I arrive at Michelle and Robert's extravagantly Alice in Wonderlanded Berkeley house just in time to slip into my Kurukulla costume, and join young Ion (aka the White Rabbit) in the front yard, distributing treats to an endless stream of little & not-so-little trick-or-treaters.  
Hello, Fuzzy  Dinosaur!
Hello, Little Cat!
Hello, Dad in a Fez!
Hello, Mom in Light-Up Bunny Ears and a Pink Bathrobe.  You are a Bunny in a Bathrobe.  I LOVE it!
Hello, Army of Princesses, including the Green Witch Princess and the Birthday Cake Princess!
Hello, Ninja Battalions, with your Plastic Swords.
Hello, Parents Who Care about Politeness, Parents Who Are Reflexively Rushing Little Kids, and Parents Who Are Holding Their Baby Hedgehog with Infinite Tenderness.
Hello!

Michelle and Robert have wisely decided to hand out finger-traps instead of candy, opening ample opportunities for dialogue:
Do you know what this is?
YES!  A finger-trap!  
Good for you.  Happy Halloween!

Do you know what this is?
No.
Do you want to find out?  Just so you know, it's a little bit scary, but in the end, it's pretty cool.
OK.
Stick your finger in here.  Now I'm sticking my finger in the other end.  Now pull.
{Child's eyes widen as our fingers become more and more trapped.  We risk mutual amputation.}
Ahh!  Oh noooo!  We're stuck together forever!  You didn't think you'd wind up stuck together with some weird lady for the rest of your life, did you?  
OK but seriously, how do you think ​we get unstuck?  Nope, not pulling.  Not twisting.  See?  If we both relax and push towards each other, we go free…  Good job!  Happy Halloween!

The growing, jostling lines of hundreds of families from all over the Bay Area might appear urgent enough NOT to linger in finger-trapping games, photo-portraits, and silly conversations, but I refuse to give in to market forces.  I know any urgency anyone's feeling is purely made-up.  What, rush to give some little Pikachu a woven grass tube, so I can move on efficiently to the Mini Bat, and the 47th Grim Reaper, ratcheting up Treat Productivity Records?  Seriously?  No.  Mr. Ford and his assembly line can totally stick it.  This is play, not work.

So we play.  I try to look at everyone, in the same way that I insist on making eye contact with wedding guests when tending bar.  ​It's the same dynamic, actually: something is free, you're feeling frisky in your finery, you're a little bit worried about the people pushing up behind you, and you want to make sure you get your Thing before all the Things run out.  Plus in this case, you're a kid, so that's a little bit like being tipsy.

Eventually, I get cold, and some of Robert's cousins come to relieve me.  But for a little while, there - for three hundred or so kids - there is Halloween Darshan, a current of love passing through felt & feathers & plastic & woven grass.
Hello, Beautifuls.  
Here we all are.

Q: What's up with all these weird window-pictures, looking at your reflection?  Isn't that weird, for someone who's all about embodiment, these days?

A: Yes!  Super-weird.  Thanks, Ice King, for being the voice of quality control around here, even if, blessedly, I now mostly live well beyond your reach.  Truth is, when I'm actually doing Inner Beauty with the Lady Lawyers & Law Recruiters; or giving & receiving blessings outside the  Livermore Public Library, I don't want to break away into the observer-instinct that would put me outside the experience, taking pictures.  It's only later, getting off BART in Oakland, noticing the beautiful ways people veil their windows, that I remember: I have a camera.  I am in a new city.  I can see myself through these spirals.  And later still, propped up on a shaky table enjoying my newfound passion for Starbucks wifi, I can write about it.  

One of the themes that's come up a lot lately is taking up space, meaning:

• I have a reason to be here, in my body, in this place, and to occupy my part of this situation
• I am aware that there are others here with me, and that they also have their part to occupy
• Fundamentally, I am welcome here.  Fundamentally, so is everyone else.  
• I can welcome the Universe, and be welcomed, just by staying grounded in my body & my senses, and by being curious about what is unfolding in this moment.

