Another Blog?

Yes, it's true. I was thinking as I woke up this morning about starting yet another blog. This one I envision being a collaborative blog though. I have recently met several other gals who grew up on farms and have this shared experience with me of disconnection and yearning. I would call it "Once Upon a Farm." The three of us could post our thoughts, memories, and experiences of being from a farm family, but no longer living on the farm. All three of us have family still in farming, we just aren't a part of it for various reasons. It's such a unique experience I'm finding. As a young child I knew lots of others who were living on farms. Throughout the 70's and 80's there was a mass exodus from family farming operations though. Again, for various reasons. Each year, the number of other people I knew who were living on farms dwindle rapidly. Now it is such a unique way of having grown up that I would like to preserve the experience as much as possible. Even if just in a little blog. Here we go again!

Wordscapes

This is so, um, I don't know, brash? I am awakening this morning from thoughts about Georgia O'Keeffe and pregnant rivers. I want to do with words what Georgia did with paint. She invited us into the smallest of spaces and opened them to us as vast landscapes. She exploited the tension between what is and where it is. The non-existent boundary between an object and it's surroundings. A seductive touch of surface, object and the caress of our eyes. We are invited to stretch ourselves along the visual curve of a body, to see it at once as a flower, bone, hill. We are challenged to own the joy with Rumi-like passion that borders on sexual. To immerse ourselves in the world around us, to dive into it like warm water, and to experience that as a divine joy rather than a perversion. It is the ultimate invitation to be present in our body.

http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/index.html

The Meditation Tapes and Reading Pay Off!

This morning I woke up thinking about work. I am going through a slightly stressful time at work right now and yesterday was especially stressful. The day started with a volunteer, that I have grown to think of as family, telling me that her cancer is back. She had been diagnosed with cancer and had surgery shortly before my mom's cancer. Her surgery went extremely well and they were so optimistic that they did not give her chemo. Now it's back and she is scheduled for chemo right away. I care about her and don't want to see her go through this. It also brought up my biggest fear for my mom and that was hard to swallow yesterday. Then there are other personnel issues going on that took a turn for the worse yesterday that just sent the day down the toilet. It ended with finding out that a family lost one of their triplets.

As I was reflecting on these things, laying there in bed, I start spinning off into "what if" scenarios, worst case scenarios and "why" questions. What I didn't notice was that it wasn't just my mind that was wandering down this path. At one point I realized my entire body was tensed. Every muscle was poised for action or braced for impact.

A light bulb went off just as soon as I noticed this and with each breath I allowed my body to relax. I envisioned my muscles unfurling and the thoughts about work vanished. I was able to bring my mind back into the present warmth of the bed and the comfort of Jovi's body next to me. I instantly felt better. It made me wonder how many times I have sunk into this whirlpool of negative/worrying thoughts without noticing what it was doing to my body. This made me grateful that I noticed it this time.

Attachments

Have I told you yet that I am attachment disordered? Yeah, yoga is perfect for me. Eastern philosophies are good for me. Not in the avoid attachment sense but rather the learn to be in the present with our attachments. I mean, everyone has some sort of disorder or such right? As a cultural anthropologist I also feel like it is less that we are dysfunctional as individuals as it is our culture has not figured out how to deal with our individual gifts.

Impulsive Me

Woke up thinking about how I impulsively look for and friend people on Facebook once in a while. Why do we do this? I know I'm not the only one? Is it some kind of weird addiction? You know they have green therapy now. Of course this was spearheaded in Portland. "What's green therapy," you ask? Well, counseling for those with eco-guilt. Compulsively collecting your food scraps even when you don't have access to compost, arguing with your partner over gray water for your laundry and whether you can afford solar or not - losing sleep thinking about not having solar? Yeah, we have therapy now for that. I laugh, but sign me up.

I think the next big thing will be social networking addiction anonymous. Counseling for those who have little panic attacks when the network is down or they don't have a signal on their phone. "Have you changed your network provider so you can get a signal when camping? You have a problem." I might need help.

Then again, I love that I can connect to people without the formality of a letter and without the face to face rejection/intimacy of a phone call. (That's right I just called a phone all intimate and face to face. Cause that's what it is now.) No awkward, let's get together over coffee when I haven't seen you in years. Sweet bliss of distance for us wallflowers.

Q&A

Realizing good questions are usually more important, transformative, and meaningful than answers.

Rumi-nations

I'm reading a novel in which a woman reads a novel based on the meeting of Shams of Tabriz and Rumi. Each time I see Rumi's name I am filled with warmth. I can't help but instantly remember longing for the passion about which he writes. I first read Rumi as a Sophomore or Freshman in college. It was an honors seminar entitled "Sacred Meanings." The 6 or 7 of us read works from different religious scholars including Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, and non-traditional scholars like Meinrad Craighead. The Coleman Barks collection entitled Like This was my introduction to the Sufi mystic Rumi.

I had never been in love at this point in my life. I had never understood a passion that would allow oneself to forget oneself. These poems of spiritual passion and longing touched a river inside me that I didn't yet know about. While it would be years before I would abandon myself to that river, I understood the spiritual longing of which Rumi wrote. Well, I understood that there was something missing from my life and that the world around me could be beautiful even if I didn't often see it as such.

I had read some Emerson and Thoreau. I had experienced the Divine in nature. While at times the woods in which I secluded myself as a teenager were isolating and lonely, I had witnessed stillness and connection. Not the ecstatic joy that Rumi sings of instead I encountered a profound quiet. To sit for hours beside a pond, partially engulfed by woods and bordered by fields, I could use all my senses to experience what was going on around me.

While it's difficult to talk about because I know it sounds odd to most people, I had my first spiritual vision there. Laying in the tall, dry grass, looking up at an empty sky, I saw myself as a bird traveling overhead. Then I was the air around the bird - literally the particles of air surrounding the bird. I felt the caress of the feathers, I felt the weight of her wings and my own connection to her. Then I felt my pressure against the surface of the pond and the solidity of the water below me. I felt it pressing back. I became the surface of the water and I could see the body of water below me and the air above me. I could feel the air move across me and the tension of the elements that held me together. This vision went on this way until I was the mud beneath the pond with the fishes and worms and turtles above me, through me.

It was an exquisite experience that I wasn't to share with anyone. It was a little gift I carried around inside me, not truly aware that it was a vision, a glimpse at what I would continue to define as God. I could not articulate this at the time. Partly because I knew most of my friends would either think it blasphemous or they couldn't connect with God this way. To them, well and to me at the time, God was a patriarchal concept that I could not accept and have turned away from. In fact, it has been decades since I've even been able to embrace the word God because I define it so differently than many people. I do not like to use the word. It is so limiting. It invokes a shared image that does not reflect what I want to communicate. I think God is something one can only experience and is far too complex to be captured in a word. God is experience, a verb or adverb.

It is interesting this thread that has run through the course of my life. This interest in that quiet chaos of love, passion, commitment, fellowship, endurance and solitude that is life. I am just now beginning to see that I am walking a path. I am not wandering aimlessly. I have always been on a path. It is in the weaving together of these memories into stories that illuminate that path for me. Each step I take is in concert with the steps I have already taken.