We Walked Along the River and Found the Current Soothing.

We walked along the Stones River on the Greenway path. The current was fast but patient. Watched the water curl and swirl and eddy and flow. The river was soothing this morning. We looked at the trees and the bushes and heard all the creatures going about their day. Our walking pace was steady but not hurried. Time in no shortage this day.

As we crested a hill, we stopped to stretch and drink a bit of water. The air was cool but the sunshine warm and bright. We walked along. We talked about all the small things that often are left unsaid for busy schedules and pressing tasks. Out talk was of the small things, the daily things. Of friends and family, of life and living, of joys and sufferings.

We walked along the river and found the current soothing. Sycamores are every where along the river. Passing under a leaning branch, I noticed a herring bone pattern on the underside of the tree where rain had hit the smooth surface of sycamore and run along the underside of following gravity’s pull. The pattern was symmetrical and regular. I had never noticed before.

Every so often my wife would wince of exhale harshly, sometimes putting a hand to her belly which is very swollen with or baby son. She is incredible and I am in awe. I am sure she got tired of me asking if she was all right, if we need to stop or if she was having a contraction. She never seemed annoyed by me.

We talked a lot of family. Ours is soon to be expanded by son, due in the next weeks.  We talked about everything, so it seemed. We talked of art and beauty, of humor and pain. We talked over our preparations for our coming son, of the incredible little girl our daughter has become. We walked along the river and found the current soothing.

We talked and walked along the river and I got the clear and specific understanding that this is our life; walking together, sharing our time, no hurry, watching nature happen around us, breathing in, breathing out and walking along the river. There was nothing extraordinary about the morning. A sunny, beautiful, clear morning toward the end of a cold winter. We find our lives where we are at the moment, and that moment is ordinary and precious and golden.

I so love these times with my wife. I never imagined my life would take the turns and arrive at the place I am today. I could have never planning to be the man I am on this morning. Grateful and humble are not enough to describe my heart. We walked along the river and found the current soothing.

Stillness and Waiting

A few nights ago, the temperature was down in the single digits. This is Tennessee. And a Tennessee boy like myself might see a temperature that low in his backyard only a few times in life. The hour was late. I was very tired. I had finished a couple house chores. The last of which was to empty the compost bucket. I put my shoes and coat on and stepped onto the frozen grass at the edge of the patio. My backyard is nearly an acre; the compost pit is in the far back corner.

That kind of cold air is colder in the dark. And it is hard to move. It is hard to breathe. The coldness and stiffness of the air seems to slow every motion. It is a struggle with stillness.

I reached the back of the backyard. I upended the bucket of scraps and heard the slop fall in the frozen pit. Sounds like water splashed over stones. Really, it sound like vomit over cold pavement, but anyway. Walking back, I stopped to look at a large hut built in warmer days. I had put some tarps over the top to protect it from the winter weather. On the lower corner of one tarp, I could see in the dark where some water froze dripping. Not just icicles mind you but a strange organic shape of frozen spilling water. On touching the tarp, there were several areas of frozen water on the top. In this cold, there is no place that moisture has not become still. There is no flow, no movement but the dry sharp wind.

Inside the Hut

I have felt this dryness at many levels these passed weeks. A stillness. A lack of inertia.

There is a unmoving waiting stillness in the world. It is hard to name and identify these feelings. The media and politics are more locked into stillness than ever. Indeed, no movement comes from

out elected leaders. They seem mostly motivated to resist movement at all costs.

After the public, random tragedies of the past years, I feel the whole world is waiting to see what will happen next. Where will a new horrible act will be executed and who will it effect.The Superbowl? The Olympics? The grocery store near my home?

As the globe moves slowly closer to a tipping point, the Earth’s children wait on the edge unable to see the consequences. Old choices are converging in our time. The compounded interest of greed, industry and exploitation are meeting in the extremes of our planet. The result is unexpected, unplanned for and unfathomable. Diseases, cancers and illness born from pollution. Resources once thought inexhaustible are disappearing in a generation. From meddling with systems that we do not understand.

We are constantly given changing circumstances. Change is the nature of the living. We live in times now when once predictable models are off course. The weather is unpredictable and every new pattern signals endless paths of possible futures. People are completely unpredictable, capable of horrific acts of violence and incredible levels of compassion. Diseases are acting in ways that far outpace research and planning.

