Crocodile's Smile

Notes from a shamanic journey...

Into the Belly of the Beast ~

I remember viscerally the experience of being in the swamp, moving through dark waters, being snatched and eaten, clamped in the jaws of a crocodile, and entering a different dimension. Thrust through the threshold of life into death and beyond. There was no fear, just a willingness and a curiosity to learn what lay beyond. Being chewed and swallowed and discovering the energy, the wonder, of being without a body ~ only spirit.

And then the delightful, joyful feeling of weightlessness, immateriality ~ zipping across time and space instantly in a flash of light ~ still a mental and spiritual presence without the hindrance of a body and all of its attendant needs. Joining with my lover's spirit in a dazzling dance of pure, intermingling intimacy, like a vortex.

We here on earth are so heavy, so close to the ground, so preoccupied with all of our basic material needs, dragging our feet through the mud. But once we are free from the body, this is true egolessness, pure presence. Nothing to worry about / nothing to sustain. No ego or sense of "self" whatsoever. Utterly free, moving through galaxies and dimensions, a bodhisattva in space, acting only in compassion, perceiving and attending to those in need ~ there is no self to get in the way.

On Kirtan, New Orleans, and the Tibetan New Year

I had the good fortune last night to go and hear Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band from New Orleans play for the grand opening celebration of East Side Yoga in Austin. The band performs kirtan mantra chants with a bit of NOLA funk thrown in, and though I lived in New Orleans for a time I had never heard them play. What fun! A great, big spiritual sing along, and so healing. We sat shoulder to shoulder, swinging and swaying to the lush rhythms while Sean, Gwendolyn, and Alvin ushered us into another dimension. Would that more spiritual practice was so drenched in music and love!

When asked, Sean spoke about the Superbowl and what it meant to New Orleanians for the Saints to have won--people spontaneously running out into the streets, embracing strangers, high-fiving between cars, and dancing in the streets of the Quarter all night long. And all of this in the midst of carnival season. What a triumph for the city, five years after Katrina, when so many had left her for dead. I've been thinking a lot about NOLA lately, the city I had to leave but who always resides in my heart...

Themes of union and separation ~ both are important in the spiritual path ~ Shiva Nataraj, dancing the world into existence, unburned by the ring of flames that surrounds him because he is one with it. In union there is no distinction, but only from a place of separation can we see and feel and touch. As the Tao says: "Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations" (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1). And yet it is an endless dance, for as the Buddhist Heart Sutra teaches us "Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form." We swirl back and forth between unity and bittersweet separation, because that's where learning and growth occur. Learning how to become more and more gentle in the face of fear and injustice and sorrow...

Learning how to love, learning the power of love ~ this was the major message from Shambhala Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche on the occasion of the Tibetan New Year (Year of the Iron Tiger, 2010), which fell on Valentine's Day this year. How can we express kindness and gentleness when provoked, rather than anger and aggression? Love is the path...

Shiva Nataraj image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Sitting with George

Just sitting.
You, draped in gorgeous brocades.
Me, just breathing.
I feel that we are breathing together,
yet when I pause, I know
that you are gone.
Eyes and mouth half open--
frozen
passing away.
Waves and waves of breath.

The fear and uncertainty of sitting with a corpse for the first time--incense burning to mask the smell of death and decay. A strange contrast of ritualized order and chaos. The care and deliberation of the fine, brilliantly colored silks, the shrine, smoke wafting through the air, and the chilling, tearful rawness of sitting with the lifeless body of a beloved teacher and friend. Cold. I remember feeling very cold--a chill that wouldn't leave--possibly from the dry ice packed beneath George as he lay there, mouth open, glasses slightly askew...

Exquisite Noticing

May, 2009

En route to Italy to meet up with friends in Umbria. I've been charged by my friend Klare with "taking it all in," and by my friend Kerry with "Exquisite Noticing." Colors, textures, elements; scents and sounds. From the plane I observe the way rivers wind their way over the earth ~ the way the land merges with the sea, as we flew over the Mississippi delta downriver from New Orleans. I was startled and then thrilled to recognize the geography as we passed above it. And the clouds: now thin and wispy like gossamer, little bits of nothing; then thick and substantial like cotton; sometimes dark and ominous, kissing and jostling the plane as we fly amongst them. Water mingling with air, substantial and ethereal at the same time...

