Emerging into Grace and Beauty

On Tuesday, I worked late up on the mountain and then grabbed a bite to eat. As I left the Ugly Dog pub and picked up a chocolate bar at the market, the sun was just setting. There is a place up in Highlands I’ve heard folks call “sunset rock,” and I thought to myself, if I head on up there, even if the sun has already just set, it will be beautiful because we’ve been having the best clouds ever this summer and tonight is no exception. So I followed the road that goes to “sunset rock” or so I thought. Instead, I was on a wild goose chase that ended me at a locked gate and so I turned back, trying to remember what turns I had taken. I made my way back down into town and passed on through to head on down the Dillard road toward home. Now it was just starting to fall darker dusk. As I wound down the mountain through Scaly I could see the bright half moon high in the sky which was still a bit blue. And when I arrived at the overlook to Blue Valley, night was falling and in the distance was a puffy long cloud, sparking with lightning. I pulled in, took a breath of awe at the sight of electrical energy lighting up the cloud like a flashing lightbulb and thought, “boy it’d be nice to sit and watch this with someone.” It didn’t take a moment for me to correct myself. I am a perfectly good someone to sit with and how many times in how many places have I had my breath taken away by the humbling beauty of nature? More than I can count.

I remember when I drove across the country and around it some to look at schools for Acupuncture - back in 2001 after I was laid off from my last magazine job in New York. There were times I was driving west when the setting sun seemed to be falling past an ocean, but I was only halfway across the country and this was just the illusion from being high in the mountains looking down on flatlands with a dust-filled cadmium sunset. There were so many times like this when tears of gratitude just fell right out of my eyes as my heart opened up wide. And it opened just like this to the cloud full of lightning. I was reminded of how this life is a journey into beauty for me. Much of it has been solitary - not by design, but more by chance, I think. And that’s perfectly ok. There will be a time I am sharing these experiences of transcendent beauty with another, and it will be all the richer (or it won’t and that’s ok). We live in the midst of so many myths - about love, success, what’s important, what is of value, what we’re supposed to do, what we’re not supposed to do, and so on. One of the hardest ones for many of us, I think, is the one that says that we have to be paired up to enjoy life.

It is at times when I am immersed in the achingly perfect beauty of nature that the myth is shattered. At these times, I feel myself melt into this all that is-ness. It is here that the lightning filled cloud is also my heart full with joy, and the fading charcoal-blue light is my breath. There is no wish to capture it on film and no desire unmet to share the experience because the experience fills me more completely than any other I’ve met so far. It fills me to the edges of the universe (if there were edges).

And so it is that over the last decades of my life I have become more and more permeable to nature, to beauty, to all that is. There are times I feel breathed by a boulder, drunken in by the river, made steam by the sun and spread thin by the wind.

On another recent Tuesday after work up the mountain - about a month back - I was in the place where I received the inspiration for the “Blessing” post. Down the Glen Falls trail at the bottom, where the big salamander watches over the lower creek, the air was different. I found myself whispering almost silently there, and more of a speaking in breath than a whisper. More sacred than a whisper, my breath was a softening into a thick world of magnetic space. My words felt as though thick vapor merging with slow liquid, just hovering in the air. I noticed this as something profound. Where normally I go about talking to myself aloud with no compunction, here in this place it was as if the atmosphere let itself be known to me with a gentle force of presence, all encompassing. This was the place where the boulder I had rested upon had breathed me, and now I felt the place - this particular stretch of woods where water that pours vigorously over Glenn Falls slows into a gently laughing creek before cascading once again - was now also breathing me, and I could feel it in my hands, my mouth, my bare feet. I could feel it in my heart - in my whole essence of being, where I rest in God. And of course this is what it is to rest in God, as we do.

So as I was sharing with a friend about the cloud full of lightning the other day, and how I spent half an hour just watching in awe, I found myself saying that this, of course, is what it’s all about, for me anyway. I am here to, as deeply and profoundly as I can, engage the unfathomable beauty here on this gentle planet. And as it happens, this friend and I for as long as we have been alive have loved this place and its beauty and it has made us in large part what we are. We live in a place where every day we hear ourselves say out loud, “it just doesn’t get any better than this.”

