Lately I have been thinking a lot about invitations: the invitations we are constantly offering ourselves and each other; and the invitations we are constantly receiving. I have been thinking about how much suffering in the world could be alleviated if we could all commit to a practice of being aware of & responsible for all the offers arising in our lives, and how we respond to them. The Eurhythmics are a good place to start: Some of them want to use you. Some of them want to be used by you. And so forth. I think it's important to recognize that all of the above & many more are invitations we have each given and received, over the course of many lifetimes. We might not like to acknowledge that we've wanted to use other beings, but even the slightest bit of introspection about, say, our eating habits, reveals that this is so. We might not be willing to admit that what have said to someone, Use me with impunity, but surely at some point in our employment, family, or sexual history, we've issued an invitation just like this. We've also said, Please stay with me. We've said, Please see me. When you see me, I see myself. In terms of living well and whole, Invitation Practice could encompass
The compassionate & generous face of Yes is culturally & psychically easy for most of us to feel: She said yes! Yes is the good breast, the compliant and grateful student, the land giving willingly under the plow.
Touching the compassionate & generous face of No is harder for us in the West, in part because most of us are missing Kali/Durga from our vocabulary of the world, and in part because we've all been exposed to so much bullshit and cruelty masquerading as Tough Love. Kali's not sending you to be brutalized in some former slave plantation masquerading as an institution of reform & contrition. She's the one saying No when you are so wrapped up in what you think you want that you lose track of What Is. Invitation Practice means you can stop evil coming into the world with the power of your own No, and with your willingness to hear No, when you need it. It means you can bring good into the world with your Yes, and with your intention to offer invitations that bring out the good in others with their Yes, too. Invitation Practice means you always have the power to be an active participant in shaping what does and does not come into the world. You are creator and destroyer, being created and destroyed, moment, by moment, by moment. Say Yes. Say No. Wherever you are, your heart is there.
1 Comment
What's meditation for, anyway? It's a way, over time, to develop a relationship with being itself, as it manifests in yourself & in all living beings & in all the situations you encounter in life. Through meditation practice, the refuge quality of being begins to emerge - a kind of spacious awareness that can receive experience in an open, interested way that isn't primarily concerned with gain & loss, fame & disrepute, pleasure & pain, praise & blame. What's the point of relaxation? As long as we are stuck in a rigid, guarded idea of who and what we are, in a tight & defended body, it is really difficult to tap into deeper layers of reality. Without relaxation, it's hard to drop below all the plastic bottles and buoys and rogue containers full of rubber duckies that are floating on the surface, and realize that we are also the ocean. Steady, sustained meditation practice, over many years, means more ocean awareness, more possibility of enjoying whatever's floating around in any particular moment, because there is the stability of knowing that you can't be overwhelmed or broken by any of it. Why not just chill out some other way? Many of the other ways of relaxation we might gravitate towards are very dependent on external conditions. Really enjoying a massage is wonderful, and important, but it might not offer you much support later, when you're stuck in a messy line trying to sort out what to do about a canceled flight. Also, some of those other routes contain a shadow element of addiction that diminishes us & leaves us feeling incomplete. You can come to feel like you absolutely cannot bear existence for one more second, unless you can have that drink/pair of shoes/lover's caress/teacher's approval. Of course, meditation can be like that too, at first - we can feel that our practice is all that is keeping us from collapse. But over time, our relationship to practice changes - we see it in vaster terms, and we understand the things that we dismissed as distractions or obstacles are actually the heart of the matter. Then we keep practicing. That's all very nice, but what if I just don't have time for this? Well, it's really up to you to look closely at your life & be clear. Do you want to meditate? Is your heart saying, please, please, let's do this NOW, I'm dying to do this? Are there 15 minutes of something, somewhere in your day, that you would be willing to trade for a chance to sit down and be still? Could be TV time. Could be internet time. Could be phone-time. Could be at first the only way is by listening to recordings while you drive, walk, or ride to work. Only you know where that time is. Also, it's worth knowing that some part of your ego really hates the idea of meditation, because it knows you're going to see through its ego-games, and that's the last thing it wants. It'll tell you you're too busy, a terrible meditator, a terrible worker/ friend/ son/ daughter/ mother/ father/ boyfriend/ girlfriend, and that you're going to starve to death, rather than leave you in peace to meditate. So you're going to have to cultivate some steadfastness if you want to do this. You're going to have to believe that cultivating a relationship with being is worth bearing with uncertainty & opposition, both inwardly and outwardly. You're going to have to make a lion face at the shaming voices inside you that tell you meditation is a waste of time, and your 900th email of the day is all you're good for. (…and since you're here anyway, the Meditations section of this site might possibly be a good place to start?)
