Poet Enough….

On three different occasions I have had a time-out from the traditional life cycle of work-home, work-home, work-home.

The first was the 28^th year of my life when my psyche was almost beyond repair and suicide was an everyday idea. The second was when I closed my business and moved to the Phoenix Metro area, grieving my life and work in California, and with a small inheritance to shoulder the burden of paying the bills, I did not immediately find work. And now again, this third time forced into quietness by an economic situation beyond my control.

Each of these three periods has shaped me greatly.

The first one saved my life….but it was not without a price. I had then, as now, saved enough money to weather the storm of no income, but I had nothing in my emotional or spiritual bank account. I spent my days seeing a therapist, reading self-help books, exercising, riding a bike at least 20 miles a day and living with more fear and anxiety than I thought one human mind could contain. Without the distractions the world provides, the inner demons of my childhood were let loose on me like a raging tempest.

I had a good friend, a young gay man, who lived in the condo on the second floor above me; he had become so used to me banging on the door, very late at night, begging to be let in, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the night terrors I experienced with every breath when the sun went down, that he eventually would just come to the door in his underwear, open it and return to bed without even noticing it was me. I spent many a night on his couch, in the comfort of knowing that if I died in the middle of the night, at least someone would be there to find my dead body the next morning. My fears and anxieties were so bad; I couldn’t imagine a time when they wouldn’t rule my world.

The second time I was bounced out of the common world, I was 47. Well past the fears of my first leap off the well-worn path, I spent most of that year angry and withdrawn.

I had voluntarily given up my business, but I did not know how much I would miss it. I had voluntarily left the richly beautiful environment of the ocean and the sea breezes, to move back to an environment so dead, brown, and hot that I could hardly believe my misfortune. I had, already, begun the process of letting go of the notion that “we create our own lives”, a perversion of a great metaphysical truth…which the New Age peddlers have sold to the masses, in great quantity. And the loss of such an enticing and seductive notion was painful in the extreme. It’s such a lovely notion… that we can control our circumstances by the sweet wishes of our minds…it couldn’t be less true and worse, it causes True Spiritual growth to go off the rails and potentially stall out entirely.

I didn’t realize when I first moved back to the Valley, that I was coming here, to begin again, the Spiritual Journey I had started that first, Sacred and Empty Year. Here is the only place I could have begun anew, for here resides the only living Sage that I have had the privilege of meeting and knowing. He set my journey in motion and my return to his mentorship, is an example of the great rhythms of the Universe. The Great Going Out, and the Great Coming Back. It was such a dangerous time in my development. I was so angry, hurt, and disappointed. So let down and dispirited, I could have well thrown the baby out with the bath water, if providence had not intervened.

Beginning my apprenticeship anew, I could see the new depth of understanding that allowed me to grasp his meanings and teachings at an entirely new level. It required me to jettison the soft notions of the New Age, the easy and sweet refrains of the pied piper who promises riches and joys untold…forever, and ever, amen. This new age notion that we create our lives by choosing our thoughts, by “visioning” our wealth, by tacking pictures of what we desire on boards, and making lists of goals we can see ourselves becoming, is the old superstition of praying to a gray haired god, just left of infinity in the heaven above us…its just been wrapped up in a shiny new bow, and marketed for mass consumption. It is exactly the same superstitious, and quite childish notion. (Lest you decide here that I do not believe in God, because I no longer believe in a gray haired elder version of us…do not make that mistake. I now experience a Mystery of such depth, breadth, length, and height it cannot be contained by the notion of a personal god. I think of it as simply, “The Mystery”.)

The outer circumstances of our lives are not ours to determine, for the most part. Can we push and shove and make a business open, a trip to Europe materialize, a new love desire us? Of course we can. Can these things provide lasting satisfaction, certainty, hope, or peace? Of course they can’t. Expansion without contraction is a fool’s idea and a fool’s journey. Ever increasing good, is not only not possible…it isn’t even desirable. Think on it for just a moment…day without night, light without shadow, up without down.

Growth without end has a name…its called cancer.

Would you really want that? Can you really conceive of it, and the harm it would bring to your life and the lives of your loved ones? The way in which the New Age has missed the mark is the confusion of states of being.

The Outer Life must have limitations; they are required, necessary, and vitally important. So important, in fact, that the Ageless Wisdom Teachings has a name for those limitations. That name is the Ring Pass Not.

The Ring Pass Not is the vital contraction state, a law that insists that what goes up, must come down. In the Bible, the Ring Pass Not is allegorically described in the verses depicting the inevitable change of the mountains and the valleys…”that what was once high will be made low, what was once low will be made high”.

The Ring Pass Not as applied to an individual’s Outer Life can be most easily understood in the concept of traveling the globe. Say you start out in Idaho headed South and continue traveling for a great distance eventually you will run completely out of South, crossing the South Pole, heading now North…and once again you run out of North and must again be moving South. This is the state of contraction, or the “Ring Pass Not” which governs the outer world and makes life manageable. Death will recycle us all, in the outer world.

But now imagine the Inner realms. Using our same allegory, lets begin in Washington and travel East, long distances consumed, miles and miles pass beneath our feet…and what do we discover…there is no end to East. This is the realm of the Inner world; there is no end, no finish, no limits, and no commandments of the Ring Pass Not.

