The paradox of prosperity

From A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink (p.35)

"The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven't budged.  That's why more people - liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it - are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning.  As Columbia University's Andrew Delbanco puts it, 'The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.'"

Beer, Sex, Shopping, Chocolate, God

From the Chapter, “Beer, Sex, Shopping, Chocolate, God” in Saints and Madmen, How Pioneering Psychiatrists Are Creating a New Science of the Soul by Russell Shorto

Andre Papineau, a Catholic priest from Milwaukee, has a perspective on the confluence of psychology and spirituality:

One of the tenets of a psychospiritual perspective is that spirituality, striving for something beyond the confines of ordinary individual consciousness, is natural to us all.  If the socially sanctioned paths to it – religions – are cut off or overgrown or otherwise useless, we find others.  Madness is one alternate route.  But there may be others.   There may be paths that are not authorized by any known church or temple, and that also don’t fit the definition of serious mental illness.  These are the paths that crisscross the terrain of ordinary life, the ways that all of us, every day, try to break free.

Addiction is one of Papineau’s favorite topics.  Addiction, in his mind, is an intriguing, ornately carved, though tragically short flight on the staircase of psychospiritual transcendence.  For an old-fashioned drunk, sitting of an afternoon in a dark, stale-smelling bar, Papineau will tell you, “God is in the beer.”  You might think that by this he means that the alcoholic worships his drink, and you would be right.  But he means it truly, not ironically.  Alcoholics are initiates into the Mystery, as true a group of seekers as those in seminary or yeshiva.  This is not, Papineau admits, a politically correct observation, but he believes it is a compelling one.

His starting point for this insight, which he developed over years of working with people who are struggling with the modest tortures of life, was Jung, who expressed to Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, his belief that “craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.”  (William James too insisted that the “drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness.”)  The Jungian Self, the center of the psyche, the part of the individual that seeks union with the infinite, tries to achieve this union by projecting its internal striving outward, onto an object.  In the case of an alcoholic, the object is drink.

To this psychological perspective Papineau adds a religious layer, borrowed from the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner.  Rahner talked about what he called the transcendental horizon:  the visible edge of wholeness and infinity toward which the soul continually journeys but never truly reaches.  This horizon is the farthest, highest, and truest home of all our longings.  It is the oxygen from which every human act of love and knowledge takes its breath.

Put simplistically, a psychological view locates the ultimate goal and source of this longing – the Self -  inside the person, while some theological views call it God and place it on the outside.  But in overcoming the dualistic split between body and mind/soul, one transcends the split between earth and heaven.  If you come to see all reality as one, then religion and psychology merge, or at least significantly blend into one another.  Psychological problems become spiritual problems, and are susceptible to spiritual solutions.

This awareness is not Papineau’s alone.  In varying degrees one might say it is shared by all psyche-spirit practitioners.  Paul Duckro considers that a woman with an eating disorder may be acting out a spiritual hunger; Tomas Agosin sees a patient falling in love with him as a projection of her Self, her “God-within,” onto him.  These interpretations come from the doctors’ seeing body, mind, and soul as all of one substance, or on one continuum.

But Andre Papineau goes a bit further.  What he is getting at in talking about addictions is, in part, the psychospiritual core of Alcoholics Anonymous.  You have sought spiritual fulfilment, but in the wrong place; now put yourself directly in God’s hands.  But, according to Papineau, the twelve-step programs highlight only part of the truth.  The darker reality is that the alcoholic, drink in hand, is on a spiritual path – as is a heroin addict, a crackhead, even a chainsmoker.  The spiritual component isn’t the thing itself but the longing.  In the reaching out for the object of mystery, the self vanishes; you become an arrow.  “The point is that we are all drawn toward the transcendent, the Other,” he said.  “And that is, inevitably, an impossible goal to achieve.  We reach out for It, capital I...but find that what we have grabbed is an  it – a lowercase thing.  So we supercharge this thing, this mere object.  We invest it with transcendent energy.”

