Recently, I have been dealing with the deep sadness of watching loved ones go through grief. The layers are many. First there is the loss of my own expectations of seeing that sweet person filled with joy through the promises to come.

the romance of desolation draws the broken to it

The “supposed to” and “It is your job to” also comes into it as well. We break upon the rocks of expectation so frequently. What we want most in life is to see those we raise and nurture to step confidently into life. What we want most is for those we have brought into the world to be somehow safe from the bruising of reality, restriction and restlessness. And death. How do we protect them from death and loss?

Yesterday, was a heavy day when the end of a dream came to my family member. I found that I could not manage doing much. My mind constantly went back to allowing. “Just allow yourself to feel sad,” I would say. “Just allow the dark heart to be.” I would occasionally breathe out slow releasing the tension from my body.

But the other layers came into play as always. The ego is so good at creating a mummified creature by wrapping layers of narrative around and around an already distressing event. The stories of failure, mine, theirs, his, its, the world’s, the universe’s just kept wrapping around me. Then came the swaddling of future narratives…. life is so sad that this will happen, and this, and this.

The inside of my Dark Knight Rises mind movie lead me to just crawl into bed. I prayed. I did some deep breathing but the parasite fear was so firmly attached that I could do nothing but be with it.

I thought about death. I thought about the time I had lost half of the blood in my body and floated above the hospital recovery room to hear a nurse screaming about somebody being gone and a doctor rushing over. I thought about spinning around on the Coquihalla with the sides of the car being crushed in first on one side of the highway and then the other as a semi truck was weaving behind trying not to end lives. I thought about my cancer operations and the feeling of waking up every morning to the realization that I might die soon.

I thought about the friends and family who have passed. So many of those I have loved, who were part of the holographic identity of myself that I had constructed, are in spirit now.
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And the grief. The grief of being in a body. The grief of others who cannot help their loved ones no matter how much they wish to reach out and take that burden upon themselves. The overwhelming sadness of knowing that inevitably the price of being alive is to experience the multitudinous ways in which we are limited by our own belief systems about what it is to be alive.

Finally, I thought of how each of us deserves comfort. Each of us deserves arms that will wrap around the body that we walk around in; the body that delights us; the body that condemns us. The warmth of being held for all we are, for all of our failures, all of our un-enlighted moments, all of our inability to go beyond our own limitations of thought. Just held in love.

It is the only way to make sense of this lesson of life and grief and death: that there is, finally, love.

I slept with my arms around sadness
I slept with my arms around grief.
I lay down with prayers for my loved ones
finding, words spoken in darkness
finding, a way to believe.

Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created (such as an idea, a joke, an artistic or literary work, a painting or musical composition, a solution, an invention or a etc.). I would add, or a self.

I am a story and a chapter and a line and a word and a letter and a gesture of pen upon paper.

Most of my DNA is masked but the hidden parts map like the rhythm of language.

Science cannot understand the human blueprint.

I am static and moving and inert and dynamic and fierce and frightened.
90% of all of my thoughts are replayed stories of the old wars in old landscapes.

90% of all decisions are from the reptile brain which decides for me 7 seconds before it appears on the conscious screen.

Is my soul reborn, is my personality reborn, are my reactions causing the action?

Am I part of my body, riding in my body, above my body?
Whose voice do I hear?

Who speaks to me?

Is this a lesson?

Where is the centre? Where is the fullness? Where am I?

I reached for the wall in the hospital because I saw a polar bear.
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We revise our histories. We go back and play a scene again with subtext script.
We color it in, give it a sound track, interpret it for the audience of self.

Was the bear a guardian spirit? A hallucination?
How am I to know without rewriting the story?

Within the lies of anxiety that we listen to like siren calls there lies a place. It can be reached. It is what Deluk the Buddhist nun told me is “the garden”.

It is in the centre. It is in the centre of the past, the present, the future. It is full of no time time.What happens in this garden is magic. What happens in this garden is no time time. It is no story, no narrative, no question.

