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Jane
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« on: June 17, 2011, 03:24:58 PM » |
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A Beautiful Bowl
Make beauty in YOUR moment.
Make what you see beautiful. If you are immersed in beauty all or most of the time, then share it when a person comes to your door.
If you are exhausted, then find a beautiful place to sleep, with the highest thread count that you can come across, and wrap yourself in a warm blanket, and sleep. Sleep for as long as it takes. Days or weeks or months or years. And let the wind bring you wonderful perfumes as you do. Let the gentle passage of oxygen in and out of your body, flow in and out of your room with the wind, and may the blessings that YOU are in the world, be carried off to the great beyond, dwelling in the trees and flowers. May you escape yourself, even as you hold your form in the land that is beyond even our imagination, even as you lie quietly in bed.
If you are hungry, have an adventure. Go to the market, or the garden, or the fridge, or the cupboard. Look at every thing you have, look at all the possibility, and think carefully about each thing. Is your choice imbued with love and gentleness? If you went back to each step of the actual manifesting of that food item, would you choose what you see. Was the animal treated kindly, was the habitat clean and comfortable, did the rainforest get chopped down and the home of those amazing creatures get destroyed while making your food arrive at your mouth.. Don’t feel guilty about the answers you find, whatever you do. Guilt will make you contract in shame and your simple awareness might evaporate. All we want here is your awareness. Ask yourself the questions and wait for your body or your imagination or your mind to tell you the answer. Ask any question and wait for the answer. For instance: Did you like the farmer at the market, the one who gave you the asparagus he cut that morning for a dollar off,? When you got the cherries, did you wonder if the fruit pickers from Jamaica had any friends here or if anyone even talked to them? Did you wonder if the money they were paid was enough? All we are doing is investigating, considering the real answers to questions you might ask. There is no harm in it. And you will be astounded at what is true, where and how your food comes into your life, the very molecules that make this body you like to dress in the morning and take out to the market. And then after you have found your food, take it, this beautiful food, and make a glorious creation. Make it taste better than you could have ever imagined. Cut it mindfully, decorate your plate, make the colours a work of are. Make is so beautiful you have to look at it first for a while before you decide to consume it. Make lots and lots so that you can eat all you want. Make extra for others. Then create your altar of food. Use candles and napkins and the finest silver, or the humblest wooden bowl, and bless all that too, those who make the spoon, and the bowl, and all those who may have used those items before. Put flowers on you place and hold hands and say Thank You
You know the drill, stop with the silliness and behave.
Hold Hands now ready,
After my mother who was after ee cummings:
“Oh thank you god for most this amazing day.
For the leaping greenlie spirits of trees.
For the blue true dream of sky,
For everything which is natural,
Which is infinite
Which is YES!
And raise your hands a little at the last part for emphasis. Praise your dog if he or she joins in with the thank you. I find most dogs will do grace if you give them a chance. And when you eat this beautiful creation, think of all the molecules and all the places those molecules have travelled to arrive on your spoon. They will be arriving from everywhere in the world probably just in time in the last few days or months. It is a whirlwind of orchestrating all of those molecules to get there like that. You think the Christmas concert is a production!
And then tasted the food. Imagine what tasting really is. How odd it is…to put food on a red, thick, rough, fleshy surface of muscle inside your mouth surrounded by teeth, (I hope you have teeth anyway) and then a set of olfactory signals and taste signals create or identify a flavour, and other signal systems on your tongue and teeth and gums telling you what your are feeling. And you know the feeling is at your tonge but you recognize it in your brain behind your eyes somewhere. And you investigate. Is it soft or hard, mushy, dry, wet? All of this information is piling into your head and you are swallowing with that complex swallowing system. (I can admit I had a hard time remembering all the cranial nerves involved in getting the swallowing to happen, not to mention the swallowing and mastication muscles.) Then the food goes into your stomach and is absorbed and washed through the energy ocean of your body, percolating in and out of every cell down to your toes and and through your heart and behind your eyes. “WE are carbon thinking, we are thinking carbon,”said Thomas Berry. This really is the dance we are doing with this dense aspect of our physical manifestation.
Oh, but then, go back to the taste or the feeling of fullness, or the ambiance in at your table. Or look across the table at your friends or guests and think of them as this amazing complex weave of everything that ever happened before and during the lives that allowed them to arise at all and then drop them safely to your doorstep. Maybe they came in a Toyota car from japan, and then imagine all those people making that car to bring your friend to you….oh, it goes on!