I'm going in for another 5 Rhythms gathering this evening - in Oakland.  Something about the challenge of staying open and present with others while dancing is sitting beautifully with me right now.  Why should dancing with other people be hard?  Well, lots of reasons. From the 10th grade dance comes the fear of rejection.  From the 6th grade sock-hop comes the creepy memory of a lecherous teacher noticing me & saying so.  From the 8th grade social dancing class comes the awkwardness of stumbling through the foxtrot with some also-shy kid 12 inches shorter than me, who is somehow, penis oblige, destined to lead.  And from the nightclubs of this life comes the disastrous equation that a woman enjoying herself on the dance floor is definitely asking for sexual attention, and a smile is as good as a guaranteed fuck.  

So I've learned to dance in a force field that says: You can see me, but do not come near me.  I am aware of you, but I am not going to look at you.  Keep your distance.  This is my space and time to dance, by myself, on my terms.  All fine and good, but also a bit lonely.  Taking up space means taking up shared space.  I don't have to cut myself off from the pleasure of engaging with others.  I don't have to worry about feeling like I owe anybody any more or any less of my attention than is precisely desirable to me, moment by moment by moment.  I can dance, and I can listen sensitively, in and out, through all the patterns of the dance, Amen.

I arrived in SF yesterday evening & went straight like an arrow (an arrow that wiggles a little bit to drop off 2 old ladies on the way) to a 5 Rhythms class in the Presidio.  Holy Moses!  Never a better way was found to shake off the I Am a Dumpling Blues of air travel.  

Here is me in a window in the Mission.  

I just had to take off that white skirt.  Two skirts, really, one inside the other.  I sewed them myself.  One was very thin material - pilly with wear.  The other was smoother and thicker - a little bit satiny even.  And there was a third, made of some oxford broadcloth, like a banker's shirt.  I always wore two skirts - so you couldn't see through them, which was important, because I was a nun, and I didn't wear underwear.  

The skirts were tubes.  We wore them by folding them and then tying them in place.  My belt was coral silk, knotted and knitted, with a wide middle, and narrow tying-ends.  There was always some possibility the whole thing - skirt, underskirt, belt - would come undone and fall off.  I just had to take off that white skirt.

I just had to take off that white jacket.  I had two jackets.  One was made of the same banker's shirt material - and here I mean a frugal New England banker, not some Italian running around in rough silk - and one was made from something thick and a bit padded, sewn by another novice who'd long ago "gone into brown," or left, or both.  I put on the jacket by tying it on the inside on the right, and then tying it on the outside on the left.  I just had to take off that white jacket.  

I just had to take off that dumbass velcroed robe.  I had two robes - one was made out of polyester sheeting, and fluttered prettily (an approved look), and the other was made of heavy hand-woven linen, from my grandmother's grandmother's tablecloth (a disapproved look).  There is little gravitas in a velcroed tablecloth.  I just had to take off that dumbass robe.  

I just had to take off that fleece poncho.  Anandi, from Germany, gave it to the nuns, and it was more cream than white, more the color that polar bear cubs sour to in adolescence, than the color kids draw them.  I could wrap that cloak around my head around my arms back and chest and stride around like some albino Bene Gesserit witch in rubber boots, reasonably warm in the damp dark woods.  I just had to take off that cloak, even though I loved it most of all.

I just had to take off that white kerchief I used to keep the sun off my head.  After Tibet, I vowed never again to let my ears and scalp get fried.  So I hemmed a broad square of robe-material and tied it over my head and around my neck, Brigitte Bardot style.  This made the nuns nervous, but it protected my head.  I just had to take off that white kerchief, even though it was an invention I'd added to the homeless ones' panoply of wardrobe options.  

I just had to take off those white t-shirts people gave the nuns to wear.  I don't remember how many of them I had, or whether the long-sleeved  waffle was with me the whole time.  It couldn't have been more than three or four, surely, but I had tot take them all off.  

I just had to give back that retarded* sitting cloth.  Whatever sitting-cloths may have meant 2600 years ago in India, in very late 20th Century England, they signified some need for separation between one's pure body and the impure world, or one's impure, going-commando butt and the monastery's pure buildings.  Whatever it was, it was some deeply repressive shit, and when I gave back my sitting cloth, I felt not an ounce of regret.