Alcohol is one of the many objects that we supercharge.  Addiction is the clinical term for a particular pitch this universal striving may take.  Addictions, delights, interests, obsessions, preoccupations, tics, and hobbies:  all are escapes from the self to the Self, all are roads to the transcendent horizon.  It can be sought in beer, chocolate, cigarettes, gambling, shoes, antiques, old coins, garden gnomes, lacquer boxes, model trains, porcelain vases, elephant earrings, heirloom seeds, or baseball cards.  It can be sought in overeating or dieting, in orgasms or old movies.  Practically anything can trip the lock on the self and send it on the path of transcendence.  One needn’t be clinically addicted for it to happen – a DSM diagnosis is not a prerequisite to entering the psychospiritual sphere.  Having a passion or hobby will do.  Curiosity and arousal are just fine.  To a genuine religious sensibility, everything is spiritual.

One difficulty with this view is that according to traditional psychology (and common sense) developing an intense passion for gambling or sex or vodka or chocolate is not a good at all but a defense, a weakness, an escape from reality.  How can such strivings be that and also genuine spiritual endeavors?  Perhaps because we live in the here and now:  a spiritual journey may be a journey of psychological growth, but if it comes at the expense of ordinary concerns – of family, work, physical health – it is flawed, for in its passionate reaching it forgets what is right in front of us, which at best is at least half of what it means to be human.

In Andre Papineau’s widened psychospiritual sensibility, the healthiest of strivings are, at least in part of the way, indistinguishable from the vices and obsessions.  To have, rear, and love children, to bond with friends and community, to give oneself, to live and die well:  these are psychospiritual strivings, journeys toward the horizon.  Love is the quintessential road to that horizon.  Losing yourself in the mystery of another is the definition of love; head-over-heels is a state of intoxication.  “In love,” Papineau said, “you reach out for that transcendent horizon, and find it embodied in another person.  But in supercharging this other, you place an impossible burden of expectation on the person.  Eventually you realize the person isn’t the All.  You become disillusioned.”

This is where things get interesting.  Depression too is a psychospiritual condition.  Disillusionment, Papineau believes, whether with a lover, a drug, or life, is “a form of liberation.”  The Latin root of illusion is ludere, to play.  If all of our striving, transcendence-seeking activities – love affairs, pastimes, business ambitions – are destined to come up short of the ultimate, they are illusive, but this fact does not mean that we should not reach outward (the only other choice is to reach inward – to sink into narcissism), but that we should keep the element of play alive in them.  Play can be a serious thing, but it also has an aspect of lightness.  We should proceed, but stay light on our feet. 

Rumi

THINKING AND THE HEART'S MYSTICAL WAY

A peaceful face twists with the poisonous nail of thinking.

A golden spade sinks into

a pile of dung.  Suppose you loosen an intellectual knot.

The sack is empty.  You've grown

old trying to untie such tightenings, so loosen a few more,

why knot!  There is a big one

fastened at your throat, the problem of whether you're in

harmony with that which has

no definition.  Solve that!  You examine substance and

accidents.  You waste

your life making subject and verb agree.  You edit hearsay.

You study artifacts and think

you know the maker, so proud of having figured the derivation.

Like a scientist you collect

data and put facts together to come to some conclusion.

Mystics arrive at what they

know differently: they lay a head upon a person's chest

and drift into the answer.

Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire. A

mystic sits inside the burning.

There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination

loves to watch.  But it's

a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight.  Stay

here at the flame's core.

                                                                       -Rumi

go to the limits of your longing....

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going.  No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Rainier Maria Rilke

To speak up or not to speak up....that is the question

Recently started a new job where I was immediately immersed in training events.  While I enjoyed the content, the presentation wasn't really suited for adult learners.  By this I mean that to engage adult learners, as a presenter/teacher, one has to be interactive, inclusive and elicit the participation of adult learners by asking them to share their own intrinsic wisdom and experiences, both life and learning experiences.  I realize that perhaps this is an approach that I have because I have been educated in adult learning theory through my Masters degree program in Adult & Higher Education at USM, but I also think that this approach to teaching and learning in adulthood is very intuitive, and in all honesty, much more interesting for the presenter/teacher.

