My list of feelings and needs

Inbal Kashtan http://baynvc.org/

I've been studying Nonviolent Communication (NVC) for a couple of years now. It has revolutionized my self awareness and the way I relate to others, to happy effect. Great tools! Simple and deep, with endless possibilities and variations.

I practice with others weekly, and a couple of fellow students recently asked me about my list of feelings and needs, a standard aid in practicing NVC, so I wrote up some notes to go with the list. The 'Newt' below is my excellent teacher Newt Bailey, whose Communication Dojo website and workshops I highly recommend.

Here's what I told my partners, when I shared the list: "I don't mind if you give this to others, but please retain the attribution, so that I remain responsible for its contents, OK?" 

• The List. The needs and feelings list that is often handed out in NVC classes made me very afraid when I first saw it! I think I had vertigo as I looked at the list of needs receding away from me as my head shrank back from that side of the page! No way do I have those needs! After some time, I realized that in order to make progress in recognizing, accepting and making requests about my needs and feelings, I would have to make the list mine. I chose to literally re-type the lists, adding my favorite words, under headings that pleased me, and probably dropping some that I just don't use. So, this is my idiosyncratic list, and not quite the same list handed out by, for instance, BayNVC. Just so you know. I would love to hear that you've made your own!
• Waystation feelings: This is my term for faux feelings, feeling words that contain so much judgment about others that they need translation. I felt the term faux--false--was itself a judgment that did not need to be propagated, so I came up with my own language. The sense is, when a waystation term occurs naturally to you, you take the time to translate into your own feelings and needs, without the assumptions about what others might mean or intend. Thus, the name waystation: a stopover on a longer journey to one's own feelings and needs. I don't think anyone else uses this term; why I'm explaining.
• Non-NVC Options: This, I believe, was Newt's concatenation of conversational or communication choices that are perfectly fine, and intended to meet our needs, but that are not NVC. So, while none of these strategies are 'wrong,' you want to be mindful that you are departing from NVC when you choose them. Helpful for Newt to cite during his practice sessions when he wanted to bring people back to our purpose for gathering in his home. I have added a few of my own activities to his original lists, so it has no single author now. 
• Sensations: I added this list, borrowed and edited, which is not NVC canon, as I have received it. I don't always know right away what I am feeling, as distinct from what my sensations happen to be. It's enough work to perceive and describe my sensations sometimes! I wanted to have a tool that would help me move from my actual sensations toward my feelings, when necessary. Also, the feeling words are often metaphorical (if I feel buoyant or radiant, I'm not actually floating or giving off light, except metaphorically), so sticking to sensations, as metaphorical as some of those words are, too, can keep me from staying in my head more than is useful. Not necessary in NVC, and borrowed from my work in Hakomi (a flavor of psychotherapy I'm studying, and loving!), but helpful for me.
• Values & Qualities: This is also not NVC canon! So, beware. I added this section, also borrowed and edited, following the many times I needed to characterize what I was feeling about my, or someone else's, actions or intentions. So, this is linked to the Needs list, under Meaning: Connection to Values. The sense is, someone else's act of kindness or sacrifice may meet my need for hope, peace, or whatever, but it may also just resonate with my own will to kindness, or willingness to sacrifice for some greater good. So, another's kindness may meet my need to connect to my value of being kind. This list thus helps me to identify the values and qualities important to me, as I recognize them in myself, or in others.
• How I use the lists: These are all long lists, and I have not yet connected to each and every need, feeling, sensation or value. Not in a hurry, either! However, as I've begun the study and practice of shamanism, I have come to appreciate the utility, ubiquity and antiquity of divination, of gaining knowledge that is ordinarily hidden, from sources of which we may not be aware. I happen to suppose, unlike many shamanic practitioners, most of this 'knowledge' comes from my unconscious or subconscious minds--rather than from divinities, occult entities, or the future--as they pare down my senses and sensibilities before presenting my conscious mind with a workable result. Thus, I consider it perfectly legitimate divination to interrogate myself by simply glancing at the lists, and seeing what pops out, 'making no decision,' rather than always 'making a decision' about what I feel, etc. I feel that 'making a decision about what I am feeling' can too often be a kind of compromise, also stemming from unconscious processes, that only wants to present safe, acceptable, socially approved, non-disruptive feelings and needs! So, glancing at the list, and being honest about what grabs my eye, seems like a better way to get at what's really going on, without the censor cleaning up my act for public display. Your mileage may vary.