In the unprecedented nature of everyday, I ask constantly ….what does this mean, what could this mean? For the very foundations of possibility seem to shift until the improbable becomes the probable and the unlooked-for becomes reality.

So, we wait. I gazed upon the cold frozen water on my hut, meditating on stillness until the bite of the cold brought me out of it and I hustled back to my warm home. What will break loose once this time of stillness and waiting is over. When the rivers start moving swiftly again, what will be mixed in the run-off?

I remain optimistic but fearful of the thaw. Sometimes the truth is a warm comfortable refuge. And the truth of change is that it will happen and no one knows how or when. For these days, I will warm myself by my fireplace and keep the fire burning hot.

Thanks for reading.

Passing Over and Moving On

This past week I have been helping my in-laws move. Their home has sold and they are wisely downsizing to a smaller home. My wife’s family is letting go of the house where they were a young family. They are doing this with grace and strength. My immediate emotional field is full of themes of  ‘letting go’ and ‘saying goodbye’ and ‘moving on’. With every trip I make to the storage unit, I see the street sign for Davidson road. I think on my friend with that last name who recently passed away after a fight with cancer. This weekend many of my friends gather to remember her.

I wish I could see her dancing at her wedding again. In the seventeen years I knew Becky, that was when I remember her happiest and most in love. My wife and I sat and watched her dance on that warm summer evening in Nashville. She lit the ballroom in her wedding gown, making the chandelier look dim and faded in comparison.

I remember Becky wrapped in her golden curls and smiling a big satisfied grin. Her smile that I remember was a content one. A grin that wants for nothing and needs nothing.

I  remember her voice and the chills she could send through me with the notes she hit. And her laugh. A laugh that made you feel like you are special, made you feel good.  A laugh that made you want to make her laugh again.

These past few years have seen a couple of  passings in my world. My mother a year and a half ago, my best friend’s father just a year ago, and Becky a few weeks ago. In all three of these people, their bodies could no longer contain them. Disease and illness had overcome their ability to resist.

There are many words and thoughts of comfort and condolences that surround us when someone we love is no longer among the living.

The lessons of Thich Nhat Hanh are comforting. He teaches looking deeply. He teaches that though the ones we love no longer inhabit a human body, they remain among us . Look deeply at your hads and see you mother and father, their mother and father and all your ancestors. They walk the Earth in your skin. Their blood is yours, their cells are yours.

And for our friends, those we love, looking deeply into our hearts, we can see the places they touched. We can feel the channels that flow differently because our lives collided with such wonderful, brilliant souls. Like Becky’s, though she and I were not close for several years, she touched my life. And my heart is changed because I knew her. And that flows out of me into the world in ways that I cannot track.

But when we consider the loss, my heart settles back to the ground. And I see that Becky and Rick and Kitt are not here. They are not living. I am grateful their bodies are not living. The thoughts and feeling that give us comfort are concerns for the living. The dead no longer suffer such sadness.

As for Becky, I wish I could see her dancing in her wedding dress again, and hear her laugh and sing.

A Narrow Path

I was baptized on my birthday. For many months now I felt in my heart that this was something I wanted to do. I have read and meditated and researched. While I feel that the act if baptism is an outward sign of what had all ready inwardly taken place; the preparation has deepened my understanding of my reality.

The morning of my 33rd birthday, I walked the woods of Camp Marymount, a place I have long called home. I walked around the lake and through the hills. I drank from the spring and walked up to a former sweat lodge site. I continued wandering the forest till I came to the Outdoor Chapel where I was married many years ago. A creek runs along the forest floor and I followed it. I found a deep pool and sat down for a time. Later I found a fallen maple tree lying across the stream. I sat on the tree and prayed and breathed. After some time I wrote in my prayer journal.

I am prepared to walk this Narrow Path: Giving all my Love, all my life away for the love of my people and my family and Earth and Creator, for my reality and to the Spirit. A narrow path, of compassion and forgiveness, of faith, of generosity of commitment. To hold the moment, to live and remain in the moment. Don’t fall to fret or fear for the future, nor lose  power by dwelling in the past.

The Narrow Path: To look ever deeper for more full understanding of reality. The way of emptiness and clarity. To surrender to Spirit and pour out myself for others.

The Way of Christ, the Way of Zen, of Suzuki, of Hanh, of Stalking Wolf and Brown. A claim of my spiritual lineage.

The Narrow path is the way of compassion, of awareness, of openness, of love and always inclusive.