I just had to give back that salad bowl I ate every midday meal out of for two and a half years.  It was an ugly salad bowl, and so imagining it as the Buddha's head felt like an exercise in religious virtue.  Sure, sure.  The sacred and the ordinary are one.  Still, this is a dumpy-shaped salad bowl with a pink melamine plate for a lid, and I'm thinking I'd rather eat out of the cleaned-out skull of a water-buffalo.  Whatever, I just had to eat my meals out of that bowl, and when I gave it back, I wasn't sorry.

I just decided to keep that bhikkhu-colored Thai bag I carried my bowl around in, and that was a good call, because I still use it from time to time, and I like the way it fits snugly over one shoulder and rests in the small of my back.  

I just had to take all of that white stuff off.
I just had to go back into the marketplace with my Mom, and figure out what the fuck else to where after the two pairs of skirts, and the jackets, the velcroed robes, and the tees.

Once, before I disrobed, I was in an REI in Atlanta, also with my Mom.  There was this other freaky white lady in there, too - I mean white as in race, but also white as in weird religious avocation.  I think she was maybe a Sufi, because her headgear looked like a pumped-up fez, and she had a long skirt like a dervish's.  We studiously avoided making eye contact.

I couldn't stand to be naked for very long after all that white came off, and so I flew home in a checked tablecloth and an old waiter's shirt.  What happened next?  I found a white cable-knit sweater and a hideous mumu; a brown fleece jacket and some  

Actually, I can't remember what else, except for a kind of Coney Island in the 1920's black bodysuit I used to swim laps in the Georgia State swimming pool.  It wasn't meant for swimming, and so it got baggier quickly.  Still I learned to do flip-turns in that thing, by swimming at the wall without slowing down.  I learned to come back into the body.  I let my hair grow wiry and chlorine-ravaged, looking more like Eraserhead each day.  

I just had to let go of all that white.  
Eventually I remembered it was OK to wear pants.  Eventually, I hated all those early post-nun clothes, except the sweater.  I gave Timothy the fleece jacket, and he forgot it in a plastic bin full of rotten potatoes.  Then he left it on the lawn in the snow all winter, and so the stink came out, and it got mottled with leaf-death.  He still wears it.  I call it his hyena jacket.

I just have to think: every single person who goes through their own death and resurrection knows something about all this.  How, before I put on all that white, I had to take off the brown satin pants I had made in Lhasa, which I loved, and the grey heather socks with ears I sewed on myself, which I loved.  I had to take off the Tibetan jacket with the sky-blue lining at the edges, and the sweater that had been Nico's brother's, before he took it off to become a priest.  

​I want to meet others who are in the process of their own moltings.  I want to be a voice that says, It is our nakedness we seek, and the ornaments it gives us are the ones we never have to give away.



*retarded in my vocabulary means: behaving in a manner that is significantly shy of one's true capacities, whatever those may be.  

Here's what the white paintings look like.  They're even harder to see in photo-form than the red ones, but, you get some idea this way.  I'm going to go ahead and say, on the basis of my own experience among the ranks, that by and large "spiritual people" are white painting kind of folks.  Don't go too far.  Keep open and transparent.  Don't be distracted.  Be quiet.  Be still. 

All good instructions, but not the complete User's Manual for this life.  Which is why: red paintings.

Going deeper into these paintings means understanding the ways of being & seeing I am entering through them.  I am learning the rules & qualities of Red.

Where the white paintings are 100% about White and its interrelationships with the White Birch ground, the red paintings are a lot less concerned with purity.  Indigo, gold, pinkie-pink, umber, sienna, bronze: YES!  The Red I am after is a quality of union that delights in bringing together many different strands.  Transparent, opaque, light, dark, smooth, rough: welcome.  The White paintings are smooth snow over ice, each with the sense of a perfectly unified field, devoid of individual, outstanding features.  The Red paintings are communities of individual parts.  White is Spirit, Red is Soul.