Best of luck exploring NVC! I welcome feedback and questions.

The visually impaired persons, and the elephant

http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html

I've been fascinated lately with the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which I am charmed to find has instances from many cultures, some linked from the address crediting the illustration.

Nutshell: they all grab a different part, and assume they've grasped the whole, and know the elephant only from their limited perspective. So far, so good. The parable's lesson depends on us knowing that there is an elephant, and from our superior perspective, these silly blind men are clearly making an elementary mistake, a sort of synecdotal fallacy, the part not merely standing for the whole, but mistaken for the whole.

Good lesson for kids, and those still completing various chores of intellectual development. Careful, you may not have seen the big picture.

But I'm coming to think this is just the rez-de-chaussée of the parable, the ground floor, and that there may be many floors above. How's this for the premier étage? What if we—scientists, shamans, seekers of many stripes—come upon something in the wild, something new? Or, equally, what if we are striving to find something old, that has been lost, and needs recovering? Is there an elephant, after all? Maybe no one living can see the whole. We can only know what we perceive, at best, or what we've been told to look for. When we want to infer, to reify, a never-seen whole, from many fragments of observation, do we ever know that there is a whole to be inferred? Or, shall we just go ahead and crowd-source that iffy reification, like the visually impaired persons of legend, call it pachyderm, and muddle through?

What am I talking about? At last Spring's excellent MAPS Conference in Oakland, many of the sessions spoke to, or danced around the question of psychedelic psychotherapy and what it might entail, and how to train—or entrain—the doughty healers who will risk life and livelihood to support something good happening with sacred medicines. But, who is an effective guide, and what do they do, and what do they know? 

Is there an elephant here, and if so, of what parts is it composed? Leo Zeff, the late pioneering therapist, whose story is told in a delightful book The Secret Chief: Revealed, expressed the ideal of doing nothing beyond holding a safe space in which the client (the seeker, the voyager, the psychonaut...) can just be and do what they need to, to unfold as the unique spirit they are. Love and acceptance may be all that is required of either party.

A couple of the presenters assumed that the ideal guide would be a psychologist or psychiatrist, specializing in this psychological treatment modality, and sufficiently experienced with the medicines of choice to conduct psychotherapy in this unusual manner. They made many convincing arguments about the knowledge and personal development required for a therapist to be effective. Large barriers to entry, in other words; years of work for the right few, to treat the ordinary psychological problems of ordinary subjects of late capital in the industrialized west.

Another presenter from a large hospital study laid out the protocol for their crash course in training doctors to administer Schedule One substances, an earnest attempt to prepare white smocks for hazardous duty. Might fly, but what a contrast with the psychiatrists who made it seem one must always be preparing—and might never be quite ready—for this work, personally or professionally.

Yet another presenter laid out a blend of indigenous wisdom and archetypal psychology that also bore the scent of a stern, patriarchal, religious worldview. The expansive, feminine medicine needs the constriction of masculine structure to be effective. You need to be saved as much as healed. Hard to see how this model can be generalized beyond the specific cultural context from which it arises. But, can any model?

I was also privileged to hear from a third generation ayahuasquero, whose family has been brewing yagé since long before the norteamericanos y europeanos started trampling the undergrowth in search of... a lot of things.* This cultural matrix starts to prepare their members early, to gradually use the medicine regularly, as part of their society's jungle-sourced, organic healthcare system, if you will. No science, but a lot of successful treatments, to hear this wise, kindly and unassuming man tell it. More generations on the way...

