Sometimes Kindness Involves Silver Shoes

Dark Moonday.  Waning crescent moon, also known as the balsamic moon, several days before the new moon.     A good time for releasing habits, patterns, and old junk of all kinds.  Pruning.

 

Recently I’ve been having one of those times that makes you think, “Was I actually happy a little while ago, and… did I really have energy to get things done?  Will I ever have energy again?”

I spent last week visiting the critical care unit of a very good hospital five hours away from where I live, sitting vigil with my family around the bed of my aunt who is fighting for her survival. 

I could feel the strands of my life slipping away until there was nothing left but the sterile hospital with pumps of antibacterial lotion at every door like mezuzahs, the efficient, rushing nurses, the buzzing, beeping machines, my aunt’s shallow breath. 

I silently chanted ‘Ya Sha Fi’, a Sufi chant meaning ‘to heal’ or ‘healing’ for hours.  It was peaceful.  My presence seemed helpful, and it felt so good to be helpful.

Coming back has been harder.  My aunt isn’t out of the woods, but her prognosis has improved.  The older generation sent me home.  They told me I'd be needed again soon, and in the meantime I had to take care of my own life.   That’s the tricky part.  Picking up those strands again after casting them aside so suddenly.

We have a very small family, and I adore my aunt.  Part of me wants to stay in bed, pull the covers up over my head, and hibernate for the foreseeable future.

But that's not what I’m doing.  I’m also not forcing myself, kicking and screaming, back to ‘normal’.  I’m being patient with the part of myself that wants to hide under the covers forever more. 

I learned this trick when I was quitting smoking.  If you really want to shift a behavior, you have to be incredibly kind to the part of yourself that is resistant to the change.  

Today I bought a pair of silver shoes I’ve been wanting for about a year.  Just looking at them makes me want to dance, and certainly to get out of bed so I can put them on.  I wore a silk dress because beautiful clothes help me to face the world.  I gave myself small manageable tasks to accomplish with the understanding that I didn't actually have to get everything done.

I held space for how I’m feeling in my meditation practice.  And I did my meditation practice. 

I’m sure that I’ll have days where I fail, days where I stay in bed in ratty sweats reading a novel for hours, getting up only to eat brownies, and I have to be kind to myself on those days too.  Tell myself its o.k.  I’ll just try again tomorrow.

Because life is too precious to be spent beating ourselves up.

For this Moonday, I’d love it as always if you have some art or a poem to share of any kind.  I’d also love to know what cheers you up?  What do you do to encourage yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed by life?

Learning to Give from the Overflow, not from the Well

There is a wise Sufi saying, 'Give from your overflow, not from your well.'  I interpret this as meaning give from a place of love, joy, and abundance, not suffering and self-deprivation.

Today in New York City its a rainy Moonday, which feels good.  Its like a snow day for gardeners.  I'm taking some time for myself after spending a large portion of the last two weeks working on a massive volunteer project.  I'm the director of a kid's community garden on the Lower East Side called the Children's Magical Garden.**

 Kids love worms. They get super excited whenever they find one.

Kids, teachers from the School for Global Leaders across the street from the garden, parents, other garden members and I have been putting in a rain garden, a small native wetlands that soaks up the water in the garden's lowest point.  When the plants have grown up some, it will not only look like a wild, beautiful place, but will also create habitat for more song birds, humming birds, bees, dragonflies, and butterflies... increasing the wildness in the city by just a little bit, and providing an amazing outdoor classroom for kids and adults alike. 

All of this warms the cockles of my heart and so I haven't minded all the hard work, even though it has involved digging three feet down into ground consisting of broken brick, brick dust, rusted metal and the like.

My hands look, to quote a literary friend, "very Pearl S. Buck" with the ground-in dirt (even after scrubbing) giving them a mottled appearance.  On the upside, I can feel my hands getting stronger and think I would do alright in an arm wrestling contest.

This community garden is one of my greatest spiritual teachers.  Sometimes its lessons have been frikkin hard. 

Its a large unpaid undertaking and has the potential to suck up all available time-- very dangerous for an entrepreneur and writer with a penchant for procrastination.  There have also been so many seemingly hostile elements to overcome such as--

• Toxic soil. (Most NYC soil is poisoned with lead from paint and must be painstakingly amended or replaced with new, healthy compost.) 
• Endless rubble.  (The garden was build on the foundation of a burned down building and has been sinking into that crushed foundation over the years.)
• Ignorance.  (Very few people have any gardening experience, and therefore greatly underestimate the challenges the space provides.  They think it is simply a matter of planting flowers and watching them grow.) 
• Personal conflict/ toxic relationships.  Toxic environments produce toxic relationships.  It has been challenging to say the least to work through personal difficulties with other gardeners.  In the end, however, it has also been deeply rewarding and transformational to all involved.  These transformed relationships have made this next, more productive phase of work/play possible after years of two steps forward, one step back.

