Over-Wintering

 
 Of course we love the sunlit afternoons, brilliant, dazzling, reassuring; and yet this morning’s slowdown drizzle carries an integrity calling: look closely, appreciate, care for the lichened branches in the muted pastels, too. 

The crow caws overhead into the chimes, and the raindrops patter, and nothing’s so important as it was.

Rain falling on garlic bed

We’re thankful for the blessing on the one-hundred forty-four garlic cloves nestled under two inches of amended mulched soil in yesterday’s planting. Seasoning. Medicinal. Over-wintering.

Maria Popova (BrainPickings) quotes from Ann Hamilton’s essay titled “Making Not Knowing,” adapted from her 2005 commencement address at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Our culture has beheld with suspicion unproductive time, things not utilitarian, and daydreaming in general, but we live in a time when it is especially challenging to articulate the importance of experiences that don’t produce anything obvious, aren’t easily quantifiable, resist measurement, aren’t easily named, are categorically in-between. . .It is the task of the artist to make material form, to give it presence, to make it social; it is the task of the artist to lead the leaders by staying at the threshold; to be an unsettler . . . "

Polishing the Mirror for Revelation

"make a practice of polishing, polishing, polishing"

The early-morning reading from Rumi’s Mathnawi provokes more reflecting on reflection with his metaphors of the mirror we make. 

… make a practice of polishing, polishing, polishing,/ That thy heart may become a mirror full of images…/In order that the forms of the Unseen may appear in it, and that the reflexion of houri and angel may dart into it . . . [Mathnawi, Book IV, lines 2469-, Nicholson's translation]

Polishing the mirror is such a similar motif to the porch-project. Stage three, the application of Transparent Waterproofing Wood Finish, was interrupted by rainfall and by a week-long trip; but when the wood planks of the deck had time to dry out thoroughly and polishing was done, their surface opened a view into the inner grain. 

Whether mirrors being polished or veils being removed, a life-work offers transcendence. So many windows, or doorways, unmuddy-ing waters, smogfree-ing skies… all such cleansing pushes a person into the mystery of revelation. I love looking into the inner flower or the deeper woods because they draw me further, yet further into the unknown. A swirling fog does it too. 

And Love itself. Falling into it, adolescently, paints a fantasy, like a fairytale coming true, a gift-giving glimpse of this world swirling into the other. And then, for me, becoming-a-father especially threw open a trapdoor with no bottom, prompting wonderment into a forever-expanding Reality. Now getting old and older, the light draws me on, more certain of the truth beyond, through the veils of this world.

Clear mirror, no rust. I am the burning core of Mount Sinai, not a mind full of hatred.
I taste a wine not pressed from grapes.
The one everyone calls to . . .

                Coleman Barks' version, from Oct 27, "I Am Not," in A Year with Rumi

The Woods; the Grain

Signs of two directions, two worlds, the outer and the inner, exoteric and esoteric. And the bridge between. Where and how does a person find spirit? For me, it’s like this: looking into the outer, going inside for the unique grain, the symbolic fingerprint, playing into the crossing, purifying, polishing, praying. It’s dedicated and reflected engagement of the kind I’m finding and making in this back-porch project, part two.

Why this fascination, some might say “obsession,” with realizing symbolic activity in what could be taken as simple matter? In this case, what’s the value of elaborating on the grain and knots in a plank of wood in the decking? Why photograph and write about this? Why connect it with spiritual text?

To respond, I might first step back to firmer footing. The broader question begins with the sense that cues importance: when is anything worth doing? Given limited time and other resources, where is the “go” signal (as well as the “no”) that guides selection and engagement. While doing the pro/con chart can be helpful, I’m relying more on an almost inarticulate sense; maybe the cue comes in the language of the heart. The best way I know to explain is through examples:

1. I’m convinced that enthusiasm tops the chart of Good Teaching. Although my certainty could be contested, about five decades of personal experience in teaching convinces me; this is also reinforced by reviews of published research on the study of teaching. 

2. I’m also convinced of the importance of resonance as a key to teaching with stories. When a person feels the resonance between a story and his/her inner being, a signal is presented saying: This is the place!  

3. In midlife, I discovered the need to invest in experiences with horses. When I’d find myself sorely in need of revitalization, I learned to spend the time and money for natural horsemanship because it provided energy for the physical, mental, and other demands of life.

The three cases point to sensing the source for vitality. Stories sometimes call it the water of life. Concerning the back-porch project, I was very surprised that this dreaded task offered a water-of-life opportunity. It was a doorway or bridge that I could easily missed. Sometimes the signal is very subtle and this one presented in a blip of fascination. I recognized a slight zing that had sufficient affinity to the scent of the water of life I’d learned to trust in cases like the three named just above. Following the invitation, I invested more willingly and expectantly as I cleaned the wood plank, then photographed the knots in appreciation of their beauty, and further explored this phenomenon as a symbolic bridge between the mundane and the divine through readings, meditating, and writing. 

