Release and Smile

There’s an odd sort of logic at play when life is fullest in release and yet we spend all our time acquiring, grasping, yearning for more. Over half of my mind-habits these days seem to be rife with receivings of some sort—confirmations about work, reconnections with colleagues about tasks to come, new horizons of learning and friendship. Mental energies fluctuate wildly up and down about little things as though they were monumental. And yet a simple release has calmed my mind, in action, in memory, and now in remembrance.

Several items of sacred recognition resurfaced in my purse the other day. Hadn’t thought about them in quite some time, as they had been out of sight. You know the old saying. Given how the path has turned and spaciousness of growth could only come without attachment, I startled a bit to listen for what to do with these precious gifts that I realized were no longer mine.

Listening with someone else always seems to pave new awareness for me, and this occasion was no different. “How do I return these to their proper place or owner without offense, without injury, without attachment?” I asked a spiritual friend. Her body language spoke what I knew too…simple returns had only renewed pain within them. Do no harm, we seemed to hear together.

Then she was given an image, an image she could share with me because she has learned—has trained herself as well as received teachings—to recognize them when they come. Rational mind would ask “Come from where” but symbolic mind rolls its eyes and reminds, “Does it really matter?” The image was perfect: a return to the place of origin of healing and attachment, a sacred grotto, to offer the gifts back to the One who had really given them in the first place. Our way of gift-giving gasps at this. How relationally rude to return a sacred gift from a friend given with such love and devotion! But if you think about it, such gifts are never not-received, after being received, wholly, once. Such gifts are not solely ours anyway, especially if we are all connected through the One whose nature is self-offering. As the Buddhists would smile: what self is there to receive the gift that it is now releasing back into the possibility for someone else’s need of it?

So now as I drive by, I am given a nudge to release, to breathe into what will come, to trust that I will be hurt again but Life beyond me will indeed thrive however it will. In a way inarticulate and quiet, I am thankful to have opened so fully, to be hurt so deeply, to know that Love never dies in the end. The action was necessary. The memory precious. Remembrance accomplished and release offered, received, alive.

Of course, now I’ll have to release attachment to the place, and this idea of release. What a pain in the ass. It never ends. J

Stone Lives

An image has entered my life with new things to say. Or perhaps I should say re-entered, as a framed print of it has hung in the hallway to my home-office for the last seven years. How many times do we walk by stories or histories or paintings with messages we do not hear, until their time?

The painting-print is Pygmalion and Galatea, an 1890 oil-painting by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. He offers us three renditions of his work, so you can almost imagine the sculpture at the center ‘in the round.’ You can see the version I’m imagining in my mind’s eye here, though Google shows a whole collection of paintings about this story. 

The story goes: Pygmalion was a sculptor in Cyprus, Greek mythological times, who had become disenchanted with women. Different sources give different reasons for this state of affairs, none interesting enough to explore here. As he works his art, a version of his ‘ideal woman’ comes to form in ivory. He spends time in the temple of Aphrodite—Venus, in other mythological terms—with prayers to find a woman like that in his life. Venus hears him, views the sculpture and sees her likeness in it, and grants him his prayer. He returns home to his studio and kisses the ivoried woman. He startles at the warmth of the stone. Each touch brings more of her to life and voilá! a love-match made in Greek myth. Contemporary versions abound, of course. My favorite is the George Bernard Shaw play that I’ve never read. Most know it as Broadway’s and then Hollywood’s “My Fair Lady,” sung-said by Rex Harrison and actually sung by one of my early imprints for impish wisdom, Julie Andrews. The movie showed Audrey Hepburn, which was a disappointment to Andrews who then landed the famous Sound of Music role instead. It all works out as it will, even in show-business.

This Pygmalion and Galatea re-entered my life as I browsed the NYC Met Museum’s gift-shop for a little souvenir for a new friend, but it quickly moved itself into my own practice-life, well on its own. It’s not insignificant that this story rests within or is associated with (I’m too lazy to actually research it to know) Ovid’s Metamorphosis, in literary history. I’m beginning to think the image has become an icon of metamorphosis, in broad brush-strokes, for me. A gradual awakening in body, in life. The touch of a creator, or Creator, if you allow it. The embers of desire that are stoked into devotion, from time to time, for holy purpose. The strongest statement I hear from it, as it has moved from the hallway to the wall in front of my office desk, is the malleable unfolding of life from what had been stone. Such a good image for the sensation of awakening. Stone lives.