Many perspectives, many visions of the work. Do they add up to an elephant, or will there be merely various chimeras of recent provenance, or revenants of the old ways, wandering in search of their blind men?

* my list would include improved health, wisdom, cures for the incurable, spiritual enlightenment, bragging rights, psychological insight, purification, business opportunities, novelty, initiation, religious experience, recipes, social community, cultural perspective, teachers, inspiration, professional training, lovers, friends, shelter from the storm, home...

Dream fragments, a serial compendium

10/18-19/13, Esalen, Artemisia vulgaris, Lavandula spp., Rosa spp.

Of course, the police would open fire at this provocation, so for me to effect the rescue, I would have to reveal my immortal form. From a distance the TV cameras in the stadium picked up only me, moving very fast, sparkling lights as the bullets struck, and my desperate laughter. What would they make of that? Not enough.

As the image congealed into a tabloid front page, it lost all meaning. There was no headline.

###

The women grew completely invisible as they approached the door. I could still tell where they were, and I bid them farewell as if nothing were amiss.

###

As I regained consciousness, I realized that I had been driving backwards at freeway speed for some time. The road's geometry was getting complicated, and reversing my orientation was out of the question. This is going to get me killed, I told myself, calmly noticing my alarm, I should go back to sleep.

###

Part of me was intent on severing the serpent. A wiser aspect knew this would destroy the creature, and would be a tragic error.

A response to "A Left Argument for Space" by Philip Shropshire

[At the moment I wrote this, the Kindle Book in question was priced at $0.00; now 99¢ Read for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/Left-Argument-Space-ebook/dp/B00G1BM0FU/ ]

Philip, I'm sorry if you took my remark as an evaluation of the content of your kindle-ansprache, rather than, as intended, approbation for your strategy for widest distribution. No, as regards the value of your labor, I commend your attention to Tim Kreider's trenchant cri de coeur: Slaves of the Internet, Unite! I would have charged $0.02, as in: "Here's my two cents. Where's yours?" Ninety-nine is fine.

Now, while my motto might as well be "so far left, it all looks right to me," the true centroid of my concerns has become so decidedly woo woo as to obtrude only obliquely into any recognizable political memespace. 

My scifi credentials are equivalently thin, but I did have the privilege of chiding Stan Robinson, over kung pao pork, for omitting a fungal inoculation from his otherwise excellent terrarium recipe in 2312. He generously granted me a point, which really belongs to 'Saint' Paul Stamets. 

I don't have any argument with anything you say in your essays. I resonate with your intention, and it's expression, but I do think you might be mistaking the froth under your board for the mighty breaker whose coming your essay heralds.

I believe, in the way Dawkins so despises, I believe it is life itself which desires to vault the well of gravity. We monkeys are merely the vector, vying for the honor of heaving ourselves out of our tide pool, and we are, for the most part, just as unaware of the import of our struggle as our gasping piscine forebear.

A tenet of my belief is that our terrible misadventures of agriculture, of industry, of culture itself, the whole nightmare of history, is little more than the story of children, shitting in their sandbox, and now weeping, imagining that's all they're capable of, or else still endlessly coveting some other child's bucket and shovel.

Childhood's end is upon us, to coin a phrase, and all that has deracinated us from savannah, forest and meadow, literally uprooted us from identifying with any particular patch of dirt, is just the backstory of our true destiny: to take our tide pool with us: to master the craft of capturing lightning in a bottle, of sustaining life in a pocket world, and of casting these bottles upon the deep, whose medium is the message: life is coming; we are here.

Long sentences, eh?

So, yeah, you're right to ask: will Eros tip our arrow, or Thanatos? And yeah, you're right to answer: it had better be the forces of light, moist warmth and connection, or else those stripmalls on the Moon will sprawl forlorn 'til the Sun swallows all trace.

