These words emerged in response to looking for a spiritual perspective to dealing with a natural disaster of this magnitude, the ongoing threat of possible loss of my home and property, the sadness at the destruction of life and living in dense smoke for weeks on end.
This poem was written in response to the Soberanes Fire, the costliest in U.S. recorded history, which has raged in our area for well over a month and is still not extinguished.
These words emerged in response to looking for a spiritual perspective to dealing with a natural disaster of this magnitude, the ongoing threat of possible loss of my home and property, the sadness at the destruction of life and living in dense smoke for weeks on end.
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.Somebody asked me recently, “How did you manage to pursue art while having a career in journalism and being a mother?” To answer that question I have to back up a ways, but the essence of it has to do with good fortune and following the pull of the heart. Although in journalism I found an interesting and stimulating career that utilized my writing skills, my real love has always been art -- an interest not encouraged in my family of origin.. My father, who was career military, often spoke witheringly of art or craft classes as “basket weaving,” leaving little doubt that anyone who pursued the arts was to be disdained.. I adored my father, so my artistic side was suppressed during my growing up years.. His military career took us to Germany for my sophomore and junior years in high school, and a family vacation to Rome awakened what would become a lifelong passion.. I had prepared myself for the trip by reading Irving Stone’s “Agony and the Ecstasy,” a biographical novel about Michelangelo.. But nothing could have readied me for the impact of this great master’s work.. When I saw his “Pieta” at St. Peter’s Cathedral, the statue of Mother Mary cradling the lifeless body of Christ, tears streamed down my face.. I had never in my life seen anything as exquisite and touching. How could this artist take a material as solid as marble and transform it into something so tender, poignant and evocative? I was moved to my core.. Soon after, I embarked upon my own art education, checking out books from the library about Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and other great artists of the past. But it still never occurred to me that art was something I might do myself. I was in my mid-20s and had been working for a daily newspaper on the Monterey Peninsula in California for about four years when I was asked to rewrite a press release about a summer offering at a local Episcopal day school. It was a program on book arts – topics ranging from calligraphy to hand bookbinding to manuscript illumination.. I just knew I had to enroll. Its appeal, I now realize, was in part that it was the polar opposite of journalism, where the work is executed in as quickly as possible under deadline, where the focus is on current events, and where the product is impermanent. These classes focused on arts with ancient roots, executed slowly and lovingly and created to last centuries. (Also not incidental, there was a religious overtone to it all, both the setting for the classes and the book arts themselves, which emerged from a monastic tradition..) I was hooked, and soon I had figured out a way to leave my job and sign up.. It would change my life.. Eventually, I began studying hand bookbinding with a teacher in San Francisco, traveling weekly the 2½ hours north from my home.. I continued my studies for about a decade moving from simple techniques to more complex and challenging ones, learning how to take apart limited-edition art books and rebind them in leather with cover designs fashioned out of leather onlays and gold tooling. By that time I didn’t have to commute to my classes as I was living north of San Francisco and working full time on staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. My books were in several exhibits including at John Howell Books, an antiquarian bookstore in San Francisco, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Arts, Sciences and Technology Center in Vancouver, B.C., and an international retrospective in Paris featuring a half-century of hand bookbinding. I also studied with a master bookbinder in Brussels, Belgium, for a month, but that experience paled in import when I received the news shortly before my departure that I was pregnant. After the birth of my daughter, bookbinding lost some of its appeal – it was too time-consuming and labor intensive to mingle well with the demands of motherhood. When our daughter was 3, I resumed work part-time at the local newspaper (we had moved back to the Monterey Peninsula) and began taking art classes at the nearby community college, ostensibly to be able to better design covers for my books.. What happened instead is that I fell in love with drawing and painting and composition and color and…you get the drift. I never looked back.. Over the years, I took as many classes as I possibly could while maintaining a healthy balance among art studies, mothering and wage-earning. When we lived for three years in Ohio, I studied art at the University of Toledo, falling just short of obtaining a second degree.. Thanks to the internet, from the time our daughter was 5 until the present day, I have been able to work part-time from home, even as the senior editor and later editor of quarterly regional food and lifestyle magazines.. I can’t take credit for how these fortuitous circumstances transpired except in this sense: I always