Cultivate Harmony

In search of clarity? Me, too. Here's a Lau Tzu quote and a new meditation/poem to help us on our quest.

In Japan, 2009. photo by Emily Erwin.

Cultivate harmony within yourself, and harmony becomes real;
Cultivate harmony within your family, and harmony becomes fertile;
Cultivate harmony within your community, and harmony becomes abundant;
Cultivate harmony within your culture, and harmony becomes enduring;
Cultivate harmony within the world, and harmony becomes ubiquitous.

Live with a person to understand that person;
Live with a family to understand that family;
Live with a community to understand that community;
Live with a culture to understand that culture;
Live with the world to understand the world.

How can I live with the world?
By accepting.

-Lau Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching



In waiting for opportunity, I've denied it.
Fearing failure, I've dismissed success.
In struggling for ease, I've crafted difficulty.
Acquiescing, I've withheld my truth.
Asserting ability, I've forgone capacity.
Attempting to contain, I've lost control.

Welcoming humility, I dismiss failure.
Acknowledging fear, I banish shame.
Resisting action, I bypass reaction.
Accepting weakness, I allow release.
Declining responsibility, I dispel obligation.
Avoiding attention, I circumvent tension.

Imbalanced, I allow myself to fall.
Forgoing power, I regain self.

-a meditation on clarity, March 28, 2011
  

Trying Times (Keep on Trying)

Thank you to everyone who spoke out against the deregulation of Roundup Ready alfalfa. I appreciate your support, phone calls, and shared outrage and concern. I can't help but feel extremely disappointed by -and in- our government at this time, and the short-sightedness that led to a decision that is so obviously dangerous to our environment, food supply, economy, and the health and well-being of not only Americans, but all our relations, across the globe.

At the same time as this is happening, though, I am encouraged by people's interest and creativity regarding ways to grow, support, sustain, and "green up" their local communities.

The paradigm is shifting; I can feel it. Not everywhere, and certainly not all at once, but it is happening, and in enough different and symbiotic ways that I remain hopeful and loving despite this calamitous setback. We CAN join hands. We CAN open our hearts. We CAN reshape the patterns that no longer serve us, welcoming in a new day of service, understanding, and respect for others and ourselves.
We are not waiting for change, we are changing. We are growing. And once again, we are holding the line of Light against what seems like the darkest part of an unending night; keeping the cold at bay with nothing but the warmth of our beating hearts. Yours in faith,

Blackbird's Daughter

Backstory, Bounty, and Blessings from the Universe (sometimes painful, always good)

A great big "Thank You!" to whoever slipped fifty dollars into my coat pocket at some point between Georgia and Mississippi. Seriously? Seriously. I'm tickled and humbled and totally grateful.

Everyone keeps saying these adventures of mine will make a great book, but I'm pretty sure the above example and the following Cliff's Notes version sum it all up:

I travel. I give away herbs. I open my heart, strangers open their homes, and miracles occur. Together, we turn Enough into Plenty.

How far-out awesome is that?

................................................

Of course, that's not the full story.

A year ago I told my students I was leaving.

I didn't tell them how sick I'd gotten; how my adrenals were shot and my heart was heavy and I could barely make it to 2:15 before collapsing at my desk. I didn't tell them what I couldn't yet tell myself; that my six-year relationship was also reaching its desperate, terrifying, life-altering end, and with it, all the dreams and stability my partner and I had worked so hard to craft. I didn't tell them how hard I was trying to hold things together, or how scared I was of not knowing what would come next, or how I was so busy vacillating between euphoric and desolate, I couldn't tell if my inner self was singing, screaming, or just plain numb.

Instead, I told them how much I loved them, that I was looking forward to traveling and cooking and learning about plants, and I hoped someday they'd do the same.

I had no idea that three months later, I'd find myself on the other side of the world, prostrate and sobbing before the Goddess of Compassion. Or that three months after that, I'd move to a tiny, one-room cabin at the edge of the woods, throw myself into a new job, and leave three months after that, so I could spend the next three working my way from Pennsylvania to Mississippi, cooking breakfasts for strangers out of my car and dispensing tinctures and chocolates, bath salts and teas, from the depths of an ever-rotating reserve.

A season of death. A season of germination. A season of growth. A season of change.

Once again, we've come full circle, and I find myself marveling at the painful, wounded, necessary place I was in back then, and how little it resembles the (sometimes) painful, (mostly) healthy, and completely necessary place I've arrived at now.

Then again, a year ago, I still thought the right combination of willpower, stick-to-itivness, and emotional duct tape could keep the swiftly severing threads of my chosen life-rope from snapping apart. A year ago, I had no idea that in the end I'd find the strength to saw through them myself, choosing to lay the clean-cut ends down with love and reverence, rather than tear myself ragged in a futile tug-of-war against the inevitable.

I remember driving through the frozen streets of Burlington, singing and re-singing the same two lines of a song I've yet to complete:

I had nothing left to cling to
once my bridges were all burned
I felt ashes slip through my fingers
each a lesson that I'd learned.

