Ash Wednesday

I mentioned to a friend recently, when she invited me to dinner, that I planned to do a 40 day juice cleanse for Lent.  Her reaction was as strong that I was honouring lent as it was that I would juice again and for this long.  I completed a 42 day juice cleanse at the start of the new year.  I have never felt better.  I am losing weight, gaining energy, and my thoughts are clear and unfoggy.  My decision to juice again for Lent is both to continue this journey toward health and heal some spiritual wounds that are lingering from a searing encounter with a traumatizing narcissist.

I read the other day that spirit is masculine and soul is feminine.  The mind is masculine and the body is feminine.  This is of course not to be confused with male and female.  Regardless of gender or biological equipment, we as human beings carry both the energy of the masculine and the feminine.  While the dominant culture carries more than its share of the masculine, the feminine waits in the shadows.  As Jungian psychology and other psychological and spiritual traditions remind us, one sidedness is a deformity of either pole.  Too much spirit leaves the soul longing.  Too much soul and the fire of spirit is doused.  Balance is key.  I see now, with the perspective of a full two years, that I was pathologically out of balance.  My spirit was well honed.  My soul neglected.  My mind well schooled.  My body ignored.  I have lived a life in service to the masculine and silently and secretly, hid the wounds to the feminine.  My body, my soul, the ground of my being has been waiting in the shadows.  So, into the pathological unbalanced darkness psyche led me.  In extreme! 

Moses and his people spent 40 years in the desert.  Jesus spent 40 days in the desert.  Jung documents his desert experience in his Red Book.  My desert has been my move to the North.  Two years later, I am coming home.  No leaving or the selling off this strange and new life.  Rather, coming home to mySelf.  As I have said elsewhere, the reasons that called us here will not be the reasons that keep us here.  As painful as it has been, I could not have asked for a better teacher or a more customized curriculum.  It has been a hard life lesson, but I do believe I have earned the title of scholar, not in the way it has been applied in the various schools I have attended, but in the fuller sense of the word. 

scholar (n.)
Old English scolere "student," from Medieval Latin scholaris, noun use of Late Latin scholaris "of a school," from Latin schola (see school (n.1)). Greek scholastes meant "one who lives at ease." The Medieval Latin word was widely borrowed, e.g. Old French escoler, French écolier, Old High German scuolari, German Schüler. The modern English word might be a Middle English reborrowing from French. Fowler points out that in British English it typically has been restricted to those who attend a school on a scholarship

I harken back to the Greek, scholastes, “one who lives at ease”.  I am living at ease these days.  In my body, in my home, on this Lane, in the North.  The hole in my psyche that led me to the experiences of these past couple of years is finally known.  It is a hole the approximate size of a soul.  My own narcissistic wound has been made more conscious and I am less naive, less vulnerable, less unconscious to the whiles of gurus, teachers, analysts, leaders, promises, or programs outside of myself.  I am a scholar of life, one who marries spirit and soul and dances with the quieter energies of balance.

Truly and honestly with gratitude, I name my narcissistic teachers in my prayers.  I thank them for showing me in the outer world what I would not, could not see in my inner world.  I bless them for wounding me in the deepest place possible.  I lay alms at their feet.  I rise from the sackcloth and ashes of my dominant attitudes.  I walk into a desert blooming with soul seared insight.   

What does this look like?  Today, this looks like a walk in the woods with the dogs, a green juice for lunch, carting in a load of fireplace wood, a hot cup of ginger and lemon tea with a wee bit of writing, a load of laundry, a few analytical hours, a couple of phone calls, and a private ceremony of ashes and oil on my forehead.  

There have been and will be many deserts.  There have and will be many teachers.  There will be ashes.  Tears.  Triumphs.  There will be Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays and Holy Saturdays.  Pray, that this year, the sun that rises over Blueberry Mountain on Easter Sunday morn, will kiss all our cheeks with the warmth of Springtime returning.            
   

The Sacred Body of the Universe

I am on Day 10 of what I hope will be a 30 day juice cleanse.  I am sure that I have never done anything so good for my health.  Why is this different?  I have done extreme diets and participated in extreme health and fitness regimes in the past.  I have also tried sensible approaches.  I have lost weight and toned my muscles only to regain weight and return to a sedentary lifestyle.  I know intimately the ups and downs of the so called YO-YO syndrome in my weight, my fitness, and my sense of well being.  When I think of the hours I have spent reading nutrition and diet books, the dollars I have spent on Weight Watchers, Dr. Bernstein, fitness coaches, athletic club memberships, or the latest diet craze on the market, I shutter and bow my head in humility.  I have been caught in the wheels of the corporate diet industry.  It has not served me well.  I realize now, my quest for good health, physical and spiritual, was mostly outwardly directed.  Out there was an answer for me.  I only had to find the right answer.  Oh, how often I have fallen into this abyss. 

