To Be or Not to Be Claimed

Can I allow myself to be claimed without being possessed? I bristle at our human need to possess property, things, people, to claim as ours a house, a parcel of land, a spouse, a room of one's own. As a friend Donna says, it's all on loan, all of it. When we were designing the art school we had a tin can that was used to collect quarters every time someone said "my or mine"; my students, my classroom, my department, my whiteboard marker. We struggled for years trying to maintain the collective and cooperative ours over the possessive and competitive mine. We finally had to concede on some things like whiteboard markers for sanity sake, but really, the concept of fasting from "my" is a good one. The more I give away, sell, separate myself from detachment in a fasting sort of way, the less I can relate to those who continue to cling. Something as small as a board member from a former workplace not being willing to let go of a button maker long enough for me to borrow it for a festival, it BUGS me to no end.

On the contrary, another friend taught me that being claimed can be a grounding experience. Claimed as a best friend, as a life partner, as a valued employee, as a child of God can root us and help us self-identify without clipping our wings and censoring our flow. Yes? Maybe? I believe, though, we must be willing to relinquish all, fast from all our attachments, before we can experience the liberation of this type of claiming.

My name, Wendy, means wanderer. Whenever I feel trapped, inhibited, tethered, reined in, I become seriously irritated, refusing to see that these reins may be just the thing to keep me from going off the deep end as I wander the edges of life. MY best friend keeps an ankle bracelet on me (metaphorically) because she knows I can drift off into nothingness when I'm needed right here in the now. I know I can take this bracelet off any time, so rather than feeling possessed by her, I feel cared for, rooted in a relationship and never abandoned. She helps me find the French translation of A bandon, "to put in one's power, to liberate."

Disorientation

I walk the edge between begin and end
beyond the tether of created self.
I am not afraid to move.
I am afraid of standing still,
utterly still in this gray silence -- this 2:00 a.m. space
where the crow has long since cawed away
the busyness of a day,
where my purpose of being
is not yet linked to memory or knowing --
utter stillness, before the morning dove has begun her lament.

I am awake
spinning in the space between --
vertigo of the soul.

The East opens beyond the sun
The West, an ocean abyss
I am direction-less.
North and South (heaven and earth)
a fading filament.
Storylines, brittle with age.

In this center threshold, this 2:00 a.m. space I am,
at the same time, both leaving and left behind.
Self and other --

We desert and are deserted
forsake and surrender
to be in our being
define in our defining.
We are both form and motion
noun and verb
abandon and abandoned.

A bandon,
to put in one's power.

To be in one's power
we must yield completely.
We must relinquish our claim,
our right --
to what?
Certainly, to our hold on other
and apparently,
to our hold on self.

We must spin without reference
without spotting
disoriented
sick with dizziness
we must continue to spin and spin and spin
until we collide and fall
until we have spun ourselves into laughter
until we have spun the new.

A bandon,
liberation.

Geography of Love

Ephesians 3:14 encourages us to explore the expansiveness of God's love, the breadth, the height, the length, and the depth, both overflowing and rooted, ours for the receiving. Because I try not to personify God, I do not imagine a being expressing his or her love in a tangible, sensory way that I can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. I can, however, notice the manifestation of that love in the landscape of my every day living:

Breadth of autumnal sunshine
and the five year old
neighbor boy's call
to come out
and play ball.

Towering circle of cedar ~
there is no ceiling
to Your love.

Moonlight and shadow ~
oh the length of You
arched long along
my living room floor,
arms open in a transept
of receptivity.

Even in the darkest depths
a porch light shines
somewhere
here or there
guiding me home.

Just Questions Today

Does sin abate when surrender abounds?

I cannot bow down to any lord, as solicitous scriptures suggest. I do not see how reverence to the lord God is any different then reverence to lord Caesar or lord Bush. The paradigm, the holding to hierarchy (patriarchal or matriarchal) is what needs to be dismantled for us all to live in unity. This is what I have believed, and yet, sin (defined as separation from true self, in my Book) continues to plague me. I wonder if surrender to the Lord God, release of my knees into soft soil, the buckling of pride and independence would not just bring me the freedom i seek. And yet, (yes, yet again) Ephesians states we are the adopted children of God. While an adopted child can (and did in Biblical times) have the same rights as a blood child, anyone adopted can tell you, it's not the same. If I am not of God's womb, how can a surrender to God lead me to my true self? We, God and me, never had the symbiotic relationship, the umbilical connection (according to what I read), so how can I return to wholeness through God if I was never whole in God in the first place?

