restingmotion

Holding the Center

I more or less shut the door on the world for a few days.  I went out to see a production of a Christmas Carol Friday night, and Sunday was the Christmas pageant at my church.  Watching little children always makes me smile, the littlest sheep especially.  Somewhere in between the two I watched Alfonso Cuáron's 1995 version of A Little Princess.  All three left me smiling and singing happy little songs to myself. I am no opponent of sappy romanticism.  Sometimes it is exactly what we need.

That also could have been because I spent much of the weekend working on knitting and handwork.  While I watched the movie I did some hand-sewing, alterations and mending on a velvet jacket (above) that I hoped to wear to a couple of holiday parties this week.

But I also did a fair amount of knitting as well, working on a few last-minute gift ideas, as well as a project for myself.  The last-minute gift knitting wasn't particularly pressured.  I'd already done all my shopping and have everyone covered, this was just inspiration knitting.  Ideas popped into my head and my fingers were itching to get started.  One should run with inspiration when it hits after all.  

By Sunday afternoon I had found my equilibrium again and I managed to catch up with the world a bit, reading the Sunday NY Times and this week's Economist between bouts of knitting and a trip to the gym.  Despite the news, and the fact there will be a bit more hustle and bustle over the next few days, I am still humming.  

 

For me, increasingly,  this season isn't really about doing more, but about finding the light and holding the center.   Somehow in my head thoughts are swirling around a bastardization of two metaphors. First there is the idea of life as an aboriginal longhouse, from Louise Penny's newest novel, Kingdom of the Blind, where "Everyoe we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lies in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or taken away.".  I am juxtaposing that with the idea of a magic circle, rekindled yes, from A Little Princess.  This entire holiday season whatever you celebrate or believe, seems to be about maintaining that circle, about lighting a fire of hope and love, and holding what is important close, be it creativity, friends, family.  Our longhouse is always full and crowded, the busyness of the world always around us.  But within the circle there is love.  What is in your circle?

 

 

 

Seeking the Quiet Space

On a quiet block, in the quiet Montrose neighborhood of Houston, there sits a rather severe looking building shaped much like a Greek Cross, or is it an octagon superimposed on a Greek cross?  It could be easily missed, and yet it is a space I treasure, a space of profound holiness.  

 

This is the Rothko Chapel.  Commissioned by Dominique deMenil and completed in the early 70s as a non-denominational chapel, open every day, open to all, it has become a center for interfaith dialogue.  The interior consists of a quiet, some would say somber, modified octagon containing 14 paintings by Mark Rothko, paintings that are mostly black, or almost black, a blackness that I see as rich with depth and color and texture, rich with meaning.

 

I get that many people do not appreciate this place, and yet many do.  The world is big enough for many understandings of what is holy.  As I grow older I increasingly understand that every moment, every place and object holds its own share of that holiness, but we all too often are too preoccupied to see.  And yet, for each of us there are places or spaces that are totems of holiness, places to which we yearn to return. For me, the Rothko Chapel is one such place. There are many who find peace in the reflecting pool, the Barnet Newman sculpture and the stand of bamboo, and there are those, like me, who find peace in the meditative silence and darkness of the chapel itself.

 

I discovered the Rothko Chapel the summer I turned twenty.  At the time I had never experienced anything quite like it, and I was the only person, other than the docent, present in the space.   I didn't know much about Mark Rothko then, but the paintings seemed to embody blackness, not as a slick of color on a canvas, but as an act of absorption, an act of containing all of experience and holding it in a holy reverence.    I felt a profound sense of peace, a profound sense of contact not only with the divine, but with humanity, a link through all people and places and things through some divine thread.

 

When I was twenty, that sense of peace was something new and powerful for me and it was something I yearned for but which always seemed out of reach.  The only way I knew to find it was to return to that one place.  And I did return several times that summer, several times each summer I worked in Houston, each time I returned to Houston.  I took George to the Rothko chapel before were married and we shared our experiences of profoundly layered depth and peace.