So, in my feedback to the training department, I gave them very specific ideas and suggestions about how they could improve/change their way of presenting even basic orientation material.   Well, the shit hit the fan as soon as I sent an email to the Training & Development Manager!   She immediately shared my email to her with my direct supervisor who called me and basically chewed me out and gave me a lecture about how the way they do things is "necessary" for the material in orientation.  Yikes! Why is it that people get so defensive when you hit a nerve of truth in them and their way of doing things??!  Why bother to give honest feedback when you get that kind of reaction?  Now, I feel like I have a "black mark" on my record....Catherine is that upstart, uppity smarty-pants that wants to rock the boat!  Story of my life!  I take my personal power and intelligence and power of observation and critical thinking and apply it, and where does it get me?....in the corner, as if I should be in detention for thinking for myself and sharing my ideas with others!

So, my question to any of you out there is:  what do you do?  Do you speak up about your opinions and observations in any given situation, or do you just eat it and shut up to leave the status quo?

I'm tired of being silent, shutting up and putting up....with the status quo!  I want to speak my truth and be respected for that and taken seriously, with acknowledgement and acceptance!  Maybe it's a pipe dream....but I'm not going to give it up!  Thanks for listening :)

Love II

Love protects us from nothing, even as it unexplainably sustains us in all things....

Love

"You, O Love, are the eldest of all, altogether mighty.  To you we pay homage!" - Vedic hymn

What frightens us....

“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”  - Rainier Maria Rilke

On Suffering (from Richard Rohr)

Suffering

Transforming Pain
Wednesday, October 17, 2018

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. I am sorry to admit that I first see my wounds as an obstacle more than a gift. Healing is a long journey.

If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.

Scapegoating, exporting our unresolved hurt, is the most common storyline of human history. The Jesus Story is about radically transforming history and individuals so that we don’t just keep handing on the pain to the next generation. Unless we can find a meaning for human suffering, that God is somehow in it and can also use it for good, humanity is in major trouble. Because we will suffer. Even the Buddha said that suffering is part of the deal!

We shouldn’t try to get rid of our own pain until we’ve learned what it has to teach. When we can hold our pain consciously and trustfully (and not project it elsewhere), we find ourselves in a very special liminal space. Here we are open to learning and breaking through to a much deeper level of faith and consciousness. Please trust me on this. We must all carry the cross of our own reality until God transforms us through it. These are the wounded healers of the world, and healers who have fully faced their wounds are the only ones who heal anyone else.

As an example of holding the pain, picture Mary standing at the foot of the cross or, as in Michelangelo’s Pietà cradling Jesus’ body. One would expect her to take her role wailing or protesting, but she doesn’t! We must reflect on this deeply. Mary is in complete solidarity with the mystery of life and death. It’s as if she is saying, “There’s something deeper happening here. How can I absorb it just as Jesus is absorbing it, instead of returning it in kind?” Consider the analogy of energy circuits: Most of us are relay stations; only a minority are transformers—people who actually change the electrical charge that passes through us.

Jesus on the cross and Mary standing beneath the cross are classic images of transformative spirituality. They do not return the hostility, hatred, accusations, or malice directed at them. They hold the suffering until it becomes resurrection! That’s the core mystery of Christianity. It takes our whole life to begin to comprehend this. It tends to be the wisdom of elders, not youngers.

Unfortunately, our natural instinct is to try to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, to try to understand it. The ego insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until we are moved by grace to a much deeper level and a much larger frame, where our private pain is not center stage but a mystery shared with every act of bloodshed and every tear wept since the beginning of time. Our pain is not just our own.

Gateway to Presence:
If you want to go deeper with today’s meditation, take note of what word or phrase stands out to you. Come back to that word or phrase throughout the day, being present to its impact and invitation.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC Publishing: 2016), 199, 120-121.

Rilke

 

Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you:  beauty and terror.

Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

I, 59

Rainier Maria Rilke

Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Translated by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

On Art and Artists

Adapted from Martha Beck:

A lot of artists – filmmakers, writers, painters – specialize in showing how people land in hell.  Their work plumbs the recesses of human depravity and despair, shows lives disintegrating into chaos, unsparingly depicts the madness of relationships and societies gone awry.

Big, fat, hairy deal.

