Blog Posts

No Place Like Home

2/1/2020

Daniel Laguitton, Sutton, Quebec

The folktale about the man on a quest for truth reminded me of the well-known Jewish tale told by Martin Buber in Tales of the Hasidism. In that tale, "truth" could easily be substituted for "treasure" or for anything one so often seeks "outside", like "the kingdom" or "Love".

It goes like this:
Rabbi Eisik of Cracow (Poland), after many years of great poverty which had never shaken his faith in God, dreamed someone bade him look for a treasure under Charles Bridge which leads to the king's palace in Prague. When the dream recurred a third time, Rabbi Eisik prepared for the journey and set out for Prague. But the bridge was guarded day and night and he did not dare to start digging. Nevertheless he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until evening. Finally the captain of the guards, who had been watching him, asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for somebody. A bit embarrassed, Rabbi Eisik told him of the dream which had brought him here from a faraway country. The captain laughed: "And so to please the dream, you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in dreams, if I had had it, I should have had to get going when a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the rabbi's home!"
Rabbi Eisik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built the House of Prayer which is called "Reb Eisik's Shul."
If truth, like rabbi Eisik's treasure, is not in our homes, we will not find it anywhere else...
The story, besides indicating that the "treasure" is to be found "at home", also suggests that without a quest "away from home", it might never have been found by the rabbi... It is a classic pattern, Coelho develops it in The Alchemist with the concept of the "personal legend" that must be fulfilled to find the treasure "inside". There are hundreds of examples of that pattern, such as Du Bellay's 16th Century poem : "Happy he who like Ulysses has returned successful from his travels, Or like he who sought the Golden Fleece, Then returned, wise to the world Live amongst his family to the end of his age!" https://www.frenchtoday.com/french-poetry-reading/heureux-qui-comme-ulysse-joachim-bellay/
Dorothy had it right : there is no place like home.

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Wake up from you Sleep, Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you

6/7/2019

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This writing comes from Apple Farm Writer George Sehy, first Farm Manager for Apple Farm who now lives in Florida.

With so many fine writers having already spoken their truth, I humbly submit for your consideration the revelations that have presented themselves to me.

I left Apple Farm around 4 years ago now.  I had been there about a dozen years and worked intensively with Don Raiche during that time and prior to that with Florence, Else, Jane and Helen.  I have been an Apple Farmer since 1979.  Once a Farmer, always a Farmer, I say.

Ephesians 5:14 says: “Wake up from you Sleep, Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (There is a variation on that last part that says:  “And you will touch Christ.”

My life in Florida has been a waking.  I have many sources of inspiration, notably Helen Luke, of course, and Dr. Jung as well as Edward Edinger and Sister Jane.  But that is not an inclusive list because I have many others that from time to time speak with me.

My biggest inspiration is the Holy Spirit.  “Come, Holy Spirit, Come and from your celestial home shed a ray of light divine.  Come, father of the poor, come, source of all our store, come, within our bosom’s shine…”

I have a prayer corner in the living room. It is a table and on it and the walls of the corner are various pictures and images as well as a statue of Justice (wielding a sword, holding a book and standing on a book with a snake under her feet.)  Also there is a statue of Wisdom as Athene (with a spear and a sword – holding an owl on her arm) and one of Mother Mary (standing on a snake on a half globe). I have a picture of Helen at a table smiling, a picture of Nancy Kurilik at church where she made her Carmelite Promises. I also have pictures of my brothers Roger and Bob, my niece and nephew, my ex-wife Becky and her daughter Lorna and Aunt Esther as well as many mandalas I colored as well as many sayings from Sister Jane and a few from others as well as myself.

I pray daily and for some years now I have been praying a Rosary for Mother Mary and also a Divine Mercy Novena and Chaplet.  I pray for as many friends and family and others that I can.  I have a prayer “book” that started out a bit like the Red Book but has evolved into my own prayers and such that are a daily part of my life.  In the prayer book I wrote:  “I pray for family and friends because I need to…my hope is that they don’t need my prayers!”

Several years ago, while still living at Apple Farm, Jim Carow sent me a quote from Sirach 6:26-28:  “Come to (Wisdom) with all your soul, and keep her ways with all your might.  Search out and seek and she will become known to you.  And when you get hold of her, do not let her go.  For at last you will find the rest she gives, and she will be changed into joy for you.”

In Wisdom 6:12, there is one part that I truly like:  "Of her (Wisdom) the most sure beginning is the desire for discipline, care for discipline means loving her, loving her means keeping her laws, obeying her laws guarantees incorruptibility.   Incorruptibility brings near to God.”

