Common Ancestors

[Back left] Aunt Martha Swope, Uncle Will Taylor, Aunt Mary Hughes, Grandma Ben .
Front : Ruth, Dad [CTB] Aunt Anna.
Brookville Lawn

My mother is the child in this photograph. Her father, my Grandfather, C.T. Benscoter is beside her, and his sister Anna is beside him. Behind them is the older generation. C.T.’s mother, Ida Taylor is the woman on the far right, and next to her are her siblings. The photograph is a great portrayal of the ancestral world.

(via Ruth’s Album | Flickr - Photo Sharing!)

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“Pattern recognition is the new form of work which combines into one the roles of hunter, engineer, programmer, researcher, and aesthete.”

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Marshall McLuhan * * “We are all a complete mixture; yet at the same time, we are all related. Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor. This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us. Our genes did not just appear when we were born. They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations.” ” — Bryan Sykes, a former Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford and a current Fellow of Wolfson College, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, 2001 (viaamiquote) * * “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.” — Italo Calvino | Invisible Cities | pg. 87

* * “I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.” - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Transformation At A Cellular Level

[photo by Robert Doisneau]

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Becoming Free

By Thich Nhat Hanh

Let go, and respond to the immediate needs around you. Don't get caught in some false perception of yourself. There will always be another person more gifted than you. And don't perceive your position as important, but be ready to serve at any moment. If you can let go of who you think you are, you will become free--ready to love others. If you learn to see your impermanence, you will be able to live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future.

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THE MATERNAL FACE OF GOD

Historically speaking, in our culture the role of men has been to create, to make new things, to fix broken things, and to defend us from things which could hurt us. All of these are wonderful and necessary roles for the preservation of the human race.

However, most children saw their mother in a different way. She was not a creator, a fixer, or a defender, but rather a transformer. Once a woman has carried her baby inside of her body for nine months and brought it forth, through the pain of childbirth, into the world, she knows the mystery of transformation at a cellular level. She knows it intuitively, yet she cannot verbalize it. She just holds it at a deeper level of consciousness. She knows something about mystery, about miracles, and about transformation that men will never know (which is why males had to be initiated!). Women who are not mothers often learn it by simply being in the “community of women.”

The feminine body can be seen as a cauldron of transformation. Her body turns things into other things—her body turns a love act into a perfect little child. Yet, in her heart, she knows SHE did not do it. All she had to do was to wait and eat well, to believe and to hope for nine months. This gives a woman a very special access to understanding spirituality as transformation—if she is able to listen.

[Richard Rohr: Adapted from The Maternal Face of God

(available in On Transformation: Collected Talks, Volume 1 (CD)]

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“The More Loving One” by W. H. Auden:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Continued here.

(via The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast)

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"We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, "I am suffering," than to say, "This landscape is ugly."
- Simone Weil

It Is Love

This is a picture of my mother and I when Max was just days old.

I don't have a lot of pictures of Mom and I together - I kind of like this one because the shadows make us look sort of "witchy" - as though we are conspiring together. I guess we were conspiring. This was the birth of my second son, so now we were co-conspirators in motherhood. Maybe she figured that I was getting a clue.

When I think about her now and remember her I see that I didn't grant her the beingness that she deserved. I thought that I understood all about her. I had my mind made up. But it wasn't until closer to the end of her life that I began to investigate further. I would ask her questions about her life and her thinking and accept what she told me and not argue or monopolize the conversation. I started to draw her out.

I'm glad we had those times - staying up nearly all night talking.

I ran into the following anecdote on Whiskey River this week:

"Self-inquiry is simple. It does not require you to do anything, change anything, think anything, or understand anything. It only asks you to pay careful attention to what is real.

I have two sons. When they were about four, they both went through a phase of having nightmares. I would go into the room and switch on the light. Two small eyes blinked at me from the corner.
"What's the problem?" I'd ask.
"Daddy, there's a monster in the room," a timid voice would reply. Now, I had more than one choice of how to respond. I could tell my frightened boy that it was not true, there was no monster, go back to sleep. That response is the equivalent of reading a book that says, "We're all one, there is no problem, just be with what is." Fine ideas, but they don't help much. I could also have offered to feed the monster cookies, talk with the monster, negotiate. That approach is like some kinds of psychotherapy. Treat the problem as real, then fix it on its own terms. But the only real solution I ever found was to have a good look. Under the bed, in the closet, behind the curtains, we undertook an exhaustive search.
Eventually my sons would let out a deep sigh, smile at me, and fall back to sleep. The problem was not solved but dissolved. It was never real in the first place, but it took investigation to make that a reality."
- Arjuna Ardagh

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I wish that I had understood more earlier. I wish that I had launched more investigations

and offered fewer solutions. Relationships by their very nature tend towards incompletion.

There's always more to say. I know with certainty that death is not the end. I know that the relationship goes on.

DEATH IS SMALLER THAN I THOUGHT

My Mother and Father died some years ago
I loved them very much.
When they died my love for them
Did not vanish or fade away.
It stayed just about the same,
Only a sadder colour.
And I can feel their love for me,
Same as it ever was.

Nowadays, in good times or bad,
I sometimes ask my Mother and Father
To walk beside me or to sit with me
So we can talk together
Or be silent .

They always come to me.
I talk to them and listen to them
And think I hear them talk to me.
It's very simple -
Nothing to do with spiritualism
Or religion or mumbo jumbo.

It is imaginary. It is real. It is love.

April 18, 2006 Adrian Mitchell

There Is No Progress In Love

Ruth Benscoter Bowman - Portrait 1963

“The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”
—Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
—Charles Bukowsk

“If the world was truly a rational place, men would ride sidesaddle.”
—Rita Mae Brown

“When all is said and done, all we have to offer one another is a welcome in each other’s messy nest.”