The Red paintings, like the White, maintain vital relationships with ground.  Whenever the Red Oak space at the core of a panel gets too covered up, I can feel something closing inside my own body, as well as in the body of the painting.  For a redder Red, I might have begun by staining the wood with some water-based pigment, but I know there is something important about some palpable presence of the wood as it is. 

Red wants shadow, as well as luminosity; heavy, as well as bright.  Red is interested in Fullness; White is interested in Emptiness.  Prayer flags flap noisily all along both edges of the Red paintings.  Deep snow breathes quietly from the center of the White paintings.  All is well, exactly as it is.

Paint!  Red paint!  Red, melting, honey-scented wax on a hot sheet of metal, on a smooth sheet of wood, on a soft goat-hair brush.  Could anything be more delicious?  

The images above are wildly in-progress.  I have been enticed to make them as companions to a set of six white paintings I made a couple of years ago.  Ever since I finished those spacious & restrained works, I knew there would be a set of red ones to accompany them & complete the cycle, but until now, I didn't have Red firmly, deliciously enough in the body to approach that project.  Today, things are moving.

I show up at the local hardware store with my intricate map of how to chop a 4x8' sheet of plywood into 48 bits.  It's worked for me before, twice, on occasions when I needed a big store of panels for teaching & for my own work.   My experience as a lady-artist has been: if I do my math right, and am sure of what I am asking for, the Hardware Guardians will smile on even the most baroque plan. This time, though, I don't really need the 48 bits: just the 6 panels for Red.  So the Hardware Guardians, who don't mess around, aren't budging: 3/4" birch ply comes in full sheets, period.  OK.  Also, Larry the Saw Master is not at all enthused about my map.  Taking stock, sniffing around the saw room, I see a part-sheet of something leaning against the wall.  How about this?  Oh, that?  That's Red Oak.  I thought you wanted White Birch.  Nope.  No, as it turns out, I want Red Oak.  By the square foot.  Right now.

Larry asks me about what I'm going to be doing with the wood.  I tell him a bit, about the wax, and the heat & color.  He's a real craftsman, so he gets it, but he's also honor-bound to poke some fun.  You went to school for this?  Larry asks, smiling from behind his Odysseus eyes.  Yes.  Luckily, it wasn't so expensive.  What a lie!  What a truth!  $33.76 later, with Larry's able help, I am off to the studio, heart brimming.

Thanks Universe!  
​Mad love always,
XOXO,
Julie

PS: Thanks, Himalayan Art Resources, for the image below, of Red Kurukulla - the goddess who turns the energy of desire towards enlightenment.  You're the best, and so is She, and so is Larry, and so am I, and so are we all.

Oh, hello, Harbinger!  I see you swirling down & Durga's laugh is my first response.  Then I go flirt with you in the garden, among the still-standing asparagus & the cornflowers.  You're not sticking around, this time, but we both know where this is going.  Better light a good fire in the studio.  Better grow some fur.  

A few days ago, poking around in my laptop labyrinth, looking for something completely different, I stumbled on Helena Eitel's lovely short film, Swim.  Helena was a student in my Embodied Magic: Drawing into Life class at Dartmouth this summer, who brought with her an amazing willingness to open up her already quite accomplished drawing & painting skills to a more improvisational way of being / seeing / working / playing.  Swim was her independent final project.  I share it here, with her blessing & her artist's statement (below), as a beautiful example of "embodied magic," and of the kind of skillful, devoted ease I've been singing the praises of here, there, and everywhere.

Thank you, Helena!  You're a marvel, and I'm glad I know you.

Helena Eitel
Professor Püttgen
Drawing Into Life: Embodied Magic
August, 2015
 
Final Project: Swim
Artist’s Statement
 
 
Swim is a stop animation film made up of painted stills. Each frame is painted in acrylic on a clear, hard plastic sheet with LED lighting underneath. At first, I started out painting each frame to completion and then taking a picture. I was looking to express the beauty of my memory of humpback whales underwater in this new medium that I think captures underwater scenes well. After awhile, however, I remembered that this was not only about my few experiences underwater with humpback whales. It was also about communicating my love of the ocean and water, the seemingly magical way that water inspires me, and my daily swimming practice. Suddenly, so many more options opened up for me and I felt less cramped and anxious about executing my perfect humpback whale animation.

