From Aristotle to Aquinas to Lewis, we fall at the feet of the beautiful.  Some say that beauty demands form first – that we must behold something in order to know beauty exists.  Others remind us that the forms of beauty we behold point to something else, the thing behind the thing.  It’s not really the thing we desire at all.  We see beauty, and we long for God. 

HOME BEHIND THE SUN, Timothy D. Willard, Jason Locy

Dear Ine Mountain,

I don’t like you.

Sometimes I catch myself being critical of you, disparaging the conditions of the relationship we’ve entered into.  Yes, certainly I can be judgmental, but you!  You can be harsh and inhospitable. In the summer you are relentless, unforgiving and abusive.  In the winter you are impulsive, volatile, and rebellious.  

You’re all I’ve got.

It rained a bit yesterday and it’s been quietly raining all day today.  You are green and soft and charming.  The horses are lulled into a drowsy ennui.  The cat and dog are on the porch, secure and lost in their napping.  Your beauty is most visible this time of year, and after a few days of rain you will be verdant and boasting of wildflowers and blooming vines.  As I look out to the north across your tangled and randomly obscured expanse, I feel my tension give way to gratitude.  You are more than I once imagined was possible.  Admittedly, I am cautious.  I know it’s a trick; a few short weeks of this display of beauty and you’ll be harsh again. You are a mercurial and irascible partner, fickle and untrustworthy, in turns indifferent then seductive.

I love you.

How could I not love you?  You are our home.  Seldom embraceable, rarely reassuring, still you are our home.  Your flora is often prickly, stinging or loaded with hidden thorns. Your hard packed soil gives way to rocks and scrappy native grasses. Coyotes, snakes, lizards, hornets, scorpions, fire ants – hardly the cuddly types – we’re all your stubborn tenants.  You provide for us, nourish us in your own way. Troubling as it is, you are where I find myself rooted, so it’s no wonder I also often find myself feeling unmoored, only a contrived and sketchy sense of belonging.  You see, my ancestors, those women whose sensibilities have shaped my modern-day longings which spark the memory of my intrinsic kinship with the earth, they all hail from northern and western Europe.  Their wisdom was wrought in the rhythm of four seasons, not just two; they breathed the air of forests, meadows, and rich tilled soil; they never doubted the element of water whether in their wells or abundant lakes and rivers or plentiful rains.  Their land was a splendid and vivid Mother.

A few days ago, my husband recounted a conversation he had with a friend who’d recently been through a divorce, the kind of divorce that provokes uncharacteristic and upsetting behaviors from the former spouse.  He said that one day while taking a long contemplative walk to help find his way through the experience, he was given an insight.  He became sharply aware that this was a ‘test of love.’  Not a test in the sense of being challenged, but an opportunity to realize that he could know the presence of love amidst the pain and bewilderment.  Love is here.  I was so struck by his story.  It made me wonder about times in my own life, when reflected upon, could I see that they too were a test of love?  Could I also realize that amid my failures, discouragements and anxious heartbreaks, love was there, even then?  Wouldn’t I love knowing that.

Yesterday a red hawk crossed remarkably close in front of my car as I neared the turn into my driveway. Its beauty took my breath away.  Its beauty is of this place, here at Ine Mountain.  I always interpret rare encounters with the natural world as conversation with the Infinite.  It’s as if It were saying to me, “Love is here, even here.”

03 22, 2012

You just said, ‘I am at the middle of Infinity.’

“Oh… Yeah, I did say that.  I guess that’s true.”

When I said it on that warm, sunny late-winter day, meeting for a rare in-person conversation with my friend in the park, it seemed unremarkable then, so…well, just an explanation of how I saw things in that moment.  Kinda’ normal, really.  Not all expansive and transcendent and spiritual-y.  I saw a diagram in my mind’ eye and I was describing what I saw.

Each of us embodies the limitless, the vast, the boundless.  Seems bold, like I’m saying we contain the uncontainable. That’s not what I mean by embody.  We enliven it. We give it an experience of singularity, a nexus point of expression.  And yet, it remains limitless, vast and boundless, the same in front of the point that is me as behind, beneath and above.

The diagram looks like this:  The symbol for infinity (a sideways figure 8), at the center of the symbol where the two lines intersect is me, or you, or anyone. In equal measure there on the diagram there is the physical 3-dimensional material experience of living, along with the energetic spiritual experience of aliveness.  The center of it all is the portal to both, and simultaneous experience of both is the whole point.  True Equilibrium. 