gravitated toward doing what I loved, and that wasn’t just one thing. I loved writing; I loved art; I loved music (I’ll get to that another time); I loved my family, and I was reluctant to sacrifice any of it. My life was a reflection of what was important to me.. By grace, I was gifted with a blueprint that allowed for it all. I had the freedom to prioritize my daughter while she was growing up, to work in a stimulating field and to find time for art. How fortunate was I? What's the Takeaway from "Art & Soul"? If there’s anything that I would like people to take away from “Art & Soul,” it is an experience of stepping out of the realm of the material, with all its apparent conflicts, contradictions and confusion, and getting a taste of a higher state of consciousness. Why? Because not only does it feel good in the moment, but more importantly, this place is nothing extraordinary.. It is our natural state.. So these poems, prayers and paintings are simply pointing us back to the truth of ourselves, to the peace, joy, love and wisdom that is our essence.. If you’re anything like me, once you get a taste of it, you will probably want to revisit it again and again.. What’s the best way to do that? By becoming still and turning your awareness -- which is usually focused on the outer world -- inside.. In so doing, you will discover what really drives your engine. . So what are you likely to find in there? First you might notice aches and pains in your body.. That’s good.. “Really,” you say, “that’s good?” Yes, it’s good because you have no doubt been ignoring these places. The aches and pains are the body’s way of trying to get your attention, to tell you, “Hey, I’m been overworked, or used improperly.” It’s not necessary to figure out what’s wrong, though sometimes it can be helpful to label the feelings, give words to them such as “itching,” “stinging” or “numbness,." Doing that can help you to stop identifying with the experience, to realize that it is just a sensation, but it’s not you. The best news is that the simple act of paying attention can, in and of itself be healing. Take one sensation at a time and hold it in kind, loving awareness. What you will most likely find is that the places of discomfort will begin to calm down and dissipate.. Another thing you will likely discover when you slow down and focus inward is that your mind is very active.. You will no doubt experience a running discourse on everything from how boring it is to be sitting and doing nothing to, “Why did Barbara look at me that way?”, to how pissed off you are at your boss for something he/she did or didn’t do, to how much you like that new TV show you watched last night.. It’s endless.. And that’s OK.. That’s the nature of mind. Just notice what it’s doing, perhaps label the thoughts, and watch them go by.. If nothing else, you will notice what preoccupies you. Eventually, you may begin to have the recognition that, as with the aches and pains, all those thoughts are just passing phenomena. They are not you. And, if you stay with it, after a while what you will begin to notice is that the thoughts will slow down.. If nothing else, you will end your session feeling more relaxed and refreshed.. If you are persistent (and fortunate) maybe the thoughts will stop altogether. Believe it or not, rather than being boring, that’s when the good stuff really begins.. In that “no thingness” of the thought-free state you will discover a sense of Presence.. There is a void, an emptiness of content, but it is filled with something that cannot really be described.. If we try to put words to it they are inadequate, but we come up with things like peace, joy, bliss, awe.. For me, most times it’s a blackness filled with points of light that is similar to looking at the night sky.. It’s like I have tumbled into spaciousness as vast as the cosmos, a vastness filled with love.. Resting there rejuvenates body and soul and likewise has the side effect of seemingly softening the contours of your waking life.. You have more resources to meet challenges and ironically there seem to be fewer challenges. It’s not a bad return on a small investment of your time.. Turning to Spirit Within In my last post I described how the prayers in “Art & Soul” differ from the conventional approach.. These prayers, rather than being “to” something are “from” a place of deep connection with Spirit. They are structured to bring about a shift in awareness away from the material plane to that vast formless Power and Presence that was never born and never dies and is the Creative Intelligence underlying everything. They follow a specific format designed by Dr. Ernest Holmes, the founder of Religious Science, a teaching that seeks to uncover the truth that weaves through all the religious and spiritual traditions.. First, the names and qualities of the Divine are evoked to turn the attention away from the world of forms and toward the sacred.. Next, the person praying unifies with this Divine Presence -- call it God or Goddess, Allah, Great Spirit, or whatever name feels right -- by acknowledging that it is everywhere present and, as such, exists within each and every one of us as well as without. How could it be otherwise if God is omnipresent? Then the circumstances that the one praying desires to experience are described in the most positive and convincing terms possible.. And finally, the outcome is given over to a Higher Power to achieve.. As the consciousness of the individual is shifted away from whatever is perceived as the problem and toward this vast Consciousness that underlies everything, he/she activates