On my daily swimming practice: I expected this task be a chore or be unpleasantly cold some days. I learned that almost every time, it was only getting there that was a chore. The unpleasant part was only getting to the river and getting all the way in the water (past the uncomfortable transition to the cold temperature that happens when I jump or wade in). Each time when I left, I felt significantly better physically, but also emotionally. To document each of these swims, I would take some photos and then record a video of myself talking to my phone about how I felt after the swim. This method of recording my swims never got less awkward (although I think it helped me be less anxious about my calling a friend from home everyday practice). In general, I don’t think it did a very good job of capturing or expressing what each swim was like for me.

Swim is my attempt to try a new form of expression to communicate all of this. So, instead of continuing to paint every frame to completion before each photograph, I listened to my recordings and improvised a new painting on the plastic, taking pictures often with a tripod. Afterwards, I started playing with the audio on garage band and added some clips from my post-swim “speeches” over the dream-like river and ocean painted scenes. The combination of my words and the images I hope will give a sense of what’s going through my head when I’m swimming (although this in itself might be a little confusing).

In the midst of all the stress of finals period (or final projects period for me), it was really scary to be working on an improvisational project. I think I got really choked up and apprehensive about the outcome and focused too much on the beautiful, perfect, underwater imagery. After only a few hours I was really tired of this, and I’m glad that I relaxed my grip on the trajectory of the project and allowed for a different style of painting animation to flesh out the film. I ended up choosing the storyline of me starting and finishing a painting, because I think it echoes the idea that swimming, to me, is much like the feeling of being immersed in a painting. I don’t think I ever would have made this connection or had this insight without allowing myself to improvise.

Swim isn’t necessarily the perfect outcome I was looking for, but I think the evolution of the process took me further than that perfect animation of whales. It has also left me more satisfied. It has elements of a really satisfying short scene of whales as well as exploratory work that comes in layers on top. This class has really pushed me to let go of my output-oriented mindset and I’m so glad. It has allowed me to remember what it’s like to just enjoy painting for no other reason than to paint, and it has also really widened the possibilities for my work. This class has helped me to start thinking about things that I feel like all artists (everybody) should be thinking about: what do we do and why? What is satisfying? Thanks so much for a great term!   

***
​Helena's blog is here.  You can contact her directly at: [email protected].
​

Today, like every other day, I wake up stiff as a board.  Today, unlike every other day, I wake up next to Timothy, neatly arranged on the wall side of the bed, between the big Bhutanese thangka of the universe:

…and me.  

To sleep together, or not to sleep together?  It's actually both simple and complicated.  Simple: You snore.  Stay away.  Complicated: that's not so true anymore.  Simple: married people are supposed to sleep in the same bed.  It's a sacrament or something.  Complicated: Fuck supposed to.  Fuck sacraments.  Simple: the distances we form in our waking lives can be resolved by simple otter-closeness in our sleeping lives.  Complicated: sometimes distances are important containers for figuring out the truths we need to figure out.

This morning, unlike most mornings, Timothy gets up from my bed, goes to walk Chloe in the damp morning woods, and comes back with chilly ears.  Yesterday night, there were tears, and somehow these tears carried the I Ching quality of a storm clearing old tensions & dangers.  This morning, I find his warm armpits, and tickle him.

Over breakfast, we talk about the senior philosopher search his department is in the midst of: how approaching people who are effectively married to their current departments (via tenure) is like proposing an affair.  Is activating the dissatisfied, what-if aspects of their minds, so that what the asker sees is not necessarily the sanest & most grounded sides of the potential candidates.  Hey there, hot stuff.  Are you getting all you deserve out of that old place?  What's your name, who's your daddy, is he rich like me?

It's the time of the season for loving.

That's a song Kristin had on pretty much infinite repeat, as we drove around Atlanta in her black Passat on various quests, fifteen or so years ago.  Sure thing - the time of the season for loving is all the time, but the important questions seem to be: what kind of loving?  loving who?  loving how?

Always coming home to the same questions: Can I work with this situation to keep growing through it?  Is it possible to love this person / this place / this whole context, in ways that open me up, or is it time to move on?  