Helen, we may remember says “Discipline is to keep a single gaze.”

“…the Holy Ghost, as the synthesis of the original One which then became split, issues from a source that is both light and dark.  “For the powers of the right and the left unite in the harmony of wisdom,” we are told in the Acts of John. (Cf James, The Apocryphal New Testament, pg 255 taken from Jung on Evil, pg 58.)

In a slightly different way of saying it, Sister Jane said for September 8, “Christ’s obedience to God did not consist of doing what God told him but of a total oneness with God’s disposition of Self-Giving love.

Some reflections, both personal and other:
*To "see" God the ego holds up a mirror and thinks what is “reflected” is the image of God.  Better to hold up Love and the image reflected is both.                             *The whole point of consciousness is to learn to “think for ourself.”  Really, to think (to know) for the Self – the unconscious part of ourselves.                                     *The River of Life flows in 4 different directions – not just one.  And it may be our “task” in life to find our “source” away from the original flow that nourished and nurtured us.  Only by finding our own source, perhaps, can we “give back” to the original.  Only by going “our own way” do we find ourselves “at home” on Earth.

Helen says:  “Finally in the hexagram of Inner Truth (Hexagram 61) there is a line that most beautifully expresses this deepest level of all in the relationship of one man with another.  The text is “A crane calling in the shade.  Its young answers it.  ‘I have a good goblet.  I will share it with you.”

I, too, have a good goblet and I will share it with you.  Enjoy.   May all of us have all we need.  May all we need be all of us.

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When the Ordinary Meets the Extraordinary

5/17/2019

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By: John Stempien (an adult adoptee)

How does one respond when the ordinary meets the extraordinary? Much of my life is rounded in daily ordinary routines—commuting to work, attending my children’s school activities, making meals, and common household duties that bring their own small satisfactions. The hanging of laundry on the backyard line on a warm Saturday morning is a calming meditation with just me, the song birds, the line, clothes pins and a variety of garments. These ordinary routines ground me to the predictable. All that is being asked on my part is a small seed of attention. However, occasionally, the extraordinary enters, disrupting ordinary foundational routines. The extraordinary happened upon me when after 50+ years, I was reunited with my birth mother and establishing contact with my birth father’s family and learning of his recent passing.

I was two weeks old when I was given-up for adoption in 1967, my birth records in the state of Michigan being sealed. Through a lengthy legal and emotional process I recently gained limited but invaluable access to my once closed past. Without falling into a lengthy discourse of the emotional landscape of the adopted, issues surrounding birth-parents relinquishing their parental rights to the state, or fathers who are denied knowledge of their child, for our purposes we only need to know that I had been searching for my biological parents for nearly 30 years. Being reunited brought extraordinary circumstances and questions. How does one bridge a relational gap of 50 years? Weeks following the reunion with my mother I caught myself in the middle of the routine of the day, thinking, “Wait. I HAVE met my birth mother.” Conversely my birth mother as well had this same thought, “Wait, I HAVE met my son.” That was the reconstruction process—the old narrative of “not knowing” colliding with the new narrative of “knowing.” In my initial phone conversations with my birth mother and my birth-father’s widowed wife (my new step-mother) I offered, “50 years is a lot to catch-up on. Let’s just talk about today and, when we want, we can visit the past.” In other words, I would share the ordinary home routines and then maybe drop in a question about the past. I took this queue from author and analyst Robert Johnson who wrote about “stirring-the-oatmeal” love. He explains,

Stirring the oatmeal is a humble act-not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To "stir the oatmeal" means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything.

A reunion of a separated child and parent or the orphaned-bastard child returning unexpectedly to its birth family are things of Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama. The only way for me to navigate the archetypal drama, and not get swept up in it was bringing the ordinary routine things into the fold.

A dream at this time confirmed this process of walking into this extraordinary experience with small, ordinary things. In the dream I am doing the routine of making a pot of coffee but now for my newly found family. As the coffee process finishes, I notice that only hot water has been produced—no coffee. Upon inspecting the coffee grinds I find that they have clumped together, with the water going around them instead of seeping through them. I realize I need to un-clump the grinds and not to rush the coffee-making process to produce this shared common cup. I spoke of this metaphor with my new step-mother, hoping it would serve as a vehicle for us to walk through our experience. Since our initial conversation, she began sending me a daily email about one fact of my late father, labeling them, “Coffee drip of the day.” Each e-mail has become a balm. Her titling it “coffee drip of the day” is a warm affirmation of relatedness. It reminds me of what Helen Luke expressed when dealing with the extraordinary in an ordinary way. She writes:

To do the ordinary thing in an ordinary way is easy. To do the extraordinary thing in an extraordinary way is easy -- both these kinds of activity are very common indeed. But to do the ordinary thing in an extraordinary way and the extraordinary thing in an ordinary way is quite staggeringly difficult and very rare indeed. It is the way of the saints.