The whole back-porch-project thing gives me a stepping stone for stretching toward a dream. I’m aware that I may be “off” and that I might come to realize I’m going the wrong way on this. That’s ok because then I’ll try a different approach. The dream/goal is to move further into the Real. I’m treating the back-porch project as a practicum for teachings such as those in Corbin’s Alone with the Alone. From this, for example, the almost invisible bridge between the worlds comes more into view; and I’m building understanding of how the act of interpretation (hermeneutics) makes the bridge.

when a thing manifested to the senses or the intellect calls for a hermeneutics (ta’wil) because it carries a meaning which transcends the simple datum and makes that thing a symbol, this symbolic truth implies a perception on the plane of the active Imagination. The wisdom which is concerned with such meanings, which makes things over as symbols and has as its field the intermediate world of subsisting Images, is a wisdom of light (hikmat nuriya), typified in the person of Joseph, the exemplary interpreter of visions. (page 190)

Corbin elaborates on the meaning and purpose of Active Imagination and takes my breath away with the connection to Story:

This imagination can be termed “illusory” only when it becomes opaque and loses its transparency. But when it is true to the divine reality it reveals, it liberates . . . The function [of Active Imagination is] effecting a coincidentia oppositorum . .  This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Hadrat al-Khayal), the imaginative “Presence” or “Dignity,” the Imaginatrix) at times when it dominates man’s sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (mazahir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God’s descent toward the creature and the creature’s ascent toward the Creator. The “place” of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols (ta’wil, ta’bir), a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir) by making them effect this crossing./ An intermediary, a mediatrix: such is the essential function of the Active Imagination. ..The intellect (aql) cannot replace it. . . it [Active Imagination] is also the place where all “divine history” is accomplished, the stories of the prophets, for example, which have meaning because they are theophanies; whereas on the plane of sensory evidence on which is enacted what we call History, the meaning, that is, the true nature of those stories, which are essentially “symbolic stories,” cannot be apprehended. (from pages 188-90)

I think Corbin’s meaning of Active Imagination extends well beyond the work I’m doing with cleaning planks and entering a bridge to “beauty” through the engagement with knots. But this might be a bit of practice. I didn’t find a way to integrate authentic passion into my teaching in the first years or decades, and learning to ride in natural horsemanship extended far beyond those first lessons. But a person has to get on the horse. 

Lessons from the Back Porch

1. It’ll keep. 

2. Follow the path of love (prioritize it above the instruction book, the well-planned intention, the push to look good for others, the way it used to be or the way I used to be…). 

3. The deep beauty values the heritage grain but leans into the hard scars.

These items map backwards, circle around with persistence until a point’s taken, and defy linear logic. So the first one listed (“It’ll keep”) wasn’t earliest but got punctuated later on and more clearly as raindrops spattered bringing about a work stoppage.  

The rain was much appreciated (especially given the recent dry spell) and eased the surrender of ego-drive that wanted to finish the job “on time.” My readiness to let the project take longer than it “should” was also prompted by muscles giving out much sooner than they used to. In younger days, I probably would have driven myself to meet the high standards of quicker completion. My aging body helps me see the foolishness of such standards. A subtext on this lesson is to trust the process. I’m more willing to look closely, slow down, and spend time until qualities such as beauty and truth can be revealed. 

That seques to number 2: “Follow the path of love…” I’m realizing that qualities (love, truth, beauty…) inhere in process, even in grunt-work. This back-porch project tries to prove to me that beauty can be better known even in the apparently inartistic labor of stripping the old sealer from the wood planks. The lesson-giver forces me down on my knees scrubbing away with the recommended stiff-bristle brush, inch by inch. Since I’m a bit stubborn in accepting the lesson, some spots still have not been cleaned even after two or three tries necessitating a return trip to the store for another gallon of stripper. 

In addition to developing sight for the beauty in wood texture that I hadn’t seen before, I’m coming to know better a truth that’s more complex than the understanding that comes from reading: the knowledge of the body. This extended physical labor also pushes me to increase the value I give to embodied knowing. It doesn’t have the style of rational discourse; the voice of the body takes dedicated effort to discern.

I won't discard intellect nor the vital guidance from inspired text. Important words have been teaching me about the masks or veils that have to be removed in the spiritual quest. They’ve explained how humans are at high risk for covering over our true nature, the divine inheritance. The breadth of testimony to this permeates across religions; in The Play of Masks, Frithjof Schuon explores it in Krishna, Shakespeare, Diogenes, Jesus, Omar Khayyam, Eckhart, Goethe, David, and others. 

The masking or veiling can also be very subtle. Alan Godlas elaborates on Rūzbihān al-Baqlī’s teaching that hypocrisy, doubt, and egocentric thoughts must be surrendered to gnosis and love or we risk the “debasement of being veiled.”

