Diving Deeper

Inspiration: Do you have a quest?

The extract below describes so perfectly the watery quest that I found myself on a decade ago now.  I called it 'Aquaest: a quest for the wisdom of water'. I saw this as a quest to discover the meeting place between worlds (conscious and unconscious) and to re-establish precious links with Nature.

Water, the most shape-shifting of elements became the perfect facilitator of my journey. Water is as much a part of our language as it is a part of our bodies and our planet.  In the ancient Sumerian language, the first letter of alphabet, A, was the word for water and also signified regeneration.

Water provides us the means to communicate with each other, with ourselves, with our planet and with the cosmos - and to inspire change.  Here craniosacral therapist Candice Marro is writing about her own healing art and the challenges inherent in learning that.

The extract is from an article published in the Cranial Wave Magazine (2003).  It can be read in full on The Craniosacral Therapy Education Trust (UK) website.  You'll find another extract posted on my website for Aquapoetics: Creative Aquatic Bodywork - Oceanic craniosacral arts.

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First tell me, do you have a quest?

Do you want to explore the moving waters of your existence? Do you like to dive deep into the unknown? Do you have in your heart nostalgia for something you can't name?

Then, open your eyes, take a deep breath, widen your attention, listen, feel, sense, taste, smell and prepare yourself. A mystery is waiting for you; something is waiting to engage with you, something that you can't imagine, you can't create, that you can only discover. You may be afraid to answer this call, you may prefer to skim the surface of the water, its uncomfortable but familiar fluctuations and its predictability. You may prefer to stick to your symptoms, resistance, identification, complexity for at least you have got used to them. You may argue that this is as good as you could do anyway, it is as far as you could go, as you are not equipped for deep exploration. And what lies beneath? Is it worth the diving, the risk and the letting go? You’re attracted to this unknown, this darkness, but you keep coming back to your familiar surroundings.

This is familiar but you feel lonely, isolated, fragmented and tired to be pushed from one wave to another, to go from one experience to another without finding the sense of it all. When you think you’ve managed to get some stability, when you think you are in control of your life, when you think you can explain and fix things, a force and the play of its groundswell takes it all away from you. So you get more and more tired of fighting, losing, gaining and losing again as you try to grasp emptiness. You keep a smile on your face, but despair and fear are ruling in your heart. You wouldn’t admit it but you're lost. Can't you see that this world of shapes you cherished and believed in is ruled by impermanence only?

So start your quest - use your grief and anger to find the strength to explore new layers. Deepen your breath, slow down your pace, get grounded and start your journey with a fellow explorer who is also not satisfied with the answers given so far and who wants to go deeper.

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Viriditas: for the love of trees

October is a month of mixed memories for me - the endings and beginnings of several important relationships in my life.  This is what life is - endings and beginnings.   Living in a temperate zone, it is the endings we might feel most strongly with the falling of leaves.  But there is still so much beauty in the trees! 

In England there are garlands of 'old mans beard' and clusters of berries along the country lanes - my father helped me gather those once for a wedding.  He died in late October, far too young. In my Ozark forest, the dogwoods are blushing dusty pink in the filtered light.  I've been lost and found in this forest.

The first poem below is about this paradox of loss and gain.  Its mention of Raven reminds of death but also of reflective memory and the wisdom that comes of that.  Raven has brought messages to me on several occasions.  He is mentioned in my posts The Hanged Man (Odin's Ravens) and in Like the Wings of my Father.

Lost by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

I recently rediscovered the above poem in an email I wrote to my partner Joe who has helped me beyond measure: 'Thank you for walking me in the trees.  I wonder if you know what this was doing to me?  I was listening and I heard.  I'm grateful.'  I wrote the next poem for Joe.  Here you will find my own green cat.

Viriditas by Sulis (Sara Firman)

That gleam on green
whose swift pause
is a glimpsed mood
half-hidden at the edge
of a foliated dream
sending its soft mewl
a rippled renaissance
through furred leaf
whiskered and burred
is the verdant one
sleek feral queen
masked in oak

Quick pan, ripe puck
track this brightening
of the imaginal realm
teach this aspirant
of feline stealth
claw-sharp ways
to blur the physical
outline of her face
merge with you now
in green wood deep
moon blanched love
wild and forever

Thank you from the bottom of my heart Joe!

The beautiful green cat image used to illustrate this post was created by Angela Russell.  It was shown at the Tate Modern, London, as part of an exhibition of Therapeutic Art created by people with personality disorders who enjoyed art therapy as part of their treatment.