As it is written:  for wide is the path and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many will find it. But narrow is  the path and difficult is the way which leads to life, and  few will find it.

Early that afternoon, my Father and wife and child came out to meet me. It was a cold windy cloudy day. We walked down to the woods together. I carried the Bible that belonged to my mother. I carried a hollow bone of a deer leg and the underside bones of a turtle that I had found on my walk early in the day. Towels also we carried. It was cold.

Reaching the bank of the stream, we said a prayer, I read a Psalm. My wife said some wonderful words and my father read a few passages out of the new testament. I stripped to shorts and my father and I got in the water. I knelt, then sat, then Dad laid me back submerging me in the frigid stream. Cold but exhilarating. I will not share the words to describe how I felt afterwords. That afternoon will be with me always.

Starts with the Spirit

Holding Our Breath

Like many people, I watched the Superbowl last Sunday  I stood by the couch folding the weeks clean laundry  When the voices of Jim Nance and Phil Sims suddenly fell silent, my attention was pulled from the clean towels to the upper deck of the Superdome. He heart sped up. I waited for the worst. Blessings come in abundance and a thousand a one prayers were answered  There was no catastrophic event, no horror waiting in the darkened seats. I feared the worst. Didn’t all of us fear the worst.

This should be a mark of the times. How our attention, our awareness has shifted. Shortly after September 11th, the government made a colored code for the level of concern and fear we be at in our daily lives. Once the level was set at emergency, did it ever come down? How can we ever lower the level of concern. We can’t. Once we react by placing  armed guards in kindergardens, they will never be dismissed. Horror has broken through to the realm of possibilities. Events of terror fantasy and violent fiction has become reality.

A few weeks ago I stopped by the store on my way home. I had a rough sinus infection that kept me awake the previous night and wanted to get some nyquil so I could sleep. The machine buzzed an alarm when I ran the bottle through self check out. An attendant came over to me to check my ID.

She spoke in the grocery store small talk, ‘What’s the world coming to’, she said ‘when I have to card you for cold medicine? Can’t trust no one for nothing. I have a little boy myself, hardly a year old. what kind of world will he have I wonder’ she said.

I don’t know any answer to that. But that making the world better for my children starts with me. Teach the children how the world is and how we hope the world would be. What can we do about the amount of fear and doubt and greed in the world? We start by not becoming hard, or cold, not succumbing to the fear. People have guns but the answer is not to get a gun myself. People fear each other but we can’t join in that and close off to relations.

These are no answers. i have no answers and I would not presume to tell anyone how to live. But for my family, we will hold faith, share love, starting in our own home and in our own neighborhood. I feel that is starts in my own garden, in my own heart. Amen

Holding Our Breath

The Veil Thins

This Advent season has been fast. I look for time each day to slow down, notice the air passing through my nostrils and the feel the moment.

Christmas is a season of teaching for these moments. In my heart I hold the moment to moment stillness of a Christmas night. The cold air makes each breath visible. Stillness also means quiet, as if the world speak in a whisper, the way we might whisper in a church, in the presence of the sacred.

And this is sacred. Christmas is a joining of Heaven and Earth. A joining of Creation and Created, of ether and earth. A time when The Star comes burning toward Earth. Comes close enough to glimpse behind the veil of creation.

In the cold, still, long darkness, anything is possible. Even evil can break through if a path is made. Christmas is no stranger to the slaughter of the innocent. A spark may ignite a into fire. Ice may break into flood. Great joy may be broken into deepest sorrow. Whispers seems as loud as thunder. The divine feels present. Like a secret being poorly kept. A Presence just behind the curtain.

And a joining is taking place. A celebration of light come to the darkness. A joining as in a marriage. The occas

ion of becoming both gift and given. And we celebrate the giving of what? Of our selves, of our love, of our attention and concern for each other. We become the gift, freely given and lovingly received. We are there for each other.

These long nights when we recognized and rejoice in the divine light we carry and share with one another. This is the good news and the Coming that brings us so much happiness. We long in excitement not for the material possessions but for the presence of Spirit.

My goal this Christmas, my intention in this night I spend awake: To deflect the cultural greed and selfishness that circulates among us and to shine back love and giving. Making my self the gift to the world. I aim to bring my most divine, my most infant, most innocent self to the world.

Waiting in the Dark

It is dark early in the evening. I walk off the elevator. The hospital is sterile, brightly lit, quiet but only muted. There is a emotion vibrating beneath the hard tiles.  The floors above are full of held breath, choked back tears, silent waiting moments.

I cross the courtyard which is vacant in the evening. The crossed brick patterned reflects the fluorescent sheen. The night shift staff is settled in their chairs and the day shift are all ready in traffic. I have been waiting for a close friend and teacher to live or die. I have been waiting to learn that a child will soon join us. I have been waiting for my shift in the Emergencyt o be over so I can go home and hold my wife.

These three or four blocks between the hospital towers, two red paper dolls and the expansive deserted parking lot with my truck waiting by a honey colored street light, these blocks are my time out of waiting. I walk step after step in the frost of late autumn and the dark that holds before the advent. I try not to rush. But my pace cannot fall too slow either. For there is too much potential change to linger on this walk.

Instead I walk in a regular pace, breathing deeply. Try to control all the worry and doubt and fear of not knowing what is around the next corner. The pain and concern of the unknown is the worst just before the turn is taken.

As a boy I feared the head lights of the oncoming cars because I could not see past them. And the fear and doubt builds and builds and reaches a crescendo to the instant before the car passes.

These times of waiting are unending. That car never passes. The corner is never taken. And the greatest fear though never realized is never out of range to possibility. But I walk the same steady unhurried, tense pace. I keep awake in the darkness. Eyes open to the coming change. I had vowed to stay awake but this is exhausting.

I look up and wait. I pray and hope and Wait. The advent is approaching.

Rooted and On Fire

When I lived alone, I used to lie on the floor of my apartment. Quiet the noises and dim the lights. Breath deeply and relax and feel gravity pulling me against the surface of the floor. When I was really tired, I would feel the exhaustion pulling me to a stop like brakes against the wheels, like putting your foot on the pavement to stop your bicycle. Feeling that relief and release when all motion finally stops. 

Breath and feel the full and complete stop to all palpable motion. Next I would feel my spine. Perhaps tense my back enough to be conscious of the support the spine provides. Feel the spine extend all the way down to the tailbone and continue through the floor into the soil. Pushing like a tree root into the Earth. Spreading out in every direction as a tree or a plant sends it roots out every direction in search of nourishment. So too, feeling roots expand and expand, gripping the Earth and branching through soil, over stones, into sand and around other roots.

This is to be of the Earth. Sharing the same soil and same space as the trees you can see and smell and touch. You are rooted in the same Earth, drinking in the same water, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide in the same air. Feel the spine rooted deep, deep in the Earth and relate to all things. This layer of Earth where everything begins, all potential is started and while not infinite, larger than our human comprehension. Feel rooted in the source of all things.

Now choose a single root and drive it deeper into the soil. Deeper through layer after layer of soil and silt and rock and shale. Deeper to the mantle, the foundations of the Earth. Deeper still to the warm liquid mama, the living, breathing, red, orange, hot, fired life blood of our planet. Feel that root at the core of the Earth. Feel rooted in the source of all things.

Allow that liquid fire to travel up the root. Bubbling, flowing up from the Core, up through the mantle following the root up the layers of shale and rock, up through layer after layer of silt and soil. Into the network of roots. Into the spine, up the spine in my back up to my neck and spilling like a fountain into my body, filling and over filling my form down into each finger and toe.

This is pure Earth energy. It is very powerful and very potent. Direct it to any wounds or pain.

I would lie on the floor of my apartment and feel rooted and nourished.

Long Form in the Redwoods

A little more than ten years ago, I sat in a clearing surrounded by Redwoods. The late morning mist dripped from their branches. I could feel the wetness on my skin. Not like my Tennessee home where the humidity covers you like a hot wet blanket. The California morning mist entered my lungs with each breath, fresh and cool. I could taste the forest loam flavor. I had come to this clearing to do a specific exercise as part of a class I was attending taught by Tom Brown Jr.

I sat on a log seat. My back was straight. My feet touched the ground. I tried to let my arms fall natuarlly to my sides with my hands uncrossed in my lap. I began the exercise. The first breath he called the Command Breath. I inhaled slowly and deeply, filling my lungs to capacity. I concentrated on putting all my stress, all my anxiety, all my fear, all my doubt…everything I needed to get out of my way into, that breath. I imagined the emotions and distractions becoming suspended in the air in my lungs. Then, I exhaled sharply  pushing out all the air, now saturated with wase, out of my body. I tried to see the air rising up, dispersing all my crap into the pale cloudy sky.