This is to fulfill my friend & Inner Beauty collaborator Elana Langer's birthday wish: What I live by is hands, heart, body & mind, sensing into the world. What I live by is the possibility of waking up in this world & finding refuge in being itself. Not super-shiny being, not good-all-the-time being, not with-the-right-people-the-right-teacher-the-right-job-the-right-foods being, just being. Ordinary-extraordinary. Everyone’s birthright, there all the time, in all circumstances, if we listen.
Anne Lamott ends a recent piece about mother’s day saying, “I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain. Like everything else, it can fill me only if it is ordinary and available to all.” That to me is like the refuge quality of being: something beautifully plain that is available to everyone. Something that doesn’t care the tiniest bit whether you’re succeeding or failing in the eyes of the world, whether you’re gaining or losing, whether you’re gimping along or racing towards first prize. I ironed Elana’s What I Live By patch to my studio apron because I want everything that happens in this space to be coming from a place of Let’s just see what happens here. A place of (as Laurie Anderson says) You were born and so you’re free, so happy birthday. Now, when I tie this thing on, I’ll think of Elana, of our complicated friendship, of her gorgeous laughter, and be reminded to live by what I live by. Why do anything else? I live by the blind places and the wide-open ones. I live by being graceful one minute and terrible the next. I live by knowing difficulty is no mistake, and ease is always available. Love, Julie Sometimes an idea arrives & gives form to something I've known for awhile, but not yet articulated. It gives new words to an old knowing, ringing in the voice of right now.
Here's one: our delusions are the masks our wisdom wears. I remember. I am in high school, and I am infatuated with a boy. Actually, my best friend and I are both infatuated with the same boy, and whatever he feels towards either one of us, he wants no part in conforming himself to my boyfriend fantasies. To me, he is a wraith, a playboy, a Scorpio guitarist, a callous & magnetic riddle. Writing in purple ink, he mails me a letter that contains spray-painted crumbles of the Berlin Wall. A later letter contains an existentialist casserole recipe ("do not turn on the oven. when it gets dark, do not turn on the lights. wait without hope for your food never to be ready"). I ask him to prom and we drink too much because for all the sad suburban reasons there is nothing else to do, and then, drunkenly, he kicks me in the thigh, so hard I have an enormous, painful bruise for days. Pause. I do not become an alcoholic. No one except a very pissed-off ticket-taking monk in Tibet has ever kicked me since then. That miserable prom night is the mask of wisdom that says Don't fuck around with drinking and abusive relationships. You can lose yourself that way, and if you do, it can be very hard to find your way again. I give this boy an ironic wedding cake knife and a crazy poem for graduation, and gradually wean myself off my fascination for him. Case closed, I think. Vaguely, through friends, I am aware that he has gone off to Turkey-Japan-Philippines - all appropriately distant places. Years & lifetimes later, I am taking psych classes at Georgia State & planning to go to grad school to become an art therapist. It is my best-case post-monastic plan. Towards the end of the semester, I meet a fellow student at the all-night Majestic Diner on Ponce de Leon, to study for our Abnormal Psych exam & guzzle cheap, sweet coffee for as long as it takes to be confident of our abilities to answer multiple-choice questions about Schizoaffective Disorder, without getting too distracted by a creeping sense of familiarity towards all things Abnormal. I must drink a lot of coffee, because when I go to pull out of my parking space, I ram the whole side of the silver Taurus parked in the spot next to me. Shit! Shitshitshit! I drive away. No one saw that, I say to myself. About two thirds of the way home, I know, You can't do that. You have to go back. So I do. I drive back to the parking lot & leave an apology under the windshield wiper of the semi-ravaged Taurus, with my name & number. A couple of days later, a message turns up on the answering machine of the landline I share with my roommates in an old icehouse along the railroad tracks. This is the guy whose car you hit. Thanks for leaving a note. Meet me at the Majestic on Thursday. I'll be wearing a black shirt and black jeans. Strange, but then again, not as strange as