So, what happens?  

On these days like I’ve been having for the past couple of weeks, I feel a looming tendency to notice things unwanted. 

On these days I don’t remember what it is that I do want, except that I want to be free of the unwanted.  There’s a line from a poem by Jeffrey Foster, the way I committed it to memory was this:  “you do not want what you think you want, what you want is to be free of wanting.”  Even as I write this I think, “True, that.”  And it all goes to hell when I believe that what it takes to be free of wanting is to have what I want.  And what I want is some unrecognized, unnamed thing or experience or circumstance or quality of condition. 

On these days I don’t remember the diagram.  My attention is on the accumulation of small differences that shift perceptions a bit here and a bit there, like a chip in the windshield that I overlook, look past and around, as it works its way halfway across my view of the road.  And until I see it, the world looks cracked, and then my feeling and thinking is cracked.

On these days I don’t remember what’s possible.  But then I catch a moment of the numinous out with the horses because they embody the boundless, they are a continuous expression of who they are, their true nature uninterrupted even by the noise of my frustration, disappointment, aggravation from unmet expectations and my learned responses to that.

On the days that I do remember, I notice the crack. 

On these days I remember what it means to be in the middle of infinity.

On these days…peace even here.

03 12, 2012

To my beautiful painted boy:

I am not afraid of your fear, Indigo.  I will step into it and meet your fear with trust.

“And what about your fear?” you ask.

My fear?  I’ll meet that with trust, too, for you and for me.

Yours is the domain of Light, lightness of being, lightness of heart, a warden for the captive yet unfettered Self, for the eternally untamable in each of us. 

An innocent aliveness will find the safe space between us. Let’s both breathe deeply from that vibrant space, maintaining our own self-carriage in such a way that we affirm our shared dignity. 

Take your time, my beautiful boy, you can never let me down.

I am hopeful. We have a collection of memories that draw us forward toward what matters.

A kind of Gypsy spirit, you remind me to trust the Intelligence of Life’s unfolding.

I remember you once said, “reality only happens moment by moment.”

I am listening to hear you. I am watching to see you.  I am determined to understand our common language.

For the sake of what do we do this work together?

Peace… even here.

02 28,2021

It wasn’t just that it was the worst winter storm to hit Texas in decades; it was a storm that obstinately could not be forecasted accurately farther out than about 36 hours.  It began just looking like “real bad weather comin’ in a week or so.”  As it neared, the temperatures in the forecast dropped each day over the course of its stay and the duration of its stay was extended beyond the days in each of the previous forecasts.  This is to say, preparation for this storm was a fool’s game.  In reality, we were responding to each 12–24-hour period as it came.  As the overnight temperature slid down the chart where it finally bottomed out at 5 degrees, a rhythm of horse care and maintenance was established consisting of five outings a day over 12 hours, from daybreak to dusk. Out in the barnyard each trip would involve breaking ice and lifting it out of the troughs, scooping and carrying poop out of the shelter, replenishing hay bags, and alternatingly delivering grass pellets or alfalfa flakes to keep their internal furnaces always well-fueled. 

If you were just watching the movie, the elements were:  highly unpredictable and potentially perilous weather and ground conditions; little or no experience to draw from in weather of this magnitude; and possibly dire consequences.

Before any horse care could happen there was the clothing assemblage at the back door, layer upon layer. This was exactly how I prepared for whatever unexpected things I might encounter; the real preparation, as I see it now, was conveyed in the articles of clothing.

The things I wore:

Red Tights – 2009. These were a gift from my mother when colored tights were hot.  They stopped being fashion wear and got promoted to thermal layering under jeans a few years later.

Black DKNY tights – 2010.  The fashionista diva in me has relaxed quite a lot, for better or for worse.  These black tights are thick and were the alternate and slight upgrade to the red ones.

Silkies long underwear –January 2013.  I purchased these to wear at one of a few week-long contemplative retreats I attended in Taos. I almost forgot I had them.  When I bought them, they were a bit uncomfortable, but they were less uncomfortable than being unbearably cold when I was walking around in Taos in January. Now 8 years later and 15 pounds lighter, they’re just right.

