Blog Posts

how I discover my truth

3/6/2020

Thank you to writer Mary Theis,

How do we find our own truth? For some reason the book “Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry” came to mind as I considered this question. This book was first published in 1970. The title intrigued me and I kept the book around the house for years – I don’t know that I ever read it.

The book is meant to demonstrate ways we can help children be in touch with their creativity. I expect this idea would work for adults too.

Why did that book come to mind as I considered truth telling? I have the fantasy that the teacher, in order to engage the children’s interest, suggested they talk about lies and lying.   It could be a lie that they told, or that had been told to them. Then they were encouraged to notice the images and feelings that this exercise evoked in them and only then begin to write. What a marvelous, non-judgmental way to help children see themselves and some not so pleasant truths about the world and human nature.

I believe this process is related to how I discover my truth. Sometimes I lie to myself and then listen to and feel the response the lie provokes in me. I see a connection between lying and creativity – maybe it has to do with allowing ourselves to look at and play with our lies.

I notice that when I am doing reflective writing – especially if I am hurt or angry – I can be blaming and accusing. In the process of writing, I hear myself and discern the deeper truth of my own shadow qualities. This is a creative process where I can learn my own truth and therefore follow the adage: “This is above all: To thine ownself be true, And it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not be false to any man.” (Hamlet, Act I Scene III, William Shakespeare)

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SEEKING TRUTH

2/28/2020

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Thank you to writer Marla Sarle, retired counselor/teacher, member of Apple Farm board of directors

Poor Pilate. His most famous question has made him quite notorious. “What is truth?” has almost become a cliché. But, I think, it still resonates because it implies that we haven’t got a clue…which can make us very anxious.

We want to know. We want the security of knowing. It was once suggested to me that fundamentalists have poor self-esteem, the result of not trusting themselves. They want someone else to tell them what truth is, the answers to life’s deep questions. And they want black and white answers with no ambiguity. They want to be off the hook. They don’t want to be responsible for the consequences of thinking for themselves. They are, then, likely to never find their own truth. It takes courage to search, seek out, and step into one’s own truth. We set upon a hero’s journey, and it is risky, carrying the fear of, “What if I am wrong?”, “What if I make a mistake?” The bigger mistake might be refusing to jump into the fray with other truth-seekers, the result of which might just be a very boring life!

Scott Peck sums up the courageous soul: “Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.”

Carl Jung speaks to the need for truth to become our own through inner experience. He says, “But the most beautiful truth…is of no use at all unless it has become the innermost experience and possession of the individual. Every unequivocal, so-called ‘clear’ answer always remains stuck in the head and seldom penetrates the heart. The needful thing is not to know the truth but to experience it. Not to have an intellectual conception of things, but to find our way to the inner, and perhaps wordless, irrational experience…”

And from Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “Those who would develop consciousness pursue all that stands behind the readily observable: the unseen chirping, the murky window, the lamenting door, the lip of light beneath a sill. They pursue these mysteries until the substance of the matter is laid open to them.” It is a life-long journey of seeking what is before us, but has not yet become fully our own experience and reality.

Attention to symbol, the Jungian path, brings together what is before us, what we already know, with what we do not yet know. Symbolic knowing is archetypal. It is beyond time and place. It connects the eternal with human experience. According to Caroline Myss, “the symbolic mind is a fountain of strength and truth.”

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The Only Things We Had

2/21/2020

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Thanks to Marilyn Ashbaugh, a poet whose work has appeared in international anthologies and journals of Japanese short-form poetry. She is a member of the Apple Farm writing group. She writes: I recently attended a Florida poetry festival and am delighted to report that American poetry is alive and well. There was so much truth shared in the prose poems read that I sat in awe. We all did. We were awe struck by truth. So below is my riff.

The Only Things We Had

flip flops and polka dots
bikinis and baby oil
sprinklers and kiddy pools
purees and steelies
shooters and thumpers
rednecks and greasers
hard boiled and over easy
duck tails and teeter totters
smoke rings and cokes in bottles
five fingers and detention
banana seats and butterflies
borrowed bikes and joyrides
Kool aid lips and sucker punches
hopscotch and holes in our socks
twinkies and tang and
T R U T H
all jujubeded and slo poked

Marilyn Ashbaugh

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The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth

2/15/2020

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Thank you to writer BARBRA GOERING, retired lawyer and member of Apple Farm board of directors

Since at least 1189, and to this day in Anglo-American courts of law, a witness formally promises, by oath or affirmation, to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”  Nevertheless, courts, and society at large, have often not been content to rely on such promises.

The concern with truth-telling, the anxiety over lying witnesses, goes back much further than 1189, of course.  Slaves in the Roman Empire were routinely tortured as witnesses; we have all seen dramatic reenactments of trial by combat and trial by ordeal; and on the Continent, as late as the eighteenth century, judges followed an elaborate process of judicial torture in an effort to guarantee that truth would be told.  As with later instances of torture by police, or in times of war, those efforts to achieve truth and real justice were a failure overall.

Our time is not unique in being awash in lies, then.  Disinformation is nothing new, as the historic efforts to assure truth telling attest.  We may feel exceptionally buried in untruth and fake news, but we’ve been grappling with this problem “since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.”

I’ve been thinking of the struggle to see truth on many levels of life.  The topic is a hard one, vast and difficult to pin down.

I do have one observation:  the more I seek my own inner truth, the more I am able to discriminate, mark and recognize truth in others.  The work to seek our own reality has no end, really.  But on the way it can open us to what is real and true around us.  I may never definitively find my true North; but I am convinced that the effort I am making on my inner journey, taking me closer to my true self, will enable me to perceive truth in the world around me. If each of us makes the sincere effort to achieve our own truth, we can contribute to clarity in our common weal.

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No Place Like Home

2/1/2020

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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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...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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