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Sep 23

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Comfort in Practice

My night reading of Koran verses was surprisingly refreshing. I used to find them judgmental—all that ‘do the right thing or be in hell’—but with a new perusing and the leavening of age and experience, that they are right.  They just are. The question is understanding what the ‘right thing’ is. Each sura drops a tiny clue in its bed of poetry to what a right thing is. Most of these clues point to finding and stepping onto the Path. This can be religion. This can also be Sufi. The Path means doing the practices. There is no Path without regular engagement in practices. None. Not for anyone of us. Practices, which constitute Path, are given, are learned, passed down, and proffered as solace for the pain of being human. They free us from the hell of personality—our own and others. All that ‘patting on the head’, competition, reaching for stardom—the fruitless ways we try to wring love out of the world.

The mesa naturally loves. Trees, air, rocks abundantly give. The sky is slow movement. The sky is slow movement. It takes only slowing and opening to receive.

Slowing and opening. Isn’t that truly what most of our Sufi Dancemeditation practices turn toward? Time—Asr—comes then, sits inside us displaying the diamonds in her pouch. It doesn’t require Ravenrock to receive this largesse, though Path will certainly accelerate here. No. Any small undisturbed room will do.

The words tumble out. Al hamdu lillah.
Breath sinks in. Al hamdu lillah.
What is Allah?
A word. A breath.
What is this Word? The Heart knows.
What is this breath? Life.

Sep 22

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Names in the Land

I sit on the deck bundled in a sweater after a late afternoon rain storm. Fans of sun rays burnish the land between the humps and banks of clouds. The mesas and canyons all have names, have had many names over time. I don’t know any of these yet. And most names aren’t contained in the hard edges of language, the sticky net of thoughts. The mesas approach and retreat in the play of light like a line of country dancers. Long shadows spill over the crest and slide down the slope into the shadowy floor.

My mind wanders, thinks about things but these dissolve; Ravenrock turns sticky thoughts slippery, hard to grip. I listen. My eyes rest on what surrounds me—bushy live oak, heavy-headed spikes of black gramma grass, bobbing juniper boughs. Breathing. Yes. My chest swells, grasps the top of the inhale for a beat, then gushes out. After, easy sliding breaths. The west wind pours over the crest. A prickly pear’s rosy fruit catches a shaft of low light, the pores from which each needle pierces out holding a glisten of rain. The fruit itself resembles an engorged, enflamed thumb. Wisps of cool, damp air ease out of the west. One cricket sings. One jay flits.

 

Sep 20

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On the Deck with Friends

Tom
I sat on the deck with my neighbor Tom Walker last night. He had come over to help refine the downspout to my cistern. Tom, a young 70, is lively and strong. He likes to chat. Though we spent half an hour mulling the downspout, conversation reliably and continuously digressed. (The major aspect of doing projects with neighbors is to hang out.) At last we sat on the deck. The sun was declining, tossing a glorious rosy light across the canyon. Tom, scruffy from a day’s work, ignored the view and relating to me in detail about constructing his septic line—hitting soft dirt, then rock, then soft dirt, then rock. All this was to warn me that I may or may not need his jackhammer when the pole barn guys come and start digging down to set the poles. I had to chuckle. He’s a good man, he really is. And he knows a lot about making things. As well, in my mind, he’s the mesa sheriff. Keeps an eye on everything. Keeps a look out.


My artist-mystic friend, Kathy. The deck was surreal when she was visited me a week ago from Austin. She followed, with a play-by-play, every tiny shift in the panorama of light effects—pure drama of clouds and light, molding, shadowing, highlighting the sensuous mesas and canyons, and the veils of rain covering hollows, then passing to reveal heavenly shafts of golden sun. Rainbows arced abundantly when she was here, not to be seen since. I felt I hadn’t really seen the view, despite how much I look at it until her visual acuity awakened mine eyes. I tend to mix visual, smell, and sensation evenly as I regard the world. The feel of things has a strong impact on me. My eyes sip. Bit by bit.

Jamie
A young cowboy. He lives on the ranch at the foot of the Apache Mesa Road. As we gaze out, he knows the ranch, that I can only see with binoculars, is La Liendre. He was on a search and rescue the other night just there, he says, pointing the a pinion/cedar encrusted slope 50 miles off. They saw the signal fire. They hiked all night to get to the guy who’d fallen off his horse from a rim. Jamie rolls his eyes. He didn’t believe that tale. He trots down to the rim, comfortable on his feet. “Sweet!” he remarks. He loves the view.

