Brushstrokes and Butterfly Kisses

Do you ever feel like you’re getting the same message in stereo—from multiple sources, perhaps in Surround Sound or Dolby?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight was recommended to me by both my mom (for better insight into my dad’s stroke) and by Andy (who thought it rather interesting) and by Mark at The Committed Parent.  But we don’t listen, do we… not until some strange dark night of the soul sends us scrambling, under a fully agitated moon, fingers restlessly crossing bookbindings and dust like a spider, searching for wolfsbane, or phosphorus, or just the right page in some arcane alchemical text… searching for the balm, for just the ticket to soothe the savage heart.

Eat, Poop, Be On Our Way: Diarrhea at Delphi

Maybe it was a bad piece of goat, in fact I’m pretty sure it was some bad goat… but who the hell eats goat in the first place?  Especially from some sketchy food cart on a filthy Athens side street.  But we were young and hungry and the tour-bus was about to depart on a three-hour ride to the mysterious Oracle at Delphi; and whatever was roasting there on the cart smelled, more or less, good… and looked, more or less, like Gyros… which was something we were used to from Greek joints in Chicago.

This was thirty-one years ago as I write, a twentieth birthday had in a cheap pensionne in Rome and a summer solstice sunset dropped softly into the Aegean in Corfu… and now a trip to the center of the ancient Greek world—of which I knew absolutely nothing—a couple of Jewish college boys blithely slouching toward pagan central.  Yet I never think of the summer solstice without thinking of the bittersweet birth of darkness—the longest day a birth (six months later) of darkest night; just as the darkest day in December births the light.

Making

As parents we deal with a lot of poop, first literally, later metaphorically—but still, it’s a lot of poop.  And yet the gold is in the poop.

Fifty years ago this month, the artist Piero Manzoni produced 90 cans of Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit).  He labeled and numbered his most fundamental work and sold it by weight at the current market’s price for gold.  The Tate Modern has Number 4 (but then everyone really got number 2)—“something intimate, really personal to the artist,” Manzoni wrote in a letter to a fellow artist.

In the alchemy of life, the treasure hides in the roots of the tree and the spirit gold truly is in the fundament, the shit of all we, at least at first glance, do not want.  Thus our fear, our shame, our feelings of unwantedness and inadequacy surely must contain treasure ripe for transformation.  Karma says that first we must completely accept the shit life brings and only after that can transformation be set free to occur.

“Three Sisters,” One Parent

Andy and I recently attended a performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.  As I mature, I find myself moved and fascinated by many of the things that once bored me to tears as a young, angry and impatient rebel with an allowance—a youth where I had the luxury of cynicism and grandiose artistic ambition, followed by a life of hard work in the wake of my father losing all his money in what turned out to be a blessing, at least for me, of the most liberating magnitude.

As I offer up these blog words in the service of love and encouragement for us all to be our best Selves (as parents and as “parents” of our shared world, as well as nurturers of, and participants in, its unfolding consciousness), I found Chekhov’s words, as well as his temporal and political context, incredibly resonant—prescient, modern and eternal.

The first director of Three Sisters was Stanislavski, the pioneer of naturalistic acting that came to be called “the method.”  Out of this school of radical authenticity, and interiority, on stage, came Marlon Brando, James Dean and later Pacino, Hoffman, Streep.  In a world of overwhelming falseness, sometimes the quest for what’s real must unfold behind the third wall of a stage… art itself being a living remnant of communing with spirit, with the Truth of what just is… of what we cannot, by our brains, hope to know.

As parents, we are often hammered by the mundane and conforming (not to mention race-to-nowhere fear-and-money-driven competition), and thus we must continually unearth and give flight to the transcendent and the luminescent, the compassionate and the connected, to be found and lived in the small moments of our big-enough lives.

Not Yet Crossing

Last Sunday I was jogging my slowish move-the-chi jaunt through my neighborhood when up ahead I noticed a little boy on the other side of the street, running with all his might down his driveway, and then, with just as much force and momentum, slamming on his sneaker-footed breaks and lurching to a stop at the precise line where his driveway became the blacktop of the street.

The boy’s trajectory caused him to sway out over his feet and then snap back.  As I drew closer he ran back up the drive, turned around and bolted back down… stopping with the same Roadrunner deft, the only thing missing was a cartoon “boing.”  He was maybe five or six, blonde, and muttering to his stopped cold feet, “Don’t go in the street. Don’t run in the street.”

The sun fell softly through the greening trees and as I passed, the boy was trotting back up the drive to try again, my neighborhood blurring and blending with everything from the street where I grew up to Grover’s Corner where Emily could just as well have been standing there, unseen, wistfully watching the boy practice staying alive.