................................................

Change can be a scary thing. Sometimes it manifests as a choice, and other times, it leaves us gasping and flailing, scrambling to stay upright in a newly-overturned world. Whether we're responding or reacting, anticipating or recovering, it's all part of the Journey. No one's immune. No one's exempt.

And no one's alone.

Namaste,

Blackbird's Daughter

PS- Funny how the other definition of change - the leftover bits of riches that most of us have scattered through our pockets and cars, the dull and shiny pieces we pool together when we're desperate and worried that we don't have enough - means pretty much the exact same thing.

Pathways and Prunings (a post-New Hampshire post)

Dynamic interconnectedness [describes] the physical world as the sort of thing that imagination and desire can effect. The magician's world is an independent whole, a web of which no strand is autonomous. Mind and body, galaxy and atom, sensation and stimulous, are intimately bound [...]all things are independent and interrelated.

-Alan G. Hefner (paraphrasing the Emerald Tablet)

As above, so below.

-Hermes Trismegistus

September 5, 2009
"I woke up this morning feeling incredibly grumpy - poor sleep, and dreams in which people I trust became unapologetically opportunistic, and I kept waiting in line at an airport to exchange my ticket for a later flight so I could spend more time visiting family, only every time I almost reached the front of the line, I'd rush off to take care of something pressing, and then have to stand in line all over again. Sometimes my subconscious is not very subtle.
"All of which has me thinking about choices and relationships and pruning. Neural pruning, to be specific, and its intimate relationship with walking one's Path; the way it mirrors in minute detail the larger decisions and actions we take. Micro and macro, internal and external. Spirit and corporeal. Art and life."

September 25, 2009
Oh yes, I spent lots of time in New Hampshire thinking about pruning (plants, neurons, options) and pathways (neural pathways, spacial pathways, rivers and arteries and the metaphoric roads we walk and stray from and return to again...). Not surprising, then, to upload the photos from those weeks and find most of the landscapes and plant images following the same theme. Straight paths, branching stems, growth and blossoms and fruits - each one representative of the myriad other choices that never came to fruition; the three hundred and fifty nine other directions one could have chosen to walk, but didn't.

The thing I kept coming back to was the fact that growth, whether in plants or people, requires both movement and purpose. And I love moving, cannot sit still in joy without getting antsy for new experiences and wisdom and ideas, do not want to stagnate...above all, Goddess, I do not want to stagnate. But decisiveness? Clarity of purpose? For all my bossiness and spontaneity, I can get so bogged down with the weight of making the best choice that it's difficult to make any choice at all.

I think, when I bring my Shadow into enough light to look at her, that my core fear is that I will miss out on the beauty and opportunity and tasks that the world holds for me; that I will not make the most of this precious, finite spark of a life. And so I get impatient and anxious when I feel like time is being wasted.
(People say -so casually!- that they're "killing time". Killing time! Here we are with this tiny, minute, indescribably brief snippet of existence, this blazing chance to illuminate even the slightest, most hidden corner of cosmic darkness, and you're content to "kill time"?? Can you at least comprehend my urgency?)
I know not everyone feels this way. But I do, and so I find that unless I either coat each moment with enough ritual to give it Import, or hide inside procrastination, to find myself in stasis means tuning in to the one omnipresent, pulsing question that every creature faces:

How do I make the most of this brief amount of time?

It's obvious that this is not an easy way to experience the world. I don't know if it's a sign that I'm greedy, wanting to embrace and experience all that I can while I'm here, or that I'm farsighted, aware of all the multitudes of possibilities that extend in every direction and wanting to explore as many as I can. But it makes for a lot of pressure.
People whose opinions I really respect have a tendency to say I'm too hard on myself. Maybe, but it's because I care, and I believe: in myself, and in the work, and in others, which is -incidentally- why I'm no harder on myself than I am on anybody else. When I push, it's because I cannot stand to see this life, this infinite capacity for joy, be wasted. Because to do less -to not accept and embrace these gifts - would be such hubris on our parts.

One thing I do know is that without clarity, pressure like this can easily lead to chaos, or (ironically) stagnation: if you constantly find yourself at the center of an ever-changing wheel of possibilities, trying to experience each spoke means you're in for an awful lot of running and returning to the middle, and not a lot of rest. Unless you've got a different way of traveling (yes, my shamanic, visionary friends, I'm talking to you). Or you're willing to let go of the other paths.

Which leads us to pruning.

Ironically, I take great joy in pruning (when I finally do it); perhaps because it's initially so difficult. By the time I let myself submit to universal laws, there's pleasure in the aquiescence. And there is grace in letting go, in chopping down and moving on and the tangible, finite act of one foot in front of the other.
That there's pain in it, too -wrenching, aching soulwounds- goes without saying.
I'm still mourning the recent prunings and parings of this past year. At this point, though, the only choice I have is to keep walking my path, one foot in front of the other, with faith that I'm journeying in the right direction. And it might hurt, and it might be asking too much of myself at times. But it's the price I choose to pay for a life well lived. I can ask no more of myself than that.