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Chaos to Meaningful Order

2/27/2021

1 Comment

 
FROM APPLE FARM WRITER/ARTIST, Kathy Stiffney

This is a series of images I took as a painting developed. They provide an example of working with seeming chaos , allowing (with inner guidance) the prime material to direct movement toward meaningful order.  
Picture

Picture
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The House

2/20/2021

1 Comment

 
FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Jo Marie Thompson

The House
​

You walked for years to this house
knowing your work awaited,
yet mysteriously unable to arrive:
the map lost,
the door chained,
the price too high,
the neighborhood in rubble.

Stomping past promises, dreams
plans, family, betrayals and suicides,
assaults, careers and callings,
animals, chances, books & statues,
deities, death and more death, gurus, rivers
poets, wars, medicines & metaphysics,
canyons & their trails, the striving activists,
mathematics, horses aplenty, inheritance,
marriage, the state of New Mexico.
Even wholeness did not hold.

Finally, though possessing
no carpenter skill,
you began to build.
Stone after stone,
rafter on rafter.
Feathers rained down. 
Toads watched,
glossy eyed and silent
from the slick logs of the
trees you had to fell.

At last, the doors were hung
the windows tight and
the stove in place.
You stalked to your desk,
snug by the wall,
alone in an empty, airy room.
The Work could begin.

Day followed day, season on season.
The cool air tangible inside,
gaze fixed on paned windows while
outside, fantastic scenes coarsed on --
arisings & vanishings, rivers & drought,
flames of the rarest sort
consuming impossible treasure,
Gods at battle, ladders to nowhere,
everything happening and
nothing taking place.

And still waiting; still and waiting.
The Work did not come.

Until one broad day in the
countless teeming of days:
a quiet breath, a turning,
and there in the far corner --
your very own likeness
and yet wholly Other
in a shimmer of wings and
a shrouding of cloud, shrugging
and with a weary smile: 
“Now, may we begin?”

Jo Marie Thompson
Kevala Retreat
January 28, 2021
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CHAOS AND CREATION

2/14/2021

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Joan Yoder Miller

What do we want to say from Apple Farm about CHAOS AND CREATION?

Shortly after the Paris bombing in November 2015 Apple Farm closed for the winter months.  I wondered how we might stay in touch when the world seemed so full of fear.  So the winter writing project launched in early 2016 was "What do we have to say from Apple Farm about fear?"  Each winter we write -- story, prose, poetry, images.

To stir the pot for our thinking about CHAOS AND CREATION, a folktale from China:

Repaying Hun-tun's Kindness
    Long ago before the beginnings of the universe, there existed nothing except unformed chaos.  At that time, Hu, whose name means "sudden," was Emperor of the Northern Sea, and Shu, whose name signifies "brief," was Emperor of the Southern Sea.*  Emperors Hu and Shu were friends that were separated by great distance.  They met halfway between their two domains in the territory of Hun-tun, Emperor of the Center, whose name means "chaos."  Emperor Hun-tun was hospitable to these two friends making it possible for them to meet as often as they wished. 
    During one visit, Shu and Hu said to one another, "Without the Emperor of the Center, we would be unable to meet this like this.  What might we do to repay Hun-tun's kindness."
    After much thought, Shu and Hu said to each other, "But of course!  Despite his wonderful qualities, the Emperor of the Center is different from the rest of us.  He lacks the seven orifices that are needed for seeing, smelling, eating, breathing and hearing.  Let us bore the necessary holes in him so that he too can have the seven features like the rest of us.  This is the way we can repay his kindness."  Hun-tun gladly agreed and gave permission to have seven holes bored into him. 
    The next day, Shu and Hu began boring the Emperor of the Center at the rate of one orifice a day.  By the sixth day, with six openings in his body, Hun-tun was appearing quite similar to them.  Then, on the seventh day, Shu and Hu began boring the last hole.  But much to their shock, as soon as their work ended, Hun-tun could neither move nor talk.  Hun-tun, whose name means "chaos," was dead.  And at that very moment, as Shu and Hu stood together and watched in awe, they also saw the beginnings of the creation of the world and all its inhabitants.
​