No contraction, no boundaries, no limits and no endings…but, only in the Inner Life. In the Inner Life, it is possible to rise so far above the swings of the metronome that they eventually merge, through the power and presence of acceptance we can eventually bring about unity, where Joy and Peace are everlasting and have no contraction states. To learn, grow, and mature to this level of understanding… our best ally, our one friend, our greatest mentor, our necessary teacher is the very thing we want most to turn from…the contractions of our lives.

What, we in our infancy, label the “bad”.

Every bad, wrong, unjust, or unconscionable thing that has ever befallen a single life, since the dawn of time, has been allowed by the great Mystery in the hope that our minds will grow open, and our hearts learn to heal.

Each individual’s circumstances are crafted in loving care, for them and them alone, who are we to take their greatest teacher from them. Be careful you are not “helping” someone out of the very circumstance they need for their salvation.

Today is the anniversary of my third year of Sacred Emptiness. A day I am celebrating the current form of contraction, my life is requiring of me. I have just recently begun to see the beauty and naturalness of this third year of withdrawal, as compared to the first year it might as well be different lives, the contrasts are so sharp and dramatic. Gone are the anxieties and fears, gone the wishes and hopes, gone the seeking and searching in the Outer world for salvation and escape. In its place, quiet harmony. Ever increasing understanding. The slowing down and cessation of the metronome. My mind is quiet; my inner life is strong, able, content, and peaceful.

The work/home cycle will return someday. I will, or will not, have the money to see it through. I will, or will not, lose my home and material possessions…all of that, belongs to the Outer Life and will in due course change, as all outer things do.

In the Inner life, this third year of quiet has deepened my connection to Soul, opened great spaces inside me, slowed my thoughts to the degree that I can watch them like a kitten watching a mouse hole, with complete focus and constancy…which is of course the only thing thoughts want from us. (If you have the courage to watch them long enough, without judgment and with forgiveness, the ones you don’t want will just get up and clear out of their own accord…taking with them a whole host of “bad” behaviors.)

So here on these pages I hope to offer you a visit to these quiet reaches inside me. I am not the Master Teacher, my teacher is, I am not gifted with a mind as pure, a motivation as clean, a talent as rich…but I am becoming quiet and still…and perhaps you might stay a spell and supp with me, if it does you good, you are most surely welcome. Remember if your focus is completely in the Outer, no matter how long or how hard you travel South it will always become North eventually. The Ring Pass Not requires that what you pursue in the Outer-if pushed far enough-will, in time, turn into the very opposite of what you wanted. It cannot be otherwise.

So, begin today-change direction, choose East and an everlasting opening to the Inner Realms.

The Poet Rilke puts it this way…

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

Rainer Maria Rilke, poet

Journey Well…

Until Tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

Poet Enough…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission.

I am Grateful…

My mother never really talked to me. Not at least until the very end of her life. She didn’t really talk then either, in the sense of explaining herself…rather she made quiet, simple, statements of such magnitude, they would quite literally rock my world.

Don’t misunderstand we spent hours and hours “talking” and what that means, as I look back on it, is…I wove stories about everything and anything…and she sat quietly and listened.

She was a woman of such astonishing contradictions. She could terrify me with her rages, as I was the place her rage expressed itself. And yet, she was to shy and quiet to ask for a bottle of ketchup in a restaurant. From the moment I could speak, I became her voice in the world.

I asked her once when I was working thru the stages of healing required by her rages, and the sexual abuse I experienced as a small child at the hands of a pedophile uncle, if I had her permission to tell my story to the world…as so much of my story was shaped by being born her child.

For some reason she agreed. Don’t know why.

As time passes and I have healed even the need for the telling of stories, I have found that I would rather tell her story than mine. But I can’t seem to come to terms with how to tell her story, mostly I suppose, because there is so little first hand accounting.

She said perhaps seven, maybe eight things, to me that came from the center of her being. Like a child in a fairy story, I picked them up and carried them in my small basket, thru the dark forest, looking for the home that I sensed we belonged to.

I carry them still.

I feel an obligation to these small, simple, and earth-shattering phrases she uttered when no one else was near, no one else to record them save my own ears. I feel such a huge obligation because they are the tumblers in the lock that eventually set me free. One by one, they lifted me free of the constraints of our agreement, set in place while I was still In Utero.

I do not know the workings of the Universe, I am not mature enough, wise enough, or pure enough, to be privy to the Voice of God, the Way of It, or to understand the Mystery. But nestled amongst all I do not know, which believe me is legion; I know one thing for certain.

I chose my mother.

I chose that relationship, and with it the terror that motivated much of my childhood, and the freedom that has characterized my adulthood. I chose her, her history, the brokenness that was her legacy. I chose the struggle we went thru, the fear of the early going, the pain of the birth of the truth, and the salvation of the end.

I gave her my commitment to see it through to the end, and she gave me a voice.

I cannot begin to express the gratitude I feel, for not having lingered over long, in the miasma that is current day psychological understanding. Our priests of psychological counseling lead us into a position of blame toward our parents, a finger pointing mess that calls out their weaknesses, while casting us as the wronged and damaged victims. It simply isn’t so.

No matter what a parent has done, no matter how heinous it may seem, or how beyond the pale, or how below the ideal…we, those of us born to them, chose their specific set of behaviors, attitudes, and appetites.

How could it be otherwise?

I submit to you that if you are still locked in the halfway point of retribution and blame, then the lack of vision is yours…not theirs. The harm you feel, the burden you carry, the victim energy that consumes your life and blocks your path…is your doing, and no others.

