Monthly Archives: February 2012

Lessons in love from the big old sun

Fiona writes: Earlier I went out into the garden and called for my two young cats.

They weren’t on their usual spot on the bed (alongside old man cat Fatty) and the paranoid part of me wanted to make sure they hadn’t both been knocked down by a car (we did lose our cat Silver, pictured, this way).

Tsuki came straight away, and purred around my legs for a while before scampering off to leap at flies. Roshi didn’t appear. ‘Maybe he’s asleep under the bed’, I thought. ‘Maybe he’s too far away to hear me.’ ‘Maybe he’s been knocked over by a car’ lurked at the back somewhere.

Eventually, just as I was about to give up, Fifi (the small grey cat from a few houses down) bounded over, closely followed by Roshi. They’d been off gallivanting together.

Roshi was delighted to see me. He has a very loud purr. He gave me some love, and then he had other things to be getting on with.

The sun is always there. It shines on us. When clouds get in the way (or the earth itself) it is still shining. We just can’t feel its rays.

Roshi’s preoccupation with Fifi’s tail didn’t mean he didn’t love me any more. When Fifi went home for her tea, the clouds moved, and he came inside and lay on my lap and purred at me some more. In fact, here he is again. (he says to tell you all, prrrrrup!)

Maybe death is only a more permanent form of cloud. Maybe the love is still radiating, somehow. I feel it when I remember Silver’s smile as she rolled and rolled in the sunshine.

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A reminder that registration for this month’s mindful writing ecourses ends tomorrow (Thursday). If you’d like to spend more time with me investigating Writing and Spirtual Practice, or join Kaspa on our brand new Journalling Our Way Home course, click the links & read more.

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Money, desire and pancakes

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Fiona writes: When I was little, my mum would make me and my brother pancakes.

We would sit impatiently at the kitchen table as she stood at the stove and slaved away. They took so LONG to cook. One side. Then the other. Then a delicious circle of golden pancake, kissed with lemon & sugar and eaten in three bites. And then the endless wait for the next.

Worse, there were two of us. We had to take turns. Oh, the agony of watching my brother eat his pancake while mine was still liquid in the pan!

I’ve been thinking some more about money after my post about money on Sunday. The book I’m reading about money is of the ‘money is unlimited’ variety. I feel a little (a lot) sceptical about this, as I know for sure that the earth’s resources aren’t unlimited, and that some of our luxury depends on poorer country’s lack. I know that pancakes aren’t unlimited.

But.

I think there is a message for me in the book somewhere. It speaks about allowing yourself to desire things, and feeling entitled to them. It speaks about getting on with your work as well as you can in the meantime, and trusting that these items or experiences will come to you. It speaks about enjoying every mouthful of them when they arrive.

What the book hasn’t said yet (maybe it will) is that if we can experience our desires in that ‘clean’ way, we are satiated when we’ve had enough. Sometimes enough is a beautifully made, expensive coat that will last us ten winters, and sometimes it’s a cheap pair of cotton trousers.

The book does speak about our fear of surrendering into our desire, and of becoming greedy. I can certainly identify with that, especially as I want to be a ‘good Buddhist’ (whatever that is). It tells us in no uncertain terms that we don’t have to worry about that.

In my experience, I feel more greedy when I’m more anxious about not getting something. When I was seven years old, I hadn’t yet learnt that there would be more pancakes – next month, or next year. I hadn’t yet learnt that after several pancakes I would feel full.

I ate pancakes for breakfast today. A pile of three generously sized circles. Made with hazelnut milk, and drenched in real maple syrup. Puddles of it.

After eating two and a half, I felt full. I left the rest on my plate.

If you’d told me when I was seven that I’d leave pancake on my plate, I would never have believed you.

