Study in Blue
The first question from the students in my January online class was:
What do you mean, it’s the small things that are important?
I paused. This simple question struck unexpectedly deep. What I was thinking about was beginning the new year with something small, slender or secret— rather than pledging to do something big. Rather than make a splash, make an offering. Something you can hold in your hand, or your heart. After a pause I thought, that is where the power is.
What do you mean, it’s the small things that are important? She asked.
What I found myself saying was:
I just watched my father die. When someone goes, they leave a space behind. What does one who goes leave you? What memory strikes your heart? Is it their accomplishments, their possessions, their image? I saw clearly, it was not my father’s inventions or belongings, his work, or his beautiful hand-crafted Japanese knives. It was the small acts of kindness.
What sustains you in collective loss and anxiety?
If you are not exhausted by months of Covid, the upcoming US election, and the uncertainty and tumult that has visited our world, then you are among the few. What sustains you and replenishes you in this time of collective loss and uncertainty?
The answer, of course, is mostly known. But how often do we pause long enough to hear the voice inside, and the answer that is waiting? I make an effort to begin the day by reminding myself to wake up slowly, to extend the time between waking and sleeping. I just don’t let myself get out of bed with my mind racing ahead like it wants to … and there is plenty of time for screens later. There is an implosion of “newspaper truth,” which by its nature needs to be dramatic or dismal to get our attention. My only hope is to begin by extending the morning quiet. Just this morning, in the wee hours, the full blue moon got me out of bed, and outside in it. What a comfort she is in her constancy and change, unceasingly waning and waxing, departing and returning, from total darkness to lambent light. Millions and countless millions of years of gliding across the night, witnessing every kind of disaster and miracle. I feel certain we all have a moon inside — a witness, something that returns and brightens after every darkest night.
Hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his journal on the necessity of slowing down, gazing … looking long enough at something until that something itself becomes alive. Any of you who have beheld the object you are drawing long enough know what I am talking about. Stones, apples, lamp posts and books — all things have their presences.
"Only in our doing can we grasp you" — Rilke
Only in our doing can we grasp you, only with our hands can we illumine you….
The first line of Rilke’s poem speaks to makers of all kinds, and how our hands can bring us back when we feel off center. Sometimes the hardest question to answer is What do I do? Or to ask yourself, listening deeply, What do I need? As they say in the old world, the veil is thinner now, Covid time reveals with urgency the gravity of the imperative to listen to your inner voice, to your calling. And to be aware, each day, of what you need. What do you need?
Odysseus’s journey was said to take 20 years to indicate it was long. For many, Covid time has shifted from something that felt more spacious, and had some security built in for the unemployed, to a feeling of long, and how can I get through?
The mind is but a visitor, it takes us out of our world…
There are so many distractions with news and this turning world, but often the biggest distraction is one’s own mind, the visitor. That visitor needs to be quiet for awhile, and let the soul emerge. Your gift has already been given. What you are waiting for has already begun. I was listening to an interview with Jordi Savall, a beloved musician, and the interviewer asked him, how did you get interested in ancient music? Jordi replied by saying that this is a misunderstanding, there is no ancient music. There are ancient manuscripts, but the music is just sleeping inside you. Take out your instrument. Begin playing and the song awakens inside you — made new.
"Every journey has secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." — Martin Buber
In preparation for a series of 14-hour drives through farmland to my father’s, from Kentucky to Minnesota, I revisited the story of Odysseus. Most of you will remember his 20-year voyage, and the monsters, goddesses, Sirens and storms he met along the way. I felt the mythical impact of being called to attend to my 96-year-old father and his dying wife, but also the “something else” — the invisible difficult web present in the family legacy. I felt trapped in that story, which creates a fixed frame of reference. A fixed frame of reference impedes the celestial help that is always here. I needed to have a deeper story inside me. Not the monkey-mind stories, but one from the universal myths that carry a timeless wisdom and a primordial knowing that has nothing to do with culture, race, gender, economics or time.
How can I begin to tell the transforming effect of having a story, which becomes a sacred map inside you? The map shows the next step, and the road is a pathway to traverse the human dilemma— the impossible circumstances we sometimes find ourselves in….