Laying in a hammock in the shade ~ utterly enveloped and supported, looking out upon the most spectacularly sweeping vista of the Umbrian countryside. Tractors rolling by on their way to tend to the hay fields, grapevines, and olive groves. All manner of birds chirping and fluttering by. Just taking it all in, with every breath ~ the way the breeze caresses my skin, the passing of the day from darkness into dawn, morning to midday, and evening into nightas the sun traces its arc across the heavens. It's all greenery and rolling hills ~ pastoral~ with sweet valleys and sensuous mountain ranges, easy on the eyes.

I am remembering the view from the plane as we came across Southern France, over the Southern tip of the Alps and the coastline of the Mediterranean ~ mountains trailing down to the sea; earth meets water. And how, in the dawning light, the rising sun reflected off the sea, painting a dazzling peach-gold shimmer. Fire on water. I wondered, is light the fifth element? Or is all light encompassed by fire? Our sun, the source of our natural light, is of course a fireball, so perhaps this is so.

A cat gave birth to four kittens the first night I arrived. The miracle of life ~ ordinary magic. Exciting, primordial, simple, beautiful. Mama cat squeezing and pushing, yet so completely calm and peaceful ~ purring for her new children and licking them cleanas they suckled, even when only two had been born and two more remained inside of her. She knew just what to do, though really only a kitten herself...

The sun has finally relinquished its stranglehold on the day, and it is such sweet relief. The crickets are singing their songs to the night and the air feels so succulently soft on my skin. The tiniest sliver of a new moon hangs low in the Western sky. I've never seen the moon so slight. New moon ~ new beginnings. Hillsides and valleys softly cascading down to the Tiber valley, and then up again to volcanic peaks. Tiny specs of light sparkling in the warm, hazy nighttime air. All is well in the world and soon I will be sleeping and dreaming of you...

Photo by Melinda Rothouse. To see more pics from Italy, click here.

Relax with Every Step

I sit with a Zen meditation group led by David Zuniga on Monday mornings here in Austin. Last week David relayed a story from the life of the Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki (founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and author of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind"). Near the end of his life and while living with stomach cancer, Suzuki Roshi was participating in a work day at the Zen Center. All day long Suzuki and his students engaged in hard labor, moving rocks and other materials around the Center grounds. One by one, his students stopped to take longer and longer breaks, some of them disappearing from the scene, but Suzuki Roshi worked tirelessly throughout the day. Finally, one of his senior students asked him how he was able to find the energy to continue working, and the reply was "I relax with every step."

Ah, how profound. Relax with every step, with every breath...This is the secret to working with energy, to refilling and replenishing our reservoirs of energy and vitality. Exertion and relaxation are two sides of the same coin ~ they complete each other ~ the yin and the yang. Out of the spaciousness of relaxation comes the impetus of exertion, and after an expenditure of energy, there must be rest, equal and opposite; otherwise there is imbalance, stress, and fatigue. How simple, and yet how challenging in the context of our speedy, restless lives. A beautiful aspiration: relax with every step.

Photo by Melinda Rothouse.

Trees in Love

As I sat in meditation this morning, attempting to calm the whirlpools of the mind and contemplate the vast spaciousness of emptiness (no small task!), I happened to focus my gaze up and outward, out through the window of my meditation room. It's a view I have looked upon many times before, out over my neighbor's yard, her tin-roofed shed, and up into the canopy of pecan trees that graces my block. But this morning I saw something I had never noticed before: two trees, "independent" beings each with its own root system, their long trunks rising gracefully from the earth, having grown so close together at their crowns so as to intermingle, their branches weaving together in an embrace of shared foliage. I thought it such a beautiful symbol of love...

Spiral Luminosity

Spiral. Shifting. Spinning. Energy of a hurricane, flowing outward and outward until it spins off into another plane, never to be seen again ~ out into untold universes, traveling to places we could never possibly imagine, across vast horizons, stretches of time and vistas that we could only know in dreams or telescopic photographs from deep space, otherworldly and beautiful but also cold and unknown. Perhaps those spaces are not so much "out there," foreign and distant, but places within our own hearts, so covered-over and protected that we no longer recognize them, so that we have become strangers to ourselves. Sometimes all we need is a reminder ~ a serendipity or coincidence that jolts us into a faint recognition, a near-forgotten memory ~ oh, yes, that is myself, and myself is no different from any other ~ we are all inextricably interconnected, but sometimes we forget...

Photo and stained glass by Melinda Rothouse.