26 years ago this month, I had my first baby.  She was born during a snowstorm and we drove her home on a quiet snow packed highway.  My husband’s knuckles were white while I sat in the back seat with her with a touch of trepidation and awe.

I was the one of the first of my friends to make babies and I had few people to answer my questions about the uncertainties of being a young mother.  I had to bumble my way through and wonder if love was enough.  (It was and it wasn’t).

When the nights and days were quiet and the snow kept falling, I’d rock her to Christopher Cross and wonder about who she would become   When you hold something so vulnerable and innocent, you make foolish promises about how you won’t let anything or anyone hurt her (as if that would be a good thing for a tender soul who needs resilience to survive in this world).

It’s been snowing since 5 a.m. on this January day and I’ve been thinking a lot about that time when her life was an empty canvas.   

 She’s a 26 year old now with a baby of her own and as I listened to this song again today, I thought,  A canvas can do miracles.  It did do miracles.  Believe me.

Sailing

It’s not far down to paradise

At least it’s not for me

And if the wind is right you can sail away

And find tranquility

The canvas can do miracles

Just you wait and see

Believe me

It’s not far to never never land

No reason to pretend

And if the wind is right you can find the joy

Of innocence again

The canvas can do miracles

Just you wait and see

Believe me

Sailing

Takes me away

To where I’ve always heard it could be

Just a dream and the wind to carry me

And soon I will be free

Fantasy

It gets the best of me

When I’m sailing

All caught up in the reverie

Every word is a symphony

Won’t you believe me

It’s not far back to sanity

At least it’s not for me

And when the wind is right you can sail away

And find serenity

The canvas can do miracles

Just you wait and see

Believe me

In dying we are born. I’ve a grudging respect for the winter along with a rather turbulent love relationship.  It is the season of introversion and it often brings upon some sadness or some crisis that cracks open the illusion that we are in control.  We get sick in winter and sickness slows us down. We pause. We surrender to Creation in winter.  

I’m skeptical of happiness vendors because they often ignore winter.  They attach themselves to the allure of spring’s sexiness and the promise of endless summer.

They ignore the season offered up by Creation which announces there is a time for everything. Happiness is a rather surface substitute for joy.  Joy knows sorrow while fleeting happiness turns a blind eye to the darkness of Creation.

The dark night of winter invites our loneliness and melancholy.  When the season is dark, we have moments when we rail to the heavens and ask why one beautiful human being drowns pain in addiction while another’s pain is transformed into Nobel Prize poetry.  There is an injustice in this.  

In winter, I have eulogized friends who died too soon.  I remember children whose tiny lives ended in incubators.  I remember the abused who shudder in dark basements and on killing fields where hope is cut short by grown ups who do not allow a kind and generous holding space for their dark winters and inflict their forgotten pain on the defenseless. 

The happiness vendors would tell us airily “it’s all good!”  ”All is One!”  Paradox is a necessary part of Creation. And we may know this is true.  But there is a “but” here.  (There is always a but).  

It’s a subtle granularity, but an important one.  

How would we recognize justice if we didn’t wholeheartedly feel and recognize injustice?  How would we know joy if we didn’t  allow ourselves to be fully present to our vulnerability and to the sorrow of the necessary losses that winter brings?  

Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu were born in winter moments.  And so was Sojourner Truth and Aung San Suu Kyi.  In loss and despair, illusions of control and invulnerability reveal themselves. Love and suffering crack us open. 

We know joy more deeply when we know winter.  

We die in winter.  We wait for spring.   Death and rebirth.  Such is the nature of Creation.

Such is the way of the world
You can never know
Just where to put all your faith
And how will it grow

Gonna rise up
Burning black holes in dark memories
Gonna rise up
Turning mistakes into gold

Such is the passage of time
Too fast to fold
Suddenly swallowed by signs
Low and behold

Gonna rise up
Find my direction magnetically
Gonna rise up
Throw down my ace in the hole

Eddie Vedder

I’m in week 4 of some plague that has invaded my body and I’ve decided to give into it.  Been breathing, been meditating, been drinking green tea, been resting.  In the midst of it, I’ve been experiencing some significant stress which has seriously compromised my immune system.  