Sometimes our feelings of want are complicated, and consist of ‘clean’ wants as well as dysfunctional, avoidant ones (i.e. buying a coat to distract ourselves from the tax bill we’re not facing). Sometimes we just want the coat. I don’t have a better way of describing that at the moment. The only way of knowing which is which is asking ourselves and listening for an answer. If we want the coat for the former reason, we should deal with our tax bill instead.

So here is my tentative hypothesis so far: we can trust our desire. If we allow ourselves, as my book keeps telling me, to relax and follow what we love – and then to love what we receive – then we will feel satiated when we’ve had enough.

Maybe we can have what we want. But what we want isn’t as huge as we think. Two and a half pancakes is plenty.

‘Pancake Heaven’ by garretkeogh via Creative Commons with thanks

Go quietly, quietly

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Fiona writes: Last week I was in a beautiful quiet place with thirteen other writers and two tutors. The tutors were wise, and the other students were helpful, but somehow I found myself getting frustrated in the group sessions. I felt choked with other people’s words.

On the Wednesday morning I skived the morning class. I walked out through the vegetable garden and lay on my stomach on a bench. I walked through the woods, noticing the scents of sage, honeysuckle and pine, hearing wood pigeons and the wind shuffling the leaves, finding a dalmation-mottled leaf, seeing a red admiral, the sun filtering through hazel leaves.

I sat under a tree and read this quote in my book, by Thoreau: ‘What is a course in history or philosophy or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared to the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?’.

I made a cup of tea. I brought it to my mouth too suddenly, and the loose tea was a whirlwind. If I waited, the black bits settled and the golden liquid became clear.

I started to settle. Slowly. Quietly. Ideas bloomed. I started making notes for this post. I covered a page – the first words I’d written all week.

The title of this post is the last line of a poem I have up on my office wall – ‘After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard’. When you are ready to hear something, everything speaks to you.

A post from the archive, as I need to remember this today.

Photo by nutmeg66 via Creative Commons with thanks.

Let me offer you the opportunity to give me some money

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Fiona writes: I’ll get to the title of this post after I tell you something about my relationship with chocolate.

Liquid salted caramels. Sharp raspberry creams. Dark and bitter with grains of real coffee. Fresh green pistachio praline. Creamy blocks of honey milk.

I like EXPENSIVE chocolate. The quality stuff. I spend as much money on chocolate as wine lovers would spend on good wine.

I spend this money because I love eating good quality chocolate. The money I spend is more than repaid by the scrumptious enjoyment I receive.

Sometimes I eat too many chocolate and my pleasure-quota reduces rapidly. Sometimes I go off a particular flavour. Sometimes my spending priorities (my desires) are elsewhere. Sometimes a recipe is changed and my favourite liquid caramel isn’t quite so amazingly delicious any more.

It can be hard to work out whether it’s the chocolate that’s at fault, or my approach-to-the-chocolate. It doesn’t really matter. I let my enjoyment levels guide me, and I’m curious about what might be happening and whether there are lessons to be learnt. Then I move on. To a new chocolate, or to a brimming bowl of tart juicy blueberries.

These thoughts originate in part from an ebook about loving money. It was recommended by a friend who, after reading the book, started making money again after a long drought. It’s encouraging me to play around with the idea of financial transactions as an opportunity to increase the fruitful exchanges happening in the world.

I want this approach to money. I want to find the people who will gain much much more from the experiences we offer than the ‘cost’ to them. I want to find the people who LOVE writing their way home.

Expensive chocolate. Therapy. My bright red Fiat 500. A day on retreat. A shiny four-slice toaster. When I buy the right things, regardless of how ‘expensive’ they are, what I receive is worth much more than the money I spend.

How would your relationship with money change if you could see it as working to open up channels for fruitful exchanges? What would you joyously buy for yourself? What opportunities-to-give-you-money would you offer others? What wonderfulness would they receive in return?

Our four week mindful writing ecourses in Writing and Spiritual Practice & Journalling Our Way Home start this Friday – register now to receive your pre-course chocolate, I mean materials, and your invite to our private group.