What I have strongly come to believe is that service, to be truly effective, must involve the concept of what my Dancemeditation teacher Dunya calls dynamic reciprocity.   This means that the work actually feeds you.  The work leaves you feeling joyful, inspired, re-energized, more creative, more full of juice for your own projects.

Forget selflessness.  For most of us, its a trap.

Dynamic reciprocity goes beyond feeling good because you are "making a difference".  That attitude of self-righteousness has the potential to slide into its own flip-side, an attitude I've felt many a time... martyrdom.  "I'm spending all this time and not getting paid.  My work isn't appreciated, and yet its now somehow just 'expected' of me by the community.  The garden doesn't look beautiful yet and so people don't see all the hard work I've put in..." blah blah blah.

Then there is "Oh my gosh!  Look at me with my big ego wanting credit!  I'm not selfless enough!  This is about the earth, the children..." blah blah blah martyrdom.

I decided that this year I was going to pull self-righeousness and martyrdom out by the roots and compost them.  I've been planting joy and contentment in their place.

I've made it a point to focus on activites I adore such as mentoring a small group of local kids I've known for years who are committed to the garden and to listening/working with the earth.  I'm learning to better delegate the tasks that I dislike, such as contacting the parks department. (I actually much prefer removing rubble by hand than organizing on the phone.)

I have also reminded myself that it is because of this project that I was sponsored by the community to go to school to become a permaculture designer, something that has dramatically increased my happienss.

The past two weeks I haven't had as much time to write, but all of the additional physical activity has magically worked out all kinds of kinks in the third draft of my play and first draft of my novel.  My third eye feels very open, and I feel tremendously grounded and focused in my herbal consultations after working so intensely with the earth.  Dynamic reciprocity is happening, and its truly awesome.

For this Moonday, I would as always love it if you have art/poetry etc. to share in the comments, and am also interested in where you have found dynamic reciprocity or rooted out self-righteousness/martyrdom in your own life...

**Children's Magical Garden website still under construction.  Find lots of pictures of the garden on the facebook group, Children's Magical Garden Community and Supporters

Thanks to friend, fellow Dancemeditator, and novelist Karleen Koen who first introduced me to the phrase 'give from your overflow, not from your well'. I've been pondering it ever since.

On breaking unwritten rules

Happy Moonday.  Its a waning gibbous-- three weeks give or take before May's full flower moon and an excellent time for spring cleaning and the release of worn-out habits before the new moon.

I've never been one to obey a rule or code if it strikes me as nonsensical or unfair.  One that I simply can't abide is the unwritten rule that a woman should not be alone in city parks after dark.  If 'bad things' happen, well, what was she thinking?  As an intrepid city herbalist I find myself alone at night in city parks with some frequency.  I do usually bring my dogs.

Sunset.  I'm on my hands and knees on the ground in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, gathering a wild, abundant medicinal plant called cleavers, Galium aparine.   I'm determined to gather enough to make a quart of tincture (a lot) because this is the lushest, largest patch of cleavers I've ever seen, and its a plant that I need for my own healing.  I've been searching the park for  hours, and have finally found it.  But its getting late. The sun goes down.

When I make herbal medicine I thank every plant as I harvest, and I chant or sing as I go.  On this, the first almost warm spring night, I'm chanting Ya-Hadi, a Sufi chant, ya (invocation) Hadi (the Guide or Guidance).

Even though its a dark moon and I'm harvesting by thin orange lamp light, I can make out the cleavers easily by their distinctive shape like successive Doctor Seuss umbrellas on a chain and the way they cleave to my fingers, as their name implies. Their stalks are rough like cat tongues.

I've long known about cleavers' reputation for soothing swollen lymph, and have taken it for this myself, but beyond that our relationship has been somewhat superficial until now.

As I'm harvesting, I'm intently 'listening' for what the plant has to say about itself.  It gives itself up so easily.  I feel that this is an excellent herb both for physical and emotional flexibility.  (Its used to treat arthritis, as it turns out.)

I've almost gathered enough when the tall dead mugwort stalks I'm sitting under start to snap and I turn  to see a large man looming over me.  I let out the deep growling warrior's bellow my father taught me.  The man jumps back.

He is not a threat, at least not to me in this moment.

I say, 'I'm sorry I shouted, but you know, you startled me.'

He replies, 'That scream... I know you are a macho girl.  You have machisimo.

'Yes,' I reply.

'You are very lonely?' he asks.

Its important that the plants have good energy around them at all times when I'm gathering and making medicine, so after letting him know that no, I'm not lonely, not at all, I tell him what I'm doing, show him the cleavers, and explain some of their medicine.