 

Although it had been many years since I had spent any time in Houston, I had not forgotten.  When I planned my loop trip, beginning with Chihuly in Arkansas, I realized I could easily loop through Houston and end with Rothko.  It had been an emotionally overwrought summer and I felt deeply in need of a quiet meditative space.  I planned an afternoon, and I stopped in.  The space was as meditative as I remembered, the paintings as rich with meaning.  As I sat quietly, contemplating not so much the space, but the act of art, contemplating the colors of blackness, of darkened shades of color, I felt this attempt to reach out and into all that was and is and will be, all of human history and potential.

 

I also realized that I no longer need to seek out holy spaces to find that inner peace.  It lives in me and with me and it always has, although I have not always been receptive to its presence.  Even now I am not always receptive, and it was true that I had needed to distance myself from my daily routines in order to distance myself from my own emotional turmoil.  But I had reconnected with that peace long before I arrived in Houston, and I will continue to carry it with me.  Sitting in contemplation I recognized that I tend not to give myself enough space for gathering in and reflecting back.  I tend to think of that time to fill personal needs as wasted time, but it is in fact not wasted, as it is that time that fuels all the rest, that times that keeps it all from spinning out of control.

 

I did not really sit at the reflecting pool on this visit, but I have.  It was raining lightly.  Perhaps I was feeling petulant at the wetness, although I do not melt.  I watched a small child splashing a toy in the water, in the shadow of the obelisk, and I contemplated space and the way we interact with space, both the spaces we intentionally create, and the way our presence has shaped and formed even those places we label as "wild" or "natural". Our every thought, our every action simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the world.  How then do we decide what is holy or sacred and what is not?  How can we?  
 

Photo of the Rothko Chapel from Wikipedia, here.

Photo of Dale Chihuly's Niijima Floats, from the Facebook page of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, here.

 

 

It Must Be Lent

Although this post is appearing Thursday morning, I am sitting at my desk late Wednesday night struggling with words.   I am tired.  The words do not want to flow, driven, at least partially, by a an internal battle with my own unrealistic self-expectations.  I wrestle with my internal gluttony, not in the most common sense, food related, but in my constant drive to overdo, to think I can do more than is reasonably possible.  The war wages on, even as I see myself slowing, taking more time to savor, and often not giving a flip as to whether I have met anyone's expectations, even, at times, my own.

 

It must be Lent.  Somehow Lent has always resonated deeply within me, and indeed I can measure my life not in terms of calendar-years, or school-years, but in Lent-years, as there is always some transformational, and/or transfigurational process going on, sometimes right up front and center, others perhaps a little more in the background.  And yet I always emerge, far from unscathed, and yet somehow more whole.

 

Yesterday, Ash Wednesday, was bitterly cold.  But it was also sunny.  And it was the first day that my house was bright again, filled with a joyous glow.  For a moment, a brief moment only, the dreariness of winter was banished, and the tantalizing promise of light was revealed.  I suppose that is one of the things I love about this period.  Rebirth will come if we are willing to dive deep.  Even at times in my life when I have not been a member of any religion, Lent has been an essential part of my being.  Even when I would rather have turned away, even when I would have denied the possibility of transformation, Lent has had its way with me.  We see it all around us. Fall, becomes winter, becomes spring.  Why should we not have our own winters? Our own Springs? It is a powerful idea, Lent, a ritual that points us toward truth.  There must be period of drawing inward, of earth, of rest and regeneration, of sprouting seeds and new roots, of death, a shaking off of the burdens the expectations of others, of life itself, has dusted over us, before we can reemerge, reimagined. 

 

The sunshine.  The joyous glow of spring light.  The soft mystery of the church half-lit for the evening Ash Wednesday service.  Silence.  Upturned faces.  Looking in the eyes of the other and seeing Love.  These are the things worth living for.

 

I suspect this post is nonsensical.  It doesn't matter, and for that reason I will not look at it again in the morning before it posts.  Much as the rational mind seeks to find the answers to everything, we still find ourselves searching for something greater, some meaning to make sense of it all.  I sometimes think we've lost the mystery of ritual, lost an important signpost on the road to meaning.  For me, all that searching is wrapped up in Lent.  I go in looking for answers.  I come out with knowledge I never thought to seek.

 

(update 8:03 AM:  I still haven't read this post, and am not certain I wish to do so.  But as I gazed on this photo in the wee hours, I realized that, this morning at least, this image needed to be added.  Photo courtesy of Jackson Fine Art, here. Actually posted on the blog once before, last April.)

