Shivaratri & Lincoln’s Birthday: February 12
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Shivaratri & Lincoln’s Birthday: February 12

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Shivaratri

I follow the Hindu festivals, much as I observe the Jewish holidays, Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas. Any excuse to pray and meditate! Any pretext for bringing myself into the Presence of this moment! The cycle of holidays through the year elevates human life, takes us out of the pedestrian and provokes reflection.

So today, Feb 12, is a collision of Shiva’s Great Night (Shivaratri) and his wedding to Parvati with Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Shiva is the god of dissolution, the one in whom the Universe sleeps after destruction and before the next cycle of creation. Abraham Lincoln is the president who dissolved the bonds of slavery. Lincoln was forced to use the destruction of war to do it, which weighed heavily on his heart. What he wanted was for all individuals to have equal dignity of prerogative.
So this, for me, is a day to reflect on emptiness and compassion, freedom and justice, union and choice.
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The Mechanism for Human Forgiveness

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Recent events in my life have led me to think deeply on the matter of forgiveness.

I’m not, in a broad sense, a fan of contemporary psychotherapy. It seems to me that the people who are in therapy the most are the ones who are most self-righteously entrenched in their own narcissism. Everything is about them and their process, and if you try to let some light into a closed and airless system by suggesting that not everything in the world is, in fact, about their process–well, it gets ugly. That’s one problem. There’s also, among some child therapists (many of whom, oddly enough, do not even have children of their own) a feeling that children are the unfettered kings of a home, no boundaries required. I think this is folly, and that it undercuts the very structure that serves to give kids a sense of safety and security, and a foundation in life-long values. Kids need structure. They also need a few lectures from mom and dad on topics like, “Don’t get drunk when you’re 14,” “shoplifting is bad,” and “just because all your friends are jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t mean you should.”

Note that Proverbs 13:24 claims that “he who loves his children is careful to discipline them.” I know, sure, it’s hokey to quote the Bible in the face of the great amorality of contemporary psychotherapy–but when psychotherapy has endured as human truth for the many thousands of years that Proverbs has, then I’ll quote Melanie Klein and all that rot.

Recently a friend, after I ranted on in this vein, told me to read James Hillman. And I am drawn to Jung, so I’ll make a go of Hillman, when I finish at least two of the four books I’m currently reading. (Which are: The Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach, The Atlantis Code by Charles Brokaw, The 5 Rules of Thought by Mary T. Browne, and The Search for the Girl with the Blue Eyes by Jess Stearn.)

One of the biggest problems I have with contemporary psychotherapy is that it practices separating the doer from the action. Dr. Phil has espoused this on Oprah, and, with all due respect, this schism goes to the heart of why I view contemporary psychotherapy with prejudice. In fact, we define ourselves by our actions. If we tell lies, we’re a liar. If we cheat, we’re cheaters.

At the same time, in this view of the world that holds people accountable for their actions, there has to be a mechanism for redemption. For returning to self-worth, in our eyes and the eyes of the community, after an error, a wrong, a crime has been committed.

And for absolute sure: we all screw up. Each and every single one of us. Perhaps there are a few saintly monks meditating in caves who have never erred, and isn’t it easy to be a good person when you’re alone on a mountain in deep contemplation? But, for all the rest of us, we are going to hurt people, we are going to make mistakes, we are going to lie and cheat and steal and rage and be lazy and be gluttonous and be jealous and take advantage and persecute and oppress. On purpose and by accident. In the collective sense, and in the personal sense.

I’m reminded of the Passover Seder and how we are supposed to say, “It is because of what God did for me in taking me out of slavery,” and I am reminded of the group confessions during the prayers of Yom Kippur: “for the sin we have sinned before you forcibly or willingly….” I am reminded of Jesus saying, “Let he who is perfect cast the first stone” and “why do you behold the mote in your brother’s eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own?”

So we all make egregious mistakes. Some of those mistakes are cruel and hurt other people profoundly. How is redemption found in those cases? Well, best I’ve been able to figure out, with the help of finer minds than mine, is that we take personal responsibility for our own actions. This looks like: 1, acknowledging the guilt, 2, expressing remorse, and 3, offering to make restitution. Concrete action toward remorse and restitution are key. Someone who has committed a grievous wrong who acts in this way, following these three steps with persistence and humility, ought to get a second chance.