Having said this, as luck or chance or Grace would have it, I have been able to say this whether I am here or just about anywhere else. In Florida for massage school I was in such a place, by the amazing Payne’s Prairie, and even the pasture where I lived behind a horse farm, and so many points in between.

After a while of engaging the beauty - I’ve been doing it consciously for more than a decade (and probably way longer) - it grows easier and easier to see.

Now, I find my self at the edge of the Mystery, diving back into her void as I embark in a month or so on the next leg of my journey to points unimagined. And to mark this time for me, this morning on my pond a great dragonfly emerged from her naiad shell, dangled a while with her fine glass wings still glued together, gave a flutter and took flight after an hour or so - right out into the big wild world. Such grace and poise - solitarily finding balance, breathing new air, testing out wings only dreamed of and never yet unfolded. Feeling her way up through gravity and into the air, into the light of morning in this little hollow where she was an egg not so long ago.

I felt so in awe of her transformation - one I cannot even begin to fathom. And, perhaps like dragonfly, my dreams have been guiding me so clearly that I, too, will know the flight path, the lay of the land that has been calling me across time and dreams. It’s such a big beautiful bright wild world out there - so much more beauty to be engaged and reflected - so much beauty to be transmitted through the unique lens that I am. There is much to do, and I am ready to test the air.

The Darkness Inside

The Darkness Inside

It’s been an intense and heavy week, with the suicide of one of the most ebullient, brilliant funny people ever to walk the planet and the senseless killing of a young man by a so-called “lawman.” Of course there’s always plenty of difficult stuff going on at any given moment, but this week, for whatever reason, it feels like there is even more of a call to action around these happenings.

We can never know what was in Mr. Williams’ thoughts and feelings that caused him to lose all hope or will to go on living, and we can certainly not imagine what was going through the mind of the officer who shot the young man in Ferguson, MO. What we do have to work with, though, is our own shadow. So many of us wrestle with our shadows throughout our entire lives.

Of course if we kill our shadow, we cease to exist. Yes, this, if we kill our shadow, we cease to exist. And this, right now, seems the ultimate challenge we are facing in the world (and maybe always). There is an historical fear of the darkness inside and outside of us. And of course the darkness outside of us is merely a reflection of the darkness inside. As Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And on one level, I interpret this to apply to what I am saying - that our shadow, our darkness, our inner demons will appear to us in our “outer world” if we fail to address them within us.

Of course we project our own darkness on all manner of scapegoats “out there.” And of course it is the imagination that fuels the fires of fear. When we truly meet ourselves and each other we can only always come back to God. Our own true essence is merely that. And we really are all the same in that way. It is only in our imaginations that we stray so far from balance and become separate, unhappy, better than, lesser than, afraid of, angry at, anxious about, fearful of and so on. So long as we keep drawing a line in the sand around us or our family, our property, our territory, our country, our….. So long as we keep this imaginary line around whatever it is we call “us,” we are feeding the fires of war - internal, external, local and worldly.

And it seems the more smug the masks we wear, the more extraordinarily out of balance we become. If I am struggling with my inner shadow in a locked embrace of war and I wear a painted face that presents a wholly different visage, then I am only adding powder to the keg with a long fuse. The consequence becomes more dire because I must overcompensate for the image I am trying to portray.

So in the case of those like the “lawman,” perhaps we externalize our shadow so we can take aim and shoot it down, only to find out that now there are even more shadows everywhere we look and this continues a viciously dangerous cycle. And in those of us with depression, we keep trying to kill off the parts of ourselves that keep stirring up the trouble, and in some cases that becomes suicide. The problem is, these places that we are trying to kill off are the wounds that most need our love and acceptance. And it is only in learning to love these hurt places, these scary shadows that we have any hope to survive moderately intact.

I was talking with a friend in St. Louis last night after hearing about looting and riots and SWAT teams and tear gas in Ferguson, and all I could think was that if only the police department’s first response to what happened was to gather the community in grief and support of each other, some kind of healing could begin to occur and there could be some grace. This morning I am happy to see that a captain from their state patrol (i think) was walking with the protesters. And we begin again.