But, we won't get there with pop culture references and left liberal exhortations to do politics right for fucking once. The yoga of the spaceborne will decompile everything we know, right back to knapping flint for bone calendar burins. And everything we've learned, and will learn, will come together in a new grammar of husbandry, but without the individual human at the center, of course, or the family, or community or economic collective. 

The new sine qua non of human endeavor will be to curate the myriad irreducible sets of DNA, the real boss on this planet, and to marshall the optimum physical and chemical infrastructure to allow that DNA to flourish and evolve elsewhere. Anywhere. Big job, millennia big.

You with me?

Joseph Campbell said that for humanity to move forward, we would have to develop a planetary mythos. The overview effect is the transformative experience that will likely form the basis for this mythos. 

Write about that, will you?

“The guys in the 70s got most of it right,” he told the Daily News.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/amazing-1970s-artwork-envisions-colonized-space-article-1.1219511#ixzz2jFRblnzF

If you're so smart, why aren't you _____?

Somewhere, deep in my childhood, there was a moment of parental skullduggery, a strained silence that was all but clandestine. All but, because I knew something was up, something about me that was not for my ears. Don't you hate that? Those whispered truths, just out of earshot?

My best friend's mother, and closest neighbor, a school psychologist, was only slightly less oblique, and thus only slightly more helpful, in this moment, and generally, when it came to the infuriating, opaque mysteries of adulthood. The G-word was in the air.

IQ Tests. The one test whose score they don't, as far as I know, let the tested see, not right away. There was something about mine, my troubled gut told me, that disturbed the adults in my life. Maybe I can see their point. I was already alienated, depressed, withdrawn, shy, lonely, introverted, awkward, psychoanalysed, plump and grumpy. What good would it do to let me know that here is yet another quality I possess that would forever separate me from my peers?

Except that I knew already, of course, that something was different about me, but I guess I didn't have a name for it. And then there were the stern, well-meaning, almost pitying lectures about how wrong it was to flaunt our privileges, which were notable. Were they worried about creating a monster? Is that why they preferred keeping me in the dark to helping me cope?

Farmboy, soldier, freak, teacher.

© www.razlan.net

The eternity of a child's summer is not ambered, but rhythmed with daily adventure.

The rural Northeast, verdant and sultry. A country road eases through the trees, past the old house, over the bridge spanning a chuckling brook. An immense silence, scoped by distant lowing, shelters my reveries.

An approaching tock, tock startles me to presence. A walking stick, a queasy presage. He's coming.

But how? He's blind. His terrible aspect now a terrifying visage. Yet he courses that gentle road, steady and true, daily, unfailing, undeterred by maimed limbs, his gait like clockwork, tock, tock. Now I would add, a jaunty stride, but there long ago, in my horror of his deformity, his swagger was lost on me.

But not his perseverance, nor his clockwork appearance, marking the passage of time, surer than meals, surer than sleep. The end will come, and autumn chase us away. Who is that? my blunt, offended question. An aunt, kind eyes veiled, answers: a local. I name him Hardacre. Not a mayfly like us summer folk. Thus, a farmboy, gone off to war years past, and returned to his home broken, hideous, and to my eyes, worse than useless. A monster. A freak. Come to spoil the cloudless blue perfection, the new mown idyll of my timeless paradise.

Almost fifty years have passed. I was, in my way, wounded, too. Then, and now. Whole of limb and blessed, each sense keen, my wounds, though hidden, were plain to many. Now, as I heal myself, my cruel disdain returns and demands atonement. And Hardacre is there, tock, tock, steady, oblivious, and yet not unforgiving, his first gift to me. Though not his first lesson: my first hint of death's iron surety, my first glimpse of pain and mutilation born of war. Of life's unfairness, and the long road we may yet have to limp, though we soldier on, and frighten the children.

His wounds, plain to all, hid his essential wholeness from my child's eyes, his second gift to me, received only yesterday, as I, blinded by sight, now see with my heart, a world new, bright, and timeless.

