Mari’s Blog
From tangled to woven
No matter where you are, no matter what concerns you still hold within your heart, no matter what questions are emanating from your mind, they will be met with a response. T4:12.5
There’s been something churning in me the last week or so. Do you know what I mean? Have you experienced being in this zone? When something—neither a thought nor an idea—is in you like a niggling, a low murmur akin to the sound of distant thunder, or a rumbling, as of a truck two blocks away.
I can trace the coming on of this “not quite there” feeling, back to when my friend Christie came to visit, and when it felt like a day to sit in the cabin. In the last few years, since the house
is often empty, my friends and I more usually share our visits there. In this way, the cabin has begun, once again, to feel more like a hermitage. A place of solitude.
As Christie and I walked out, I said, as I almost always feel compelled to say, “Excuse the mess.” And she said, “What mess? I love it.” As we passed the disintegrating fence and the rusting lantern hung from a tree, she told me, “They look like pictures from Maine.” And then yesterday, likely with that prompt, I took my camera out with me, and found my favorite photo to be of a dried and twisted grapevine. I know the beauty in this disarray. It reflects something that is passing in and out. As if mimicking my surroundings, what most often occurs is not a cognitive turning of the wheels of thinking that create structure, but a churning down-under that causes structure to fall away.
The harmony in the wild, the decomposing, the not yet formed and the in-formed that is losing its form—feel like existence in a blended state. That’s what my modest terrain reminds me of, very subtly, like a whisper come to replace (or compliment) the rumble.
Because there is, at times, a charge that exists between beauty and disarray—in the world and in myself. The recognition of the difference between the tangled webs I can weave with my thoughts, and the undoing that makes a spiral 
from a twisted knot, or a space that reveals the heart of the matter.
Then I understand about the movement from the entangled to the woven-together, that it is the next step, the movement from viewing what’s on the surface to seeing the depth beneath, and the blending of the two.
The joining.
It’s taken me a long while to accept it all and not to call some of my thoughts by names that I consider slurs, like “ruminating,” and others of them by names I elevate, like “contemplation.” I am still discovering the subtlety of judgment. But I am making these discoveries.
If “I” can enjoy the coming of a discovery such as this, and not malign the tightly wound places as the untangling occurs, I know each of us can cease to evaluate our discoveries with judgment. We can hold it all together gently, compassionately, and allow ourselves to keep going deeper with whatever process takes hold of us.
When the deep is reached, the way of getting there has already fallen away.
Take delight in these surprises. Laugh and be joyous. You no longer have a need to figure things out. Surprises cannot be figured out! They are meant to be joyous gifts being constantly revealed. Gifts that need only be received and responded to. T4:12.6
This is receiving
Here is something I wrote as I was joined by Jesus in that way I call “receiving.”
“Thank you so much for the slow/fast arising of that response, the moment of waiting and the feel of the words coming before the words or the readiness of my hands to type. . . the moment of blur between. . . is it me or is it you . . . then the thankfulness for You. Thank you for joining with me.”
Even if you don’t hear words in the way I do, don’t you at times, feel this blur, or this slow arising?
Another day I wrote:
“Why do I linger and linger here, Lord? It is to be with you and to be with me, to be one with you and with me. It is the same. And what I need to live and breathe freely. To linger with you. My “true self” is one with you! You are the weight taken from my shoulders. You open up what is blocked in me.”
Even if you don’t hear words in the way I do, don’t you at times, feel the desire to linger? The lightening of the weight of the world, or of a decision, or the opening of what is blocked in you?
Yesterday I was reminded of these words:
You do not need to believe in the words nor the potential of the exercises to change your life, for these words enter you as what they are, not the symbols that they represent. An idea of love is planted now, in a garden rich with what will make it grow. C:3.9
These words enter you as they are, not the symbols they represent.
This is receiving.
Arise, all who have hearts!
The first union is union with the Self. This union with the Self is resurrection or rebirth. All are capable of this life-giving union. All are capable of birthing the Self. T1:9.7
I spent a somewhat unusual Mother’s Day (having celebrated with my mom yesterday), enjoying a simple brunch at the home of my youngest daughter and her husband. All my kids and grandkids were there and we talked inside a house still cool, and then went out back while the kids that could, jumped on a trampoline nestled beneath shade trees. Going out to our cars later, we were hit by the first mid-80-degree day full force.
