Meltdown in Mali – End of Exoticism

Vulnerability in Leadership

Vision Shift – Engaged Creativity

IMAGINATION

Often amazes me how my imaginal mind-in-the-moment zooms off – given the slightest cue – on flights of memory to exotic locales I have known and loved. Recently, at the Prajna Mountain Refuge, an Upaya Zen Center upcountry inholding tucked into a soft grassy valley in Northern New Mexico, I was asked to fetch water from the Abbot’s cabin. To haul a multi-gallon bucket of water up to the main kitchen to be boiled for the perfect Putanesca seemed, at first, a simple enough task.

“Break Trail – Keep Them Safe.” 

 www.upaya.org/programs/event.php?id=771

www.StoryShards.info

Information & Registration:

www.upaya.org/programs/event.php?id=771

UPAYA REGISTAR:  505-986-8518  x12

Lisl@StoryShards.info

     

Hopefulness & Clarity in a Broken World

VISITATION & OBSERVATION

REFLECTING ON THE ORIGINS OF STORYSHARDS, I observed a ladybug land on my computer. She swiftly traversed the backlit screen. Reaching the left bezel, the ladybug reversed. She cut a diagonal line to the upper right screen corner, then scuttled back across the edge of the lid. I caught up with her backside on the Apple glyph, and gentled the ladybug’s tiny red-and black-spotted body into the garden. A STORYSHARD, indeed, the British fable “Ladybug, Ladybug fly away home” is about hope for saving her children in a house on fire. While only Little Anne survives by creeping under a frying pan – rather than flying into the flames – the story is a relevant parable for today. It is a call to action – about the consequences of showing up late for service in our broken world ablaze.

STORYSHARDS AT UPAYA

THE FABLED LADYBUG’S AUSPICIOUS visitation to my computer screen served to focus attention – and my affirmation that the upcoming STORYSHARDS: Gathering for Women at the Upaya Zen Center,  September 14th-16th, is a call to action. It is about how we show-up and engage in the world. Based on a vivid multimedia presentation, STORYSHARDS is a new fusion of Personal Story, Complexity Thinking, Engaged Creativity, and Spiritual Practice. The retreat experience – with its accompanying field-guide STORYSHARDS–THE DIG: Re-forming the Vessel of Your Life – provides an opportunity to take time-out to take-to-heart the inspirational memories and motivating themes of your life that form your service today in the world-at-large.

Retreat Information & Registration

http://www.upaya.org/programs/event.php?id=771

 

STORYSHARDS TEAM

A WOMEN’S ENGAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP retreat, STORYSHARDS at Upaya is about clarity, relationship, and hopefulness for your Story Forward. In hosting STORYSHARDS at Upaya, I will be joined by an exceptional team of women practitioners representing a broad spectrum. They are: Buddhist Chaplain, Psychotherapist and Wellness Coach ANN-MARIE MCKELVEY, LPCC, MCC; Complexity Scientist and Facilitator MERLE LEFKOFF, PhD; and Upaya’s visiting teacher from the Olympia Zen Center EIDO FRANCES CARNEY, Zen Arts Scholar, Artist and Social Activist. Together, we will consider the intimate observations and fresh perspectives on how your stories reveal your mission – and how we all engage most effectively in our worlds.

REAL KEEPERS

WHAT’S A STORYSHARD? They are the succinct short-stories – scattered throughout our extended  narratives, and punctuating our Story Lines. Often left in the dust of our fast-forward narratives, STORYSHARDS are sifted and collected from the under-stories, side-stories, and back-stories of our lives. STORYSHARDS are the Real Keepers: the lessons learned, the wisdom gathered – the pithy parables unearthed from the fields of our experience and wisdom. STORYSHARDS are the inspirational memories and motivating themes of our lives – integral to the whole vessel. Like an archaeological dig, it takes personal spadework to recognize, and brush off, the Real Keepers in the complexity of our fast-paced lives.

WILDERNESS & WEATHER

HOW ON EARTH DID I DIG THIS UP?  Here is the context – the extended narrative from which my awareness of succinct STORYSHARDS originally arose. Shards from the diversity of cultures exist in all shapes and sizes – sometimes sharp-edged, or softened to the touch by time and attention. The the shard mnemonic emerged in my imagination many-moons-ago while on my first retreat with the Upaya Zen Center. It was a ten-day wilderness emersion guided by outdoor savvy Upaya’s Abbot Roshi Joan Halifax. For the four-day solo fast, I hauled gallons of water, and pitched-up on the banks of the Chama River with only a tarp between me and the weather.

WEATHER THERE WAS – MAINLY IN MY MIND. Not a bean to eat, coyotes yipped and quipped all night. As hunger pangs subsided, I morphed into Wily Coyote, trotting light-headed and empty-bellied on prolonged early morning and evening forays above the Christ in the Desert Monastery. Penetrating shady narrowing canyons and sinking deeper into arroyos, at first, I hallucinated big cats and rattlers – casting about a watchful eye.

ENTRENCHED MEANDERS

 SOON BECOMING RAMBUNCTIOUS, curious and clever, I was, at the same time, observing aspects of my mind-full-of-mischief that were turning me into a rabid coyote. Mind games and heroic strategies to parry off shard-like proliferations and the bits-and-pieces of extraneous thoughts were failing. As usual, coyote was chasing her mental and emotional “tales.” After a lifetime of ineffective mind-  control strategies, I had deliberately entered the Chama wilds to observe directly the whatever of tiresome entrenched mental meanders – to see if there was any hope of  groundedness and quietude on a wilderness plunge informed by Zen practice. I found out.

RAIZING THE GAZE

 WITH A HEAD FULL OF COYOTE fabrications and constructs, I was habitually looking down at the ground. Kicking up a shard, I  popped it in my pocket. But here’s the real Keeper Shard: As I raised my gaze out upon the  boundless Northern New Mexican sage-scented vastness, with moody O’Keeffe clouds scudding above, I observed that my head cleared and my senses quickened. The coyotes yipping and quipping quit my head: I ceased, for a spell, telling-stories-about-the-story – no longer projecting me, myself and I. This glimpse of clarity was long and vivid enough to make a palpable shift in my mental weather. Walking slowly cross-country through the Rabbitbrush and dry skeletal junipers, I practiced this new-found open-presence.

STEP-BY-STEP ON THE ANIMAL PATHS around the Chama River, I never dared drop my gaze to the ground: I was sprung for a time from trickster-mindedness. I had a new view of possible liberation from my species of mental suffering. I vowed to surrendered self-conscious mental strategies born of psycho-spiritual concoctions and inflations. Hopeful, I entered the path as a student of Zen Buddhism. This Treasure Shard in my pocket was a keeper.

NATURAL WISDOM

IN PREPARATION FOR MY wild-minded  time on the Chama, I had read Roshi Joan Halifax’s THE FRUITFUL DARKNESS – A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom (Harper Collins, 2004), recently republished with a forward by Thich Nhat Hanh. The right wisdom for a wilderness fast back then, it is even more relevant in today’s alienating and broken world. Roshi Joan writes: “The sixth Inherent Condition is Wisdom, Natural Wisdom, the mind that is clear like a mirror, like space…I go to the wilderness to find the activity of Natural Wisdom…Everywhere in these worlds I find a ready mind, not stopped by conceptual knowledge, the mind that does not have to stumble over strategy as it responds directly to the world. There is no strategy in the wilderness. It is a place where Truth is experienced and expressed directly.”

VISIONS & VOWS

EACH ONE OF US HAVING DIRECTLY experienced our own particular truths, and all safely back at base camp, we Chama soloists entered a closing riverside ceremonial circle, sharing our visions and intentions. After the circle, I was gifted a real keeper. I received a succinct Wisdom Shard given to me by Wolfgang Brolley, a fellow retreatant, and future Mt. Kailash pilgrimage trekking buddy. The gift was not actually a shard, as such. Close: it was a tiny perfectly-shaped and preserved arrow head – he had turned up two. Wolf noted that the double-edged arrowhead is capable of cutting both ways – for good or ill. Wise man Wolf stated directly to me: “I must vow to be ever watchful as to how I engage my obvious edges, moving forward in life.” A Wisdom Shard – a keeper worthy of remembrance – a STORYSHARD to keep in my pocket, and see clearly.