I have no doubt that should you be reading this, and hear me so clearly calling out the desire to remain a child that characterizes the unhealed individual that has been haunted by a terrifying past, that I will make you angry with my assertion that you bear the responsibility and accountability of your adulthood. Your anger, should it be knotting your stomach, and balling your fists, is the very proof that harkens to my assertion. Your parent and mine, were the crucible upon whom we hoped to break ourselves open.

In that vast place we were prior to our birth, in that tender mentoring that must surely have been provided us, for the next leg of our journey…our Soul knew, precisely which unique set of circumstances would be needed to supply the lift, necessary to reach escape velocity.

Had your Mother, Father, family member, school teacher, neighbor, preacher, priest, boyfriends, girlfriends, et al., not behaved in exactly the manner in which they did…you would have spent your precious, irreplaceable time upon this green and blue globe, slavishly fawning over the sensual and pleasurable appetites that belong to the lower, and quite frankly, animal nature of your being. Yes we have a pleasure center, and yes a good meal, a sexual encounter, a nice pair of shoes, a trip to some romantic getaway, can and does entice. But those of us sensible enough to have chosen the circumstances we think we were “dealt”, we have the gift of priorities, driven by the pain that sprouted up so dramatically in childhood.

There was a time, that appetites ruled my world, buying and having, seducing and partying, getting and winning…but once healing, began to have its way with me, these lower attitudes and appetites drifted away upon the wind, like dust on the breeze.

Once your heart begins to open, nothing else will do.

Once you know the source of your lifes direction, the balance of a life lived in comprehension…then the rudimentary delights of the sensual life no longer have a foothold in your consciousness, or a demand upon your time.

I live now, not for delight…but for Understanding.

May it please the gods, whoever and wherever they are, that I have the willingness to share my small portion of understanding before the reaper comes to carry me beyond the scope of sharing.

My mother, her rages and absences, her judgments and demands, created my desire to explore the topography of depth, or die trying. She pointed my feet toward the horizon, the compass, map, drinking water, and other assorted tools were provided by the great wisdom, warmth, kindnesses, and support of a great many Spiritual Teachers. But only my mother could have rung the starting bell. She and she alone, held the starters gun. Who would I have become without her?

I shutter to imagine, the emptiness of a life, which holds only the promise of goals-achieved, approval-acquired, recognition-sought…in other words, the Outer Life… a plane of life destined to wither, an inconstant upheaval of change and loss. A life not tempered by the fires of a crucible, has only a constant yearning as its companion, a gathering of more and more, with less and less satisfaction. I have escaped that fate due to my Mother’s wrath, and my own will.

I am grateful beyond my capacity to convey.

Until Tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

I Am Grateful…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission.

To See What Is Beyond Me…

After I left the fundamentalist background I was born to, I drifted around for a long while, deeply afraid to look at the spiritual side of life…lest I burn in everlasting hellfire, for the transgression of leaving the pew I was born to occupy. The very one that my parents sat in, to the day of their departure from this plane of existence some thirty-five years, all in all. (There space was so well known to be theirs, that on the rare occasion some newbie inadvertently slipped into the well-worn spot my parents held, it was like the world tilted on its axis and made every thing look slightly skewed and crooked.)

Left hand side, twelve rows back, three different preachers, four different cushion colors, and Lord only knows how many scandals, they occupied their place in the world with little or no concern for its ultimate veracity. They didn’t question…and they could never understand why I did.

Even then, I suppose, it wasn’t enough for me to “just believe”. It took me years and years to understand how damaging “believing” is to growth, maturity, and responsibility.

To be a true believer is to close the door on any questions, doubts, insecurities, or concerns that might dog your heels, or cloud your brain. So if your search is for comfort, find a belief system that you are fond of and hunker down for the long haul, it will provide comfort, but it won’t provide increase, or gain…otherwise, we would still be making maps that showed the Earth as the center of the Universe and the world as flat as a pancake.

To “believe” is a posture developed for the express purpose of holding back the fear of the unknown, and I have come to understand the unknown is the only place real life happens.

It wasn’t easy letting go of believing. I fought it almost every step of the way, and there are still occasions now, I look around me and wish I could go backwards to the safety of a set of pre-prescribed rules for what is right, good, and appropriate. To give up Dogma, to stop preaching your personal point of view in the world, to stand back from the cacophony of voices trying to gain attention and approval, sometimes feels like utter chaos and total loss. And yet, I have come to see that the freedom and sanity I pledged myself to, cannot become mine, until I can rid myself of the views of the times, into which I was born.

I have heard a story that illustrates my understanding of the difference between Truth and beliefs very effectively. I have no basis for knowing whether the story is allegorical or historical, but I do know that it speaks to the idea, that the limits of Truth that we are capable of reaching, are bound and limited, by the dedication we have to the “beliefs” we have been taught.

The legend is set, during the first voyages to the Americas by the Conquistadors. A local Medicine man-a spiritual leader of his people-took to standing for long hours staring out to an empty horizon line across the broad, cool and blue-green expanse of ocean bordering his homeland. His people would come to him, worried for his sanity, and inquire why he spent so many hours staring out at an empty horizon. He told them he himself did not know, he only knew something was coming and something was about to change the world as they knew it.