Polar fleece lounge pants –January 2012.  I purchased these in Petaluma after the first day of training for Somatic Coaching certification at Strozzi Institute. The evenings in Petaluma were cold and damp in January and I had packed nothing warm enough for relaxing at the end of the day back at the HomeAway.  Linda, (a dear friend from Austin who also attended the introductory level of the training and with whom I shared the cottage) and I stopped at a K-Mart to shop their post-Christmas sale for something cheap and cozy.  Black fleece loungies with a purple fleece top came home with me from the first level of somatic coaching certification.

Sweatpants – November 1999.  I bought these sweatpants to take and wear as pajamas in the Sacred Valley in Peru because at 13,000’ elevation no conventional pajamas were up for the task.  Along with wool socks and a sweatshirt, they saw me through 11 nights after hiking and exploring the ruins in the Sacred Valley and Machu Pichu with 5 other women.

Ralph Lauren black cashmere sweater– 2014. This was a gift from my sister-in-law, who is a professional chef for a private estate.  The ‘Lady of the House’ was clearing her closet and offered the staff first takes before it all went to charity. Kendel saw 2 cashmere sweaters in my size, the black one and a navy one., “I thought you could wear them when you’re out with the horses,” she said when she handed them to me.  Ha! Ralph Lauren cashmere and horses – never a pairing that would have otherwise come to my mind.  I never wore them out with the horses, but the times I had worn them, I felt different.  Some things, like cashmere, just do that.

Black fleece vest – September 2013.  The vest has the logo of the Coaching with Horses Academy on it.  I purchased it in Colorado during that coaching certification training. While I was there, I learned a lot more than simply a method of Equine Assisted Coaching.  After the training was over it took a long time for me to reach for this vest in my closet because the memory associated with it was harsh and indelible.  My response to the experience of that program created a hard veer from my intended path.

Purple hoodie “Dawgs” sweatshirt. – September 2006.  I accompanied Wayne to Tacoma on a trip for business.  It poured down rain the entire time, but we braved the elements and got out a lot anyway.  I wore a pair of made-to-order western boots, the only footwear I had with me; they were never the same.  I bought the hoodie at the University bookstore, not that I knew anything at all about the school’s sports team, but its color is purple, and it has a husky dog on it.  I’m very fond of both.

Black REI Gore-Tex coat –November 2002.  I got this coat for a second trip to Peru.  Wayne and I went with a group of people, a few he knew well, and I knew slightly, and the rest we only met on the trip.  It was another excursion through the sacred ruins, this time lead by a local Shaman.  Near the end Wayne got seriously ill, really crazy high fever, so he spent a lot of time in the room, slept, hardly ate and barely pulled himself together to move on to the next town with the group. I honestly wondered if he would die.  He finally got some medicine, which eventually broke the fever and, except for being exhausted to the bone, he made the trip home alright.  We had been married only 7 months.

Several combinations of gloves of various types and materials.  My favorite gloves for doing barn work in the cold were a pair of black pleather, fleece-lined driving gloves that had belonged to my mother.  She gave them to me one day, as she was in the habit of insisting that I take certain things of hers during her final year. Mostly I said yes because it seemed to give her so much pleasure.  Some things I insisted that she keep, I know now because I wanted her to still believe that she would need them sometime…or maybe I wanted to still believe she would.  Early in the storm two fingers on the right hand blew out at the ends. I tried patching the holes with black Gorilla tape, but the tape is a magnificent conductor of temperature and my fingers nearly froze.  After several other trials, the final and best solution for warm hands was a little pair of black sweater-knit gloves with faux ocelot fur trim (another gift from my mother; she bought them at the Dollar General Store for me to keep in my car for when the steering wheel was too hot to hold in the summer – the irony) worn inside a pair of Wayne’s ski gloves. Warm like toast.

What I recognize now is that there was no real ‘gear’ in this assemblage, nothing that was purchased as winter barn clothes.  Each piece of clothing came from another time, and with it, stories and memories forged from experiences.  Situations, circumstances, people, places, and points in time – each and all were what it took to bring me to this moment, to this time when the person I have become would summon all the constitution I have to draw on to give my best to my beloved horses.  These were the things I wore, the things that kept me safe, feeling strong enough, up-to-the-task enough to get out and do it again, every time.  In truth, it is always what prepares me for the unknown/unknowable just ahead.  Everything that’s come before is always there.  I must trust that. 