 VIDEO: CHAMA ARROWHEAD OFFERED ON TIBET’S MT. KAILAS 

SPECIES OF HOPE

 WHILE  STORYSHARDS AT UPAYA is a women’s retreat, by no means are the discriminating insights and wisdom of men not integral to our stories. Friend of the Upaya Zen Center, William deBuys, storyteller, naturalist, ecologist, environmental activist and author of award-winning books, including The Walk (Trinity University Press, 2007) www.williamdebuys.com. In a memoir of a life devoted to wilderness, he opens this book with an intimate observation of the wood grain on his pine desktop: “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing – one phenomenon or essence – so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.”

STORY FORWARD

WHETHER WE WE ARE OBSERVING the grain on our writing desk, a ladybug on our computer screen, or a Keeper Shard safely tucked into our pocket, STORYSHARDS is an engaging visual meditation. STORYSHARDS: Gathering for Women – Personal Story, Engaged Creativity, Spiritual Practice, and the Science of Surprise is based on a vibrant multimedia presentation which creates the conditions and opens the inquiries that allow for your own  discreet observations. The take-away shards are: hopefulness; a deeper connection to yourself; enhanced creative engagement with the world; and clarity of  intention and purpose for your Story Forward.

Visual Artist – LISL DENNIS – Story Guide

Retreat Information & Registration

Contact Upaya Registrar

Roberta@Upaya.org

http://www.upaya.org/programs/event.php?id=771

Contact Lisl Dennis @ 505-986-1106

 

     

Your Story Reveals Your Mission

 GATHERING FOR WOMEN  

SEPTEMBER 14-16, 2012 – Santa Fe, NM

www.upaya.org/programs/event.php?id=771 

(Click image for What’s A StoryShard? video)

PERSONAL STORY–ENGAGED CREATIVITY–SCIENCE OF SURPRISE

For women with passion and purpose, StoryShards is a timely fusion of personal story, engaged creativity, and Complexity Theory – also known as the Science of Surprise. Framed within Lisl Dennis‘ vibrant multimedia presentation, you will align your narrative, personal practice, creative spirit, and life work into a meaningful and effective engagement and leadership in the world.

Lisl Dennis is joined by three faculty women who bring their diverse, creative and inspirational perspectives to this uniquely conceived retreat. They are: ANNE-MARIE MCKELVEY, LPCC, MCC; MERLE LEFKOFF, PhD, Complexity Scientist; and ROSHI EIDO FRANCES CARNEY. This exceptional team has an experienced, expansive, and inclusive view of the world-at-large.

Whether seeking a career path, re-focusing an original vision, or clarifying and grounding an ongoing mission, the solidarity and mutuality of women is vital today in support of our individual and collective Story Forward. By gathering and integrating the forgotten, or neglected, shards of your life, StoryShards reveals that the discreet inspirational memories and motivating themes of your narrative are continuously emergent in positive and creative ways. They are foundational in support of your capacity in service to the world.

FACULTY REMARKS

Visual Artist – LISL DENNIS – Story Guide

“My deep intention for StoryShards at the Upaya Zen Center is to create a vibrant multimedia context and conducive atmosphere that encourages and supports women from all walks of  life in a grounded, practice-based engagement and leadership in the world-at-large. Remaining creative – and staying unconditionally connected to all cultures is my calling.”

 www.StoryShards.info

 Buddhist Chaplain – ANNE-MARIE MCKELVEY – LPCC, MCC,  Coach

“When women come together, we think out of the box. What emerges is usually timely, needed, and ready to manifest – both individually and as a group.”

 www.AnnMarieMcKelvey.com

Complexity Scientist – MERLE LEFKOFF, PhD – Facilitator

“Complexity Thinking is also known as the Science of Surprise. The closer we allow ourselves to move to the Edge-of-Chaos, the more creative we become – and the more surprising the outcomes.”

www.EmergentDiplomacy.org

Zen Arts Scholar – EIDO FRANCES CARNEY, ROSHI – Artist & Poet

“It’s prime time for women to regroup and consider our engagement and leadership for the future. We’re losing ground every day: We must leap out ahead, and go where women have not gone before”

www.EidoFrancesCarney.com

 www.StoryShards.info

 Lisl@StoryShards.info  –  Tel: 505-986-1106

www.upaya.org/programs/event.php?id=771

 FOR INFORMATION & REGISTRATION, CONTACT ROBERTA

 Registrar@upaya.org  –  Tel: 505-986-8518  –  Ext: 12

SLIPSTREAMING INTO SPRING

 UPAYA: ZENDO SITTING, MOUNTAIN WALKING

JANINE M. BENYUS ON BIOMIMICRY

 REFUGE ON THE RIO BLANCO

SLIPSTREAMING

  Spring emerging: rivers run with snow melt – floating forms of dissolving sludge and icy particulate. I am in a slipstream along the Rio Blanco for a brief spell. My mind awash with nonlocal counter-currents and global conflicts – the world spinning either too fast or too slow – I’m seeking refuge and steeping myself in the local flow along a river running south of Pagosa Springs, CO. This intimate safe place offers me quietude, creative opening, and a merging into a multivalent slipstream of awareness – every stomp of the way.

Not sure whether there is liquid or solid beneath my boots, I’m postholing a trepidatious line along the river’s dissipating snow-packed bank. Entrained between a drainage ditch, and impenetrable thickets of tamarisk and barbed wire boundaries, I pull up boots-full of  heavy snow. Expecting to sink into the drink as I step forward, I poise my camera down onto optically intimate images of icy shards and shadows; phantom shapes of snow melt sliding beneath transparent sheets; glistening gurgles; and crystalized slurpees floating by. Frosty-filigreed daggers remain en-garde and pendulant from the river’s bank.

MELTING

Melting into the slipstream: thin frozen formations break off moment-by-moment into warming waters. Rising sun is intent on melting every image before my eyes. I frame-up a fragile leafy feuillette – the perfect satellite picture – only to witness through my lens its peninsulas and estuaries slip away. I think I hear it – the scale of sound so slight given the amplification of the water’s warble and the camera’s zing. Image capture, I know so well: That which is too closely observed dissolves beyond all grasping – resisting capture of any kind.

DISSOLVING

  The book I’m into, left in my car parked on a sloppy spring shoulder, is BIOMIMICRY – Innovation Inspired by Nature (Harper Perennial, 1997). Biologist, Natural Science writer, Innovation Consultant, and TED presenter, Janine M. Benyus asserts: The difference between what life needs to do and what we need to do is another one of those boundaries that doesn’t exist. Beyond matters of scale, the differences dissolve.

An innovation consultant to businesses seeking guidance around sustainability practices, Janine Benyus is co-founder of the Montana based Biomimicry Guild and founder of the Biomimicry Institute. All about emerging creative applications of  lessons learned from natural systems studies, along with her colleagues, the scale of Benyus’ vision and activities abide at a boundless scale.

The Biomimicry Institute       www.biomimicryguild.com

Scale is the message I’m drawing from observations alone the Rio Blanco. The camera now exhausted and dismissed over my shoulder, I am fully in the presence of these frozen formations. To the unfiltered eye, with their distinct textures; various gauges, thick and thin; interwoven patternings; and stress engineering for changing conditions, these forms model nature’s ongoing adaptability, shape-shifting capacity, and endurance – for a season. Metaphors for the ultimate impermanence of all forms: kerplunk, there goes another one – dissolving into the flow.

KERPLUNK

With each witnessed kerplunk, I am reminded that, in the human scale of things, it’s not a matter of great or small in the social domains. Everyone is an interconnected integer: we all scale up and scale down in the course of a lifetime. The deal is to stick to the text of our individual stories – come hell or high water – staying in right relationship to the great whatever of our lives– till our very own liquification day.

BIOMIMICRY

Dissolving the awareness gap between ourselves and natural systems is the creative narrative around biomimicry. Janine Benyus stories it well: The new science (of biomimicry) studies nature’s models, and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf.” She continues: Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but what we can learn from it.

REFUGE

 Whether on mountains or in rivers, learning from the natural world, I must be an open-source system myself: all the sense-gates flung wide. Along the Rio Blanco, I am also aware that there is no such thing as silence. There is a cadence to quietude: a felt-sense of nature’s rhythms – a very fine frequency. Puts me in memory of a Dogen inspired Mountains & Rivers meditation retreat I participated in years ago. Mountain loving Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, NM, guided us silent retreatants up and along the high Sangre de Cristo trails – after grounding ourselves in morning meditation practice.