And another thing. We are all One in God's love through the sacrifice of Christ. What about Buddha? What about Ghandi? What about MLK Jr.? What about the rest of the world? The Euro-centrism disturbs me. I want the Bible to make room in my head for a more global embrace of humanity. Seems to me that's what Paul was suggesting with his chain letter to all communities in Asia Minor. Still so much to learn. I must remember to read loosely.

Grace, Oh I Get it

"It is not falling in the water that drowns us, but staying there."

By grace I unveil
shame like steam from crimson
burnt branches
once smoldering then doused
by tears of compassion

By grace I rise
from stark wrongdoing
to circling caress,
her smoky whisper, "I still
love you. Don't ever forget."

I had a realization that to have Christ live in me is not about clothing myself in the costume of Christianity and pretending, but rather it is surrender...Disclose and de-clothe to raw vulnerability, ask forgiveness and begin again, naked and new, every day.

More Scriptural Shorts

Psalm 126

Laughing hallelujah
and God recommends
we re-commune with sisters, all
from beginning to end and back again
Aloha and ciao


Dr. Luke 24, a Gentile among Jews

Every day
doubt looms
like gray clouds
threatening to ruin my
garden party.
So I am called to remember
Jesus is in the cornbread.
Can't you see?
Every day.
So eat up.
Abundance comes from loss.

Lies can be Life Saving

I am your Rahab, as you are mine,
living on the edge
one stop short of rejection
and one window away from freedom.

We spin a deceitful thread
not silver, not gold, but blood
red, my life for your life
we lie to save both.

Salvation for all,
this thread, we know
will not devastate,
if delivered as kind protection.

A redeeming passion, we must trust
will save us from stone walls
of panic and fear, away
from enslavement, from possessive love.

This crimson thread will
lead us to transformation
to open hearts and silver
waterfalls of unity, if we are not afraid.

Let it be so.

In a Nutshell

I'm taking this course with some church friends called Companions in Christ. We have Bible readings and I just got the idea to write some short poems summarizing what I read.

Genesis 12
Leave it all behind
Blackberries and 'mourning' doves
Impugn not my call

Genesis 28
Jacob
With head upon stone
I wrestle an angel, dreams
descending like dust

What next?
Glad tithings?
Let's make a deal!

Exodus 17
Water from sand stone ~
Doubt and you will die of thirst.
Exodus ain't easy.


I've decided that my study plan for Goddard will be to study both Rumi poems and Paul's letters, Sufism and Christianity, find the connections, travel to Turkey, and create a contemporary response from my unique perspective in letter and poetry form. These mini poems are good practice. I'll send on more if anyone is interested.

Mortgage and Marriage

I choose to sell my house because I don't want to be locked in anymore to the commitments, obligations, costs (literal and not so literal), work, and constant repair involved in a mortgage. As soon as I had a buyer, I started looking at where I would live next. Some days I thought, I really want a clean slate, empty rooms, not even paintings on the wall (painted by ex-lovers, streaming red with aching memory). I'll just rent a studio, make art, collect unemployment and detach from my entire past. Oh so tempting. Then I explored intentional community living...A community just starting, out on Sauvie Island. I could build a yurt, meet and eat in the big house, work the land, sustainable living, a fantasy since my Sandy days almost 25 years ago, a vision from six years ago that I called the Place of Grace. Or I could join the established Lighthouse Community, an urban, Buddhist community just off of Hawthorne. The house is enormously spacious with a poetry stage and movie seats in the basement, an open flex space with just an alter and some pillows, and a modest bedroom with sunlight, a fireplace, and hardwood floors. But wait, I already have a community. I am already committed to Bridgeport. Granted I don't live with these people, but I stood in front of them four years ago and promised to give and receive through thick and thin, for better or worse, like a marriage. I can't sign on to another community, that would be bigamy, wouldn't it? Yet why do I feel the need to flee?

