A Lesson in Calm

Known as the month of Mary, May is when the fragrance of blooming Russian Olive fills the dry air here in the Rio Grande River valley. Now is the time I am wanting to live along the river where it grows in abundance.  The tiny yellow flowers that line the branches of the tree produce a pungent aroma the hummingbirds adore.  Yesterday, on the new moon, I took the late morning to follow it's sweet call and wander along the trails to the river's edge.  I noticed an elegant thin black shape in the middle of the river just south of where I found myself. Peering through my binoculars I discovered it was a black bird, a large water bird poised on a log that I assumed must be lodged in the thickness of mud of the shallow river bed.  Somewhat similar in shape to a Blue Heron, this bird had a much shorter neck and a smaller body.  Quite black against the muddy brown water, I watched it for a while from a distance and noted it's serene manner, so still, so composed.  

I felt restless by comparison, not settled, not as calm as this winged one appeared to be.  He or she was in fact, so still that I wasn't certain it was a bird, at first, but perhaps a blackened branch.  I wanted to get closer to it, so I rode my bike along the sandy trail until it started to veer away from the river, then I laid the bike down and walked west through the trees and brush until I found just the right viewing spot underneath two twinned cottonwoods, magnificent umbrellas in their new spring green leaves.  For most of an hour, I bet, I sat and watched the beautiful black one barely move on this log in the river. As I admired it, and its ability to be in stillness with the environment, the name came to me-Cormorant.  Later, checking my observation with a friend she said, yes, that sounded correct from my description.  

Looking up the spelling, I noted that originally the name is from medieval Latin meaning "sea raven".  I learned it has a voracious appetite and because of that, a cormorant has come to mean, figuratively, a person who is insatiably greedy.  But this one did not seem at all hungry, not feasting on anything at all as I admired its composed spirit.  It appeared to be complete, content and very satiated.  I left before it did. I did not get to see it dip into the water or spread its wings. but it gave me a teaching in being calm. Finding a photo of it today, I am awed by its dramatic display with wings spread and plan to go back and hopefully, see it again.  A rare treat to see a sea bird in the desert, a gift.  

I learned from Michael Dunning in a Craniosacral class that in the earliest embryonic process the heart arises from stillness, deep stillness for 48 hours-as the future heart gets impregnated with spiritual information.  The heart forms literally, above the future head and folds into the interior space of the body later.  When we are first conceived, our form, the zygote-meaning yoked- is more of a mineral than an animal, cells dividing inwardly, not expanding until we are implanted into the wall of the uterus.  Once that happens we are more plant -like than animal.  A thin membrane connects our spine to our mother before there is an umbilical cord, we are more two-dimensional than three-dimensional at this stage.  I want to entrain my heart again, to that stillness, to that calm connection to Mother Nature.

Addendum: Three days later, I travelled a little further north along the river and spent an afternoon at the water's edge. I saw three more, similiarly standing, preening on a log in the river.  And then again two more, spotted a couple days later...altogether six birds patiently waiting.  

A Prayer for Juarez and West Mesa: An Offering Mandala

Sunday, March 24, 2013

2 p.m

Plaza of the National Hispanic Cultural Center

Avenida Cesar Chavez and 4th Street

Albuquerque, NM 

Free and Open to the Public

Please join us to create a prayerful community offering in memory of the young women of Cuidad Juárez and West Mesa, Albuquerque whose lives have been lost to violence.  Wear black and bring a large bowl to pour water, one to another, as we create a mandala—a portal between the dark and the light. Please invite your friends—men, women and children.

Contact:  Deborah Gavel, djgavel@gmail.com 

This special event is part of Women & Creativity Month and is sponsored by Littleglobe.

To view a video from the event in March 2012: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEdyK3O1-U0

About Deborah Gavel: Deborah is an artist, educator and art activist in Albuquerque.  She is interested in the intersection of healing and creativity. www.deborahgavel.com

Women and Creativity Month is an annual, month-long series of events that celebrates women’s creativity across the disciplines.  Coordinated by the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC) and the Harwood Art Center. Women & Creativity is a collaboration between over thirty partners and organizations in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  Visit the website at www.womenandcreativity.org 

Littleglobe is a New Mexico based 501(c)3 organization of creative professionals dedicated to artistic innovation in the service of social change.  Littleglobe exists to create collaborative art, nurture community capacity, and foster life-affirming connections across the boundaries that divide us.   Learn more at www.littleglobe.org. Littleglobe has been a Women & Creativity partner for the last five years.

