Back in 2003, I wrote a little booklet called “Movement within the Course of Love Series.”  I have a certain casual attitude to anything I wrote that many years ago, a feeling that I have moved beyond what I might have seen back then. Yet it’s been on my mind lately. That notion of movement was a true one and I was writing of it because I was feeling it so keenly.

When my spiritual path opened up to me, one of the most amazing feelings of it was one of movement, or of “real” change. I felt, after a mere year or so, that I’d changed so much that I was hardly the same person. I saw that I’d been pretty much the same person my whole life. Until I began to see and experience in a new way, there had been no “real” change or movement.  Lots of things happened. There were periods of considerable growth, but it didn’t really matter. It was as if all of those things, those physical changes, those growth periods, had only been like painting a house. I kept improving on the same old self and, at the time, those changes felt almost as meaningless as weight gain and loss.

So I imagine that what I was finding so remarkable back in 2003, was a movement that kept happening and that kept revealing a truer “me” and greater truths about life, love, and the work of A Course of Love. I do remember that by the time I finished putting the booklet together, I was entering a descent that had maybe already begun when I started it, but I’m no longer sure.

What I was seeing was the “honeymoon” that A Course of Love originally swept me up into.  The maturing of the relationship that was like a marriage – where the blossom of first love fades and you see yourself and your marriage partner in a more whole fashion – in all the various moods and circumstances and where, in a sense, the “work” begins of “union and relationship.” Then I saw the next stage as a maturing, of having “the work” behind you a little bit, and of enjoying the more organic wisdom of the elder.

I also used the metaphor of undergraduate, graduate school, and entering a profession. In the undergraduate years you can think you know a lot more than you do and you’re really still following in the way of your teachers – not yet having come into your own. In graduate school this “coming into your own” is required. You have to choose your path and commit to it and bring fresh ideas – your own – to it. And finally I saw a parallel between The Dialogues and the time of entering a profession. You become one of the people “on the ground” living the profession you’ve chosen, and perhaps through professional associations, sharing in equality with your peers the wisdom you and they have gained through experience in the field.

It was easier to write this in 2003 than it is now when I can look back and see more of a cyclical pattern, a continual stream of these phases, a revisiting of being in love and beloved, a revisiting of the “hard work” times, and a fading in and out of wisdom or of calls to profess. Sometimes I feel as if the more I think I know the more I don’t know and I’ve come to welcome times of utter confusion even if they still make me uncomfortable.

At the end of 2003, after completing that booklet, I had one of my many “turning point” moments when I felt a call to solitude.

“Doing” still seems to take me out of the zone of contemplation a little too far. Before long, when I start doing, I feel as if I get mired in the details. I begin to long for a return to a different rhythm, one that’s like the difference between cleaning the house like a mad woman, and puttering about. I’m at my best when I’m in puttering mode, going at my own pace.

After some busyness, it takes me a while to shed the hyper-drive, to wipe myself clean of the details, and to begin again with a fresh slate (or state of mind and heart).

Transition times seem as if they’re about the same thing, but with greater longevity. You stand in the in between longer, neither here nor there, not quite able to disengage or to get your rhythm back. The music of the dance is changing, you can feel it, but you don’t yet know the beat. You feel awkward and totally lacking in poise. You want to move, but you can’t quite catch the swing of it. You might want to partner up, but can’t find the partner who’ll make it a smooth glide across the dance floor. The longer the transition time lasts, the more you feel you have let things slide and ought to be doing something other than what you’re doing. As much as change is longed for, it’s hard to hang out with the transitions that bring them into being.

I send these musings out into the internet stratosphere, in one sense as warning, in another as a hopeful if cautionary tale, an encouragement to hang out where you are, to appreciate transition if you can, to honor gestation, and to be aware of the cycle.

The grape vines that have been making their return this summer have just reached the trellis that separates yard from woods…and so have the Japanese Beetles. They glow iridescent as I walk through the passageway. How long have they been there? Last week they were still in hiding from me as I watched the progress of the vines. Now the telltale lacy leafs seem as if they couldn’t have gotten that way in only a week.  Was I blind in my zeal to see the vines once again cover the trellis, or was there a change so sudden that I could not have observed it sooner?

