A Continuing Experiment in Perception and Experience
Lately I have been focused on a process of opening myself to the world in a way that includes a search for an authentic and mindful approach to living. I was perceiving this as a journey outward into the world as I incorporated rituals and practices which kept me in tune with connection with the complexities of who I am. Now I am readjusting my view of the process as a simultaneous unfolding and folding process like a multi-dimensional topological thought experiment where I occupy a location at the center of an infinite labyrinth while simultaneously experiencing myself and the universe as the labyrinth itself. I feel as if I am working on integrating the two experiences into one life. This is an infinite self-experiment of folding and unfolding, a way of viewing, moment by moment, my place as both the cosmos and a tiny interconnected piece of an inconceivably complex and undefinable whole. I can constantly exist at the beginning and end of my journey and by shifting my focus perceive all the steps in between. It does not matter where I am but what point of view I take and my ability to perceive the whole and my part in it. I am not sure what difference it makes in my life, but I do know the more I can widen my perception of the universe and my place in it the less I worry about the past and the future and the more I appreciate the infinite possibilities of each moment.
In order to be fully alive, I must have contact with the grief and loss that I have experienced recently otherwise I will only skim the surface with no commitment to the depth of experience that binds me to others and brings me to a compassionate understanding of what it is to be engaged and truly alive. It is so easy to allow myself to be numb to pain and push it away, but when I am numb, I lose the capacity for joy and connection with the world. I live a shallow existence cut off from deep experience and oblivious to the suffering of others.
FOR WHAT BINDS US by Jane Hirshfield
There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set down — and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before. There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh, is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest —
And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.
“When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.”
Fred Rogers
Zen pretty much comes down to three things — everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
― Jane Hirshfield
“There are days when I can’t live in this country. Not the whole thing at once, including the hateful parts, the misogyny, the brutal disregard of the powerful for the powerless. Sometimes I can only be a citizen of these trees, this rainy day, the family I can hold safe, the garden I can grow. A fire that refuses to go out.”
Jesus said: that he who has ears to hear… He echoes the passage of Isaiah 32:3: “The eyes of those who see will no longer be closed. The ears of those who hear will listen.”
Here and there, no one is without ears to hear or eyes to see. Simply, the organs are hidden, unusable as they are. All have eyes to see, but do not see, all have oreiles to hear, but do not hear. Through these words, the deep nature of man is.
The deep heart of man can always see and hear the word of Isaiah, the presence of Jesus invites to remove the layers of the ocultant filters to see. In the previous verse, Isaiah speaks of the abundance of this divine nature: 32:2: “Every man will be a refuge from the storm, a stream in the desert.”
The dryness of the soul is no more, the violence and fear of man who goes through life without seeing or hearing, without letting his deep heart open and are no more. Thus hatched, it in turn becomes a source of life, refuge or rock to shelter all its brothers. Without this openness, he is condemned to remain in the worlds of fear, ignorance, violence, to suffer from lack, to dry up lack, to dry up osus the blazing sun.
Precarious Habitations: A Week of Mental Management
“Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.”
-Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
All week I have been reading Iris Murdoch’s deeply humorous and thoughtful novel Under the Net. It helped me to maintain my sense of humor and perspective as I waded through one emotionally precarious moment after another. While the above quote seems very deep and fatalistic, the character who is narrating it moves from one ridiculous situation into another totally random self-inflicted confusion. He never stops moving and acting or until the very end, gains any self-knowledge or finds a mentally focussed center to act in a mindful way. His ungrounded optimism and fearless ignorance make for some deeply comic and ironic self-commentary, which I could both relate to and laugh out loud at.
In this interval of waiting to move, I can make no definite plans that might interfere with my main purpose, so my mind feeling constrained like a cat in a harness can only try and burst into a thousand unassailable alternative futures, and other parts of my mind that must concentrate on work and managing keeping an emotional balance are made frantic trying to calm my overactive imagination. Whenever I got too seriously into this struggle, reading Murdoch kept me on the lighter side and showed me a way to maneuver through without too much damage, just a little less sleep and a little more agitation.
Now that I look back on my week, most of my days at work I was dealing with difficult patients with complex issues and very full schedules that needed constant adjustments in order to fit into other people’s schedules to get everybody the time they needed to facilitate their continued recovery. I was able to accomplish this even with my constant feelings of being overwhelmed and off balance mainly because in the middle of my bouncing from one challenge to another, I have developed an inner voice that is able to retain compassion for myself and anyone I am dealing with. I can help myself muddle through where in the past I would be adding up the failures in my head, I could see each situation I worked through no matter how frantically as a mildly irritating victory over my distraction. I was able to help people and be a good enough colleague when working with my fellow employees. It was not smooth or graceful but functionally rough and unsatisfying.
Coming back to the tarot every night helped me to focus on what was important and the tools available to get me through this period of disequilibrium. It is appropriate that my week ended with the very symbol for grace and flow, The Princess of Cups. I am feeling like I can settle into the coming week by flowing from each moment into another until I pass through this zone of uncertainty.
Myriad Ways 