Now The Green Blade Rises (+playlist)

The Raven that Refused to Sing by Steven Wilson

This is the story of a man who loses his sister at an early age and becomes embittered and reclusive. He believes that the soul of his sister may have entered into the personage of a raven, which he tries to imprison so that it will sing for him whenever he needs it. The raven refuses to sing and it is only in setting it free at his sister's behest that the darkness is banished.

Mistrust. About trust.

Have we had this one before? It's worth repeating anyway:

Mistrust    Rainer Maria Rilke

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us. If there are dangers, we must try to love them, and only if we could arrange our lives in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us to be alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.

How could we forget those ancient-myths that stand at the beginning of all races—the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you've ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you. Life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

Veni Veni Emmanuel

First Sunday: Happy Advent!

Abiding in fellowship

The practice of "being with", neither evading nor invading the integrity of others, is transformative. It is transformative in those situations that cannot be fixed -- when someone is dying, or living with dementia, or suffering depression or profound grief. This is because it keeps the person suffering in fellowship with the rest of us. They are not left to suffer alone as if we can no longer bear to be present to them, and this means that they can continue to be present, less fearfully, to their own experience. And it is likewise transformative for those situations in which taking some kind of action is a possibility. Action that arises from having attended deeply and non-compulsively to the reality of a situation is very different from the re-action driven by my anxiety to assert control and so deal with my helplessness and other unmet needs. 

Contemplative practice forms us for "being with" reality, letting it and ourselves be. It enables us to discern more clearly when there is something to be done and when there is not. And it enables us to distinguish more clearly between our own needs and the needs of the world. As I am able to be increasingly with my own feelings, of frustration, grief and powerlessness, so I can be in situations that cannot just be fixed at will with a greater measure of peace and freedom... Living contemplatively in the tragic gap opens the possibility of joy in the midst of sorrow and suffering, and of remaining there even when the prospects of "success" seem distant and uncertain. 

Sarah Bachelard, "Experiencing God in a time of crisis", Continuum press, 2012, pp. 103-104. 

There will always be cheerful people who would want to "sort you out", fix and mend it, find a solution; they will patiently and at length explain you what your problem is, and what, in their opinion, you ought to do, and how best to go about it. There will be others who would just disappear -- gone with the wind, faded away; because they "cannot deal with it". Both will send you on a guilt trip: sorry guys, I see you are trying very hard to fix me, but I must be hopeless; sorry again, what's wrong with me, bubonic plague or what else makes you avoid me? Both will be acting out their own fear to find themselves where you are now: helpless and in pain, gasping for meaning, unable to make the ends meet. 

Now maybe one, just one will simply sit with you through the darkest hours of the night, dealing with nothing, offering no advice or remedy; in silence linking you to the rest of humanity. 

Does meditation help?

To the question « how does meditation help you? » I can only answer by a shrug – it doesn’t, and I did not ask for help when I started to meditate. I asked for freedom and for conversion, I wanted enlightenment and experience of God. These things now are all coming about, but saying that they “help” sounds to me grotesquely, comically absurd. They don’t, honestly. They make my life more complicated than ever, they confront me to the questions I really do not want to face, they lead me to the places no one in their right mind would choose to be. Meditation set in motion forces and processes that I cannot control and only partially understand. Whatever wisdom I acquired thereby, it is the wisdom of insecurity. No, clearly, meditation does not “help”; God is no-thing, and cannot be summoned to fix my life…  What emerges instead is a sense of happiness which does not depend on events and circumstances of my chaotic life, a touch of the fundamental joy of being that lies deep within and can be shared with others in a simple act of presence. That's what it is about, really.

On fulfilment, or "Babette's feast"

It seems absolutely incredible to me that there are people who do not understand what it means, "to be fulfilled in and by doing" something; who cannot believe that some things are done for the mere joy of doing them. Not to be approved, not to be thanked or appreciated, not to be praised and accepted, but simply because just doing it fulfills us and makes our craving for approval redundant… 

I am reminded of Babette, in the awesome film "Babette's feast", sitting in the kitchen after having cooked a gastronomic meal for a bunch of strangers. Nobody thanked her, and she did not expect or need thanks: because she represents the lavishness, the ever-abounding bounty of God who does not care about approval. 

I agree with a sigh: these things that are done with no desire for approval are rare, and it is debatable how much of this inglorious motivation we conceal from ourselves when we think we have none. But they do exist; in them we participate in the abundant, luxuriant divine life, where being and doing are absolutely unconditional, therefore absolutely free. 