I feel, once again, that the vines reflect my life.  It’s always so disconcerting to
suddenly see what I didn’t before.  Then I wonder if I was blind and what it was that might have blinded me, or if it is simply impossible to see … until suddenly I do…which often as not leaves me wondering what else I’m not seeing!

I don’t mean to be obscure with this metaphor but what I’m saying is obscure. It seems the nature of revelations to reveal precisely those things that were obscured.  At times it seems to happen slowly. The blindness gives way to the obscurity, which is like a hint at something beyond what can be seen. At other times, there isn’t even the knowing that anything is obscured until suddenly it appears and then the feeling of having been blind comes, and the wondering at why, and at what else is hidden.

This isn’t a big conundrum or anything like that, just something that came to mind today as I saw the beetles and the “sorting out” of various blind spots (both known and unknown to me) in one picture frame.

Yesterday, my grandson told me he wanted to be with me all the time – even when I go to work.  As a grandmother, my heart just about burst for reasons of delight and also for reason of a sort of apprehension. An hour later, when I asked if he wanted to go do something, he said, “No, I want to stay here with you.” I then asked if he wouldn’t like it if the two of us went to his cousin’s house to play, and he was eager to go. Still later he didn’t mind at all when I left him there on his own for a while.

I use this example because of the sorting I’m doing in that one area of my life where I’m only just beginning to see my clinging to the way things were even as I attempt to move on to a new way. I’ve sought to create an environment where Henry wants to be with me, and I’ve sought to let go of the imbalance of being together so much that other heart tugs are left in the dust.

Almost everything in my life feels like it’s in this same stage of one “love” tugging against another “love” and I guess that while I’ve wanted each situation to fall in one direction or another, what I’m being shown is to hold both loves in balance.

I feel that bliss must be when you don’t know you don’t know and when you don’t know you do know.

The in between wondering could be the “between and amongst” of those relationships that have an uncanny ability to present us with, and to at times give us the grace to hold, the creative tension of change.  Change’s fluidity keeps showing us our blind spots and bringing, at the same time, (or soon after) greater clarity, and that bit of wondering…

What else is it I’m not seeing?

I don’t propose this as an active state of wondering, but I’ve seen that as soon as I’m convinced that I understand something in just the perfect light, I have the side of my head whacked – kind of like when you’re a kid and think you know better than your parent. “Don’t get so sure of yourself,” is what that internal whacking seems to say…don’t be so sure you understand…don’t be so sure you know the way to go…don’t be afraid to change course mid-stream. It’s not at all about doubting myself. It’s about being present and listening and seeing as truly as I can at the time. That’s all any of us can do, isn’t it?

Like all of us, I’ve got some good friends who don’t really understand the kind of experiences I’ve had, where they’ve led me, or how they’ve changed me. I don’t know about you, but every once in a while there is an occasion that causes me to try to share something from the spiritual dimension of my life with such a friend, and I do so with varying degrees of success.

When A Course of Love was being published, I didn’t know how I would explain it to my more practical friends, and when one of my first opportunities came to do so, it was revealing.

I owned a coffee shop at the time. We called it a gift café for the spirit and sold good books, stones, jewelry, and incense as well as coffee, pastries and sandwiches.  The shop sat on a corner in the central corridor linking St. Paul and Minneapolis, in an area of old industrial warehouses that had been converted to artist lofts and political offices.  The clientele from the near buildings was fantastic.

The shop was near enough to the University of Minnesota campuses that it was frequented by a few students, by old friends I had worked with there, and one seriously old friend – a man who’d been a good friend of my first husband and who had remained my friend since my teens.

He came in one day just after A Course of Love’s publication and we sat down for a minute. I wanted to tell him about it, but didn’t want to weird him out as he was a real logical, earth-bound kind of guy. So I started explaining it to him as being about a way to move from head to heart. I said, “You know, I really needed that movement.”

He said, “You?” with a look of disbelief on his face. “When were you ever in your head?”

All kinds of things flashed through my mind in that moment – like a review of our whole history from being “want-to-be-hippies” who gathered in my future husband’s Portland Avenue apartment like groupies around his fantastic musical talent, to the subsequent melt-down experienced after our marriage and the reality of a baby and responsibilities hit us, to all of the non-logical, “not good for me” decisions I made in the years that followed.

