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.

David Loy and Erykah Badu

Last weekend I went to hear David Loy give a talk called “Healing Ecology: A Buddhist Perspective on the Eco-Crisis,” at U.T. Austin. Loy is a professor, the Besl Family Chair for Ethics/Religion and Society, at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is also Zen Buddhist teacher. His talk explored how Buddhist ideas of interconnection, compassion, and exchanging self for others, might speak to current environmental problems.

Loy first described the notion, based on the Buddhism's principle of no-self (anatta) and its attendant radical non-dualism, that to help others is to help oneself. If we accept this idea, and if we agree that we are currently facing an unprecedented ecological crisis, this principle logically leads to the fact that humans as a species must protect the environment in order to protect ourselves. There is no separation. What’s good for nature is good for us.

It strikes me that this idea allies closely with the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that the earth is a complex living organism, of which we humans are only one part. Loy’s discussion also closely resonates with ideas of sustainable economics (or ecological economics), which question neoclassical economics’ assumption that infinite economic growth is a good thing. Our whole global market economy is based on the idea that the economy must constantly be growing, that we must always have bigger, better, faster, more, in order to be “healthy.” But isn’t that idea rather absurd when you think about it? The earth is a finite resource, and a delicately balanced system at that. Shouldn’t our economic system, in order to be deemed “healthy,” work in harmony with the larger environmental system in which it is embedded rather than positing a goal of infinite growth?

The next day I went to the Austin City Limits Music Festival and heard Erykah Badu rock out and speak out about politics and the broken system. She referred specifically to a documentary called Fourth World War (2003), which follows various resistance movements to globalization, war, and poverty. She was so moved by the film that she named her new album after it. And it strikes me that there are so many people out there, coming from so many perspectives, viewpoints, and experiences, but all seeking a change, seeing that the system is broken. How might we all come together? How might we harness all of that energy and love and put it towards actually creating change? How could we create a system that serves everyone and seeks harmony and balance, with the earth, with all people and all beings? I guess it has to come from the ground up. We are all implicated. Change begins right here, right now, with you and me, baby.

Photo by Melinda Rothouse.

More snippets from my travels in Ireland

Yesterday was anxious, emotional, angsty

Today all is calm, all is peaceful

there is nothing to do but be,

nothing to anticipate,

nowhere to go but this very moment ~

rushing headlong into a great adventure

~

Through the airplane window

sensuous crescent moon:

the journey begins

~

Smoky, damp air

a spectrum of greys and greens.

Trudging through misty streets

both foreign and familiar ~

it feels good just to breathe

~

Raindrops falling gently

against the windowpane

sleep will come easily tonight

Photo by Melinda Rothouse.

Poems on Death and Devotion in Ireland

Brigid’s Well

I see it first from above
through sprigs of fuchsia
tied with bits of tattered,
multicoloured fabric,
a trickle among stones.
Gazing up from the grotto, there’s
Jesus in a frame, and a trio
of Virgin Marys draped
with rosary beads ~
pious, penitent, prayerful.

Over every surface, a collage
of mementos, trinkets, and keepsakes
serving a second life as relics.
A careful clutter of candles and coins,
ribbons and faded flowers,
their once-brilliant colors now fading
to grey.
Headless plastic baby doll, an infant’s
pink onesie
and Hello Kitty, hanging from a string.

Dizzy, bearing witness
to so much life-in-death,
clumsily congealed and scrawled
with grief,
I pay silent homage
to this sacred spring
that gives of itself simply, freely
to all who come near, seeking solace,
just seeking.

Photographs of the dead
look on, lifelike.
as holy water
gurgles from the earth
undergirding everything.


Touching Time
St. Enda’s Church and Cemetery, Inishmore

Around the bend, and there it is –
graveyard among grasslands
waiting,
inviting.
As I pedal down the quiet coastal road
low tide has turned the bay to mud,
a broad reach of seaweed
and tidal pools.

Neat rows of Celtic crosses
mark a tidy city of the dead.
But closer now, I see
rising from the turf, the carcass
of a structure –
bones of stone.

Ruins. Ruination.

A narrow, sloping trail leads
around the edge of the ancient church,
down through the generations.

Now I stand
enclosed by four walls,
open to the sky
yet below ground level.
On each side of the narrow chamber,
low, wide bowls accept offerings of rust-encrusted coins
from modern-day pilgrims.

Beyond these walls lie
the ever-growing strata
of bones utilized and then discarded,
returning to earth.
Only the recently departed retain
their identities, names and dates carved into smooth stone.
Beneath them are the rest –
nameless, faceless.
I feel them beckoning.
I am sinking
into the tangled strands
of time.

Photo by Melinda Rothouse.