-Annie Lamott

"Love remains forever that part of life we can never control. As Bruckner says, it continues to resist indoctrination and ideology. It does not yield to the inquiries of theory. The world has tried to bring it within the realm of reason and ethics, make it modern and progressive. Bruckner is here to tell us that 'there is no progress in love. It will always be a surprise,'"

- Robert Fulford

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Happy Mother's Day, Ruth in this world and one more. This blog was begun in her memory.

I thought I'd write about her one day, but maybe I won't. To those who knew her - to those of us who were her kids - we are left with the riddles she left behind. Her complex world, her history, her psyche, her theology. I don't know if I ever could do it justice, except to forge along in my own life and keep hacking away at the underbrush.

But I honor her today, Mother's Day. I remember her, today and always. I carry her with me in my own life and how I navigate the world. I understand more as I get older what she was up against. She fought the good fight and she was a fighter. And much more.

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Stop Slamming Doors

Abraham Maslow points out in his “hierarchy of needs” that one cannot meet higher needs at any level of depth if the lesser needs are not first tended to. One cannot do an “end run” to levels of communion and compassion, for example, when one’s basic security and survival needs have not been met. As Jesus put it, when you are “worried about many things” (Luke 10:41), you cannot have faith. When you cannot enjoy the lilies of the field or the sparrows in the sky, don’t waste time thinking you can enjoy God. Start at the bottom; try to love a rock. Otherwise, we end up trying to be spiritual before we have learned how to be human! It is a major problem. Maybe this is why Jesus came to model humanity for us—much more than divinity. Once we get the human part down, “stop slamming doors” and start loving rocks, God will most assuredly take it all from there. Get the ordinary human thing down, and you will have all the spirituality that you can handle. Richard Rohr: Adapted from Contemplation in Action, pp. 83-84

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The Tension of Opposites By Parker Palmer To be in the world nonviolently means learning to hold the tension of opposites, trusting that the tension itself will pull our hearts and minds open to a third way of thinking and acting.... We must learn to hold the tension between the reality of the moment and the possibility that something better might emerge. A Hidden Wholeness via Inward Outward * * When we use this term “basic goodness” it indicates some fundamental possibility. Life is possible. Situations are possible. And anybody can start to gain some kind of insight and appreciation of their lives. That’s what we call “sacred.” It doesn’t mean something dramatic, but something very simple. There’s a sacredness to everyone’s life. In order to relate to it, you have to build confidence. Because of this need to build confidence, we speak of “warriorship.” There’s a tremendous amount of fear in people’s lives. I think it’s based on not wanting to reveal oneself. You’re always protecting yourself. So the journey of meditation and the journey of Shambhala is “One has to be fearless. One has to be brave. One must break out of the world which is comfort-oriented.” [From “Tricycle” Interview With Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche - the eldest son of the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.]

Steady Your Gaze

The three musketeers : Peter and ReUnion friends

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Prayer is not the avoidance of distractions, but precisely how you deal with distractions. Contemplation is not the avoidance of the problem, but a daily merging with the problem, and finding its full resolution. It is a way “to look over [our] shoulder” for God (the brilliant insight of the anonymous author of the 14th Century book, The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 32).

The persistence of the distraction can actually steady your gaze, deepen your decision, and increase your freedom and desire for God and for grace—over “this” or “that” passing phenomenon. The “shoulders” of the distraction become your necessary vantage point, and they create the crosshairs of your seeing. What you quickly and humbly learn in contemplation is that how you do anything is how you do everything.

I wasted so many years trying to deny, repress, or avoid distractions—which never worked. It is not the avoidance of problems that makes you a contemplative, but a daily holding of the problem, straight on. But not letting it hold onto you, and finding a resolution in the much deeper and more spacious “peace of Christ, which will guard your heart and your mind” (Philippians 4:7). I never knew it would take such hourly vigilance to guard my heart and my mind from anger, judgment, fear, jealousy, and negativity of any kind. Only the vast peace of Christ can do it. Now it is my only daily discipline, much harder than poverty, chastity, and obedience ever were.

Adapted from Contemplation in Action, p. 18 - Richard Rohr

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And the heart, unscrolled,

is comforted by such small things:

a cup of green tea rescues us, grows deep and large, a lake.”

—Jane Hirschfield, from “Recalling a Sung Dynasty Landscape”

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I am inside all of this with my soul."

~ Rumi

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What Your Body Knows

By Patrice Vecchione

What does your body know? Its ways of knowing will not desert you. Its knowing remains true and will be enhanced through your attention and reliance. The musician Jerry Garcia once said, 'In the water you're weightless. It's so silent you're like a thought. When I begin to relax, the songs start happening in my head.' The body needs to relax to float. If you're stiff and afraid, the water will not hold you well and you'll flail and splash.... But if you have faith in the floating, faith in the water, alliances are made from that.

Writing and the Spiritual Life

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Intending to Pray

By Emilie Griffin

There is a moment between intending to pray and actually praying that is as dark and silent as any moment in our lives. It is the split second between thinking about prayer and really praying. For some of us, this split second may last for decades.

The Experience of Prayer

Equal Grace Force Fascination

Youth, large, lusty, loving - youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
force, fascination?

Day full-blown and splendid - day of the immense sun, action,
ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
restoring darkness
- Walt Whitman 1819-1892

[Photo by by Sam Haskins]

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You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when grown-ups came in and explained everything important to the other kids. They said, "Look, you're human, you're going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, and have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of the fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life." And then they told the children who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don't know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.

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But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instruction. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren't there the day the instructions were passed out."

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excerpt, "Some Assembly Required" by Anne Lamott

[via Lassie and Timmy]

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To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It’s a way of life. To take a photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality.

–Henri Cartier-Bresson