At least, that’s what I am thinking now. This current thinking is subject to evolution, as I journey through my life. It’s a complicated, troublesome subject. I want to be someone who chooses forgiveness and who receives forgiveness. This is so despite my knowing that there are some things I don’t know if I could ever, or will ever, forgive. I also know there are mistakes I’ve made for which I am not able to make restitution, for one reason or another, though I wish I could.

Which brings me back to the essential conundrums of human life: this vale of tears. And the Buddha’s observation that “Hatred does not cease through hatred but through love alone they cease.”

So, here is my prayer: May all conscious beings be released from their suffering. And may I be an instrument of the Lord’s peace, giving and receiving forgiveness.

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The Art of Asking Questions

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The Art of Asking Questions

There’s a scene in the first HOME ALONE, a truly classic movie, where a child of about 5 years climbs into a van waiting to whisk a large family to the airport. The enterprising child besieges the driver with questions. He leans close into the driver and queries him relentlessly about all sorts of matters, a stunning barrage of interrogatory, verbal machine gun fire. The driver’s brain comes undone. He’s left rattled and nettled and hopelessly askew. It’s the first domino that falls in a trail of them, winding up with… a child left home alone to fend for himself during the holidays.

I think of this scene often (and isn’t that what makes a movie classic, the way particular scenes haunt you forever?). This scene comes to mind because I have a four-and-a-half-year old daughter who regularly enacts it. Daughter? Shall I call her the demon imp of questions, the patron saint of why, how, what, and how come?

As I write this, she sits next to me at the dining room table with a pad of paper. “What do we need from the store? Do we need sugar? How do I draw a ‘K’?” she asks. I surmise that she’s making a grocery list, something she’s watched me do a thousand times. “Can you show me how to draw a ‘K’?”

This is only the beginning. As long as she’s around me, and I don’t turn on the TV babysitter, she’s going to come up with questions. “Then what do we need, mama, after milk?”

“Eggs,” I tell her.

“How do you spell that? Do you like my ‘E’? Does ‘G’ have a kickstand like this? Do we need balloons? How do you spell ‘balloons’?”

It’s partly about observing and making sense of the world. The other day she launched herself like a missile into the bathtub and splashed around happily for a few minutes, making an aquarium of our bathroom. Then she turned serious. “Why does the water get higher when I get in? Why can’t I hear my hands when they clap underwater?”

So my hapless husband and I wracked our brains to explain the volumetrics of water to her.

Sometimes it’s about avoiding an unpleasant activity, like bedtime or picking up her crayons. Nothing will elicit a stream of questions like closing the cover of the last bedtime book. “How come the bear in that story has brown fur? Do all bears have brown fur? What about polar bears? Can you really fly all the way to the moon? How far away is the moon? Is the moon next door to the sun?” How long can she prolong the delicious moments of cuddling and conversation, before we flip off the light and close the door to her room?

And, naturally, the questions are about drawing my attention, or her father’s, or that of one of her three big sisters. This little sprite likes to engage with people. She enjoys the limelight. If she can draw us in with a question–she’s got us. She figured that out a long time ago. Not that it’s entirely self-serving. She can maximize the utility of what she’s doing, and suck in our attention while also… making sense of the world.

Most of the time I enjoy my little one’s questions. Sometimes they fry the gray matter rattling around in my cranium, sure. I get tired, I get exasperated, hey, I’m not the Buddha, and I don’t want to put together an explanation of why the sky is blue while I’m trying to make a dinner salad and, simultaneously, explain to my 14-year-old middle daughter why she can’t attend a football party where there will be 18-year-old men.

But often, in response to these questions, I experience the same piquant thrill that I do when I’m traveling. That is, I’m jolted out of my habitual way of seeing the world, and I look with new eyes, and fresh wonder, at the world around me. Isn’t the blue sky a kind of miracle, anyway?

My sweetie doesn’t do what adults sometimes do: disguise judgments as questions. This is the crucial difference, this matter of innocence. Her questions are really questions, not statements, even if they have an ulterior motive of getting me to pay attention to her or of getting her out of eating broccoli. She wants to know, and to understand. So her questions arise out of the innate art of our human core, the art of genuine curiosity.

On Beauty
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On Beauty

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On Beauty

I have been reading Rumi.

I do this whenever I am heartsick, soulsick. Usually it’s for something I can’t identify, though there’s always some exterior thing like a convenient hook to hang it on: my dog bit my little one and had to be surrendered; my 14-year-old told me a great big whopper; my in-laws have rejected their own grand-daughter and disinherited my husband as a means to communicating their supreme dislike of me; my husband is cranky with exhaustion and overwork and a long string of fourteen hour days; the publishing industry is in a stupid place, and largely, in my view, because publishers publish the same damn crap rather than searching out interesting work, and then they wonder why people don’t want to buy it; our financial situation is fraught, as is our situation with our two former spouses…. There’s no end to people and matters that will serve as an excuse. Rumi says, “Everyone chooses a suffering that will change him or her to a well-baked loaf.”