Schizoaffective Disorder, and that's a thing in the world, so, why not? I turn up at the Majestic, and immediately spot Berlin Wall Boy, sitting on a stool at the counter, right in front of the door. This is already a lot of information to process, but then I notice he is wearing a black shirt and black jeans. Really? I came a cat's whisker from ramming Bruise Boy's car with anonymous impunity, and turned back? Sitting down to coffee with him instead, and having a relatively ordinary conversation together, I realize I am encountering the mask of wisdom that says We are all connected in unimaginably complex ways. Some kinds of understanding arise only from doing really stupid things and accepting the consequences for them. This accident, resolved, is the opportunity to drop a whole mass of suffering, to take care of the world, and to be taken care of. My Dad, who'd deeply hated this boy when I was in high school, ended up paying the bill to have his car repaired (and mine). I suspect the mask of wisdom that was operating for him in this case was something like Love your daughter even though she is a truly terrible driver, as well as lost, deportable, and broke. For my friend with the Taurus, maybe seeing the huge dent in his car triggered a realization along the lines of Violence is actually pretty violent. Maybe it would be good to refrain from that. Anyway. It's good to squint at things a little, to see inside the costumes. Yesterday, as part of my very excellent 43rd birthday, my husband & a friend & I drove way out to the Barrett Hall in South Strafford, VT, to hear my friend & teacher Sayon Camara play West African music with his band of merry ecstatics. We arrived around 9:15 at night. No lights save for what was coming dimly from the Hall windows, and from a near-full rainbow moon with clouds processing all around it, like something out of a Hodler painting: So: moonlit night, white clapboard New England village hall, cascading drum sound rolling out to meet us. Inside, Sayon was wearing what can only be called the Hat of Pure Joy. It embodies some hints of a Roman Centurion's helmet, of Pipi Longstocking's braids, and of Tibetan monks' ceremonial crests. More importantly, it is tremendously effective. In the Hat of Pure Joy, Sayon becomes the catalyst of a whole network of bliss: 93 year-old ladies bopping around with sturdy-footed Vermont hippie chicks, drummers finding truth in rhythm, young men & old men shuffling & leaping, all of us bringing forth gladness for the spring, for bodies, for fearlessness alongside all the fears we all know. I wrenched my knee (again) for the sake of dancing with abandon. This is a habit I share with my dog, who will wrench her knee for the sake of any halfway good-smelling dog, any day. We understand each other this way, but it still hurts. Laying on my back on the scruffy lobby carpet, trying to shake the stuckness out of my joint, I listened to the drums & thought I heard the sound of voices shouting joyfully with them - many happy voices affirming the dancers & the bravery of the music. Maybe they were devas. If I were a local deva, that's where I would have been, last night. On the way (pirate-walking, in my case) back to our cars, we got to talking with some friends about the election, and then Donald Trump and the Hell Toupée: Someday I want to teach a workshop where over the course of a day or a weekend participants produce their own Hell Toupées and Hats of Pure Joy.
Each person's Hell Toupée would bring form to their infantile rage & grumpiness & self-centeredness & fear of death. Go ahead: spikes, feathers, chains, prim felt, little veil, whatever it takes. Each time a workshop veteran had the presence of mind to pull her Toupée out of the closet & put it on, she'd be acknowledging that her pain is a state. Painful, yes. Part of being human, yes. But not who she is. She might make a terrible face in the mirror, roar, giggle, sob, stomp around the room, and then just set it back, next to the uncomfortable shoes she never wears. Or she might choose to wear it that day as fair warning: Dear Sir or Madam, Do you not see I am wearing my Hell Toupée? For your own safety, I suggest that you save your wishy-washy passive-aggressive request for another occasion or listener. And each person's Hat of Pure Joy would bring form to what is bravest and most peculiar about them - their capacity to enter into absolutely ordinary situations and create space for what is brave and free in oneself & others, unafraid of how it looks, seems, or might affect one's bank account. A workshop veteran might be wise to pack his Hat of Pure Joy for the family reunion he wasn't especially looking forward to. Suddenly, it seems possible to ask Aunt Mary to show him the steps of her high school dances, or to talk with Cousin Steve about what really happened, that summer when everyone got really quiet all of a sudden. It seems possible to enjoy the world exactly as it presents itself, moment to moment. Surprisingly, the Hats of Pure Joy & the Hell Toupées might not wind up looking all that different from one another. Go deeply enough into rage & pain what we find is release, joy, compassion, for all of us, wrenching our knees, doing the best we can, moving on. Wherever we are, our hearts are there. True story:
Once upon a time, when my now-husband and I had just met & we were completely out of our minds for one another, we spent a weekend together, both blithely using debit cards that had (unbeknownst to us) ceased to be connected to bank accounts containing any money at all. So, Heineken mini-keg: $12, plus $36 overdraft fee. Bagel with cream cheese: $4, plus $36 overdraft fee. Two tickets to see Shrek 2 at the drive-in movies in Fairlee, VT: $10, plus $36 overdraft fee. You get the idea. It is worth noting that we both also had credit cards the whole time, but didn't use them. Together, we racked up something like $800 in overdraft fees over the course of three days. It was awesome. Bank of Evil was 100% unmoved by my argument that persons experiencing unprecedented levels of love-hormones should be granted amnesty from stupid financial decisions, just as deer in rut should not be hunted. Among all those transactions, best of all was: custom $12 roll of Jenny Holzer-inspired Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise American flag mailing labels, $36 overdraft fee. There is something absolutely perfect about that, no? The medium is the message. The same bank that about 5 years later would be receiving a multi-billion-dollar bailout from me, the love-struck taxpayer, for big-time mortgage naughtiness, was prim and remorseless about my bagel, my stickers, and my post-grad-school poverty. Yesterday, I read this story about jailed & tormented Chinese women dissidents. Wow, I thought. I wonder what they were doing, that was so scary to the government? Answer: they were planning a series of protests against sexual harassment of women on public transportation. Really? Mentioning that it might not be OK to grope people as they make their way in the world is scary enough to throw some women in jail, transport them far from home, and threaten them with gang rape? Just like, some guy running away from the cops because he owes child support is scary enough to warrant shooting him repeatedly in the back & then claiming he is a taser-thief, because you need some shred of evidence to sort-of begin to excuse your actions? Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise may sound like the "discouraging word" that is seldom heard on the mythical Range, but I don't see it that way. I see it as an invitation to wake up & stop pretending that what is happening is really not-happening. I see it as an invitation to notice when I am the one abusing, when I am the one being abused, and when I am observing these abuses happening in the world. It's a way of looking at the world with a sense of, Huh. There that goes again. Whatever they're/we're/he's/she's/I'm calling it these days, its true name is Abuse of Power. Don't be fooled. Don't let anyone try to talk you out of what you know. I have come to the conclusion that it is time to bust out those overdraft-fee labels & post them widely. If you'd like some, send me your address & I will mail them out to you ASAP. Flying back to the US yesterday, as each plane landed, I thought Thank you, dinosaur-oil! Thank you, working people! Thank you, parents! Thank you, beings I have eaten! Thank you, entire world, for making this impossible flight possible.
Fly across the ocean, and the world changes. In New Hampshire I found winter again. Not winter-winter, but the kind of evening where you definitely want the pellet stove on, and it makes sense to wear a light wool coat indoors. My fingers turned white as petals, and I had to stuff them under Timothy's leg to warm them up. Tricky, as I was also trying to stuff ravioli in my mouth at the time. Above - a stack of ripe tulip petals from my mother's garden in Switzerland, glowing in late afternoon sunlight. We won't have tulips here for another while. But, the rhubarb and raspberries are waking up, and all but the most giant snow piles are gone. Letting petal-shock go, I re-settle this here and now. 1. What type of creative work do you do? In what media do you work?