Peace, even here.

02 19, 2021

Nothing is not the absence of something.

Nothing has a presence all its own.  It is some thing; 

Something that sometimes, when I try to rise above the familiar, moves like an invisible force field out in front of me, shaping my experience around it,

Something that sometimes, when I reach inside myself to give, slips through my hands like sand.

Nothing is what I see as my personal resource to provide for the horses in the face of this new and epic winter storm.

Nothing informs my self-concept the way ‘non-profit’ informs a business model.

Nothing is, not surprisingly, what I feel when I try to imagine passion. 

Nothing is, not surprisingly, what I imagine when I try to dream. 

My ancestors, like many women before them and since, arranged their lives around Nothing and often, rising from the ashes of their desire and will to provide, found the gift of themselves to give.

Loneliness and Fear can come in and cozy up beside Nothing, as though someone gave them each the key to the backdoor, which they enter without waiting for an invitation. There was really no need to provide two keys because they rarely come by themselves. I used to believe they were the thing, the issue to be dealt with, but I recognize them easily now; they come to visit Nothing. 

I would have asked you, my dear friend, how do I get rid of Nothing?.  Can it be banished, or made irrelevant, convinced to pack up and move out? I see it lurking about the house from time to time.  I suppose I’ve known it was there for a long time but thought it best to ignore it, focus on its uninvited houseguests, Loneliness and Fear.  Currently, I’m thinking it’s not likely that any of them will actually leave town.  Maybe the best to be hoped for is that I retrieve the car keys from Nothing and insist they all ride in the back seat.

Peace, even here.

02 09, 2021

A new (to me) quote I’m pondering: “It is the time to leave the Flatland of conscienceless and unconscious pursuits.  It is time to move on to something greater and more noble.”  David G. Yurth

When I first read this quote, I heard the emphasis on the quality or character of the pursuits, conscienceless and unconscious. I heard the imperative, as if we could or should leave the pursuits themselves behind.  I’ve held it in my mind now while moving through my pursuits during the days and it occurrs to me that I could think of it as not simply what we pursue, but who we are when we pursue our pursuits and how we are pursuing them.

Saturday, I had a day of ‘ranch work’, which included hauling horse poop out to the back pasture to be spread.  My wheelbarrow had had a blow out, the rains came, and the best I could do to keep up with the ongoing accumulation was to create ‘staging piles’, 3 of them, away from the area where the boys eat. So every morning instead of loading my wheel barrow, I carried the droppings over to the closest staging pile.  The replacement tire had to be ordered so this newly arranged “system” got protracted and now removal was a major project.  The silver side to this dark cloud is that in the meantime I learned of a fellow who refurbishes ‘yard tractors’ and resells them for a song.  NO more hauling with the wheelbarrow!  But still it took 6 loads in my new yard tractor wagon to get it all redistributed to the back.  The piles still had to be shoveled into the wagon, of course.  Here’s where I’m going with this story.  While heaving each loaded manure fork into the wagon I heard, ‘what quality could I bring to this pursuit, not only physically but also energetically, such that it would be ‘greater and more noble’.  It was about more than just the specific cause being served, the stewardship of my horses, although there is a nobility in that for sure.  It was, “who am I, how do I show up for this task, is ease and grace possible here, what elegance is there in fluid repetitive motion, what lightness of being is available just in feeling the aliveness of my body and the devotion of my attention.”  Attention is Life Energy; to what am I devoted while shoveling this poop? My ponderings crossed over into the ‘Divine Feminine meets Divine Masculine’ conversation.  I won’t go through all the angles I played with in that part of the inquiry.  But eventually I got beyond the mental concept of ‘no separation’ and into the sensation of energy moving through energy, energy exchanging information with energy, breath, exertion, trees, mother earth, father sky….and poop (the great recycling of life energy!  😊)

This and the other fractured musings have opened up a kind of portal of perception; things are played out on the stage in my days, memories come back to mind in a new frame, insights about my mother and my ancestors (in the context of the Divine Feminine)… more to be continued.

01 31,2021

Something happened with the idea of Speaking Peace to Power, a new and nascent clarity.  I strongly sense that the power of the Divine Feminine and the call to reawaken and re-enliven it throughout humanity is undeniably integral to what’s on offer with ‘Speaking Peace to Power.’  We are being asked to see through the swirling tumult of our times and notice that there is an option to integrate and make whole the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine, the unified whole, both on a personal level as well as a collective level. 

