The Spider and The Fly

It's popular today to let go of your story, or to stop your story or to rewrite your story. Yoga teachers, self-helpers, mindfulness people -- everyone, it seems, believes that our stories can hold us back from whatever our true purpose or intentions might be.

I've always felt uncomfortable with this, perhaps because I've woven a dense one. A thick story that I'm living by, a web that I've woven, sticky and strong, full of flies. Do I have to tell a different one? Is it holding me captive?

The poet Mark Nepo wrote that sharing our stories -- even over and over -- as they continue to press upon our hearts -- is sort of like chanting a mantra whose truth is, finally, released. His take on story is quite different in that it is by repetition that we find release.

I'm mulling these things as I tell my story -- here and elsewhere. The story that you know and the story that you don't know and won't know. I'm the spider and the fly.

Spring, Eliot and Nepo

We have much that is spring here in sunny southern California, gray mornings that seem protective of the plants, sleeping, before the brilliance of afternoon sun. The oak-leaf hydrangea reach ever higher in my front yard, each tiny white blossom a cup where hummingbirds hover.

Birds sing, too, and are nearly jubilant even as crows hop belligerent across the street, their caws less frantic than a month earlier.

Green isn't green but chartreuse, and marks the line between spring and summer.

April, though, is the cruelest month, as the poet wrote.

It breeds lilacs out the dead land, Mixing memory and desire.
(T.S. Eliot)

I have felt lower in April than March and certainly February, Winter kept us warm, Covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.

This morning, the birds sang and the crows hopped and Sophie hummed, but I felt as if I were pulling love out of shadow. I read this:

If you can't see what you're looking for, 
see what's there.

Close your eyes and know that though you may 
not see anything, you are growing, and that something
larger than you is carrying you toward the light.

I am growing. I am being carried toward the light. I lack nothing.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

The belly of our days

A cresting wave, Antigua, a million years ago

Good Lord, ya'll -- I'm hard up for words here at a moon, worn as if it had been a shell. The pink iceberg roses in the backyard are a riot and the oatmeal is crusty in a pot on the stove, interminable boys' laundry is spinning in the washer, and the dog's nails are clipping the floor to distraction, but I'm not really thinking about a damn thing. When I meditated this morning, I read the April 30th entry in Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening, and I thought you might find it interesting, if not helpful as you go about your day. There's some cliche in there, but like they say, there's a reason for that.

There's a quote from Basho, first:

Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey and the journey itself is home.

And then there's a brief story about the writer's immigrant grandmother, and then there's this:

I'm asking you to imagine the life of your spirit on earth as such an immigration, as one constant arrival in a new land. Given this, we must accept that no matter the shore before us, the swell and toss of the sea never ends. When brought to the crest of a swell, we can see as far as eternity and the soul has its perspective, but when in the belly of  those waves, we are, each of us, for the moment, lost. The life of the soul on Earth has us bobbing on a raft of flesh in and out of view of eternity, and the work of the inner pilgrim is to keep eternity in our heart and mind's eye when dropped in the belly of our days.

Then Nepo advises this:

Sit quietly and imagine yourself bobbing safely on the ocean of experience we never stop crossing.

Breathe deeply and imagine each day is a wave.

Enter your own rhythms and feel what kind of wave today is.

If today is cresting, look about you and take in all that you can see of life.

If today is a belly of a day, acknowledge the hardships you are facing.

Breathe slowly and remember that another crest is coming. Bring to mind the last rising, remembering what that enabled you to see. 

Two Things

This:

Hildegard of Bingen, The Spark of Creation, from the Liber Scivias, Book II, 12th century, Germany

and this:

... if we tend to things at the deepest level, our repair will be so much a part of who we are that there will be no scar. It is easier to bend underneath the surface, in the deep timeless fluid of the beginning, than to break once fully grown.


Mark Nepo, from The Book of Awakening