Hidden Things (from St Beuno)

From St Beuno, with love. The chant and prayer above spell out one of the messages I received during this retreat; a chant that seems to pervade subtly my days since I am back. On the other (thinking) hand, the data is being processed :)), and a more detailed post about what happened there is being written somewhere in the left hemisphere of my brain. Meanwhile, let's share the chant.  

Book of Memory, by Rebecca Hazelton (Once I saw I couldn't unsee..)

In my seeing there was a blank and he filled that blank

with words, there were words for darkness which made it lift,

there were words for cover which ripped them off,

there were legs that crossed and hearts that crossed,

promises red and read, and the pluck of banjo had a name

for that twang, and the way he called the world into notice,

that had a word, too. Once I saw I couldn’t unsee

and the worst was that the light glaring from the letters

left blue haze under my eyelids. There are no photographs

of this time, and I can only go by what others

tell me: I was blurred and erratic, I drew a circle

of white chalk around me and called myself inviolate,

I watched for horses on the horizon, my walls

were under siege from smaller men who called themselves

heroes. They say I reached over the balustrade and picked

up the tiny ships and threw them over the edge of the world.

I tore my hair, cut one breast from my body and plattered it

as around my fortifications one man pulled another man

behind his chariot. If they say that’s how I was,

that’s how I was. I have no words for the one in the mirror

who apes me every morning. She’s not the one I remember

imagining as a young girl. There must be a way to unsee

how I tap the glass and she taps back, and which wall,

which Cassandra weeping—everything I saw I spoke to his ear,

and the wall crashed into place between us, the horse

had a bellyful of it, the blank was full of small soldiers,

and he turned from my beauty and said my name.

Rebecca Hazelton, “Book of Memory” from Vow. Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Hazelton. 

An amazing voice; just watch, just hear the feverish, delirious flow of this poem, the force and the helplessness with which the thought, the words are circling around an experience so powerful that only the ancient myths can come close to its burning intensity. A lucid, crafty and intricate poem too. I am so happy people still want to take language to these liminal spaces... 

Alina Ibragimova plays Bach

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml4AweDceYg

The Way to Transformation - the way of the moth

Have you ever felt sorry for the moth attracted to flame? Here is Goethe's take on it as a metaphor for us all:

Tell a wise person or else keep silent.
For the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.

In the calm waters of the love nights
Where you were begotten
Where you have begotten
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now, no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness
desire for higher love-making
Sweeps you upward
Distance does not make you
Falter now, flying
Arriving in magic
You are the moth and you are gone.
So long as you have not 
Experienced this:
To die and so to grow
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

Falling upwards indeed!

On the necessity of the finite

I find the following helpful, from my reading in the Grief and Loss course. The quote at the top is from a man called Golomb, who I am assuming is unrelated to the character from The Lord of the Rings:

What is authentic must be finite since one cannot own and grasp an
infinite process or entity. Death enters life to conclude it, making
possible its adequate explication. Hence, only Being-towards-death
can be fully meaningful and authentic. Each time we entertain the
possibility of dying we undertake an assessment of our Being. In our
anticipation we define our existence. (1995, p.l 07)

The concept of 'Being-toward-death' mentioned here is one introduced by
another important existentialist writer, Martin Heidegger (1962) who has
already been quoted. What he meant by this term is that it is necessary to
recognize that life cannot be separated from death in the sense that: (i) death
is an ever-present possibility; and (ii) death makes life finite and therefore
precious.


So is argued that authentic existence, the Existentialist life-cry, is absolutely dependent on the reality of death. I am interested by the idea of the 'explication' of life being the ending of it by death, that it becomes a necessary ally to life.

A necessary loss

This follows on from the Krishnamurti stuff, taking a long view on loss. Just about to do a counselling unit on Loss and Grief so maybe that is why it came to me whilst walking on the mountain nearby:

A necessary loss

I no longer believe in our tales of consuming love.

Being devoured does not enrich me,

And in making you mine

I subsume your otherness; acid-etch the ground of you

as well as your relief.

And yet.

In having been absorbed

I understand

that that death was a rehearsal,

My nothingness

a stripping bare to the essence.

Only in dark absence

would I allow my flesh to be reknitted

and another breath inspire.

Only in dissolution

Can the fracture be reset.

The running away is what you know

Sorrow is not to be ended by the action of will. Do please understand this. You cannot get rid of it. Sorrow is something that has to be embraced, lived with, understood; one has to become intimate with sorrow. But you are not intimate with sorrow, are you? You may say, "I know sorrow", but do you? Have you lived with it? Or, having felt sorrow, have you run away from it? Actually, you don't know sorrow. The running away is what you know. You know only the escape from sorrow.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bombay, 10 January 1960, in On living and Dying, HarperSanFranciso, 1992, p. 88. 

