Reflections of a Tumbleweed

No room at the inn...

12/13/2016

December brings a host of memories in its wake. In our family, many of those memories revolve around Christmas, often with numerous relatives and tables groaning with food. There is one Christmas Eve in particular I remember, in which I played the starring role in my own Yuletide drama.

I was one year older than I was in the picture to the right (that's me, with the horse in my arm - of course). In that picture, we were celebrating our one and only Christmas in godforsaken Columbus, Indiana (as my mother so often called it). One year later, we were back in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, living in a rental home on Perry Lane.

It was a house with some unusual features - the garage had been turned into a family room with a window seat that stored toys and built-in bookshelves, and was never very warm. We had a basketball hoop on the tiny back patio, which I loved, though I hated it when the ball went down the stairs to the cellar door and I had to go down after it. The cellar was a typical unfinished basement, with a fruit cellar built into it, and it held a washer and dryer that were fed by the clothes chute that came down from the second floor. The basement was to play an important role in my story.

One of my favorite holiday activities was arranging and rearranging the Nativity scene. There was Mary, on her knees in the traditional blue robe, and Joseph, also on his knees, both of them flanking the baby Jesus, lying in the manger, arms wide to welcome everyone. The young shepherd stood tall carrying a lamb fireman-style on his shoulders. One wise man knelt, the other two stood, all of them carrying their gifts. The colors were bright, not like the pastels stores favor these days. And the stable in which they sheltered was made of a strong cardboard, with a hole in the back for a light/star. In Indiana, one side pole of the stable was broken, and at some point my mother decided it was beyond saving, and she threw it out.

On Christmas Eve, I decided I needed to build a new stable for the baby Jesus and friends. We had a hammer and nails, and there was plenty of wood lying in our yard, having fallen from the trees in lovely, stable-sized branches. Of course, I had never built anything in my life. I was nine years old, and the hammer was adult-size.

Undaunted, I harvested my wood after lunch, and made my way down to the basement, determined to create the best stable ever. Hours later, I had a few nails sticking out of sticks, none of which would stay together as soon as I tried to add a new branche. My level of frustration was high, to put it mildly, and by the time we sat down to dinner I was near explosion level. I made it through dinner without exploding - it was after dinner when I went back down to finish it and my brother or sister or both of them came down and nagged me to come upstairs so we could sing Christmas carols.

Vesuvius had nothing on me when it came to eruptions. I would guess my mother might have characterized my behavior as hysterical. She sent me to my room to calm down, while the rest of them finished the decorating and preparations, including setting up the Nativity scene under the tree, without benefit of stable.

This nativity scene belonged to my parents - not the same one, but very similar in coloring, and minus one wise man...

When they were ready to sing Christmas carols, my mother came up to get me. As I recall, she thanked me for my hard work, and explained that sometimes things just didn't work out the way we planned. We sang for about half an hour, all of us choosing our favorite carols, and I looked at the nativity scene under the tree. Without the stable, you could actually see everyone better. I don't think we ever had a stable again...

Have a wonderful holiday, and safe travels. I will be travelling too, so it's unlikely I will be posting refularly during the next few weeks. Be well, Doc

Picture this...

12/6/2016

Every so often words fail me. When I find myself trying to express certain things, and prose doesn't do it, I turn to poetry. When poetry doesn't work, I turn to art.

Mind you, I don't consider what I do real poetry or art, because I'm pretty darn sure I'm not much good at either. Yet I do both, because there are times I can find no other means of expression. Tonight I find myself wanting to share three pictures I drew or painted, and a little bit about where they came from.

The drawing on the right was done at Tassajara (hence the title). Now if I'm being strictly accurate, I don't know that I ever sat on the ground under a tree to read a book there.

Tassajara self-portrait

Anyone who knew me at Tassajara probably remembers I had some difficulty sitting low on anything, which is why, by the time I left, I sat on a chair in the zendo. However, in the summers, on my days off, I could often be found on a chair on the lawn in front of the Stone Office under the trees, with my nose in a book. Or on the deck of the swimming pool, reading or writing. And yes, I did have red shoes the summer I drew this picture - red Keds, just like I had when I was five years old. They even had the white rubber toe area. Was it a pain having to tie and untie them? You bet. But I loved them. And just like when I was five years old, I wore them until they literally had holes in them.

Please be sure to notice the squirrel in the picture - yes Leslie, I still think they're cute! At Tassajara they knew no one would hurt them, and I once had one jump onto my leg and put its little front paws on my arm as I read. It looked up into my face as if to say, "Don't you have a treat for me?" When I said hello, the sound of my voice sent it flying off to scamper across the lawn and into a tree.

Journey

You could say this next one is a self-portrait too, though I gave it a simpler title - Journey. I drew this the same summer, and it was an accurate depiction of what I felt was going on for me. I had a long, hard climb ahead of me, and the way was not straight. I had some support (my staff) and some of what I thought I'd need (my bag), and like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I appear to have been dropped onto the path out of nowhere.

I'm not sure why the trees were so small and the squirrel so big. Likely it's because my sense of perspective was (and is) not so great in my artwork, rather than looking at it as symbolic. On the other hand, the art itself is symbolic of the failure of words at that juncture of my life. Both pictures were drawn during one of the toughest times I experienced, and I looked at them often to give myself hope.

This last picture was painted about five years before the other two, and was inspired by a picture I saw at a retreat with Adyashanti. He had a similar picture up near him on the stage, but the buddha and the clown were reversed. He talked about the difficulty of the clown seeing the buddha in himself.

When I painted it, I reversed the two. I painted it a couple of years after the retreat, when I was at Naropa getting my Master of Divinity degree, and I felt fairly comfortable with the buddha in me. The clown, not so much. I didn't especially want to see the clown in me - it was too painful.

It was an intense time, and I took myself pretty seriously. There wasn't a lot of lightheartedness in me then, as I recall. And I think I saw myself as a bit of a clown, a pretender, a joke, and I didn't want to see that at all. At the same time, I knew I had to integrate both sides of me, all sides of me, in order to survive in a healthy way. The painting was one way to try to do that.

Buddha and the Clown

At the retreat, I'd asked Adyashanti how buddha could be willing to see the clown. His answer had to do with love and self-compassion, things about which I still had a lot to learn.

In a sense, you could say my playing with art and poetry is a form of love and self-compassion. They give me a way to explore the world without needing to justify their existence. They are play, and a treasure trove of delight.

Take a few minutes to find your own way to play today...

Doc