Discovery's Paradox

The paradox of discovery fascinates me. Plato named it way before me, of course, but the resolution to his Meno’s Paradox is not the point. It’s the entrance into the paradox that matters. How do you come to know something truly new if you don’t remotely know what it is you will come to know? How do you decide what you aim to learn if you don’t already know it in some fashion, so to aim properly in learning it? 

Plato’s Socrates creates some concoction of memory and recollection to resolve the question. In order to pursue knowledge of something, you must have some recollection or memory of it in order to pursue “it” in the first place. Buddhists would place this felt-sense in a previous life, this sense of seeking to learn something new that a previous you had already known. I don’t have much confidence in Socrates’ recollection or the notion of previous lives, so I’ll have to content myself with the amorphous notion of ‘embodied intuition,’ which, admittedly, doesn’t really help me much with my new quest (to come to know, perhaps even articulate ‘a psychic representation of my reproductive body’). Particularly if I struggle to know what I mean by 'embodied' and what I mean with 'intuition.'

You wanna know the first thing I’ve done in order to listen more deeply to my body’s speech? I went to the university library. I checked out books by Nancy Chodorow and Carl Jung. And they’ve been very interesting reads, as far as these things go. I get the sneaking suspicion that this is not the most germane path of discovery for my particular interest, however. Neither 'embodied' nor 'intuition' seems a focus of a research quest at a university library. Which is not to say they're not active in such a setting, of course. In this case, however, neither word describes my experience of this research.

I have spent a little time reviewing old blog posts and reflecting on the listening ahead of me this summer, however. This journeying really has been going on for quite some time. A year’s explorations of “authentic movement” and a more free-form but circle-practice called “wild heart,” allowing any form of movement, shared space, meditation and more within a covenantal community. Sustained commitment to physical training over a period of a year now, with specific attention to development of core muscles and awareness. A renewal of engagement in ChiRunning, a form-focused contemplative path of running aimed at integrating the wisdom of Tai Chi into long-distance running. I’ve been listening to my core for a long while now, though it’s hard to put into words.

I wonder if that work is what my new friend, Susan, saw? How does one see core or energy-work in a person?

Now I have an occasional evening-art listening practice to accompany my library books. Another new friend, at least while she wasn’t drawing beautiful, large naked women around her Sudoku puzzles, showed me a simple abstract way to express feelings and association on old typing/copy paper needing recycling. A perfect ‘medium’ for ‘end-of-day-listening’ before heading off to sleep.

I’ve also been encouraged to listen more intently to my dreams, which I’ve been a little less successful at these last couple nights. Upon return from some days away, at a 5-day conference in Colorado, the dreamworld felt so much more accessible, for a time. I think I resist it in my normal routines here at home, allowing only the tectonic ‘awakening’ dreams to surface when necessary. Kind of like never cleaning your room because when it gets really bad, the difference into a clean room is so much more satisfying than a daily clean, everything in its place all the time. I tried to convince my mom of that once. She didn’t buy it.

And I’m about to explore a new abdominal massage therapy, apparently. One of the women in one of my circles invited me to explore it a bit, when I told her I needed to pursue a little belly-listening. I wonder whether I’ll reach a point when I can no longer enter into worldviews so completely outside my own? How do we decide when there’s no more to be learned on any given path? Hmmmm…..

At the very least, there’s some snippy bumper sticker wisdom to be remembered here: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” Perhaps someday I’ll remember who quipped that aloud, but I do love its redress of Meno’s Paradox, which is where we began. You learn what you want to learn by listening to your own yearnings—whether they be recollections, memories, past lives, or not—and trying completely unexpected, new methods entrusted to you by companions along the way.

Perhaps I should just take the books back to the library for now. They’ll be waiting for me if I need them.

An Unconscious Womb...For Now

Something conceived last week. 

Typically, one would say “was conceived,” in passive voice, but I know that to be untrue. The conception required a stringent attention to my own voice, my own agency, while immersed in a 5-day teaching with a charismatic-journey teacher. It did not just happen to me but was brought into awareness as a labor of love, shared by many. Even so, I had no expectation or anticipation that the fruits of these monies and efforts would be as they are. The event advertisements said nothing about tectonic renewal and release. “New form” too, because as I reflect on the significant events of these last couple years, I do sense a familiar, companionable generativity that has been deepening and blossoming for a long time. Last week did not birth a new thing as much as accentuate a long-coming and continually-deepening awareness of…what? Or Who? I'm listening to find out...

A new-old spirit-friend befuddled me several times throughout the week with who she saw—sees—me to be, for instance. She asked whether my primary sense of myself was “here, and maybe here,” gesturing to her head and a bit of her heart/chest area. “Of course,” I said, wondering aloud where else one’s sense of articulate being would be. “I experience you much more here, and maybe a little bit here,” she said, sweeping her hands around her lower abdomen, stomach, and a bit of heart height. Up here,” gesturing to her head, “serves you where you are,” returning her hands to her belly, womb. Those may not be precisely her words, but roughly, that’s what I heard, understood. There was something in her gaze that I knew to trust, that I was willing to “try on” a bit for clarity, but I found myself wondering whether she knew someone in me I had not really met yet.

As I leaned into the trust for the week, I learned unexpected things that will take me a long time to distill into articulation. One is that I have a vast capacity to hold space for others, to balance light/dark energies when quietly surrendered to Her I know now as "Mom." But what does that mean, “to hold space for”? I learned to relinquish an attachment to the eternal quest for the One Teacher, which has roots going way back in my family, to Grandpa Ben and Grandma Ruth, even earlier. Being the "favorite" has a huge history in my family, as it probably does in many families. Placing this in a longer view, I was able to re-receive a past teacher in a new way, in healthy past-tense without attachment or aversion, yearning or anger. I learned that I come from a long line of embodied intuitives. I may even be "a healer," whatever that means.

Most importantly, though, I learned that I have an invitation to explore and name a "psychic representation of my reproductive body", whatever that may mean. If my intellect is to serve my core-body-awareness, then I need to learn more about what I will call this “subtle reproductive body.” Subtle seems apt, as this is not a “play pregnancy” or some unconscious desire because my beloved and I chose not to have children. I still love my life and my husband too much to want to alter either with the tasks of mothering and nurture of a young one or two. I’ve never had much desire for or facility with children anyway. Better for them and for me to remain as is! But I still have a reproductive body, as a woman. I have an entire area of my own body that I’ve not really known, except in restriction (i.e. birth control). Ah...here's how to say it: my womb is entirely unconscious.

Doesn't help much, does it?

The phrase, “a psychic representation of a reproductive body” comes from the work of Nancy Chodorow (in True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School, edited by Susan Gubar). I understand her to be saying, at root, that female wholeness and a healthy sense of self come with integration of all parts of a woman's being, whether actualized in a biological pregnancy or not. A woman cannot be truly whole unless she has, at the very least, a psychic representation of her reproductive body. If it is denied, neglected, hidden, or even evicted, a woman’s sense of herself is incomplete…unless she does the deeper, psychological work to honor all parts of herself, un-realized but active reproductive body included.

So I guess an early question arises for me here. A reproductive body can be active in ways other than pregnancy, or so my prose above suggests. Active how? I wonder.

At the very least, I accept the invitation I have heard. Being the contemplative-empiricist that I am (scholarly jargon for disciplinary cover in my work), I propose a listening project beginning with body-practices and intuitive avenues to identify and then explore. Seems logical that this new listening “spell” should take about 9 months, whatever else it involves. I’ve wanted to listen to my life outside of the regular presence of alcohol for a while, so a spell without the booze also seems logical. Interestingly enough, I suspect that will create some real dissonance at home. My beloved enjoys a glass of wine or bourbon regularly and is leery of enjoying it alone. I doubt he’ll want to join me in my “project” to that degree, but who knows? It’s also clear to me that because I am in covenantal relationship with him, his contribution to this new listening is crucial. We’ve already begun conversations that have suggested some really neat generative energies about what we might write and/share with a larger public about “choosing childlessness in the Midwest.” At the very least, he’s a marvelous partner to share a willingness to participate in something neither of us knows in any precise detail. Last night, I learned that there is such a thing as a belly-womb massage to be had as well. Hey, why not? What might that teach me?