My story, my childhood was violent, threatening, chaotic. I was taught fear. I was taught to fear the environment, to fear death, to fear to speak, to fear all formulations of what I was.

My confusion did not help creativity. Neurosis does not help creativity. The lizard brain is not creative, it is looking to survive.

So how did I find myself. Here. Sometimes sitting in the garden of no self. I have learned to watch my mind. I have learned to know when I am being 6 or 10 or 15. I have learned to embrace the shadow self. And for all of these incarnations which appear I have learned to follow Thich Nhat Han’s advice and sit with them. I sit with whatever is presenting like one would sit with a baby. I hold it. I comfort it. I come home to myself.

And since I have come home to myself, I am clear. I am clear in what I say. I am clear in my art.

We are all given gifts. Much as the Fairies in fables show up at the birth. They stand next to the baby and they bring gifts. The universe has given you gifts. When you are no longer afraid, when you are no longer letting your lizard brain tell you the story, when you are no longer letting your past create the hologram of your present you simply use your gifts. It is easy. It is what we are here to do. Without ego, self judgement, without waiting for applause or condemnation, we just use our gifts.

Be curious, transform

And that is when we truly come home to self. We sit in the garden and blossom. It is why we are here.

The holding in place a space
my body inhabits so solid this anchoring self.
I am an animal of culture and inculcation.
The impact geography of my childhood,
my alliances, my institutional experiences
sometime trap.

upcoming poetry readings

I saw the Tom Cruise film recently called OBLIVION and it gave me pause.

First, yes Tom’s various manifestations as characters in movies are all just a clone of himself. So many exact reproductions of the hyper-kinetic energy of his personality invested with a script build around it and differing costumes are given an enscripted name.

Next I moved my mind over to the idea that always draws me. I am amazed at how much I dwell in simple three dimensional feed back, tethered to a reality construct that I cannot release.

We are a reflection of reflections. Either cultural or of the mind.

My whispering Ate spirit is my constant companion. She tells me things that keep me imprisoned.

One of the spells she weaves is of proximity. “You are better off submitting to local galleries,” she tells me. “You will find a love who lives close to you.” “You will achieve the artistic power you deserve by reading poetry locally, by submitting writing locally.”

Even after reading dozens of books and articles about Quantam Physics and the illusion of competition; even after taking classes in science of mind for two years; even after my four Shamanic retreats and daily meditation my mind locks onto appropinquity, juxtaposition, contiguousness, adjacency.

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the romance of desolation draws the broken to it

The surface terrain tells us that having a lottery ticket one number out from the big win means we are close. It translates to interior self talk that someone in a black Toyota dying on the highway means one must be careful when driving his or her Toyota on that same highway.

There is so much primitive grief embedded in the concept of nearly real. If it is next to me, it is more likely.

Lately I have been working with my attachment to the Proximity Myth.

There is another dynamic which is arising. However deeply I feel something, however far into my body, my essence, my heart, my imagination the more likely that energy is to manifest in my life.

So standing next to someone who seems to hit the jackpot is not the answer. Neither is it the answer to believe that a local gallery is more likely to appreciate what I create. Locality is not reality.

finding the bright steady centre

My work is to see my mind bind and start cutting the threads. When do I stand up fully in who I am? The work is now, for me in this time, to find the work. The work is now, for me in this time, to use discipline and reckless abandon equally and trust that I do not need to see the road to travel upon it.

Gumball
slot machine world
take a chance.
If I can touch the thing
and find the slot
Bingo baby
Payout
filling both my hands.

As I have gone through the labour of giving birth to a new self, a new consciousness and a new dna inheritance, I have come to see exactly how being right has played out in my life. However, I could be wrong about this.

The Dragon is fearless

When I was young and raised by a man with 168 IQ (as ascertained by army testing) and a mother who continuously took courses at the local college never garnering less than an “A”, the message was that the family was extraordinary.