a spiritual field that has the power to create something greater, something beyond the capacity of the individual personality.. In aligning with this inner dimension, what Deepak Chopra calls the Field of Infinite Potential, and claiming it as a reality within our own being, the problem-based thinking is transformed and the situation is handed over to this Infinite Presence to resolve.. The relief on an energetic level is palpable and virtually always immediate.. And quite frequently, the by-product is that the perceived problem simply disappears and the desirable circumstance begins to take form.. At the deepest level, this kind of prayer is a form of surrender to a Higher Power that has the wisdom to know what is best in every circumstance.. There is a trust and freedom that allows the ego to relax and be at peace with what is.. * * * * I started writing poetry during silent meditation retreats about a decade ago. During these retreats my mind became so still and I was so filled with love, beauty and peace that I wanted to capture and express what I was experiencing. I can’t really claim authorship; the poems simply emerge out of the silence.. One day, after several years of writing poetry, I suddenly remembered that as a young woman in college I had wanted to be a poet. However, coming from a very practical family none of whom were college graduates, I did not think I could earn a living as a poet, so I channeled my writing abilities into journalism.. It was a revelation to realize decades later that I had finally come home to my original yearning. As for the artwork, I have been pursuing art as a sideline all my adult life.. I started out doing hand bookbinding and showed my work internationally before I set it aside to rear my daughter. Eventually I was pulled to drawing and painting and studied art at the local community college and later University of Toledo in Ohio.. About 15 years ago, I lost interest in interpreting the outer world and only wanted to convey inner experiences.. Like the poems, the artwork simply emerges out of the silence or out of the energetic field created by chanting. The paintings are my best attempt to give form to that which is beyond form – a paradox for sure.. It is my sincere hope that this book offers a taste of these same blissful experiences to anyone who takes the time to imbibe it. It is not a book to “read” so much as to absorb. Those who are drawn to it may want to use it like an oracle – simply open to a random page and see what it has to offer. It just may be the perfect antidote for whatever challenges are appearing in the moment -- balm for the heart and soul. Creating the work in this book was pure joy and fulfillment. Everything in it reflects an experience of higher states of consciousness -- the inherent peace, presence and happiness that can be found when we are in connection with Source, which is our own essence and lies within our own hearts. I decided to compile all the elements – the prayers, the poems and the paintings – into a book in the hopes that anyone who took the time to let the words and images really wash over them might get a dose of what I had experienced in their creation -- a taste of the sacred.. It took me four years between the conception of the idea in 2012 and the publication of the book late this spring. The prayers were all written for the cover of the Order of Service at the Center for Spiritual Awakening (then Pacific Coast Church) in Pacific Grove, where I am associate minister. Congregants kept reporting to me that they had pasted them up on their refrigerators or on mirrors in their bathrooms and that they were still referring to them years later. After hearing this from a number of people, it occurred to me that perhaps if I put them all together in some form it might be a useful resource.. The prayers are tailored to address a specific need or desire.. Say, for example, a person is feeling alone and that nobody cares, the prayer entitled “Support” might help them dissipate these fear-based beliefs and feel more empowered.. All the prayers follow a format designed to bring the person praying into alignment with the spiritual essence that lies at the core of every one of us.. The prayers are not “to” something out in the ethers somewhere, they are prayers “ from” a place of consciousness connection with the Spirit within.. The connection is actually cultivated by the structure of the prayers.. It is a form developed by Dr. Ernest Holmes, the founder of Religious Science, a teaching that elucidates the “golden thread of truth” that weaves through all religious and spiritual traditions.. I'll tell you more about the hows and whys of this type of prayer and talk about how the poems and paintings came into being in my next posting. A Soulful Homecoming I recently finished reading “Pilgrimage through Loss” by Linda Lawrence Hunt, a poignant, sometimes heart-wrenching book written by an author, teacher and scholar whose 25-year-old daughter, Krista, was killed in a bus accident while she was in Bolivia with her husband doing humanitarian work.. I obtained the book last fall after attending my high school reunion in Spokane, Wash.., where I stayed in the retreat center that Linda and her husband, Jim, created on their property as a memorial to their daughter. This facility, called “The Hearth,” is a beautiful two-story house with living room, dining room, full kitchen, two bedrooms, 2.5 baths and a library, constructed on the site of a former barn behind their hillside home -- the home that my parents owned for 12 years and where I spent my formative years.. As I