I’ll tell you this for free:  anyone can go to hell.  Most of us do so regularly; it’s a very short commute from ordinary life.  No one has to tell me that pain is ubiquitous and we’re all going to die.  I respect the talent of artists who dwell on this message, but they are worlds away from wayfinders, artists who Form creations that take their audience to hell and back.  Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence.  Good artists often get stuck there.  Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.

To Hell and Back (adapted from Martha Beck)

A lot of people say, “I need to find my passion.”  They rarely realize that the word “passion” is from the Latin pati, “to suffer,” or that passion originally meant “pain” (as in The Passion of Christ).  Knowing that, it becomes much easier to track your passions; even if you feel no interest in anything, odds are you have suffered.  Wayfinders of all cultures know that healing the self from any kind of torment is the groundwork for healing others, for creating a positive change in the world of Form and thereby establishing your career, your life’s work.  Let’s track your true nature along this path of passion.  It’s often the clearest trail.

Think of the worst thing you’ve ever survived.  Describe it.  Then think of the next-worse thing.  If you’ve had a long and eventful life, you may be able to make a list of several ways you’ve been to hell:  being jilted, being jilted at the altar, having a miscarriage, developing tennis elbow, getting robbed at gunpoint, accidentally pressing “Send to All” on a very private email involving photographs of your special body parts.  Pick your top five, in order of awfulness, and then write them down to consider.

Though these experiences were dreadful, because they were dreadful, they are also precious.  Pain gives our true nature an objective we can pursue with genuine passion.  Whatever ways you’ve been to hell, you can make the experiences meaningful by leading others out of the same grim spot.  The most motivating thought for a suffering wayfinder is “I can help other people who’ve been through this.”  This is a win-win-win-win idea.  It helps heal the healer, transforms the tragedy itself into a gift of grace, blesses and repairs other beings and radiates healing outward to the entire Great Self.

Language and Transcendence

Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under the control of reason, but a delight in unknowing has also been part of the human experience. Even today, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment.

One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. 

We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to slide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence.....Language has borders that we cannot cross. 

When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness. “It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers,” explains the British critic George Steiner, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.”

George Steiner, Language and Silence (London: 1967), 58-59.

Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (Alfred A. Knopf: 2009), xiv, xviii.

Quiet surrender (for Jim)

You know that time with someone, when you can truly approach them, I mean who they are, the part that they've been holding to themselves for protection.  But sometimes there's an opportunity of quiet surrender when you can get close and be peacefully, lovingly, with deep acceptance with that person.  I love those moments of knowing, of being, simply two people loving and trusting each other unconditionally and without reservation....

LOVE DOES THAT

All day long a little burro labors, sometimes

with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries

about things that bother only

burros.

And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting

than physical labor.

Once in a while a kind monk comes

to her stable and brings

a pear, but more

than that,

he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears

and for a few seconds the burro is free

and even seems to laugh,

because love does

that.

Love frees.

- Meister Eckhart

Me and my sis and bipolar

When I was six years old, I was looking at a photo album my mother had put together of our family, and I started crying; crying because I knew someday that everyone in that photo album was going to die.  I felt their mortality, and mine with it and I was overwhelmed by a profound sense of loss and loneliness that I had no words for, no expression for, no way of talking about to my parents, or to anyone else.  I thought there was something wrong with me.  Of course there was; it was either the dawning of an existential being, or the beginning of a life of crazy! 

            Years later, I had an equally profound, yet different experience.  Somewhere around age twelve, I was walking with my family on a warm spring afternoon, right after the rain had subsided.  My sister and I were ahead of my parents, running and splashing around in the puddles, laughing and having so much fun.  Suddenly the sun came out, streaming through the trees; I turned around to look at my parents and I was overcome by a penetrating sense of joy, even beyond joy; it was something like ecstasy.  I felt beyond myself, as if I was looking at my family from a distance and seeing them as they were from the inside out.  I felt full of love for them…they were beautiful; everything was beautiful and I felt connected to all that was around me, at one with the world that surrounded me, that was beside me, inside of me, part of me. Energy was coursing through my body and I felt truly alive – I was trembling with electricity; the light was brilliant and there were rainbow colors hovering around me. The feelings were real, more real than anything I had ever felt.  I felt whole; I was connected to my self, my family, to nature, to all of my surroundings in a way I had never experienced before.  I was free and full and deep and open and full of beauty and joy.  That lasted for what seemed hours, but it was only minutes and then it dissipated and I felt bereft, as if I’d lost something precious, essential to my being.  I felt confused and lost and lonely again, as I did when I was that six-year old.  There was obviously some strange force working in me, right?  Later in life, my psychiatrist would tell me I was bipolar because of these swings from “mania” to “depression,” but I went somewhere different than that damaging diagnosis....