Days passed, and still he stood, alone and staring…while all those around him went about their daily lives with no thought for the strangeness that had overtaken their beloved and revered Holy man.

And then…one day, he saw it. Shimmered into existence, right before his eyes, huge ships with heavy sails lining the horizon as far as he could see. Ships a name for something he had never seen, and because he had never seen such monolithic structures floating atop the water, he had no reference point for their existence and no subsequent belief that would have allowed him to see them, when they had first arrived.

His eyes were not at fault. What was lacking was the liberation of boundaries his beliefs required of him, boundaries that limited his sight, and with it his understanding. No such thing could exist, because he and his fellows had not first believed in them, which had rendered them invisible.

The legend goes, that once the Holy man was able to see the large Spanish ships, eventually all his tribe began to be able to see them as well. A belief shattered, a barrier breached, a wall tumbled, and a new truth had dawned…and with it a new age.

You no doubt, have heard the aphorism, “Ignorance is bliss”…that old saw has its roots in the understanding that to question your beliefs is to shake your world asunder. I know…all about that.

I questioned my fundamentalist upbringing, and lost more than I could chronicle here…but I gained the first tiny steps toward wisdom and depth.

Then I became a student of a man whose Wisdom and breadth of Soul is so vast it took me years to understand him and he shook my hold on the “New Age” beliefs, I had adopted to replace the fundamentalist ones, right down to the core. (In fact, he broke me free of them.)

He required, maybe even demanded, that I give up the safety of the known and head off to parts unknown.

I don’t do it well. I am not graceful, or beautiful, or beatific, in my search for greater and greater unfoldment. Half the time I don’t even know if I am headed in the right direction. I stumble, start over, withdraw and give up, so regularly that should anyone be counting on me they would have thrown in the towel, long ago.

If it were a game of Ready, Set, Go!! I would still be hugging the tree, counting to ten-over and over-long after everyone else has given up, and gone in to dinner.

But on the rarest of occasions, in the most mundane of circumstances, without the slightest effort on my part, I have been opened to moments of such profound originality, beauty, and aliveness…they have taken my breath away, refreshed my Soul, shod my feet, and moved me father down the path.

It is these moments of rare and precious clarity that keep me gracelessly moving toward an understanding only I can perceive, only I can develop, and only I can reap the benefits of.

I want…no, I yearn for the mountaintop.

My Teacher describes the mountain of Spiritual understanding in this way…

“At the base of a mountain I see what is before me. At the peak of the mountain I see what is beyond me.”

G. Addair

I want so much to see what is beyond me, to find the Truth of the unknown, buried inside my Soul, awaiting my arrival. What else is there, really? I have had money, or at least the taste of it. I have had notoriety, or at least the taste of it. I have had approval, applause, and recognition…and none of it is worth one jot or tittle, to borrow an old Biblical saying. But to see beyond yourself, to open your heart, to the beat of the drummer only you can hear, now that is something worth achieving.

Like butterfly kisses, I have had just enough of those moments to keep me on the path…heading straight for the unknown.

I will let you know…if ships, suddenly pop into view…

Until tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of Clint Barnes whose work may be seen at www.flickr.com under the tag Senrab4

To See What is Beyond Me…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission.

Still Water….

 

In my early life, loneliness was a central feature of my day-to-day experience.  The turbulence in my family life, the loneliness of my parents and their sense of denied betrayal.  Born so much later than my half-siblings, I was in practice, both an only child and left behind by my sisters.  Often scared witless by the episodic rages and misconduct that characterized the adult interaction I had around me, I sought refuge in aloneness, even as I feared and begged for relief from its embrace.

Alone, I used the imagination I was gifted with, to build elaborate fantasies and rescue imagery.

My favorite place to build these Technicolor marvels was the hammock; my father had hung between two huge trees in our backyard.  Tall, stately, and comforting, their large rough trunks held me suspended between the cold hard ground and the tops weaving their dance with the breeze.  My favorite time of year to spend hours suspended this way, was October, gone was the uncomfortable high desert summer sun, to be replaced by cool wind and with it the sound of the trees susurration.  Susurration, I love that word, and have never been under trees moving in response to the breath of the world, without I must say it to myself-under my breath-and in response to that lovely sound trees make, in the wind.  It means to murmur, whisper, or rustle softly… the sound of it never fails to soothe and comfort me.

I would lie in that hammock, covered with a quilt against the almost-too-cold wind, my hair moving across my face, my checks turning pink with the soft abrasion and the cool weather, and dream myself away from the pain of my family, my confusion, and my desire to fix it.

My earliest memory, was asking my mother what was wrong with me.  I just knew that the rage that periodically threatened to tear my house down around me, or the quiet emptiness that preceded that rage, somehow had to be my fault…how could it be otherwise?  I desperately needed and loved the one whose rage tore at me, wounded me, and caused the acid to churn in my stomach until it seemed I might be eaten alive from the inside out.  Love and fear, co-mingled, co-imprinted, conjoined twins…that turned my mind in on itself and nearly broke my spirit.

No human being escapes the development of this injured mind.  It isn’t possible.

In the early years when I would “tell my story” as part of a recovery of my wits and capacity for growth, people would often tell me how sad my story made them, or that they had sympathy for me.  I almost always thought, but hardly ever said, you have it wrong.  It was a gift, a crucible, and a purifying fire.

