Sparks will fly #43 #openness

The quest to stay open to all possibilities is closely related to detachment.  There is an old poem of David Whyte’s The Opening of Eyes that comes to mind that life is the opening of eyes long closed.

I think it is about seeing what there is in front of you. Without all your own luggage, assumptions, expectations, by seeing this as they are – raw, beautiful, exotic, simple, clean, complex – whatever they are. This takes practice.  I am re-entering worlds I have been absent from while on holidays and am noticing things I hadn’t before. I was listening to the recording of a meeting and heard things I hadn’t heard before, like the tone of a person who was fearful although clearly being assertive, the literal meaning as a place to hide for safety, the spaces and time it took for someone else to find the right about of compassion to move a conversation to its next level of maturity. This is one of the things I love about improv, it is immediate, call and response and takes only what is on offer,  nothing more and nothing less. You let go of anything you thought you might be able to use and go with the offering. It is a way of accepting and facing the facts. It is the act of being open to invitations and recognising them as such, then saying yes.

In the opening of my eyes, that has happened to me in the past couple of years, I am knocked off my feet, astonished at all the signs I missed along the way, because I held on so tightly to my worldview. There were facts and evidence everywhere for decades, that I explained away based on my assumptions, beliefs and attachments.  There was even medical evidence that I thought must have been a clinical error. I am speechless when I see I was like a sealed impenetrable  vault. It is like the person who keep looking for a cure despite all the evidence before them. I have deep wounds from my inability to not see that facts as they unfolded over decades.

Living in the now is the only way to really live and to remain open to possibilities also requires you to go to the desert like Moses, notice the burning bush alive with all the sparks of instruction for leadership, cleansing without destroying, appearing in something familiar like a bush. Moses wasn’t daunted by the sight, he was curious, he stepped closer to get the message, to understand better and to hear what was being asked of him. He was open. Instead of holding onto what we all know bushes that burn will be razed to the ground, bushes don’t speak, God doesn’t appear to give us a bespoke message – he ignored all that he would have known – and received what was right before his eyes. Maybe it was the afternoon light glowing through the bush that made it look like it was burning?  Whatever it was it must have taken an incredible capacity to be open to the scene, to the message and to the invitation.

I can’t help reflecting on those who might be on the autism spectrum and just see things as they are and state them obviously, I feel I am learning that from Greta Thunberg who has told us she has Asperger’s and sees it as her superpower. Her capacity to tell us all without fear or favour of the climate emergency we are in and we are at the beginning of a time of mass extinction. So many of us are holding on to our assumptions, our arrogance even, maybe even our love for the life we have that we can’t see the facts. I usually see this as the complete opposite of openness, yet being able to have a reality check seems a reasonable foundation for curiosity and creativity.

On Friday night, I hung out with a couple of friends, one a decade younger and another a decade again younger, they took me on as an accidental apprentice for a few hours, coaxing and cajoling me to take more steps towards an open door. I have a lot of learning and this kind of life coaching ahead of me. I can see the door, and I know it is there. I have more steps to take to open it. Their love and generosity were overwhelming. What was simple and easy and very well integrated into their lives was a long way from mine. A complete novice. I need more guides and more practice. Detaching is never easy.

The preparation for this evening began in my sub-conscious over the past couple of weeks, with a series of dreams all about letting go, and calling out to a void to find nothing coming back to me. The void must exist first and then in the relief of this blackness, light arrives to you can tell the difference between the black and the white.

The two-tone prints on the wall of the room I am sleeping in while house-sitting is a constant reminder of this phenomena. You can tell what there by what is not. One such print is of a vase of waratah’s and in the way the bush is burning and in the spirit of the Celts who are in my deep DNA, Felicity Urquhart sang a dreamtime story about how the waratah became red. Wonga the pigeon lost her mate and gave up calling for him and fell with a broken heart onto the white waratah and her blood made it red for immemorial. I am not taking this course, I am however taking from the story of transformation, first the act of giving up because you can’t find what you are looking for, it isn’t there anymore, then perhaps the lesson of lying down to rest and letting the heart open as fully and completely draining away the life force that held it together, and then the transformation for others to enjoy, celebrate and see in their landscape an opening of beauty.

From these serendipitous threads being woven around me this past week or so, I am trying to take a facts and invitations, not as the remaining pages of a book waiting to be read, or of memories passing, but more as steps towards throwing more shoes away. Small steps of being astonished and curious and knowing that when I fall to the ground, it is solid beneath me and shoes aren’t needed to tread lightly on this earth. Sparks will fly, and like the burning bush, I will not be consumed by the fire.

 

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.
It is the vision of far off things

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

— David Whyte

Photo by Ethan on Unsplash

Sparks will fly #42 #ephemeral

Katoomba has been my home for the past week and with 54 others we shared our lives, played and made music together. Each precious moment, each breath lasting just as long as it needs to last. To live completely in the now, to understand and live, as if for just for one day, to squeeze the life out of each moment and infuse each moment with life, starts with the act of taking a deep breath. You turn up, body and spirit, you open your heart, your ears, your lungs in that order. There is no voice without feeling and listening.

To live on earth, as it is in heaven is surely to live with all the harmonies and each person finding their own note. We will have conductors and guides to help us sound better, take more risks with ourselves and those who will invite us to go to new horizons because they can see something in us we can’t yet. These are some of the many lessons singing in choir gives me – and singing as an Ephemeral Choir – and the lesson I seem to need learn over and over is being in the moment, living the now, is writ large.

