Delight
“The more stuff you love the happier you will be.”― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
The nature of synchronicity* is surprise and delight. Those moments when the gods seem to collude in unexpected ways to make astonishment manifest. All kinds of things happen without any apparent cause, conspiring to make the impossible possible. It’s the feeling that something outside you has unexpectedly touched and answered an inner yearning.
You have all had moments of synchronicity, moments that confirm the connection between the inner and outer world. Something that has no causal explanation. I find I am often more open to this while traveling, wandering, or being in a strange place. Generally when I am away from my long list of things to do. I am not trying to get from A to Z. It happens when I am no longer expecting to know what I will find, but just noticing things. Transitions are a good time for synchronicity.
Repertoire With Invisibility
This quote comes to mind:
Every journey has secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. — Martin Buber
I woke up this first morning at Ghost Ranch to the dream voice proclaiming: Take stock in invisibility. Take stock? One of the definitions of stock is repertoire. A repertoire with invisibility. I feel the power of darkness in the desert; there is nothing but starlight up here on the mesa. The imperative of trusting what I cannot see. Waiting for what wants to come. Taking stock in the unknown.
Here in New Mexico in the dark of the moon, the desert sky is dripping with stars. Just standing beneath such vastness brings back an immensity, a gap, a pause. A shooting star. A recognition of something you have always known.
First Song
In the beginning, before writing, all speech was song. It is said, in the beginning was the word, and in this story, the word is a song. Even before your first breath you were given a song. Finding the note that belongs to you is a remembrance, something you have always known, but forgotten, a recognition as close to you as your own face. Something no one else has, and or will ever be again. When you hear that song, it strikes yes in your heart. You belong. Everything belongs. You mount whatever horse is waiting.
Through song, somehow all your efforts and wrong turns are rearranged into a new shape that has always been. Waiting. Grace is this intervention, the silence between notes, banishing thought. Recognizing your own place in the world, finding and being found. The song is not singing to you, but to that place inside that knows who you are.
Pause at the Threshold
I decided to take to heart this idea that the gods want to know that you are serious. What you are reaching for will be supported by your undivided attention and fervor. So I packed a suitcase and some supplies, shut down my email, and found a retreat in easy driving distance….
We aren’t alone. It is a relief when I remember that there are intelligences that are non-human. Other voices are trying to reach us, to teach us, to guide us. Sometimes I need to get away from busyness and my usual routine in order to hear. All of you have had moments when the veil briefly lifts and there is a timeless moment of clear perception. This joy, this moment of belonging to everything … isn’t that what we all reach for? And what human can take credit for this?
“It could have been better.” — Joan Armatrading
I have been thinking about perfection — not as that human reach toward the ever-distant horizon, which we must strive for — but as the frozen thing that stops us from moving forward because we get discouraged, embarrassed, self-defeated or afraid. The never good enough feeling that assails us. The most recent assignment in my writing group was to watch a video of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire put to the music of Joan Armatrading’s It could have been better. It brought to mind how we stop ourselves by thinking I could never do that, and alternately, the transformation that can happen with vulnerability and courage.
“Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing.”— William Stafford
My attention turned to sound when I heard the great horned owls calling this morning. I went out before dawn, as if they were summoning me, and listened. One was a tenor, the other a bass. Back and forth they sang, with long pauses. Once the tenor came in early, blending their voices together in harmony. The owls were hidden in thick shades of green, and the air a moist medium of song. When it began to get light, I thought surely this is the last verse. But the sun rose, the songbirds chimed in, and still the owls continued their duet.
"Come, let's stand by the window..." — Danusha Laméris
Each morning after meditation when I head down to my studio, there is a process of re-orientation. I used to think that after I had been painting this long I would walk into my studio and know what to do. This hasn’t happened yet. So I begin with my opening ritual — a way of re-orienting a mind in chaos. I take a glass from the altar and fill it with clear water. I light incense and ring a bell. Above the altar I have pictures of my guides, friends and family. I express my gratitude. An old greeting card is also posted on the wall, with a child’s drawing of a train climbing up a hill with the caption yes you can, yes you can, yes you can.
The Invisible Driver
All these dreams about being in a car — mostly as a passenger with an invisible driver, headed for disaster. There is always a tragedy about to happen: the car is on the wrong side of the road or careening out of control down a steep incline, or in a sudden slick ice blizzard.
Just as in the “impossible tasks” theme in the old stories, there is no apparent way through. It is terrifying. I am in one of these dreams; this time I can see the driver, but he is facing backwards. His hands are not on the wheel, and he can only see where we have already been. I am in the passenger seat, looking, and unlike the driver, I see what is ahead. The road has a hole in it large enough for a truck to fall into, and deep enough for a dozen. The faraway caw of a crow draws my attention to the distant hill, where a crowd has gathered. Then, somehow, the crowd vanishes. The driver and I are alone, heading at rapid speed toward the cavernous opening. When I try to speak, no sound comes. At the last moment, the driver, still facing backwards, adeptly navigates the car over the hole with the compass of a blind seer.
As in the old stories, help comes from unexpected places. In these dreams it is the invisible driver, as most often I cannot see who is driving — I only know it isn’t me.
"Tree, Stone, Eye" | Student Images from Taos
Before I left for Taos to teach the opening classes at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, I was pushing against the inertia of our long, long sequester. I felt the uncertainty that had grown in many of us about going into the world. I felt the reluctance to move. The poem below made me smile:
My head was heavy, heavy;
so was the atmosphere.
I had to ask two times
before my hand would scratch my ear.
I thought I should be out
and doing! The grass, for one thing,
needed mowing.
— from “Inertia,” a poem by Jane Kenyon
Now I have returned from a few weeks in New Mexico, teaching the classes that had been postponed for almost two years. We were the only ones at the retreat, and the classes were small. The landscape was beautiful, christened with desert showers and new blooming flowers. Everyone had been through something significant in our long period of sequester. There was rejoicing — the fresh newness of being together in a room. This rejoicing was helped along by spectacular food, made by our chef, Sophia, and her team — and good wine.
I began, as always, with the conviction that each student who shows up has a particular gift, and is in class to enliven and strengthen that gift — the seed they were given at birth. Everyone is born with a gift. I believe, and am privileged to witness, that the making of art for its own sake will “bring into realization the self most centrally yours” (William Stafford).
Lying Fallow: "Something in us does not erode." — Mark Doty
“ … that there is
something stubborn in us
— does it matter how small it is?—
that does not diminish.
What is it? An ear,
a wave? Not a bud
or a cinder, not a seed
or a spark: something else:
obdurate, specific, insoluble.
Something in us does not erode.
— Mark Doty | from “Manhattan: Luminism” in Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
I have not disappeared; just took the month of April to lie fallow, or take flight. Fallow: left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility. I set down my work— brushes, paint, ink, canvas, classes— and was, for a while, a student and wanderer.
Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
— Mary Oliver | from “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?” in West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
My husband, desperate for an adventure, got the idea of driving to the nearest shore, which from here in Kentucky is Alabama. The picture above is from the ferry we took from Dauphin Island to a small spit of beach on the other side, whose only name we could find is “Grass Island.” On the way there the children on the ferry were joyfully throwing bits of their lunch in the air, which the gulls caught in frenzied dives, mid-flight, just above our heads.