In my own life, lately, I have been embracing those with whom I have had strained relationship in recent times. I came to the realization that it is up to me how I want to be in the world and no matter the cause of dissonance, it is to me to reset the harmony and create resonance in some higher or more neutral vibration.

We all have shadows to struggle with, and many of us are always seeking escape from them. We can keep running from our shadows our whole lives long, and we can keep attacking them when we cast them onto others. But again, killing our shadows - be they the shadows we cast in our souls or those we project onto others - we are killing our selves. Each murdered child is me, each soul who falls to suicide is me, each fallen soldier is me, each innocent murdered by police is me, each civilian killed in a senseless war is me - and so are all the killers, me.

And so I must remember, shadows are cast by light - that ephemeral thing we are all made from - and if we can remember that there is texture and detail in the shadows (just ask any seasoned photographer) and that it can be quite beautiful if we learn to explore it more deeply, and in fact all we need is to adjust our lighting or focus to better see it.

This reminds me of a poem I wrote the day I received a call from my late friend Joe, telling me he had been diagnosed with the cancer. Joe, of course, had many demons that he was managing quite nicely by growing organic vegetables, throwing pots and working tirelessly for our environment. The poem is in an earlier blog post:

It is light that defines us
shadow refines us
solidity is only an illusion
we can only see our shadow
from our delusion of self
our true Self contains us
while the ego just claims us
as different, as separate, as whole
our Oneness becomes us
as we see the wholeness
that mostly eludes us
when we look as from loneness
we’ll continue this dance
with our shadows
as long as we walk in the light
and just as we dream
in the nights in between
it’s ours to keep our life bright


Thoughts to walk away with...

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

The length of a shadow depends on the angle of the light source.

Our shadows move when we do, and sometimes they pass us by.

We can appear to disappear when covered by the shadow of another. The temperature changes and everything feels different, but we don't have to change unless we let our imaginations get the better of us and throw us into fear.

Our shadows can be diminished by additional light from other sources that act as "fill."

AND SO, please, let's keep shining our lights for ourselves, for each other, for our precious planet hurtling through space. And let's try something different with our darkness inside - how about we make shadow puppets and give voice to the darkness made visible.

Blessing

On a recent evening, after a long day of work up the mountain, I stopped along my commute back down and hiked down along Glen Falls. I found a perfect spot on a perfect boulder by the mouth of a lower stretch of the falls, watched over by a lone newt.

The depression in the boulder fit my body perfectly, exactly in the way I needed to bend and stretch to relieve my stiff neck and stretch my trunk. My connection to nature, as often happens, deepened once again to my core of being. And so on my way back up the trail I was inspired anew. On that boulder I was breathed. I sank deeper into the stone, merging with it, and I felt its breath through my being. On the way down the trail, I had stopped many times to greet formidable trees. Ancient, knobby Black Gum, Grandmother Hemlock, Great Pine, curvy Chestnut Oak, Maple... thanking them along the way, loving them.

In recent times I have occasionally felt that I have fallen out of grace with myself and in this way, too, come to feel out of grace with the world. There are many reasons for this, but those don't matter. Always, again, I return to nature. Always, again, nature returns to me. Always, again, I find in nature my nature, which can never be lost. And so I am reminded and I receive, once again, from the woods and waters an invitation.

(Blessing in progress)

May your every footfall
be a blessing unto the Earth.
May you recognize the love
that comes in every form you meet.
May each breath inspire your heart
with the fullness of receiving.
May your softening glance be answered
by growing astonishment deep in your brain.
May your every word
fall with kindness into a ready world.
May your ears extend to meet
the quietest birdsong and whispers in the wind.
May you rest upon the earth
with featherlike ease.
May melodious crickets and tree frogs
sing you to sleep even under noise of traffic and barking dogs.

...to be continued.

Along the trail back up to continue my commute home, I was inspired to a new practice, which now in retrospect seems utterly obvious to me as a natural extension of much of the work I have been doing. It also feels like it might be an aspect of my Dharma, if I understand this concept appropriately.

I began to even more consciously and slowly bless the Earth with my feet. Each step a slow and deliberate sweet meeting with the Mother of us all. A deep connection of love and gratitude. A welcoming in both directions. Grounding myself to the earth, kissing her with my soul via my feet. Anchoring whatever I bring down through the vessel that I am in whatever capacity I have to hold Spirit in a sacred way.

I have said casually many times over recent years that I often consider that I might just leave stuff behind and walk the planet. I have always meant it, but in the way of stating "someday" things. Once I came to this practice, however, it seems so right, especially as these last couple of years I have shed my shoes to better meet the earth and expand this connection.

Of course it would be my practice.

In the weeks since I had this inspiration and have been making it a practice, I have experienced a deepening of the gentle connection I feel as I walk in the woods, along the river. I even feel it as I bring the practice into the car with me and imagine that I am still walking and blessing as I drive the mountain roads.

As I walked back up that trail, that day, I also had the feeling that I was laying trails for other selves. That coming and going throughout time, there are so very many "me's" and that I am establishing paths for my other selves to follow. And this makes it more profoundly sacred to me and at the same time mundane. Of course I am doing this throughout time and space. Surely I am led to this practice by the footprints of other "me's" over time-space. And of course if I make it important and give my larger self to it, it is bigger and wider and resounds or ripples out through time-space.

Just as importantly, it brings me unerringly into the moment at hand, in communion with all the trees, plants, waters and creatures around me; in clearer touch with all the elements - the sun's warmth on my skin, the gentle breeze dancing in my hair, the feint birdsong, the floating petals, the bee just buzzed past my ear, the coolness in the shadows, the fragrance of sourwood blossoms and the earthy damp mushroomy air.

And so for now, I continue this practice of blessing the Earth with my feet. It feels so utterly right to me and is a strong and steady practice to keep me on my path. It is a powerful way to return to now, to return to presence and feeling and sensing. It humbles me in just the right way without punishment and with grace.

One day more recently, I experimented with mantras as my feet met the Earth. "I love you" a step, "Thank you" a step, etc. What I discovered is that the Earth is not concerned with my voicing my love, but she welcomes my gratitude. And this was an interesting lesson to me. it is not important that we let people know (by telling, anyway) that we love them. It is very important, however, that we show pure gratitude for all beings - JUST AS THEY ARE. For though we think we long to be LOVED. What we deeply long for and truly require is to be received, seen, acknowledged - NOT for being good, or beautiful, or special - for just simply what and who we ARE.

Thank you.

Thank you for taking the time and care to read these words that come from my heart, from me, simply as I am.

Thank you for being simply you, just as you are.

Thank you for blessing my life with your feet as you have walked through it in your very own way.

The Light Inside

(I wrote this post on May 17, 2014.)

I have recently noticed that certain kinds of comments or ideas shared on social networks spark interesting conversations. Sometimes they are completely passed over, but sometimes they seem to hit a nerve or three. One of these is a truth I have held for quite some time, and not one I would have expected to hit a nerve, and yet it did - I shared my personal belief that “there is no place that is not sacred.”

Because it struck a nerve for at least one person whose eyes rested on it, I gave a little background as to why I came to this truth. There are probably too many reasons to list that led me to this truth and in many contexts. In any case, this has caused me once more to rest in thinking about what makes places sacred. It’s funny, I can’t say that without almost suggesting that not all places are sacred, and yet they are, and of course that was my original point. It’s like God, really. And of course if we start down this vein, we’ll end up at the place where ALL THAT IS IS SACRED. And so why is there even a word, sacred. If all is sacred, doesn’t that mean there is no need for such a word? And yet we have a word for God. If God is everywhere and everything, why do we name God? And why are we differentiated from God?

It can become so confusing once we start thinking about it.

I don’t think it is so much that something IS sacred as much as that WE DEEM or MAKE something sacred - that we treat it as such for a particular reason. And why would we do that?

What is sacred in our culture (that of the USA) as far as I can see, is money, guns, freedom (which means many different things to many diverse peoples) private properties and ownership and the power that those allow us to wield over others.

In response to the fragment that I posted, a friend replied, “Come back to Atlanta. I can think of a few places that may change your mind.” Granted, for those of us who grew up in Atlanta and have watched it change in so many ways over the years, this is not an unreasonable response, and yet it opened a question for me. What makes it seem not sacred to this person? Is it the place or the way people have treated it? And I replied to the friend, “I have lived in St. Louis, Brooklyn, Atlanta, etc. It's not about where I am. It's about how I see. It is also about remembering the truth of my observation that all places are sacred. The sooner we remember this, the sooner we might remember to take better care of this beautiful planet that we are meant to steward.”

Over the years when I lived in (or visited) cities, there have been moments when all of a sudden something shifted for me and I had an overwhelming felt sense of what was in a place before it became industrialized - when I could almost see and feel the landscape as it was (or maybe will be when we are no longer here). It is a strange sensation, and a gentle reminder of the impermanence of things (and people), for sure. It is also a gift to be considered - an invitation to hold space for that which was and can be - and somehow is, underneath the surface of things.

And when this happens in me, I tend to take some moments and just look and listen and feel what is there. I imagine just a little bit what the shape of the earth, the quality of the woods, the sounds of the birds and breeze in this place is like in some other dimension of time, when people are not here or are here differently. It is a fleeting feeling sensing, and it is very real. It always leaves a deep impression in me. And so yes, I sense the sacred underneath the industrialized places. I sense the gentle beauty of the landscape as it may exist in another time. And I think to myself that there is an energy in a place that exists throughout time and space - perhaps an implicit order or imprint or blueprint for what is. And I sense that it is here all along. Just as I am aware that there is peace underneath all the busy, noisy-ness in our world.

Somehow it is like in meditation, we must simply keep letting the thoughts pass by, the noises be what they are until we rest in the peace underneath it all - with all the noise still present. And so it becomes an iteration of a vibration. Matter is simply energy, slowed down until it becomes solid, and so perhaps meditation reminds us that matter sped up returns to being simply energy. And so perhaps as we speed up our vibration, the world will regain its original order and harmony. If you have never seen cymatics - this is a great illustration. When sound frequencies are introduced to particulate matter, it reorganizes into more complex and beautiful designs - like sacred geometry.

I have heard about how certain lizards and maybe some other critters are able to re-grow tails and/or limbs that they lose along the way. And I have seen images made with special kinds of photography that capture the energy of, say, a leaf - where some part of it has been removed. In these images, the energy of the whole leaf appears, even where the part is missing. So we see that energetically the whole leaf is still present. The lizards take this a step forward, creating a part where only the energy remained after it was removed. So this leads me to think that there is some kind of implicit order in the energetic imprint that brings things into being to begin with. Which leads me to wonder, was my energetic blueprint here before I came into being? And what can I do with it - how does it work, really?

When it comes to these places in the world that have been so abused by mankind (and sometimes the weather), what can we do to restore them to their original way of being? How can we aid their energetic blueprint back into material being?

I built a blog several years ago that was pointing to one possible answer, though I wasn’t thinking of it until just now, as I write this. So maybe this blog post will also go there. Hmmm. What we can do is first do our best at whatever it takes for us to become fully present in the authentic moment we inhabit, in order to be able to see the world clearly as it is. Once we can see it truly (and we may have to ‘fake it till we make it’ or take hints from those who are clear seers), our job becomes holding the image deeply in our beings, (and here is the important piece) COLLECTIVELY. Now this may seem a daunting task. Afterall, our culture has worked hard to make us a fractured, ‘every man for himself’ society. But if we take a hint from indigenous cultures, we see that they operated (especially during celebrations and important rituals) as a whole - all-inclusive. And there was a reason for this.

It will be by the deeply held vision of so many peoples that the world is restored to some semblance of harmony and health - if this is to happen while we are still here. I have believed for quite some time that up until now in recent centuries, it is due to the strenuous efforts of the world’s many religious and spiritual traditions that focus quite a lot of energy on keeping things whole - specifically or especially those who spend multitudes of time in meditation, that we are still able to inhabit the earth.

