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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.  
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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 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. 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:
What are your thoughts and reflections from the presentation, "Boundary-making as an Expression of the Savior Archetype"?
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 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. 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. |
...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 Archives
February 2021
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