Health has the same etymology as hearth.  The centre of the home.  The alchemical lab.  The kitchen.  The place where raw material are transformed into nourishment.  Healing and heart know this etymological neighbourhood.  If I am to be healthy, I need to bring heart to the hearth of my healing.  Sounds like a tongue twister.  And perhaps that is just what it is.  Something to twist and trick me out of typical ways of being with myself.  Something to twist and trick me out of looking for redemption outside of myself.

This juice cleanse is meant to reboot my whole system.  I pray that it is not just another new year's resolution or another red herring to chase.  I pray that it is a way of coming to terms with the macrocosm in the microcosm.  The microcosm in the macrocosm.  My body and my planet are crying for my attention.  I can no more save the whales nor the polar bears until I save myself from the toxic soup I unconsciously ingest.  Every decision, however small, has consequence.  I admit I have done more psychology and personal process work than most.  Not because I am noble or crazy, but because there have been parts of me that have remained elusive.  I know the science and psychology of eating and nutrition.  Yet, I have not been able to integrate my understandings.  I have not been able to bring it all home.  To my body.  I sign petitions against global warming while munching on potato chips.          
Last year, as you may know from previous posts, my younger sister was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Her treatments have just concluded.  Not too many years ago, my mother was diagnosed with and treated for the same.  A few years before that, my older sister was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.  In my own medical history, I have been biopsied for both a benign breast lump and a benign thyroid tumour.  I have seemingly dodged the bullets.  Yet, I do not feel unaffected.   

My mother's, and my sisters' cancers have deeply affected me.  I remember too vividly approaching our mother's house with my sister to see our mother weeping through the window.  The call from the doctor had just concluded.  I remember throwing the I Ching with my older sister as she prepared to take the radioactive iodine and begin her treatments.  I remember sitting this summer in our Turtle Dreaming Lodge and weeping with my younger sister as we waited for the post surgery biopsy results and wondered together what her death might mean.  What does anyone's death mean?  What does anyone's life mean?

If the computer is not responding to my commands, if it freezes, if it acts up, the best advice from the experts is to reboot.  Shut the system down, count to ten, and reboot.  I have never fully understood the logic of this, only that it works.  So, I am shutting down some of my own hard drive, counting to 30, and rebooting.  This idea of fasting and cleansing is not new to me.  It has been part of my spiritual discipline for some time.  Two or three times I year I have participated in a fast and refrained from food and water.  Each time I have done this spiritual fasting I have felt rebooted.  Yet, it has become a bit like going to church on Sunday and behaving like a SOB Monday through Saturday.  I need to find ways of making a deeper commitment.  I need to make space for healing.  I need to take time to clean out my hearth.  I need to take responsibility.

We moved the dining table out of the kitchen just before the holidays.  We moved our living room down into our walk out basement.  Now, when you enter our home, the extended table is the centre of attention.  A large harvest table with seating for many.  Too often in the past years we have crammed together and tried to linger over a lovely meal at the table with neither enough room for the cooks nor the diners.  We rarely dine, in this our Remember INN, alone.  More often than not, our house and our hearth is filled with guests.  Now, finally, we have reassigned space.  Space to cook and space to linger over a meal.  Odd that this reorganizing should be followed by my decision to embark upon a 30 juice cleanse.  On deeper reflection, perhaps not so odd afterall.  Once the table was moved, I rifled through the kitchen cupboards and discarded ingredients past their shelf life.  I reorganized the shelves.  I cleaned the oven.  I cleared out the fridge.  Part of this was ritual for the ending of one year and the beginning of the next.  Part of this was an unconscious preparation for what was ahead.

