This is the work of what I am currently learning in school. I might more accurately say this is what I am currently learning in life, which is nothing new. It happens to also be a quotation from the Psalms and the words my biodynamic cranial sacral therapy teacher said in class yesterday.
Being still and knowing is challenging with a schedule. Perhaps that is why so many of us have schedules. I have always been fond of one – especially a full and busy one. My classroom is teaching me to be still and know no matter what is going on. Sometimes during lecture there can be three or five side conversations happening while a young student is beating her thymus with a tennis ball. My average ability to focus on what an instructor is saying is inversely proportional to the amount of chaos happening in the periphery. I have lots to time to quiet myself anyway and to contemplate what I know. Usually some of the lecture seeps through that quiet even if the specifics I am desperately interested in escape my clutches.
I got to be still at Fossil Creek. I last left you with backpacks packed around me so it’s time to share some beauty with you and to claim boldly and proudly that I hiked and and out with my pack – my first trip since college without incident or even very much complaining.
Here is our camping set up on the creek. Allen found us a place protected by huge rocks. Canyon wrens sang their haunting song into the evening and morning.
I got to write, read, contemplate, restore and rest. Our tent allowed a good view of the stars so we could crawl into a warm sleeping bag and watch the constellations make their journeys across the quilt of night.
This is dinner. Allen figured out how to cut up chicken and peppers with an army knife and an old log as a cutting board and made the tastiest chicken stir fry I’ve ever eaten. He also managed to have rice cooking on the same stove to come out with the chicken and pepper. For dessert: hot chocolate with peppermint schnaaps. The picture below was taken BEFORE dessert. truly.
Here Allen is checking out the chub he plans to hook with his flies. While he fished, I wrote the following: This place reminds me of North Carolina streams. Everything is new spring green. Light plays off the white capped rapids and the bugs are clearly Sufis doing their dervish just out of leap reach from the chub Allen is about to fish for.This was the anniversary of our adopting Louie. More on him below. First, a few more photos from our hiking in Fossil Creek:
The irises were blooming about a 5 minute hike from our campsite just above the waterfall, which was full of baccanalian youngters that made us each smile with happy recollection of our campus ministry days. It seems everything reaches sunward out in the desert come springtime.
on our hike back out:
I came back from our hiking trip to a week of Shiatsu in class. Shiatsu is a Japanese form of healing based upon the same meridians and understanding of chi used in Chinese acupuncture. On one level, all massage ultimately originated from these Eastern ways of understanding the body and health. I struggled for a while to explain to my father, who made a career in western medicine (pathology, no less) the difference between eastern and western medicine. This is what I came up with: In western medicine, there is a focus on the structures of the body: skeleton, muscles, organs, tissues. When something goes wrong, one looks for the problem with an eye to making the problem go away. In eastern medicine, one focuses on meridians of energy that support balance within the body. Before something goes wrong, one looks to sedate or tonify (strengthen) that which is out of balance. This is as unfair a generalization no doubt that all overly distilled ideas become, but I will still cast my lot with western medicine when acutely sick and with eastern medicine while trying to remain well.
In the east, there is a lot of knowing in stillness. Watching one grow. We had the pleasure of watching a desert garden grow in Tucson over two weekends. We were welcomed warmly and richly at the Catalina Park Inn near downtown Tucson. It was the loveliest Bed and Breakfast I’ve ever had the privilge to rest within. Breakfast was gourmet, the owners were helpful in every respect of advising us and seemed interested in our experience of Tucson. Our first weekend was an exploration of Tucson and we spent several hours listening to the mourning doves, humming birds, and birds whose names I don’t know sing and dive and twirl about on the veranda. It was so beautiful and restful we returned for a second weekend which happened to be during the folk festival.
We visited a gallery show of Andy Warhol. These were photographs taken of him while he worked on movies in Southern Arizona. We felt a bit disturbed by the show. It had a haunted quality to it. Maybe it was one of not still and knowing little. His eyes seemed as lively as his paintings of Campbell Soup cans. The following weekend we saw an exhibit of his work at the Tucson Museum of Art that included a video of those loved and admired him and were grateful for that balance of the yin and the yang.
