More Foolsgold

Two sweet friends called to see if I was OK after reading my Heartmind post. That brings a smile across my face. I like being thought of, being important enough to another that something I say about my life process triggers them to be concerned and to check in on me. It's a blessing to have friends,to be loved.

Anyway, I'm fine. And I was wonderfully intact when I wrote that last post too. I was just going through my stuff and experiencing some intense, emotions/realizations. I was in little pain but I wasn't suffering from it. My heart was very open welcoming the insight. So thank you Susan, for Foolsgold. It's really working for me. Here's some more from chapters three through nine.

In chapter three, moving the dishes, Susan offers this quote by Lao Tzu:

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

That basically describes the bulk of my spiritual practice lately. Dis-identifying. Coming more and more to terms of what I am not. It's like emptying the trash. I've been so full of stuff I've been thinking is me, some quite lovely stuff by the way, some frightfully shameful, that it's been quite the spring cleaning rampage which has extended into the summer, fall, winter...Lets just say this identity decluttering is an ongoing process. And I keep picking up more new identities to hoard on my way to the dump. Oy vey! I need to empty enough of what I'm not to be able recognize the truth of what I am.

Susan talks about her thirty year marriage ending and her craving of open space that coincided with this period of powerful transition. She wanted her house empty "to match my heart, bare, with no room for anything but white, cool light coming in." She craved barrenness but the empty space yearned to be filled. Her son came and helped her move her dishes. During their transport to her new home she wondered, "if the soul of a house hides in the dishes. Dishes hold all that food, decades of meals, spoon to mouth, salads and fruits and stews and cakes and pies and eggs and toast on plates in a circle for years on an old round table." Her words touch my heart and fill an empty space inside.

She writes of emptiness, a concept that has always frightened me until the last couple of years when I've experienced some of the vast, open, freeing, potential of empty space. Up to this point in my life, the word "empty" has always implied lack, want, craving, the ache of loneliness. She says, "The creative, it seems is spawned from emptiness. Giving over to silence, waiting, allowing, listening...In the emptiness we might get an inkling...of how we'll begin to form and open to who we're becoming, who we most truly are. We need to leave space both for what we'll discover and what will emerge to discover us." She encourages us to "notice what's overfull in your world right now" and to empty it, making room for something new. Yes. I know this, it's my continual process, something I'm always doing and always getting around to doing.

In chapter four Susan tells a story about how after giving birth to her second child, a daughter, with a two year old son, it seemed impossible for her to lovingly mother both of them at once. "Help was closer than I could have dreamed" she says. All I'm going to add to this is the name of the chapter, big toe: within arm's reach, and her explanation. "My heart, with its own imagination, sympathetic to our plight, scanned the scene and found something not only nearby, but an ever-present part of my body, to save the day." Susan's son, is now a grown man, but still today she finds what she needs in life as close as her big toe. This is a precious, heartwarming story.

From chapter five, Hafiz:

Tired of speaking sweetly,
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

I crave being manhandled by love.

The ocean admonishes Susan to to pay attention and tells her,"Don't take too much credit for your cleverness or writing..." If she pays attentions she is filled with inspiration. And here's the rub. Paying attention so I'm aware when God arrives, simply allowing this creative force to channel itself through me. Yet I often catch myself in narcissistic glee, my ego taking personal credit for some little thing I like that has come through me, and I feel proud. I'm clear I'm a mere tool for divine source expressing itself, but I do forget sometimes.

Susan encourages us to feel our consciousness sink down to our hearts and to pay attention to the world from this place and we will be informed of everything we need to stay safe and connected to our creativity.

In chapter six, her lessons come in the form of a great blue heron she calls Hank. He teaches her to be still,watch, listen... She wonders if time alone, engaging our senses in the natural world, is not the place from which art and love emerge. She implores us to fully touch down, taking in whatever the natural world has to offer. She says, "Get to the heart of place". This reminds me of a Rumi poem I love which is part of my daily awareness practice:

Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.

And she offers a quote from Eckart Tolle, author of the books, The Power of Now, and A New Earth. I've learned a lot from his teachings. He says:

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you being...how to live and how to die.

Chapter seven is intense and Susan offers this quote by Friedrich Willhelm Nietzsche to entice us:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue/ Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed?

It is at this point in Susan's life that she experienced a deep depression that shifted into a psychotic break. She was twenty one years old. Her parents, concerned about her behavior, took her to a psychiatrist who told them she had to be immediately committed. She was transported to a hospital where she was held down, shot full of drugs, and forced to drink liquid Thorazine and Stelazine. Her delusional behavior continued for awhile until she eventually learned to copy "normal" behavior and was allowed to go home where the paranoia and dread lifted and she felt freer than ever before in her life. She says "I needed to learn that I can't always trust my mind, and that thinking can lead me in tight circles farther and farther from my heart." Wow, that is so powerful and it is certainly a match with what I've been discovering over the years about my own thinking mind.

Susan says that whatever took her to this place still tinges some of her mornings with dread. Dread. The moment I hear that word I feel it in my body. I know dread too intimately. I'm suspicious of certain life experiences that originally took me to that deep, dark, foreboding place of dread, where I spent fifteen years of my life, from the ages of approximately twenty to thirty-five, waking up every single morning filled with the overpowering experience of dread. It took me lots of inner work and self forgiveness to release the hold it had on me and when I remember those shackles that I am now free of, I give thanks.

And from Gospel of Saint Thomas:

If you express what is inside you, what is inside you will save you. If you don't express what is inside you, what is inside you can kill you.

In chapter nine Susan quotes Hildegard Von Bingen:

We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.

Susan says "maybe some of us need to dive into the depths of self, no matter how dangerous it seems, to uncover more meaning, passion, expression of soul, and, indeed, more light. We might feel most alive in the presence of what seems most dark within us." She says it helps to "shift perspectives and turn ourselves inside out and upside down." This reminds me of the Hanged Man in tarot and it's also a good descriptor of what I've done in my relationship with Jerry in making the choice to walk the path of polyamory and truth telling. Here's a tarot story (I found it here)about the Hanged Man:

The Fool settles beneath a tree, intent on finding his spiritual self. There he stays for nine days, without eating, barely moving. People pass by him, animals, clouds, the wind, the rain, the stars, sun and moon. On the ninth day, with no conscious thought of why, he climbs a branch and dangles upside down like a child, giving up for a moment, all that he is, wants, knows or cares about. Coins fall from his pockets and as he gazes down on them - seeing them not as money but only as round bits of metal - everything suddenly changes perspective. It is as if he's hanging between the mundane world and the spiritual world, able to see both. It is a dazzling moment, dreamlike yet crystal clear. Connections he never understood before are made, mysteries are revealed.

And from Natale Goldberg:

Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.