So, I’m giving in to the truth. I’m grouchy and sick and tired and positive thinking is downright annoying.  

And, the most I’ve laughed over the past few days is Oscar the Grouch telling James Taylor that No one can tell me that I’m doing right today.  

Rotten, baby. Go Oscar.

When I first read of the shootings in Arizona, my response is visceral. “See, this is what happens when you use violent rhetoric in your politicking, ” I rail. 

For a few moments, I do not see Gabrielle nor do I see Christina and John. They are on the periphery of my awareness as I am so angry.  If you look at the spectrum of natural human instinctual responses of fight, flight or freeze, I tend toward the fight response.   

Yet, as I begin to read and the details fleshed themselves out, I see that Jared Loughner’s writings were similar to the notes my high school boyfriend left on my car and in mailboxes of family and friends after he began to hear voices in his head and before he died of suicide. I can no longer place the blame solely on Sarah Palin’s map of political targets because mental illness has its own story of inner terror.

What strikes me as the day goes on, is the synchronicity of the events.  I will leave it to the law to determine what led to these senseless killings and to the pundits to chew through the political and cultural fallout. 

Spirituality looks for meaning that may be elusive to the naked eye…it invites us into ourselves into places which we avoid seeing.  It looks to the cosmos and tries to find meaning in chaos and order. 

So I look for patterns and wonder about what is underneath. Consider the events:

• The shootings took place in the state that is currently at the center of one our most contentious debates: immigration. 
• Gabrielle ‘s opponent holds an M16 shooting event in which supporters can fire a rifle to “get on target with victory.”
• She was listed on Sarah Palin’s map of crosshairs that identifies opponents to “target.”
• She had a glass door broken recently and had received death threats.
• Judge John Roll had to receive protection after he agreed to take on a controversial case in which immigrants sued a rancher.
• Jared Loughner was described as left leaning by those who knew him even as unsubstantiated reports emerge that he has ties with a white racist group.  
• He listed The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf on his favorite books list…books of opposites
• Catherine, the 9 year-old child who was killed, was born on 9/11, a day in which violent rhetoric erupted and birthed in our nation, but a few days of unity.
• She had just made her First Holy Communion and was at the rally because she had just been elected to student council and wanted to learn about the political process.

I then read the Comments sections of blogs and news which house our most  base, knee jerk reactions.  Many Sarah Palin supporters on her Facebook page blame “haters” on the left who blame her for a random act of violence by a mentally ill man. 

Many on the left blame “haters” on the right who use gun language and imagery which, throughout history, has created a climate which seems to invite violence by its very presence.  

The Old Turtle 

This morning, I lie in bed after an apocalyptic dream.  Shaken, I remember a book I used to read my children called The Old Turtle.  In the book, the mountains, the river and rocks and the animals on the planet have an ARGUMENT about the nature of God.  The mountain says  ”God is a snowy peak, high above the clouds,” while the river argues that  ”God is a river who flows through the very heart of things.” 

As the argument escalates, an Old Turtle stays silent and when the volume reaches its peak, it says, “STOP.” 

So I stop. I consider something called the Law of Three which is both practical and spiritual. It’s a trinitarian law which says that the answer is hidden in the problem and you find it by looking at the polarities…opposing forces if you will. 

The third force, the reconciling force, births the Fourth Way.  It is not about mushy compromise because it does not “meet in the middle.”  Nor does it place attention on canceling out the resistance.  It allows  the polarities to exist as they are for they are the very forces that engender the third force which birth a whole new way of seeing.

It demands the seer let go of identifications to either perspective because if we are attached to one perspective, we cannot see the reconciliation for we are third force blind.  It requires silence.

I silence my thoughts and the reconciling third force…the spiritual response… to this tragic Saturday emerges.  It is embedded in the story of the Old Turtle. 

I can’t stamp out my anger for it is part of the story.  When I stop and pause, I feel my anger, and the blame and my helplessness.  I feel the horrible sense of loss and senselessness.  I shake my proverbial fist and shout the visceral, “NO.” I feel my country torn apart by polarities and shouting. 