A good many folks never wake up to the cleverness of the mind because there is no reason to, pain as much as we seek to avoid it, pushes and prods, demands and decries, “you will reach out…you will find the light…you will mature yourself…there is no other choice.”

How can I say with such assurance that all human beings are subject to the injuries produced by the “clever” mind?  The greatest minds of both the East and the West assure us that we are all lost.  The Buddha says it so bluntly as to make his meaning undeniable…  The first of the four noble truths, Life is Suffering.

Life is suffering… to be born, develop the monkey mind of desire, to live in and thru, beliefs handed down to us by elders who themselves, were lost and wind swept…this is the meaning of the Buddha’s first truth, or the Christ’s assertion that we are all lost.

Lost to the center of our being, whose nature is peace, kindness, acceptance, and nobility.

A childhood less dramatic than mine means that the impetus for awakening may very well take a back seat to approval, achievement, or the cultures demand for conformity, all of which may leave the person trapped and unwilling to forgo the norms in search of the freedom that pain demands of us.  I am glad for the fires of my youth; they planted my feet on the path early and with urgency.

I now know the difference between reality and illusion.  I understand that Peace is the product of acceptance, and cannot be attained by any other means.

The Buddha’s second noble truth is… We create our own suffering.  It is a consequence of our desiring things to be other than they are.

Here is the most important thing I have ever learned; it took years and years for me to be able to see the magnificent truth in this simple statement.

 To end the grip of pain is a simple matter of accepting things, people, situations and circumstances as they are, without opinion or dissent.

 That means quite literally, if you are stuck behind a little old lady doing 35 mph on a 60 mph road, you have two choices you can accept her decision and await an opportunity to go around her…or you can rant and rave, push up next to her bumper and make yourself crazy with the belief that she shouldn’t be allowed to drive, or she shouldn’t be driving so slowly or any of the other shoulds and should not’s we bring to the party with our opinions and beliefs.

 Every opinion we hold that runs counter to What Is, is both a lie in the most fundamental way and the source of all pain that ever enters our lives.

 The Buddha said we are the source of our suffering, because we desire things to be other than they are.   His third noble truth…it need not be that way, we may choose our perceptions and with that choice our freedom from pain and suffering.

When we have become capable of choosing our perceptions, of telling ourselves the truth, of interacting only with What Is and not with our illusions and desires, then and only then, we may come to possess that strength of mind that is the greatest gift that can be given another…

 We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer, life because of our quiet.

                                                William Butler Yeats

Still water, a non turbulent mind…I have spent the last 25 years unfolding that calmness, I see from this new vantage point that all things, and all events that have ever entered my life, have come into being to support my capacity for stillness and the silence of acceptance.  The most notable being my Teacher, he embodies the very nature describe by Yeats.  I have lived a fiercer, clearer life because of his quiet.

I could not begin to find the necessary word to express my gratitude for his gifts and commitment.  I have always wanted to follow in his footsteps.  I have neither the humility, nor the simplicity to do so…but I have the commitment to try...

 Until Tomorrow…

 R.

Photo courtesy of  Patrick Smith Photography you can see more of his stunning work at www.flickr.com/photos/patrick-smith-photography/

Essay copyright 2009 by Ronni Miller may not be reprinted without permission of author.

 

Step Into This Stream…

 

Last June, three weeks from a full year now, I was laid off from my job.  Like a canary in a coal mine, the landscape company, for which I designed and sold installation projects, rolled itself closed like a roly-poly bug startled into a “defense is the best offense” posture.

Remember those little gray bugs from your childhood?  Like micro miniature armadillos, they tucked head between tail, pulled up their prodigious quantity of legs and rolled themselves into a “Closed-Gone Fishin” posture.

I had worked for the Landscape Company for a year, always in their top three sales producers.

But in the early part of 2008 my sales, (and the companies in general), began to drop like a thermometer at the South Pole.  Gone were the heady days of producing $120,000 in jobs each month, replaced with numbers so dismal the company shuttered the doors and turned us all out.

The economic tsunami that we all-are now so familiar with-was still three to four months off, and I assumed I would get another job easily and quickly.  But as the months went by, and more and more unemployed flooded the job market, my resumes went without comment or contact…and, I slowly began to see the enormity of the financial situation facing me.

Luck and preparations were on my side.  Early in my Spiritual development I came to understand that debt and voracious spending were primarily a Spiritual problem and subsequently, I had, many years ago retired a considerable debt load, and begun saving money like a rat hiding cheese.

So I hunkered down, did labor intensive, no or low-cost, projects around the house and garden, met and fell-head-smack-over-heels-for my neighbor’s three small children and cared for and tended to, my own small family of animals.  (Three little eight-to-fourteen-pound-mighty-dogs and a self assured cat.)

With the small stipend the Government provides in the form of unemployment insurance, (and my steadily declining bank account), I have stayed afloat and managed my lack of income in a truly frugal and impressive manner.  I don’t make any purchases of any substance that is not truly a need, that means I feed myself and my furry family, and I skip almost everything else.

In practice, it turns out to be a little bit like house arrest…

Gone are dinners out, movies, trips, to anywhere but the grocery store, and in; are long walks with my dogs, visiting with my little friends, and prolific reading.

It’s not a bad way to live, provided your sense of self is not derived from your job/income/position/business affiliations/acquain-tances/or any other form of association, that disappears when your money stream ends.