*Although the words Shu and Hu combined (Shu-hu) means "lightning," it is thought that this was broken down by Chuang-tzu in this myth to denote the truth that when the illumination from light strikes chaos, it leads to the creation of life and the restoration of order.
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Suffering and Social Class

9/29/2020

1 Comment

 
​It was a pleasure to read from Helen’s essay on suffering during the Thursday evening group.  In her essay, Helen says:  “There  was no guilt involved in being born into this or that social class, but nowadays we are beset on every side by false guilt which is inverted pride."

I was interested to find the following quote from Robin DiAngelo just the day after Thursday night group on Suffering:
 
  • "I am sometimes asked whether my work reinforces and takes advantage of white guilt. But I don’t see my efforts to uncover how race shapes my life as a matter of guilt. I know that because  I was socialized as white in a racism-based society, I have a racist worldview, deep racial bias, racist patterns, and investments in the racist system that has elevated me. Still, I don’t feel guilty about racism. I didn’t choose this socialization, and it could not be avoided. But I am responsible for my role in it. To the degree that I have done my best in each moment to interrupt my participation, I can rest with a clearer conscience. But that clear conscience is not achieved by complacency or a sense that I have arrived. Unlike heavy feelings such as guilt,  the continuous work of identifying my internalized superiority and how it may be manifesting itself is incredibly liberating. When I start from the premise that of course I have been thoroughly socialized into the racist culture in which I was born, I no longer need to expend energy denying that fact. I am eager—even excited—to identify my inevitable collusion so that I can figure out how to stop colluding! Denial and the defensiveness that is needed to maintain it is exhausting."  DiAngelo, Robin J., White Fragility (p. 148 and149). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

1 Comment

Boundary-making as an Expression of the Savior Archetype

7/27/2020

6 Comments

 
What are your thoughts and reflections from the presentation, "Boundary-making as an Expression of the Savior Archetype"?
6 Comments

Noble Truth

4/21/2020

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Noble Truth
 
Truth visits some days
twirling her hair and
gracious in her half smile,
but flinging wide her cloak
to concede what lives within: 
Suffering--
that dry and rattled leaf,
pale eyes cracked and
blue as aged porcelain,
weeping a pale mist.
 
Maybe you feel her wintry hand
brush the clenched fist of becoming
and sense the easing of a cramping grip.
 
Maybe you waken, then,
in this holy perplexion
where the letting go runs
to both ruin and salvation,
and you find yourself not
marvelous or divine, but
a shade more delicate,
a trifle more worthy,
in your servitude
to Suffering.

    Buddha’s four noble truths are…  the truth of suffering, the cause of suffering (clinging), the end of suffering (relinquishing), and the path to the end of suffering (the noble eightfold path).  Buddha's teachings of non-clinging and suffering have always dogged the central musings of my life, Helen's essay "Suffering" tops my list of favorites (though I'm sure that's true of many here) and a calligraphy of Joan's hangs near my bedside and serves as a reminder on anxious nights: "Demand Nothing; Refuse Nothing - all Opposites are of God." I've always had a feeling that if one can get close to understanding suffering, truth is not far behind.

 Jo Marie Thompson
 February 20, 2020
at Kevala Retreat for Apple Farm
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What Do I Feel?

4/20/2020

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BY Karen Branan
 
     What do I feel? Not any one thing for very long. On waking, wonderment at that dream of the pink baby girl who spoke with wisdom which I do not remember. Wonderment is followed by intrigue as doors inch open to possibilities in that dream. Intrigue is immediately interrupted by affection as Spike bounds upon my bed and nestles into his customary cradle between my blanketed legs – another baby, this one hungry for hugs and tuna.
     Awake now, the Out There seeps in, bringing a frisson of fear. What now? What today? What new White House idiocies? Who stricken? What learned? What closed?
     The pack-rat has also awakened with her worries, her lists, her inventories. What is enough? What is too much? And the mother comes forth as well with her need to nurture. Who needs sanitizer? Apples? Tylenol? A walk? A poem?
    What do I feel? Hope, yes, because the glorious work I have done for so long goes on and is, in some strange and inextricable way, enriched by this crisis, this plague, which while shutting us away from each other shuts us into ourselves and plants seeds for tomorrow, then brings us together through technology to plan and build and know that a new world is aborning at the very moment the old is being destroyed.
    I have no word for this feeling, but know I have been preparing for this time since I was that tiny pink baby of whom I dreamt and know that somewhere deep inside new feelings and wisdom await that will carry me to this coming world, to this entirely new life.
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Truth