Media-culture urges us to see and hear this ‘icon’ within a frame of erotic love, sculptor-creator to sculpture-wife, but what a disservice to the sculpture that is! Not to mention women, in their own sense of agency and power. Women may be brought to new life by the kiss of a male partner, but it could just as easily be said that the woman’s form & life drew the man into new life. Except that’s not part of the myth traditioned by men over a history written largely by men. So we are easily impoverished, inoculated from seeing what might be seen anew. This painting has its partial truths, given voice in its history of interpretation. I’m interested in what the icon is speaking to me today, as a woman at a bit of a threshold in life and work.

Awakening has fascinated me these last several years. The mind-body experience of coming to new awareness, through insight or percolated wisdom flowing forth in new forms like poetry, prose, music, and more. The sculpture here is not unlike my mind, unfolding or opening anew into paths of encounter I could never have anticipated, imagined. What had been shaped in certainties of stone within my received tradition(s) of faith/profession has become much more malleable, if no less durable. Way has opened to dance back and forth across the line of knowing and unknowing, with assurance from elsewhere that all will be well and all manner of things will be well (thank you, Jean-Luc Marion and Julian of Norwich—a strange pairing!).

The path I yearn to note here, however, is the more literal speak of the icon: what is the awakening of bodysense that always seems on the cusp of revelation for me these days? Is my own body-wisdom coming to life from the stone imposed by my tradition(s)? How will I know? Or how will I unknow enough of what I’ve received—in all its beauty and toxicity—to even find out? If I come to know anew, do I flatten the knowledge then in prose, here or elsewhere?

For now, I will sit with the image. I will (perchance) listen alongside a new friend. I will show up at the page, as Julia Cameron says, and the mat/elliptical/track. If I’ve learned anything in this strange liveliness that is a practice-path, way does open for those who listen well. Thich Nhat Hanh has said even a stone can be our teacher. How much moreso a stone that comes to life within a creator’s—Creator’s—care. 


Perhaps there's even new visual form for what I mean. After all, sometimes it's finally time for life come out of our frame(s) and on its own accord.

Path Companions -- 1

[I think it's time for a new 'series' of sorts, for the upcoming autumn-writing-season.]

Companions on the path come at the least expected moments. Perhaps that’s what makes them stick out as significant—the startlement or surprise. Or perhaps it’s simply the felt-sense of resonance and recognition that we are not alone in something we hold dear, have to offer the world. Meeting Barbara Marx Hubbard recently in one of her essays felt like such an unexpected moment. Like meeting an old friend I’d never known before.

She thinks and writes large, for one, which is a breath of fresh air for me as an academic. Her bi-line names her a “futurist, author, speaker, and social architect.” What in the world is a social architect? She observes we are at a crucial time for our planet, a “crisis of birth” toward the next stage of human evolution. “The entire story of creation has led to the birth of a species which must learn to cooperate and co-create on a planetary scale.”[1] Like I said, large. And, admittedly, potentially dangerous. No individual ought to be a “social architect” without careful consideration of past (and horrifying) mistakes. But…her emphases upon co-creation and “spirit-awakening for life,” for all, soften my concerns.

She observes something radically new is happening with women. “We feel it within ourselves as an upwelling of creativity, of frustration,” she writes, “of the desire to be more, to find life purpose, to express and evolve ourselves and our world. This sense of increased power and purpose is, I believe, a phenomenon of an evolutionary order (meaning it will lead to transformation rather than reformation or incremental improvement), not merely an historical order.”[2] Wow! is she talkin’ my language. I don’t know about the bold prose and whole evolutionary-transformation bit, but I recognize this overwhelming upwelling, frustration, and more.

Where the tears came, where I felt like she was writing specifically to me, came after a narrative of vocational arousal and an interpretation of the evolutionary suprasexual drive toward co-creation and a fusion of genius. Aren’t those great phrases? They are for a theological educator, an intentionally childless writer, and one whose path seems to be spiritual friendship across traditions with unexpected ‘others.’

