DAILY How many words for love do you know? Can you find one more? What guides you through your fear to safety, then risk? Who heals the healer that is thou? In what shape are your ‘sacred contracts?’ How trust-worthy can you grow?
Read moreInspirations: Crazy Love
Magic of the human heart-perfectly aligned with Star of David in the heavens
Our 14-year-old dog Abbey died last month. The day after she passed away my 4-year-old daughter Meredith was crying and talking about how much she missed Abbey. She asked if we could write a letter to God so that when Abbey got to heaven, God would recognize her. I told her that I thought that we could, so she dictated these words: Dear God, Will you please take care of my dog? Abbey died yesterday and is with you in heaven. I miss her very much. I ‘m happy that you let me have her as my dog even though she got sick. I hope you will play with her. She likes to swim and play with balls. I am sending this picture of her so when you see her you will know that she is my dog. I really miss her. Love, Meredith We put the letter in an envelope with a picture of Abbey & Meredith, addressed it to God/Heaven. We put our return address on it. Meredith pasted several stamps on the front of the envelope because she said it would take lots of stamps to get the letter all the way to heaven. That afternoon she dropped it into the letter box at the post office. A few days later, she asked if God had gotten the letter yet. I told her that I thought He had. Yesterday, there was a package wrapped in gold paper on our front porch addressed, ‘To Meredith’ in an unfamiliar hand. Meredith opened it. Inside was a book by Mr. Rogers called, ‘When a Pet Dies.’ Taped to the inside front cover was the letter we had written to God in its opened envelope. On the opposite page was the picture of Abbey & Meredith and this note: Dear Meredith, Abbey arrived safely in heaven…. Read more »
Read moreQuestioning the Heavens
(Summer Reading) How do we become who we are? How do we emerge from the nexus of childhood? Why and how did we choose that tribe? That particular moment of birth? Providence or accident? DNA or the Moira of our ‘allotment’? Luck or Karma? Random or synchronistic? These are watery, Cancer questions, and Astrologically, we are awash in Cancer energies, making moms, family, tribal connections, country, ancestors, and emotions of utmost interest. Rilke wrote, “Never believe fate’s more than the consideration of childhood.” Since Rilke was a poet of profound heart and thought, I agree. But what composes the matrix of childhood? Like Yoga, Astrology, myth, and psychology multiple layers, seen and unseen, are tangled together in that ‘fate.’ One does not argue about the layers, only their substance, their consciousness, and perhaps, their timing. If we think mythologically, as in Greek, members in a family come together from a litany of tragic connections. The hope in each incarnation is that ancient wounds of slaughtering and being slaughtered tale opportunity to heal, and that old curses be laid to rest, ‘paid in full.’ Myths may be florid and over the top, but looking at their archetypal patterns we still act out similar energetic tragedies, much of it remaining unconscious, which is why it remains powerful. Is this allotment, or our choice? Perhaps archetypal patterns within the family help create blood and bone, the DNA, of biological heredity. The conversations, the silences, the habits and wounds, the dis-connect, as well as the love enmesh the closed family circle. These are the amniotic fluids of Moira. If we are born with innate predispositions, and if we are choosing to work through particular myths, then it may be true, as many believe, the soul chooses to take on a lifetime, the parents, and… Read more »
Read moreMother’s Day Re-Defined
Yoshiko Matamoro wrote, “Each moment of this precious life is a treasured vessel, ready to be filled with every grace and many blessings.” Nietzsche wrote, “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” Does not every mother give birth to a ‘dancing star,’ a shining soul worth everything she has to offer…. her Grace AND her chaos, her light and her dark? Do you perceive yourself as a ‘treasured vessel’ filled with blessings? Or, do you feel that you are more ‘a messenger of chaos,’ perhaps dark with drama and danger…a fallen star, not a ‘dancing star?’ Depending upon mother’s perspectives, as well as our own, derived in part from ‘MOM’, we formulate ideas of what life is about, how we might lead it, and who we might become. Emerging from the embryo, re-defined in a new cellular structure, mysterious, in fathomless layers of re-formed DNA, we are born. Birth is such a chaotic, creative, physical-meta-physical, spiritual, magical event. From each cocooning womb emerges a life, the majesty of what the feminine offers the Universe. There has to be chaos for new life to emerge. There must be destruction, fabric torn, and emotional dissolution to create anew. If we could reconcile ourselves to our own chaos, we might re-align ourselves more readily to another’s, namely- mother’s. She is after all but one of our own conduits for magic and crazy, Grace and abandonment, terror and forgiveness. Whenever we honor the dark gods within it allows others opportunity to meet theirs. Mothers so wish their off spring to be perfect, to be happy, to be safe. Our chaos is terrifying to them, as theirs was/is to us. Mother’s Day is but one day out of all others to honor her years of struggle, with herself-and with… Read more »
Read moreLove & Loathing
Last week I wrote about ‘right relationship.’ This week, I un-expectedly return to that theme due to an article in the NY Times on 1/5/12, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Life,” by William J. Broad. It has gone viral in the Yoga community, and despite being well written, and informative, has created tremendous fear and negativity. It returns me to considerations of ‘right relationship.’ As a species, we long to destroy our gods as soon as we begin to worship them. Yoga is no exception. As gods go, Yoga is as great as anything else we choose to make a god, but the issue is anything that is all-consuming, anything and anyone we do not question, that which we make master/mistress of us-rules us. We cease to question, we become child like, assuming big-daddy, or master-momma will save us. Our dis-owned child within refuses to become an adult, a peer to/with our new god, and we allow ‘the fabulous guru’ to mastermind our life. Anytime we are that out of balance, we are ‘offered’ lessons. The teaching comes in bizarre, often insidious ways, making it difficult to understand what we truly need to incorporate, and learn. What is asking for balance? Being child-like does not mean giving up that lovely quality, for it offers wonderful gifts of joy and creativity. The lesson is forging a balanced polarity between inner child and parent. Being an adult means we grow into peership to, and with, our gods. Life is about learning to discriminate, then allowing partnerships to evolve from experience. In the very last line of a fear-filled, negative look at Yoga, William Broad wrote what could have been a wonderful opening salvo which was that Glen Black’s message is, “Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact if you… Read more »
Read moreKarmic Connections
This fall calls for us to be clear about who we are, to be as authentic as we know how, and to unhook from what, and who no longer represents us. Life always demands this, but if we don’t, or can’t now, we shall be lost in the tsunamis of change. Few of us are where we’d like to be, there is not enough high ground. But hopefully we find solace in who we are, and who we love. Perhaps in the world’s instability, our treasure becomes one another, but we cannot truly be with one another if we are not authentically ourselves. We can facebook, but we cannot jump into the same lifeboat as the water sucks out to sea, unless we are committed. Committed to what? Committed to the alignment of self with self, self with other, self with the earth. Our karmic companions, those Wily Coyotes of heart and mind, are here to change our lives. We must be in cahoots, AND we must be wily, or fail miserably. Every time we toss around the word, ‘karmic’ we are in deep waters, for karmic infers past and future relationship, as well as present. It infers profound entanglement. How to un-tangle lead from gold? How to be in cahoots as cohorts, not desperados? How to bow to the other while holding personal integrity? We cannot escape. We are in the territory of Libra’s gracious requirement of partnering, plus Saturn is slowly wending its way through Libra, demanding that the structures of every relationship are ship shape. We are about to have a Full Moon face off in Aires/Libra (self in polarity to other). I write to you with the energies of the Universe behind my pen. But even if I didn’t, this is a pivotal hour in the… Read more »
Read moreYoga Drugs
Wind moves the tall grasses, opening a slender swath at the spine of the hill. I trespass her narrow path, feeling her breath in my spine. Her inhale pauses, whooshing out in exhale. Our attunement grows so perfect she is the breath of my beloved, as I am hers. Every healing longed for moves between our inhale and exhale, conduits of life force. Beckoned to the top of the hill, I pause with inner arms turned out, head and palms stretched back to surrender offerings to the sky. My breath/her breath, the logos, surrendering everything without, holding all within. This earth’s breath, so assumed we do not build her shrines, nor meadow-statues, yet she is patron saint of givers & high-livers, friend & neighbor, mothers-fathers, and every lover persuaded by her dance. Would that I will conjure this moment for my death. Call it to me as simply following the wind down from the high crest into the shadowed meadow. There, in a long windswept exhale, weight falls away, stone is cut from stone, and the iron link unfastens.
Read moreDestruction & Choas: Third of Three Installments on Love
The line of skeletal trees against a later sunrise suddenly seem vulnerable without their covering of snow, or darkness. They remind me of an old photograph of women, stripped of their clothing, their small hands desperate to cover naked pain, running between two lines of laughing soldiers, How does the mind layer these terrible and tender disconnected images? What are we to do with un-accountable polarities? How are we to synthesize being human/inhuman? I was about to write, ‘animal,’ but animals treat their own that way. With relationships, we have all been privy to the polarity of those painful times when after the first rush of romance, we are faced with cutting bait or being cut. We are forced to look more closely after sweet, intimate years of a partnership grow stale and stagnate. There are painful betrayals in friendships that bring us right up against ourselves, our expectations and behavior. When we are exposed, vulnerable to our flaws, or the flaws of those we thought wonderful, we run naked, unable to be who and what we wish to be, or thought we were. We are at the mercy of…everything love and friendship are not supposed to be. Humans are not supposed to treat one another with carelessness, brutality, or cold indifference. Are they? How else are we to learn? If we have chosen earthly lives in order to grow soul-mulch, how are we to grow into greatness if not through pain? It is only those who are able to re-create love out of a broken heart who really understand how to love, It is those who have expanded their compassion from an illness who glory in the gift of each day of health. It is those who have irretrievably lost a best friend through carelessness who are able to… Read more »
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