Chocolate photo by gkamin, coin photo by Swamibu, both via Creative Commons with gratitude.

An interview with Colleen Leonardi: Writer, Editor, Choreographer

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Fiona writes: I found Colleen Leonardi through her lovely blog, and soon discovered that she was multi-talented… choreography, cooking, yoga, writing… a fine candidate for our series of creativity interviews. We’re very privileged to welcome her here today.

Welcome, Colleen. What drives your creative work?
My love of grace and the imagination, and an endless sense of curiosity. It’s a longing I feel in my body to understand things, transform things, and give back. When I was young and training in dance, it was the desire to jump higher, turn faster, and dance as much as possible. My writing life was private. I kept journals and promised myself that someday I would be a writer, but for the time being, dance was my passion. As I grew up, experienced the world, and came to accept how I see things, my passion for dance and my private desire for writing mellowed, each moving into the other. Eventually, I came to see my all of my life as creative work. And the longing I have in my body to write, cook, move, knit, make things needs to be expressed on a daily basis in order to feel like I’m connected and contributing to the world. It’s also a matter of survival. For me, the drive to create is like the drive to eat. If I don’t do it, I get hungry, cranky, and weak.

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and meet yourself at the beginning of your creative career?
Trust your voice. Listen to your inner angels. And don’t be so hard on yourself. Life is for fun, so have fun. Play to know but also remember you know more than you think. And be kind to yourself. Be so, so, so kind and gentle to your most beautiful self.

How do you keep creating when things get difficult?
Sometimes I can’t keep creating through the difficulty. I have to stop and take a restorative break. If I’m being honest with myself, that can take a week, a month, three months, sometimes a year! I’ve gone through phases where I’ve quit dance for a year at a time to ground and nourish my most basic self. Or I’ve stopped writing a story only to return to it months later. More often, it’s daily difficulties that can wear me down. And I have my tools: take a tea break, clean up and organize stuff, go for a walk, leave it for tomorrow, cook food for myself or someone I love, spend time with my husband, pull out my file of inspirational things and play—get inspired and play, come back to what it is I love about my creative work-life. Oh, and I remind myself of something Pema Chödrön said about something Rilke wrote: “Just keep going…the beauty and the terror…no feeling is final.”

How does your creative work affect the rest of your life?
I tell myself that my creative work is my life and my life is my work. And I work to strike this dance for myself. And, for the most part, I do. But I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit that sometimes my creative work gets the best of me, leaving little for my family, husband, and friends. I once read something Willa Cather said when she was writing one of her novels: “My art is more important than my friend.” I was conflicted reading this. I love my friends, but I understand what Cather was suggesting. I feel a duty to my creative work. It’s how I know myself. And sometimes the creative impulse emerges at inconvenient times—for my family or friends—but I have to honor it. I have to turn my back, hunker down, and go.

What is it like to send your work out into the world?
Nerve-wracking and thrilling. After I send my writing out into the world, I have this strange bodily experience—I don’t know how people are going to experience it, so there is grief and fear for me but also peace. I feel like a Picasso painting—totally twisted but serene. With dance and performance, I am the experience, I am generating it while people generate their feelings and thoughts about it. And that is a distinctly different bodily experience. It’s an absolute high—pure energy running through me, out into space, into the lap of a perfect stranger. I feel alive when I perform my own choreography. As a writer, I experience that aliveness during the writing and imagining of the work—all those long hours at the desk and staring out the window. Writing is a performative act for me in the sense that I have to get into a state of mind to do it. I also think performers experience the grief, fear, and peace of releasing your work out into the world after the show or project is over.

What was the best advice anyone gave to you?
“The freedom is in the discipline. The discipline is in the freedom.” It’s from an old ballet teacher of mine. I remember hating this when I heard it. All it meant to me was that I had to practice a lot to be able to turn faster, jump higher, etc. Now I see that it is your practice that sustains you when all else fails. And the rigor of your practice has so much play and freedom in it. But you can’t truly have play as an artist without the discipline, form, craft, commitment—call it what you will. You need the discipline to find your own freedom within it. It’s a paradox worth living.