No, spring is not over and I’m still enraptured by first flowers and sunlight laying shadows over freshly cut grass, and the sweet and pungent smell of its leavings. But today, as I remembered Mother’s Days of my past, days when family gathered to plant my mother-in-law’s garden, and my fill my mom’s flower boxes with pansies, I got to wondering about the more distant past and the origin of the day. I found several references to a declaration made by Julia Ward Howe that I’d never heard of before.
Julia Ward Howe – an abolitionist best remembered as the poet who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic” – initially worked to establish a Mother’s Peace Day, dedicating it to the eradication of war. This is her call to action, sounded after the Civil War (in 1870). I have taken much of the below from this site: http://www.plough.com:
“Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
“From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
“As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.”
I so appreciate finding this and the expression of commemorating the dead before taking counsel with one another to find the means of living in peace. Such counsel is surely as needed now as then.
Yet, even the simplest celebration of Mother’s Day can have some sense of the under-recognized demonstration of the way of women. We have some experience with birthing the new. The new we’re called to birth now isn’t exclusive to women, but neither will it happen without us, without the way of Mary, or without, as Jesus says, the coming together of the ways of Mary and Jesus “like intertwined circles.”
The way of Mary represents incarnation through relationship, demonstrating the truth of union, the birth of form, and the ascension of the body, (see below) But we also hear:
“All are capable of birthing the Self.”
This, to me, is the reminder of spring—the continual birth of the new—the unendingness of this rebirth. The way life changes us so that we’re never exactly who we were yesterday. Our call is to appreciate this birthing and to extend it into the creation of a new future.
Jesus asks a question of us about this birth of Self. He asks, “What then of the necessary act of giving and receiving?”
And he answers, “You have long waited to receive what you have thought could come only from some other.” T1:9.8
This has certainly been true for me. I didn’t always realize it, but I have now.
And so, Julia Ward Howe’s “day of counsel,” impresses me as being much like our call to dialogue. It is part of a long line of “counsel” that we’re given in A Course of Love, the conclusion of which is to come together in dialogue. This is not a “waiting on some other” but a “joining.”
What continues of this Course is its dialogue. A.46
In delineating the ways of Jesus and of Mary, we aren’t hearing of a division, but of needed differences.
The way of Jesus represented full-scale interaction with the world, demonstrating the myth of duality, the death of form, the resurrection of spirit. The way of Mary represented incarnation through relationship, demonstrating the truth of union, the birth of form, and the ascension of the body. Both ways were necessary. Both ways were necessarily represented or demonstrated. Both ways were represented and demonstrated by many other individuals as well. The way was a choice. The main ability of the individual is the ability to represent what God created, the means of coming to know—which is Christ-consciousness—through individual choice or will. Christ-consciousness is your will to know, to be, and to express. The time of Christ, and the second coming of Christ, are expressions meant to symbolize the completion of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth as a means of coming to know. D:Day17.10-11
Division and “sides” (as we see so easily in politics and not often as easily in our own lives) disallow dialogue. To come together, even with all of our differences, is crucial, and beautiful. It’s a form of wholeness and completion. It’s the way of peace and of new life.
I hope you have had a wonderful “coming together” today, and that it continues . . . and continues . . . in many and varied forms!
Encouragement
Do you need to be other than yourself in order to navigate your daily life?
What you are being shown here is that you do not.
What you are going to realize from this time of seeming difficulty is an end to difficulty and the growth of your ability to do whatever you do peacefully and to be who you are in any situation in which you find yourself. There is no time to wait while you learn, or think you learn, the qualities that will allow this. This is the point of movement, being, and expression coming together. The point of convergence, intersection, and pass-through. This is it! Right here in your life as it is right now. There is, thus, no call to be discouraged. This is not delay, but what you might think of as trial by fire. Be encouraged rather than discouraged that you are able to embrace this dialogue and remain in your life. Realize that this is just what we work toward! This difficulty will pass through you as you allow for and accept where you are right now and who you are right now. DDay6:30-31
I was sitting at my dining room table writing thank you notes to the hosts of my recent trip to Florida, and after a while, it being so quiet in the house, I started hearing what I thought might be a mouse. We live with woods behind us and get mice from time to time, and even a red squirrel got in once. So, I was aware of this and kept listening as I wrote. When I was done with my notes I got up, and walked—literally with an ear cocked toward the front of the house. Maybe it was in the closet or the fireplace? Finally, I realized that, with the front window open, the sound might be coming from outside. I was still thinking critter, only now maybe a woodpecker…until I opened the door. As soon as I did, I could immediately see the source. Strange as it will sound, the muted tapping was coming from a block away and a roofing job being done.