Those questions take on a special kind of sauce when I think of them in the context of the seventy or so billion lives I know I've led, as everything from a sea cucumber, to an antelope, to a despot, to a concubine, to this particular six-foot package of pretty much everything, with freckles, astigmatism, a great vocabulary, and a mighty restless heart.  Here's a Waylon Jennings song I love to sing in a hearty voice while driving the dog around:

We arrive at the dog park, and at first it's impossible to even get Chloe in the gate, she's so glued to the fence, watching other dogs.  Once in: yeah, she sniffs some butt, but really, it's the running she's after - the straight-up charge of her four fast paws on the ground, somehow chasing the other dogs, but really just running free, a beard of froth hanging from her mouth, completely turned on by her whole dogness.  I get that.  

Marvelous Mir, who I met in Philadelphia, dedicates a video to me & to all those who bear the burden of a gypsy soul.  A gypsy soul looks back on the endless voyaging of samsara, and sees not the cemeteries swelling with its corpses & the oceans swelling with its tears, but the call of the open road.  There are good reasons for travelers not to stop for long: the locals don't appreciate goats grazing on their golf courses, or chickens disappearing from their coops.  

Still: stopping.  Stopping and growing at the same time.  Traveling with the flavor of stopping.  Not stiffening around always moving on, around never having to explain myself.  Not-stopping means never coming home, or else it means defining home as a quality I carry with me.

I seek out places I can't call home, make some show of trying to learn the local customs, get offended, and leave.  Get killed, and die.  Make  some show of not giving a rat's ass about the local customs, get chased out.  Become a charismatic rebel, and leave of my own accord.  

It's worth taking these dynamics out for another spin on the dance floor.  Shoop!  What happens if I try dropping the storyline of seduction?  What happens if I'm not so interested in the dyad home / not-home?  What happens if I inhabit this being completely, wherever I am?

This morning, unlike most mornings, I wake up next to Timothy.  He's warm, and familiar.  I'm warm, and also familiar, though if I'm honest, I  can't begin to claim complete familiarity with either of these beings.  What a curious creature.  I wonder what she, what he, is thinking?  

Susan Faludi's Stiffed winks at me from the library shelf.  Hi, Susan!  I remember your article about Shulamith Firestone, who was a brilliant feminist leader in NY, until she got eaten alive by the sisterhood, went mad, and never left her apartment again.  An argument for carrying the quality of home with you is: you can leave your apartment.  You can go anywhere.  I've lived those lives before: the repudiated leader, the disillusioned follower.   I  don't need to do those things again.

What, in the interests of de-stiffening, do I need to do?  Well, the thing I said this morning would be a good guide: it's not some fucking thing I need to do, it's some fucking thing.  Some easy & ecstatic expression of the deep union I am between knowing and doing.  For that to happen, minimal planning, much listening.  

That last part of the Metta Sutta is not about rejecting embodiment - it's about surrendering so deeply that traveling & not-traveling, staying married & leaving, waking stiff & waking groovy are all seamless expressions of this one creature with her clever paws & burning heart & feet on the ground, doing the play of What Is.

This morning, like every other morning, I wake up with the fully present possibility of living well.  I can choose.  Here are the old patterns of exile and recrimination, longing and its obstacles.  And here are the new patterns: knowing, loving, staying loyal at a deep level wise enough to know how to wander & how to be true. 

Rumi knows how I can be a tiger, forming wants and hates that stem from looking to the fractures in the world, and not its wholeness.  Rumi also knows that burning heart that shifts to kindness: Here, walk in my shoes.  Here.  Feet on the ground.  Paws soft.  Belly soft, heart soft.  Even in the places that scare me, even in the non-home places I so stubbornly seek out, needing rejection as proof that wandering homelessness is all there is.   

The dissident daughter finds herself talking with the economist about how he flunked kindergarten.  She finds herself talking with the warrior about his shoes.  To the anorexic about the horse that saved her.  The dissident daughter wakes up and finds herself mother, lover, sister, wife, bitch, battleaxe, teacher, student, sticking nowhere stiff as a board.  Dancing, in fact, between and through these all.