Sep 19

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Spoilers: Letter to Karleen

Letters are the best! The best. Proper letters, on paper with an envelope and a stamp tempered by time nestled up against other letters traveling across country in trucks or vans or airplanes. Depending on the interlocutor, its like a journal, but witnessed. You toss down your burdens. You aren’t alone with the head buzz of ‘stuff’ (no matter how legitimate), and the time it takes to run a pen across a page slows down expression just enough (to catch a breath?),; as well, there moments of marination between writing and posting the letter. Its a beautiful process. And I felt all that as I read your letter. I felt how different it was from talking with you on the phone, or reading an email or your blog, all of which are equally authentic yet each bounded by different ‘rules’ of time.

And I think of your concerns—not the specifics but the fact that you have them—and we all have these karmas that eat us for lunch. Lately, on the mesa, I struggle for the right to be happy, to be content. I fell both quite a lot, and then I am hit with a dump of penitential guilt. Perhaps: I am utterly irresponsible and selfish; humans, particularly women, are meant to get their joy, if allowed any, from serving others, and the more gruesome the service the more peace we are meant to feel; or, simply, a good person is an obedient person is a happy person. That obedience, of course, is to rules and regs set down by others. Well! All of that lurks in my shadows. In my life, which I suspect looks carefree to others, I knuckle down hard—be a good artist, (Obey those Art rules, which someone else made up!), be a good Sufi (Pray hard, hard hard!), etc. So to sit here flowing lightly with the day, shot through with a loving peace, listening and sensing my through, is both soft and radical.

What do any of us deserve? Our time. Our own organic rhythm with no Spoilers. Spoilers—the worst sort of people. Truly. Spoilers are those who stomp on the happiness of others (because they don’t cultivate their own?) I’ve got quite a few inside me still, but it’s the outside ones that P me off. “Go clean up!” I think. That’s in part what a decent spiritual path is in part—not inflicting one’s misery on others. And not eroding their peace and joy, their precious peace and joy.

I’m looking at rosy morning rays play over the wide face of Hermit’s Peak, that massive edifice you see from the top of the mesa. Little magenta flowers that open in the morning and close at night like Morning Glories bob around my ankles in the Pine Grove. I saw an enormous tarantula yesterday around dusk. The size of my foot. Black with a yellow back. Ge stalked relentlessly across the fire pit toward the Ponderosa forest. What a creature!

Since you were here, the metal roof and gutters are on and a 250 gallon cistern collecting off the lower roof is nearly full. Water! Now I just carry or boil drinking water. I am mostly at ease now except for the having no plan about scaring off the bears. I’m working on getting a loud blasting horn. For now, I have stopped watched videos on my computer at night, since the sound keeps from hearing outdoor noises. Instead I entertain myself by writing the fiction novel. I know you’ll be amused by that turn.

So mesa life unfolds.

I send  you a big hug. And much, much love.

Sep 10

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I Need This Palace

Late night. The crickets sings. I don’t sleep. I wake, light a candle, and read beautiful Hafiz poems and Koran. My cabin is a cranium, the door a mouth, and the deck its tongue. I walk out of the head, through the mouth, onto the tongue, and fall into space as a song. Quiet settles in me. It grows too cold for the cricket. I close the window and lean toward the candle. Read more

Sep 8

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Sponge Bath

Basin & pitcher for sponge bath

I enjoyed this evening’s sponge bath more than usual. I lit a candle and put the blue enamel pitcher and basin on the old wood table. Next to these, Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap, a blue wash cloth and, for after, a white towel. I washed slowly, listening to a podcast of Radiolab about the emerging neuroscience of embodiment— of proprioception and body-mind sequencing and Air Force pilots’ out-of-body experiences— all rather old news to me. Autumn’s cool evening has come. I had to heat water to keep this from being a chilly bathing. The radio drone, the wind outside, and the water splash were pleasant, soothing, normalizing for me while I methodically washed one part after another.