Better Late than Never

 

Monday was one of those days, the kind of day where my schedule gets turned upside down and inside out and there is really no solution but to go with the flow.  Come to think of it, that seems to be the pattern of my Mondays lately, but it seems to take me a little time to recognize new patterns and adjust.  I don’t mind change or flexibility, but my brain patterns are often a little slow on the pick-up and for the last 10 days or so I have felt a little slower than usual.

 

The weekend before last, I was on the team for an Episcopal Cursillo.  I had been a candidate a year ago, and was honored and excited to be on the team. I didn’t really plan on taking a blog break however, mostly because I had just taken one six weeks before, and I can't seem to manage to fit my life into a consistent pattern.  I have struggled with this, struggled with my own tendency to need and seek structure, a tendency which often clashes with my increasing rather profound comfort with the unknown, my interest in putting people and the soft squishy things that connect us first in life.  Perhaps this is where I need to be now.  Perhaps I need to simply accept this struggle that I see within myself, the constant back and forth, and accept that my own internal struggle is in some sense a mirror of the struggle I see in the world.

 

There is a lot of information online about Cursillo, in fact pretty much everything about it is available online in this marvelous world of Google and internet transparency.  And I’m a big fan of transparency and opposed to secrets that tend to exclude: secret societies, hidden handshakes, and all the carefully guarded and hidden things that we humans use to separate “us” from "them". But here's the thing, all that stuff that we do on a Cursillo, all the materials, all the structures, everything, is just a framework, an underlying skeleton if you will.  These things shape the layout of the weekend, but they aren't the experience.  The experience itself is much more squishy because it depends on people, on the interactions of people, people working together with faith and hope and love, and because people are always different, and their interactions and experiences are in fact not structured and predictable. The experience of Cursillo is something unpredictable, and very often quite wonderful.  It is in fact, something greater than the weekend itself.  Cursillo is not a weekend.  The weekend is merely a door which one is invited to open.

My experience of one year ago was entirely different than my experience this year, and this difference was not entirely due to the fact that first I was a candidate and now I was on team, although that did contribute.   I was different and I needed different experiences, I reacted in different ways.  Although the underlying structure was the same, the flow of the weekend, the people involved and they way they interacted were also different.  But the thing is, even if we tried to duplicate the exact same weekend, with the exact same people, it could never be the same, because we are never the same.

 

Last year, I was still pulling myself together following George's death 17 months previously.  I had been through a year of emotional turmoil, a year where, trying to pull myself out of a profound sense of isolation, I said yes to everything that passed my way until I realized that I needed to slow down.  I had been through a year of emotional instability, where I felt like my rational and deliberate side had been  drowned in a tsunami of emotion and circularity, and I felt I was more likely to get sucked down some giant drain into the void  than I was to climb out and regain any kind of consistent hold on life. 

 

A year ago, attending Cursillo forced me to pull inward, forced me to look at that messy, emotional, touchy-feely, embrace-the-unknown, part of myself, and accept her as completely valid and necessary for my continued existence.  I realized that the tsunami unleashed by George's death, was in fact a huge part of my true nature that I had suppressed for many years, since childhood really.  Somewhere along the line I had been brought up to believe that emotion was bad (and I had an excess of it), and that the creative, needs-to-write-everything-down-in-order-to-understand,  meditative and philosophical parts of myself were not acceptable either.  I had emphasized the organizational, intellectual, structure-oriented, project-oriented, planning part of myself to the exclusion of the other parts.  And I had been fairly successful with that.

 

Until I wasn't.  And all that other stuff came pouring out and I tried desperately to slam the door on it and shove it back into the void.  But instead, the walls came tumbling down.

A year ago, I finally began to accept that it was ok to indulge my introverted self,  that being introverted wasn't shameful, that it was fully acceptable to pull back when I needed to pull back.  I finally accepted that I needed to write; that I needed to explore the more creative aspects of my personality, and that only if I gave myself permission to be fully myself, not the self I thought the world wanted to see, could I find peace.   That weekend was an open door.  And I stepped through.

