Diving Deeper

Quote: Watsus are poems

 

The originator of Watsu (water shiatsu), the bodywork practice that inspired my adventure in water is first and foremost a poet.

Watsus are still poems written in water,

but they are poems we write together.

Harold Dull

More: Harold began writing poetry in 1955 as a student of Stanley Kunitz and Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington. On graduation in 1957 he joined the poets then meeting regularly with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan in San Francsco. In the next few years he had several small books of poetry published by the San Francisco Renaissance presses, White Rabbit and Open Space. He has compiled a 54 page collection that adds recent poems arising out of his experience with Watsu to a collection of earlier poems. It can be downloaded here.

Season's Greetings 2008-2009

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and
next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
T.S. Eliot

In the writing of Missouri-born poet, T. S. Eliot, Water often appears. 

From a warm haven in a silent and water-bound forest in the Missouri Ozarks,  I want to mark the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 with two quotes from T.S. Eliot's work. 

I hope they will inspire you too.

I'd like to thank all those who have supported my quest for soul this year and in previous years. 

I am posting this on a new website - one of three rivers of words with which I'm endeavoring to celebrate and support Water.

Please take a moment to view the trailer for a forthcoming film about Water from the Healing Water Institute, New Zealand.

 As I cannot thank all of you adequately and individually this year, I will be making a donation to this project as a gesture of gratitude to you and to Water.

Divine Water is an inspiring film intended to 'show the world what water really is ... how water is really like a human being.....or really how human beings are like water'. 

I support these concepts wholeheartedly! 

Whether  you came to this post via a notice from me, or have found it serendipitously, please consider yourself welcome to the Water. 

I invite you to sign my Guest Book by leaving a short comment below. 

If you'd like to follow my writing on water, please do subscribe (see below).

Here is a familiar final stanza from Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, ... final stanza

Wishing us all and our blue planet a hopeful and happy future. 

Sulis

My other water-related blogs (find subscription boxes on each of them):

Vision Spa Retreat: Reflections on Spa, Soul, and the Role of Water

Aquapoetics: Creative Aquatic Bodywork

Don't forget to leave your message below - Thank you!

Change (with the seasons)

Whether or not you go in for new year resolutions, this time of year certainly seems to ask us to change something.  And if we don't, whatever it is that calls to us  from somewhere deep down in the hidden oceanic depths of soul, will insist.  In this quote Dr and well-known nutritionist Elson Haas, is  perhaps describing this unavoidable urge.

Many times in our lives when we feel something is being asked of us, or we ask something of ourselves, we may experience feelings of fear, anger, or anxiety, and this may become the resistance to our change or growth.  Can we stop nature?  We can slow her by intervention, like damming a river, or cementing a cliff upon which ocean waves are crashing, but eventually nature has her way - the message comes forth - "Change!"

From: Staying Healthy with the Seasons by Elson M. Haas, Celestial Arts, 1981

Prairie dogs cry for rain

One of my favorite writers on wilderness and the true spirit of it is Stephen Harrod Buhner.  This commentary on water knowledge and 'the focused power of human consciousness' comes from 'The Loss of Biophilia and Biognosis', Ch. 4, p. 61 in The Lost Language of Plants (2002) by Stephen Harrod Buhner.

This gives me new respect (and greater tolerance) for the little creatures who burrow under the forest floor where I live (and sometimes leave my plants with their poor roots hanging in mid air).

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If you kill off the prairie dogs there will be no one to cry for rain.

- Navajo warning

Amused scientists, knowing that there was no conceivable relationship between prairie dogs and rain, recommended the extermination of all burrowing animals in some desert areas planted to rangelands in the 1950s "in order to protect the sparse desert grasses.  Today the area (not far from Chilchinbito, Arizona) has become a virtual wasteland."

- Bill Mollison, PERMACULTURE

Water under the ground has much to do with rain clouds.  If you take the water from under the ground, the land will dry up.

- Hopi elder

Burrowing creatures, such as prairie dogs, open millions upon millions of tubes in the soil of Earth.  As Mollison notes, these "burrows of spiders, gophers, and worms are to the soil what the alveoli of our lungs are to our body."  As the moon passes overhead the underground aquifers rise and fall and Earth breathes out moisture-laden air.  This exhalation of negative-ion-charged air through the many fissures and tubes opened by the burrowing creatures helps create rain.

How could indigenous peoples have known this?  By all our standards of scientific knowledge they could not.  We have neglected to realize that indigenous peoples have always had access to the finest probe ever conceived, one that makes scientific instruments coarse in comparison, one that all human beings in all places and times have had access to: the focused power of human consciousness.

- Stephen Harrod Buhner

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Much of the Great Plains has been converted to farming or pastureland, and prairie dogs are not often welcome in such places. Because of their destructive landscaping, they are often killed as pests. During the 20th century, about 98 percent of all prairie dogs were exterminated, and their range has shrunk to perhaps five percent of its historic spread. National Geographic

For another kind of 'cry for rain' in the recognition of the therapeutic potential of subjective healing experiences (and how these do depend on the 'filter of human consciousness', J.L) such as those possible sometimes with aquatic bodywork, see this latest post on my other blog Aquapoetics.

Washing a rock

 



Washing a rock, one finds rocklike presence within.

“Zen Dust, Zen Sweep” Dominique Leigh, Mothering Magazine.