I felt kind of embarrassed and challenged and didn’t know how to explain myself. To my old friend, the “head” was the mind and the mind was logical. The mind caused you to make good decisions, to take care of business, to navigate the practical world with success. At all of those things, especially during the time we were closest, I had been a failure. I also could see that he thought being “of the heart” was the way I’d always been and was the cause of my many poor decisions and the floundering I did in my early twenties. To him, being of the heart was being led and undone by emotions.

I can’t remember now where the conversation went from there; only that it was short! But it was kind of a good conversation to have had in those early days. It got me wondering about what I actually meant and how to convey it.

I’ve achieved no eloquence in this regard and I remain baffled on the finer points, but the aim of wholeheartedness helps a lot. Not too many people confuse wholeheartedness with being emotionally driven.  It’s a distinction that’s hard to describe but being wholehearted might conjure up notions of maturity and emotions honed by the wisdom of the heart, or even simple realness as opposed to posing or melodrama.

Jesus said, “Love gives reason its foundation,” and I like that. The reason of the practical mind devoid of love’s foundation is what I’d say has caused many of the problems we’re facing in the world today.

But it wasn’t my practical mind that A Course of Love came to release me from.  I probably was led by emotions that fed my mind a bunch of material to use against me.  When my friend made that comment, I could see he didn’t know how much my mind had tortured me as I’d gone about life, not so much even making decisions, but simply falling from one circumstance to the next and then being full of recriminations and those “figuring it out” thoughts that get you nowhere, especially after the fact.

I felt most often like a very loving person who gave and didn’t receive, which in looking back showed me my deficiency came from not letting myself be known.  Relationships were my downfall because I didn’t face my own needs and desires within them and so didn’t really share of myself in a way that allowed the intimacy I longed for.

Relationships still test me, which is why existence in union and relationship, as well as the practice of dialogue feel so essential.  For me, as for many of us, bringing the expansiveness gained from spiritual experience – which is so often a solitary and inward movement – outward into relationship, is where attention needs to be given.

What “moving from head to heart” means and feels like is probably different for each of us and I could, as usual, go on and on.  I was simply remembering this story today and thought I’d share it and invite your sharing.

Life doesn’t pause for themes. It’s the wonderful thing about life, and about a blog. You can get going on a theme – like one of “care of the heart” or of “dialogue” – and yet at the same time you can jump ship  – anytime you’re moved to a new topic. (And even discover that all themes merge together.)

So today, I was thinking of a friend of mine, Richard, who has an issue with his brain.  Something is going on, but exactly what is not yet clear. I’d told him on the phone about Jill Bolte Taylor’s “Stroke of Insight.” If you haven’t heard of her or her book by that name, she was a 37 year old brain scientist when she had a stroke that affected her left brain. It took her eight years to fully recover. This wasn’t the encouraging part that I wanted my friend to hear. The encouraging part was about how she discovered nirvana.

My friend said he was spending a lot of time on the internet so I went out looking for videos from Jill. The first one that came up was this TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

As Jill spoke of the brain, I had two things that I was relating to: my friend with the brain issue, and A Course of Love. Briefly, here is how she described the brain’s two separate hemispheres:

Right Brain

Here and now

Information as energy coming in from the five senses

Pictures

Connection – connected as one human family, perfect and whole

Left Brain

Linear, methodical

Past and future oriented

Picking out the details, categorizing them

Associating, projecting

Feeling separate

Jill’s talk illustrates this in amazing ways. She says, “Step to the right of your left hemisphere.” We can choose the side of our brains that we spend the most time with. The way of A Course of Love is one of “stepping to the right.”

Broadening your view from the specific to the general is one of the most difficult tasks of the curriculum.  It is easy to see why this is so when you recognize how bound your thinking is to specifics.  Again this is why we call on love and the hidden knowledge of your heart.  Your heart already sees in a manner much more whole than the perception of your split mind.  Even your language and images reflect this truth, this difference between the wisdom of your heart and that of your mind.  Your heart may be said to break, but the image that these words call forth is of a heart cracked open, not of a heart in separate pieces.  Your brain, on the other hand, is separated into right and left hemispheres.  One side has one function, one side another.  While your brain and your mind are not the same, your image of your mind and what it does and does not do is linked with your image of your brain.  Let this image go and concentrate on the wholeness of your heart, no matter how you view its current condition.  Be it wounded, bleeding, broken or full, it rests in wholeness within you at the center of who you are.

It is from this center that truth will light your way. 7.18-19