Krishnamurti is extraordinarily ruthless. He won't have excuses, fantasies, wishful thinking. He doesn't want you to follow him -- he wants you to wake up and see, take up your bed and walk, "go into" the heart of the matter and understand with your own heart and mind what it is to live, to die, to love, to be alone, to be in communion. That requires ruthlessness. What he is asking us to consider here is properly a liminal experience, something terribly revolting to the common sense -- everyone knows that we must avoid pain by all means, it is unhealthy not to… But I am thinking of Liz's St Francis facing the wolf, and of the Greek word metanoia, usually translated as "conversion", and which literally means "turning around" -- turning on your heels, going in the opposite direction.  

Yes. Going there is an ambitious plan. Just to stop and meet what we are fleeing would be enough. 

A door into the unknown

Sir, have you ever died to your pleasure -- just died to it, without arguing, without reacting, without trying to create special conditions, without asking how you are to give it up, or why you should give it up? Have you ever done that? You will have to do that when you die physically, won't you? One can't argue with death. One can't say to death, "Give me a few more days to live". There is no effort of will in dying -- one just dies. Or have you ever died to any of your despairs, your ambitions -- just given it up, put it aside, as a leaf that dies in the autumn, without any battle of will, without anxiety as to what will happen to you if you do? Have you? I am afraid you have not. When you leave here now, die to something that you cling to -- your habit of smoking, your sexual demand, your urge to be famous as an artist, as a poet, as this or that. Just give it up, just brush it aside as you would some stupid thing, without effort, without choice, without decision. If your dying to it is total -- and not just the giving up of cigarettes or of drinking, which you make into a tremendous issue -- you will know what it means to live in the moment supremely, effortlessly, with all your being. And then, perhaps, a door may open into the unknown. 

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Saanen, 21 July 1963, in On living and Dying, HarperSanFranciso, 1992, p.54. 

In this extraordinary series of talks Krishnamurti is concerned with the problem of death. He discusses the fear of death, the desire for continuity, the way our mind is dealing with both death and life. His approach is not speculative at all: he wants his audience to see, to approach the mystery of death -- not merely to have an idea or a theory about it. In this passage, I am reminded of Jesus's words that so many Christians would like to take out of the Gospel: that whoever desires life shall take up his cross, deny himself, and follow Him. The Gospel would be so much more acceptable, agreeable, understandable without these words... But there they are, and (worse!!) there will be St Paul with his "dying to sin", where the only word we can possibly utter without resistance is "to". But when the resistance is gone, when words are seen without the burden of the associations, thoughts, traditions  conditioning what we call "thinking" -- then it just makes sense... 

Tyranny and fear of impotence

Virtue is happy to pay the price of limited power for the blessing of being together with other men; fear is the despair over the individual impotence of those who, for whatever reason, have refused to "act in concert"... Fear as a principle of action is in some sense a contradiction in terms, because fear is precisely despair over the impossibility of action. 

 Thus the common ground upon which lawlessness can be erected and from which fear springs is the impotence all men feel who are radically isolated. One man against all others does not experience equality of power among men, but only the overwhelming, combined power of all others against their own... Out of the conviction of one's own impotence and the fear of the power of all others comes the will to dominate, which is the will of the tyrant. 

 Just as virtue is love of the equality of power, so fear is actually the will to, or, in its perverted form, lust for power... Power itself in its true sense can never be possessed by one man alone; power comes, as it were, mysteriously into being whenever men act "in concert", and disappears, not less mysteriously, whenever man is all by himself. Tyranny, based on the essential impotence of all men who are alone, is the hubristic attempt to be like God, invested with power individually, in complete solitude. 

Hannah Arendt, On the nature of totalitarianism, in Essays in Understanding, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1994, pp. 336-338. 

Hannah Arendt comments here on the political theory of different forms of government (monarchy, republicanism and tyranny) formulated by Montesquieu (and "virtue" as love of the equality of power is his concept). But beyond political theory, this is one of the deepest insights into the nature of abusive relationships I have ever met... With a terrifying clarity this text makes the point: lawlessness that the one in control practices towards the weaker partner is the expression and consequence of his or her utter isolation beyond loneliness and despair over the impossibility of action. Sounds only too familiar. 

Can one deal with it, be it on a personal or on a political level? Can the destructive power of fear be reversed, healed, can a tyrant be reconnected to the Body in a meaningful way, so that the real power coming from participation, not from domination, is restored to him? Hannah Arendt leaves the question open, and personally, I have no clue. "Leave it alone" (= "emigrate")  has been the only advice I have ever received, and it does not aim to deal with the abusive partner but with the abused one. 

On the activity of understanding

What is important to me is to understand. For me, writing is a matter of seeking this understanding, part of the process of understanding… Certain things get formulated. If I had a good enough memory to really retain everything that I think, I doubt very much that I would have written anything – I know my own laziness. What is important to me is the thought process itself. As long  as I have succeeded in thinking something through, I am personally quite satisfied. If I then succeed in expressing my thought process adequately in writing, that satisfies me also…

You ask about the effects of my work on others. If I may wax ironical, that is a masculine question. Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand – in the same sense that I have understood – that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.

Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? Language remains”, in Essays in Understanding, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1993, p.3

This is an archetypal enneagram Five statement! They do not write, paint or found a new branch in psychology (like C.G. Jung, a notoriously Five personality too) to share knowledge  or vision out of philanthropy (in the literal sense, that of “love of humanity”) , like Twos do; nor do they express their thoughts and visions  to be original, special and appreciated, like Fours. Fives are interested in processes, articulations, relationships between things as such, they like connecting facts and weaving them into dynamic systems; they only use different means of expression insofar as they are of an added value to this process.

This explains why Fives do not aim to convince and do not mind disagreement – as long as they are satisfied with their thought process, fuelled by insatiable curiosity and often impressive erudition, as long as the picture they are busy at completing is complete in their mind, opinions of other people matter very little. This is not because Fives are such snobs (which occasionally they are, to be sure), nor because they find other peoples’ opinions insignificant – they are just too absorbed and exhausted by their thinking to worry about those opinions.

 



Thinking vs Rationality

"Oh nooooo! That's too intellectual!"

(from an offline discussion) 

Just a moment! People very often mix up thinking and rationality, reason and logic. That's why intellectuals are seen nowadays as cold-blooded creepy creatures playing with ideas in a rational and/or abstract way. The very word "intellectual" has become a kind of insult, and poor kids who happen to like thinking more than say, basket, are clearly heading for trouble... But thinking is much more than mere rationality, and is not at all necessarily abstract. 

The idea that reason equals rationality is a very Enlightenment one, and I think it is a tremendous impoverishment, a haemorrhage of meaning out of the word. Thinking is an attempt to engage with reality in a meaningful way. It is a method we (especially those for whom thinking is their main function - sorry I am into Jung again these days :) use to approach life. Thinking does "happen" in our brains, and it does use rationality, logic and abstraction as its instruments -- not always, nor universally: despite our Western education based mainly on rational reasoning, much of our thinking is  still intuitive, imaginative, even sensory, and Eastern cultures developed thinking based on entirely different assumptions than ours... But wherever efficient and authentic thinking takes place, it involves the entire person, body and soul, mind and heart, the whole human being standing in the midst of his or her experience to find out its meaning. 

On the function of weakness

I do not believe that It is humanly possible to differentiate all four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition - M.) alike, otherwise we would be perfect like God, and that surely will not happen. There will always be a flaw in the crystal. We can never reach the perfection. Moreover, if we could differentiate the four functions equally we should only make them into consciously disposable functions. Then we would lose the most precious connection with the unconscious through the inferior function, which is invariably the weakest; only through our feebleness and incapacity are we linked up with the unconscious, with the lower world of the instincts, and with our fellow beings. Our virtues only enable us to be independent. There we do not need anybody, there we are kings; but in our inferiority we are linked up with mankind as well as with the world of our instincts. It would not even be an advantage, to have all the functions perfect, because such a condition would amount to complete aloofness. I have no perfection craze. My principle is: for heaven's sake do not be perfect, but by all means try to be complete.

C.G. Jung, Analytical psychology, its theory and practice. Routlege and Keagan, London, 1989, pp. 109-110.

This is the idea we find in many spiritual writers, from St Paul to Calvin and Paul Tillich… I think Jung’s “complete aloofness” is  what Christian tradition calls Pride: a state of total self-sufficiency; and it also could be called “Hell”, because such total autonomy cuts the individual from the community (commun des mortels) and alters and distorts  his or her perception of reality. To be fully human,  we need our weaknesses just as we need our strengths; we ought to value them and be grateful for them too.

Cutting through... perplexity...

Mum's comment (perplexed) : Oh look! Does it mean, a male dog cannot be walked here, but a female one is welcome? 

(That was a sign just in front of our hotel in Vienna. More perplexing signs will follow... :) 

Lady with the iPad

Incredible - the Austrians knew it all before Steve Jobs!

