of Advent. Emptiness feels bad though, no matter how you philosophise it. I don't know if we ever get used to the feeling, being made as we are to be filled to the brim. Sometimes I wonder if we don't feel most empty at the very times when God is moving in those inward parts of us most bruised, most distorted, most twisted and most singed at the ends. Moving and denumbing us.

Fasting is a good thing. I haven't done a great deal of it in the past. These days, I can't seem to stop :) It is a strengthener. We are stronger than we think we are (insert whatever other Diane Warren/Jim Steinman-esque type quotes you think applicable here ;).

All I know is that I am 37 years old. I am most likely not going to have children (at least not in this life. I have put in a request to God that if all the babies that are unborn in this life require some sort of looking after in the next, that I might get some nursery duty :) I want my life to count for something. The past 8 years in the backside of the desert have been priceless and I wouldn't even trade them anymore. I've fallen off the tracks and realised that I don't even want to get back on again. I don't want to be anywhere but on the fringes. I just don't. You can see
clearer from here, and you get to miss out on great big blobs of the bullshit that sucks us into living fruitless, pointless lives devoid of meaning (the stock-standard Empire fit life, all shiny on the outside but as filling and nutritious as a bowlful of sugar).

I don't want to live that life. I could very easily spend the rest of my days stuck in front of the television or the computer screen every night. But Mein Gott I really don't want to. This is where praying dangerous prayers comes in. It's to save me from myself. I don't know where my life is heading. But praying dangerous prayers means that maybe I don't need to :) I used to think that praying that kind of prayer would mean God would send me somewhere where I could continue feeling like a square peg in a round hole, somewhere that I would get to use none of the gifts that I had and would have to squelch all of the ones I did. That kind of thinking was box thinking, however. God is just a leetle bit more creative than that.

I also used to think that it was kinda a one-way street of "doing God's will" - of listening and being all passive and getting directives from him. But the directives come slap bang right in the middle of a life well-lived, me is thinking. (What do you think?) And they come from within myself and my own heart desires, and it's when those inner things meet the outward sense of directive that the heartstoppers happen, the "ooh!" moments of clarity that propel you forwards into this direction, not that one.. It is much more of a co-creating of my life with God. I get to fully participate in it. It is fully mine, with him enshrouded and enmeshed and threaded through it until it becomes something beautiful. He is life and love.

I wanna know what those things are he's prepared for me to do from the foundation of the world.l I wanna go out and do them. I think I am really finally starting to heal.

It is raining, slightly chilly. The weather has been wild and woolly the past few days. Flooding rains and thunderstorms. My brother is down from Balranald with his dog. Now there are two dogs petrified of the thunder. I hope it's the last of it for their sake.

I am coming to the end of my latest parasite cleanse. I am feeling better and with more energy than I have in the last month. All bad medicine comes to an end at some point. There is so much change in the air. I can smell it on the wind. But I can't see what any of it looks like. There's a copper hair colour with my name on it on the bathroom sink. A symbolic changing to reflect the wind scent. I don't know what's gonna happen. But like I said, I don't really need to. But sheesh, doesn't mean I don't really want to :)

PS: I have this bad habit of editing my posts for about half an hour after I write them. Is that bad blogging etiquette, seeing some people read the first draft and then you go and change it again? I just like seeing how it looks "published" on the page. I seem to get inspired to change it more once it's there :) Annoying and I apologise :)