Becoming the wine / More of one thing leading to another

Let This Darkness Be a Belltower

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

(Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy)

*

This morning I was looking for insight into what makes a good and lasting committed relationship or marriage, having not experienced that in my life.  I loved a man at what I once thought was a safe distance for 42 years until his death from the results of alcoholism and drug addiction, always hoping that he would be able to return my love.  I may have been physically safe but emotionally I was never in healthy territory.  This morning I'm looking deeply into my lifelong pattern of loving from a distance, stemming from my childhood where it was not safe to love my parents unless I kept my physical and emotional distance and which resulted in being so distant from them that I no longer felt love.  Love was replaced by fear and shame.  

Meeting R when we were 17 years old, I felt that it was finally safe to love another person.  For the only time in my life that I could remember,  I felt fully alive, but it wasn't long before I didn't feel worthy of his love and retreated into unvoiced fear and shame.  During the year he was in Vietnam, I perfected my ability to love from a distance for a sustained period of time.  He returned from Vietnam, broken and unable to love anyone.  At the time I thought that this proved that I was not worthy of love but, unlike my childhood response of ceasing to love, I made what I see now as an unconscious vow to love him no matter what happened in hopes that my love would be returned.  I could not imagine a life without him and, at the same time, I could not imagine a life with him and so I remained alone, waiting for something that could never be.

This brings me to a painful turning point this morning.  Although I now feel able to love and worthy of love, I find myself afraid to ask for emotional and physical closeness.  My childhood fears are still with me.  I learned early that asking for emotional and physical closeness resulted in anger and abandonment.  My relationships with men have been fraught with my fear of anger and abandonment and yet I see that I am drawn to men who want me in their lives but not too close.  The part of this that is apparent to me this morning is that I have to admit that I am comfortable being kept at a distance because I am unable to believe yet that a committed relationship, much less marriage, is possible for me.

Through blogging, I have been given the gift of witnessing long-term loving marriages.  That gives me hope, knowing what is possible.

So, I asked the darkness for help with my own situation and waited for a response.  Help came in the form of a gentle inner prompt to read the weekly newsletter from On Being that appears at the top of this post.  O my goodness!  All is not lost.  In fact, nothing is lost.  Thank you!

Weltinnenraum / Synchronicity and more of one thing leading to another / With Blogger playing tricks with fonts and spacing and formatting

Recently, a friend mentioned that she had found an unusual book on the "free" table of the apartment complex where she lives.  The book turned out to be Grapefruit, Yoko Ono's square yellow book of instructions and drawings first published in 1964, before she met John Lennon.  I remembered looking at the book 50 years ago and expressed that I knew of the book and hoped she would enjoy reading it.  My friend has written poetry since childhood, and the book caught her attention because she saw Yoko's instructions as poems of a memorable nature.  She was born too late to experience the Beatles firsthand.  I'm not sure how much she knew about Yoko Ono when she picked up the book.

Last Sunday in a socially distanced masked visit with my friend, she brought it out and asked if I would like to borrow it.  (Given my growing awareness of the alarming surge in COVID-19 cases in our county since my visit with her, I have decided to refrain from any more socializing during the next few months.)

It may have been in a bookstore in Santa Cruz in 1970 that I eagerly looked through Grapefruit, Yoko Ono's small book of instructions and drawings, for the first and only other time.  The book had evolved from her 1964 limited edition version (500 copies), with an added introduction by John Lennon and new instructions including pieces such as "SKY EVENT for John Lennon," which ended with:

"Do not talk loud or make noise, as you may scare the sky"

and was followed by:

"SKY event II

(IMAGINARY SKY EVENT - refer to SKY EVENT for John LENNON)

Do the sky event in your mind

THEN go out into the street and take photos to document the event

If the sky event in your mind takes place in another city,

ask a friend in that city to take photos for you."

My recollection is that I was delighted by some of the instructions and disturbed, dismayed, even horrified by others.  I didn't buy the book and blocked out the instructions that upset me.  Reading the book in its entirety this week, I remembered some of the instructions as if I had read them yesterday, some even more delightful, some even more upsetting ("ON RAPE").  The following set of instructions intrigued me, but I had only a vague recollection of ever reading them before.  In 1970, of course, I didn't have Google Translate and would have puzzled over the German word, only able to guess what it might mean in the context of the instructions.

CARD PIECE I

Walk to the center of your Weltinnenraum.

Leave a card.

CARD PIECE II

Cut a hole in the center of your 

Weltinnenraum.

Exchange.

CARD PIECE III

Shuffle your Weltinnenraums.

Hand one to a person on the street.

Ask him to forget about it.

1964  spring

*

Google Translate:

Weltinnenraum:  Diesen Raum der Erfahrung, der sich in der Präsenz ereignet auch zwischen Mensch und Welt nennt der Dichter Rainer Maria Rilke Weltinnenraum

Weltinnenraum:  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke calls this space of experience, which also occurs in presence between man and world

*

The photo at the top of this post caught my attention because, coincidentally, I had made similar marks on one of my recently completed mandalas.  

The marks were based on a drawing in India ink that I made in 1967 or 1968 during my freshman year at UC Irvine.  I titled it "God."  The drawing was made on an 8-1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper and was a single line that went up and down in small varied increments across the center of most of the page, which I had placed horizontally.  I had not thought of the drawing for years but when it came to mind, I decided to incorporate the idea into the mandala I was working on this week.  A college acquaintance had expressed that she loved my "God" drawing, and so I gave it to her all those years ago. 

*

I've continued thinking about the concept of Weltinnenraum.  George Harrison's song, "Anyroad," came to mind early on:

I keep traveling around the bend
There was no beginning, there is no end
It wasn't born and never dies
There are no edges, there is no size
Oh yeah, you just don't win
It's so far out - the way out is in (am's italics)
Bow to God and call him Sir
But if you don't know where you're going
Any road will take you there

I'm almost finished working on Mandala #54.  Maybe I'll finish it today.  Maybe there will be a 2021 calendar with 12 mandalas after all.  These mandalas may well be Weltinnenraums. Thank you, Sabine and Robin and Ellen, for your encouraging comments.

Rainer Maria Rilke

For some reason, in the context of "weltinnenraum" that poem came to mind.  During my early years of counseling for PTSD, a Gestalt counselor I worked with for several years quoted this to me, changing Rilke's "man" to "woman":

Winning does not tempt that woman. 
This is how she grows: by being defeated, decisively, 
by constantly greater beings.

*

If I understand the word correctly, I sense that COVID winter is opening up weltinnenraum.

"... One single space pervades all beings here:
an inner world-space. Silently, the birds
fly through us still. Oh, I who want to grow,
can gaze outside: a tree will rise inside me ..."

Talking Cricket During The First Days of Spring

Jiminy Cricket was billed as "the only conscience with a sense of humor."




Funny how the mind works.  I looked at Jiminy Cricket's top hat and thought of this:



Coincidence? On March 28, 2007, on his Theme Time Radio Hour, Bob Dylan played "I'm No Fool," by Jiminy Cricket:

Chop the water
Pump the hay
Shoe the eggs
Water the pump
Butter the cow
Water the milk
Churn the horse
Milk the grain
Sow the shoe
Pitch the field
Water the plow
Chop the eggs



which reminded me of this:

It is spring again.  The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)