On humility

The word "humility" comes from the Latin word "humus",  which means fertile ground. To me, humility is not what we often make of it: the sheepish way of trying to imagine that we are the worst of all and trying to convince others that our artificial ways of behaving show that we are aware of that. Humility is the situation of the earth. 

The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour all our refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed.  

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, School for Prayer. Daybreak, London, 1989, p 11.

Leaving the results to God

What I aim at is to live within a situation and to be totally engrossed in it, and yet free from involvement. The basic thing is that I never ask myself what the result of any action will be -- that is God's concern. The only question I keep asking myself in life is: what should I do at this particular moment? What should I say? All you can do is to be at every single moment as true as you can with all the power of your being -- and then leave God to use you, even despite yourself.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, School for Prayer. Daybreak, London, 1989, p xvi.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A friend told me a couple of days ago the story of Virginia Woolf's suicide: she was losing her mind; one day she put in her pockets a ballast and walked into the sea, and died drowned. She did it, I was told, because she loved her husband immensely (that was the word my friend used), and wanted to spare him the pain of watching her become insane.

And I thought, arrested by a sudden weariness: good Lord, there is no end to this... Here is, again, someone taking a decision that does not belong to her, here is someone deciding for someone else what is good for him, assuming that she knows, assuming she can control life and death, as if she had the whole picture; here is a perfect self-sufficient pride born of self-loathing enacted...

Later, trying to find sleep, I thought that what Virginia Woolf was dealing with by her suicide was her own inability to bear the thought of another person loving her so unconditionally as to accept her insanity; so fully as to value her life and presence, however disrupted, however incomplete and diminished, more than his own happiness... You cannot bear this if deep down you feel you wouldn't be able to love in the same way -- so you conclude that others cannot either. And this is a logical conclusion if you live with the idea and feeling of alienation, of our existence being only and desperately individual, fragmented, disconnected from the whole and thus ultimately insignificant. But not all of us live with this idea and feeling; or not all the time.

But of course, my understanding is as partial and one-sided as anyone's, and I am as good at projecting my feelings as anyone... so perhaps, Mr Woolf was, after all, relieved to be rid of his crazy wife, and we may be totally mistaken about her real motives, and I may have no clue to what it means, losing your mind. I can see a grandeur in her decision too -- the irresistible impulse to "lay down your life for your friends", to put the well-being of another person, however misunderstood this well-being may be, before your own. I do not know, and she is not there to explain. All I know is that for a short while that night rage and grief of a loving heart left onshore became mine. Nay -- they are mine each time a person assumes he or she knows what is good for me or how I feel about this or that, each time a unilateral decision is taken to spare me something I do not want to be spared. And to the joking question "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?", I find myself answering with Martha, in Edward Albee's play, shivering on a cold morning just as the curtain is about to go down:

- I am, George. I am. 

Hilarious! Enjoy (in French)

A new year, apart, shared

A new year, apart, shared

Hot rain searing part-closed eyelids

Shadows hiding in dark long grass

 

Snakes coil on pathways in moonlight

Unravelling to meet the bells’ joyous swing

The fantastic and the real worlds enmesh

And time loses touch with itself and sleeps,

Elastic, enfolded, in reverie

 

The revellers, unexpectedly released,

Touch cells across the gap

Laugh amazement

And fix the memory

Knowing that all the debris drops away,

Leaving the essence

Entire, entwined, in the eyes of the heart

 

(New Year’s Day, 2013)

(So THAT is what happened, along with the journalling, reading, and feeding of other people's possums. I never did get to the gardening.)

New Year's Message from Richard, via Rohr

Here is something to help me, and you too I hope, grow in mutual esteem in 2013 (actually, it HAS to include you, as I cannot grow in esteem mutually on my own). I read it a while back and it keeps coming back to me, demanding attention. I think this must mean that it is significant:

BRIDGE BUILDING
Somewhere on our journey we stop trying to explain reality and instead to deeply experience it. This puts us in touch with feelings that we would change our lives for, such as desire, compassion, anger, friendship, loyalty, and love. Such feelings come out of the great unconscious, but they are still largely hidden and confused, and often scary.
We can't risk invading this unconscious land until we've developed a clear sense of identity, an appropriate sense of our own and others' boundaries, and some sense of order and control. This is the task of the first half of life.
Like a bridge across the river between the unconscious and the conscious, our soul mediates and carries the images from one realm to the other. The soul also mediates between the body and the spirit, and builds a bridge to the other side so the conscious and the unconscious can walk back and forth. This is soul work. Opening up this bridge is the task of the second half of life. (On the Threshold of Transformation, Day 130, p. 136)