If they are your children, think of how they spiralled down one night like the cadueseus, the healing snakes that Asclepius carried as a healer. One snake is a metaphor for this awesome big huge ovum, large and giggly, and actually quite old too. It amazes me to think that the ovum that made me was alive inside my grandmother who was outside of my mother while my mother was a fetus inside her uterus. If you think that is hard to think about, stay with it, like a tongue twister until you can see the pathway that I am talking about. It is very wonderful, this journey! It turns out, these eggs are all formed by the time a mother is born as a baby. In other words, my mother came out of my grandmother’s vagina with about 400 little ovums tucked away in her baby ovaries. Of those 400 ovums, six of them got to the next stage of being fertilized over a 20 or so year period when she was having sexual relations with my father. And these six were my biological brother and sisters. This is only the beginning of the menagerie that was my family though which means there is even more mystery.
Oh and the sperms! What a situation that must have been on the one day the egg that made me, or that made you, was available for fertilization (And in vitro fertilization is no less spectacular, Jay-sus, Petri dishes and eye droppers and large eyes in bodies with white coats on… amazing.) And sperms for god’s sake, 250 million sperms! Can you imagine if that was a salmon run up the Kenamu River! Frig, that is a lot of salmon! And imagine too, the testicles in your father’s scrotum that made those sperms! It is no wonder they call these the family jewels. And then, oh god, it is almost too much consciousness-- imagine your dad, and all the food he ate to manufacture those sperms, and then, imagine him as the sexual being the he most surely was. Imagine him having to figure out how to negotiate a relationship with your mom, through all of weird sexual conditioning and shaming of his day! And then imagine, your dad figuring out how to deposit the sperms with his penis inside your mother’s vagina. That was likely a heroic journey though the wall of religious shame, best depicted in the bible’s story of the garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. (the fall into consciousness, the loss of unity consciousness, the shame, the fig leaf…) But back to your father, imagine that if he was not a very good lover whilst doing depositing his sperms, your mother was probably cranky and a bit dismissive of him as a man, well, and disappointed too. There was such a long period of time when women were NOT very sexually satified, centuries it would seem. This dissatisfaction of the women carried on out into the marriage and the day to day comings and going of the relationship and sadly, into the context into which you were born.
Imagine how many people for instance, are conceived the first time their mom had an embarrassed, poorly boundaries sexual intercourse experience. This is not at all uncommon. So the sperms fire off in this amazing race through the primordial swamp that your mother holds inside of her. And one of them, friggin’ gets there the fastest and is accepted in by the egg. I am not saying any of this is ‘conscious’ per se, though I am sure there is still some human consciousness creating you when your parents begin to negotiate their relationship; but soon it is another order of order and connection that begins to take over.
Ha, and we know too, given the fact that most of us have had a load of groping and boring, guilt-ridden, unconscious sex with people we hardly know, how likely is was that your parents were sexually conscious when you began arriving. It is just not likely that they saw you as a blessing and invited the marvellous you into their lives I will tell you about my sexual and conception experiences in another missive, but judging from them, and I doubt many people were that much more conscious than I was. Birth, conception, sex, or relationships in all of theses parts of our lives are barely coming out of the dark ages right now, in spite of the other technologies we have, and even the science that shows us so much of the actual, real-time molecular flow.
Back to you and your conception:. It is likely really, that your mom likely was trying to be some paragon of beauty so that she would be loved, when down deeply, she was not sure she really was loveable, and she was likely complete flabberghasted by the whole 40’s or 50’s thing, with all the weird hair and canned food and cadillacs with wings and swing music and radio and the big band sound. And there were all of those wars too. That made for a lot of sadness. For everybody. And women were frustrated, and your dad was really in between a rock and a hard place. Still, imagine these little people, sidling up to the plate and getting it on with each other. Your father was probably both horny and wanting to be chivalrous to the woman he could make love to. Or they might both have been dreadful selfish narcissists; anyway, regardless of how gracefully or haplessly they might have arrived at the relationship with each other, it is through that relationship with each other’s bodies on the particular moment you were conceived, that you entered into the sphere of the possible, then the probable, then the actual, and then the actual YOU found yourself becoming housed in your actual real body.
The sperm and the egg did the amazing embryology dance and produce a BABY that was you!
. And as you , YOU, the amazing you, you are able to read this missive, again, this is light going from the sun, bouncing off this page and into your eyes, the cones, and the optic nerve into your braing and so on! And also you are able to turn you imagination skyward at night and wonder how even those distant stars were you, WERE YOU, at some moment 13.7 billion or so years ago, when the something, something exploded and the gases began to form and consolidate and become, among to much other cosmic debris, the earth, this magical blue green gem, circling the sun, this fiery, hot, boiling, burning, energetic, shining orb that sends photons to the earth and heats and cools her chemistry until the conditions are just right for the photosynthesis dance to begin, and later for the Kreb Cycle to kick, and then this entire plethora of flora and fauna to spring forth with all of this relationship to each other thing…and then the humans and the blood lines the spewed forth your parents with all their grace and grit, and foibles and perversions, and conditionings… and then some set of circumstance that made them get together.