Something happened to my recognition of who I truly am, a new recognition, a remembering.  This has been requisite to knowing my purpose.  The desire to experience a vibrantly alive Peace, what I previously may have called radiance, has become my driving impulse.  I previously have referred to this as purpose.

Something happened to that instability on the internet of my Intelligence, that static which has kept me from knowing who I am, from wanting to be seen. It is not pain, not grief, not anger, not self-pity, at least not at its center.  When those do rise up, I believe it’s from a profound and longtime unacknowledged loneliness.  Not the kind of loneliness that we hear so much about now which comes from too much isolation.  It’s the loneliness that happened when I lost awareness of and contact with who I am/was when I came to this life. 

Now I sense an intense curiosity to know who I am before the loneliness, when all I knew was the abiding alive sense of peace.  Maybe my mistaken presumption was that first I would remember who I truly am and then I would know again that vibrantly alive peace.  It occurs to me now perhaps that’s entirely inverse; remember to tap into…entrain to my inherently vibrantly alive peace, and then, then I will know who I am.

And while I am not yet clear on how, I am clearer than ever that reawakening the Divine Feminine in my self/Self is the crucial connection between what is and what is possible; an awakening of the collective Divine Feminine is a crucial component in the transformation of what’s possible in the human evolution experience.

The work of Speaking Peace to Power affirms and serves this awakening.

01 24, 2021

“When you know who you truly are, there is an abiding alive sense of peace. You could call it “joy” because that’s what joy is: vibrantly alive peace. It is the joy of knowing yourself as the very life essence before life takes on form. That is the joy of Being – of being who you truly are.” Eckhart Tolle

There’s a path not taken…

A path taken off course…

A mistaken identity, a misfire, a disruption….another failing.

I’ve got to fill in these holes,” I said.

Silence.….

“Trust, ” She said, “your connection is unstable now.”

“I should atone somehow.”

“No atonement required.

Allow Me to be bigger than your thought of Me,” She said.

“I would so like to express myself authentically professionally,” I said.

She said, “What’s always on offer – solely, ever – is your connection to the Infinite, to Self.  What’s the most expanded consciousness you can allow?  From there you can encourage others to allow that same connection to guide their experience.  There is no order of difficulty.”

“There is hope in that,” I said.

“I am calling on you,” they both said.

01 24, 2021

Sometimes when I look up from the sink after washing my face and see her in the mirror, see how much older she is than I am, I think it’s time to move on from this interminable quest for work, a quest that has become so familiar it feels like home.  Work has always felt empty.  But who I really AM, what matters, that’s not empty.

But there’s something about resignation, there’s no relief in it.  It doesn’t bring Peace.

Can I ask myself to experience peace even though nothing may ever change.  When I think I’ve experienced peace in the domain of ‘work’, I wonder if it’s actually resignation, submission to the crushing weight of Reality saying, “Admit and accept that you will never know the beauty of standing in your own radiance feeling the joy of ‘Ahh, this. This is what I’m here for.’

Over the course of the past week’s inquiry, lots of memories have come up, swirled around … only the occasional shimmer or a shard of insight.

The one about moving to very rural Texas just as I turned 12.   The high school I would go to was smaller than my elementary school in Dallas. It might as well have been Mars.  My friends in Dallas were continuing their violin lessons, foreign language classes, learning about the world.  I can see now the meaning I made of that, and glimpses of that conclusion still repeat.  ‘I will never be the person I thought I could be.’  But it wasn’t resignation then, it was fury, resentment, rebellion and contempt.  Burn the house down.

The memory about showing horses, Fashion Design school, a year abroad to study language in college that wasn’t….  memories about times I tried to step out into a world of mastering a skill…but…something would happen, and nothing would happen.

Face it.

But I don’t like looking into the past for answers.  What’s the secret of happiness?… stop being unhappy.

Where is my bridge of Peace into ‘My Wildly Profound Work in the World’?  I experience Peace and trust it, until I turn my attention to the domain of work.  I try to close my eyes and imagine a world in which I make a congruent and authentic contribution, feeling whole where once I felt divided, recognizing the joy of meaningful work. 

Truth:  I do not have a vision of that world. 

Truth:  I long for wholeheartedness.

Truth:  I’m afraid that this is all there is.