I am deeply fortunate to have opted out, the first time, in my 28^th year and spent that year saving my physical life, (for from that time forward-to this day spent talking with you), I have spent less and less time deriving my sense of self from what I Do, and more and more time seated in the bedrock of who I Am.

Oddly, I learned the most about that process while owning and operating a decidedly hands-on business.  Providing murals for high-end homeowners and retail customers…a business where what I produced, was the only way to provide a paycheck for myself.

I had painted on canvas for many years of my life, small snowy-white rectangles, of 8x10 or 16x20 inches.  And in the strangest set of circumstances imaginable, found myself thrust into the process of creating paintings on canvasses not measured-in-manageable-inches. But rather, in expansive spaces where I often needed ladders and scaffolding so tall, they could have been used to bring Rapunzel down from her tower, after she tried that new Dorothy Hamill haircut.

In this context, “What I Did-Slash-Produced” was how I made my way in the world.   A direct result of my actions and mine alone, paid my bills.  (Or didn’t-as the case may be-those first years were a roller coaster ride of chicken one month and feathers the next), but the bottom line was, I fed myself by my own hand.

A circumstance, I would highly recommend.  To work for yourself, to provide your own living from the inner reaches of connection to yourself and your own gifts, is to mature yourself, in ways to numberable and meaningful to describe.

Not the least of which, is learning to understand the difference between “Doing” and “Being.”

We humans, particularly we American humans, have very little sense of the difference between Being and Doing.  That is due, in large part, to our lack of understanding regarding the Inner and Outer worlds to which we are all attached, like fetuses to umbilical cords.

Our confusion is primarily funded by our senses.  We see that we must “DO” something to make seed grow into food, resumes into job interviews, lumber into houses fit for habitation.  (Which is where our collective addiction to goal setting stems from-something I did away with entirely in the years I spent painting Murals-I haven’t set a “goal” of any kind in more than 2 decades, and yup, I’m still breathing.)

That bias is so strong in fact, that there are few of us indeed, who give more than a passing-Sunday-morning-knees-bent-head-bowed-done-that-been-there-bought-the-Tshirt, kind of nod, to the notion of Being.  And even then, only in relation to the Great Being, with hardly any understanding at all, of the Being we share in common with the Great Unseen.

The Great Unknowable called forth the creative process out of Beingness, (Nothingness), not the work of hands in soil or hammers on nails.  So too, must we call forth the life we were meant to live, not out of the actions we spend our days pursuing, but out of the connection to Beingness we find deposited asleep so deeply within ourselves.  Then and only then, does action take its rightful place in the Great Creative Pulse, that funds are capacity to fill our lungs, beat our hearts, and understand our place in the scheme of things.

That very understanding was what developed for me, those long and difficult days, spent standing on ladders.  Agony spreading itself across my shoulder blades from hands held, for to long, above my head.  Painitng images I couldn’t really even see, because I was to close to them to grasp the entire contents of their form and shape, spread as they were over 20 feet, rather than 20 inches.  (To know where I was in relation to where I needed to be, in order to continue to develop a piece, I would have to get down and walk backwards for 15 feet or so to see what was maturing under my hands…then back to the “canvas”, I would go, once again blurring the images to mere groups of color.)

A painter…essentially painting blind…

It called forth the development of a Trust so pure, so large, so intrinsic…it carried my broken heart the rest of the way across the great divide that had begun in my childhood, away from the pain and anguish, which characterized my early life, and into a life of connection and humility.

As my skill and reputation grew, clients would be drawn to me who needed to experience my particular brand of high wire act.  By this time, I had long since given up planning, sample boards, and artistic certainties, in favor of letting the canvas/rooms dictate their needs and outcomes.  Customers, who couldn’t conceive of giving someone a large check for a commission that had no accompanying evidence, save the work they had seen somewhere else, would shake their heads and look for someone other than me.

But for those who could handle the ambiguity, the artistic uncertainty, and the co-evolution, (their money-my time and talent).  The rewards were always well worth the anxiety, both theirs and mine.  (I say this not out of hubris, but out of the many, many clients who upon seeing their finished rooms, cried, or beamed, or pointed out the angels, they say, the saw beneath the surface or some combination thereof.  One woman said she loved it so much she wanted to “lick it”…whew…)

They would always remark in some fashion or other, how proud I must feel about producing such quality work, and in the early days I used to try to explain to them how it wasn’t about the outcome for me.  The results were what they paid for, and richly deserved, but those results were not what I worked for.  Don’t misunderstand, I needed the paycheck…but the paycheck was the ABSOLUTE least of the many blessings I was so freely given, in recompense for putting in such long and difficult days.

The very best gift I received in all those years, (I eventually shut down my business, because the artistic well ran dry, but more about that another day…), was the deep understanding that developed, in me, regarding relationship to Beingness.  And the recognition that the painting originated in the invisible realms, passing through me, depositing its gifts and graces and moving out into the world, not so much a product of my skills, as it was a product of my obedience.

Let me attempt to more fully explain, by telling you a small story of my all-time favorite Vocalist…Bobby McFerrin.

An aspiring singer auditioning for Bobby McFerrin’s choral group Voicestra, reported McFerrin started the audition in a very unique way.  When I walked in, she said, McFerrin drew a line with his foot on the floor and instructed.  "Step into this stream of music and sing what you hear."

(Bobby McFerrin is a national treasure and 10 time Grammy award winning jazz singer, go to www.bobbymcferrin.com and “click to launch radio”-to hear this magnificent voice).