Our planet needs our attention.  The forest canopy is dying.  The oceans are menaced by a colossal continent of plastic garbage.  There is a gaping hole in the protective ozone.  Species are disappearing.  How is it possible that if I reclaim my own health, take responsibility for my own choices, clean up my own nest, that this could affect the ecological crisis?  Consider this.  Ubuntu. An Shona principle that loosely translated says there is no me without us.  I am because we are.  The interconnected is in the indigenous understanding if Ubuntu.  I have longed embraced this principle in my sociology.  Even my psychology.  What if this is also true in my theology, in my relationship with the Divine?  What if the gods need me to manifest.  I am truly beginning to get that the holy, the Divine, the gods, the truths are not to be found out there.  And, they are not, as some misappropriating of programs like The Secret imply, totally subjective.  A deeper understanding is called for.  What if the gods are in the thing itself, as it manifests through me?  What if the gods, or fate, or illness do not act upon me but through me?  How do we manifest health in the face of illness?  Consciousness in the face of planetary peril?

Here are a few thoughts.  What if we accept that what we are in here and now is the only reality and that it contains the Divine?  What if we begin to speak our own truth rather than seek a teacher or a Master?  What if we begin to believe in the spiritual substance our thoughts manifest.  What if we truly begin to bless all that we are in, all that we are?  Is it possible to bless the illness and the health?  Consciousness and unconsciousness?  I cannot nor should not answer these questions for anyone other than myself.

I am on Day 10 of a juice cleanse and I have never felt better.  I am healing.  I am acting in such a way as to move in the direction of my health.  I am making a prayer to my holies.  And in the words of the poet Drew Dellinger, I implore...
     
let's meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs
for one instant
to dwell in the presence of the galaxies
for one instant
to live in the truth of the heart
the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is
"the secret One slowly growing a body"

 Hymn to the Sacred Body of the Universe
Drew Dellinger
www.drewdellinger.org

 

Healthy New Year

The New Year brings with it reflection, resolutions, and resolve.  May this be your healthiest year ever.  Last year we were challenged with a life threatening illness very close in our family.  There is nothing like a diagnosis of cancer to wake one up.  As many of you already know.  For my loved one, the treatment is complete and the prognosis is good.  But as the one who went through the surgeries and the radiation told me, cancer is not cured, it merely goes into remission.  We all carry the potential time bomb that explores in some of us as the diagnosis of cancer.  I watched my loved one carry for us, this time, the burden of such an eruption.  And she carried it well.  As have others I have loved.  I’m not sure I would have been so stoic, or honest, or determined.  She neither became a victim nor a warrior.  She became informed.  And she informed us all.  By her words.  More significantly, by her actions.  

How does one go to sleep once the alarm has sounded?  Too easily.  Too easily we trance out and resume our unhealthy  patterns of living.  Too easily we hit the snooze alarm and return to the illusion that what we do and do not do is inconsequential.  Everything has consequence.  Every word spoken.  Choice made.  Opportunity avoided.  Our bodies are barometers.  They record the inner and outer pressures we expose them to.  They will tell us in whispers, in words, and in screams that we are out of balance. 

So, I wonder, again, what does it mean to be in balance?  As a poet I love said so beautifully, “Balance is a fleeting thing like newly morning dew, it’s not in falling that we test ourselves, but in rising that we do.”     

Cancer, obesity, anxiety, depression, addictions, to name a few,  are our teachers.  They are not our enemies.  We need no wars against, no ribbon campaigns, no medication from; rather, we need to listen to what these dark teachers are trying to tell us.  Can we listen with interest and curiosity to the language we use to convey our beliefs?  Can we listen to the music in the background?  Can we listen in stereo to the inside and the outside world?  Can we be because we are?

If I have learned anything by this, my 55th year, it is this:  missionizing, colonizing, militarizing, evangelizing, or criticizing leave more victims than converts.  I read Joseph Borden’s latest book, Orenda recently.  It opened my eyes to a lot of things.  It allowed me to wonder, on the edge of First Contact, what purpose is served in suffering, sacrifice, being the one chosen to carry an unwelcome destiny.

Back in the day, so Borden narrates, each of us is given a song to sing.  Every encounter, dream, disappointment, illness, joy, wound, and wonder become the notes and lyrics of this song.  It is called a Death Song.  When the final moment is at hand, the song is to be sung.  Sung out loud.  Sung with gusto.  Sung so that the life lived would be carried by the song sung when it was over.  Like an ear worn, the Death Song would reiterate in the minds and hearts of those who heard it.  In this way, no one was ever forgotten, no life deemed inconsequential.   

May our lives be a song.  A lament and an alleliauh.   May each day of this year, and each year of this life, deepen the song we were each born to sing.  May we be granted the chance to fling it against the stars and may it bounce back and fall into a newborn’s cry.  May our coming and our going be a symphony.