Aesthetic bereavement

"Live and create. Live life to the point of tears." - Albert Camus

Why do we cry when we see and experience art and beauty?  Perhaps it's the fact that, in representation, art and beauty, point to the ideal, hints at the exception to our everyday life, allows us to reach to the full potential of our being.  There is a deep, wrenching poignancy to the beautiful, to the art that shows us the vulnerability of ourselves and our world.  When you witness an architectural form, a painting, a landscape, a spectrum of colors, the ineffable in words, you enter into an altered state of consciousness; an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace and awe....imagine walking into the Sistine Chapel and looking up at that ceiling....it's breathtaking, or a Gothic cathedral where the light coming through the stained glass windows is like the sunlight filtering through the trees....memory, recognition, transcendent understanding....

Go chase beauty today....I am....

Breaking open

"I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world."  - Mary Oliver

Where have you been so that you have fallen deeply in love with that place that conspired to crack the shell of your usual quiet emotional isolation?  Do you remember that feeling of being broken wide open, no resistance left, no hesitation to go forward, no regret that you left the hesitant, scared, ashamed, choking part of yourself?  You're free and full and deep and you can finally breathe the sunlight, taste the air, see far into the distance where you're safe and alive and full of wonder and awe....

That happened to me when Africa came into my life.  I remember it first started with watching "Wild Kingdom" as a child - all the amazing and mysterious and gorgeous animals of the wilderness there.  I waited impatiently every week for the show to come on, for the hour of escape to a mesmerizing land of beauty and wildness.  Then, I discovered the movie, "Born Free," about Joy Adamson and her husband, George, who was a ranger in a wildlife park in Kenya.  One day he was out hunting for a lion that had killed local herdsmen's cattle, and suddenly came upon a lioness that attacked them, only to find out after killing her, that she was simply protecting her cubs.  The Adamsons adopted the cubs and named the runt of the litter, Elsa, who was the sweetest and cutest of the bunch.  As we watched them grow, with their mischievous stunts and endearing affections, the Adamsons finally had to decide to send all the cubs except Elsa to a zoo in Europe.  Elsa stayed with them, as part of their family.  After awhile, for a variety of reasons, the Adamsons decided that they needed to help Elsa to go wild again.  It was the most heart wrenching process to watch, but finally she became free again and joined a pride of her own.  I remember as I watched the whole process of Elsa finding her freedom, I cried profoundly, deeply....even now, as I think about it, I feel a lump in my throat....and why?  Because for those moments, watching that film, I felt free too, free from a childhood of feeling different, strange, shy, sensitive, awkward and what seemed like on the outside of everyone else around me.  For months after watching Elsa, I played the theme song to the movie on the piano, over and over and over again.  Just recently, I looked up the words to the song....here they are:

Born free, as free as the wind blows
As free as the grass grows
Born free to follow your heart

Live free and beauty surrounds you
The world still astounds you
Each time you look at a star

Stay free, where no walls divide you
You're free as the roaring tide
So there's no need to hide

Born free, and life is worth living
But only worth living
Cause you're born free

What slavery and colonialism did to Africa

Move Your Shadow

moulded from liquid dust burning

vermilion under African sun,

black soul of earth bleeds

through skin sweating onyx rivers

burnished hips of women flow

indigo chitenjes over fields

of okra and cassava root

where pounding feet dance

to invisible drums

of an ancient memory:

crimson jacaranda sea

of blood rising mercilessly

over splintered amber hills.

here, the light eclipsed blackness

and white days of darkness

lifted this beautiful skin

to strangle the unbearable soul

Catherine S. Duclos

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come. 