3/18/2020

2 Comments

 
Thank you to Apple Farm writer Jane Smith-Eivemark, analyst from Hamilton, Ontario

Thirty years ago I worked for a group called the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA Canada) in Toronto.  I was marketing events for (what we called) leading edge thinkers.  Among such thinkers was Riane Eisler, who is best known for her book, The Chalice and the Blade. Meeting Dr. Eisler was a powerful experience on many levels – namely, her speaking to our profound need to see things differently and to act in ways that are possible, as well as necessary, in the transformation of the world. My introduction to such thinkers helped me to more deeply appreciate the need for my search for truth. My search for truth took further shape in (what is affectionately known as listening to the living human document) clinical pastoral education circles where I trained, as a clinician, and teacher in that model of education. Here I discovered more of the truth of both the patient’s life as well as my own as a professional offering pastoral (spiritual) care.

In short, on a vocational level, the tension of truth finding is my guiding star. The tension of the social and the religious streams that I knew/know in my work in spiritual care led me to open another door in my late 40s – the work of being in analysis and the study of depth psychology as I prepared to be a Jungian analyst. At this time when I am transitioning to be named a senior analyst I live within this rubric of the social and the religious tensions in new ways.

I realize that there are measures of truth telling. The questions of: “What is it that is being told and who is the one who is listening?” are central to the process of discernment.  There are interpretations of life in which a person declares that he/she/they have heard the truth. In days gone by, for example, I held that love was the deepest measure of truth and now I am no longer sure of that. In fact, I lean toward the work of D.H. Lawrence and his imperative to go deeper than love.  He writes these words in his poem of that name:

There is love, and it is a deep thing
but there are deeper things than love.
 
First and last, man is alone.
He is born alone, and alone he dies
and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.
 
Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives
alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy
and alone.
 
Love is a thing of twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.
 
And underneath the great turbulent emotions of love, the
violent herbage,
lies the living rock of a single creature's pride,
the dark, naif pride.
And deeper even than the bedrock of pride
lies the ponderous fire of naked life
with its strange primordial consciousness of justice
and its primordial consciousness of connection,
connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire
and the old, old final life-truth.
 
Love is of twoness, and is lovely
like the living life on the earth
but below all roots of love lies the bedrock of naked pride,
subterranean,
and deeper than the bedrock of pride is the primordial fire of
the middle
which rests in connection with the further forever unknowable
fire of all things
and which rocks with a sense of connection, religion
and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness
and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial
imperative.
 
All this is deeper than love
deeper than love.

 
The depths are where we find truth according to Lawrence. I see this as people die in hospital.  I see this, also, in peoples’ attempt to hang onto life in the name of love. As a result of my work I feel my attraction to Lawrence’s sense of truth in greater depth than is knowable on many levels. It is in the depths where we don’t know in a rational sense but do know in other ways. We see in the work of our best thinkers and/or leaders – in any discipline – this profound embodiment of truth.

Within the Jungian world I look to Wolfgang Giegerich, a post-Jungian analyst nowadays. Giegerich writes about the logic of the soul in its search for truth as we live in soul. Our work, according to Giegerich, is to know that we live in soul and by listening to its demands – no matter what they are – we are living the truth.

​In short, truth is highly subjective for individuals and society. It remains to be seen how we can find new myths that sustain the integrity of finding the truth in our fragile, beautiful and dangerous ways of living on both individual and social levels.
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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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