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our unique and extraordinary planet

5/5/2019

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Response from Apple Farm writer Daniel Laguitton, Sutton, Quebec

a) The voices getting my attention for the last two or three years are the voices of the billions of creatures in the sea, in the air and on the land, dying individually and becoming extinct collectively in a context of callous indifference on the part of their killers. They are not voices, they are screams and cries and gasps and whispers of all kinds. If these creatures had a brain working like mine, they would probably utter: “God, why have you forsaken me?”

b) I have been seeking and listening to the voices of mystics like Meister Eckhart and of prophets like Thomas Berry. The former teaches me to recognize signatures of the Godhead in all creatures and helps me to admire the wisdom of the old Sanskrit aphorism “God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and is conscious in humans”; the latter clarifies in his writings the tragic impact of the industrial and materialistic trance that has engulfed mankind and convinces me that “the universe is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects.”
And since these questions emanate from Apple Farm, how not to mention the masterly voice of Helen Luke in her essay titled “Suffering” that concludes “Old Age: Journey Into Simplicity” (1987, Parabola Books). Oh my! I just fetched that book on a shelf to find a suitable quote from that essay on suffering, and I am flabbergasted to read its very last paragraph which I must now quote in its entirety: “When suffering breaks through the small personal context and exposes a man to the pain and darkness of life itself, the way is opened to that ultimate state of passion beyond all the passions of desire. There, being completely empty, as Christ was empty when he cried, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me,’ he may finally come to be filled with the wholeness of God Himself.” I am truly astonished to find again in that paragraph the voices I quoted above in section a)! Thank you, Helen Luke, for that wink of synchronicity!

c) The response that is wanted of me is to spread that awareness by all means at my disposal, spreading the word is only one of them, adjusting my daily life to minimize my complicity and enmeshment with the forces of destruction of our unique and extraordinary planet is a much more demanding response and yet so essential.

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Following the Brush: A Wabi-Sabi Meditation

4/28/2019

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a Zuihitsu by Marilyn Ashbaugh
Note on genre: zuihitsu is a form of prose-poetry that emerged during Japan’s 11th century (Saito). Translated as “following the brush,” zuihitsu collects observations, notes, personal feelings, and quotes in a seemingly random and associative manner, ‘not too close, not too far”, leading to surprising poetic expressions and insights. Or not. When cultures collide there can be collusion.
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Atlantic Coast, Florida

Life can only be understood backwards.  – Soren Kierkegaard

If you want to know the future, heat up the past.  - Chinese saying

Nothing Special*
My father never spoke of it directly. When I was a young girl, he told me to never confuse a priest with God. And never let a priest tell me I was special, for that would be a lie. Never be alone with a priest and never enter the rectory, ever, for that would be a sin. I was more afraid of my father than I was of any priest, so I followed what my father told me.

So when the new young priest with the big smile enters Sister Margaret’s eighth grade class to ask who would like to “babysit” the rectory phone, no one questions why the priest couldn’t answer the phone himself. All my classmates raise their hands. Everyone likes the handsome young priest with the big smile.

a flycatcher

dives for the butterfly

morning mass

*Published in Presence, issue 62.  Voted best in issue.
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Mountain Empire, Arizona

Pink Satin*

I open the door to an apparition. Seated in the small space is a ballerina. Her hair forms a perfect bun atop her head. She too wears a pink leotard with pink tights, the ones that fold open at the feet. Her one foot is completely wrapped in tape. Her hands lightly fold around her exposed foot as if she is caressing an injured bird. Her foot is raw and bruised and her toes are so misshapen as to appear broken. She briefly meets my eye with a look of determined composure, and then proceeds to wrap her foot.

My cheeks flush. I look away as I gather my pointe shoes and gently close the door.

on pointe

we tie pink satin ribbons

around each ankle

*Published in Presence, issue 63
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Maurer School of Law, Indiana

behind the black robe

a white robe. . .

a butterfly wanders through

looking on paper

for jurisprudence

cut to the bone

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Good poetry makes the universe share a secret.  –Hafiz
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All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident -Arthur Schopenhauer

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my soul has its own pace

4/19/2019

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Response from Apple Farm writer Marla Sarle who lives half the year in Michigan and the other half in Arizona.