Jack Gilbert

On being a closet mystic

"Much of our life we are trying to connect the dots, to pierce the heart of reality to see what is good, true, and beautiful for us. We want something lasting and transcendent." - Richard Rohr
Seeking this truth, beauty, goodness....the lasting and transcendent is the life of a mystic, the life of us all.   So why be in the closet about it?  Because that's where the cultural norm in this country puts you, when you are not following the path to materialism and influence and power.
Mysticism is not magic tricks and hocus pocus.  It is the earnest yearning of the heart for the eternal in the moment; unconditional love in the face of the hatred and violence that besets the world in history.  It is the beauty, the gorgeousness of living freely within a self, a soul that's contained in a body.
Being a mystic these days is a hard road to walk.  It’s not sexy, doesn’t buy you a house and a big life and baubles.  And it usually plants you smack dab in the middle of the trussed up psychiatric system, labeled, packaged, medicated and miserable! I know because that is what has happened to me.  The official medical term for my particular brand of mysticism is bipolar.  For those of you who don't know what that means, it's when you have amazing times of expansive awareness and understanding and connection....with everything, everyone....so beautiful....then, as the beauty and awareness and understanding and connection start to fade, and disconnection and longing and sorrow starts to take hold, you get depressed.  This is a narrative I wrote about my experience:

Somewhere around age twelve, I was walking with my family on a warm spring afternoon, right after the rain had subsided.  My sister and I were ahead of my parents, running and splashing around in the puddles, laughing and having so much fun.  Suddenly the sun came out, streaming through the trees; I turned around to look at my parents and I was overcome by a penetrating sense of joy, even beyond joy; it was something like ecstasy.  I felt beyond myself, as if I was looking at my family from a distance and seeing them as they were from the inside out.  I felt full of love for them…they were beautiful; everything was beautiful and I felt connected to all that was around me, at one with the world that surrounded me, that was beside me, inside of me, part of me. Energy was coursing through my body and I felt truly alive – I was trembling with electricity; the light was brilliant and there were rainbow colors hovering around me. The feelings were real, more real than anything I had ever felt.  I felt whole; I was connected to my self, my family, to nature, to all of my surroundings in a way I had never experienced before.  I was free and full and deep and open and full of beauty and joy.  That lasted for what seemed hours, but it was only minutes and then it dissipated and I felt bereft, as if I’d lost something precious, essential to my being. 

You decide for yourself:  Is this pathology or is this simply experiencing the depth and beauty of life, this world, our potential as human beings to be connected to our world, in all its wonder and awe and transparency....join me someday....

A VASE

I am always holding a priceless vase in my hands.

If you asked me about the deeper truths

of the path and I told you

the answers,

it would be like handing sacred relics to you.

But most have their hands tied

behind their

back;

that is, most are not free of events their eyes have seen

and their ears have heard

and their bodies have felt.

Most cannot focus their abilities

in the present, and

might drop what

I said.

So I’ll wait; I don’t mind waiting until

your love for all

makes luminous

the now.