This has not been an easy week waiting for the days and nights to tick over into the second anniversary of my love’s death. I spent the dreaded day surrounded by beauty, in song and in a space where love and compassion were the only currencies being traded. Giving grief an ephemeral nature allows it to come and go, to swell and subside, to flow over rocks and through caves. There are days where you find depths in the shallows, in little pools there can be rivers of pain and sadness. Equally, the quietest smile across a room from a friend can ooze just the right amount of love you need at that moment. More than once I recalled the line from Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

To live with a plan and act as if there isn’t one, capturing the moment as a complete and never to be repeated experience, is also the practice of living life with all the lights on the stage not in rehearsal mode. The discipline of living in an ephemeral way is quite a challenge. Plumbing the inner silence for courage and unlimited access to the well of peace, is the call, time and time again. I need to get my breathing right in order to be up to the response. Singing reminds me how to breathe and helps me to accept the invitation of sounds and silence. The spaces between the notes are just as important.

I am heading back to Adelaide, borrowing other people’s roofs to put my head under for awhile. I am returning to communities in which I work and play. The pilgrim or perhaps it is a swaggies life I am walking, continues.

There is a litany of gratitude for all the visible and invisible help that has accompanied me and enabled me to be in these spaces. I am grateful to the generosity and abundance of this precious life I live. I know sparks fly in caves, in song and can be found in the pounding hearts of lovers of the ephemeral life.

Sun set over the Blue Mountains.

Sparks will fly #41 #buffers

Starting last week of the Big Holiday in Sydney and heading to Blue Mountains for singing and sights after I had built a little buffer in to recover from the jet lag and to re-enter my homeland.

Buffer zones have been a feature of past few weeks – that time and space you build in to your schedule to accommodate delayed flights, wrong turns and surprises.

The place of a buffer in your day has the potential for easier breathing. When you make space for a buffer you are giving your future self a gift of time to absorb or at least reduce the stress or shocks of the unexpected and unplanned. I have learnt buffers can come in the shape of people, places and empty spaces. You can make buffers for yourself or even be one for others.

Buffers have intentionality attached to them, while being completely agnostic about why they are needed. Only when they are required is their purpose validated. From time to time we are buffers for others, holding space, holding quiet, being in between, while the full extent of why we are there may not be immediately revealed. This kind of detachment to purpose and being defined by the arrival of a surprise, often unwelcome, defines us as much as any purpose we might define for ourselves.

Buffers come in and out of my life to protect and hold me to keep me safe is such a blessing. Like the spaces in the music critical for the sound to resonate and seep into the soul, so too do buffers enable thresholds to be noticed and traversed to enable the journey to continue.

Already this day buffers have delivered coffee, a friendly face, respite from negative thoughts, joyous sounds in four part harmony, lunch between friends and a walk in the sun.

Building in buffers as a self-care practice is providing the space for embers to be coaxed into life by bellows for sparks to fly.

Sparks will fly #40 #maps

Mapping out where to go, working out where you have been or perhaps where you are going requires some orientation. First you need to know where you are. You need to be able to recognize a symbol, sign or perhaps a landmark. When you don’t know what to call what you can see, or are searching for the word from a time gone by it can add another layer of complexity to the challenge.

There have all kinds of maps around me lately from the yellow arrows of the camino, to the new AR of google maps, maps embedded in memories and others drawn on the soul. Maps to guide me away from locations that may no longer serve me and others to pull me towards destinations that are on a horizon not yet fully in view.

The humble map of a bus route on a guided tour in a city like Berlin, that reveals polarities and integration around every corner is the kind of map I find encouraging. Just enough information to support discovery and not too much so there is still room for error, to get lost and find your own path.

Where others can see you going and go calling out to you to go this way or that, and for another to pull you back from a kerb when you don’t see a truck coming, and another to hold the map for you and take you with them are the kind of sojourners with map reading skills I need around me. Recognising these people as part of the landscape, signs and supports in my map of life also requires some knowledge of knowing where I am.

I begin this week as the last of the first in my sixth decade, knowing there are less days ahead of me than behind, more settled and unsettled in real and metaphorical ways than I have been for this past year. I have inner maps so well worn and frayed at the edges it is hard to read in places where there are tears and repairs, faded print, where new lines are being drawn and some of the signs are yet to be properly interpreted or named. I have new maps which are waiting to be unfolded and perhaps some that never will.

The sparks of light flitting off the device to guide me sometimes takes a while to catch up with me or tells me where to go a different path to my intuition or what I can see in front of me – it knows about things I can’t see, like road blocks and traffic jams. This would be quite a helpful feature for my inner map!

The poet Hafiz says ‘the place you are right now, God has circled on a map for you‘. The birds know when to sing, the clouds know when to hide the moon, the tiniest of ants follow the sugary path to gather what they need for their nest, the stars have provided maps since the dawn of time, and remind me they are the original sparks that fly. Soon, I will be piloted from this hemisphere to the next where familiar signs will give an edge to my navigation. No guarantee however that I won’t get lost.

I will be aiming to keep open to reading maps made just for me and ones that others will introduce to me, keeping the pilgrim’s way ready to accept visible and invisible help and to be guided in equal measure by curiosity and clear directions.

Over the Alps en route to Berlin.