Sep 6

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Morning Prayer

The morning wind blast from the NW. It is chilly for the first time so I’m in two polartechs and Don’s huge sweatshirt, sitting on the sunny deck with my goatskin over me to drink my morning tea and write. Read more

Sep 1

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Coming Home: Letter to Kate

I sit in the Pine Grove a bit shocked by all the small purple flowers, tufts of long, tender grass, and feathery, ferny stems springing up from what was a dense, brittle carpet of pine needles when I departed. I am wading in shin-deep greenery! The ground is vaguely springy. The rainy-season has also brought along  other not-so-pleasant shifts—mosquitos. Surprise! There were never any mosquitos in all my prior years in New Mexico. I’m trying to wrack my brain for what good there might be in a mosquito…Now I have to put in screens or forfeit entirely the cool night breeze.

What stuns me is the quiet. The stillness. Of course the wind sings and the birds and insects make their diverse little chorus, but under all that infrequent music the land sits large and solid and silent. This is joy to me. I see a picture of my path—to be as connected to the large, solid, silent and enduring magnitude as possible and let the small movement around all that come and go.

Yesterday, as I was getting out my truck after moving two large plywood sheets, I looked up and saw a raven. It flew quite low, hovering over me with its legs hanging loosely down, talons half spread. It tipped and turned, a glowing blue-black spade, gently circling closer and closer. As it neared out came a soft gurgling. I’d never heard such a delicious sound. Then another, followed by a few light cracks, before it wafted away—the best welcome home I could ever have asked for. Its partner came along soon after and I haven’t seen them since. My ravens.

So I am home again at Ravenrock, waiting for all of me to arrive. Writing to you helps.

Much love to you ~

Aug 25

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The Dharma-Karma Thing

The Dharma-Karma Thing is what I call the sense of two divergent, often dissonant, but equally substantial streams of purpose running through my time on earth. Karma—the world, family, business, stuff, stuff—feels a bit heavy. Dharma feels like the forward unfolding of spiritual Path, my reason for being born. Both carry responsibilities and both bring satisfaction or misery, but one is laden with the past and the other is the freedom of becoming True.

I’ve just spent six weeks with my parents at their Maine island home. This year it was hard to leave my solitude on the mesa in New Mexico. I didn’t want to go, but I did want to have time with my parents. As well, they are elderly and my presence helps them continue to do what they love with a sense of safety. I have my own little cabin so their space is still their own, but I am nearby. Just in case. We visit every day, talk, do things very slowly. I wash a lot of dishes and do piles of laundry which would otherwise heap high.

My practice on the island became sudden bouts of of deep sonorous breath suffusing me with ‘here-ness’,  rising suddenly, sweeping off my thoughts, shucking husks off my eyes, and landing my limbs in gravity. Aware embodiment came abruptly, intermittently, uninvited but welcome. Rather than going toward my breath, my breath came to me, rescuing me from the drain of things. I’ve walked toward the ocean for all of my meditative days and now stand in the surf, waves crashing over me.

Living with my parents was the karma of the Dharma-Karma Thing. I repay, gladly I might add,  goodness given to me in my childhood. I hope I express, by kind and loving company, gratitude for being so well brought into this world. In past summers I wasn’t very good at all this. Simple, petty frustrations would not subside. I saw how my lashing out riled them and poisoned me. Shame for this immaturity began to torment me. After 50 a person should be able to grow up, yes? And not only in the apparent aspect of actions but right down into one’s core. I despaired of ever outgrowing my habituated resentments, those barnacles of pain.

But this summer was better. On the outside I did almost perfectly. I didn’t provoke my parents or rise to their provocations. Without playing my end of the game, our typically inflammatory interactions petered out. As the outside calmed, my reactive-ness grew fainter, tamped down, then out. I observed its staleness, its dullness, its irrelevance. Yet this was work. The daily four hours with my parents was effort for me, and if not for the years of Sufi practice, learning how to stay put, stay ‘in’, stay focused and weather myself, I would have been incapable of being kind and aware and present with my parents. I would have been incapable of taking on my karma. So though right now I am weary, I feel deep satisfaction. How wonderful to not hanker for approval but instead to seek to usher in happiness. My despair has lifted. There is hope.

Aug 9

Summer Mysticsim: Water, the Divine Guidance

In this picture a Teacher gives a water blessing to a Seeker.

A teacher begins as a person outside the self. In Sufi, the Teacher moves from intuition and is guided. Over time, the Teacher forges an internal guidance in the Seeker. We all strive to internalize Trust in Divine Guidance, Trust in Intuition.

That is the meaning of water—Intuition and Divine Guidance.

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