Typical for me to squirm in tight spaces. As Denise Levertov says, "Don't lock me in wedlock, I want/marriage, an/encounter--" Most traditional committed arrangements are too tight and rule-filled for me. I need room to flex and flow with the changing tides. I need to be able to say, "Until life do us part." I know that nothing is forever and don't need to lock myself in with a myth of security. In younger days, as soon as things got too tight, I split open and flew on winged feet to start another honeymoon of lightness. Then, three years or so later, I would be disappointed with the superficiality, the unsatisfactory nature of the relationship (individual or organizational), and think it must be time to leave and seek again. My longing has changed from a desire for light flight to a yearning to go deep, with clay feet, through all the scrapes and mistakes, dents and scars of loving and living, to the other end of community, family, work, relationship.

Rilke writes, "Like so many other things, people have also misunderstood the position love has in life; they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure are more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, precisely because it is the supreme happiness, can be nothing other than work. It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

So first I say, "Okay, I am ready to step in deeper, no more toe dipping." Again, Denise Levertov in her poem "The Ache of Marriage...two by two in the ark of/the ache of it." Or three by three, or 50 by 50, whatever commitment to comm-unity calls for. Now, what about authentic self within? If I am to exchange winged NIKEs for clay heavy work boots, do I not need to be fully of this earth, true to who I am? This brings forward, for me, the question of secrets and integrity.

Another reason I have fled community in the past is that secrets became too heavy for me. I cannot hold in secrecy and feel internal integrity. We all have secrets. How do others maintain long term relationships with individuals and community while keeping secrets? Really, I want to know. That's a genuine question. Is it a matter of semantics, renaming secrets and calling them a right to privacy? Is about saying only what is necessary, true, and kind? I've always thought the path to greater intimacy is through open disclosure. My cousin once said that it is impossible to reach intimacy in a group. Maybe this is why. I am particularly challenged by committing to greater intimacy in a faith community. Am I not expected to walk in transparency, light, soul-filled truth? How do I do that in heavy, soil-filled boots?

Help me out here. Let's dialogue for future blogs.

9.11

We shudder, all of us, no doubt, with each plane passing overhead today.

So it Goes

We are in reunion with rage
a stone throwing stone
upon stone
upon stone upon
cordon of memory
Caught in a storm of twin sorrows
we rage -- eleven upon eleven
at tomorrow at forever
at mid-night
and so it goes
Blind-sided by terror -- naked, alone
a stark stones throw
away stone
upon stone
upon stone
upon stone
upon stone
and so it goes

Ah, but stop, listen to the circle of cedar
listen to pine and her spine
soft marrow of forgiveness
and light, listen
where darkness springs bright
and we can unite in a faltering
flight
upon flight
upon infant
flight

-Wendy 2001

Vested but not Vetted

I have a buyer for my house. The new title company sends me a document: "Commitment for Title Insurance. Schedule A. 4. Title to the estate or interest in the land is at the effective date hereof vested in: Wendy J. Thompson, an unmarried woman."

That's it? An unmarried woman; not poet, teacher, theologian, philosopher, lover, kind and thoughtful friend? No wonder I struggle with my single, childless status in this world. Legal language defines me solely in relation to other and never in relation to my true self. No wonder I've felt lost trying to play by society's rules of good behavior and integrity: go to college, get a respectable, acceptable, vetted, and appraised job, get a spouse (vetted again in socially acceptable pairing), have a child, buy house, control your wild, wandering, verdant soul. I don't fit in that mold and I'm tired of trying. I can only hold in integrity when I hold in center, sound in who I am and who I was created to be ~ not trying so hard to fit and merge and blend with other.

Rainer Rilke wrote in "On Love and Other Difficulties" that "Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another...It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake."

This transition I am in (selling house, leaving a job, going back to school) is all about me daring to step into my true self, my true call, become who I was created to be, ripen, and trust that just being that person will be more than enough for the rest of the world. I've spent most of my life trying to be for others, helping to manifest other peoples' dreams, helping others transition into wholeness. I continually feel left behind, left out, kicked out, unappraised, unvetted, for all that I invested in the world outside my core. Now, starting today, I give attention and vested interest in MY life first.

Yesterday was a pivotal day, my last day at work (to name just one significant event). I am no longer Executive Director, titleless and free, I refuse to be defined and held in a definition not true to me. Instead I hold myself together in stable soundness, listening within to what is right and good for me as the unique creation that I am. I trust that such integrity within will serve the comm-unity around me without my having to try so hard anymore.