read this sensitively written account, I found myself on the brink of tears much of the time as Linda recounts her sojourn through the darkness of the loss of their beloved daughter, sharing not only her own personal story and those of family members, but the stories of many other families she came to know, who have likewise traversed this searing and unwelcome landscape.. Her intention was to create a work that could offer solace and guidance, and, yes, perhaps even understanding, to all those grieving the loss of a loved one, but most particularly anyone who has lost a child.. Somewhat ironically, when I was staying at The Hearth it had only been 6 months since the passing of my mother at the age of 92.. My 90-year-old father had preceded my mother in death by three years, so I had now lost both parents.. (They had relocated across the state to Longview after they sold the house in Spokane..) This was the first time since their passing that I had revisited my childhood home, and I was still actively grieving my mother and awash in memories of all that had transpired in this warm and inviting neighborhood, which I had left with deep regret at the age of 15 when we joined my father, who was career Army, in Augsburg, Germany.. Thanks to the kindness and generosity of the Hunts, I had stayed at The Hearth before, a decade earlier when I attended a previous reunion, and I had seen and experienced the transformation in the property since Krista’s tragic accident. The grounds had been turned into something of astonishing beauty -- park-like, with waterfalls and koi ponds, a variety of trees, shrubs, flowers galore, bridges, benches, statuary, nooks for contemplation.. The verdant lushness of the setting, lovely when my family had lived there, now took my breath away.. Though I didn't talk about it with the Hunts, I intuitively knew that all this exquisite beauty was their way of honoring their precious daughter and dealing in a tangible way with this shattering tragedy.. I was equally taken with The Hearth itself, the care and attention that had obviously been expended on every detail. The house is handsome in a sturdy, earthy way that is just my taste and filled with Christian art and artifacts, books and remembrances of Krista. I immediately could feel that this was sacred space, filled with reverence.. Indeed, The Hearth was the outgrowth of the Krista Foundation, which the Hunts had established in their daughter's memory to provide support to similarly inspired young people who wanted to do humanitarian work in the world.. This earlier visit took place before Linda had written “A Pilgrimage Through Loss,” and both my parents were still alive at the time, so although I was touched and even inspired by all that I saw, the experience did not have as much impact on me as on this more recent stay when I was going through some measure of the kind of loss -- albeit quite different since my parents died in accord with life's natural progression at a ripe old age -- that had under-girded all this transformation.. As I gazed down from the second-story bedroom window at The Hearth onto the back of the house -- including my childhood bedroom, now Linda’s office -- and the yard where my two younger sisters and I had cavorted with our dogs, built makeshift tents on the clothesline, slept out in sleeping bags under the stars, played badminton and fashioned angels in the snow, there was a bittersweet quality that had not been there before.. Time’s relentless march had stripped away the preceding generations that had been an integral part of my life when we lived there.. My father’s parents had resided in a small one-bedroom guest house adjacent to the main house, and at one point, my mother’s parents had lived in our basement, so we had two sets of grandparents on the premises.. Now both sets of grandparents and my parents were gone. Reading Linda’s book in small doses over the past months since my return to my California home has felt intensely personal as I traveled with her and her family through the bleak chasm of grief and loss. I got to know their beloved Krista and learn a bit about their two other children, Susan and Jefferson.. I was allowed a glimpse into that pivotal agony and vulnerability when they received the news of Krista’s death, and the horror, the shock, the debilitating, paralyzing sorrow that ensued.. I traveled with Linda and Jim as they journeyed to the village in Bolivia where Krista had been working to establish a library and stepped with them into the primitive hut she and her husband, Aaron, had transformed into a cozy home.. As part of reclaiming her own life, Linda eventually established relationships with other parents who had lost children, and their stories and how they coped with their grief, are woven into the narrative.. The backdrop for anecdotes in the book is often the Hunts' Spokane home -- “my” home where some of the most vivid and identity-shaping events of my life took place.. At one point in the book Linda refers to a tiered rock garden made by previous owners – my grandfathers.. I remember them toiling one summer to reclaim a sloping hillside behind the house and transforming it into something beautiful, planted with rock roses and flowering shrubs.. Linda describes the process of building The Hearth on the site of a decrepit barn, which was torn down.. That barn was old but not decrepit when we lived there.. It was home to a flock of banty hens and our lamb, Paddie (born on St. Patrick’s Day), and backdrop for our learning about the miracle of birth, as several litters of kittens and puppies came into the world..