 

But accepting what I needed to do and where I needed to go was not as easy as I might have thought.  I still struggled.  In fact it took me most of the past year to figure out how to balance my needs for space and thoughtful reflective time, with my need for being busy and being involved.  It took me a long time to accept that it was acceptable to say to myself, "no, I need to take time to write", even though my writing may not be good, even though I am not pursuing worldly success as a writer.  I write because I must, because it is who I am, but giving myself permission to own my writing took a little more time.

 

Now, a year later, I write most days, even if my writing is merely the process of keeping a journal.  But I have written a few things of which I am very proud, and some of them have not been for this blog.  And the process of writing has helped me with the process of thinking, of knowing who I am and what is important to me.  It has helped me with the process of speaking and even of acting in the world.  Writing has helped me with my own sense of presence and space.  And because I see the need to write, I see the need for personal time, not just for writing time, but for daydreaming time.    And I need to withdraw less, because I honor the time to myself more.  Oddly enough giving myself permission to need private time, has made my public time more effective, and made me a better planner and manager because I am no longer building walls.

 

A year ago at Cursillo I was overwhelmed and needed to pull away from the experience, to internalize it, and it took me a long time to recover from the experience.  This year I managed to be fully engaged in four full days of pretty much being constantly "on" without coming home and slamming my door on the world.  Yes I took a personal day.  In fact I took two.  But that was partly because I came back to a crazy schedule and a crazy world, but it was a world in which I was fully engaged and fully invested. 

 

What I have learned is that by honoring all of the conflicting parts of who I am, I can actually be better, and more engaged.  I can be invigorated and inspired by contact with others and the flow of ideas without needing to withdraw completely and seal myself into a little safety bubble.  It is possible for the social me and the introverted me to coexist harmoniously, hand in hand. Allowing myself to honor my inner creativity has actually allowed me to do more and to withdraw less.

 

Another door has opened.  No bridges have been burned.  What new world awaits?

 

Monday: Sunshine and Blues

The Brugmansia, or Angel's Trumpet is blooming and this alone brings me great joy as I sit outside on the porch this morning with my computer and coffee.

The air is cool, and although it is not quite crisp, which I might prefer, the nights not quite as cool as is normal in the Hudson Valley in early August,  it is still lovely to be out.  I am amazed at the difference a few degrees have made in my own acceptance of the hot weather.  It is still hot, and I believe today's high is expected to be near the record for this date. But I am accepting it better, primarily because I have longer windows in the morning and evening in which to enjoy the beauty of nature, even manicured suburban nature.

 

Even the act of simply sitting, of the softness of the fresh morning air, looking at flowers, and dirt with its damp loamy scent, lifts my spirits.  This is good because I kind of crashed and burned this weekend and I needed a bit of a rekindling spark.  

 

There was more than enough good in my weekend.  I attended a great training session on Saturday where I met new people and had a wonderful time.  I was filled with excitement, filled with a sense of promise and potential, offset with just a touch of trepidation over pushing my own boundaries.  But really, I have come to accept and even embrace trepidation, for there is no growth, no creativity without a little tinge of discomfort.  But by Saturday evening I realized I had experienced an accidental contact with gluten and I was as sick as a dog.  Sunday morning I had to force myself to pull myself together.  I am grateful for Sunday morning:  giving someone a ride to church; the rituals of liturgy; the thoughtful and thought-provoking sermon that poked me exactly where I needed it; the camaraderie of working altar-guild after the service; the joy I find in tending to the altar linens (my main job) -- of keeping things white and crisp -- all of these things elevated my state of mind away from myself, away from my discomfort.  I thought they would carry me through the remainder of the day.

 

I was wrong.  I got home and was felled by a massive sinus headache, a headache from hell, a headache I could not escape.  It stunned me because I have been mostly sinus free of late.  But I have learned that food affects more than just our guts; that our bodies are complex systems with multiple and overlapping reactions.  But that is not the subject of today's post. The subject of today's post is that I allowed that headache to bring me down.  Yes, it hurt to move, yet it hurt to think.  But I allowed myself to succumb to discomfort and misery.  I allowed myself to curl up on the sofa and spend the afternoon watching bad movies as I sank lower and lower into the sea of despond.  I allowed my trepidations to rise up out of the mists and give birth to fears.  