PRACTICE

During our solo silent hikes, we were guided to identify and pull focus on the individual sense fields – one-at-a-time – into practices of awareness. Seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting: that included my P.B & J. Bringing each of the senses forward – like popping up a buried window on a computer screen unearthed from multiple layers – an intimacy with each sense arose. With practice, a palpable shift in my collective sense-fields took place on that retreat – beyond self-conscious concepts of such.

More than a nature walk, a similar opportunity for immersion in mind and body is upcoming this spring at Upaya. The sesshin experience alternates periods of zendo meditation and high country walking, and is guided by Roshi Joan Halifax – indoors and out.

Upaya Zen Center – May 1-6, 2012

SESSHIN:  ZENDO SITTING, MOUNTAIN WALKING

http://www.upaya.org/programs/event.php?id=842

IMMERSION

Immersions in the natural world should not be occasional special happenings. As Janine Benyus advises: As adults, we need to put down our books about nature and go out into a rainstorm – be startled by the deer we startle. Climb a tree like a chameleon. It’s good for the soul to go where humans do not have a great say about what happens.

HAPPENINGS

As a child, I grew up wild, weedy – oft-times wet and cold in the northern New Jersey countryside. I bounded outside gleefully into natural happenings – scrambling up into my treehouse in all weather – all seasons. In rainstorms, I’d disappear at dusk down into the farmlands below our house on a wooded hill. Barefoot – shoes in hand – I’d squeeze between drenched corn rows, mud oozing between my toes. Emerging stealthily into open fields, deer would leap off, but the cows, horses, and sheep payed me no mind. I tested barbed wire fencing for liveness with blades of grass before suppressing it and popping over.

BEYOND

The occasional snake would flush. Distant thunder – counting seconds – the lightening.  Sopping wet and body heat lowering, I’d grab watercress for the dinner salad out of a spring we shared fearlessly with farm animals. If a clear evening, I’d join my older brothers – and together with farm kids – we bailed hay well into the crepuscule. Hitting home after dark – back from beyond – we were stuck head to toe with hay slivers and soil. We ate dinner late in our family – after the cicadas kicked-in.

POST-HOLING

 Memories! Now on the Rio Blanco, practicalities kick in. Beyond the maw of picture-taking – and of any conceptualizing of biomimicry in the natural scheme of things – I am fully present with post-holing in the soft snow back to my car for the three-hour drive to Santa Fe. The quiet cadence of my refuge along the Rio Blanco is a mere evanescence. Clear in mind, however, is Janine Benyus’ boots-in-the-earth wisdom. Her personal story of intimacy with the systems of the natural world is lucidly relayed in the last chapter of BIOMIMICRY.

STORY

Always mulches down to story. The last chapter of BIOMIMICRY: Where Do We Go From Here? draws the reader into the narrative challenge: STORY – to see connections, patterns, and consequences and, finally, to envision a different future. This ability to literally scout the river of time mentally gives us an option: Run the rapids the way we always have, or pull into an eddy and learn a better way.

Eddying out for gas, I’m now driving through spring squalls along the rolling road from Pagosa Springs to Chama. With its ebbing-and-flowing speed limits, I’m on speed control to offset the renown officious fuzz who aims to keep slipstreamers like me in his cross-hairs.

At max, I tap on satellite radio Sirius XM – The Bridge.

PAUL SIMON:

Slip Slidin’ away…

You know the nearer your destination,

The more you’re slip slidin’ away.

Believe your gliding down the highway

When, in fact, you’re slip slidin’ away.

—

PERSONAL STORY RETREAT – UPAYA ZEN CENTER

STORY SHARDS

WOMENS’ ENGAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP

 Visual Artist – LISL DENNIS – Story Guide

September 14-16 – Santa Fe, NM

–

For information & registration click below

http://www.upaya.org/programs/event.php?id=771

www.StoryShards.info

lisl@StoryShards.info

505-986-1106

IN-FEAR-STRUCTURE  &  FREEDOM FROM IT

SMILING AT WILD FIRES  &  WILD FEARS

OCCUPY HOME THOUGHT & FLOWERING ASHES

COURAGE TO GIVE NO FEAR

“When Max came to the place where the wild things are

They roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth

and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till

Max said “Be Still” and tamed them with the magic trick of staring

into all their yellow eyes without blinking once.”

– MAURICE SENDAK, Where the Wild Things Are

FEAR MONSTERING

SNAP, CRACKLE, POP. Wild fire season long past, wild fears rage worldwide in the forms of floods, earthquakes – even around Santa Fe, NM; assorted conflicts, floods, and famines; unspeakable atrocities; inclemencies and calamities; and crazed political discourse. Spooky faces all around: this Halloween, I’m thinking it’s time to bring down the firewalls and face my own fears and sadness directly.

BOO–O-WEEN! WITH MAX-LIKE BOLDNESS, staring down one’s fear, sadness, and despair over the spectral of today’s spooks requires discomfiting due diligence in detecting and acknowledging these gros and  subtle critters in the first place, assigning to them a genus and species–then in unmasking them.

MASQUERADING AS WHAT? So many wild fires and wild fears snap, crackle, and pop in the  soft folds of consciousness. Hobbeldy-goblins gambol about undetected in the living rooms of our minds, till one of them trips a loud thought or a big emotional bang in our waking or sleeping dreams.

IN-FEAR-STRUCTURES

WHAT SPOOKS ME  MOST: Institutionalized In-Fear-Structures and imbedded ideologies masquerading as presidential candidates hell-bent on obliterating the already invisible Separation of Church and State; beliefs that separate–my own and others; reversal of women’s rights and offenses to civil liberties; deliberate distortions and obfuscations that fly for political discourse; lies, lies, and moral insanity; ongoing deconstruction of literacy and the humanities in our educational system; and the constipation of creativity in our culture across the spectrum. There’s more…

FEAR, SADNESS, AND DESPAIR occupy the hearts and minds of many these days. Honest conversations with friends reveal that they suffer from chronic fluctuations of FSD Syndrome. This condition often includes a lack of clarity as to one’s own agency–capacity to step-up and engage in any useful way–in the world.

DILIGENT AGENT OF INFORMATION on the Santa Fe scene is KSFR radio newscaster Ellen Dupuy. She allows that: “Yes, I do feel a deep visceral sadness for the overwhelming mess on our planet. I love this earth and the beauty that one finds in our natural environment.  My concerns are endless: environmental degradation, endangered and extinction of plant and animal species, overpopulation, the local/global political scene, et al. I dream I am facing an enormous dike with so many leaks springing forth. I (society) can not keep up with the relentless flow of water. This is only a metaphor for the problems we face where I find so little action and rational thought.”

 OCCUPY  HOME THOUGHT

BELOVED BUDDHIST TEACHER Pema Chodrun speaks of mental health and the deep need to deconstruct firewalls in order to Occupying the Living Room of our Minds: “Our consciousness may be in a state of bad circulation. We may have a block of suffering, pain, sorrow, or despair; it’s like toxins in our consciousness…(uninvited guests) always want to come up in our mind consciousness, into our living rooms, because they’ve grown big and need our attention…So we try to block there way…We don’t want to face them, so our habit is to fill the living room with other guests.

RATHER THAN PLUNKING ourselves down in our living room of reflection, prayer, and inquiry, we seek avoidance and dispersal. Pema Chodrun continues: “Whenever we have ten or fifteen minutes of free time, we call a friend. We pick up a book. We turn on the television. We hope that if the living room is occupied, these unpleasant mental formations will not come up. But all mental formations need to circulate. If we don’t let them come up, it creates bad circulation in our psyche…”

FIREWALLS & SMILING AT FEAR

   SMILING AT FEAR MAY SEEM a  supercilious spiritual conceit. It’s an interesting practice, I find, to witness spooky faces transform before my eyes, and sense what becomes of my mental living room home under the influence of this exercise. This includes the not-so-OK-ness of life.

BEING OPENHEARTED TO ALL conditions is a fundamental Buddhist practice of self- awareness. In SMILE AT FEAR (Shambhala Sun, March 2011), Pema Chodron writes of being on friendly terms with fear and discomfort: “What produces a genuine person is NOT feeling okay. It means to be open to everything…When we wall ourselves off  from uncertainty and fear, Trungpa Rinpoche said: ‘We develop an iron heart. When someone develops a true friendship with themselves, the iron heart softens into something else. It becomes a vulnerable heart, a tender heart. It becomes the genuine heart of sadness, because it is a heart that is willing to be touched by pain–and remain present.’ “

CHARNEL GROUND & GREATFULLNESS

VULNERABLE HEART MAKES a soft bed for fear and sadness – like  lying down in the ashes of the charnel ground of one’s own home. Without concern for self-conflagration, breaking down the firewalls of resistance between oneself and practice, I find that when I am most resistant to zazen, to my personal meditation practice, it’s because I know I’m vulnerable to spot fires of fear and sadness flaring-up in my own home heart. So what is it that grounds me?