What helps you to pay attention to the world?
A commitment to the world and a curiosity about how it works. I consciously make time to go for walks, see things, meet with people, engage with the place where I live, and stay active in the community as a part of my creative work-life. And I take breaks throughout my day to stop, breathe, and truly see. And seeing for me…it’s about accepting and listening to others and accepting and listening to myself. I know I’m not really seeing when I’m “lost in thought.” It’s when my ears open, my eyes widen, my breath deepens, and my body softens that I know my attention is truly with a friend, or the world, and I see them—I’m caught in that luscious, sensory space between perceiver and perceived. I’m present.

Colleen Leonardi is a writer, editor, and choreographer with a passion for cooking and teaching yoga. As an artist, she aims to build a body of work authentically rooted in how she sees the world. Currently, she is editor of Edible Columbus, a member of Edible Communities, winner of the 2011 James Beard Foundation Award for Publication of the Year. She teaches yoga at Yoga on High in Columbus, Ohio. She is a member of Skoveworks, directed by Lily Skove. And she make dances from time to time under the umbrella Colleen Leonardi & Co. Learn more about Colleen and read her work on her blog. Photo by Colleen.

The closer we get to people, the more we see their wonderfulness & their terribleness

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Fiona writes: Recently I’ve been following the controversy surrounding allegations about a top yoga teacher in America. People in positions of authority are always getting into trouble. Spiritual or religious teachers, CEOs of companies, politicians, sports coaches…

As we come to trust & depend on these people, especially those we know personally (our doctor, or the head of our family) we become vulnerable.

Unfortunately, spiritual leaders & CEOs & doctors are also human beings. They are driven by a whole host of conscious and unconscious drives, some of which will be healthy and altruistic, and some less so. Serious allegations might come to light – of sexual misconduct, or financial swindling, or something ‘minor’ might happen which nonetheless transforms our view of them as ‘safe people’.

When this happens, it hurts. If we can’t trust this part of this person, then can we trust the rest of them? Can we trust anyone? Where are we safe?

One solution to this disappointment is to just not become vulnerable any more. If we don’t trust people, then we can’t be hurt by them, can we?

In my experience, there is no skipping this bit. It’s necessary if we’re going to let these people do their job without questioning every decision, and it’s necessary if we want to truly learn about ourselves. I’m not suggesting that we hand ourselves over to the other utterly, but we do need to feel enough trust to lean back on them occasionally and to know that we won’t be dropped.

Kaspa & I are also in this position, on a much smaller scale. We head up a small local sangha, we have an online community with more than 900 members, we run ecourses & other events where we’re responsible for holding a space for people.

If we’re doing our job properly, people will become vulnerable in these spaces. As people get to know us better, a small percentage of them will crash into our own blind-spots (ouch). They will be disappointed.

What can we do with this disappointment?

We can acknowledge that this experience is a part of being human, and allow ourselves to feel sad. We can remain curious about the relationship we’ve entered into. Are we ignoring aspects of the person we’re trusting because it makes us uncomfortable? We can talk to the person. We can talk to others. We can be kind to ourselves and allow our wounds to heal at their own pace.

Sometimes it’s the right thing to end a relationship. Sometimes it’s the right thing to stay. Sometimes it takes a very long time to decide which of these is best for you, for the person concerned, and for everyone else.

I think that it also helps if we can find a deeper faith – something that lies underneath our fallible nature as human beings. This person might let me down, but I will learn something necessary as a result. This person might mess up, and I might discover deeper levels of compassion. Seeing your messiness might help me feel better about my own.

It’s not easy. But love can transform disappointment into hope, if we give it enough time and if we can let it in.