Boughs & vines, entwined

As I free fall into a carnival of New Age stereotypes, choosing my words with care is a welcome, grounding, chore.

One new-to-me concept of great utility is the container, with which we hold space, for a notion, an intention, a relationship. In Hakomi: relationship, especially the therapeutic relationship between therapist, client, and whoever else is immanent. The therapist fosters the bubble, in which he witnesses and encourages the client to witness and encourage her own healing evolution. Beautiful work, this: right action, right speech, creating the container for precious cargo, the unfolding human soul.

So why does this word grate on my ears, and set my eyes to rolling?

Maybe it's the associations. Containers are what fast food comes in. Containers are piled high in every port, when they're not littering the beach. What needs containing in our world? Radioactive waste, plague vectors, social breakdown, errant desires...

Maybe it's the lineage. Somehow, container is all about the function, good, bad or indifferent. 

Latin continēre, to hold together, keep together, comprehend, contain —OED, as well as the following

Good as far as it goes, until you notice the controlling, reductionist scrutiny, and we're right back to quelling something that wants to escape. I'm drawn to words whose roots grabbed earth before Rome paved the way back to itself across the West. You know, the languages of barbarians, where all of our best four letter words come from. Container, well... marches straight back to Rōma. 

I long for something else, a word freighted with an agency and intention more appropriate to the project, and I've come up with: bower

Old English búr dwelling, etc., corresponding to Old Saxon bûr
A dwelling, habitation, abode... especially, a vague poetic word for an idealized abode

Yes, better, something built, with a lofty intention, to restore something lost, to house ourselves in sylvan splendor (I admit, L. silvānae, goddesses of the woods). But, it gets better:

An inner apartment... especially applied to a lady's private apartment; a boudoir

Thus we imagine a gentle realm of intimacies, of shared secrets away from the harsher, masculine realm of commerce and politics, although this might rightly be challenged and derogated (L. dērogāre to repeal in part, etc.) by feminisms undreamt of in the 14th Century, and only now roiling brows hidden by burqas and chadors...

And, best of all, because it evokes my preferred, long view, transpersonal, ecological memespace

A place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, shrubs, or other plants; a shady recess

Photo: missy_gardenwhimsy

Now we have all the aspects that make bower so attractive to me: a constructed refuge, woven with care over time, from natural elements, to hold the things we love, in a place of mindful intimacy, a soul solacing retreat from all that wounds us, where we abide with all that would heal us. Yay!

I hold a vision of the post-historical future, of the fractal bower of our survival: the great bower of Gaia, tended by a billion loving spirits, sharing bowers of home and garden, each spirit weaving many relationships within and among, embowered by loving regard, and our better angels.

mothers' day

when I was young, I wept because I was weak and helpless,
I could not contain my pain, and my mother held me to her breast;
now I am grown, I hold my mother in my breast, I am strong and fierce,
and I weep because I cannot contain my ecstasy.

Tout Abus Sera Muni

Fabrice Ducouret 

My trusty Honda died a few weeks ago, masha'Allah. Twenty-one years old, 17 under my dominion, sold to me by my mother for the obligatory dollar, and it outlasted her by ten years. Died in the south-facing left turn lane of Sacramento Street at Dwight Way, waiting for the light, taking me to my ptherapist for maybe the 199th time. Another challenge, another blessing. Within thirty seconds of lifting the hood with a helpless, apologetic shrug to those trapped behind, a ginger Irishman in a candy-flake shamrock green pickup stopped to help me kick my dear teal car-cass to the curb.

So, I've been walking a lot—even got my bike repaired—and riding the bus quite a bit, especially in the East Bay, and I think I've put my finger on the essence of the vastly different passenger experiences between East and West Bay.