I wonder if other women plan mid-life crises in such detail? J Said with a smile, mostly because if this is what mid-life crises feel like, more of us would be having them, planning them, exploring them. I’m fascinated even as I’m befuddled about what this could possibly teach me. The impulse and passion to pursue it is unmistakable, however, so…blessed be. Here we go.

A Touch of Light in the Dark of Wisdom (for Nona)

The charismatic journey teacher paints

A Caravaggio in every room, light and shadow

To be sensed, seen, sown. And mourned,

Grieving, witnessed aloud. For a

Crazy wisdom does speak in the life of light

That yearns to be shared. In questions

Trust and intimacy, awakening and sleep,

Agency and doubt abound.

There is more than one way to skin a cat,

We say, when we neglect or hide the pain of it.

Are you drawn to the light? Dream

Into the shadow, learn the blood, sweat

And tears of all the worlds’ pains.

Does the darkness tear at your heart?

Allow it to break open yourself, for only

Love of a heart revealed can see

Light in the chaotic holy dark.

There are many ways to skin a community,

We say, when one and all: to protect innards,

To give shade from the glare of the piercing sun

To create a container that can hold and

Behold, know and be known, love

Like a geyser within one and for all.

First Fruits -- a draft

The charismatic journey teacher paints

A Caravaggio in every room, light and shadow

To be sensed, seen, and sown. And

Mourned, grieved, witnessed aloud.

A crazy wisdom speaks in the life

of light that yearns to be shared, though

Questions of trust and intimacy,

Awakening and sleep, agency 

And doubt abound.

There is more than one way to skin a cat,

We say, when we neglect or hide the pain of it.

Are you drawn to the light?

Dream into the shadow and learn the blood

Sweat and tears of the pain.

Does the darkness tear at your heart?

Allow it to be broken yourself, for only the love

Of a heart revealed can see light in the dark.

There are many ways to skin a community,

After all--to protect all our innards, give us shade

From the glare of the sun, to create a container

That can nourish and be nourished, know

And be known, love and be loved. For all.

A touch of light in the dark of wisdom itself.

Coming Home to an Unknown Land

I feel a bit as if I’m finding a new family I didn’t know I had. 

In preparation for a week’s R&R and a bit of post-semester, professional development, I downloaded Susan Gubar’s edited compilation of essays entitled True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011) into the Kindle I rarely use. Except when travelling, when it becomes a portable library of companionable authors. I knew of Susan Gubar’s work because of a recent New York Times Book Review that caught my eye, but this volume drew me in with the proposition of listening in to women professor’s autobiographical musings about their lives before, during and after careers in higher education. I recognized several names in the Table of Contents, but not very many, truth be told. I became a feminist myself mostly out of self-defense in my years of theological education. While sympathetic, even a quiet advocate and servant of women, I’ve not been well-versed in the literatures of feminism. I was therefore completely unprepared for the overwhelming resonance and recognitions of myself, events in my life, directions in my work as a poet-scholar in higher education. I devoured essay after essay on the plane-ride, amazed at “coming home” to an unknown land in the lives of women I’ve never met. And now I have so much correspondence and nesting to do!

Shirley Geok-lin Lim gave me words I’ve yearned to say myself. She calls herself “a mongrel academic-creative writer, between and in between the two institutionally-differentiated identities of scholar and poet.” I need to look up the etymology of “mongrel” now. She describes a guiding force in her life--and in my life right now--which is “other forms of community…peers, older women who offer an alternative and new form of gyno-love (a woman-based, woman-centric homosociability separate from lesbian love).” Was she in my head or just connected in that web of interdependence we all talk about but so often forget?

The essay by Patricia Yeager, “Labial Politics,” reflected on the first time her mother taught her to use a tampon and gasped, “Oh, they’re so big, so…you’ll have no trouble having babies.” She stared, Yaeger observes, finding herself then in a paroxysm of insecurity: what was the matter? Was I malformed? I was myself returned to something my mother observed to me, probably in 8^th grade or so, when I bemoaned how large I was and how dainty other girls seemd to be, including my own sister. She said to me, “Lisa, you’re so lucky: you have child-bearing hips.” The irony of that observation hit me today with full-force. What is a woman not interested or called to child-bearing to do with “child-bearing hips”?

Nancy Chodorow’s essay, “The Psychoanalysit, the Sociologist, and the Femnist: a Retrospect,” drew me into some wonderings for the learning of the week as well. She confirms her established sense that “meaning comes from within as much as from without,” in contradistinction to much of the sociology of knowledge that was prevalent in her early scholarly formation. She mused on being “accused of writing like a man,” which reminded me of a church member once attempting to encourage me by saying, “Someday, you’ll preach like a man.” 

But in her The Power of Feelings, which I’ve not read, Chodorow shares her more recent thinking about the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship for a woman’s sense of her female self and femininity. She evolves her earlier work to re-focus (if I’m understanding correctly) renewed attention on the “internal and external relation to the mother” as developmentally central for this sense of self and sense of femininity. The distinction here being the internalized self-in-relation as well as the actual or external relation to one’s mother. She then reclaims something she had earlier rejected. In her earlier work, she observes that she’d historically given “the body quite short shrift” in her theorizing. “In my more recent thinking,” she writes, “I reclaim the reproductive body and drives. Even if these are not biologically enacted in an actual pregnancy, I suggest that this biology demands psychic representation.” A wave of curiosity and energy...but what does that mean?

I’ve not thought about the relationship with my mother in any critical or re-listening sense in years. In my late twenties, during my own clinical training, the reclamation of my femininity paralleled a re-engagement of reflection on the quiet or implicit relationship I seemed to have with my mother, in contrast to the quite overt and intense relationship I had with my father and two of his brothers. It was a lively time for both Mom and me, I think, as she grew surprised at my interest in her early life and I grew more and more insistent that these years were important to me, even if they didn’t seem to be for her. 

As I read Chodorow’s words, I was also startled to remember something a rather wounded woman said to me two years ago. She’s a psychotherapist with whom I worked for two separate and brief periods of time—the first to explore the potentially destructive energies around childbearing (or not) I was having, the second (ultimately) to complete that narrative with a “thank-you” reflective-session or two. The last visit with this therapist did not end well, when I came in to express my thanksgiving and be intentional about closure. She responded with a systematic attack on any areas of insecurity she had perceived in me, concluding with some barb about the relationship with my mother. “You’ve never addressed the serious work you need to do on the relationship with your mother,” or some such quip. I had been steeping in lectures on nonviolent communication, so I (deftly, when I think about it now) eased my way out of the door with minimal retaliation or offense. I processed her violation of her oath to me to “do no harm,” implicit in her professional ethic. A professional colleague and a circle of healthy friends affirmed my sense of violation and injustice. I considered sending the drafted letter to the psychological association ethics board, but did not. In this instance, I don’t believe she saw something for me to work on that I did not see, though perhaps something spoke through her for me to hear in the future. Her words struck me as a last-ditch attempt to get me to stay in a dependent relationship with her as a therapist. Perhaps she’s got work to do about motherhood and abandonment?

Upon the memory surfacing today, I do wonder whether there will be a richness of life ahead were I to reconsider the depth and breadth of my relationship to Mom, a reclamation of my own reproductive body and drives, a psychic representation of this reproductive body which appears never to actualize in a biological pregnancy. It seems probable, as I am preparing to steep in teachings with a Jungian “cantadora” whose recent work professes devotion to Holy Mother. The gathering conference participants seem to be largely (and some quite large!) women who do seem this speaker's niche of audience or market. How interesting to be in a center devoted to Divine Light, surrounded by more and more women, anticipating listening to Dr. E who many call “Mother Clarissa.”

Coming home to an unknown land, indeed. Blessed be.

Running Sacred

It was a season of running.

One year into a new life with new jobs, a new home in the Midwest, a seasoned but young marriage, many decisions of life pending. The retreat center close to home offered as good a running trail as any, complete with paved and woodland trails. I was running more and longer, almost as if I were afraid of something behind me, within me. Whatever it was, it was so close I could not seem to get away. The more deeply I felt it, the longer and faster I ran, not unlike a horse increasingly frightened by a riderless wagon hitched behind him. I entered the grotto near the end of a looped run, dappled by sun and shade. A Marian figurine towered above, whitened but for specks of outside toil. Two faded turquoise kneelers rested at the grotto’s base. Without anymore straight-aways to run, I slowed to a cantor, then to a trot, then to a walk. Exhausted, I lowered my body onto the faded pads of a kneeler. It felt strange to me, a running Protestant reined in close to a blessed Mother.

