Stay Strong.

A great little who's-who of the kirtan world and a positive (and very catchy) message for the week.

Card designs...

Since I just recently received a handful of samples to photograph, here are two cards I designed for a client last winter. The motifs are hand engraved on their famously luxurious paper, and the top heart is further embossed in shimmering red foil. Want one? The heart card can still be purchased here.

Yesterday brought snowflakes that grew bigger and fatter until they dissolved into rain and disappeared.

Then the temperature dipped and turned the rain to ice, catching droplets in mid-drip and leaving them there for the sun to shine through this morning.

Creating thin ice sculptures on top of branches.

Hipity-hopity. Rabbit prints head off in one direction and smaller prints nearby show evidence of...

a struggle? Confusion? I think this little creature and I are on a similar path of starts and stops and circles this week.

 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Olivier asks.
All I hear is the wind in bare branches.

The Story of Cosmetics...

Good things to know.

Unfold your own myth

Last night I returned to weekly kirtan (with Dave, above) after a 2 month hiatus. I was meandering down Main Street afterwards thinking about how emotionally high I used to feel after chanting when I first began the practice - almost giddy, really. After about a year this feeling seemed to fade slightly. What had happened? Last night it occurred to me that kirtan and the various practices I've been engaging in since losing my mom seem to have led me to a more stable place emotionally — making day-to-day highs feel a little less high and lows a little more bearable. These days I come to kirtan in good spirits and leave in good spirits — as opposed to crawling in to kirtan from an abysmal pit of grief and hopelessness and leaving ecstatic.

That was a comforting conclusion to arrive at.

In a similar vein, a friend recently asked me how the spiritual stuff is going.

In truth, the kirtan hiatus has applied to just about every part of my practice. Its rapid boil needed to slow down a bit, because I felt it was bringing on an inner transformation more rapidly than I could arrange my outer world to accommodate the profound changes and that floaty, ungrounded feeling of vairagya. What I've experienced in the past year and a half has forced me to take a hard look at every aspect of life and ask challenging questions about its purpose — and the meditation sessions have been almost frighteningly effective at revealing answers.

Once those answers began to show up (and for me they show up high-kicking and banging gongs, nothing subtle about them) it's kind of hard to return to business as usual and pretend you don't see them. In his blog post yesterday Guru Singh wrote, "When you begin to align with the harmonic convergence of your song, you become intuitive. Intuition is not good guessing . . . intuition knows beyond the rational. You know because you know and that is that. When your instrument is fully tuned, you not only live harmoniously in time space, but you know beyond timespace."

I used to think intuition was all about predicting the future, but it's actually about recognizing your personal truths by trusting your gut feelings instead of relying on books, dogmas and society to define them for you. Only you know what is right for you. Practice opens the book and intuition gives you the means to translate what's on its pages. Warning: Reading that book may beckon you completely out of your comfort zone as well as out of the mainstream — but it's genuine and original and my hope is that if you dare to keep reading, its story is about the fulfillment of one's destiny.

Rumi writes, "...don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation, so everyone will understand the passage, we have opened you."

I think maybe you open the book and then the book opens you.

Some of the most startling discoveries I've made this year haven't even been shared here. I hint at them, and perhaps someone adept at reading between the lines could guess at a few — but when it comes time for squeezing them into syllables — well, I'm at a loss. Some things just are what they are, indescribable. "How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?" (Rumi, Shreds of Steam).

It's Rumi I turned to for companionship when I returned home from Ananda last summer, and we passed several months together, short on words. My withdrawal and silence didn't go without notice at work. None of my coworkers asked me about it directly, but by September I was pulled into my boss's office. Ever since my mom died I've been straddling two worlds. I felt the shift immediately. Sometimes I wonder if a kind of door opened to let her through that morning, and because I was there, witnessing, I was permitted to look in - not with my physical eyes, which are limited and flawed, but with some other part of me that sees more clearly.

Truths are revealed by practice, and change is demanded by truth — but realistically and practically speaking how quickly can one begin a metamorphosis without coming across as simply reactionary? I think its safest to try and respect the natural rhythm of emergence, which I wrote about last week. Choices are never simple, never between just  "the black" and "the white." There are gray areas to be considered. There are repercussions. There will be a sacrifice of something, whatever you choose. What are you willing to renounce? This is an enormously difficult question. It can't be rushed.

December, January, February...for the last few months my practice has been slowly simmering on the back burner while I lay a bit of practical groundwork and construct a little cocoon, my eyes still fixed on the path ahead. The next step has come into focus, and it's almost safe to turn up the heat on my practice again. All the while I keep thinking about the theme of last summer's retreat, "radical transformation" and about the caterpillar I wrote about beforehand, completely unaware of his butterfly destiny. Oh, and about Rumi.

"Start walking towards Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you've grown, lifting."

The Beautiful People

Uncontacted Amazon Tribe: First ever aerial footage from Survival International on Vimeo.

This video clip, filmed by the BBC in collaboration with the Brazilian government and released on February 4th, shows uncontacted Indians on the Brazil-Peru border in never-seen-before detail, and is the first-ever aerial footage of an uncontacted community.

Peru’s President Garcia has publicly suggested uncontacted tribes have been ‘invented’ by ‘environmentalists’ opposed to oil exploration in the Amazon, while another spokesperson compared them to the Loch Ness monster. In fact, there are more than one hundred uncontacted tribes around the world.

Oil workers and illegal loggers are invading the lands of uncontacted tribes in Peru. They risk introducing infectious diseases which could wipe the Indians out. They won’t survive unless the invasions stop. There's an effort underway to protect them, including this petition, which will be delivered to Peru's President Garcia.

In this wired, always-on, increasingly populated, globalized world it is just amazing to think that there are still pockets of wilderness where hidden groups of people living in complete harmony with nature; completely unaware of the conveniences and luxuries we think we can't live without; hunting, gathering, practicing traditional herbal medicine, completely self-sufficient, thriving. The very last of their kind.

"There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness."

— Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light, "The Jiva's Journey," p. 46

Above the fold...

J ended up on the front page of the local newspaper again today, working in his tee shirt and sunglasses on this gloriously warm February day. I'm glad the photographer isn't a woman or I'd be starting to get suspicious!

The rhythm of emergence

Marion from Joy and Wonder shared this quote from poet John O' Donohue in the comments today and I wanted to share it with those of you who may not venture into the comments...

The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. 
Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. 
The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; 
change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. 
Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always captures us unawares. 
It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.

I read these words thinking not so much about spring but about the fresh beginnings I'm trying to make in my life — that "manifestation" I vowed to focus on this year. I don't know about you, but I am so impatient with myself, wanting to jump quickly from the fat to the fire, wanting to know and be right before I've even given myself the time to be taught, and allowed myself the space to be wrong. Wanting to be finished before I've even begun. Perhaps 12 years of working under deadlines has done this to me, created this monster of anxiety. "I can't wait for this, I can't wait for that..." J teases me. I am truly always in a froth for what's around the next bend.

Last night, curious, I took a peek at last February's posts. I had only been chanting for 3 months. I had just started taking yoga classes. I had just celebrated my first Shivaratri. I was only just beginning to make major changes to my diet. I hadn't yet been on a retreat by myself. I had only browsed through a textbook on Ayurveda. I need only to look back on that one month to see that I have indeed been inching my way forward, unawares.

This is kind of a springtime for me.

Stop for a moment to consider the rhythm of your own emergence.
And then re-read that beautiful 4th line about change remaining faithful to itself until "the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival." What encouraging words!

I love that this quote ends with the sense of being surrounded by this new manifestation.

I can't wait!

Oops.

Spring is just hiding beneath three feet of snow...

I just know it is.

The world around me is still cold, white and icy, but I can feel winter loosening its grip a little this week, can you? I drive home from the office with light in the sky and a bit more lightness in my heart. Spring is coming.

Inklings

I don't remember where I found this, but I like it.

Barn Raising

Though my own work has been all-consuming for the past several weeks, the project that J and his boss have been working on is far more interesting to look at — and since he always brings his camera to the job site I have plenty of photos to share...

...of this traditional post-and-beam barn rising from the snow in a nearby town. Here it is waiting for its roof trusses and looking a bit like the Lincoln Logs I used to play with. 

A local paper found the project newsworthy and sent a photographer to the work site to clamber up the beams and capture some amazing birds-eye view shots of the beams being lowered into place by a crane. That's J in front, above.

Back to J's photos: Trusses in place.

A barn wouldn't be a barn without a cupola on top.

When the frame was complete, J was sent up to "top out" the project with a small tree, a building tradition.

Tomorrow work on the roof and deck begins and I'm sure I'll have more photos to share as the barn comes together.

Meanwhile I'm hoping the sudden influx of work I'm trying to juggle will begin to slow down a bit so I can get back to blogging, reading, cooking and having some semblance of a social life (though I did sneak out with J last night to see Jai Uttal at Kripalu - and ran into a friend and fellow blogger!) It was a nice change of pace — going full tilt days, nights and weekends is ok for short bursts, but making it a lifestyle isn't my intention!

The Johnny Cash Project...

A global collective art project. Did anyone else hear about this on NPR this weekend?
Working with a single image as a template, and using a custom drawing tool, participants from around the world have created (and are in the process of creating) a unique and personal portrait of Johnny Cash. Each portrait/frame is combined with others and integrated into a collective whole: a music video for "Ain’t No Grave," Johnny Cash's final recording.

Amazing!

A refreshing afternoon break...

 Vixen's blond friend.

Impressive snow.

  

I promise I'll stop digging holes in your trail now.

Wood for the afternoon ahead.

Now it's back to book building! Happy Friday!

Live, Freeze, and Die

Some comic relief.

Night Commute

Morning Commute...

I love the snow. It's the driving I could do without.