AC Transit drivers, you see, tend to think their job is to move people around the city, taking them to work, to shop, to see their loved ones, or just soothe their madness for a while with the illusion of escape, or progress toward some other, better, place. The bus is just the means whereby the fundamental civic value of mobility is served. We get on, we exchange greetings, thank yous and you're welcomes are commonplace. There are little movies on some buses, a slideshow of coaches through the years, a tiny documentary on the coming hydrogen generators... The humanity and solicitousness of the drivers sets the tone for cheerful cooperation among riders to provide seats and space for the variously burdened or challenged, and it's generally a satisfying, if slow, means to an end. I get off the bus feeling relaxed and grateful.

SF Muni drivers, by contrast, generally consider their job to be driving the bus, while cleaving to a schedule. This is why they almost universally consider their lowly human cargo such a disagreeable impediment to the next lavish paycheck on the slippery slope to retirement. Again, this morning, the 28 driver yelled threats at the cattle to mooove back into an already overcrowded coach, proving once again they consider it our fault that we are so numerous, and never imagine that we, the folks in whose name, and by whose tax dollars they are privileged to have a fucking job, might just need another fucking bus to come along in a goddamned hurry! 

This is why I tend to despise these odious hell-spawn, who lord over their tiny diesel fiefdoms with such infuriating wrongheadedness. Another challenge, but the blessing of a twice-daily opportunity to rise above, while riding along, I admit, often eludes me. Last night, I missed an AC Transit bus by seconds, coming home late, tired and hungry, but the memory of good rides opened a space in my heart to encompass my anger, and the wait for the next one afforded me time to consider the temptations of sorcery (as it happened) among shamanic practitioners, and I was glad to have this lesson handed to me for the price of an 18 minute sojourn in my moral imagination.

I look forward to resuming my privileged status as a driver, this time with an ancient, elegant, biodiesel burning German tank, within a couple of weeks. As a result of my adventure in carlessness, I'll ride my bike more, and consider taking the bus for certain journeys, but only on the sunrise side of the Bay, insha'Allah! 

My invisible tattoo

I have long since vaulted the watershed
that parts youth and age,
now my rivulets all gather
to the great ocean, to death, and beyond

I have never been inked, and may I never be, but if I did invite the prickly pen to inscribe a passing whim, I would put the name of this blog, Memento mori, smack in the middle of my left palm, the omphalos of my phallus-grabber. I know, not very original. It might as well say Carpe diem, or Smell the roses, or Ho bios brakhys, hê de tekhnê makrê, or Quod vos estis, ego quondam fui; etc., etc., fer chrissakes. But, why doesn't it; why won't I?

Well, I used to hold most of the inked tribe in mild contempt: poseurs, dilettantes, naïve cultural imperialists, Māori wannabes, gokudō wannabes, fake Petak Island maffiya pedigrees, adenoidal ADX Florence dreamers, modern primitives (I'll grant this: they are vastly more primitive than the humblest indigene), right down to stamped tramps, cutesy butterfly barbies, fucking hipsters. Narcissists all, and not in a good way: I'm special; I've suffered; I belong; look at me, I'm not like everyone else! Riiiight...


OK, my projector is way overheated–bulb is smoking–and I've settled down a bit, and am gradually retiring my trebuchet of aspersions. After all, back in the day, some hard-working witch doctor was just trying to protect the tribe, invoking the spirits, the elements, warding off the worst, because the worst is out there, waiting. Protecting, identifying, remembering, connecting: these are good things, or can be.

http://www.threehandspress.com/odalisque.php

My search for the perfect tattoo ratcheted up when I saw an ad for a very special book recently, The Three Hands Press "Odalisque" Journal:

Limited to 433 exemplars

bound in full black hard-grained Nigerian goatskin

raised bands on spine

100 lb. acid-free writing stock

garnet 80 lb. art paper endsheet, crush emboss

black satin ribbon marker

The most notable feature of this codex is not that all 192 100 lb. acid-free pages are merely blank. This is a grimoire of great power. As their pitch declares:

Certain magical teachings convey that the most potent books are those which remain unwritten, for such a state allows infinite possibilities, providing the fluidity of inspiration and power from the great reservoir of the Unmanifest.

