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sleeping restless

Posted on Feb 24th, 2008 by doolang : Unity doolang
lonetree


I woke this morning trying to recover a dream and i said to myself why bother it was just constant chatter, just odds an ends rambling on and on. It wasn't like the visions that come to me in my stillness, those visions come with clarity. Often a singular image, repeated in myriad forms. It was then I realized the difference between the ever-questing masculine energy that seemed to be nervously digging and tearing through everything in search of some unknown, but always on a specious quest and then its counterpart: the calm accepting feminine stillness that washes away the worries of the day, letting everything go, letting everything be. Loving acceptance on the one hand, wandering dissatisfaction on the other. I wonder if that is what ADD is like...is it just masculine energy gone awry? Short sighted blundering stumble from one thing to the next...in search of...............stillness???? I see it in my hands, fingers rubbing together trying to feel something, but there is nothing there to feel.

Living alone and semi-isolated in the country, I found it much easier to allow the feminine to blossom inside me. Now that I have come back to the farm I find myself in the constant company of others. I find myself in the midst of this strong masculine energy. Dustin and Robert (Father and Son), dominate this household forcefully, not violently or angrily, just a forceful presence that seems to know no stillness and is easily moved to action and opinion. Their words betray a desperation, that realizes their ineffectiveness at the moment of utterance, but knows not what else to do.  It seems to be invading my sleep, bringing back what was already there, inviting me to look again. The feminine creatures seem reluctant to stick their necks out. I sense a timidity and fear, I experience it myself. I make tentative reaches. Mostly I watch from the shadows. As usual, I'm just a visitor.

I find myself seeking solace in the company of other women. Their words, their photos. My friend Laura is my inspiration for writing here. She shares herself so lovingly, so sincerely, so openly. She has created a wonderous garden for me to play in. She invited me here a year ago. Today I speak my first words. 

In a world such as this so few people it seems have had the opportunity to become themselves, that there is little to find solace in. The space they have created is not big enough for one, let alone two. 

"Deep in my heart, there's a house that could hold just about all of you."
Marc Bolan of T. Rex Spaceball Ricochet

Marc Bolan - Spaceball Ricochet


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Tagged with: love, loneliness, feminine, heart, isolation, dreams, masculine, space

earthly love, earthly lover loving heartily

Posted on Feb 22nd, 2008 by doolang : Unity doolang
fall remembered

I finally understand what I am doing here at the farm. I came here to get grounded. To connect with the earth. I started it before I left washington, I went kayaking. Feeling the rhythms and chaos of nature, it's abiding and unflinching slow love. It's a slow and chaotic pulse. 

I'm sitting in my old bed, an old  futon that i brought with me from Seattle to Chicago to D.C. to Chicago and finally abandoned in Jasper. My desk, my chair, everything pretty much as I left it 5 years ago. The Georgia O'Keefe Sunflower still cheering me in all its gloriosity. Stormy's excited drawings and watercolors still warming my heart. My own pictures still hanging reminding me of my friends and accomplishments and the special times I had here.

I'm back on the farm. Mercury Retrograde took me here. I came to get back to my roots, to get back to nature. To recover the roots of the agrarian connection. I'm perched atop my cotton cloud listening to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

16 hours of complicated travel to get here. I just laughed at each new manifestation of mischievous Mercury. Leaving the airport Robert and I somehow missed the exit and added another 15 minutes to our time finally arriving here at 3 am. No matter. I had to go back.

I left something here that i needed to recover: my earth connection. I've never felt it stronger than right here. This is the most beautiful farm i have ever seen, because it is many farms in one. Most farms are pretty generic throughout, but not this one. I just keep wandering from one secret garden to the next. Each space has its own energy, it's own personality and our own sacred relationship, from the years i once lived here.

When i come here. Robert always gives me space. I wake up when i feel like it and he just goes on with his business by himself, giving me time to adjust and explore. He leaves me be until i finally come find him. I've always liked that about him. 

The rest of the family can't wait to talk to me, so i stayed in bed till they were gone. I ate a light breakfast and wandered the farm, through woods and meadows, over hilltops and river. The sky was brilliant blue and the air was warm, the sun bright in the sky. Nature pulled me along on a wonderous chaotic adventure. She asked nothing of me, expected nothing of me, absorbed my every action. I felt my feet sinking into her soft, wet earthly flesh, and I was instantly transported to bygone days of passionate affairs with her as I revelled in her beauty and symmetry her magical loving providing purity, her hopeful directing of life to grow to new heights to be its best and how she filled me with her magic. I laughed at this ancient image because it just did not fit the beautiful woman I  saw before me: The slow plodding woman of broken rhythm and guttoral undulations, encouraging growth by limiting boundaries and embracing chaos.

A romantic projection had fallen and I was seeing the gracious beauty of truth. The world as it is, not the lies I'd been told and imagined i saw. Something simpler, truer, and after the initial loss of my illusions more beautiful than I had ever seen before. Some people talk of the amazing symmetry of nature, but anyone who has ever looked for it hasn't found it. They imagine the perfect whorl of the pinecone and they draw pictures of its perfect geometry, but find it in nature they do not. Just a projection that blinds us to her true chaotic nature. As Einstein said, "God does not play dice." Perhaps, but "God is dead," spake Zarathustra and nature does. The photographer is forever searching for the perfect symmetry in a leaf to photograph it and it is always flawed. God is just another romantic projection to blind us from seeing the beautiful truth: Life is available to us: Life is ours: Life is individual and unique.

gateway


Nature called me to higher ground, pulling me into a wooded path wrapping me in a canopy of sleeping branches penetrating the sky like a network of capillaries waiting to deliver her life's blood to the sky. Deeper and deeper she lured me into her meandering tunnel till i emerged near the top in warm spot between two soft green mounds, the crease anchored by a towering oak. As I walked into this sacred space I stepped upon and crushed a decaying and broken branch. I suddenly felt like a transgressor and that I had violated the space. "It is what is." she said. "It always will be sacred. Always sacred. Like you. Someday dead, decayed, broken, and crushed, but still sacred" Mother Earth felt no more love for me than for a dead branch. "All the same," she said. "All my children. Always my children."

"Suckle" she said and i drank deeply, "Deflower me. We'll devour each other eternally" she said squeezing me tightly. "Go where you will. Do what you like. But you will always come home to me. Forever my baby. Forever my lover. Respect me and i'll be here for you. Respect me not and i'll still be here, but maybe not the way you would like me to be."

Hers is a beautiful equanimity. Hers is patient acceptance of what is. Hers is equal love for all down to the finest grain of sand and every element of the universe inside it. Hers is a compassion that always welcomes one home and gives one the strength to go out into the world again. 

I was honored to be in her presence and share in her company and conversation. I hope I can follow her example. If i don't succeed at least i know i will never disappoint her and she will always love me. 


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Tagged with: nature, earth, connection, love, sacred, feminine, equanimity, passion, farm

It's a Man's World

Posted on Feb 26th, 2008 by doolang : Unity doolang
Balanced Love


This is a community overflowing with love, joy, stillness, nurturance, sharing, healing, acceptance...I assume everyone has noticed the resistance these primarily feminine values encounter in the world at large. 

Why is it uncomfortable when others share their feelings? Is it just because it stirs up our own feelings? Do we need to strengthen ourselves so that we can endure that? Do you see any other way that we can ever learn to get along together without being able to empathize: to feel what another is feeling? 

I recently healed a rift in my spirit. An ancient wound. I restored the feminine to her rightful place, joined in me we are one whole complete person able to feel, to find stillness, to accept, nurture, heal, love, and feel joy and connection and revel in the divine, but i make the people around me uncomfortable with that. I frighten or intimidate or embarrass and they withdraw because they can't express their feelings, nor allow me to express mine. If i have time then one by one I can bolster them, and give them the courage to see me, and to discover and express what they themselves are feeling. I suppose i should clarify, if i am touched by a story, or event, i might express my gratitude, joy, sorrow, in some other heartfelt way, I might even be moved to tears, I might get choked up, nothing over the top and showy, just a sincere genuine display of feeling. So i am not embarrassing people because i am trying to, i am just communicating in a direct way. I'm a fairly popular, social person, usually well thought of, outgoing, friendly, expressive, but not overly dramatic.  I've always been loving but never felt allowed to express that generally and so I have suppressed it for the most part, until now. 

I am enjoying being back in possession of my emotions. It's liberating to know what i am feeling and be able to show it. I'm able to feel the suffering in the world and those around me and not be harmed by it. I've overcome my urge to do anything about it and I find i am able to just let it be and let it go. I'm able to connect with the people around me and allow them to feel and to express what they are feeling and to accept it whatever it may be. I'm in a good space and i'm making it better. I'm exceedingly happy, but deeply concerned, because there is much healing needed. There is so much healing needed that we must all become healers, because we have to heal ourselves. But how can we heal if we can't feel?

In general, people are so bereft of compassion for things distant. Could it be that we are so overwhelmed by the suffering in the world that we just tune it all out? Is that the main reason we are so disconnected generally? Is that why so many float on the 7th Chakra cloud on top of the mountain far, far away from the knee deep blood that covers the surface of the earth? Is that why so many wade blindly through life? Where did all that blood come from? It seems the feminine is used to hiding in this Man's world, keeping to the shadows. Every feminine value it seems is viewed as a weakness that can be exploited, while the masculine runs rampant. Is there something fundamentally out of sync here that is preventing us from loving and accepting one another?

If a man were to fall down and I went to help him up, it would hardly catch the attention of anyone in a crowd. But if i were to just start beating somebody up, hitting them and making them all bloody, then a large crowd would gather, they would be excited they might even be pushing each other to get a better view. Why is the barbaric more worthy of attention than the noble? Why in those circumstances is the pain of the loser not felt, and we share instead in the potential glory of victory of the pummeler?

Here we are in this Man's world. Knee deep in it. Sending love and joy out into a world that is blind to feeling. Does it still arrive? Does it? 

What is it that keeps us from feeling? Why don't we share our feelings? Why are most people uncomfortable with other peoples feelings, stillness, joy, love, compassion, nurturing, healing, acceptance? 

My short life of a couple months trying to express my newly recovered feminine values has me wondering if women in general aren't experiencing it even more. I would guess that women find themselves unable to be themselves. It is hard for me to express these ideas, values, feelings in this Man's world. I just finished reading White Oleander, which pretty well confirms that, in its oft repeated phrase: "It's a man's world." Astrid finds no quarter for her expression and ends up living a gypsy's life, memories packed in suitcases, so she can at least show herself what she could never express to anyone else.

Are there aspects of femininity that you wish you could express? How does that affect your ability to be yourself? Do you possess an identity internally that you can't live externally? 

Sorry at this point i have more questions than answers. Do you have any thoughts on this? Recommended reading?

blissfully confused,
darin

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Tagged with: femininity, feeling, identity, love, sharing, White Oleander, empathy, healing

Isabella Allende on the need for feminine energy

Posted on Feb 28th, 2008 by doolang : Unity doolang
Just watched a passionate lecture on femininity by Isabella Allende, novelist, memoirist, speaking at the TED conference in 2007. Thanks to Darina, Joy Bringer for bringing it to my attention. She speaks with passion about the unique difficulties of being a woman in this world, and comes to some brilliant conclusions:

"The time is right to make fundamental changes in our civilization. For real change we need feminine energy in the management of the world....and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men." --Isabella Allende

Allende's passion was amazing. She seems ready to burst into sobs throughout her speech. Her heart was caught in her throat, her voice quaking from the massive energy pounding loudly on the gates demanding freedom. I often have that sensation when i speak from the heart in front of an audience and I know i just want to burst with tears or something, some ineffable energy I just can't find an outlet for or a receptor for. What is that? God/dess it's beautiful!

 

Perhaps it is a welling of love from my heart that is going out so suddenly and with so much force that it squeezes all the moisture from my throat till it has nowhere to go but out the corners of my eyes.

“There's something in me that could dare to love the world again.” – Arthur Miller: After the Fall

Isabella Allende: Tales of Passion
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Tagged with: femininity, Isabella Allende, passion, compassion, nurturing, identity, love, sharing, empathy, healing

How does if feel to hear that you're safe?

Posted on Feb 29th, 2008 by doolang : Unity doolang
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for February 29, 2008:

I broke in. I stole it. I snuck out. I'm free. Home. Safe.
...the fire burns brightly.
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Tagged with: QaR, safe, safety, reaction, emotions, response, thievery, criminality, dostoevsky