Until I retired I rarely got enough sleep. My second grade teacher let me stay in and take naps during recess. The noise of a college dorm kept me awake with anxiety: Music theory class at 8:00 in the morning required rest. I occasionally cried myself to sleep. The exhaustion and anxiety of working years sometimes called for a little pill in the middle of the week so that I would have at least one good night’s sleep during the week.

Now retired, I live in Arizona for five months of the year. I go to bed late. 12:00? 1:00? I am a night owl. After so many years of being tired, I recognize that the world does not operate on my circadian rhythm.

I naturally wake up between 7:30 and 9:00. My husband puts coffee on my bedside table at 8:30. Sometimes it is cold before I realize it is there. An hour of thinking about and writing dreams, checking email, reading the news…I am ready to leave my warm cozy. I might put in a load of laundry, clean the bathroom, run Roomba in the bedroom--he vacuums under the bed!

Maybe by eleven I am ready to eat something. Is it breakfast or lunch? I do my daily 7 Little Words and the Washington Post Crossword Puzzle.

By now I am ready for the shower. The text comes: Am I ready to play cards down by the pool? I have to dry my hair and get dressed; I need fifteen minutes. My card playing friends have been on the go for hours. Their houses are clean; their laundry is finished (my laundry still needs to go in the dryer); their dinners are in the crockpots…

We play cards until happy hour or dinner time. We have fun and laugh a lot. But, I have had no reading time and have done no writing. I don’t function on their schedules.

I realize something else: I am a be-er. Many of my friends are do-ers. Their energy levels put mine to shame.
They love to go and do. I want to stay and be still.

And I also recognize: Two of my favorite people are ENFP’s on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I am an INFP. I envy my extroverted friends’ energy, their eagerness, their accomplishments. I love conversations of depth with them, but I cannot keep up with their activity levels. They seem to have it all and do to all—and to have it all together.

Sometimes guilt slaps me up side of the head. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I live like others? Why can’t I do what others do?
Why can’t I be on the go like others? Why can’t I accomplish like others accomplish?
But then I read, “What does it mean to live at the speed of your own soul?
(Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer)

The world may expect me to live at its speed, but I realize that my soul has its own pace.
I work at understanding what that means for me and honoring the regulating voice within.

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Being Faithful

4/10/2019

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Response from Apple Farm writer Jane Smith-Eivemark who lives in Hamilton, Ontario

Be faithful to soul. You may not know where you're going but that isn't the point. The real point is to open up to what is being asked of you. To be faithful as you are asked to move with a soulful perspective - one that is larger than one could imagine. One that makes sense in its own way.

Wolfgang Giegerich writes in many ways about the soul having its own logic.

We move toward something or someone thinking that he/she/it is this/that/or the other only to find out that we need to leave that vision behind through a negation of what we see and open to what really is. It isn't, though, that our journeys are insubstantial or not worthwhile if what we think "is" and it "is not". We learn, rather by this journey to this/that/other and the act of negation to know more of what really "is." We cannot learn otherwise.

Being faithful to always knowing that we reside in soul, in this sense, as distinct from soul residing in us offers a very different perspective in life. The soul is always thinking in its own way - not with rational logic, but with soulful logic, with a logic that invites us to a fuller expression of life.

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Let It Go

4/5/2019

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Response from Apple Farm Writer Barbra Goering who lives in Chicago, IL.

This winter the voice I hear is one that has spoken on a guided yoga meditation recording for many years:
If there is frustration, let it go. If there is anger against people, let it go. If there is criticism for yourself, let it go. Life has so many frustrations, small and large, and so many frightening problems and crises. If I use this mantra, it becomes the starting point for action. The “let it go” is not passive or even, necessarily, pacific.  It clears the way of the emotions of desire for revenge or hatred of oneself, emotions that can block my ability to deal effectively with a problem or person.  I have listened to this voice when suiting up to face small or large challenges, whether they are personal, national, or worldwide.

When I let go of the feeling of frustration, a new feeling comes in:  a peace that can allow contemplation of the source of the blockage.  When I let go of my fury against another, I can step back, assess the other and what the other presents to me.  When I let go of the criticism of myself—for feeling the frustration, for feeling the urge to exact revenge for a wrong, for my inadequate response to evil—then I can feel an opening for a new way of thinking and feeling to begin. I may be able to see the quarter-turn that Helen Luke writes about—the shift that opens the way to revelation.

The problems of this world, inner and outer, may remain knotty and difficult of resolution.  But the way can be cleared to face them, to strategize, to feel my true response deeply.  Then the hard work can begin.

Barbra Goering February 2019

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...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives. -Helen Luke, The Inner Story

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