The Garden of Silence, Part 1

"Inward. inward. To the sacred groves." -Mary Oliver                    

Longing for the seashore now, for a stretch of sand, I am floating on a memory from last year, being in Truro on Cape Cod. During a perfect September weekend after Labor Day, I led an art and meditation workshop on silence.  If you have never been there, think of Cape Cod as the shape of a bent arm reaching out into the Atlantic off the body of Massachusetts. Truro is on the National Seashore just north of the elbow, south of the fingertip at Provincetown, it has take-your -breathe-away stunning beaches on both the ocean side and the bayside.  We met (four friends) to share food, to take walks, to be in silence and to find through the process, a gateway to expand our creativity.  The inspiration for this adventure: Listening Below the Noise, a memoir by Anne D. LeClaire.  It tells the story of her personal commitment to silence, every other Monday since 1992.

The serendipitous fact that LeClaire lives on Cape Cod just a half an hour from where the workshop was to be held seemed too synchronistic to ignore.  So I looked up the author online just before my departure and sent her an email request, hoping that we might connect while I was there.  She is a writer of note, her most recent novel, The Lavender Hour as well as seven other novels has kept her busy along with family, a full schedule leading lectures, retreats and workshops. So I was surprised and delighted to get a positive response to my invitation to her to be a guest during a part of our weekend.  

She is a self-proclaimed "chatty-Cathy" who was not at all sure she could be silent for twenty-four hours in a row when she began the practice of silence.  But she did make it through that first day and consequently opened herself to a new state of mind like she had been away on retreat. Her inclination to continue these mini vacations has fed her as a writer and inspired a beautiful journey of a book on her experiences with silence.  Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "[n]owhere, beloved, can the world exist but within." Silence takes you within, it also takes you, when it is a conscious choice, not a forced silence or an accidental silence, to an orientation that might help open the door to creativity and further self-expression. 

LeClaire writes, "[l]ike countless others before me, I would come to silence to learn how to listen." Not only to learn to listen to others better she notes, but to learn to listen within, to learn to listen to her better self, "into a sacred space where wisdom can be heard."  To find a space of silence is not so difficult a task for me, because I live alone, my days are frequently sans conversation, but this I have come to experience is quite different than intentional silence.  Of chosen silence, John Francis says in his story, Planetwalker, about his experience of seventeen years in total silence, "[m]y life altered." Mahatma Gandhi took one day of silence every week, every Monday for a year in 1926.  He said, "speak only if it improves upon the silence."  Anne LeClaire claims the power of silence has influenced and lighted her way more than any thing or any one during her more than twenty year practice.  In just five months of following in her footsteps, I am beginning to sense what she means. Chosen silence has begun to feel like a warm blanket around my shoulders on a cold winter day. It deepens the experience of my days, stretches out the hours.  

During the weekend in Truro we took our silence from bedtime through the first few morning hours of the next day, including breakfast.  Even that short a time frame proved difficult for some but it was a way to fold our conversations around the text in a first hand way. On Saturday before dinner, when Anne joined us for a drink, one of the women asked if she had ever broken her days of silence. She responded, "only once", when she was involved in an automobile accident and chose to speak to the emergency crew. She added that, because it was a day of silence, it seemed to support her in the process of staying calm. Detaching from conversation twenty-four hours at a time has given her the opportunity to tune into the deepest part of herself, to her own secret garden. And she says, “[t]he garden of silence is always there for us. Patiently waiting.  We only have to claim it.”  I am learning January can have its gardens of silence as well as any other time, along the seashore, close to home, or the sandy beaches in our minds. 

Mary, Mary, Mary

“...many times late at night I was 

to see Ultima returning from the 

llano where she gathered the herbs 

that can be harvested only in the 

light of the full moon by the careful 

hands of a curandera.”-Antonio in Bless Me, Ultima Rudolfo Anaya

A friend, Mary Symer, first introduced me to the poetry of Mary Oliver.  She patiently hand -copied a number of Oliver's poems and others into a small chapbook, written on spirit papers. Also known as ghost money or Joss papers, this paper is primarily used/burned as an offering to ancestors in China and Vietnam. Artists like it for aesthetic reasons and so this booklet I have treasured, a perfect going away gift for my departure from New Mexico and return to the eastern seaboard in 1996, (near to Oliver's current home) seems to hold within it's pages so much. Both life, death and like the moon's phases, a reflecting light one can hold in hand.  

It would be many years later after I received this booklet of poems before I discovered that Ms. Oliver and I both come from the same part of Ohio.  Although we grew up in different eras- she had already moved to New York before I was born- I like knowing we stepped through the same surroundings and shared landscapes. Easily, I love her words, her way with words.  She writes about all that I hold dear about the nature of nature with such depth and meaning.  For instance, most of us tend to speak of moonlight in timeworn ways, a modern condition I imagine brought on by our paled experience of the night sky in urban areas.  Not so Mary Oliver. In her book of poems, Twelve Moons, she writes about full moons in so many sacred ways: of the Pink Moon, the Wolf Moon, the Flower Moon.  On it's thin pages, a richness of wording for each of the full moons of the year, Ice in February, Strawberry in June. This book contains the wonderment of a fawn too new; a story of two turtles embracing; a mother bear under a snow moon giving birth, "she nibbled them with teeth like white tusks; she curled down beside them like a horizon." And there is a fish climbing from the sea as moonlight blazes black rocks.   