I've worked all across media & disciplines, as need & interest arise. My undergrad degree is in Photography - but even 20 years ago, I was setting up room-sized paintings, photographing them, and then painting on the prints. As a graduate student - 10 years later - I started making installation work that takes Buddhist ideas and manifests them in interactive forms that people can literally enter into. So, for example, for my 10th reunion I offered a literal Indra's Net, where the 1300 people I matriculated with could use string to connect one another's names as they had in fact been related through thousands of meetings and interactions, into a vast & very tangible cat's cradle. Later, I studied Thangka painting in India with a Tibetan teacher. Those studies have translated into scroll paintings based on iconography of ordinary people's hands/mudras. While I love materials and process, I am not interested in identifying with a particular material or style. 2. How long have you been meditating and in what tradition? I've been meditating for about 20 years, beginning in the Thai forest tradition, with a stint in monastic life, and continuing through Zen and Mahamudra. Again, I am not interested in identifying with a particular school or tradition - I am interested in what works towards liberation, both for myself and for my students, since I am now teaching meditation. 3. Does your meditation practice inform or affect your creative process? If so, how? Yes, of course. Practice affects everything. I think the clearest connection is the kind of faith-mind that arises through improvisation in the studio, and through sustained contemplative practice. In the last few years, engaging in improvisational movement has been incredible for learning to open to a fully embodied practice with others, in real time. I think my practice life is richer for my art-life, and my art-life is richer for my practice. Meditation helps to see through the ego-based nonsense that is so prevalent in the art world, and art practice helps to see through the spiritual bypassing nonsense that is so prevalent in the "spiritual" world. 4. For you, are meditation and creative practices the same? How do they differ? Same-same, but different. I think a key difference is that both worlds demand study of tradition and process, but art practice more obviously & sooner demands attention to particular, idiosyncratic form. Art practice wants to know, How do these possibilities manifest in THIS life? Of course, spiritual practice wants to know this, too. Sadly, it's also entirely possible to hide out in pat solutions whether you are an artist or a meditator. Thomas Merton's essay on Integrity, from New Seeds of Contemplation, has been particularly helpful to me in articulating this question of bringing practice to particular life. 5. Are there other ways that you incorporate your spiritual beliefs into your creative or artistic process (e.g., ethical conduct, generosity)? Sure - I try to. Answering this questionnaire is a way of generosity. I pay attention to where my materials come from, and whom I am dealing with. I try to undertake projects on faith & to remember that the true measure of my work & worth is not to be found among the worldly winds. I try to express my appreciation for the generosity of others, and to support my artist & practitioner friends. And I try to make work that is an expression of the Dhamma as it moves through the world. 6. What specific techniques might help an artist incorporate meditative awareness into the art creation process (e.g., forming an intention prior to creation)? For me, contemplative practice is about letting go into Being, and Knowing, and creative practice is the same. So, an intention of trust, and of being willing to see & be responsible to whatever arises, without prior demands of goodness, or beauty, or whatever. To be truly engaged in their work, artists and meditators have to be willing to be with what is unlikable, unfashionable, ugly, unsalable, unpopular, and unsayable. If you want to look good & be good all the time, and if you think you can follow some pre-existing format to fame, fortune, and enlightenment, you can kiss the whole thing goodbye, because it won't work. 7. What additional question would you like to answer that I have not asked? Or what question(s) would you recommend revising or deleting? Does it matter to find & befriend & learn from other people who are engaging with art and meditation at a deep level? You bet your ass, it does! We are odd ducks, there are a lot of us, and we have a lot to offer in terms of bringing Western Buddhisms into life. Is there something meditator-artists can offer to the larger Buddhist community in the West? For starters, we need to start making contemporary iconography for meditation centers and private homes. Until we start seeing Buddhas that look something like us - black, white, brown, Latina, Asian, fat, skinny, old, young, tattooed, queer, straight, we're going to keep nurturing delusions of the Buddha somewhere else, with a pointy head & Asian manners, and that is NOT the point, friends. Lisa Gilbert is an artist and a researcher collecting responses from long-term artist-meditators. If you are interested in joining her study, you can contact her through her website. This long lake valley opening between Lausanne and Geneva is not un pays de loups (wolves' country). So much is staked, regularized, protected, mown. If I were a wolf here, I would have to hide in the scrubby strips along the tracks all ay, and hope for the best at night, among espaliered apples and the tall graceful shade trees over absolutely flat lawns. I would have to have a fine nose to find other wild creatures to befriend, or to eat.
It does not behoove a wolf to eat food grown in rows, and I am not so sure it behooves us, either. Row-food, row-phones, row-houses. The soul grows small, and forgets to visit swans' nests at night, under the crescent moon, rattling underground with leaves like tiny bones, to reach the dark waters' edge. The soul grows small, and once small, agrees that this is a dangerous, expensive world, rather than a wondrous, abundant one. [Night] A wild swan sits on her nest at the edge of the harbor, under sodium-vapor lights. Her neck is a thick, feathered snake, russet where it bends. Her eye is alive, she is at rest but she sees. Nest of scattered driftwood, resting swan. Eggs underneath, growing without changing shape. The stubs of the plane trees' arms glow against dark sky. Venus hovers centered on the new moon crescent. On the water something dark is stretching itself, is rising and lengthening. It is a seal it is a mad nocturnal swimmer it is a swan drying his wings coming in to harbor from the vast darkness of open lake waters. [Day]
The swan is there on the nest, the swan is in the water, the swan is pulling down from his chest lining the scooped-out nest the ten pale-grey eggs. Swan from afar, come near. Swan on the nest, go out, released, shaking your tail, rubbery black feet paddling silently the slate-grey limpid lakewater. |
|
108 Names of Now