Do drop in

You and I have spoken all these words
but for the way we have to go,
words are no preparation.
I have one small drop of knowing in my soul.
Let it dissolve in your ocean.
Rumi

Cooking up Calm

Welcome.  Given that my intention is to help you come into better relationship with your fears, I thought I might employ imagination rather than explanation at this juncture.

Since fear is at the epicenter of our sorrows, If you can get authentically safe and calm this benefits everyone you love.

This blog post strives to serve as a virtual offering, one we might chew through together in our quest for something that can nourish us and our collective children… rippling perhaps from mind into tangible reality.

Soft Brown Shirt

In a recent post on attachment parenting I offered the notion of “containment parenting,” as a middle ground, at least in terms of verbiage, between “attachment” (which perhaps, to some, sounds a bit too involved, fussy or enmeshed) and some abstract opposite, such as “non-attachment” (which might sound good if you’re hanging with Thich Nhat Hahn, but not with an infant).  A reader inquired if I could say more about “containment parenting,” and while I could suggest an old post on the colander and the bowl, a poem made its way into my head.  At least it’s easier reading than my typical post 🙂 …

*

I fell in love with a

Brown-eyed girl

Who had a brown shirt

In New York city

 

I saw that same shirt

In a Soho shop,

Soft brown cotton on Sullivan

Street.  It was dear indeed

 

But I wanted to be just

Like her.  Cotton as soft

As her lover’s touch,

And I wore it until

 

It fell apart.  And we were

Left to love without shirts

On our backs until children

Held on tight:  monkey arms,

Piggy rides and broken banks

 

Parenting soft like that brown

Shirt.  Softly holding until

A butterfly drifts up and away

From your sun-warmed hands

Off to explore the garden

And back again for snacks

 

Her eyes sparkled brown except

When enraged.  Then they flashed

Green at the bars of her cage

Until they were mirrors

And the world and the stage

And we all loved each other

so much that we sometimes wept

*

And on that note I close 2010—wishing all those who happen across these words Brightness, Good Cheer, freedom from fear, the realization that true desires are already fulfilled, All Good Wishes and, most of all, Love.

Namaste, BD

Full Circle Solstice

Well, happy summer solstice, again.

Hello, again.  Good-bye, again.

Go. Dog. Go, again.

How can I begin to say what I really mean?

How can I convey the love I feel for you, and for us and for our world?

I may have failed to tame my ego, heal my narcissism and more fully place my self in proper service to the Self and our collective SELF (although I like to think I’ve made a little progress this year), I have certainly failed to become any sort of perfect parent (not that this was ever the goal).

But I have treasured a year; and in working hard, I have made a difference—to myself.  I do know that I have also made a difference to some others, and I choose to not be coy and pretend I am unaware of this and the many kind and encouraging comments I have deeply appreciated along the way.

I have sought to give, but I have received much in the bargain—age-old wisdom proving true personally and viscerally that it is good to give, that it is through what we give that we find connection, relationship and happiness (and that “giving” can be attention, presence, affection, patience, even just thoughts).

I have apportioned time to blogging, time disconnected from Andy and Nate and Will (thanks to you guys for weathering my self-imposed year of blogging mindfully, too often at your expense).  So, now it is time to follow Kristen’s example and “buffer.”

Only connect.  This is what I have learned from Forster via Andy, and what I have striven to write and live (the challenge about connecting proves to be:  how much and with who?).  Moving forward I hope to continue to only connect, but in balance, connecting virtually, actually and internally with the spirits and the muses.

Fractured Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was a grandiose troublemaker named Miller.  He lived in the land of kings, but after he pimped his daughter out by saying she could spin straw into gold, his own name was mud and he got way out of Dodge.  Dodging his family and his old life, he got on a boat, thinking he might make himself into a king in a new land.

Eventually he arrived at a magical island between two rivers where a people lived without time and without gold.  Miller told them tall tales about treasure and kings and he tricked them into trading their island for a necklace of beads that he enchanted them into believing was gold of great worth.  His ability to spin things in this way made him a bit of a Rumpelstiltskin in his own right.

Now it was his island.  Now, as far as he was concerned,  it was Miller Time, but Miller had not brought with him a wife.  In truth, no woman in the land of kings would have him, but he enchanted the chief of the bead-buyers to also give him his beautiful daughter who was soul incarnate, but Miller never bothered to learn her name.  Instead he named her, Romanee Conti, (after a fine wine for which those in the land of kings overpaid and then drank), as even Miller’s pale former kings lionized the conquerors who had once tricked and enchanted these now-gouty folks away from living without time and without gold.

Romanee Conti lay with Miller once, but she found him so repulsive that she had a wall built between them.  It was no longer Miller Time, and Miller could think of nothing but getting another chance to be with Romanee Conti.  He sent many messages to her, asking for her fair hand in earnest.  She saw him as practically a stalker and kept him at bay through telling him that if he could learn her true name she would accept him once more into her bed.