GREATFULLNESS IS THE GROUND of fearlessness and freedom. I’ve found that expressed and explicit greatfullness practice is an antidote to fear, sadness, and despair. Especially for zazen novitiates like me,  it’s not enough to assume that “just sitting” will send all our spooks up the flu in a jiffy with only a few breaths for a tailwind. But gratitude inspires and softens fear, I find.

FACING FIRE 

AN INSPIRING READ on fearlessness in the face of fire is FIRE MONKS: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara (The Penguin Press, 2011). Author Colleen Morton Busch quotes Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who established Tassajara in 1967. Suzuki  affirms: “In order not to leave any traces, when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire…Zen activity is activity which is completely burned out, with nothing remaining but ashes.”

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE 

EARLY FALL, I HIKED WITH FRIEND Clare Rhoades down the Middle Fork of the Gila River in Southern New Mexico’s rugged Gila Wilderness. We breathed the transporting scent of fall wilderness flowers and decomposing leaves crunched underfoot–all delicate and vulnerable to imminent frosts. With stirings-up of sand and silt each of the twenty-six consecutive crossings of the rushing sidewinder river–swinging around each time to meet us–we caught a whiff of old smoke still ambient after the summer fires.  

THERE’S FIRE & FLOWERS

WHAT AMAZED US MOST was the bursts of Four O’clock flowers emerging from shinny jet-black branches of recently burnt-out trees felled in summer wild fires. The ground around, surrounded by aureols of whitish ash. Clare and I wondered at the confident magenta Four O’clock blooms bursting from the charred branches, robust in scale regardless of conditions on the ground. Flourishing: No fear. Like the Four O’clock flowers, it is an imperative to bloom and thrive in all conditions. Moreover, to stay awake in home consciousness–no matter how anesthetizing and hypnotizing the worldly ashes-to-ashes scene may be.

 FEARLESS ENGAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP

WOMEN, LIKE THE FOUR O’CLOCKS arising from the Gila Wilderness ashes–in increasing numbers–are awakening and fearlessly engaging as activists and leaders on all fronts. Women of all ages are emerging worldwide: The female Butterfly Effect is taking flight.

HUFFINGTON POST’S ARIANNA HUFFINGTON is conspicuous and vocal among them. She writes in ON BECOMING FEARLESS: In Love, Work, and Life (Little Brown & Company, 2006): ”We need women leaders to take us beyond the world of fear…We undervalue the internal qualities of leadership that made outsiders like Dr. King, Mahatma Ghandi and Mother Teresa such powerful leaders…Internal Leadership compels us to try to make the surrounding world–whether it’s our family, our community, the entire nation–a better place.”

COURAGE & AWAKENING

“AWAKENING IS THE COURAGE TO GIVE NO FEAR.”

This is the response I got when I asked Roshi Joan Halifax, Co-abbott of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, NM to share her defense against the In-Fear-Structures surrounding us these day.

BOO-O-WEEN!

THIS HALLOWEEN, LET’S SIDE with Maurice Sendak’s Max in staring down the beady-yellow-eyed faces of Wild Fear: down-regulating reactivity to the frightful beasties all around. And with Roshi Joan Halifax in “Awakening is the courage to give no fear.” Join Arianna Huffington in womens’ engagement and leadership–transcending fears on all fronts. LET’S NOT BE POSSESSED – OCCUPY OUR OWN MINDS.

 UPCOMING WOMENS’ RETREAT–UPAYA ZEN CENTER, SANTA FE

STORYSHARDS for WOMEN in the WORLD

Visions of Engagement & Leadership through

Personal Story, Complexity Science & Creativity

September 14-16, 2012

 LISL DENNIS, Visual Artist & StoryShards Guide

MERLE LEFKOFF, PhD, Complexity Scientist & Facilitator

WWW.UPAYA.ORG

www.STORYSHARDS.info

lisl@STORYSHARDS.info

505-986-1106

PIGEON-HOLERY & PASSE POLITICS

WENDY JOHNSON AT UPAYA ZEN CENTER

GARDENING MNEMONICS, OLD TOOLS & GARDEN SHEDS

“I am often most alert and settled in the garden when I am working hard, hip deep in a succulent snarl of spring weeds. My mind and body drop away, far below wild radish and bull thistle. I live in the rhythmic pulse of the long green throat of my work.”

– WENDY JOHNSON, GARDENING at the DRAGON’S GATE

GARDENING MNEMONICS

Taking my parched and weedy thinking to France, the lush Burgundian hills–and a little grape–re-tilled the soil of heart, mind and memory. Visual mnemonics: gardening metaphors galore gave rise to natural reminiscence. Being in verdant French countryside cleared the acidic soil of my mental garden–separating the tares and wheat of coo-coo current events. Debt ceiling Passe politics, bizarre sexual shenanigans, and worldwide pigeon-holery dissolved into the evocative moods and memories so nourishing to my own horticultural soul.

GARDEN SHED

Visiting glorious chateaux gardens caste a special memory spell on me with feelings and reflections coming home to roost in the gardens of  heart and mind. At d’Epoisses, village source of my favorite cheese, I entered the sublime grounds of the Chateaux d’Epoisses, the seventeenth-century domain of salon hostess and witty letter writer Madame de Sevigne. The chateaux is renown for its 3,000-hole pigeonnier. BTW: the Old World carrier pigeons have long flown the coop.

The chateaux’s crunchy gravel paths led me directly into the garden shed on the edge with its door ajar. Slipping inside, I was immediately hit with history, humidity and memories of my own gardening childhood.

In the garden shed, light filtering through the weathered glass-frame played onto old tools and miscellaneous gardening stuff: rakes spawning tines of all guages; piles of seeds whose secrets known only to the gardner and to mice; brittle root bundles and buckets of pine cones; patinated spades and shovels; scrambles of wire and twine; stacked slated wooden produce crates; long favored gloves and odd lengths of unruly hosing.

Everything in the shed was a mnemonic feeding a gardner’s soul, for sure. Visuals, as well, for my photographer’s eye.

MELANCHOLIA

The curiosities and etceteras of centuries of gardening became for me a melancholic photo-meditation. While my husband Landt sauntered on to the vast and soaring rondavel of the pigeonnier, I was absorbed in the visual mnemonics within the garden shed: natural remembrances evoking moods and memories of a childhood at my garden club mother’s side in rural northern New Jersey.

In our house, blowsy roses, feathery peonies, and jaunty daffs were everywhere, inside and out, while confident flouncy nasturtiums overflowed borders. What I dearly recall from my childhood garden is not so much the garden itself, but the softening off-scenting flower arrangements my mother lovingly maintained in the living room throughout the thick and thin of our family life.

During my summer childhood days, there were various old gardening tools all around. The ash-handled wonky-jointed scythe was my favorite. I wielded this thing, bigger than I, in the grasses that sprung buggy and tall above the parterre. My two older brothers and I sharpened the blade each spring with a pumice stone. The third-generation smooth-handled rake, shovel, and axe are still in rusty service today in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

CONTEMPLATIVE GARDENING

Returning to Santa Fe from France, I immediately joined organic gardening mentor Wendy Johnson and Co-Abbot Sensei Beate Genko Stolte for a weekend retreat on Contemplative Gardening at the Upaya Zen Center www.upaya.org. The retreat True Nourishment from the Boundless Field interwove their grounded guidance and seasoned Buddhist teachings with meditation practice. Upaya’s old tools at hand, sangha members installed – in one weekend – an entire dharma garden beneath the signal whirl of the vintage windmill.

At the Upaya gardening intensive, what impressed me most was the seemless syncopation of five gardening crews on different tasks: fence installation; composting technology; tilling and seeding; dropping in drip lines; and shrine conception to Quan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion – all happening within twenty-five square feet with no confusion or collision.

Upaya’s resident head gardner Emily Baker, Montana born to the earth, had activated the dormant windmill garden earlier this spring, and had overseen the installation of six hoop gardens already overflowing their gunwales with greens of every shape and hue. Emily shared in group chat that, for her: Gardening is about remembrance.