Part of a hillside had been cut away to accommodate the barn, so on the back side of the structure the ground was actually at roof level. There was only about a 2-foot gap between the barn and the hillside, and so as kids we were constantly scrambling up on the gravel-shingled roof and perching on the peak, then running down the side and jumping back onto the hillside -- something that would have appalled my mother had she known about it. Linda recounts how one day Krista and a friend had dipped their hands in paint and applied hand-prints to the door. When the barn was demolished, that section was saved and, with some added ornamental paintings, used to adorn at The Hearth's entrance.. So the old barn, with Krista's imprimatur, is memorialized. It’s a little confusing, this intensity.. I feel it all so acutely.. As I read this book, their story and my story, are intertwined.. Because of my childhood memories I feel quite proprietary about "their" home.. My life there, in that same place, though it exists only in memory, is no less real than is theirs, happening now in time and space.. In a sense, this truth is perfectly illustrated by all tangible transformations throughout the property created out of love for Krista, who herself exists now only in memory.. So their lives and mine are interwoven, and I feel deeply related, not by birth, but by place -- and by the universality of the human condition.. None of us goes through life without loss, some more devastating than others.. Like it or not, at some point or another, we all are called upon to dig deep into ourselves, to face sorrow and disappointment, question our beliefs and assumptions, excavate ourselves from emotions that threaten to bury us and move forward when we have no idea where we're going and there seems no point or purpose.. Linda's book does not try to pretend that it's easy or that they will ever get over Krista's absence, but it does illustrate how we all can be tempered by such adversity and the positive changes that can result, both internal and external. While nobody wants to suffer great loss, there is no doubt that with it something in us can deepen and soften, and we feel the connection with all of humanity.. But this happens only if we can open completely to all our feelings, allowing them to reshape us as only the fire of such ego-annihilating events can do.. Our human condition is very fragile, and we are kidding ourselves if we believe otherwise.. What is not fragile, however, is the love that created and sustains us -- whether you call it God, Consciousness, the Self, the name is immaterial -- it remains with us through all the ins and outs, ups and downs of our lives.. It does not always give us what we want, but it always, always offers a beacon, even in the darkest hours, that can lead us home.. In my case, with this particular journey with the Hunts, it is to a recognition that home is not a place.. I had to bid farewell to this childhood home in Spokane that I cherished.. I was uprooted and forced to move on.. A part of me has always wished that my family had never sold that house and wondered how my life might have been different had we not moved.. I realize now that although it would have been different, it would not necessarily have been better. I had my own path to follow and it led me away from Spokane, to foreign shores and eventually to California, where I have lived most of my adult life.. And so, nostalgia notwithstanding, I make my peace with this phase of my history and share this legacy of place with another family, feeling gratitude for this connection that allows me to return again and again. True home is in the heart, and the heart is portable.. It goes wherever I am, and, as I have found after many years of meditation practice, exists only in the present moment. Anything else is imagination.. In the most real sense, there is no past and no future, only now. So while it is entertaining and sometimes illuminating to revisit old memories and speculate on how things could have been, the present holds the real riches.. Everything in the material world is impermanent, which is the deepest lesson of great loss:. All things will pass.. So the more we can open fully to the present, the more we loosen the grip of suffering and can feel love and beauty that is always available here now. For further information about the Krista Foundation visit Kristafoundation.org. |
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In my youth I wanted to be a poet, but channeled my writing skills into journalism -- a much more practical pursuit. I worked for daily newspapers and magazines for over 30 years as a writer and editor, focusing on food, interior design, art and architecture. As my spiritual life began to occupy a bigger and bigger part of my life, I came full circle and finally began to write poetry. My passion is to express the sacred through writing, art and music and to help others do the same. Archives
December 2019
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