'It give me energy?' I say it will.  'Delicious?' I tell him no.  Its bitter.  Good for the liver, like all bitter herbs.  He tries it anyway, and says nothing.

I turn away from him and continue to chant and gather.  He stands and watches me.

After about ten minutes I've gathered enough.  Earlier I had collected a small bag of silvery green spring mugwort tops for tea and wild dandelion greens for salad.  I can't find the brown paper bag in the dark.  I ask if the man will help me to look for it.   We find the bag. I thank him and say goodbye.

'Be safe!' he says.

'You too!' I reply. 

Cleavers definitely helps increase emotional flexibility.   (And next time I'll bring my dogs.  I'm happy to talk to curious onlookers, but don't want them sneaking up on me when I'm deep in a plant conversation.)

What is an 'unwritten rule' you sometimes (or often) break?

As its Moonday, I'd also love it if you would post poems or art of any kind in the comments.

doubt, prayer, and the healing power of beauty

 

Sunset.  Low tide.

Faith and prayer have never come easily to me.  I’m a doubter.   I talked to a friend about it once when I was feeling anguished on a meditation retreat, and she said maybe the most comforting sentence I've ever heard.  She said, ‘Maybe God likes you that way.’

Recently I watched a loved one go through something hard, and I came to the realization that I'm completely powerless to help her.  It seems that I’ve been given two choices:  worry, or pray.  I’ve had this short poem by Hafiz rattling around in my head for days now.  I need to have it tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

Now that all your worry has proved such an unlucrative business, why not find a better job.

So this is my prayer.

Sometimes time melts.  Six hours spread out in our minds to reach the girth of a decade’s worth of memories.

My friend and I were fifteen and it was summer.  Neither of us appreciated those facts much.  Both of us had a parent with cancer and life felt full of snares.  But we'd been graced by a trip with her family to a largely unspoiled island with the Atlantic stretching out on one side, and wide green salt marshes on the other.  It was easier to breathe there with the salt air and all of the space just to be. 

After dinner and some games of gin rummy one night we took our usual barefoot walk along the quiet beach.  We could see layers of stars above the dark ocean, and little else except for the glint of foam at our feet under the half moon.

We walked a long way along the shore to our favorite place, a protected cove on the northernmost point of the island where the beach ended and we had to navigate through spiky reeds and armies of sand crabs to sit on some large rocks over the water.  That night the sea was smooth and it was easy to imagine walking on it, out and out.

Still heat curled around our bodies and tickled drops of sweat from the backs of our necks before we slowly eased into the dark water. We walked in up to our chests, then dunked our heads and shoulders under quickly, shivering for a moment before adjusting. 

We traced constellations in the sky, getting lost in endless layers of stars and distant galaxies.  Shooting stars radiated over our heads, one after another.  It was a meteor shower, a poem to bent time, end of time.  It felt like a mystery that was outside of us, and somehow passing into us directly through our eyes.

Around our shoulders and arms we found more stars.  There were stars in the reflection on the sea’s surface, and yellow sparks inside the water too. 

Phosphorescence danced with our movement, shimmered in our wet hair.  We were crowned with stars.  We were inside of them, two Queens of Heaven, two infants safe inside of Mystery, splashing and laughing, in love with the rise and fall of our sparkling forms, in love with everything until the sky grew light and we made our way home to slip into our beds by sunrise.

That night unfurls inside my spirit like a map to Source when I’m full of doubt and forgetting beauty.

I pray that my loved one who shared it with me can be comforted by the memory too, that if her pain ever becomes too big, she can remember that time, have it become one of her maps back to beauty.  I pray that like for me, it will help her remember that the universe is vast, gorgeous, endlessly varied, always changing, always eternal, whole, and that somehow nothing is ever lost when we love it.

Finding Moments of Peace and Presence Through Dancemeditation

Day 8 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: Prompt: What was a moment of peace for you this year?

I don't need to fly to a beautiful tropical island to find peace, as Gwen Bell convincingly argues in her post on the subject.  But time spent immersed in meditation has made it easier for me to find peace everywhere, even on the streets of New York City.

One day I was walking up Sixth Avenue on my way to my Dancemeditation class, quietly chanting the Peace Prayer, 'Let me be an instrument of thy peace, where there is hatred let me sow love...' when everyone on the sidewalk froze as a man punched another man in the face, hard, and the other man swung back.  No one moved or spoke.  In a deep, authoritative voice, I found myself saying, "Quit it."

The men paused.  One turned and began to walk away. The other ran after him.  "You!"I said. "Stay there. You.  Go."  They did as they were told.  After the first man had disappeared into the subway I went on my way.  A small woman in a ruffly silk skirt, I'd taken charge in the moment because I was fully present.  I have my Dancemeditation practice to thank for that.