I’ll never forget the inimitable Wendy Johnson orchestrating the crews from Quan Yin central: the concert was a testimony to Upaya sangha members constancy of practice, and their demonstrable understanding of gardening fundamentals aligned to Buddhist, Mindfulness, and Complexity perspectives. A practice dedicated to living systems and relationships – not the individual. Gardening grounded in lovingkindness to all beings and creatures; an awareness of context and scale; and skillfulness with all tools, new and old.

OLD TOOLS & ZAZEN

In her book, the un-put-downable GARDENING at the DRAGON’S GATE: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World (Bantam Dell, Random House, 2008) Wendy Johnson opines: Meditation practice is like gardening…When you select your favorite tools and begin to shape the ground, in this digging and cultivating, the garden shapes you. Eventually, you free your heart and mind, and in this work you also free the true heart and mind of your garden.

Longtime organic gardening activist, and one of the founders of the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, CA, Wendy is advisor to the Edible Schoolyard of the Chez Panisse Foundation. She writes the “On Gardening” column for Tricycle magazine www.tricycle.com/magazine Wendy’s website is: www.gardeningatthedragonsgate.com

Of the toolshed at Green Gulch Farm, Wendy Johnson considers the mnemonics within: A cob straw bale structure brimful with well-used tools of our trade, oiled and gleaming with age and hard work. Each person chooses the tool they want to work with–a Scottish manure fork, a battered bulldog digging spade, a caramine-red pair of Felco hand pruners from Switzerland. We learn as much about each other from the tools we choose as from the work we will engage in. I am convinced that the tool chooses the worker as much as the worker the tool.

Seasoned old tools bring to mind the many wise and cultivated women who choose to remain constant today in the gardens of their hearts and minds – ever active in the tri-season of their lives. Well into their late 6′s, 7′s, even 8′s–and beyond–so many women today, worldwide, are striving to plough under – and till up – our parched boney earth. Millions of women are seeding and watering their fields of service as fierce gardeners with a strong sense of place in our world – and in their passionate practice.

SITTING IN THE GARDEN

Returning from France to regular zazen, or meditation practice, after a spell off the cushion, feels as uncomfy as sitting upon an old hose. In GARDENING at the DRAGON’S GATE Wendy Johnson reminds: Meditation practice is not for the faint of heart. Neither is gardening. Both take gumption and commitment, and a steady willingness for the world as you know it to come apart and be reorganized.

SENSE OF PLACE

The world as we know it is coming apart: undergoing a positive dissipation – Deo Volente, a re-formation. Engaged in this experience, timely wisdom for today, Wendy Johnson insists on a Sense of Place: Don’t move. Stay still. Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with the vow not to move any more.

Stillness is the sweet spot, illusive in our hummingbird water-bug lives. For me, it’s a strong sense of having been someplace familiar before: an indwelling pulse of belonging in the here and now. Deliberate and conscious stillness – far from stasis – Wendy insists: Setting deeply down on one spot on earth demands that you grow and change constantly just to keep up with the pulse and will of your place.

PULSE IN PLACE

Within the garden shed at the Chateaux d’Epoisses, there was a palpable Pulse in Place: A humid concentration of soil, truffle, mold, and mouse–fermenting and fluctuating inside the glass house on a grey day. A potpourri of sensations, aspirations and memories, the shed’s atmosphere invoked the sense of longing Wendy Johnson refers to frequently in her writing. A yearning to abide in the particularity of place: a desire to stop, slow down, in order to nurture the seed within itself. To return to the breath: to regulate the pulse.

Waxing and waning: The pulse of full moons and solstice seasons encodes the passage of time. Metronomal–like the counting of the breath–and the pause at the top of the inhale and bottom of the exhale–there is also a pulse and pause in solar cycles – so imperceptible as to be unbroken boundlessness.

Of this awareness, Wendy Johnson observes: I have noticed that the summer and winter solstice times are the two moments of the year when the sun appears to stand still (which is what the Latin word sol-stice actually means: sun-standstill) at either its northernmost point, on June 21, or its southernmost place, on December 21.

Deepening one’s relationship to the earth during seasonal shifts, embracing the light and shadow, Wendy recommends: Marking how the cardinal holidays appear on your own garden landscape extends your awareness of your land.

EVERGREEN RELATIONSHIPS

During Upaya’s Contemplative Gardening retreat, Wendy Johnson spoke of the intertwining of relationships and gardening practice. While seasonal gardens and Farmer’s Market produce are ephemeral in their life cycles upon the earth, our perennial relationships to land and community live forever in the field of memory. Wendy writes of reviving her father-in-law’s abandoned garden where she and her husband planted a memorial French Lace rose.

Peter joined me in the garden: I remembered Charlie as he had been, a legendary baker…he ran the Hermitage Pastry Shop for thirty-seven years. I thought of him kneading dark pumpernickel dough, his arms dusted with flour. Peter worked along side me folding old horse manure and decaying maple leaves into the earth of his father’s garden.

TRUE GRIT

Over time and seasons, the relational practice of gardening makes a whole cloth of a person’s life. So does meditation practice. As Wendy affirms: The Zen tradition speaks of cultivating an empty field. This is the field of our whole life,  full of every possibility and empty only of the permanent, unchangeable identity–of one absolute way to be. It takes true grit to cultivate this empty field that, from the beginning, is vast and complete unto itself.

GARDENING AT THE EDGE

On commitment to practice, Wendy continues: Meditation practice is not for the faint of heart. Neither is gardening. Both take gumption and commitment, and a steady willingness for the world as you know it to come apart and be reorganized.

Early August: Santa Fe oddly feeling like fall  these days. I recall how we Upaya gardeners had gathered together in June in closing circle to bow out around the core Quan Yin shrine of the windmill garden. The garden has been in robust production all summer. Wendy signed a copy of her book to me: Gardening at the Edge of the World, Gratitude for all Your Work and Practice. Did she really mean End of the World…I wonder?

SEED WITHIN ITSELF

Together, the Upaya sangha seeded and watered the summer of our lives. The seed within itself keeps our gardens of service growing robustly – from heart and mind. May we all be blessed on earth to find the sustainable path of our own calling. As Wendy affirms: My focus was on socially engaged lay life, and on developing the garden as a true practice place of productivity, beauty, and inspiration.

In Burgundy, I remember leaving the garden shed inspired by vibrant memories as I strolled over to the pigeonnier. Both France and the American Southwest have been in longterm deep drought. With the world-at-large a hardpan desert thirsty for new thought, I’m thinking this year’s waxing and waning invites us to till the gardens of our hearts and minds: seeding and watering anew whatever be our particular terrain.

Within the seventeenth-century rondavel, I wondered if the ghosts of cooing pigeons past were witnessing the pigeon-holery of our worldly goings-on of today?

PIGEON-HOLERY

Seems there’s no debt ceiling on pigeon-holery these days. My relationship with pigeons has never been too strong: those productive dull-grey birds with their mellifluous murmer. However, the atmosphere of 3,000 pigeons past was haunting. Old birds once useful and desirable for eggs, pigeon pie, and messengering–long gone denizens of an archaic system. Today there remains only an empty pigeonnier once Full-O-Feathers.

Everyone today, old and young alike, is being flushed right out of our comfy cubicles of debt ceiling pigeon-holery: ineffective, outdated, and outmoded ways of thinking and being. What is our personal debt ceiling in service to the world.Whatever Bird-O-Feather we think we be – whatever our particular plumage of old thought, it must fly away. Worldwide, we are vectoring–in exquisite formation–into a perfect feathery and suffocating storm.

Mnemonics: It’s history–no more roosts for passivity, passe politics–and old thought!

For Upcoming STORYSHARDS Retreats

WWW.STORYSHARDS.INFO

WWW.UPAYA.ORG

LISL DENNIS

LISL@CYBERMESA.COM

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RESPONSE FROM MARGEAUX
Thank you for sending coo-coo. I love it! I love the long, narrow format – like the snake, the long roots, the throat. The images are intimate, echoing the writing (or vice-versa), that goes deep – intertwines- rootish- with life, spirituality, friendships, the world, large and small. Your writing is wonderful and I love all the references, quotes and relational aspects. You’re cool, Lisl. Love, Margeaux

ARAB SPRING – ORANGE BUTTERFLIES – BLACK SWANS

MUEZZINS IN MOROCCO – MINDING THE GAP

SUPER MOON – VERNAL EQUINOX – SPRING PRAYERS

Allah Akbar – GRAND MOSQUE – Casablanca, Morocco

Orange butterflies took flight by the gadzillion-millions from the rural village of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010. Winged things vectored throughout the Arab world on whisper internet winds after a market vendor self-immolated in protest and despair. My husband Landt and I traveled in Tunisia in the late 1980′s to see its Bardo Mosaic Museum; Roman ruins at Carthage; palmed oases; and Sidi Bou Said, an idyllic seacoast blue-and-white Mediterranean fishing village. We were on assignment for Town & Country magazine – neither a political peep nor butterfly flutter back then.