Before, a hundred years ago, this was usually not such an impossible thing, everybody stayed in the same town and married each other for the most part; but now-a-days, we have developed all of the Information Technologies and travel technologies, again using the oil for travel and the metals and oil and silica to make the computers, and the satellite stations that relay the signals the I can set off by flapping my hands of the key board in a pattern that I learned in high school typing class, that makes words that represent sounds and patterns in my brain and thoughts that I am thinking which somehow represents MY imagination, and this resonates also with the imagination of the earth and then the cosmos as a whole, and sometimes it might resonate with you too, and you might come over to me and we would be able to have a look-see at who the other really is.
I think about how we think telepathy is not likely. Well, I have not got an opinion about that, however, consider how likely having a bunch of energy dance up into molecules and become your tongue and brain so that you can talk and push air through you lungs and form shapes with your tongue and lips and push air in odd frequencies out over to my ears that have special membranes for picking up the vibrations that will then send the sound signals down into my auditory nerve and again into the neural network of my brain and I can then receive your thoughts and think them too, if I want to..! That seems as awesome as telepathy if you ask me. In fact, it sounds like it is telepathy pretty much.
Oh, I digress. It is hard not too.
So look at the person across from you at the table, and just behold what a amazing and astonishing miracle they are, just like YOU are. And if they have poor manners, wonder at that too, what manners are, and why we need them…. How sometimes manners create space in the studio of our lives so that we can be artists drawing our own selves and situations and making the supper that you are eating, and sometimes manners hold us in like a tight corset and make our lives miserable. Just draw your awareness to that.
Oh, where was I, where was I.
Perhaps I need to get back to work in the garden. You see, perhaps you all know this already. I always thought that everyone did. It was my sister Johanne who said to me “you cannot see that other people cannot see what you can see.” When she said that, I thought about it for a long while. I had some ego puffing going on for a bit, suddenly feeling smug as if I had arrived at some splendid view after enormous effort and no body was sharing with me because I was so ‘special’. After a while, I started tofeel very lonely in my isolated place, in my very big place of understanding. I knew that I did not have an option at having arrive here at what I know. I was obsessively compelled to complete circle. I knew it would save me. And it took me a while too to realize that pretty much everyone else would be thinking the same thing, if they were able to see that they too had travelled out of the fireball and ended up in this isolated unit of awareness we call our body and our life.
Everyone would have a story to tell, that would be astounding, unbelievable, more amazing than anything you could begin to imagine yourself, even if you were the best novelist ever.
I learned this too: We never know each other stories unless we learn to listen to others, AND unless we also learn to be the narrators of the grand story of our own arrival. It is very humbling to do this. I mean, to actually just tell it the way it is or was. Already, I have been talking about your father’s testicles. This is not the usual conversation that we are invited to put there.
Anyway, depending on how bold we are, we both are the writers and the narrators of this grand story, ME for the story of my unique arrival and YOU for the story of your unique arrival. And so we must be the storytellers when some one needs our story to help them find their own place when they are lost. We must be listeners too, if we want to see how this magic moment that we are beholding in this moment was created. We can learn to see this cosmic dance of creation. We see it with more than our eyes. Way more! In fact look deeply, do not be dazzled by the dazzling colour, even though it is enough to take your breath away if you let it…. Look deeper than the dazzle, and you will be peering head long into the deepest mystery you can ever imagine. And if you look over here, you might be able to see me looking at you too. And I love you.
Oh, where was I… something about the food and the plate that we eat from.
I am mostly eating from a wooden bowl these days. I eat a lot of salads. I am repairing and healing my body. The bowl was made from a tree in the Hearst Forest in Ontario. A man cut the tree and carved the bowl out, and while he was doing it, he accidently cut his fingers and rumour has it that I was the doctor that sew up his fingers in the emergency room that night. It was a coincidence if it is true, that the bowl came to me. My father took me to the auction for the Hospital Fund Raiser, and then bid on the bowl because I like it. Then he gave this bowl to me.
It would be a great begging bowl. You could feed a family of four it is so big. And it is beautiful too. I am grateful for its arrival in my life….. and for anyone at all, who got this far in the story, I am very grateful to you for being here. This story is so amazing it is hard to open it up and put it into order. It is so wild and scraggly and beautiful, and it keeps taking me back to the beginning and to the wonder. I will never get finished it, but I can be committed to cleaning up the writing and focussing on the specifics. It is a page burner, I tell ya. Though I guess it is more likely to be on your computer or ipad or your kindle, blips on a screen. I am glad we are not using these amazing trees to write on as much as we used too… we need to let the trees be trees, oh, trees those amazing oxygen fountains that spew forth the very air we breathe … yes, let the trees be trees whenever possible.
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