Step into this preexisting stream and sing what you hear…what, huh, who…

Yup, that’s right, a stream of fluid sound that pre-exists the singer and deposits itself in the vessel that has conditioned herself/himself to receive the sound, and carry its vibration into the light of day.  That is the best definition of Beingness I have every heard.

That is exactly how I painted, I picked up a paint brush, held a palette knife, or a piece of charcoal and stepped into a preexisting stream of visual vibration and let it have its way with me. 

Just so you know, in the early going, giving up that measure of control, opening yourself unconditionally, that kind of total obedience…well darlin’… it scares the living daylights out of you.  Particularly when all those around you are waiting to see what the “Artist” is going to do.  When your livelihood hangs in the balance, when whether you eat or not is directly linked to someone else approving of something, you know, you have no control over.  I don’t know how I got through those early days…

It taught me humility on a scale I had never before understood, much less contemplated…it also, in time, fed my Soul like a sudden downpour in a drought plagued savannah.  Just like that savannah, Life leaped up from every quadrant, and inundated me with blessings and multitudes of blessings.

This is not the only way to bring a product into the marketplace, in point of fact, you can push and shove, goal plan and market, advertise and strategize, Do an Do some more…and get results, but beware…there is a high price for this perversion of the creative process.  We see it all around us, in our polluted land, rotting skies, and confused over-medicated children.

Doing-rooted solidly in and flowing freely from-Being, heals and transforms, feeds and provides, shelters and warms, gladdens and uplifts, soars and sings and touches all who draw near.

It is also balanced, harmonious, humble, does not take more than is necessary, and leaves a light, weightless, gentle and nimble footprint upon the earth, and all her creatures.

If you are sensitive to your Inner depths you can feel the difference between those creative types who come from Being and the ones who come from the desire for fame, riches, and accolades.  It’s subtle...but it’s always there.

For me, one day, the Creative Pulse took its leave of me.  Just like that…there one day-gone the next…which is how I ended up working for a Landscape company in the first place.  I grieved, and wandered around like a lost child for a very long, “dark night of the soul”.   At the time I couldn’t understand why, or how, it had departed.  I only knew that it was gone, the grief I felt for that Companionable Director, that hand upon my hand, was one of the worst times of my life.

So what did I do…I moved to a climate whose embrace nearly cooks my brain, and I waited and waited, and waited some more.  Childish and petulant, I demanded to know why I had been abandoned.  Not yet mature enough to understand, I was going back into the chrysalis stage.  That I had to be patient enough to await a new birth, I won’t lie…it was hard…

Slowly I began writing, which mostly came from Doing…but here lately, I can see the first green shoots of the growth of Being, here at the keyboard, in front of the computer and out into the Blogosphere.

Have I found my next canvas?  And with it the many gifts I received thru those years and years of ladders and paintbrushes, I cannot say and in Truth I cannot know… 

All I can do is have the discipline and obedience, to show up here every day.  That, I can do…I have the muscles for it, I put in the time, I Am Willing…

Until tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of Clint Barnes whose work may be seen at www.flickr.com under the tag Senrab4

Step into this Stream essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission.

 

Somewhere on the Open Sea…

 

A few years ago, I was in an Antique shop, browsing among the colorful old books, looking for a book to set on an easel and decorate my plant ledge.

Having once made my living as an Interior Designer and decorative painter, I have very specific tastes and a home that reflects a commitment to beauty and order.

I found just the right book, colorful, fun, playful, with a young boy on the cover and with the necessary age and patina, in a shop in the downtown district of my City.  While purchasing it, I struck up a conversation with the woman who owned the shop; she too, was an antique.  At least 75, she was time worn, threadbare, bent, and growing hair where women are not meant to, (or at least don’t want to).

I can’t remember the context of our conversation, only its last sentiment.  We must have been talking about, “The Future”, or some derivation thereof…because her last line was…”I’m still waiting for my ship to come in”.

I remember the line, its delivery, and the poignancy with which she said it to this day…at least four years later.  The sadness of the sentiment oozed out all around me, even though she was not aware of my emotional response to her message.  It implied without doubt, that her 70 plus years of life had not brought with it, satisfaction, contentment, or prosperity.  Her ship.  It’s wealth, lost and rudderless, somewhere on the open sea.

I suppose it was the curtain about to draw closed on a life spent waiting for an illusion that struck me so, and made me sad for her and her Lost Ship’s worth of personal treasure.

I have a friend who is stuck in this exact same tide pool.  He talks of becoming a famous actor, though he has no acting skills and none of the requisite passion for the craft of acting.  He talks of getting rich, winning the Lottery, or in some other way stumbling across great fortune.  He imagines that “rich” people are somehow unique and special; somehow exempt from the trials and tribulations that he believes plague his, “head just above water”, minimum income lifestyle. 

Once I tried to peel back this illusory view of a life lived with the means necessary to purchase whatever one might fancy, as being free from troubles and sorrows…he got mad at me.

I said,”Every life has its limitations.  Every life is filled with challenges.  Every life has sadness, sorrows, disappointments, the wealthy are not immune to this…and in some ways they might actually have more than their share of burdens and disappointments. 

(They are not afforded the luxury of an illusion that allows them to believe,  “if I only had money life would work for me, I would be happy, life would be easy”, they know money won’t fix it.  They know better than to be waiting for that particular ship to dock, it would be a waste of time indeed.) 