What appeals to so many of us in the Indigenous traditions of the world (I can only speak for myself, so am making an assumption here) is the inherent “making sacred” of all things/places/peoples. Indigenous cultures make rituals for all kinds of things. To welcome a new life into the world (human, animal, plant, etc.); to mark certain transitions in life/death; to honor the elements and ancestors who provide wisdom and sustenance; for healing; for traveling; for growing crops and harvesting food in the form of plants and animals. In indigenous cultures, all things are alive with spirit in some way - even rocks.

And so, what I have been thinking this morning is that it is our job - those of us who can or intend to perceive the implicit order of things, i.e. the light inside, the beauty underneath the mess, the peace underneath the noise - to hold the vision. To SEE each other in bright wholeness and to SEE the earth in it’s bright wholeness, too. Not so easy when the river is full of black oil, the mountaintops are removed for coal, the ice caps are melting, the air is dirty, the waters are fouled, the animals are going extinct, your lover is dying, our children are ill. But this is our most important job. It just is.

And then interestingly, as I was just soaking in the tub to try to get warm on this cold, rainy spring morning, I was listening to “On Being” and Krista Tippet on the topic of Kabbalistic connection between Ein Sof and human moral action, playing a recording of Rachel Naomi Remen reciting what her grandfather had shared with her about Ein Sof and “tikkun olam,” and I think this is exactly what I have been trying to convey in my ramblings this morning. What a beautiful synchronicity for me to hear this just this morning.

“In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand, thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world was scattered into a thousand, thousand fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day. Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It’s a very important story for our times. And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It’s the restoration of the world.“

On Being Program

All My Relations (a poem in progress)

All My Relations

I am the fading hemlock,
flayed orange by woolly adelgid.
I am the soft creek,
sneaking past the mossy rock.
I am the bright bubble,
bouncing along the surface.
I am the cobalt sky,
reflected in the caught pool.
I am the broken giant,
cut short by careless campers.
I am the hearty moss,
clinging to decay.
I am the worn path,
kept soft by loving soles.
I am the cool winter breeze,
rattling leaves and coaxing trees to moan.
I am the nervous wren,
flitting across the brushy floor.
I am the hawk,
calling, arcing high above.
I am the woodpecker,
wheezing as I glide between trees.

Too, I am the din of airplane,
laying trails across the sky.
I am the coal ash,
dumped foul into the river.
I am the oil spill,
slicking the ocean and its floor.
I am the choking albatross,
full with unnecessary plastic objects.
I am the starving child,
in too many places to count.
I am the tired mother,
running circles around the sun.
I am the greedy banker,
collecting, collecting, collecting.
I am the addicted teenager,
searching for what cannot be found.
I am the abandoned slums,
left to nature to transform.
I am the contaminated water,
where creatures adapt or die.
I am the one whose greed
has disrupted the balance of nature.

I am the one who has come to make it right.

words and images ©Honor Woodard 2014

In Transit

as i stand
as this column of light
as i move
through this nature
through this place
through this time
this leaning
into what I cannot see
informs me
this feeling what my eyes see
so deep in my being
press of air against me
expansion of sound inside of me
pooling of spirits
at unrest in my heart space
watery feelings
feathery sensations
reach outward
through my grasping
connecting inwardly
with the skin
of this tree
of this stone
of this stream
where my sole makes contact
with the mother of all things
joining us together all ways
uniting us
beyond our capacity to choose
beyond our discomfort
against each other
in spite of our sensitive skins
our cold feet running
like the clear water
still finding its way
downward, always downward
against the mother
into the womb
of the sea

(One of many faces along the Trail of Tears, this one along the Mantle Rock Trail in Kentucky)

An Invitation

An invitation
to this rock
to this now
leads me across
the gentle water
diverted from the river
by a boulder island
to this diurnal bat
grazing the air
drinking from the river
and finding suspended perch
in the sap green boughs
of a surviving hemlock
to this nest-building Raven
patrolling the corridor overhead
keeping watch of passing vultures
along Raven Rock
to this trickle
over moss covered stone
glistened with wet silt
to this garden of shade
where cool, damp air
brings me home
to my skin
where the weight of me
resting on this flat, sunken
garnet-studded ancient being
is pulled as by a magnet
merged, matching coolness
meeting texture of skins
mosses, glint of mica in late sun
and this River keeps sliding by