I sense into the part of myself that wants to numb the pain with food and drink and intellectualism and indifference.  I observe the part of me that wants to write a righteous post on Facebook.  Then, I slow enough to see Gabrielle, Christine, John, Gabe, Dorothy, Dorwin and Phyllis.  The families who have lost life as they knew it.   

When I allow these polarities in the privacy of my own home, I see the answer and it’s the answer of the Old Turtle. 

STOP. 

The instinctual, visceral, hair trigger responses are part of me, but I do not have to take them to the public sphere and add to the clamor.  

I am part of a collective that celebrates fast, trigger like response and quick assessments and immediate blame.  On a personal level, I am temperamentally disposed to speed and quickness. 

Yet, when I stop, I hear voices I couldn’t hear amidst the which deepen my understanding. They shift my perspective as new insights spring forth. 

I ask myself, ” What is this tragedy telling us about who we are? What is this tragedy telling me about who I am?”   I am thinking this will take some time.  

Pause and discernment,  the third force require slowing down.  They require reflection in order to hear what is behind the clamorous voices. 

The Old Turtle speaks in a voice that “rumbled loudly, like thunder…and whispered softly like butterfly sneezes.” 

He reminds the creatures of the earth, who are angry and confused that we are connected to one another…to God…to the earth. 

It is a memorable plea for peace.  It is a reminder that opposites themselves birth a new way of seeing.  It is a reminder to Stop.  To deepen into the silence whose only response is to stand in Love and be present to the suffering, the joy and the confusion.  To be fully here now.

I wrote my grad school thesis on contemplation and compassionate action and I proposed that we can’t have one without the other….contemplation requires action and action requires contemplation.  It is a dynamic organism of relationship.  Each is born in a pause.   Each is born in silence.  

The Old Turtle closes with these words: “And after a long, lonesome, scary time…the people listened, and began to hear.  And to see God….Love….in one another…and in the beauty of all the Earth.”  

In the pause, we remember who we are.

Sixteen of us….men and women… gather in a large, warm wood paneled room with a stone fireplace to explore the sacred across the world’s wisdom and religious traditions.  The lighting is warm and music is playing.  Among us is a yoga teacher, a school administrator, a family physician, an editor, a marriage and family therapist, a theology professor, a grandmother of 7, an analyst at P & G…..some I’m just beginning to know.  

We begin with a meditation in which we are called into silence and invited to sense our bodies which themselves, are expressions of the sacred.   We gather around a circular table which holds totems across the traditions and we light a candle and offer a prayer: 

Blessed be the longing that brought you here ….
May you have the courage to befriend your eternal longing.
May a secret Providence guide your thought and shelter your feeling.
May the sense of something absent enlarge your life.
May you succumb to the danger of growth.
May you live in the neighborhood of wonder.
May you belong to love with the wildness of Dance.
May you know you are ever embraced n the kind circle of God.

May the strength of God pilot us,
May the power of God preserve us today.
May the wisdom of God instruct us,
the eye of God watch over us,
the ear of God hear us,
the world of God give us sweet talk,
the hand of God protect us,
the way of God guide us.

Spirit be with us.
Spirit before us. 
Spirit after us.
Spirit in us.
Spirit under us. 
Spirit over us.
Spirit on our right hand. 
Spirit on our left hand.
Spirit on this side. 
Spirit on that side. 
Spirit at our back. 
Spirit in the head of everyone to whom we speak. 
Spirit in the mouth of every person who speaks to us.
Spirit in the eyes of every person who looks at us. 
Spirit in the ear of every person who hears us today.

Come let us travel together,
Following our hearts, honoring the still small voice within,
Finding our own ways Home.

We shift partners and share answers to questions in which we explore our encounters with people from other religious traditions.  We review the content of upcoming weeks and share a closing ritual.

Yet, what strikes me is moment in which we set a group intention and then invite each person to share  individual intentions.  