For more poems about trees see The Solace of Trees (7 poems by Sulis)

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A bowl to empty: a bowl to fill (sharing poetry with my sisters)

For nearly 2 years, I was inspired to write and share my poetry with several Ozarks sisters - Jenna, Susan, River, Chris, MaryBeth, Clare, and sometimes Miriam and Anou.  I'm grateful to each one of them.  This month I received a beautiful book of their poetry - about me!

This treasure was initiated I understand when I had to leave our fold without the possibility of a proper goodbye.  Jenna bound it in some of her hand-made paper and Susan made sure that it reached me.  Thank you all so much.

I thought I'd reciprocate with this poem written in spring 2006 after a colorful potluck supper at Susan's followed by our usual spontaneous poetry writing.  It was always astonishing to me how the words we turned out so swiftly at our gatherings were often the very best.

The natural fibres bowl sculpture here was created by Jenna Weston and re-imaged by me for a 2009 calendar.  I am glad to have this 'balanced art' with me still, reminding me always of sunshine, sun dance, ozark creeks and river rocks, and the butterfly poets.

ART (by Sara Firman)

A bowl
to fill
as if art
balanced
diet
of creativity
eat
your colors
orange
green
arranged

A bowl
to empty
as if art
assimilates
best when
eaten
before
sell by
date
art
shared

Inspiration: The deeper we dive

The deeper we dive, the less we mind upsetting waves.
Robert Augustus Masters (Aug 18th from web)

This beautiful image created by A. Andrew Gonzalez appears on Robert Augustus Masters' website.  The same image was used by the editor of Shamans Drum Magazine Tim White to introduce my article on the shamanic aspects of aquatic bodywork 'Dancing in Healing Waters'  (issue 62, 2002, pp. 17-27).

Noticing this, immediately reinforced the resonance I felt with Robert's work when I discovered it.  Robert A. Masters is a writer, psychotherapist, and spiritual teacher whose approach has an unswerving honesty and firm groundedness that always refreshes my own efforts to live a deeper life.

Under the heading 'Guidance for a deeper life' on his website, Robert says:

What I share here is crafted from over 30 years of deep immersion in – and equally deep work with – human nature and evolution. I’ve had my successes, but it's been my failures that have most deeply instructed me. Some of my most powerful teachings have arrived when I‘ve been down on my hands and knees in the mud.

When I too was down on my hands and knees in the mud, and wondering what to make of the strangely glittering persona of someone I loved who seemed to have thrown me there in his place, an essay by Robert Masters helped me to clamber onto the banks again.  He wrote of 'spiritual bypassing'*.

Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual belief and/or practices to 'rise above' or otherwise avoid dealing in any significant depth with our unresolved wounds and related emotional and behavioral problems....

Spiritual bypassing is a dehumanizing practice, however much it may talk about and believe in light and love and compassion....

The greater the pain of our unresolved wounds, the greater are the odds that we - if we are invested in being 'spiritual' or being seen as 'spiritual' - will manifest some form of compensatory self-inflation (however humble its robes), whether it be metaphysical grandiosity ('You created your past ...') or self-proclaimed transcendence of personal issues ...

I was one who minded 'upsetting waves' (see opening quote), and sought so much to calm things around me that I myself became becalmed on a dangerously silent sea.  It was the unnerving calm before a storm that apparently came from outside and seemed beyond my control - because I had not honored the currents of my own life.

Once as a teenager, I sat watching the sunset with my peers on a beautiful beach.  An older woman had joined us who wanted to befriend these barefooted youngsters.   She said 'Oh, the ocean is as still as a mill pond' but it was wild and choppy that night.  None of us wanted to put her right, since we felt her loneliness.

Loneliness often makes us fearful that if we reveal our true selves, or speak our truth, we will not be loved.  And many of us have been wounded in our self-revelation by a person we have loved.  My wounding gave me the gift of walking for many months in shadowy places.  But darkness  is where light glows.

I recommend Robert Masters writing to you.  And the mystical art work of A. Andrew Gonzalez. The image above seems to me to convey the energies of both Fire and Water.  It's a combination that recurrs in my explorations on this blog (see for example Creativity: Fire+Water).

You may also be interested in this post on my Aquapoetics website - Trance, dreaming, and aquatic bodywork - in which the work of another Robert Masters (Robert E.L) is described along with more from Robert A. Masters regarding the dream state.

More excellent writing on the subject of spiritual bypassing (a term actually coined by Charles Whitfield, author and long-time recovery counselor) which references the criticism of alternative therapies by science can be seen here: Spiritual Bypass by Bruce Bibee.

*Robert A. Masters' next book will be on the topic of Spiritual Bypassing - now published, see below.

Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters
by Robert Augustus Masters