Now that's what I'm talking about! What better way to say Remember, you will die, than with an invisible tattoo? Those of us on the way down with eyes to see can see it every day, in the mirror, in each other, in the way the gazes of the young and restless glide right past, or right through...

I've always had this invisible tattoo. Now, I know it. I may not be special, but I sure as hell belong. Look at me!

Oy weigh iz mir

There once was a middle-aged fellow, call him Lamb Perdue, heavy and sad. Sad, that is, when he wasn't irritable and mean, mean to himself and to others. Divorced, lonely, and often feeling friendless and despondent, his depression kept him isolated, and as his hoarding grew and grew, and the trash piled in drifts like filthy snow, there seemed less and less possibility of lightening his load, or of gladdening his heart with visits from his dwindling friends, to say nothing of taking a lover! Who would want him, with so much flesh, and so much darkness?

He had stayed in therapy for years after his separation and divorce, only leaving his trainee when she was unable to accept his new forged covenant with cannabis, to pierce the darkness of his imprisonment. He made her cry, when he rejected her help, in favor of a forbidden medicine. The tactics and tricks he had learned with her, to identify his distorted thoughts, to challenge his hurtful beliefs, seemed like too much work for too little reward. He stayed depressed, and alone, and forgot his pain in the evenings an hour at a time, snug in the blissful embrace of cannabis.

Still, as the years of his life abandoned him, and his health declined, and his weight increased, and his joints got stiffer, and there was less and less room to dance or breathe in his little house, he still nurtured small flames of hope, deep in his imagination.

Three little flames Lamb kept burning in the hope of liberation from sadness: to outrun it with vigorous movement, to see through it with observant stillness, and to transcend it in the crucible of love. Movement, but not dancing, which challenged his awkwardness too much, but just a little exercise, to stir the blood, and maybe ease his bulky clumsiness. At the University, he pumped the machines with his arms and legs, and puffed and sweated and coughed, and sometimes felt better.

Closer to home, he found sangha with other seekers, and sat vipassana, and breathed, and coughed, and breathed some more, and coughed, and sent metta to the far corners of the universe, and sometimes felt better. But movement did not compel him, and stillness did not soothe him, and neither fed his deepest hungers, nor even showed him what they might be.

And all this time, season upon season, all the fragrant springs, all the smoky autumns, all these empty years, there were no playful dances of flirtation, no bright interludes of love, no urgent intimacies of bodies become one. Surely, he knew the rapture of infatuation, but only from afar, and he knew it had to be that way, for whenever he let slip his secret, his beloved would shy away, or scowl in anger, or pierce him with a shrug. Better to be almost alone, he said, alone but for dreams of my beloved, whoever she may be. I'll never stop longing. I must always long for someone, he said, and feed myself on dreams, or starve in silent agony.

And Lamb risked another experiment, to combine the stillness and the movement, and just by chance, he learned a hard lesson of love. Hatha yoga is millennia deep, and just as demanding, and his aching limbs could scarcely twist into the simplest asanas. He tried too hard for a couple of teachers, and then a teacher arrived who changed him, and his world. Her given name meant Bright Sanctuary in the old tongue. She was no child, but much younger than he, and very lovely, and kind and gentle, and above all, serious and skilled in the postures, the philosophy, and their teaching. 

Eros & Thanatos

Lamb's heart stopped when he first beheld her, and then beat so quickly. She had a generous, sensuous fullness from her father, a man of the south, and blue eyes and sharp cheeks from her northern mother, and her honeyed hair came from somewhere between. Her dazzling smile, like clouds parting for the sun, soothed and ingratiated all who found her, and only a few glimpsed the forlorn girl, the lost girl for whom the clouds always returned.