The denizen of chi-chi expats from Europe, and tourists in exotica, one would never have imagined that a twenty-three-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, denied a license to sell produce in a picturesque local market, would self-immolate – tipping-off a Butterfly Effect that conflagrated an entire region into the Arab Spring. The humiliated Mohamed Bou’azizi was hassled by the authorities who fined him, nicked his scale, and publicly shamed him in his inability to support his family with dignity. Not able to pay the fee for his vendor’s cart, Bou’azizi
was slapped in the face by a police woman – in public.

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Known to be a generous man, Bou’azizi frequently gave food to those less fortunate. His ultimate gesture of generosity was to become a change agent: a fresh produce vendor trips the Butterfly Effect throughout the Arab world. In this incident, an imaginal theory became humanized, actualized, and relevant for us all – especially considering that unrest and transformation still rolls from country-to-country in the region. I might have photographed Mohamed as part of the quaint local color – pray I bought a glass of juice.

The Tunisian vendor never knew that his rage and shame metamorphosed into a metaphorical orange butterfly. The Butterfly Effect, as it has come to be known, has manifested today throughout much of the Arab world  as we witness millions, moved by individual and collective cultural humiliation and shame, rise to change the initial conditions of their lives in: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, Jordan –and to a lesser extent in Morocco, where my husband Landt and I have lived and worked on-and-off for twenty-years.

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The metaphor of the Butterfly Effect “encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely, a small change at one place in complex systems can have large effects elsewhere.” – Wikipedia.

What small changes can I make in my thinking – like the subtle flutter of a butterfly’s wing – as we bear compassionate witness to the chaos and calamity, pain and suffering pervasive throughout the world: the ongoing strife in the Arab world; the compound of environmental and human catastrophy in Japan; and the insanities playing out in the political theatre here at home. Daily, I need to affect  major changes in my thinking about these situations: personality and image overload is causing me to desensitize – to think these crises are not about me and my world – somehow external, remote, somewhere out there. The immediacy of engaged compassion is a practice, I find, and does not arise from the alienation of disinterest or disgust in the lack of maturity and leadership in every arena worldwide.

Subtle changes, not to mention shifts, in consciousness are not so easy without the intimacy of an individual spiritual practice and informed point-of view. Buddhist practitioners are trained to not take dissociative perspectives of viewing situations from the outside, buffered, as well, by two-dimentional screens and printed matter. Neither to deny news intake altogether, as if ignorance and not being current in conversation is a high calling. Too many otherwise smart people do not wish to be rattled: to discomfit their consciousness or destabilize their situation.

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In our Buddhist Christian family, Landt and I wake each morning to practices of prayer, meditation, and reading, moderated by the intake of fresh coffee, CNN, and the New York Times tossed at our door each dawn. The news media informs, discomfits, toughens, and frightens – spiritual practice keeps us soft, open, informed and responsive.

Zen Buddhists practice strong back – soft front as the most skillful and sustainable stance with which to meet the unanticipated events of our lives – including the global phenomena of Orange Butterflies and Black Swans. With the strong back of principle and soft front of compassion, we are able to witness more of – not turn away from –  the world’s phenomena, and treat all with the appropriate response that can have significant healing Butterfly Effects in our interdependent relational lives.

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Does spiritual practice have a Butterfly Effect for good in daily life, creating subtle changes in our mental atmosphere that can alter the trajectory of reactivity? While it may not heal all that ails us, I find my practice  – if consistent  – down-regulates my reactivity to the usual rigors and triggers in my realm. So I don’t get ambushed by the Black Swans winging out of my shadows – not to mention those that vector through multiple two dimensional media sources.

THE BLACK SWAN by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a must read for those of us living on the planet today – or hoping to. Taleb defines a Black Swan as: “a highly improbable event with three principle characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it actually was.”

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Black Swans shadow over Japan like chaos and old night – with earthquakes, ongoing aftershocks, tsunamis, potential nuclear meltdown, and human devastation in their wake. So far, the 2011 apocalyptical-scale events indicate that we live – not on the Edge of Chaos– but in its epicenter. My husband Landt says all the emerging conversation around Chaos Theory and Complex Adaptive Systems is the way we humans are currently coping with what we don’t get; cannot  control; and certainly are not prepared for. An intellectual constellation around Not Knowing – a hot new system seeking an application and positive outcome.

With a multivalent ongoing disaster on their hands, the heroic Japanese people and government are getting a crash course in manifesting a whole nation as a Complex Adaptive System, within the collective field of Not Knowing. Who knows, the world, may benefit from witnessing their challenge, courage, and resiliency, as they work and re-work the system.

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Buddhists are big on Not Knowing. Impermanence and fundamental instability are the contexts in which we practice. Abiding in uncertainty with equipoise and dignity is facing the wall. During annual Rohatsu Sesshins, held in December to commemorate Shakyamuni’s birthday, Buddhists do just that: face the wall directly. A week-long retreat, during hours of meditation practice, we witness our own orange butterflies and black swans – and do our effortless best to not believe our own thoughts. And to open-presence the space between phenomenon; what the Buddhist neuroscientist Francesco Varela referred to as “Minding the Gap.”

Full Stop is the only way to Mind the Gap. Intimate observation of the space between phenomenon reveals the empty space on the canvas of consciousness, without which there is no form. Referred to as negative space in the arts – hardly lacking in content, action, and import.

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The recent Vernal Equinox with its Super Moon, Sunday March 20, 2011, I found to be a prime time to stop and be still. Balancing equal periods of night and day, and global tidal extremes, that weekend was an auspicious time to mind my own gaps in prayer and meditation on the noumenal nature of Not Knowing, and to bear witness to the tides and curves of consciousness. The Vernal Equinox – with its Super Moon – heralded the first day of spring. Full moons are inflection points inviting me to open my heart to all peoples in prayer for protection and salvation worldwide. Not coincidental, it was during this spring’s Vernal Equinox that the Alliance chose to initiate Operation Odyssey Dawn over Libya – on the longest day and night of the year. This timing went unnoticed by the news media, but not by full-mooners in prayer. Currently, Libyan rebels have made much headway in their own liberation, while the news media and the world is transfixed by the Syrian theater.

How millions pray: Allah Akbar. The opening call of the Muslim prayer is the clarion cry in the unfolding Arab Spring. The prayer is as inspirational to millions, as it is interpretation and location sensitive to non-Muslims. Landt and I have spent much time in Islamic countries, including Morocco where I made these orange images. When multiple muezzins send their voices from high mosque towers, we often stop to receive this essential sound, and to witness humanity in community on its knees: it’s a grounding experience.

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In Marrakech one evening, Landt and I were walking down a dimly-lit pot-holed back street on our way to restaurant. It was prayer time, and dozens of mosque muezzins syncro-sounded-off. As we crossed an intersection, men swarmed toward us. Giving no fear, we stood for some time in witness as hundreds swiftly gathered at a corner gas station, dropped to their knees in the dirt, and collectively prayed to Allah Akbar. We were suspended, right then-and-there, in a Butterfly Effect of devout positive aspiration – dinner could wait!

No matter what their initial conditions, current circumstances, belief systems,  or how they may worship, if there ever was a time to stop and pray for the people of our world – and for ourselves – it is NOW!

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For upcoming StoryShards retreats

www.STORYSHARDS.info

LISL DENNIS

lisl@cybermesa.com

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ISRAEL “IZZY” KAMAKAWIWO’OLE

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW – Harold Arlen & E.Y. Harburg

WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD – Bob Thiele & David Weiss

WHAT THE FRACTAL ARE YOU THINKING?

Monday January 17, 2011 – Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial Day

I, too, Have a Dream: I Dream a World – A Wonderful World. Today, this Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Day, what might he be thinking about the recent repeating patterns of mental mayhem and political assassination in America? This New Year – 2011 having started off with a bang, like a nightmare – Dr. King might well be anguishing in his grave.