My head understands this principle of removing masks/veils, and my intellectual knowing connects with life experiences that have stripped away pernicious illusion. And yet, the knowing in/of my body still needs attending. It’s my body that has to submit, to provide the more powerful perseverance that is required in stripping off highly-resistant veils, like ones that presume to define my identity but in truth carry an ungodly arrogance 

This mind/body dynamic might work like the “true unity” of rider and horse. Of course, I know the mind/body/spirit dogma, but that doesn’t mean that the knowing of/in my body is realized and respected. Probably my body-knowing has been so dominated and devalued by head-knowing that we have to absorb (or remove a mask/veil) related to the truth trying to come through. In this back-porch project, it’s taking repeated cleaning of the wood, involving sweating out at least three caps, shirts, etc. Like the lovely rainfall that halted the “get-it-done” mentality, the sweatouts were accompanied by the revelation of gorgeous textures hidden under the scum of sealers.

This truth coming in seems to be saying that I need to realize each everyday-project, the very business of living, can be and even must become a gateway to the other world. The work and play of each moment is given from God. Remember Rabia’s “Slicing Potatoes”…”putting my hands on a pot, on a broom” (in Daniel Ladinsky’s Love Poems from God, p. 10; performed on the Wilcox/Pettit CD Out Beyond Ideas). My mind may get the idea of this doorway so that I’m partially prepared for a life experience, but my body also has to be readied to join up, to surrender, sometimes to suffer the way.

When I took on this back porch project, the expert presented it in three simple steps: 1. strip the surface using product A, 2. apply the cleaner with product B, (allow time to dry), and 3. roll on the new topping. Voila. Ought to be a 2-3 day deal. I’ve lost count but this must be at least day five and I’m still in step one. 

But you know what. That’s ok with me because the lessons from the back porch are much more significant than getting it done. I’ve become leery of plans and can blame my suspicion on Mr. Burns: “The best laid schemes of Mice an’ Men gang aft agley.” Through the guidance related to veils and by attending to the revelations of labor, by searching for good work instead of results, I’m open to a transformed translation of the “cruel coulter” that strips the layer. I wonder at what kind of plough the divine hand has to employ in order to remove the facade that prevents us from seeing past skin color, income level, vocabulary… How many racist leaders are needed to strip away ethnic pride? What suffering has to happen before the eye of the heart can be opened?

One God; many faiths

“… I’ve traveled through my history, /From certainty to mystery. /God speaks in rhyme and paradox…” Carrie Newcomer & Michael Mains “Leaves Don’t Drop They Just Let Go” 

     I grew up near a small town with 3+ churches of the Christian variety along the few blocks of the main street. As a child, I was taught and believed the two other than our own were going to hell and our mission was to save them. The exclusionary tactic might have purpose to keep children from straying, but there’s also a teaching about growing past childish things. I believe spiritual growth includes moving from “certainty to mystery” and accepting the humility invoked in paradox. (I’m also wondering if the texture of certainly can be reborn, but that’s another story.)

     I remember the day when JFK got elected and the sense of despair in our church because we feared Catholics took their orders from Rome. We each travel through our histories and maybe we’ve grown a bit more tolerant now, but distrust still pervades our nation. The religion of love can be hard to find.

     I cannot claim to understand why we have difficulty grasping a religion of love with “One God and many faiths,” but I have a few ideas and an awesome passage from Alone with the Alone. Perhaps a basic requirement necessary to advance beyond childish belief structures involves a capacity to engage paradox, in this case, the One and the many. We accept many roads to Rome; why not many pathways to God? 

     I suspect the difficulty comes in deeper emotional obstacles, especially 1) Fear and 2) Power:

1. Fear: When it comes to going to Hell, most of us don’t want to be wrong about God. Even if there’s no such thing as Hell or if it’s not all brimstone (whatever that is), still any risk-possibility runs high on the scary scale. So it’s comforting to have others alongside who are taking the same position (i.e., religion) about what is required to go to heaven. To take responsibility for working out one’s salvation without the confirmation of others is a hard thing to do. 

2. The Power thing probably starts off with parents taking care of children who need protection from danger. You must do a, b, & c; you must not do x, y, & z. . . and if you don’t, God will get you! The problem is that power is addictive. Both the “high” from controlling and the “security” of being controlled can be hard to escape. As just noted regarding Fear, going alone is difficult.

Unfortunately for #1 and #2, humans seem to be made as individuals, not as clones. To the best I can get it, my spiritual path requires and rejoices in progressing toward a closer fit with my unique God-given character and destiny. That’s a life-long pathway. Yes, we do have opportunities and responsibilities for sharing, and still ultimately, essentially, faith is a one-person fit. One God; many faiths.