Next, I began to concentrate on my feet. I took a breath in calm and relaxed, then tensed the muscles in my feet to quarter strength, just enough to feel the grip in the soles of my shoes and notice my feet were little cold and a little wet in the stiff leather. I let the breath out easily, relaxing my feet feel at the same time. The stress and tension flow our of them. I could feel the difference in my feet compared to the rest of my body. It was like slowly walking into warm pool. I breathed in again and tensed my ankles and calves, again to quarter strength, relaxing the muscles as I exhaled. Next, my knees and thighs all the way up my body even to my head, face and ears. This is the Body Segment Relaxation part of this exercise. The second step.

Then I imagined a star shinning in the blue-grey sky. It’s light shone down on me blue, a little warm and glistening in the thick fresh air. The blue light shone on my feet first and slowly spread up my body until my whole form glowed with this blue light. This is called the Blue Light Sequence.

I tried to avoid distracting thoughts. At this time in my life I was pretty young and ignorant to these kind of things. Song lyrics were a constant demon of distraction to me. As was thoughts of travel and distance. While these distractions never really go away, we can learn to turn down the volume to near inaudible levels.

Next in the exercise was called the Pain Sequence. This is taking a pain in your body and removing it. This is also body control. While it is optional and not always necessary, I went though it this morning because my muscle were sore. I don’t remember doing this part very well.

After the optional part, came the Body Position Sequence. I tried to notice and be very aware of my position, how my arms fell, how my legs sat, I noticed my posture. I took another deep breath in and tried to feel the weight of my body in gravity. I tried to feel how heavy my form sat against the log underneath me. I noticed the additional weight of my feet on the ground. This is called the Gravity. The next step is to reverse the feeling and feel weigh-LESS. Allow the sensation of floating in space the come upon you. I remember imagining our place in space, how the atmosphere starts where the ground stops. I imagined floating in the ether. This is the Weightlessness.

Finally I relaxed and took another deep breath in, again filling my lungs to capacity but with a bit more calmness that the beginning breath. This time I pushed everything that still held me back. I put all final doubt of questioning and stress into the air in my lungs. Once built up as much as I could, I exhaled sparply but calmly. He called this the Breath to Surrender. We give up and give over to the universe, to Spirit, to whatever our intention is from there.

I would later learn that the end of this “Long Form Meditiation” is only a starting point. There is no finish.

The Summer of Soggy Shorts

Last weekend I hung a new rope swing in our backyard. This new one has a wooden plank for a seat. It is wide enough for about two butts to sit. The branch is high and the swing goes wide. My daughter loves her new swing.  I sit in the old rope swing which is just a double loop. My feet rest on the wooden seat of the new swing and my daughter sits in it holding onto the ropes on either side. We swing “two swings”. She squeals in laughter when we swing high. Her short blonde hair brushes her young cheeks. Her small hands squeeze a sure tight grip on the smooth nylon rope.  She is fearless, ignorant and strong.

The summer has been hot. We’ve had months of record temperatures. In Tennessee the humidity becomes a thick heavy shroud coating all creation in a warm gossamer blanket of wetness. But these past weeks, the shroud has lifted. The rains have come and cooled the land. These days have been cooler. We’ve been sleeping with the windows open and the air conditioner off. The Summer is ending.

Autumn approaches and I feel the temporary nature of this time spent swinging with my toddler daughter. She will not be a toddler for long. All ready she is becoming more of a little kid. As we swing back and forth, I become aware of the impermanence of this time. All of  this is only “for now”. She will never be a small child again.

The “Summer of 2012”, “the Summer of the Split Tomatoes”, “the Summer of Soggy Shorts”, the “Summer of the Two Week Beach Trip” is ending and there will never be another summer of its kind.

This is not a sad thought. Growth is not something to regret. The swing comes still and she runs to the garden. We eat okra off the stalk and she pretends to share bits with her baby doll. We share a laugh over the feeling a ripe okra seed popping between your teeth. They explode in tasty goo. My wife joins us in the yard. Her schooling is done now and the Autumn will see her getting the jobs she wants. Our little girl offers her a bit of raw okra and she takes it. A wonderful moment. My heart in our garden with my wife and child. Then, the mockingbird calls from the roof. An airplane flie overhead. Time takes another step.

I breath deeply and try to release any regret for experiences not had. Instead have faith that life will unexpected and surprising. This season is over and another will come. And another will follow. And another will follow.