Can they buy better fantasies?  Of course, they can.  Does that free them from pain or heartache?   Of course, it doesn’t.

Most people define freedom, financial or other, as the right to do what you please, as you please, when you please.  For me, that is the working definition of chaos and a life without merit.

Limitations are the shape of your Soul, brought to you specifically for the growth and aggregate gain of depth and breadth, which is necessary for you to become more truly yourself.

I point to Christopher Reeves, as a remarkable example of this process in action.  Early in his acting career, clad in blue tights and a red S, he looked every inch the Free-to-do-as-he-pleased-Hero.  A take-charge guy, with pearly whites, coal black hair and the requisite V shaped chest.  He got the girl, the respect, the applause, and the rewards…but of course, that was just the movies.

Contrast that image, with the man just prior to his death.

Helpless, (at least physically), immobile, wasting away, tied to a ventilator its unnatural pace, dictating his speech and making his rhythms artificial and stiff.   And yet, he was the very picture of grace and dignity.  His soul shone.   His wisdom was revealing itself.  All because of the limitations his Soul had chosen for him. 

Every life, and every form of life, is required to have limitations.  Or chaos would ensue and balance would be lost.  Just as prey have predators, Summer’s glory kneels to Winters demands, Life bows its head in supplication to Death, and Light must end with Darkness…all going out, must result in a coming back.

Most humans resent and resist this natural order.  We want all things to prosper indefinitely, to march upward without waver or penalty, to exceed our wildest imaging’s and allows us a berth on a glory train we don’t have any right to.

This is pure fantasy and the arena of the immature.

Over time, with help and a constant desire to mature myself, I have come to see the wisdom of the Soul bringing limitations to my doorstep.  More than that, I have come to see the wisdom of choosing my own limitations as well.

Gone are the days that I wished for unending fun, sun, friends and parties…to be replaced with Silence, Harmony, Rhythm and most prized of all, Understanding.

Understanding is the “Pearl of Great Price”, it manifests only for those who have paid her price-steep as it is, costly as it is, demanding as it is.

She favors restraint over bombast, humor over wit, kindness over sophistication, gentleness over dominance…she provides just enough of herself to keep you moving ever forward, just enough light to keep the path illuminated for only the length of your own shadow in front of you…never the whole way, or past the curve in the road ahead, so as to keep you mindful of her desire for limitations and the use they have in the development of the Self.

To aid and develop her companionship, I have begun to choose limitations and to commit myself to their use.

In the physical I choose to eat little or no processed foods and to exercise five times a week.  In the financial I purchase only needs and very infrequently wants.  In the professional, even in this time where I cannot find a job, I show up at this keyboard, as though I am making a living from it.  In my home, I have a place for everything; everything in its place and beauty prevails.

In the Spiritual, I remember that the only choice that has any relevance at all is the one that chooses Truth over Illusion.

You can easily make the mistake of thinking that choosing Truth means to force others to believe the same way you believe, or honor the same rituals and traditions you honor.  That form of “truth” is Truth lost.

Truth in its righteousness, in its right-use-ness, is a total dedication to the qualities of the moment that arises directly in front of you, exactly as you find it…without opinion or editing.   The line you are standing in that doesn’t seem to move, the car who just cut you off in traffic, the lost luggage, the upturned plans, the demands on your time, the lost job…or even, the accident that stole the use of your limbs.

To say Yes to these limitations, to honor the moment as it arrives…never searching for some other place in the path, some other road to travel this is the “right-use-ness” of Truth.  This acceptance of the moment forces you to reach inside to find the only location actual freedom exists.  The Inner World.

Having once been an Associate Minister for a New Age church, I spent plenty of time building a lecture or workshop series, around the idea of truth.  An Idea I did not have the right to propose, as I had not the requisite understanding, or right use of the very tool I was proposing to teach others to use.  Born out of my escape from the confines of a religious childhood that taught Hellfire and brimstone, I gravitated toward a religion that promised abundance, happiness, and ease.  It fit my, living in the future, personality.  As the years passed and my understanding matured, I again had to leave the confines of the “New Religion” I had attached myself to…in favor of the demands and disciplines of the moment by moment Truth.

Can I, Will I, Am I, capable of accepting this moment just as it arrives? No bargaining.  No complaining.  No protesting.  No turning away.  Here is where Life happens.  Now is when it happens.  If I find myself unwilling to accept this moment, always choosing the re-engineered past or the illusory future, then there is no hope for a reunion, in this life, with the Soul I came into this world from and to which I will return.

Ask yourself; can I learn to separate fantasies of the mind from the form this moment takes?   Can I live for today, instead of righting some imaginary wrong in the past, or fantasizing about the future?

Almost all, emotional pain is a derivative of resisting the current moment, and as such is a painful form of self-denial and a loss of connection to the Soul and her greatest handmaiden Understanding.

In this poem by David Wagoner, we find the solution to all our impatient wanderings and lack of fulfillment.  He reminds us we must be willing to Stand still…

“Lost

 Stand still.  The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost.  Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes.  Listen.  It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost.  Stand still.  The forest knows

Where you are.  You must let it find you.”

 David Wagoner

Until Tomorrow...

R.

 Photo courtesy of Clint Barnes whose work may be seen at www.flickr.com under the tag Senrab4, poem by David Wagoner

 Somewhere on the Open Sea essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission.