Tag: John O’Donohue

pilgrimage, Uncategorized

When The Way Disappears

annacitrino

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

There’s something satisfying about the basic act of putting one foot in front of the other. When walking, the body is absorbed into a different sense of time as it finds a pace that feels natural and pleasing. To put on your shoes, open the door and set out for a walk is to escape from walls that confine and to enter a wider world. To walk, whether as a form of exercise or as an act of pilgrimage, is to go slowly. Slowness allows us to see things we do not see when in a moving vehicle. We experience the world with our senses—the scent in the air, the temperature, the feel of earth under our feet. Frédéric Gros, in his book A Philosophy of Walking, suggests that “The true direction of walking is not towards otherness (other worlds, other faces, other cultures, other civilizations); it is towards the edge of civilized worlds, whatever they may be. Walking is setting oneself apart: at the edge of those who work, at the edges of high-speed roads, at the edge of the producers of profit and poverty, exploiters, labourers, and at the edge of those serious people who always have something better to do than receive the pale gentleness of a winter sun or the freshness of a spring breeze.” Walking is a restorative act, able to bring us into a greater state of wholeness–body, mind and spirit interrelated.

Bruce Chatwin in his book, Songlines, wrote about the aboriginal songs or “dreaming track” connected to places in the landscape that allowed people to find their way across various distances by singing the songs. The rhythm and melody sung while walking helped people recognize where they were and connected people to specific places in the landscape as well as connecting them to the footprints of ancestors and the narratives of their origins. “The melodic contour of the song describes the land over which the song passes … certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the actions of the ancestors’ feet. An expert song man … would count how many times he has crossed a river or scaled a ridge – and be able to calculate where, and how far along, the songline he was … A musical phrase is a map reference. Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world,” Chatwin described. When Australia was colonized, however, the songlines were disrupted, similar to other native cultures, languages and traditions worldwide. Indigenous cultures’s way of life has in the Americas as this interactive map shows. According to the Minority Rights Group International, indigenous indigenous people worldwide struggle to survive for reasons such as “impact of armed conflict, land dispossession, forced assimilation and discrimination on the most fundamental aspects of minority and indigenous identities, namely their languages, art, traditional knowledge and spirituality.” How does one hold on through the progressive disintegration of a way of life in the face of oppression? What happens to people when the path they’ve traveled through time has disappeared?

It isn’t only indigenous people whose way of life is threatened. Our warming planet will change the way of living across the world that people have previously been accustomed to. As an example, in the past month, California experienced severe weather with storms bringing down a tremendous amount of rain in a brief period of time. The Sentinel Record reports that “32 trillion gallons of rain and snow to fall on California since Christmas.” Paths once walkable disappeared under the flow of water and mud. In some urban areas water was deep enough for boats to navigate. Coastlines crumbled, water undermined roads in some areas making them give way, and mudslides closed others. Some people lost their homes, others their lives. While these incidents of flooding may not have been directly caused by a warming planet, extreme weather in California is predicted to become more prevalent in the future. Drought and fires have seriously affected California in the past several years. These, along with a higher probability of floods will make the future challenging as the climate continues to warm. It’s not just California that will be impacted by extreme temperatures. As this interactive map shows, the entire world will be affected. People can no longer assume we will be able to move along the familiar ways of living we’re used to, and that’s difficult.

To be alive is to experience change. Even if we don’t belong to a culture that has been oppressed and haven’t yet experienced extreme weather conditions, our life can still flood in ways that prevent our journey along accustomed paths. Lose a partner or a child, and the world shifts. Travel and we may come to see the culture we grew up in differently, causing our beliefs to shift. As a result of an accident or age we might lose your ability to walk. Numerous possibilities can arise causing the way of living that we’ve relied on to disappear. Be it old age, climate change, or some other loss of a way of life, change will come.

The way we view the future and the story we tell ourselves about it affects how we walk in the present. John O’Donohue writes, “It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.” Returning to this insight that “being here is so much” might be the beginning awareness we need to help during difficulty–to walk on the earth, reminding ourselves of our connection to it, how we are earth, and the miracle it is to be alive. As Thich Nhat Hahn writes in his article on “Walking Meditation” in the Lion’s Roar, “When we walk mindfully on the face of the earth, we are grounded in her generosity and we cannot help but be grateful. All of the earth’s qualities of patience, stability, creativity, love, and nondiscrimination are available to us when we walk reverently, aware of our connection.” A lived awareness of our connection to the earth and to each other is a fundamental quality necessary for survival, and gratitude for that connection generates respect for life, which in turn regenerates more life.

When loss stares us in the face, we become more aware of our relationships. When things are difficult, we often grow internally the most, not when we’re comfortable. Often, it is in the face of loss that we learn how to live more fully as it’s then we more readily recognize we’re standing on a threshold between two ways of being in the world. Though we don’t know exactly where the future will take us, we can cultivate an attitude and way of thinking that helps us face hardships and loss so when the difficulties surface, we are more able to respond to challenges from a place other than fear. As Wendell Berry writes, it’s the impeded stream that sings. It’s when we don’t know where to go that we begin our real journey.

Difficulty and the recognition of imminent loss places us on a threshold and makes us reassess where we stand. When someone is dying, we affirm the relationship we’ve had with them and take extra care for their needs. We spend time with them and tell them what we remember about them that touched our lives. It seems this a way to live when we come to the end of a path we’ve been on and realize we can no longer follow. We affirm what the understanding and gifts the path brought us to. We give thanks and extend gratitude. We take extra time with what we’re letting go of or turning away from in order to see more clearly, and to mourn. We focus our attention more purposefully.

The connection Australia’s indigenous people had with the land with songs and stories that carried them on their journey that Chatwin wrote about can be a window into the understanding that there is a different way of responding to life. Though the future is uncertain, nurturing our relationships with others and with nature–the more than human world–creates more aliveness, and that aliveness and sense of community and connection helps sustain us. In the opening to her book, Inherited Silence, Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind, Louise Dunlop writes about listening to a Harvard webinar where an Indigenous Wampanoag elders ‘cautioned against merely academic approach to the university’s treatment of their ancestors. “Our people do not discuss genocide with out prayer and ceremony.”‘ How people hold up under oppression and what happens when the path people have traveled has disappeared is bound to be different for different people. One way we might begin to cultivate a deeper relationship with each other and the earth as we walk into the future is by each day sending out the intention of blessing and gratitude. The One Earth Sangha site has a beautiful expression of this intention toward wholeness.

May all places be held sacred.
May all beings be cherished.

May all injustices of oppression and devaluation
be fully righted, remedied and healed.

May all who are captured by hatred be freed to the love that is our birth right.
May all who are bound by fear discover the safety of understanding.
May all who are weighed down by grief be given over to the joy of being.
May all who are lost in delusion find a home on the path of wisdom.
May all wounds to forests, rivers, deserts, oceans,
all wounds to Mother Earth be lovingly restored to bountiful health.

May all beings everywhere delight in whale song, birdsong and blue sky.
May all beings abide in peace and well-being, awaken and be free.

May your steps carry you peacefully into the future.

Uncategorized

Places That Scare Us

annacitrino

“Yes, it looks bleak. But you are still alive now. You are alive with all the others, in this present moment. And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart. And there’s such a feeling and experience of adventure. It’s like a trumpet call to a great adventure.” Joanna Macy

Halloween and All Souls Day are here but I’ve been thinking about the places and things that frighten me for some time. From ongoing drought to the rising cost of living, to the continuing effects of the pandemic and beyond, so many things in our daily lives can lead to overwhelm and fear. Observing my cat, Teekeh, I notice how she’s ready to jump or leave the room over the seemingly simplest things–the movement of a chair or the sound of air blowing through the heating vents. It seems we humans are not too much different in reaction when things frighten us.

Out for a walk recently, I noticed how a neighbor down the road wove a giant spiderweb helter-skelter through the redwoods, playfully adding to the Halloween atmosphere. Perhaps it’s a good idea, to look at what webs of fear we’ve wrapped around events and people in our lives and how these hinder our thought and movement. Kay Ryan in her poem, “Spiderwebs” writes, “It isn’t, / ever delicate, / to live.” How do we live courageously and open-heartedly alongside events and people that can cause fear and create the conditions that expand a greater experience of life’s regenerative qualities rather than responding defensively, running away, or shrinking back into ourselves? 

When I was in grad school, once each year a dance was held where those attending invented and wore costumes expressing a suppressed desire. Expanding on and playing with this idea a bit, creating a Halloween costume to express an inner fear could be an interesting way to observe a fear we have and what it is has to say to us through the shape, textures, and colors we choose. If creating and wearing the actual costume isn’t possible, we could draw or imagine what it might look like. Then stand at the mirror and have a conversation with the fear. Some things that frighten us we might not be able to do much about. But we could try befriending the fear in conversation, it could be interesting see how we feel in our gut when we see ourselves in the costume, or when we look at it, and what that reaction might have to tell us.

Currently contemplating the need to move from a place I’ve called home for many decades, I’m experiencing an ongoing feeling of uncertainty about where the right place will be. In any one day, I might find myself imagining living in four different locations! I’m hoping to find a place to call home that will carry me deeper into the the rhythm of my life’s heart, and to recognize it when that place tells me “This is it.” Making a wise choice about this move seems challenging when the future itself is uncertain because of ongoing droughts and fires in the West. John O’ Donohue, in his book, Anam Cara, writes, “Wisdom is the way that you learn to decipher the unknown; and the unknown is our closest companion. So wisdom is the art of being courageous and generous with the unknown, of being able to decipher and recognize its treasures…Wisdom, then is the art of balancing the known with the unknown, the suffering with the joy; it is a way of linking the whole of life together in a new and deeper unity.” Finding balance is extremely challenging as it involves not solely one’s own life, but balance within the culture we live in as well as with aiming to live in balance with the natural environment that is increasingly changing and growing more vulnerable. How do we find the balance?

Occasionally, insight arrives in a moment. Other times discernment emerges slowly after long periods of contemplation. I’ve not yet arrived at the insight into what the right move to a new home will be, but talking to my uncertainty makes living with it more bearable. The conversation isn’t necessarily long, but I’ve been taking a few moments every morning to talk to it. I might not be actually feeling concerned about the uncertainty at the moment, but I speak to the emotion anyway because at some point during the day it surfaces. Often I don’t know what to say to this emotion other than something like, “I’m here for you,” or, “I know the uncertainty is uncomfortable. Things are unfolding, even now, though you don’t see it.” Then, I stand there for a few moments, looking into the sky, gazing at the redwood trees’ sturdy height, noticing how despite drought, smoke, or many inches of rain in one day, the trees carry on. Daily, trees live with the uncertainty of drought. But they carry on as best they can despite the challenges. Aware of the wider rhythms of nature, I’m held inside an affirmation that I, too, can carry on. “Stay open,” I say to my uncertainty and then turn to go on with my day.

There are a lot of colorful fears sitting around in the environment and in our brains like pumpkins in an October field. Caught inside the maze of thoughts we can circle around them, playing our fears over and over in the mind causing us to lose the enjoyment of being present in the life given to us each day. These thoughts could become frightening jack-o-‘lanterns if we decide to carve them up in a way that allows us to scare ourselves. Alternatively, we can talk to our fears, set them out in the light and familiarize ourselves with their story, allowing them to simply remain pumpkins without need to take on a sinister appearance of a jack-o-‘lantern. Alternatively, we can transform our fears–turn them in to nourishing soup, delicious muffins, or pies through creative acts such as art, music or story.

In his poem, “My Courageous Life,” David Whyte writes,

My courageous life
wants to be 
my foundation,
showing me
day after day
even against my will
how to undo myself,
how to surpass myself,
how to laugh as I go 
in the face 
of danger,
how to invite
the right kind 
of perilous
love,
how to find 
a way 
to die
of generosity.

We like to feel comfort. We want to feel like we’re riding on the Yusuf Islam (Cat Steven’s) “Peace Train.” We like to know where we’re going and to have clear answers to difficult questions. But these don’t always come readily and there may be no easy answers, as Sami Yusuf expresses in in his song, “Make Me Strong.” Some answers require sacrifice or enormous change. Our joy, uncertainty and despair are connected to the experiences of the world that is both in and around us, both human and nonhuman. Compassionate conversations with difficult emotions we experience is a way to be generous with ourselves, and can also be a way to find laughter as we go, even while facing danger. As Joanna Macy describes how she works with her difficult emotions, “…it’s been central to my life and my work to make friends with our despair, to make friends with our pain for the world. And thereby to dignify it and honour it. That is very freeing for people.”

poetry, Reading, Uncategorized, writing

Beyond Fear Into a Larger World

annacitrino

In her poem, “The Best of It,” Kate Ryan, describes how it feels to have continued loss, to be reduced to be so little considered that you have next to nothing.

THE BEST OF IT

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

In some cultures, people choose to become monks who own virtually nothing. They have begging bowls and their clothing, and that’s about it. They depend on people around them to give them food. This helps the monks practice gratitude and to control their wants and desires, and it helps other people to practice giving and hospitality. The work monks do can encourage us on our life path. Most of us, however, aren’t monks who have chosen to take the vow of poverty. We work hard to make a space we can live in so we can provide ourselves with food, clothing, and other necessities. There comes a point when making the best of it really isn’t enough. People want to do more than merely exist–need more than just their one bean.

Circumstances can arise that make it so getting these things aren’t possible or are at least very difficult to obtain. If we’re poor, it’s rarely by choice. We need the diversity that entire gardens possess. In a flourishing society, the social structure supports people in developing their abilities and provides varied and abundant opportunities for them to contribute to the community. If someone literally doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from or is struggling with severe pain or loss of bodily function resulting from a terminal disease or other such loss, what enables a person to go on, and how do people cope with their fear and anxiety during such situations?

Recently, I’ve been researching about Italians immigrants living in San Francisco during World War II for poems I’m writing. During this time period, the US government labeled 600,000 American-Italians as “enemy aliens” resulting from Executive Order 9066, an act that held numerous consequences for Italian-American immigrants.

During WWII, Italian-Americans had to carry a booklet identifying them as an enemy alien and have it stamped once a week. They weren’t allowed to travel more than five miles from home, had to stay in their homes between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., and were required to turn over radios, flashlights and cameras to government authorities. Approximately another 10,000 Italians living in prohibited zones near coasts were forced to move (sources vary, as the Smithsonian, states it was 50,000). Many people lost their jobs, some because their place of employment was further than the five miles from their house they were allowed to travel. 1,400 Italian fishermen in San Francisco weren’t allowed to fish. Three hundred Italian-Americans (some sources say more) were put in internment camps. Certainly, these changes and losses caused the Italian-American community anxiety and fear regarding their livelihoods, the safety and well-being of their family members, as well as serious questions regarding how their future would be affected.

In the fall of 1942, Roosevelt lifted the enemy alien status but Executive Order 9066 remained on the books until 1976 when President Gerald Ford removed it.

Fear in the American society at large was a significant motivating factor behind the government’s choice to remove civil liberties from Italian-Americans, as well as from the Japanese and Germans. When the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, saw the internment camps, she spoke out against them. “We have no common race in this country, but we have an ideal to which all of us are loyal: we cannot progress if we look down upon any group of people amongst us because of race or religion. Every citizen in this country has a right to our basic freedoms, to justice and to equality of opportunity. We retain the right to lead our individual lives as we please, but we can only do so if we grant to others the freedoms that we wish for ourselves.” Her voice didn’t cause the camps to close, however. The families in these camps continued living with their difficult situation.

Italian-American immigrants faced significant injustices, as have many others world-wide throughout history, as well as currently. Life can change quickly and profoundly when you are suddenly seen as no longer acceptable. It’s easy to see how difficult life could be in such circumstances and to imagine how easy it could be to live in a state of fear, anger and resentment when facing such a cyclone of events you couldn’t anticipate and had no control over. 

We don’t know our futures. We want to be ready to face our fears and the storms that come our way. In his poem, “Snowfall in the Afternoon,” Robert Bly clearly depicts what it’s like when confronted with an unavoidable fearful situation– in this instance, a rising storm. “It was the sort of snowfall that starts in the late afternoon,” he writes, “And now the little houses of the grass are growing dark.” Like anxiety and fear, the storm grows, picking up strength, feeding on its own furry as it continues, until the very home one lives in seems to be made of grass–vulnerable to gale force winds.

Yet beneath the surface, forces not attended to had been somehow present all along. Bly writes, “A darkness was always there which we never noticed.”  The poem goes on, explaining how watching from inside the house, the cornfields seem to shrink. Then, like some wayward galley holding a great weight of grain, the barn’s bulk moves threateningly closer, about to crash into the house where “All the sailors on deck have been blind for many years.” Whether blinded or aware, the viewer is left in an alarming situation. This is how we feel sometimes when confronting unavoidable situations–waiting for a hurricane or fire that might engulf our house and ruin our entire livelihood and future. How do we cope with extreme difficulties that can’t be avoided–when we don’t know how long anything around us will last, if our efforts will make any difference, and when we’re alone in our vulnerable house made of grass about to be plowed down by something we see coming and yet are unable to do much about?

Because the darkness was there all along but simply not previously noticed, we can see a possible way to begin to understand what we fear and what we might do about it: look around. Notice where darkness is growing and storms might be brewing. Practice acknowledging the presence of fear–look at the fear and purposefully be present with it in our thoughts. Rather than rushing past our fears, covering them over with restless activity or hiding them, simply practice noticing when the fear as it arises, observe it, be curious about it—what brings it up, how it feels in the body, what it’s telling or teaching us.

When we see a storm coming toward us, typical responses are to run, to hide, fight, or even to find ways to cooperate with the storm or move with it. A significant portion of Italian-Americans during WWII, for example, kept a low profile. Parents during that generation chose not to teach their children Italian. It was considered “the language of the enemy” and they didn’t want their children to stand out. Italians also enlisted in the army and went to war as a way to demonstrate their loyalty.

Like stony mountains, difficult things don’t necessarily go away. We have to learn to live with our emotions in spite of their presence. There are other ways to respond to difficult situations, and we can teach ourselves how to think, act and feel differently in response.