Yes, we were. We as a group were quicker to deconstruct the news the media was delivering. We read volumes. In fact, no other eight year old I have ever met had H.G. Wells’ Outline of History read out loud to her. My father was fascinated with mesmerism as it was called. He studied mind control and the body’s shifting in the face of expectation. No where else in the society was I hearing anything about the connection of belief and body.

He designed and built a model balsa wood house with corner windows and architectural features in the 1950’s that I only later saw in the 1980’s as a reality.

Although both of my parents suffered mental illness, addiction and lived a tangled chaotic life, their minds were exceptional. The consequence was that I was taught to read; to think for myself (one cannot rely on authority when authority is crazy). We also frequently feasted on the stupidity of the Average Joe. At the dinner table I ingested the judgmental narratives of how individuals around my parents were unaware automatons. At the hospital where my mother worked as a scrub nurse, I heard about drunk surgeons making egregious decisions. I learned from my father about the normal citizen was allowing him or herself to be manipulated.

In school, I had the advantage of an inherited high IQ, living in a household where ideas were flying around as frequently as furniture was being thrown and I had the gift of escaping into reading.

Consequently, my vocabulary by grade 10 was that of a second year University student.

I remember distinctly heading home from grade 6 with a group walking behind me chanting nasty, little colorful curses upon my head for utilizing words in class which they could not comprehend. I could feel myself shut down and become numb. I was different. Should I camouflage in order to escape the social censorship?

What I see at this point in my life is that my parents used being right to cover up their own bleeding out. They taught me to learn, to grow, to not trust what the culture tells us is the truth. But they also taught me that I can stand taller if I am standing on the neck of another person. He is beneath me. He is stupid. She can’t understand because she is unintelligent.

These coping strategies worked brilliantly for me. They justified my isolation. They reinforced my ability to trust what I was learning without trying to make it fit into the cultural puzzle.

It allowed me at 14 to attend a fundamentalist Sunday school with a friend and be uncompromising.

The minister told us that all who did not believe in Jesus Christ were damned. I ignited. I flamed into passion. “How can someone be cursed who was born before Jesus appeared on the earth?” I asked. I envisioned millions of souls writhing in eternal agony in an unjustified condemnation. The class began to murmur with the question sending the vibration of doubt through the rigid rows.

I was asked to never return to the class.

How can an ant see the top of a mountain? How can a person trapped into competitive right/wrong warfare fly above the learned self? These are questions I am sitting in at the present time.
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The deleterious effects of the “superior being” attitude is that it has prevented me from growing. To lock into a belief with the addiction twist of the mind tool of ego has kept me locked down. Any tightening, rigidity, hardening means that there is not the open, soft space for my growth.

Watching Mind

It is in not knowing, being “wrong”, looking over my shoulder and seeing I have been enthusiastically pumping my knees in the air and moving my feet on the wrong path that the gift comes.

So when I see a comment on facebook that is incorrect; when I hear a person say something so unskilled it makes my jaw clamp; when I eaves drop on my interior monologue and say WTF, I have to do the work of seeing why it triggers me.

The reason I react in such a rigid and condemnatory way is because I want the self rewarded prize of being right. I want the winner’s ribbon, the stamp on my life passport, the silent accolade.

I want to be seen as correct, as astute, as an early adapter, as one who sees beyond the illusion. And that comes from my own lack of self esteem. That reaction comes from my fear of making a mistake, of being a mistake.

If I hold the belief that life is a war; that life is a jungle; that it is survival of the fittest then I will most certainly need to be correct in order to survive.

Competition, fear, anxiety, lack of a strong interior space have lead me to hold on to the need to be seen as “right”.

The question is: Am I ready to let that go? Am I ready to be as one who is in a kayak going down white water and just imperceptibly shift to the forces at play? Can I keep my seat, my balance by allowing energy to play through my body?

Standing up in the kayak and making a speech about how I knew that rock would be there, seems pretty stupid to me now.

But I could be wrong, deluded, up the dark alley, dead dumb. And so what?

All I can do right now is call out, “Sit down in the boat, woman. Trust me.”

Fearlessly stepping away from ego