These are among the surprises of spring. You’re so unused to open windows that, for a while, you can misjudge.
You’re so unused to the open window, so unused to the thirty-five shades of green that line your street, so touched by the budding of the fruit trees, by the mint patch making what feels to be a miraculous comeback—that you’re in awe. You love the dandelions because they’re yellow and the spring catalogues that speak of bluebells and goldenrod, lupine, and violets 
and morning glories.
The new growth and fresh air and even the onset of fine-weather-projects, make spring . . . encouraging.
This got me thinking about all the encouragements of this year so far—of which there’ve been many. I mean, I’ve already had a new grandbaby this year. That’s about as encouraging as it gets.
But my time in Philadelphia in February started my year in a spectacular way. I was feeling tired and ready for a break, but also so excited for the invite to speak at the Center for Contemporary Mysticism, that—as I was preparing for that visit—which I planned to be my last of the year, I laid in bed one night, asking myself, “If this is to be the last gathering of this year…what do I really, really, want to say?”
I got such a stream of answers to this question that I turned on the light and started taking notes.
When I read these at the Center, I got, I think for the first time ever, applause in the middle of a sentence. You know—sure you get applause at the end of a presentation, but this was a spontaneous eruption like the gurgle of a spring.
What I wanted to give was—encouragement.
I started by saying, “I want to give you every encouragement and every permission to be who you are.”
I said, “I want to tell you to do what you want to do, rest when you want to rest, say yes or no as suits you, and to know that it’s okay and you don’t have to feel guilty.”
I thought of everything that delayed me, and the first thing that came to me as what delayed me was other people’s ideas of who I should be. So, I also said, “Don’t let anyone else tell you who you should be, or how to feel, or that you don’t need to feel as you’re feeling, or that you’re not doing it right…or any of those things…especially not for your own good. I want you to truly feel free to follow your hearts, and to not let anything coming from outside of you hold you back, and to not feel that something on the inside that isn’t pleasant is a mistake, or like it doesn’t matter, or that your past matters too much, or not at all; or that you can pretend to feel good, or bright, or peaceful or happy when you’re not.
“Love is about the end of pretending, and hiding and avoiding and being unkind to ourselves. We can be true and we can trust that we’re on the heart’s path and not wander off to seek being someone other than we are again, because nothing else is going to do what coming home to yourself can do, what loving yourself can do, what getting to know who you are can do, what expressing the love that you are can do.”
Somewhere in there, I got that applause.
I didn’t quote directly but mentioned lots of encouragements Jesus gives us in ACOL too, encouragements that make it really clear that he’s not worried about us over-indulging ourselves—but denying ourselves; not concerned with us giving ourselves freedom—but with denying it. He’s not asking us to be disciplined—but to liberate ourselves from what restricts us. He’s not asking us to give away our power but to claim it. He says, Release yourself from the prison you’ve been in and don’t give keys to a new jailer. (see D:4)
And now I’ve just returned from a visit with friends in Florida, and my friend Paula wondered if we might not have a “Conversation with Mari” at a center there. I said, “Sure.” And even though I didn’t say a word about encouragement this time, I felt it going out from me, and I felt it coming at me like a rabbit- foot-charm laying itself up against my cheek. I felt these soft brushes of encouragement floating around me from everyone I met, and from the manatees that circled my kayak while I was on a lagoon.
In dialogue with a little group just after I returned, I had the sense of an idea being born, right there, between us as we spoke. An idea that had no intention and wasn’t invented or invested in ahead of time—but that was born of “us.” That was encouragement!
Surprisingly, new life springs up without our encouragement . . . and gives encouragement. . . to us. I hope you will accept this little springtime encouragement from me!