Her light, her shade, her kindness, her patience, her beauty, all enlivened with quick sparks of fury for obstacles, for foolishness and the tentative; all her qualities moved Lamb in ways that demanded much of him. Here, for perhaps the first time, he saw a woman he longed to give children, and for whose love he would joyfully pay any price, including his life. And while he knew this for a dream, it was a dream of great power, a power whose source he might find, and so he let his hopeless love grow.

And Lamb's love only grew, as she showed him his many fears, and the deep pain, resignation and neglect inscribed in his flesh. And harder, she showed him, with just her presence, his defects of character, of judgment, his frivolousness, and all manner of painful truths, all plain and simple in her glorious mirror. And as his image grew more flawed, so hers grew more sublime. And as his heart broke, as the true distance between them was revealed, so he clung all the harder to the beatific vision.

In the crucible of his aching heart, as his spirit guttered and threatened to extinguish, the yoga of bhakti, of devotion, of selfless love, was revealed to him, stronger than in his past infatuations, for his small self could no longer contain this great and powerful love. And then he began to see that it was not just Bright Sanctuary that he loved, that she indeed was becoming an outline without a face, a portal through which he saw, not just a pretty girl with a troubled spirit, but a goddess, a radiant incarnation of the divine feminine. 

And then Lamb knew he could not chase Bright Sanctuary and hope to encounter the goddess, for She did not so much reside in the girl, as hover, in subtle immanence, somewhere between his perception, and Her immortal realm. And worse, he could not hope to know Her, to find the source, for his only understanding of himself was as a weak and broken creature, a weary amalgam of flesh and spirit. This was not bhakti, for the goddess could not love him, or so he thought, to his despair. Nowhere in himself would he find Her counterpart; the idea did not even occur. He had no notion that the divine masculine could manifest through him, though that might have eased his pain. And when his teacher moved on, he lingered with other teachers for a bit, before falling away again into darkness, into years without bright sanctuary.

Dream us in furs

Dream, night of 4/30–5/1/13

Scene is an impromptu market, under a fractured overpass, in a shattered city, under leaden skies. Several hunter/warrior archetypes are staffing tables of pelts and furs. Off to the side, a gaggle of pasty masculinity tourists teeter slack-jawed, fidgeting, as one of the hunters patiently prepares them for some weekend work involving minor pelts: squirrel, rabbit, dog.

Armael Malinis

I am here on my own, drawn by something grander, but I can't remember or articulate my desire. An old hunter, also a shaman/magician, knows exactly what I'm here for, and digs out a magnificent elk, with lustrous, wolf-like fur, a real magic carpet of a pelt, and we admire it together, in silence, and are deeply moved.

But then my doubts creep in, and I ask myself: What would I do with it? I wouldn't want to waste it. I bet it's really expensive, and I know I have rejected the offering, and failed the initiation, and the dream collapses into sour, wistful wakefulness.

By happy coincidence, I saw my Hakomi ptherapist later in the day, and was able to journey to the dream and re-engage with the old hunter:

At first he presented as stoic, yet loving, waiting, with the perfume of sorrow and disappointment that I could not accept his gift. I became the unsure boy, and was ashamed, recalling other gifts, unopened, squandered.

I was invited to enter the wise old man, to view the boy from elsewhere, but my boy-self could not take that step, could not claim his power. Instead, I knew the boy must address the gift: what would he do with it? what would melt his reticence?

With gratitude, with tears, the boy wraps himself in the magic cloak he thought was a pelt, and knows thereby he has the protection of the helping spirits, and their love. Now, he can accept himself as an unsure boy, a boy who needs love and protection. And suddenly he is both boy and man, wise old hunter and tearful initiate, occupying all the roles in the spiral of his life.

And now he can see the pasty gaggle as the boy he was, and see them with love, and hope. And the view from the market, once fading to dim chaos, receding across the blasted city, now opens to vistas of subtle magic, to realms uncharted, and the not-boy, wrapped in his cloak, calm and clear-eyed, takes his next step.