- Hafiz

Oasis

Walking through incandescent streets

cinnamon skin trees uncoil in pools of water

shining reflections of a girl

dancing in her red dress

laced with satin ribbon

she unties the silky ribbon

rippling it over the water

splashing prisms upon the street

a tiny wavering girl

she weaves among the trees

in her red diaphanous dress

she knows her dress

lapping in ribbons

flows languorously like the water

sifting slowly down the street

towards the calm of the trees

where the pretty girl

lays naked, fragile girl

without her simple dress

waiting alone inside the trees

cries rushes of water

puckered ribbons

flooding through tainted streets

glowing fluorescent streets

wrapping her in ribbon

curls, the little girl

now stripped of dress

drinks the lucid water

opalescent between the trees

transparent shadow trees

unveil the fading girl

who sees herself now dressed

as a woman, lush with fertile streets

and dancing waves of ribbon

slipping through her tender waters

ribbon trees sway softly

by the girl, entwined in nuptial streets

flowing crimson water, oasis of a woman’s dress                                   

Catherine Duclos

        The marketplace was crowded.  It had been this way since we arrived two weeks ago;  perhaps because Zomba market was renowned as the best in the country...but no, today was different, the air was agitated, pulsing, almost suffocating.  Becce and I crossed through the gate and at once were overwhelmed by the cloying stench of long dead fish drying in the sun.  Someone had just brought in a new load from the lake and the men were busy throwing them into piles:  chambo, kampango, tiny bite size ones and split flat fish we didn’t know the names of yet.  One of the fish sellers called out to us, “Ma-dam, please come buy my beautiful fish, a bargain, beautiful fish ma-dam.”  He picked them up, turning them over and over, slapping them on their creamy bellies so the scales flew off in silvery showers; as they sifted down along the spindly brown legs of the seller, the sun caught their somersaulting in flashes of tiny light before they settled with the rest of the dirt swirling around countless barefeet.  We retreated, to try to find what we had come here for, but as we squeezed through the crowd other sellers slipped their wares in front of our faces - mangoes nearly dripping sticky juice as they dropped into our hands, fat shiny cucumbers, tear-drop ripe papayas, avocados the size of  hand grenades, and pineapples that we smelled from yards away.  Women were laughing, their pink tongues flying between cracked lips, while the babies wrapped tightly to their backs were sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the wild gesticulations of their mothers, and the din of the market around them.

            A surge of people pushed in on us and I got separated from Becce.  I stood still, trying to relax until the crush subsided.  I realized then too that the banging of the tinsmith was ringing in my ears.  He was smashing his hammer onto the side of a half-finished bucket trying to smooth out the kinks; beads of sweat gathered on his forehead until a few dropped onto the bucket, dulling for a moment the screech of the two metals grinding together.  I was getting claustrophobic.  I thought I saw Becce across the market, by the bottle seller, so I moved to make my way to her, but something caught my eye.  I turned to see a woman walking towards me.  She was unruffled by the commotion, walking resolutely, in a straight line towards me.  Her eyes were so clear, but empty.  No, not empty, just far away, very far away.  I stared at her, at the landscape approaching me in her eyes, but she brushed right by me without stopping.  I followed her, but stopped by the edge of the maize stand as she approached the other “tomato ladies.”  She moved a little beyond the group and laid her basket down slowly, almost reluctantly, as if setting down this burden was like relinquishing a part of herself.  This basket of tomatoes was a part of herself, the many hours and days spent tending and weeding and waiting for the rain to come.  Now, the red blush of these fruits must certainly attract buyers to her, like lovers drawn to the freshly painted full lips of the one they desire.

            She stayed bent over her treasures for a long time, just staring at them, gripping tightly to the sides of the basket.  Then suddenly she snatched one from the bunch, turning it over and over again - then another one, and another one until satisfied that they were still ripe and plump, she let go of her panic.  Her blouse clung to her back, the tiny flowers of the pattern drowned in the salty sweat.  As she stood up she pulled the cotton from her skin to let the cool air pass through.  She paused, leaning back over the hand resting on her waist; her head slipped back so I could see her eyes flutter then close for a moment, her lips moved imperceptibly forming words unrecognizable, unheard.  But then as if this reverie would trap her somehow, she shuddered and straightened.  She gave a furtive glance around to see if any of the other women had seen her, lost in this indulgence, but they hadn’t.  She tugged the folds of her chitenje loose to tighten them again around her waist.  She wrapped it once, but it wasn't tight enough.  She kept wrestling with it, not quite getting it the way she wanted it; each time the birds on the material quivered on their branches as she swirled it around, waiting for their chance to finally alight in peace.

            I left her there.  I left my sister there, and walked up toward Zomba Mountain.  I walked past the Indian stores where tailors sat on the khondes pumping rivers of lush material through their machines, past the Gymkhana Club and the perfect white stripes on the tennis court, past the women laying out a colored puzzle of dripping clothes on the rocks, past the sprawling colonial mansions that were once Britain’s glory, until I came to the tall grass;  the tall green grass, that had finally come with the rain.  I didn’t look for the path, I had no patience left.  I walked into it, into the smell of it, into the length of it, into the silence of the swishing blades.