Now . . . new life
Let your heart be open to a new kind of evidence of what constitutes the truth. Think of no other outcomes than your happiness, and when happiness comes deny it not, nor its source. Remind yourself that when love comes to fill your heart, you will deny it not, nor its source. You do not need to believe that this will happen, but only to allow for the possibility of it happening. C:7.23
The gift of redemption was the gift of an end to pain and suffering and a beginning of resurrection and new life. It was a gift meant to empty the world of the ego-self and to allow the personal self to live on as the one true Self, the one true son of God. The gift of redemption was given once and for all. It is the gift of restoration to original purpose. T3:5.7
Ever since writing my last dismal post on taxes I’ve been wanting to write a cheery spring one: one that says, “You can go on to the glory of spring and love the world . . . even when you must do taxes.” But I was not motivated to do so until today when I noticed that all through Holy Week my journal has been filled with the word Now:
“Now I watch a squirrel by the wood pile pick up a hunk of the bread and climb a slender tree to eat it. Then, for the first time ever, I watch as he drops it, and must climb back down to retrieve it. What a kick that is—to see something I’ve never seen before. Ah…this is what I live for!”
On another day:
“Now a heron drapes its way past my plot of sky. A moment later a junco sits atop the fence, head bobbing this way and that, and then drops over the edge, falling away from me rather than toward me. Then he’s back without warning, his two little legs looking so tender beneath the roundness of his underbelly.”
“Now seeing my first purple finch of the season.”
Now and now and now. That’s what it’s been like.
The first spring rain came. There was a little here and a little there so that I could go out with some garbage to toss, or stand on the stoop and drink in the smell of wet cement that I so love. And then another short rain burst would arrive and this repeated several times as I made ready for the washing of my windows. And then suddenly, the work done, the sparkling windows brightly reveal that the apple trees now have buds. It was like a time lapse film of the passage of time.
Another day I write from the cabin window of the focus it takes to see the gradients of light and darkness before me at the pre-sunrise hour, and then that “there are little strips of light blue in the almost black sky and it’s such a wonder to not have seen them sooner. So like with life! And the Course!”
I’m always feeling surprised by our Course. It’s a now I see, and a now I see, and a now I see . . . over and over.
In a flash I realize that this “holy” Holy Week is inspiring my devotion in a new way, without, in a sense, my former dedication to the church or the past.
Since then I have been graced with the charm of open windows, and I love it especially in the living room when it blows the sheers and they move like they’re breathing, and float in and out like butterfly wings.
And yet I did return to church for my parish celebration of Easter, and I thought of my dad, who I first started remembering
intensely after noting that the lilac bushes were blooming (the first of the bloomers, even before Holy Week). I found myself feeling how much like him I’ve become. At the end of his life he found his greatest happiness outside the window…literally. He had a picnic table filled with bird seed sitting on the deck directly below his kitchen window, and he could sit there so happily, for hours and hours, watching the birds enjoy their feast.
Dad cried easily too. I know his eyes teared up over the beauty of birds and the moon and even a greeting card. He was so easily touched by life.
So I’m sitting in church with bulletins and hymnals laid out on the three chairs next to me awaiting my daughter and her family. Mom had hoped to come but as usual lately, was too tired and had watched Mass on television. As I sat waiting without her, I noticed all the other “waiters” and my eyes teared up each time they were greeted. There was a dad, whom I could just tell was a little surprised as well as pleased with the arrival of his young-adult daughter. She joined him with a quick kiss as she slid past him, looking young and hip. There was a young couple coming with their children to join their parents and the delighted hugs exchanged between the grandparents and their grandchildren. Scenes like these repeated over and over. Then my own family members arrived, Henry (my grandson) first, and he slipped into the chair beside me as I welcomed him with the least possible fuss I could muster, but tears still stung my eyes. As I moved to let my daughter and her husband pass, I caught a glimpse of a man who often sits behind me, and he had the same look and smile on his face watching me, as I know I had watching the other “waiters.”
Throughout the Mass my eyes and nose continued to tingle with tears. To me there’s nothing more dear than a child’s folded hands. But then when the collection basket came around and Henry (only 10!) refuses to have anyone contribute for him, and takes a bill out of his pocket? That about did me in!
I felt the blessing of Easter and of Spring and of the end of waiting. I felt the Now of it all. I felt the end of waiting—but not the end of expectancy. “Jesus Christ is risen today” we sing, and I know the risen Christ is in us. We are no longer waiting. But we are still as expectant as we are with spring…for each Now of New Life.
Hesitate no longer. Let your willingness exceed your trepidation. No longer wait to be told more before you accept what you have already been told. Do not wait for a grander call before you accept the call that has already sounded in your heart. Let this be the day of your final surrender, the day that will usher in a new day. D:5.22
Do not turn your back on the hope offered here, and when new life flows in to release the old, forget not from where it came. C:7.23