To set the stage, Hubbard tells of her life as a mother of five in the fifties—a suburban housewife in Connecticut. This life then unfolded within her as a new, second chosen one: a storyteller of evolutionary re-birth. She names her vocation and newfound path “to understand, communicate, and help realize humanity’s evolutionary potential to transcend current limitations and to co-create a magnificent future. … In my case, [a] peak experience, combined with reading and deep dialogues with my artist husband and others, set me on my new path…I became a storyteller and a futurist. … This growth within myself made me a far better mother.”[3] The force for this new path is her coined phrase, vocational arousal. “It can strike at any age, from eighteen to eighty. It’s usually felt at first as frustration, as the desire to do more, to be more. … It’s the awakening of our passion to create, to discover what more we are born to do, to give. It’s the third great human drive: from self-preservation to self-reproduction to self-evolution.”[4] As a theological educator, my whole line of work is about this kind of vocational arousal. How do we set about the holy work of awakening? How do we live our lives such that others awaken to their own potential? How do we recover from mis-steps on such a path…or are there such things as mis-steps on a path to awakening?

I’d never considered my own experience of devotion in Hubbard’s terms either. She argues alongside Ghandi’s maxim—we must be the change we wish to see in the world—a planetary version of it. The drive for ­co-creation “grows out of the desire, intelligence, and power to co-create a new and better world.” Not just self-improvement but planetary improvement. Not just psychological health but ecological health. A planet and species who thrive together. She argues that “evolutionary forces are helping in this transformation. My understanding,” she writes, “is that the sexual drive to procreate is expanding into the suprasexual drive to co-create. The life pulse of sexuality is animating our creativity, and awakening our genius to evolve ourselves and our world. … In sexuality, we are attracted to join our genes to have a child. In suprasexuality, we are attracted to join our genius to give birth to our full potential selves, and to produce the work needed for the world.”[5]  

Following this path of increasing (global) childlessness and vocational arousal, Hubbard argues for a fusion of genius, joining our genius with that of others. “It happens when we get excited over a project and begin to resonate with others. It’s explosive! We are thrilled, totally alive. We want to do more of it because by doing more of it we become more ourselves. Thus the acorn within us is given sunlight and water and feels itself unfolding, become the giant oak!”[6] One cannot help but smile here, amidst a blog-venue called “Seeds Catalogue” with the tagline in this very image of acorn-to-oak.

Now, I know not many of my colleagues would follow me down this rabbit-hole. It’s “too much,” by which I mean too grandiose, too easily critiqued as unfounded, uncritical, imprecise and more. And I haven’t even given voice to the later essay sections with words like ‘noosphere’ and ‘Goddesses’ in them! Those would cinch collegial avoidance. This rift between my job and my vocation is what can make finding or staying on the path difficult, lonely, isolated. On both professional and personal levels, for surrendering to the unruly path, untended, can be costly.

As Hubbard describes it: “When a woman becomes vocationally aroused and surrenders to a vocation, her beloved may feel displaced, no longer central in her life. Many women find their mates depressed, feeling diminished by their creativity. … a spiritually motivated, transformationally activated woman is a powerful force. She usually wants a partner, she does not want to be alone, but it takes a very strong and sensitive man to be able to live with such an awakened feminine co-creator.”[7] As such, she urges us to imagine together what a “co-creative couple” looks like, feels like. “The ideal,” she suggests, “would be when the woman’s creativity is aroused, she is received in love by the man [sic] she loves, and is accepted, indeed loved, for her creative initiative and power. In turn, she draws forth from him his unexpressed creativity and he too becomes more fully himself through the union.”[8]

Perhaps in the end, Hubbard’s words are specifically for those who need them, who yearn deeply for what she describes. Perhaps the point here is to have met an old friend I’d never known, and to realize feminine co-creators are not alone, whether they are biologically male or female. Co-creators are finding each other on unexpected moments along the path, and the path is extraordinary. There is nothing quite like being “activated by spirit, awakened in the heart to express a unique creativity in loving action which evolves both self and the world.” If this morning’s musing makes such words available to others, then blessed be.

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[1] Barbara Marx Hubbard, “Awakening to Our Genius: The Heroine’s Journey,” in The Fabric of the Future: Women Visionaries Illuminate the Path to Tomorrow. Ed. M.J. Ryan (Berkeley CA: Conari Press, 1998), 8.

[2] Hubbard, 7.

[3] Hubbard, 14.

[4] Hubbard, 15-16.

[5] Hubbard, 15.

[6] Hubbard, 15.

[7] Hubbard, 17.

[8] Hubbard, 18.