I looked up at her, of professed blessed status unknown to me. I heard myself ask what it was like for her, What was it like to offer your own body for inconceivably sacred purpose? A question of lengthy sacred trajectory, when I thought about it. “This is my body, given for you,” I heard. How does one offer one’s own body to another? To a stranger, to a beloved, for what purpose? Something in me stopped running. I could not outrun this, nor could I continue to try. I loved my husband. I yearned for him, but my body was being drawn to Her.

We set a time on the phone to meet at her house the next morning, but her husband had the flu. “Let’s meet at the Grotto,” she said. I put the old Celtic ring on my right index finger, to remember who I was, the beloved of a gentling Irish soul. It was old and familiar but now felt new, fragile, scarcely breathing. Her car was there when I arrived. We walked through the arbor and sat on a bench, in the gaze of the Marian figure. An autumn breeze picked up, rustling the leaves, making shadows dance on the brick tiles at our feet.

“I’m not sure how to begin,” I began. “At the very least, we cannot bathe as sacred that which is not.” Her eyes softened. She smiled. “I was thinking about you the other day,” she said. “I realized something remarkable.” An impish tone entered into her voice, a gentle strength with expansive warmth. “It feels like we’re married already somehow. Is not that wonderful?” She touched my hand, gently, covering it with her own.

All of me felt it at once—a sensate warmth, a tectonic shift, an easing of weight, an expansiveness beyond anything I’d ever known. Early childhood returned. There was no Shame. None. What had been was no more. Its clammy hold had released. Its deadening weight, its opaque veil, lifted. A light holy breath rushed into every dark space I had known. Even if it were to be for just that moment, I realized I would know for the rest of my life: the old, dusty language of my parents’ youth had a feeling. Sanctification could be sensed.  Its reality blossomed within my very bones. When offered, in the touch of her hand, a guilt-ridden body can be transfigured. The fragrance of erotic love overpowers all shame.

Today I smile, celebrating over a decade of marriage to my Irish beloved, the man who taught me of such anam cara loves, holy friendships between persons in most unexpected pairings. I smile today because what our over-culture decries as an abomination—an erotic love between women—was precisely what sanctified my body, cleansed my spirit, emboldened my soul, freed my mind. A stone rejected by the builders is the chief cornerstone of my life, the unruly, sensate lifeline to my Beloved in whom I know all the loves of my life. 

I smile today because the wonderful, terrifying thing is that this was not the first, nor the last run. This charging steed of life keeps finding me, others, running sacred within all those committed to love, overwhelmingly abundant only within bounds. “This is religion!” we say, in union with one and all.

Yearning's Calendar

I miss him, though I smile in confusion at just who or what I miss, precisely. Is it the man or the connection, the sensations or the sense of purpose? I felt myself missing her yesterday too, which was new. Is it the woman or the connection, the sensations or the sense of purpose? And then, of course, a deep awareness of missing them, which cycles more regularly these last couple years. Who do we miss when life moves us into new paths and relationships, when those who have been our companions are moved onto their new paths or are living their lives in their own directions, as we all must? What of them was ever “lent” to us in the first place? What did we feel we had been given that is now no longer “ours,” instigating this deep sense of loss or yearning?

I’ve been reading some old writing pieces, one out of necessity, the others out of curiosity. One brought me back three years, into an early phase of a new spiritual friendship. A book was sent and received as a gift. A teaching collaboration began. Resonance and learning for transformation grew and a healthy but unruly love was borne. It awakened me in public, grew my spirit to imagine previously inconceivable offerings, challenges, possibilities. It shaped my own relationship with God at a fundamental level, growing faith where there had been knowledge, compassion where there had been duty, abundance where there had been sufficient provision. I wince today at the vulnerability and passion of prose that flowed out of me, some directly to him, some offered in faith to the path. I know the grief of relinquishing him in faith. And I yearn for him or the intensity of connection or whatever the yearning is about this time.