Their intentions reveal universal themes:

“I want to become more conscious.”  
“I want to awaken.”  
“I don’t want to age and get stuck and overly certain and fossilized in my opinions…I want to keep    growing.”  
“I want to be aware of my judgments and be open.”  
“I want to be an open vessel.”  
“I want to be receptive.”
“I want to experience contemplation and meditation.” 
“I have spent my life performing and doing.  I want to learn how to do ‘being.’”

They do not come seeking certainty  and answers nor do they come to a room full of people who share their worldview.   When people state they want to be aware of their judgments, they reveal a desire to  step into the unknown and into the questions inside of themselves and others.  

They come as open vessels.  Individuals and systems that transform share these qualities:

• A recognition that our worldview is conditioned by assumptions.  
• Openness, receptivity and curiosity.  
• A willingness to step into fear and experience a jolt to the “self-system” and challenge long held assumptions.  
• A willingness to surrender and embrace new worldviews.  
• A shift in location of authority from outside of oneself to inside of oneself.  This engenders a capacity to self-reflect and self-empower
• A recognition of our radical interconnectedness and .  (We don’t transform in a box.  Nor do we transform by hanging out in a box with a lot of people who look like us and think like us). 

As facilitators, we plan our classes, choose our books, music and slides and gather our materials and students.  Yet, there is something really cool about stepping into the unknown because we’ve no idea how a group will grow or what will emerge.   

Open vessels we are.  Let the surprises, the revelations and the wake up calls begin.  

Someone wrote a comment on my Facebook page in response to a quote about stepping into your vulnerability.  I had posted on my status, “If the last decade was about stepping into your own power, what if this decade could be about stepping into your own vulnerability?

Her response: 

Yes! Lets all be more vulnerable so the kind world can be …. as mean as it is when we are faking it? Come on now defenses are an adaption that have kept us alive, don’t blow it now!

She’s a therapist who works with teens with some pretty severe mental health issues.  She was calling me on the risks of stepping into your own vulnerability. “Faking strength” serves some people well in a world that can beat you up.  She sees from where she stands and she has a point…it’s been received.

Here was my response to her:

…glad to see this perspective….and it’s why I wrote more about it above ’cause sometimes you can’t have your sweet old life force hanging out…it can be a cruel world.

My post was partially motivated by this blog piece I read written by a woman, Vanessa Fisher, about a porn star, Sasha Grey. She writes of false ideas of feminine empowerment and fearlessness which is often a breath away from an individual and collective narcissism which is oh so familiar in this culture. She writes: 

“Our revolution may then start by having the courage to challenge the false ideas of empowerment and fearlessness that have so often been sold to us by postmodern consumer culture, and begin to realize that, although not “wrong”, uninhibited self-expression (sexual or otherwise) will never ultimately take us where we want to go, nor will it support the deeper possibilities for real freedom that we truly yearn for.

In order to inspire a real revolution in culture, we will have to mature out of our more adolescent forms of rebellion, which will mean putting some containment on our free self-expression, not to repress it, but so as to create some space to check in with our own motivations, and to channel that energy into a more cohesive and collective purpose that can lead us all to deeper and more meaningful change in the world at large. As we embark on this journey, we do well to look to each other for support, as well as drawing guidance from the wisdom of our female elders. And let us always find renewed strength, courage and inspiration by looking to and honoring the lineage of awesomely righteous female heroines from our past.”

Right on, Vanessa. And, it takes vulnerability to ask for guidance, to honor the ones who came before and to see the parts of ourselves that are less than STRONG! POWERFUL! AMAZING!

Let’s just be real. Sometimes the one we most need to be vulnerable to is ourselves…and have some kindness about it.

Strength and power are valuable…except when it’s pseudo-strength and pseudo-power feeding an illusory self which is terrified of its own vulnerability.  Vulnerability has its own power.   

I work with men and women across the financial, cultural, religious and political spectrum.  For some, transformation is about stepping into their power.  For others, transformation requires stepping into their vulnerability.  

For all of us, it’s about recognizing the core false self system that keeps us bound. Discernment is key. For all of us, it’s also about recognizing we are part of a larger, interconnected whole.  We’re not walking this trail alone.