This idea is far from original. Among the books gathered on my desktop at this time are Divine Love (Ed. by Jeff Levin & Stephen Post), Buber’s I and Thou, Nasr’s Religion and the Order of Nature, Marcus Borg’s The God We Never Knew, and God in Search of Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel. (I haven't read them all.) In his introduction to A Year With Rumi, Coleman Barks surveys a wonderfully wide range of “Disrepectable Unaffiliated Mystics, though most are not at all disreputable, and many are devoutly affiliated,” and he speculates that blasphemy “is in whatever insults the soul” (p. 7). 

As promised earlier, I especially find comfort and direction in teachings such as Henry Corbin’s interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabi (Alone with the Alone). The passage takes some careful reading as we should expect if we are to venture into the name and nature of “God”:  

God: “a word which each man understands according to his aptitude, his knowledge of himself and the world around him, or else it is a symbol for the form of his personal belief… Thus the faiths differ with the Lords, just as the Lords differ, although all the faiths are forms of the one faith, just as all the Lords are forms in the mirror of the Lord of Lords. . . it does not follow that the Godhead condescends with equal docility to all determinate beings; God is not limited to the manner in which He is epiphanized for you and makes Himself adequate to your dimension. And that is why other creatures are under no obligation to obey the God who demands your worship, because their theophanies take other forms. The form in which He is epiphanized to you is different from that in which He is epiphanized to others. God as such transcends (munazzah) all intelligible, imaginable, or sensible forms, but considered in His Names and Attributes, that is, His theophanies, He is, on the contrary, inseparable from these forms, that is from a certain figure and a certain situs in space and time. . .” [pp. 309-10, fn51]

The image of the God whom the faithful creates is the Image of the God whom his own being reveals, his own being revealed by the “Hidden Treasure.” Thus it is the Image of him who first imagined His being (created it, that is, revealed it to being) as his own form or Image, or more exactly his mirror image. . . the symbol of the Self. [p. 266]

Even Beyond Intimacy

Last night, during the special dream-zone, more specifically between 3 and 4AM, I woke and jotted down notes about interruptions. Of course, all dream figures can be seen as parts of oneself as well as persons outside this multiple-layered complex called the “self.” In this dream, the figure that was most clearly me, perhaps representing the “ego-self,” was speaking and being interrupted by a young man. Why might this restless border of consciousness be troubled, like the waves moving in and out at the ocean edge, by consideration of which voice has the right to be heard? 

In reflecting on the dream, I recalled recent experiences of interrupting and being interrupted. I wondered what if everyone in a group just talked over the others, giving full expression to that desire we each have for center-stage: "Go on. Speak right now, before the line is forgotten, before the spotlight-instant passes by!" What a chaotic mess we make when deafened by the ego-desire, sometimes called the animal-soul. 

If the selfish impulse were restrained, might a different, a deeper desire, arise? The one that focuses on listening and really opening to the other. Perhaps beneath the impulse to speak, as well as the one for listening, pulses the yearning for intimacy, to belong, to know and be known, to love/be loved. When I interrupt, am I not acting out my fear of being unseen and unloved?

My explorations in psychology, in religion/spirituality, and in natural horsemanship offer names of that higher goal: “true unity,” the One, the Self, and so on. In Sufi writings, such as Rumi’s Mathnawi, the parts of the self and the soul are presented in the figures of a king and an advisor (“vizier”). The king is as the spirit and the advisor like the intellect (Book 4, line 1256a, Nicholson trans.). 

Rumi’s story contrasts two advisors; each even has the same name, with one advocating generosity while the other argues selfishness: “the corrupt intellect brings the spirit into movement (towards corruption)” [line 1256b]. Our interior landscape allows a variety of advisors. The intellect can be poisonous or sweet. The second advisor in Rumi’s tale is linked to a fallen angel. How vital that we continually discern and purify our inner and outer guides.

Sometimes when we are granted enough passing years to re-vision the difficult moments in life, we can perceive that what was taken as a calamity can be re-seen as the “death” of an ego-desire and a resurrection of a cleaner self. Sufis often recite “die before you die.” Cleansing of false advisors, especially ones reflecting the fallen angels, makes for a hard path.  Rumi says:

Do not take the particular (individual) intellect as thy vizier: make the Universal Intellect thy vizier, O king./ Do not make sensuality thy vizier, else thy pure spirit will cease from prayer. [line 1259]

photos taken at Chincoteague, VA, Oct 2016

The pathway, the journey home, is guided by this Universal Intellect. Our deepest desire attunes to that calling. It’s even beyond our yearning for intimacy and comes through the escape from the ego-self, “death” of the animal-soul; it follows the surrender to the Self, the divine-soul. And to help us along the path we have “that angel whose dignity” corresponds to our better self, the angel who has the “radiance and testimony of the Sun.” [Mathnawi,Book I, lines 3647-3655]