Love to ask Dr. King his wisdom about what each of us can do to down-regulate hyper-reactivity to such events: how can we nurture the intentionality and skill-sets to bear witness to nasty news and weird worldly doings – Koyaanisqatsi imbalances on every front – not with morbid curiousity, hopelessness, shock, awe, and outrage – but with more constructive considerations and actions. A re-patterning of perspective and response. If alive today: What the fractal would Dr. King be thinking?

Seemingly normal and deeply-felt hyper-responses to world events – which I often share with friends – have a distancing effect upon my soul and psyche. Disempowered social sensitivity and political reactivity does not necessarily indicate a genuine sense of personal engagement and individual responsibility. Are there, I wonder, deeper pro-active responses and pro-social practices that could serve to neutralize my own toxins?

Daily grounding in prayer and meditation often illumines conscious choices around the mayhem in my own mind? Stopping: stepping out of the spinning gerbil-wheel of hyperactivity creates the space and conditions to consider what engaged-mindfulness might feel like – informed, as well, by what neuroscientist Dr. Dan Siegel refers to in MINDSIGHT – The Awareness of Awareness. (More on Dan Siegel, see Break My Heart) One can self-witness what’s really going on in the undercurrents of one’s own consciousness – invoking: What the fractal am I thinking?

Thinking fractals: the reveal of the spectacular geometry of nature. Patterns within patterns, within patterns: simple, self-similar, and repeating patterns are the integers of everything in the natural world. The FRACTAL FRIDAYS show in the planetarium at the New Mexico School of History and Science is a psychedelic trip without the danger. The surrounding projections sweep and swirl viewers into galaxies of fractals from the early days to the latest in-your-face 3D formations created by Visual Neuroscientist Jonathon Wolfe, PHD, the show’s impresario and Executive Director of  The Fractal Foundation. www.FractalFoundation.org

Fractal formations were discovered in the 1970s by Benoit Mandelbrot, a Mathematics Professor at Yale. Of Mandelbrot’s revelation, Computer Geologist, Systems Theorist and author Gregg Braden writes in FRACTAL TIME – The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age: “Nature does not use perfect lines and curves to to build mountains, clouds, and trees. Rather it uses irregular fragments that, when taken as a whole, become the mountains, clouds, and trees. Revealing the spiral within the rectilinear Golden Section, the key in a fractal is that each fragment, no matter how small, looks like the larger pattern that it’s a part of.” Love to have been inside Mandebrot’s head: “What the fractal was he thinking?

A complex read, futurist Gregg Braden’s FRACTAL TIME engagingly interweaves fractals as a metaphor for the patterning of human consciousness, and the conditions for continuing sustainable life on the planet. With seer-like scholarship, Braden guides us on a galactic adventure within the realms of  Time Codes, gravitational forces, geological patterning, and long-term cyclical changes – way-past, ongoing today, and future – near and far. The year 2012 is soon upon us – and beyond. www.greggbraden.com

The 2012 Mayan Prophecy is a topic of ladies’ lunch wonderment and dinner party chat. In response to the conscious and unconscious puzzlement – if not anxiety – around Shocking Transformation, Gregg Braden’s underlying theme in FRACTAL TIME is that humankind – individually and collectively – has arrived at a critical Choice Point: “Is it possible that by choosing a way of being, we can change the way we experience things, such as the frightening outcomes predicted for 2012?”

Gregg Braden states:“While there are new discoveries that show us how directly thinking effects our world, they are generally variations of the centuries-old experiment that was designed to find out how much our beliefs really affect our reality.”While subjective reality theories have been around forever, perhaps they should be a critical consideration in today’s pandemic of projections and paranoia? It’s a weird world out there: What the fractal is everyone thinking?

Short of  being driven to absinthe by today’s doings worldwide, we can choose to scrutinize our personal mental patterning as an auspicious practice to participate in the initiation of this young New Year. Still only a few weeks old, 2011 is the alleged run-up to the much anticipated 2012 – the year for making the right personal and collective choices in the ongoing wave of Shocking Transformation, an alarming term, also known as The Shift and The Great Turning.

Whether The Shift is the end of man-time or the new birth of a flourishing epochal cycle, the facts and fictions swirling around the predictions of the Mayan Calendar: the Hopi Prophecy; the visions of Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce; the writings in the same vein of Mary Baker Eddy; the teachings of deep-ecologists Arne Naess and Joanna Macy; and numerous seers, prophets, and wisdom keepers over the course of human history – individuals truly grounded and gifted with precognitive skills. Wouldn’t you love to know: What the fractal were they thinking?

Referencing Arne Naess in COMING BACK TO LIFE – Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, Joanna Macy writes of our need to grow-up: “He (Naess) calls it the ecological-self, and presents it as the fruit of a natural maturation process. We underestimate ourselves, he says, when we identify with the narrow, competitive ego. With sufficient all-sided maturity, we not only move on from ego to a social-self and a metaphysical-self, but on to an ecological-self, as well. Through widening circles of identification, we vastly extend the boundaries of our self-interest, and enhance our joy and meaning in life.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. concurred: “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns all humanity.” Such rich living could create a tipping point for the world.

Tipping-point maturation for mankind at a systemic level requires each one of us to do our bit. In a sense – to becomes active fractal thinkers. In the realm of Contemplative Neuroscience – way beyond inflationary I-Am-What-I-Think and Mind-Over-Matter New-Agers – today’s challenges demand a deeper systemic re-distribution and re-attribution of patterning – at core. The ego does not like change, however, let alone a self-induced systemic shift in our disposition toward the world and our individual role within it. Such a shift requires intentional focused-attention to bring about a new neuronal order in our minds: an actual practice. Luffing in the winds of the world’s horrors and befuddlements simply will not sail us into The New World Age of Braden’s FRACTAL TIME.

With umpteen caveats, Gregg Braden emphasizes that we have arrived at a window of opportunity, or Choice Points: “A time when conditions make it possible to begin one path of experience, and then to change it by changing the focus of our awareness – our beliefs…Chaos, suffering, and destruction are certainly  possible – and maybe even probable – if the course of human events remains on the same trajectory that it has been set on for the last two centuries, or so. The discovery of Choice Points gives us the opportunity to change that trajectory.” If not already too late, as some affirm, today is a threshold opportunity: What the fractal should we be thinking?

The epochal shifts undeniably well-underway on all fronts are an individual and collective threshing-hold, and have been writ-large in the sky for some time to those who could read. Among the existentially literate, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discover and Founder of Christian Science, spoke of such a threshing-hold opportunity for mankind in the late-nineteenth century. In PROSE WORKS – Miscellaneous Writings, Mrs. Eddy wrote in The New Birth: “Between the centripetal and centrifugal mental forces of material and spiritual gravitations, we go into or out of materialism, and choose our course and it’s results. Which then will be our choice – the sinful, material, and perishable, or the spiritual, joy-giving, and eternal?”

I, too, Dream a World. The choice I’m making today is one of curatorial distinctions within my own awareness. “Stand porter at the door of thought…The time for thinkers has come,” Mary Baker Eddy implored her students. While remaining aware of the StoryLines – the facts and fictions – swirling around 2012 and a global sustainable future, I vow to cease and decist from keying any aspect of my personal survival – or demise – on a specific point-in-time.

Don’t be caught up in the undertow of contagious and fragmented group-think. Suspend speculation and idle chat about the Mayan Calendar; the Hopi prophecy; polar flip-flops and global tsunamis; tune-out the newby-seers and sci-fi sorcerers; and the end-timer wizards who go peep in the night with individual or collective annihilation anxieties. Are we headed for Armageddon or Eden? Maybe, maybe not! At any rate, to not live at the affect of the buzz about anything – I need to down-regulate my own reactivity to the collective stupefication – a kind of shock-and-awe holding-pattern that works the porous borders of consciousness – like a Drone.

Fractal Thinking: these days – caste as the wind-down of a 5,000-plus years epochal cycle, waking-up to a fractal-thinking requires that we mature into being systems-practitioners– wherever we are, whatever we do. The work is here-and-now – with all it’s complexity, color, patterning, textural interweaving, and relational continuity. It’s about relationships – and belonging: I vow to bear witness to the ever-unfolding interconnected patterning of consciousness – my own and the collective – without needing to know all the answers or outcomes.

Not Knowing is Most Intimate. At The Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, we Not-knowing Now-timers regularly chant The Bodisattva Vows:

Creations are numberless; I vow to free them.

Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to transform them.

Reality is boundless; I vow to perceive it.