We saw much art and craft and human ingenuity in Tucson. We also saw the handiwork of the breath of life. I want to show you from the east what it means inside the channels of fluid in your body to see things bloom from the dust of the desert. It is as if a new pulse begins again and the tides of change are hopeful and filled with promise.
I have never seen the Saguaro cactus bloom. We set out to hike in the Saguaro National Forest, but the winds were so high we were unable to bear it. Folks out west seem funny about the wind, they find it troubling, unrestful, disturbing. There is nothing to break it or slow it down. My father came to visit this weekend and we went to the Hopi mesas with plans to take a tour and experience some of Hopi culture. The tours were not available due to all the katsina (kachina) dances. One of them was open so we drove to the Second Mesa and hit it right at lunch break. A friendly gentleman explained to us that if we waited we would be able to see a dance. Wait we did. But there was a windstorm. The women covered themselves with large drapes. I began to see how women in the desert regions of the Middle East wish to cover their faces, hair, etc. Three days later I can still feel dirt in my sinus cavities (all of them). Our ears were caked with desert dust. Some of it is flour fine and some of it is course and rough. On the one hand, it was a miserable hour bearing up to Mother Nature’s breath upon the chaos. On the other hand, it was the cheapest and most effective facial I have ever had! If this is Ruah, the wind that scattered across the seas, I understand how creation could happen. It shakes everything up, rearranges everything and then settles back down.
Hopi people do kachina dances with community form not unlike revival. At mid day break, they head into homes and rooms for communal meals delivered by the women. Children play outside and dogs hide behind walls from the wind. Games began for the children including a pinata full of candy. Children played keepaway with sweatshirts tied around candy.
As the dance resumed, everyone returned to folding chairs and covered themselves. The men gathered in circles three deep wearing their kachina dress and we saw one dance during which they passed bread and fruit out to the community. We stayed for a 20 minute dance and then began our long trek home.
The winds were so high (over 50 miles per hour) that the interstate was closed and we took a more scenic drive home. I have no pictures to share of our Mesa experience out of respect to the Hopi who allowed us access to their lives. They request no notes, recordings, or photographs. The dance is sacred and not to be captured in time.
Here are some still pictures left long ago by the Hopi ancestors. I welcome their simplicity and wonder at their tenacity.We also visited the Museum of Northern Arizona, where some words were shared by some Native Americans. One of them opened with, “We feel the world is good” I resonate strongly to this and the work of massage therapy also shares this belief. In many Christian traditions, there is much attention to the ‘fall’ of creation as the context for redemption. I notice that I believe fundamentally that the world is good and remains good.
The quotation went on as follows: We are grateful to be alive. We sense that we are related to other living creatures. Life is to be valued and preserved. When you go out of your house in the morning and see the sun rising, think about it. That sun brings warmth to the things that grow in the fields. If there is a cloud in the sky look at it and remember it brings rain to a dry land. When you take water from the spring, remember it is a gift from nature. Albert Yava
There is a stillness to this that I cherish and for which I yearn. Allen noted that Christianity evolved as an urban religion. In my current study of biodynamic cranial sacral therapy, I have the opportunity to welcome familiar vocabulary. Our practice is referred to as ritual, in which we focus on centering ourselves first. We ground ourselves before touching the client. Our work is to make connection with the life breath within the client, finding the rhythm of our own life breath (ruah) and that of the client’s. We create sacred space. We move very slowly. Our task is to witness while staying connected allowing for the sacred space between to move and flow.
This language is in reference to the natural world in my classroom. I am grateful to have this vocabulary back in a large, broad context. Among the other creatures I am related to is Louie. He is the Dog of the Month at the kennel we use: Run Amok Unleashed. A bird built her nest in the exhaust fan above our stove. Her eggs hatched before Easter. About two weeks ago the birds got large enough to pique Louie’s interest. He could not see the birds, but could hear them.
A few days later Allen heard Louie barking ferociously in the kitchen and entered to find him on the stove, all fours on burners with his nose into the fan cover.
The birds flew away about 48 hours later.
And with the birds gone, it seems I am Louie’s entertainment for the evening as he is in a mood for fetch.
He has not yet mastered be still and know.
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