Ursula K. Le Guin  on rocks:

In general, rocks aren’t living in the same way or at the same pace that we are. But you can find a rock, maybe a big boulder, maybe a little agate in a streambed, and by looking carefully at it, touching it or holding it, listening to it, or by a little talking and singing, a small ceremony, or being still and quiet with it, you can enter into the rock’s soul to some extent and the rock can enter into yours, if it’s disposed to. Most rocks live a long time. They’ve lived a long time before we pass them, and they’ll live a long time after. Some of them are very old, grandchildren of the coming to be of the earth and sun. If there were nothing else to be known from them that would be enough, their long age of being. But there is much other knowledge in rocks, there are things that can be understood only with the help of rocks. They will help people who handle and study and work with them with pleasure and respect, with mindfulness.

Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guinn, p. 309

[The above quotes were gratefully received from Susan Wiseheart, a fellow rock lover!]

A note on collecting rocks

The urge to collect is the natural response of the human psyche to an aesthetic object that speaks directly to it, stirring memories that lie deeply within.  Collecting confirms the indigenous belief that the human psyche reads and understands symbols and that attraction to beauty is a function of psychic awareness. 

Malidoma Patrice Some. The Healing Wisdom of Africa.

In nature there are so many things that attract the eye and elicit the urge to collect and arrange - flowers, leaves, twigs, stones, feathers, seeds - and rocks.  Andy Goldsworthy's natural and ephemeral outdoor sculptures are an extraordinary example of this. 

Whilst we should take care not to do damage by picking wildflowers before they can seed or removing fossils from special reserves, many items are just calling to be noticed and appreciated in this very human way.  It's also a way to remember a wild place you've enjoyed.

Here is a 'Stone Walk' from a book called The Artist Inside by Tom Crockett which contains many intriguing ways of cultivating your creative self.  I used this often with guests at my previous retreat and many of them went home with rocks that they (much) later wrote me about!

An underground stream of spirituality: quoting Brad Kochunas

A beautifully articulated account of the qualities (astrological and elemental) of soulful spirituality, with water as a central image, from 'Elemental Spirituality' by Brad Kochunas in The Mountain Astrologer, #136, Dec./Jan. 2008

I wish to offer for consideration the possibility of an underground stream of spirituality that has been poorly articulated and frequently overlooked.  This approach, like water, moves downward toward the lowlands, the lonesome valley, the shaded glade, the dark wood, the shadowed path, the vale of tears.  This is a perspective viewed through water and earth imagery that our spiritual traditions have often ignored.  It carries more languid, meandering, sinking, and brooding images.  In contrast to the spirited yang experience, there is a more pronounced soulful, yin quality to the shape of this perspective.  Neptune, in its natural relationship to the sovereigns of earth and water (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and Pluto), reflects a harmony of purpose and  a willingness to descend to the dark abyss.  The relations suggest a more soulful spirituality reflecting attachment, humility, sensuousness, patience, realism, depth, and embodied life.

Often this path begins at a point of personal failure or catastrophe, when we no longer measure up to the fire and air values so infused in our Western culture, and we have given up the challenge of the spiritual climb.  It has been characterized as the dark night of the soul in Christian mysticism and the night sea journey into myth....In this plunge away from our well-ordered, well-lit, and well-controlled lives, we are open to the world, made vulnerable, wounded, and inferior - no longer rising and floating but, rather, falling and sinking deeper into the solitude of our being and the flow of life.

.... we ignore the invisibles of repressed and forgotten water and earth at great peril....A true materialist loves the material world and is a disciple of earth and water, cherishing the things of the world, repairing not despairing, recognizing the sacredness of a living Cosmos.  In this sense, then, it seems prudent to affirm a more soulful spirituality, one that walks in the vale, allowing us to see the necessity of tears and sorrow, to embrace the loam of mortality, and to esteem the treasures of darkness.  When our spirituality no longer promises paradise but plants us firmly in the present, and our astrology no longer predicts the future but immerses us fully in the moment, then our lives, in tune now with the rhythms of soil and sea, may truly blossom.

For more on the challenges of Neptune, see also the poem Neptune has a Heart by Sulis (Sara Firman)

Being a bridge: Nan DeGrove

Oh, I understand!  You were being a bridge.
Well, that's nice, bridges are important.
But you know, the only problem with being a bridge
is that you, yourself,
never get to cross over.

Nan DeGrove

I discovered this quote in Stephen Buhner's book The Secret Teachings of Plants which continues to be a revelation and inspiration to me.  The quote brought me up with the shocking lurch that indicates something significant.  I did not discover until I came to post it here, many weeks later on the eve of my birthday, that Nan DeGrove is an astrologer.  And that provided another 'ahah' moment since astrology has become an increasingly valuable source of understanding for me.  Esoteric studies of water, plants and planets converging.  Me being a bridge and yearning to cross over.

Stephen Buhner quoted elsewhere on this blog: Prairie dogs cry for rain

Creativity: Fire + Water

'From the alchemy of fire and water below to the divine light entering from above, the figure in this card is literally 'possessed by' the creative force. Really, the experience of creativity is an entry into the mysterious. Technique, expertise and knowledge are just tools; the key is to abandon oneself to the energy that fuels the birth of all things.

'This energy has no form or structure, yet all the forms and structures come out of it. It makes no difference what particular form your creativity takes - it can be painting or singing,  planting a garden or making a meal. The important thing is to be open to what wants to be expressed through you. Remember that we don't possess our creations; they do not belong to us.

'True creativity arises from a union with the divine, with the mystical and the unknowable. Then it is both a joy for the creator and a blessing to others.'

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From the Osho Zen Tarot, this interpretation of the Major Arcana Tarot card 'Empress' appeals to me in my ongoing search for a good way to combine these two elements - Fire + Water = Creativity.

The card came up  this week when I tried the online reading sample that you'll find here (if you feel the need for some transcendental support also).  Share if you like!

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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.

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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