 

Luckily for me I do tend to have a shut-off switch.  I noted this long ago.  I can wallow, I can flirt with things I shouldn't flirt with, but I am very reluctant to lose control.  I can only go so far and then I throw the switch.  This may be a gift I have received from my alcoholic father, inadvertently as it were.  It is not a gift I wish to take for granted, for even gifts can be lost if held too lightly. Like all gifts, this switch has its benefits and its dangers.  But today I am grateful and lucky to have a switch.  I am also grateful for Tikka who dragged me out for a walk right in the middle of the neighborhood puppy-social hour, where I had to interact with other people and other dogs, and accept the gifts of conversation and wagging talks and many licks.  

 

Today my head still hurts.  Today I still feel a bit punk.  But I will keep moving, albeit slowly.  Today I am grateful for flowers and dogs and cool mornings.  Today I am grateful for friends and obligations, for those things that pull us outside ourselves.  Today I am grateful for an altar linen that needs to be washed and ironed, because although life is not white and crisp and pure, ironing linen reminds me of what we are striving for and why life is worth living.

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Acquisitions from Portland and a Knitting Update

When I went to Portland earlier this month, I told myself I was not going to buy fabric or yarn.  I bought both.  You saw the green knit when I posted it, shortly following my trip, but truthfully there was more.  I had packages shipped home from two stores, a few items that I believed would not have fit in my tiny roll-aboard suitcase, but in fact they probably would have fit, and I could have saved myself the shipping expense.  I would have had to check the bags, as it would have been unlikely I could lift them, but since I checked the bag coming home anyway, would not have been a problem.

But of course, then I would have not experienced the joy of opening the packages.  I failed to anticipate that sense of excitement, the thrill of opening, even knowing the contents. I had simply put both packages aside, apparently patiently awaiting just the right moment.  I opened the smaller package yesterday, a package from Knit Purl containing some lovely Habu yarns, and even knowing all this, my pleasure in the unwrapping was palpable: the promise, the anticipation.  Would I still love the yarn?  Would the getting actually be as exciting as the anticipation had been? Yes, and Yes. Even more so, in fact because of the promise of creation that lies ahead.

The four cones at the bottom contain yarn for a simple summer top, probably something that is fairly open, knit on big needles, and meant for layering.  There is an image in my mind, but the details have not yet been confirmed.  The two yarns at the top left will be for a lightweight scarf or shawl.

Neither project will be started right away.  I have two projects on the needles, the zebra mitts, and a second project, a shawl using some Jaeger Sienna in a pale pale lilac which I have decided I shall never wear. The mitts will be finished first, the shawl is too small even to photograph well, only 5 repeats, out of 75 for the main pattern, have been completed.

Palm Sunday

 

Lorenzo Ghiberti: Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. One of twenty panels depicting scenes from Christ's life on the North doors of the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence.

 Palm Sunday,  I can never quite explain what it means to me.  There is the story I grew up with, the triumphant entry into Jerusalem with the cheering crowds and the palm fronds.  And yet, all that revelry turns to darkness, death, despair, and eventually new life.  We don't necessarily like to think about that, but it is always there, and always a part of our lives, not solely in our religious observances.  For does not religion also provide us with a path through which we attempt to understand our own lives?

Here we are.  Another Palm Sunday.  Another winter becoming spring.  Here in Knoxville the trees are bursting into bloom, but it is a tenuous celebration, a fragile flowering.  A sudden chill and glorious blossoms become limp reminders that sometimes we celebrate too much too soon. And the service that I remember as celebratory when I was a child takes on its darker meaning.  How easily our loyalties and our emotions shift.

I've written before how this period of lent, of winter becoming spring has always been a period of reflection and growth for me and it has never been particularly easy.  Each year I ask questions and hope for answers.  But the harder I look for those answers the more slowly they seem to be forthcoming. 

But of course the answers are all always already there, waiting.  It is not that the answers don't come.  It is that we don't look in the right places. The answers are there before we even ask the questions.  God gives us the answers before we even know what we are looking for.  We are not waiting for God to respond; we are waiting for ourselves to be ready to listen.