‘I Hate How Much I Love You’ by shewatchedthesky via Creative Commons with gratitude

Feed your head (by opening your heart)

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Fiona writes: Sometimes our heads need feeding.

At the weekend Kaspa & I walked across the Worcestershire fields alongside the river Severn, with the Malvern hills as our backdrop. We stumbled upon a caravan park, deserted for the winter, and sat and looked at the reflections in the water. I noticed long-tailed tits, the squidge of mud under my boots, the cold air entering and exiting my lungs.

I also disappeared into the glittering Aladdin’s cave that is Pinterest. Pinterest lets you gather the most beautiful images with a click of your mouse & create your own ‘boards’. Here’s Channing Allard’s glorious board where I found the goldfish image, and here’s what I’ve made so far.

This is how I fed my head this weekend. But I don’t think it matters so much where you go or what you do. It matters whether your head is ready for feeding or not. To prepare yourself for nourishment, you need to allow your eyes, ears, nose, fingers, mouth, head & heart to open.

This is the kind of preparation we talk about when you go out hunting small stones. What helps you?

What helps me? Sometimes I need to ‘talk something out’ with someone before I can focus on what’s around me. Sometimes I need an afternoon slobbing out with a trashy novel. Sometimes I need to be disciplined about doing the things I know are good for me. Sometimes I need to say ‘no’ to things. Sometimes I need to say ‘yes’. Sometimes I need reminding that nourishing my head doesn’t always taste nice, and I need to digest a few uncomfortable truths. Sometimes (often, always) I need to remember gratitude.

What helps you? Can you do something today? Can you put something in your diary? Do share your thoughts in the comments.

We have a few offerings that will help. Our two ecourses (Journalling Our Way Home & Writing and Spiritual Practice) start on March the 2nd. Kaspa wrote 30 days of small stone prompts. I wrote the free PDF How To Write Your Way Home about Lorrie. There’s lots of good stuff here and out there, waiting for you to pick it up and devote some time to yourself.

And if you fancy feeding your head with a little more psychedelic, here’s the song from which I took the title of this blog: White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. I’m very fond of it. Happy feeding.

‘Goldfishes’ originally from creative journal.

Happy Birthday to Writing Our Way Home (have some cake)

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Fiona writes: We are one year old.

One year and a couple of weeks, really, but it’s still a good reason to eat cake.

This weekend we both suddenly had the urge to redesign our logo.

We wanted something earthy, elegant, solid, made-by-hand. Something that reminds you of home. We hope we’ve succeeded.

The urge came because, as a company and as individuals, we’re metamorphosising. We’ve grown more confident about what we have to offer and we’re (hopefully) getting better at sharing it with people.

Getting the word out is always a fine balance between people thinking ‘ooh, that looks interesting’ and ‘grrr, not them again, less of the hard sell already!’

My friend Sage has written a beautiful article about marketing here, where she proposes a model of marketing as ‘love made contagious’. Sage says “We all get the delighted impulse to share. [...] What if we were to let go completely of the idea that we need a certain amount of bluster or bravado to “promote ourselves” and instead consider how we might let what we love most about our intimate writing lives overflow a bit onto the people around us?”

Marketing as an overflow of love. Like writing pieces about the things we’re passionate about in our weekly newsletter. Like sharing quotes & images that inspire us on Facebook. I even started a Pinterest account today where I can put gorgeous things.

We hope a small percentage of you will take an ecourse or buy an occasional book, but our relationship will only remain mutually beneficial & satisfying if what you get in richness & pleasure & learning & fun = at LEAST the cash you hand over to us. We want to find the RIGHT people. We want to make you happy.

We still have lots to learn. I hope we never think we know what we’re doing. But we’ve had so much fun watching this newborn grow. We can’t wait to see what the next year will bring. Will you come? Will you?

Um pedacinho importante by Diego Dalmaso via Creative Commons, with gratitude.