The awakened way is unsurpassable; I vow to embody it.

Awaken, awaken – Do not squander your life.

WHAT THE FRACTAL ARE WE WAITING FOR?

WWW.STORYSHARDS.INFO

505-986-1106

lisl@cybermesa.com

“Sacred shards are StoryShards – those integrative memories and experiences – reflective of the whole-vessel of your life.”

JOY RIDE!

“Don’t Let the World Shut You Down.”

Joanna Macy, Deep Ecologist

Shikantaza in Biker’s Paradise

Joseph Campbell on Aliveness

Jane Fonda on Embodiment

Roshi Joan Halifax on Stability

Light Hands on the Handlebars

Music – PONY – Waifs

With what-all’s going on in the world, raising a jigger-of-joy is not so easy. For me, an 100% proof method for upping my joy-quotient is to roll-out my two-wheeled pony and ride. I can peddle-up a sensation akin to contentment in as little as two-tenths of a mile, or so. And if the countryside is spectacularly conducive to raising a glass – and lifting the heart and mind – I spin into a joyful inebriation in no time at all.

This screams road trip: Recently, I peddled my two-wheeled pony around the American Southwest – leaving behind the New York Times, CNN and the bewildering miasma of the collective mesmerism. My intention was to maintain: a spam-free mind; balanced seat; resilient stance; nurture a joyful disposition – not easy for me – and bike my buns off.

So with two ponies – both road and mountain – atop my Suby-WRX, my husband Landt and I motored-off for Chaco Canyon, and on into the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Capitol Reef National Park regions around Lake Powell and Boulder, Utah. Full-on fall foliage: need I say more about the scenery?

First-stop Chaco was an instant consciousness changer: a context that spam-filters the modern world. I was cast in it’s spell, once again, as I spun laps on the circuit road while Landt took the Chaco mystery-tour for his first time. I’m always amazed at how biking – which creates an instant breeze through the system – serves as a clarifier with each passing tenth-of-a-mile. It’s as if the layered kleshas of consciousness re-prioritize in my field-of-view – like shifting multiple open-windows on thecomputer screen of awareness.

While biking, thoughts which do not subserve safety and joy on my two-wheeled pony get spammed-out: they simply recede, revealing a clear window on the immediate scene. A kind of biker’s shikantaza may arise – beyond the egoic-endorpin rush – an open-presencing of place within an 360% awareness.

This stable-state – I’ve found – can be experienced, not only on a cushion in a zendo after hours of staring open-eyed into space – or at a wall – but can come through on a bike-seat, as well, after quite a few miles: hills and heat help. Assuming, that is, one is into such sport of embodiment practice – ALONE!

Solo biking, hiking, trekking and skiing have all taught me lots about my mind as a clogged sieve, and my regular need for the spam-filters of exercise and fresh air. Both subtle-embodiment practices like yoga, and aerobic exercise in the outdoors offset the stasis that creeps into my system: a sclerotis that loves to germinate under the guise and guile of hyper-busyness – social and otherwise.

To offset sclerosis of the soul, taking time-out to re-embody: to exercise and oxygenate – and allow consciousness to clarify – takes intentionality.

Workout guru Jane Fonda spoke of such intentionality during a recent retreat at Santa Fe’s Upaya Zen Center www.upaya.org. On the subject of Wisdom & Time: Composing a Life, Composing a World, this intensive included anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, Roshi Joan Halifax, and Rabbi Malka Druker. A fitness retreat on all fronts for futurists and social activists living in the embodied now!

Looking fitter than ever,Jane Fonda said that many people who are all buffed-out – the gym-jocks of both genders – are not necessarily embodied. She averred: Girls tend to move out of their bodies early in life, and live next door to themselves.

At home in our bodies, Roshi Joan halifax reinforced the need to maintain a strong-back and soft-front, and to intentionally keep a light-hand on the tiller of life – without the stranglehold of anxiety that can result from overexposure to today’s uncertainties. Roshi Joan Halifax affirmed: We need to develop mental flexibility to see clearly and observe the emerging world – and to hold it lightly. Consciously playing with the forces of change invites a fundamental insecurity.

Cultivating joyful resiliency, and a light-minded capacity for subtlety and nuance in life, is like biking down a 14% grade, curvy scenic road. Wariness and joy become interchangeable open-windows on a speeding screen: now you feel it – now you don’t.

Plenty of culinary joy to be felt at Hell’s Backbone Grill www.hellsbackbonegrill.com in Boulder, Utah. Blake Spaulding and Jennifer Castle met as former Grand Canyon specialty chefs, and established this end-o-the trail restaurant eleven years ago – followed by a wake of joyful Buddhist practitioners who settled smack in the midst of a rural Mormon community. Working sustainably with local growers, all produce is organically raised – so you eat clean and fresh – along with yummy warm breads; imaginative combinations dished-up every day; and a fine wine selection – taboot – in this remote upcountry enclave.

When I asked Blake how she maintained her resiliency and contageous joyful nature? Daily practice: she responded. And I’m about to marry the most marvelous man! Furthermore, she stated that all employees must manifest a joyful nature in order to maintain their jobs – and they all do so quite charmingly well. Thanks bodhis for the upbeat atmosphere and culinary-squares to keep me spinning.

Hell’s Backbone Grill staff even dished-up joy at breakfast – witnessing me carbo-load three day in a row. After downing a final breakfast of blue corn flaps – with all the fixings – I biked my buns off: down the spine of Scenic Rt. 12 – with its Bierdstadt vistas and Moran panoramas flowing fast, left and right : through a hailstorm into Mormon valley inholdings along Hell’s Backbone Road – with it’s otherworldly-chroma of roadside weeds; out the historic Burr Trail into Capitol Reef’s moonscapes toward Glenn Canyon.

Daring to I sneak a peek at the bike’s odometer: it read 32+mph as I peeled down-down-down a steep switchback on the Notam-Bullfrog-Middle Point Roads. Is this joy – or a spam-dunk? With far-away Lake Powell directly in my crosshairs, any irregularity in the granola-road could have pitched me right into the drink.

In that instant – with an open-presence recall of Roshi Joan Halifax’s light-hand-on-tiller admonition – I softened my white-knuckle grip on the handlebars; stabilized my seat; pulled focus on the immediate field-of-view; and braked gently – stopping slow-and-long into a scenic pull-out to breathe.

The landscape, quite literally, took my breath away. Taking a deep one, I exploded with a joyful lion’s roar out over the canyons. Landt and I had hiked the canyons earlier on the trip: we’d driven-up the same route.

This shikantaza joy ride down the Notam-Bullfrog-Middle Point Roads brought to mind, as well, Mary Catherine Bateson’s quips during the retreat: We live longer but think shorter – We need to think wider and further. Right then, behind me, in tiny rear-view handlebar mirrors, Landt drove-up: way late for the ferry over Lake Powell, we were. A startled prairie dog looking on, I fast-strapped my pony atop to the WRX, and we made for the Bullfrog landing – arriving in the nick-o-time.

Heading home to Santa Fe, I paused to pony through more spectacular red-rock-scapes over the Colorado River at Navajo Bridge; down to the Lee’s Ferry put-in for the Grand; and along easy-does-it Marble Canyon Road. By now, my well-practiced light-grip on the handlebars suddenly released altogether: I found myself pulling joyful sun-salutations as I wheeled through ever-unfolding Indian Country with a chi-full glee.

Chi: that sense of gut-level aliveness we all wish to abide in. A quote by mythologist Joseph Campbell has been hanging around my office for some time: People say we’re all seeking meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking:

What we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.

Alive, well, and back in Santa Fe, I stabled my old Specialized Tricross pony. Next day, I went to Bike-N-Sport www.bikensport.com for a tire-fix. There, a $6,000 high-performance, just out-of-the-box, feather-weight Italian bike caught my fancy. The too pretty blue-and-white Pinarello Paris had cushy white handlebars; the latest in gear-tech; and I could lift it with one finger – no less.

Try it: the lads urged me. No pony this: doing rounds in the store – like riding a specialized swan feather – the bike flew off beneath me as I rounded the sales counter smartly; nearly plowed into the women’s sale rack; and braked just short of the glass Oakley Glasses case.

Joy Ride? Only 6K between me and Icarus!

StoryShards – soon – at  Santa Fe Soul

November 12-13, Fri night 7-9pm & Sat 9-5, $95

www.StoryShards.info

Lisl Dennis 505-986-1106 or lisl@cybermesa.com