Imagination is a powerful tool. We can imagine various situations we’re afraid of and practice letting go of the fear—visualizing a different way of responding. Collette Lafia, in her article on the Gratefulness.org site, describes a practice where you sit quietly with a bowl, imagining filling it with your sorrow, grief, anger, exhaustion–whatever your wound. You don’t try and fix it, you just put it in the container and with humility hold it out to the Infinite for healing. I can see how this is a way of gaining a larger perspective and how it would help instill an understanding that the working out the problem that creates the fear isn’t about will and control. By placing the fear (or other strong emotion) in a larger context we can gain a kind of freedom from the thought patterns that bind us related to our fears and see how resolving an issue or dealing with fear is part of a larger interaction.

Pema Chödrön in her book Comfortable With Uncertainty, writes, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” Difficult situations can be complex and we might not readily know by ourselves what it is we need in order to resolve our fears. Maybe we can begin elsewhere, however, and simply probe the emotion without having to think it must be resolved or that we have to come to conclusions about it. Living the question until we live into the answer might be the more appropriate thing to do, as the poet Rilke suggested.

So that we move out of our own tightness and fear–our tendency to cling and be anxious–we might also shift our gaze, aiming to familiarize ourselves with others and their pain. We can imagine ourselves taking in someone else’s pain, and send them light and energy. Pema Chodron describes specific steps for how we might do this in a practice called tonglen. The specific purpose of this practice is to expand our capacity for compassion. Instead of treating people perfunctorily, as someone who performs a task, we can begin consciously practicing to enhance relationships with those around us. This could be just a thought we think when we see someone pass by us who seems different from ourselves in dress or perspective. We might in our minds wish them well, to be released from pain or to find fulfillment. Fear, anger, resentment–these can trap us, make our lives miserable but we can live alongside these emotions, observing and putting them into a wider, different context, or turn from them toward something different. Learning to love ourselves, we learn how to love our neighbors. We can open our arms, and nurture our hearts into a larger world.

We all want to live a life where we feel valued. Recognizing how the well-being of our own life is interconnected to the dignity of all people is foundational to moving beyond fear into a larger world where we can live with greater freedom and attain more of our full potential. After World War II in 1948, representatives from countries and cultures throughout the world put together The Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the goal of protecting people from “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” The declaration was put in place in recognition that people shouldn’t have to be pushed into “rebellion against tyranny and oppression.” Neither should people have to hide, run away, or deny their language, religion, ethnicity, gender, or other fundamental aspects of their personhood just so they might continue living. All people need dignity and should be able to thrive in living condition free from fear. Article 1 of the Human Rights Declaration states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Practicing in our lives each day how to move beyond our own fears, we can begin to integrate into our lives how we might respond to fears in others’, and perhaps see how to respect and protect their freedom. As John O’Donohue writes in Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom, “If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition: there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.”

Uncategorized

Letting Love Find You

annacitrino

“We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.” –John O’Donohue

We want our lives to be meaningful, to give something of true value to the world and those around us. To be certain, none of us are pure. We try to live well. We want to be whole, but in our incompleteness we are bound to do things that were best left undone or have hurt others we meant not to hurt. We are given choices to make and sometimes none of the options seem acceptable, yet we still must choose.

Maybe we chose the practical way through a dilemma the first time around, or a way that seemed safe. Maybe we wished afterwards that we were more courageous, but we just didn’t have it in us at the time. Too much seemed at stake. Nevertheless, we made our decision as we could, and on we went, thinking there was no turning back–the die was set, the nail hammered in.

Further on down the road a similar dilemma presents itself. Once again, we ask ourselves if we have the courage to follow what our hearts tell us is right–the way you did when you found the one you love, for example, and said “yes” to him or her, even though you were unable to see into the future. Do we follow the path that will change our life even though it may be costly, or do we continue on, trying to keep things as they were even though we know this is a defining moment?

So, you make your decision once again as best you can, step by step moving out into the darkness. “Here I am,” you say to that place of unknowing, each step a prayer that love will find you and carry you into a safe place–as safe a place as there is in a world with shifting boundaries.

Robert Frost wrote in his poem, “The Road Not Taken” about choices and the two roads diverged in a yellow wood. The roads he described were both equal and fair. Sometimes the roads we must choose between is neither. We will all be telling our stories ages and ages hence, and when again I am faced with a difficult choice, I want to be traveling down a road that I know has made a difference, at least to me in my own heart.

The safest place I know is is in the arms of those who love me. When we need to know the way to go, maybe the best thing is to stand still and simply say, “I am here,” and listen to what love tells us.