The altar space pictured above organically emerged in my studio in 2020 right along with Covid.  Just know that visual creativity is not my artistic go-to expression.  So it’s intriguing that installations, the visual imagery that sets the tone for 5Rhythms sessions, have ramped up in fascination for me over the years.  Just recently personal time in this studio suffered a too long hiatus.  Travel, a nasty cold, heater on the fritz…I yearned for self care moments up there that sustain me on the regular.  Sigh.

But finally, on Saturday, I turned to the west wall, where all my salvaged treasures await: bones and shells, rocks and wood, textured fabrics and feathers, little sculptures and hearts of all kinds.  A lot of this and plenty of that.  Sometimes something moving in me calls for concrete form.  But this time I created right out of the empty space, trusting what emerged each step of the way.  First a branch turned into a white cave.  Then a rock became a throne for a reclining goddess from Santiago.   Moss from New Brighton Beach.  Bird spine perfectly echoing goddess spine.  Bird skull meticulously fastened to branch with chunk of glue stick.  In my utter trance I knocked over a full tea thermos. I threw the toweled wet mess off the landing and glanced down to spy last year’s Halloween raven mask.  Of course.  Sometimes it happens just like that.

And sometimes I pull a card from the Osho deck and ask, “What do you have to tell me about this creation?”  I already had my own thoughts on that question, but I spread the cards face down on the floor, hovering over the choices with my receptive left hand.  Finally I zeroed in on one card that just did not want to come out of the deck, avoiding my finger grip with a tenacity that made me double down my effort.  Clearly that was the one!

And there it was: the Completion card, final image in the Major Arcana. I just about lost it.  A few excerpted words here:

“… in the ever-changing flow of life there are moments we come to a point of completion….we are able to perceive the whole picture…either be in despair because we don’t want the situation to come to an end, or we can be grateful and accepting…that life is full of endings and new beginnings.  Whatever has been absorbing your time and energy is coming to an end.  In completing, you clear space for something new to begin.  Use this interval to celebrate both—the end of the old and the coming of the new.”

Indeed. Isn’t this exactly the time of year we dial ourselves in to those flow of life seasonal shifts?  The heavens gift us with transitions based in the whole picture eternal. The sun so south-low blankets our northern hemisphere in darkness, a twilight that reflects all that is ending, in completion, finished.  Damp ground moulders and incubates all that has been shed. I trust that mouldering, this interval, this gestation.  It was Tolkein who wrote:

A Zoom call this morning included a meditation to engage in active wishing.  Wishing felt a bit exotic, like I was granted permission to be in youthful delight.  Yet in this child like reverie I noticed the notion of inspiration arise.  Not just for me, but for you, for us, for this needy planet.  Inspiration fueled by wonder, stoked by an imagination released from the need to take immediate action.  Inspiration fueled by wander, by playful meandering, by casting about without fear of disappointment or failure or expectation.

And so, as this year, this season, this whatever draws to a close, the perception of conclusion, of endings, may surface for each of us in its own distinct way.  My wish?  May we open our eyes to the mystery inherent in this moment of completion.  May we grant ourselves a proper pause.  May we be gifted with revelations nourished by un-tethered wonder and the joy of haphazard wandering.

May it be so….and bountiful wishes of healing and holiness to you and yours.

Love, bella

Sitting on an edge, far north Monterey Bay, Capitola tucked behind an echoing bluff.  Her old wooden pier an offering to the sea, Pleasure Point capping the farthest reach of land.  Here I’m gently held by the horizon, that asks nothing in return, just bestows silent comfort as it surrenders, softly circular, to the duet of earth and sky.  I find myself yearning for this, quintessential wide open space, whenever I’m hemmed in by urbanity.

I wish I could remember the name of a book read in my early twenties.  The young protagonist was newly embarking into the work-a-day world.  Her alarm rings on Monday morning and in that dream ‘tween state she imagines the 8 to 5 week ahead.  She fully awakens, stunned by the agenda she has unwittingly agreed to.  Trading her life away for a mere two days on the week-end.

At this same age, this realization slowly dawned on me as well.  It’s what spurned me to chuck it all before I turned thirty and crazy travel for four months.  Not once, but twice.  But life has a way of tumbling forward and all that brilliant awareness was buried under marriage and children, home ownership and careers.  The middle class American dream-come-true. And yet…so much beauty, not one regret.

But wide open spaces never stopped calling me out.  And what I am coming to understand is that the natural landscape/urban world dichotomy is a physical one, yes, but the metaphor of it lives inside us.  And I’ve been an eager student unknowingly soaking up the tutelage of wide open spaces my whole life.  Two decades ago my 8 to 5 shifted into something much less predictable but actually just as time consuming.  I appreciated the change up, barely knowing what the day might hold.  Time off was weirdly interspersed and, as the years went by, slowly became more plentiful.  Covid totally boosted that down time.

Interesting phrase: down time.  Because mostly I am finding it very uplifting.  Very seductive.  Very about time.  There certainly has been more travel to the landscape of wide open spaces, especially in the form of camping.  Which I’m up to right now.  But the fact is, I am increasingly tuned in to the wide open space when I’m home.  An agenda-less afternoon here; a list-free morning there; an evening with nothing in particular to do.  This feels new, at times interesting, curious, exciting.  At other times weird, frustrating, frightening, boring.

There are many emotional scales like this one.  Which is not particularly fabulous, but caught my attention this week:

You can look at it for general attunement to what you feel right in this moment.  Pretty limited, but a good starting point.  What captivated me more was where I generally hang out these days.  And it’s fascinating how that has shifted of late.  Because to tell you the truth, I am mostly, and most simply, content.  Pretty even keel.  Lacking of melodrama.   A little nostalgic for the old roller coaster at times.

Notice that right beneath content is boredom.  And here’s what I’m noticing: boredom is sprinkled throughout the field of wide open space.  Frustration and doubt are scattered there as well.  Travel up the scale to see all the other juicy feel-good inhabitants co-existing in the wide open space.

However, those challenging ones—boredom, frustration, doubt—can often turn out to be uber-rich fertilizers of that field.  These sentiments can be so exquisitely uncomfortable that we doubt the beauty of the field and do anything to steer away from those wide open spaces.

With all the changes in my work life, with all the ways I am working with younger people and willingly taking steps back, it sometimes feels like I’m putting myself out to pasture.  And I suppose I am, partly cuz I’m intrigued with this wide open pasture.  Willing to move with boredom, dance with frustration, be face-to-face with doubt.  Content to breathe and be.  Satisfied to sit for awhile, right here and now, and see what authentically arises of its own accord.

It was good, that life in the fast lane.  But you’ll find me way over in the right lane now. Falling in love with noticing, appreciating and harvesting the complexity and simplicity of an endlessly transformative scene slowly passing by.

❤️Bella

Maybe this musing about the mystic is spurned by current loss.  Beloved mother-in-law of fifty years.  Did we really first meet when I was 19?  Matriarchal moon holding six siblings in her orbit, so many grandchildren, great grandchildren.  And now, the shape of this long-standing constellation shifts.  A few days later Robert Ansell passes, steadfast partner to Gabrielle Roth.  Did you know he was a high power criminal attorney in NYC?  Until he met Gabrielle.  Until he ditched all that, dived head first into playing bass drum, deeply supported her in the work.  She had that effect on people. The wheel turns again as the next aging generation steps up to the plate.

And I suppose that includes me.  The evidence as such softly blankets my existence.  And there it is again: I catch myself making a repeating request.  “Please don’t ask me the ‘when’ question.”  As in, “What year did we take that trip to Mexico?”  Or “When did we last paint the house?”  Or “How long has it been since we’ve gone to Yosemite?”  Or “What year did your uncle pass?”   I totally remember all these things happening.  Please, just don’t ask me when.  Because my senior memory function has alarmingly shifted over these last couple years.

Is it pandemic-induced?  Is it a natural aging process?  Is it more dire than that?  I really don’t know.  I just have this sense of sailing off into the mystic.  Of existing in a space unbound by time.  As if all memory has been surreptitiously moved into an un-catalogued container.  What happened last week exists right next to what happened last year.  A story from my fifties cozies up to a thirties story.   1970?  1990?  Who knows?

Rest assured:  this has nothing to do with my brain’s ability to function in other ways.  I drive my car like a champ.  Curiously, I take patient histories, plan treatments, create home videos more fluidly with each passing year.  I listen to and catalogue new music like a pro.  I’m masterful in the kitchen.  I could go on.  But this strangely altered relationship to time.  What choice is there but to sail off into the mystic?  Surrender to the reality of memory that shifts like desert sand.  Give up on time as an organizational constraint.  Thrive in this revised zone.  There’s a breath of freedom here.

But I am a meaning-making individual.  And I wonder what to make of this in the big picture of a life.  Well, of course, there are neuroscience facts.  For every decade after age 50, the brain loses 2% of its weight.  But this is also true: some cortical neurons become more abundant after maturity, actually continue growing in healthy old people.  In an essay entitled Memory: Short-Term Loss, Long-Term Gain, James Hillman postulates that the “gathering of old images to the exclusion of recent events seems imposed on the aged, as if the soul insists on this review.”

Well now…this sweetly rings of meaning.  My brain no longer auto-pilots into organizational mode.  At 2% loss per decade, something has to go.  But how about those new cortical neurons?   Here’s the poetic way Hillman frames what they are up to:

“Life review yields long term gains that enrich character by bringing understanding to events.  The patterns in your life become more discernable among the wreckage and the romance, more like a well-plotted novel that reveals characters through their actions and reactions.  Life review is really nothing other than re-writing—or writing for the first time—the story of your life, or writing your life into stories.  And without stories there is no pattern, no understanding, no art, and no character—merely habits, events passing before the eyes of an aimless observer, a life unreviewed, a life lost in the living of it.”

Wow.  This just rings true.  Perhaps we break free from tracking the mundane so that we might probe the past.  Make order from the myriad wild and strange events that transpire over a lifetime.  Let go of the details that no longer serve.  Surrender to the truth of what remains.  Take refuge in the privilege of arrival at the dock: of art, of pattern, of understanding, of character. If this is the journey of sailing into the mystic, I’m a grateful passenger.

❤️Bella