Another writing brought me back even further to another awakening into spiritual friendship. The new pastors had arrived and bought a home close to their new jobs. One of them was man-handled by a “gentleman” in the congregation. The other fell silent for years, his rage quelled in the face of small-town privilege, provinciality, financial captivity. Two months later, two women sat on a bench in a holy grotto as they became one heart to be shared. Holy desire, sanctified and sanctifying, nourished them both, for a time. A way of covenant was published. A new path of spiritual direction was birthed. An interfaith marriage was transformed and new communities found new leaders. Then neither friend could sustain presence with the other, for some reason. Grasping at fidelity to what had been, each was required to relinquish the other into the arms of the community, unknowing why or for what reason the friendship had completed.

Yearning appears to have its own calendar, I guess. It has holidays and ordinary times in a rhythmic cycle. Except one cannot hang this one on the wall, to anticipate what comes or the mundane days that make up a life. No, yearning’s calendar creates itself amongst people and uncontrollable connections. 

When I trace this life I know by yearning, I am surprised to see my calendar beginning as early as grade school--third grade, to be specific--with my schoolteacher, Miss Donley. I remember her telling the class that she would be leaving school that summer to get married to a young man named (for us) Mr. Smith. (It occurs to me now to wonder if that really was his name.) Regardless, that afternoon, getting home from school, I sat on the pilled green circle-chair, pushing myself round and round on its swivel. The yearning hurt. Her departure made a little girl cry, going round and round to nowhere in her living room. No matter that the next year I would have been in another grade, with another teacher. No matter that my own growth meant I was leaving her too. Connection and separation, relinquishment and yearning.

Then I become aware of this same energy again and again—or better, my body remembers these sensations again—across distance and years: a high-school chemistry teacher, a college RA, an atheist uncle, an assistant soccer coach, a roommate’s brother, a head of school, a pastor-scholar, a naming uncle, a professor of theology, a professor of transformation, a mentor and her partner, an organist and choral director, an impish Sister of Charity, a Quaker of nurture and compassionate anger, a crusty-wise Hospice patient, and more. Each of these persons in my mind today recalls a yearning energy into my body, my awareness. I have felt ashamed sometimes, when remembering them in my life, even as I mark them as the most significant presences in my life. Like it was shameful to feel so deeply, such intense connection to persons I should not love like that. Whatever “like that” meant in each case to me, or them. Whatever “should not” means. At root, these relationships are the ones that have made me who I am, these are the ones who have shaped my life’s work, have directed my path, have touched and transformed my spirit unto its delight, resilience, and gifting.

And they continue to do the same today. Remembering this, seeing this line of companions, strengthens a sense of intention or purpose, regularly questioned amidst any relinquishment. Remembering them, describing them even this briefly, reminds me there is work to do and fruit to offer a world increasingly lonely in its everpresent connection but lack of intimacy and provision. The blessings of such connection—so many connections over the years—are newly received when seen in such a line over time.  How could I be so gifted with intense connection to so many different persons, of such remarkable gifts and passions they were willing to share with me?

The amazing thing is that what we've been given, truly given in faith over embodied time, has been etched in the historical record of living bodies. I remember the gut-wrenching fear when my husband travelled to Israel/Palestine for a period of three weeks when we would have little to no contact with each other. Separation, we knew. Daily news media of violence and threat, I knew. And then my body remembered and taught:  any companionship of Spirit never dies, in the end, as it is always a part of one’s embodied life written into form by the Infinite. What Spirit gives is never eradicated, especially if one relinquishes it in faith. I knew that if something happened to my husband, it would be awful for me in loss and grief. But I also knew that everything we had had together would always be a part of me, even if I couldn’t remember all I wanted to remember of it. The sanctity of the body, perhaps, or its gift to us, daily.

Yearning’s calendar and practice require a longitudinal view, it turns out, if one is to sustain the yearning in faith, in fidelity to all those who have made us who we are, and are becoming. It doesn’t soften the sensation of it all, the joy that stings, but it does remind me to receive the day as it is with a smile. And to offer a prayer for all those who have shared their path with me. I am so very thankful for each and every one of you, even if we are now about other things. I wouldn't miss you if it hadn't been significant, formative, Real.