But I think that is preferable to avoiding the suffering, and failing to rise. That happens, too.

So there is all this stuff amenable to being blamed for my anguish, not to mention that it is that time of the month. But is the body or its relationships or its contexts really the reason for this melancholy seeking without an end?

Yesterday this poem of Rumi’s manifest itself to me, in a moment of bibliomancy, or at least I like to think that the Divine was smiling wryly at all my flailing about, and granted me this mouthful of grace.

Coleman Barks calls it THE MOST ALIVE MOMENT:

“The most living moment comes when
those who love each other meet each
 
other’s eyes and in what flows
between them then. To see your face
 
in a crowd of others, or alone on a 
frightening street, I weep for that.
 
Our tears improve the earth. The
time you scolded me, your gratitude,
 
your laughing, always your qualities
increase the soul. Seeing you is a 
 
wine that does not muddle or numb.
We sit inside the cypress shadow
 
where amazement and clear thought
twine their slow growth into us.”
 

(THE SOUL OF RUMI, translations by Coleman Barks.)

I cried after I read it. I found excuses to cry all day. It’s something I rarely do. And then my husband showed me this photo on his iPhone of his Apollo’s outstretched arm. Even in process, it was beautiful: gesture and form, a supreme example of artistry. I cried some more, alone, in my bathroom, so no one knew I was being so silly. And I remembered why this man, this life, this set of choices that has led to this moment in all its bittersweet, empty fullness.

3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN
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3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN

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3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN

My friend Gerda is not only a gifted healer and psychic, she is also a friend who understands. We have had this discussion many times, to whit: What are we doing on Earth? We don’t belong here. This place is crazy.

I maintain it is because of Chocolate. I was happily zipping around the cosmos as a gas being, all cool and free, when I approached a pretty little blue and white planet with its sticky astral plane, and someone waved a gooey piece of hazelnut-filled chocolate. BAM! I was caught, like a fly on glue paper.

“Oh, yes, chocolate,” Gerda sighs. “That would do it. Have you tried Milka?”

I am lucky there is someone else here from my unit…. And that 3rd Rock can still be seen on dvd. My children gifted me with seasons 1-4 for Christmas. I laugh and laugh watching it, the laughter of truth and understanding. The laughter of, when is my mission over, when do I get to go home?

Meantime, this planet is rich in pleasure. It wasn’t just chocolate that lured me here. There are also hugs from my children, swimming in a warm sea, lying in the sun, stretching into trikonasana, love-making, beautiful clothes, the scent of lilacs and white flowers in perfumes like DelRae’s Debut or Yosh’s White Flower, an old ripe amarone or brunello di montelcino (I’m partial to the 1997’s), sliding between clean, crisp sheets at night, Krishna Das rocking out to Hare Krishna, or the Dixie Chicks wrenching my heart with Landslide, walking through the Vatican Pinacoteca….

It’s worth it, even with all the accepted, institutionalized insanity, even with all the suffering and loss that come with this bipedal flesh bag with opposable thumbs and uncontrollable emotions. This mission is valuable in and of itself.

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On Transparency

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Of late I’ve been thinking about karmic entanglement. Maybe it’s because 2008 is drawing to a close; maybe it’s because Ketu, the moon’s south node & the keeper of the book of the past, is transiting the ruler of my chart. The past, and my past actions, are much in my consciousness.

I think it comes down to mutual forgiveness. Meaning, forgive the other person, and forgive yourself. Send forgiveness to neutralize the acid of interaction that’s fraught with hurt, longing, anger, pain, or even with the alkalinity of love and kindness. Peaceful forgiveness, so that the interaction returns to a clear state without the varnish of meaning, without the binding of a bond, any bond. Transparency. Liberation.

As a believer in reincarnation, I have a sense of the occlusive stickiness of the wheel of birth and rebirth, and how action and reaction, cause and effect, desire and fulfillment play out, over and over again. I wish to stop riding this wheel like a caged rodent. I think a lot about how to get off the ride. It’s also scary. What will happen to my precious individuality when I merge with all that is?

But the first step is to release. May all conscious beings be released from their suffering.