An interview with Rosemary Starace: Artist, Writer

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Today it is our great pleasure to welcome Rosemary Starace to our series of creativity interviews.

Welcome, Rosemary! What drives your creative work?
It just seems to be my nature. It’s mysterious to me. It is simply something I want to do.

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and meet yourself at the beginning of your creative career?
I would say, “This is your nature, you can trust it.”

How do you keep creating when things get difficult?
In a certain sense art and life are always difficult! And so, the answer to this question would be, “Accept the difficulty!” When I was young, I confided to an advisor that I found it very hard to get to my studio and start working. I was asking him how I could change that; he asked me to ponder how I would deal with it if it never changed.

This is a tricky question in another way, too. Its wording implies that it is better to keep creating amidst difficulty than not. I don’t think that is necessarily so, though I can certainly find myself feeling that way. But our culture has an unstated prejudice toward productivity. What’s actually true is that fallow periods are part of, not separate from, the creative process. And deep creative work can be going on internally even when it seems like nothing is happening.

Taking this one step further, what if it were OK to spend our lives being, not doing—or certainly, to spend our lives not worrying about doing? In life and art, we can show up, be open and curious, and see what happens.

I live in these questions all the time!

How does your creative work affect the rest of your life?
My creative work gives me practice in paying attention. Paying attention is itself a creative act, maybe the basic one. It is a state of being simultaneously directed and diffuse, active and receptive. The poet Novalis said, “Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.” One way to understand this would be to say that when we give attention to something, whether it be a person or a rock or a situation, it actually comes forward, reveals itself more fully, becomes more perceptible. This can be verified by experience. I find that my life benefits from the quality of attention I give to whatever is going on. When I pay attention to my life, it opens itself to me.

What is it like to send your work out into the world?
I used to feel it was like sending a message in a bottle, an almost futile act. And I had great reserve about it: fear of rejection and ridicule, and fear of experiencing the world’s indifference. The logistics involved in submitting work and keeping track were also hard for me. I eventually came to see sending my work out as an act of participation and self-support. It’s still hard for me, decades into it. But it makes me so happy now, after the struggles I’ve had, to merely be able to send my work out with some consistency and ease. That freedom and the sense of caring for my work is almost enough in itself. Yet to get a positive response, or any real response, is so affirming! And it’s not “extra,” and it’s not merely ego gratification, but answers, too, an impersonal demand of art to be given and received.

What was the best advice anyone gave to you?
I’ve received several communications that, if they were not precisely advice, have been formative and directive.

The first was from an art teacher I adored and studied with extensively. She told me, at the end of my studies with her, “Rosemary, you have ‘it.’”

The second was discovering that Art comes from a deep impersonal source, but through the person that I actually am.

Then there was the advisor I already spoke of, who said, “What if it’s always difficult?”
And the beloved poet who told me, in terms of my work, that I could and should “nail it.”

And last, was the call to pay attention to what I actually want, to pay attention to my deep needs. I’ve resisted this because it sounds selfish, but it’s not.

All of these advisories are connected. Though some of them appear to be personally about me, I think they all speak to something true about everyone.

What helps you to pay attention to the world?
Ah, I talked so much about attention in earlier answers without realizing there was going to be a whole question about it! What helps me to pay attention is knowing what astounding, tender, and terrible things come to me as a result. And also, of course—and fundamentally: the world helps me pay attention to it because it is just so interesting.

Rosemary Starace, originally from New York City, now lives in the Berkshires, a hilly, forested place in western Massachusetts, USA. She concentrates on writing, but is also a visual artist. She is author of the chapbook, Requitements (Elephant Tree House, 2010), and co-editor, with Moira Richards and Lesley Wheeler, of Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv (Red Hen Press, 2008). Individual poems have appeared in Orion, qarrtsiluni, Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment, Studio, and other venues. She’s on Facebook, and her poetry and visual art can be seen on her website.

Artwork: 16 circles by Rosemary Starace.

In praise of special places