I’m a long talker, but when I get back from my yearly two week Dancemeditation Movement Monastery in June and friends ask me how it went, I tend to respond, ‘great.’ Period.  I don't have the desire or the ability to say much more.  If they ask for details I tell them about the simple food, the  Victorian mansion where we sleep, the old mill where we dance, the rushing waterfall behind the mill.

Its a rare gift to have two solid weeks to focus on embodiment, to sensing, moving, and breathing; exploring the space of the body, the space around the body, the space inside the body.

Going into this deep inner place with a supportive community is like paddling out to sea on a big raft.  We can go farther when we navigate through the waters together.  We get to places we could never find alone. 

By the end of the retreat I stretch like a cat, enjoying every sensation.  I'm learning anatomy and physiology from the inside out, articulating movement I wouldn't have thought possible several years ago.

There are usually some hard parts,  times when my brain won't shut up, or my dancing feels leaden, or there is some drama about kale.  Sometimes painful emotions surface.  But the hard parts are forgotten after periods of oneness….. of actually getting to leave the experience of my ego/story for awhile…. These moments are sustaining.  They shift me in subtle, fundamental ways, and they support me when I'm back in the hectic world. There are typically all sorts of little personal epiphanies along the road too.

These words feel entirely inadequate.

Here’s a poem I wrote on my very first retreat in an attempt to capture something I couldn't express through prose.  Incidentally, it was the first poem I had written in years after a long block.

I am in the sea
sinking under Love
past razor junk fish
through light and shadow.
I have begun to understand gratitude.

No words come for it. 

I can say only
that it feels right
to push my head and heart
to the sea floor.
It feels right
to take off my face
and let the water seep inside,
shifting my organs with the sand.

Blood and lymph
bathed in salt tears
become thresholds
for spirit to slip
back into my bones.

Waves lift me,
 rock me,
press me into crevasses,
fold me over myself
until there is nothing
but the folding,
pressing,
spanning,
sinking,
lifting
motion creating space between the cells.

I want to become these waves,
foaming into coral,
sliding through the sand,
rising up inside the sky
to shudder down again.

For now I breathe through them,
chest under the blue green water,
head above their purled crests,
until they send me,
charged and weighted,
to the shore.

lovedrunk freewrite in which I do something that scares me

I have no idea what I am going to write about.  None at all. I am writing about the blank page.

The last hour or so has seen me flitting around on twitter, peeling at my cuticle, reading the New York Times Sunday magazine, and thinking about working on the novel.  A procrastination snarl.  I am fairly famous for them.  They feel usual.

This is unusual, though, this blogging 'off the cuff' about nothing when I have at least 10 blog ideas in my mind.

What is really interesting me right now is my novel, and the play I am getting ready to workshop, and the opera I am dramaturging.

And this.   I've been thinking about my spiritual path.  I'm a Sufi.  To me, this means a seeker who is lovedrunk-- not just with the Divine, but with the world.

It has taken me four years of deep practice to define myself as Sufi.  A novice.  Learning slowly.  Its great, this slowness, learning something that takes many years to deepen into instead of something I'm supposed to 'master' after some six week course.

But  I'm not very comfortable with labels, and I'm even less comfortable discussing my spirituality.  That said, something has shifted and it feels innate.  Permanent, somehow.  A part of my core self.

To be lovedrunk is just what it sounds like.

Let's say I find myself holding a grudge.  For example, a woman I respect belittles a child in a crowded room.  I'm too shocked to respond before the moment passes.  I want to forgive her, but I simply can't.  She's made me feel powerless.  I can't shake it.  I want to shake her instead. 

Then one night I have a glass of wine, and another, and maybe one after that.  My heart is like a singing bird.  I happen to think about the person and find that the grudge is gone.  The love has returned.

Tipsily I dial, the phone is miraculously answered, I gently tell her how I felt and we make up.

Sufism finds ways to get to compassion, forgiveness, and love without the actual wine, and eventually embody those feelings not just in ecstatic states, but always.

The process is not always pretty or pleasant.  It can feel tough, though it can also be blissful.    I am a Sufi.  I needed to say that. 

Now to work on the novel.

*painting by Pakistani artist Shafique Farooqi

El Hai

After my meditation retreat (dancemeditation.org) I have fewer thoughts in my head.

I care for the slightly licorice taste of basil and the pungent salt smell of ripening tomatoes.

My deepest fears feel somehow like surface patter in comparison to the heady summer scents washing over me.

My home is full of fresh chamomile and drying linden, blooming gardenias, yellow sweet clover, with an undertone of Paul’s tobacco and the dogs.

Earthy, moving smells rich in their beings.

That is how I feel.

The Best Advice Ever

With that Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, love me.
Of course you do not do this out loud,
Otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
This great pull in us to connect,
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
In each eye that is always saying
With that sweet moon language
What every other eye in this world
is dying to hear.

--Hafiz