The moon in any phase that we see in the evening sky, is a massive reflector, bouncing the light of the sun back to us.  Isn’t there something so beautiful in this night- light shining upon us as a metaphor of receiving and giving back light?  Consider the moon, this planet of our familiar, as a daily reminder of our human and more-than- human* cycles, our own phases of radiance and veiled expressions. Of course the entirety of the moon is always there but we usually see just the portion that is sunlit. Often it appears to our eyes that the rest of the moon has been curiously carved away and made invisible. My personal favorite phase of the moon is the thin crescent two days after the new moon when it appears to be a silvery sliver among the stars.   It is perhaps most enchanting when on rare occasions it sits on it’s side - a cradle in the heavens, a smile in the sky.  This is the moon that the Virgin of Guadalupe stands upon: the horned moon.  She is Mary of the evening, her mantle covered with stars, her feet planted firmly along the curve of the moon, held up by an angel.  And so tonight , as we approach the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year,  I take pause as I write these words to look out and see if I might find the rising moon peeking pink over the mountain crest. And I stop to thank these three wise Marys for guiding my way through the darkness of the llano, the "funnel of the night," with your words of light. 

Cold Moon-Hannah's Children

They will come in their own time, 

Probably in the black

Funnel of the night,

And probably in secret-

No one will see

Their marvelous coming

But the goats,

And Maple the pony.

Now, on the evening 

Of the last counted day,

We latch the stable door.

As the white moon rises

She settles to her knees.

Her curious yellow eyes--

Old as the stones

Of Greece, of the mountains

That were born with the world-

Look at us in friendship,

And then look away,

Inward.  Inward

To the sacred groves.

-From Twelve Moons by Mary Oliver

 See this smiling cresecent moon on the evening of January 13-14, 2013

* and thank you David Abram for the borrowed term: more-than-human

The Path to Creativity V: With Ears for Seeing

Late June in the bosque, among the trees, I hear before I see anything, lots of birds chattering in the Cottonwoods.  Some high pitched squawking mixed with more melodic birdsongs gets me smiling as I walk in with my bike; it's such a unique chorus today.  When we look or search for something it is often hard to find, like misplaced car-keys, so I know I need to be patient, get quiet, find a roost and wait for what is entering my ears to become visible to my eyes. Hummingbirds abound and in short time I recognize the outline of a hawk-type beak on a bird in a tree, back-lit from the still early morning sun.   Binoculars to my faculty of sight, details of this rather fuzzy brown shape become a bit clearer - it has distinct vertical markings on the side of its face and neck- very occupied pecking at something in the cavity of a broken tree limb.  I hear myself asking, "What are you?"  And then, settling into my heartspace again, thinking, "oh, just enjoy the view."

A man on his bike pauses and I point out the bird as it flies off.  He says it is a Kestrel, a male Kestrel, then the female arrives into view and they both land on the same limb. 

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

     but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, "Stay awhile."

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,

"and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine."

-Mary Oliver

After the kindly man named Michael shows up to synchronistically answer my question, "What are you?," the pair glide wide through the treetops. Flickering through the green leaves, they show off flits of chevron-banded feathers on their pointy swept-back wings. (I read they can have a two foot wing span and can see ultraviolet light; they are small falcons once called by other names.) While relishing this rarity before me, the two Kestrels are joined by a third and with a flourish like the fan in the hand of a flamenco dancer, a fourth one appears! I am so grateful to catch sight of their flights of joy. Just as Coleman Barks says about Mary Oliver's poems, "I ascent to every line,"  I ascent with each glimpsed wing.

Touched by this majesty while epic fires are blazing through forests north in Colorado, hundreds of homes destroyed, I wonder about all the wildlife. How many birds and other animals have been lost  as hotspots continue to burn throughout the southwestern states, six fires in Utah, many in Arizona as well as here in New Mexico? The devastation is surreal, global warming sure feels real, each day this week, temperatures are in the triple digits. 

Today is the last day the park systems will be open to the public here, a cautionary step probably for the rest of the summer of 2012. This very area, where I watch Kestrels, burned on both sides of the Rio Grande river in 2003. Amidst the loss around us, all the uncertainty in the world, I am so thankful the Kestrels, by any name, grace me with their aerial display.

To hear Mary Oliver reading:

and with Coleman Barks: