Image-ination

I’m taking a course at CMU. It’s been a great experience. Two of the main reasons that it has been so good is that it’s a graduate level course with only 11 students and that it’s about spiritual formation. What this means is that as we discuss what spiritual formation is and how we can understand and facilitate this in our lives. Through this we are getting to know each other quite well. With each week I enjoy the different perspectives and people more. People share their lives, hopes, and even a few fears. What has happened in this class reminds me of what one of the authors we are reading says about language and words. If you’ve read my blog in the past you probably know that I love words, love to find out what I’m thinking as I write, love to create something new and different with words.

Peterson writes:

“There is an enormous communications industry in the world that is stamping out words like buttons….Implicit in the enormous communications industry is an enormous lie – that if we improve communications we will improve life. It has not happened and it will not happen. Often when we find out what a person “has to say”, we like them less, not more.” HA! I laughed when I read that…because I could instantly see the truth of it…we have all seen it.

He writes further: ” Words used as mere communication are debased words. The gift of words is for communion: a part of my self enters a part of your self. This requires the risk of revelation, the courage of involvement. At the center of communion there is sacrifice. Working at the center, we don’t use words to give something but to give up a piece of ourselves. Communion is not as much interested in using words to define meaning as to deepen mystery, to enter into the ambiguities, push past the safely known into the risky unknown.”

And when this happens things seem to breathe more deeply. This morning as my kids were getting ready for school we were all using a lot of communication…except for Graeme…he was all about communion. It took me a while to hear him as he was using a lot of ‘tude in his communion. Sorting out the ‘tude from the message can be a little tricky at times. How do we respect our children, listen for the pieces of themselves that they are offering and at the same time teach them to respect those around them with tone and choice of words. It’s easy to shut someone down or out when they are very, very, very, grumpy.

But Peterson says something about this as well: “We who are made in the “image” of God have, as a consequence, imag-ination. Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future. For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we see reality whole, in context. “What imagination does with reality is the reality we live by”" and tag to this another quote from him, “In every visit, every meeting I attend, every appointment I keep, I have been anticipated. The risen Christ got there ahead of me. The risen Christ is in that room already. What is he doing? What is is he saying? What is going on?”

When I think to use my image-ination, when I look for Christ in my home, my kids, my vocation as a mother, suddenly I breathe easier (as one of my classmates shared in class last night)…I remind myself that Christ was in my children’s dreams as they slept, he was there as they opened their sleepy eyes in the morning, as they interact with me in the business of the morning. When I pay attention to this, energy flows in a new direction, new things are created, communion occurs…even if someone calls me mean or expresses disgust at the meal I have prepared (sometimes this is me hahaha).

Peterson, and many others, have said that faith is dead unless it lives within the grittiness of live, in the dailyness of life…when I take all this head knowledge that I’m learning from the course, and allow it to come to life in the realness of a Thursday morning before school…it transforms life…a new present is created, a new future is created. When something is practiced it goes from head to heart to action to communion. Cool.

Deus intimior intimo meo

St. Augustine said that. It means “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.” I love how Jon O’Donohue pairs this thought with one from Meister Eckhart that basically is what the Tao says about the Divine. Our ideas of God are only fingers pointing in the direction of God…and as soon as you try to define God your description becomes a like a finger pointing at the moon…in that when you describe the moon, you haven’t captured it, or defined it, or really explained it at all…in fact when you attempt to describe or represent it in any way you have actually diminished it in your own mind and those with whom you are conversing because now you’re only seeing a slice of the huge reality that is the moon. You’re looking at it from one very narrow perspective. And so it is when we try to describe, or capture in our imagination, God, the Divine, the hugeness of the Power that the universe is and dwells within we only seem to be looking at a finger pointing in the direction of the moon…or in the direction of God…and who God is is even further away in our understanding than before we started pointing. Holding Eckhart’s “God becomes and God unbecomes” in tension with St. Augustine’s “Deus intimoir meo” draws us a little deeper into the mystery and intimacy of God. The quote that follows is from the podcast on Speaking of Faith called “The Inner Landscape of Beauty”which is an interview of John O’Donohue.

John O’Donohue: I feel that there are two ways that you must always keep together in approaching the God thing. One is, and this is what I like about the Christian tradition — and this is where I diverge a little from the Buddhist tradition even though I love Buddhism as a methodology to clean up the mind and get you into purity of presence. What I love is that at the heart of Christianity, you have this idea of intimacy, which is true belonging, being seen, the ultimate home of individuation, the ultimate source of it and the homecoming. That’s what I call spirituality, the art of homecoming. So it’s St. Augustine’s phrase, “Deus intimior intimo meo” — “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.” Then you go to Meister Eckhart, and you get the other side of it which you must always keep together with it, where in Middle High German, he says (in German) that means, “God becomes and God unbecomes,” or translated it means that God is only our name for it and the closer we get to it the more it ceases to be God. So then you are on a real safari with the wildness and danger and otherness of God. And I think when you begin to get a sense of the depth that is there then your whole heart wakens up. You know, I mean, I love Irenaeus’ thing from the second century, which said, the Glory of the human being — “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”

John O’Donohue was a poet and writer that equated beauty with God. This is common in pop-spirituality. However, the fact that he brings together this concept of  ‘God is beauty’ with the God of intimacy, of a God who knows you, who sees you…really does make the spiritual journey one of  “a real safari with the wildness and danger and otherness of God”  Again, holding these two aspects of God together brings depth and awe to the whole thing. It gives me a better understanding of that ancient language of “the fear of God”…oh yeah you start to see the fear as a real smart move when you recognize how wild, dangerous and other God really is…that coupled with ”this idea of intimacy, which is true belonging, being seen” really makes your heart wake up…gives it a jolt of awareness, of wariness, of wonder and joy. I think it is human to lean one way or the other…we want to believe in a God of intimacy and somehow this seems in conflict with the wildness, and unpredictability and dangerousness of God…if we go with the second perspective it seems difficult that the God that created a world that includes tsunamis, war, cancer, poverty etc. can also be a God of intimacy and of Love.  It’s hard to hold the two perspectives together.

I loved listening to O’Donohue  speak about spirituality, about God, about beauty on the Speaking of Faith podcast. My mom purchased his book, Anam Cara, for me on the weekend (I finally picked a birthday book…long story). I am really looking forward to reading it. He talked about so many things in that podcast that resonated with me. He talked about the beauty of language, of music, of humanity and the natural world. He talked about friendship. His book title Anam Cara is Gaelic for Soul Friend. His poetry is profound and beautiful. He read many of his poems during the podcast. One of my favorite is below…he wrote it for his mother when his father passed away. It’s the kind of poem that I wish I had known during grieving times in my life…but I have it now for ones yet to come. It’s a brave and hopeful poem. It’s called Beannacht, which is Gaelic for ‘blessing’.

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

 a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

 may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

 may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

There is a slideshow of photos to go with him reading this poem on the Speaking of Faith website.

Sadly, John O’Donohue passed away last year a few months after he did the interview. He was young, only 52 when he died. Thankfully, he left us his writing to bring us closer to the beauty around and within us.

House Boat Adventure

This July we spent 4 days on a houseboat on Lake of the Woods. Doug McKim, our guide, drove us on the houseboat for 4 hours to the sweetest little bay on Lake of the Woods.

 

On one side there were rugged looking cliffs and the other three sides were lush forest.

 

It also had a long narrow stretch of beach.

In the water you could see hundreds of crayfish scuttling about. The kids were out with the nets within moments of tying up.

 

I don’t have a picture that accurately represents how very many crayfish the kids caught. The bucket was reminiscent of the lobster tank at the grocery store. They crayfish came almost as big, too.

The adults did some fishing (well, except for me which is why I have no pictures of it) and lounging on the upper deck. It was sunny and most days were pretty warm. Out beyond the bay we could see huge whitecaps and were quite happy to be in our little cove.

When they went out fishing they got tossed around a bit but were pretty successful. On Falcon they go for two hours and maybe catch one…here they came back the first day and had caught 16! We ate fish daily and it was so delicious…even Robyne, who isn’t a big seafood fan, liked it. Doug, our guide, came out once to take people out fishing and also did a fish fry for us. Sadly my picture of him cooking didn’t turn out (dang manual settings). 

 A favourite activity was to spread the fish guts over the rocks in the cove and then watch the gulls and pelicans entertain us.

The pelican may be an ‘ugly’ bird but so fascinating to watch. And so graceful in the air. We had four keeping us company by the last day and the way they floated and moved together was beautiful.

It took until our last full day for the kids to decide to climb the cliffs. They were so excited when they got to the top…must have been an impressive view. Some of them made the trek more than once…Graeme did it 3 times.

In the evenings we sat by the fire and had smores and fun.  One thing we commented on a few times was that it was very nice to be in a place where no one cares how loud your kids are and once you want it quiet, there is no one else making noise. The freedom was awesome. We both have a measure of this at home as we both live in the country, but we usually don’t holiday at home.

 I would love to do this again next year! I highly recommend it, and our guide was great. He was very helpful, accommodating, and fun to hang out with. We’d definitely go back to the same guide/houseboat. I’ll just tack on a few of my favorite shots…the rest are on Flickr.

Cliff Jumping

At Falcon Lake there are some jumping cliffs…and you can jump from any height up to about 8 m. There is a rope swing at one spot. Our kids looooove going to this place. It’s in a bay and often sheltered from the wind. They’ll play on the rocks and paddle about in the water for a looong time. It’s very pretty with the rugged cliff walls and the jack pines…a great place to anchor your boat and relax for a while. Every year the kids get a little bit braver. This year they’ve been jumping from the rope jumping spot without lifejackets. Ali did this once last year together with her dad…this year the older two are jumping from here with glee. Jordan’s content with the lower jumps for now. The jump is between 4 and 5 meters I think…high enough to make my stomach do a flip when I jump…which I haven’t for a very long time…and I’m oh so fine with that.

Taste and See

I love the imagery of the bible…it has so much texture and depth and can evoke such strong emotions or reactions. But then I love words used well, and the bible is full of beautiful words…be they stark, or compassionate, or anguished or joy filled…the words of the bible are full of words that are pregnant with meaning.  Whenever I see a sunset that has this tangerine color it almost makes my mouth water. I’ve seen some pretty stunning sunsets living in the prairie and all, but this color is my favorite because it looks like a tangerine, or a peach just waiting to be tasted. And it often brings to mind the verse in Psalm 34:8 

 An education course that I took, back in the day, opened my eyes to the power of representative language and how a good metaphor could make or break a piece of writing. I had been through high school English courses and University English courses (in fact English was my minor) and never had anyone taught something so, well, elementary in many, many years of school. And the prof was a real arrogant sort who blustered and waved his arms about.  And in very disdainful and contemptuous tones tried to teach a bunch of university students about writing. I already had my degree and was back to work on a post-bac and was less than impressed with his approach. Which was really too bad, as sometimes your delivery can really get in the way of your message…and we’re all familiar with those sorts of scenarios.  I remember him exclaiming that a piece of writing without metaphor (similes were apparently not as essential) was like eating cardboard and that every piece of writing (I guess that includes parking tickets lol) needed metaphor to effectively reach a reader. Now, I wasn’t averse to metaphor, I did, after all, like poetry….which is chock full of imagery. But to push this so hard seemed a little obsessive. Well, anyway, each of us had to produce a portfolio of writing (and of course, we all knew we had better include a lot of metaphor) and so I set about writing poetry, short stories and a few other things and along the way started noticing metaphor in the language around me…no big surprise as I’m sure you know how when you buy a new red car (for example) suddenly you’re amazed at how many red cars there are on the road. Or if you’re expecting a baby you suddenly realize how very many other people are growing babies as well…it’s just a human quirk. Anyway,  I was reading my bible one day, in the Old Testament, I started to notice all the imagery and was amazed at how much the language brought power to the message, brought emotion, brought understanding. I have never read the bible in quite the same way…that was a real gift. And this awareness comes up all the time…even in my thoughts as I look at the sunset and think that the color is so delicious I can almost taste it. And if you go back and read this post you’ll see many, many metaphors that I didn’t plan or try to embed…they’re just part of being human…to look at life through comparison…to think about how this is like that and that makes it fuller, deeper, gives more texture. When you read and look for metaphor you’ll be amazed at how many metaphors are within the text. When you do that though it can get downright distracting, and sometimes it’s best just to let language affect you at a deeper level…especially poetry, story, and lyrics. And don’t you think that how our minds work, how we use language, how we craft our writing is what makes reading the bible possible at all…makes faith possible…without the ability to use language in this way we really would be unable to appreciate the world as richly as we do.

 

 

Photos of Mom…it can happen!

Sadly, here at the cottage I do not have the software on Ric’s laptop to upload the photos from Ali’s camera or my old Powershot.  This is sad for a silly reason…but I must say I’m quite pleased with myself. In the past I have shamelessly paid my children to pose for photos…as they are pretty sick of me wielding a camera (can’t imagine why lol). But now this holiday I’m trying something a little different and I wish I could upload the photos to prove it. I am now paying my children to take photos of me…HA! The photos of me are usually few and far between as I am generally holding the camera. This is something I have lamented as we all know that memories last longer if you take a picture. And, of course, since I am in so few pictures my children will think I did not exist!!! Now that I’m paying my little angels to photograph me I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the results. I’m only paying for photos that I approve of and so many get deleted…but it makes them work a little harder to get a crisp, well exposed, flattering shot of their mother….not bad, not bad if I don’t say so myself. And since the better I like the picture the more I pay I’m pretty happy with the keepers . Now I can say…see, I did exist…and I looked pretty darn good hahaha. And along the way my kids are learning a little about focus, dof, exposure, framing, line, focal point, negative space, color, perspective etc. etc. etc.  Really, it’s a win-win .

Shifting

A year ago (or so) I was staring at a huge mountain that I needed to climb before we could leave on our time at the lake. And here I am again staring at a huge pile of packing, errands, laundry and tidying that needs to happen in the next 24 hours.  However, things have changed in this past year. If you know me well, or have read my blog, you probably know that I cope with depression and have for many, many years. It is hard to admit this because it makes me feel like a broken human. That there is something wrong with me that makes me ‘less than’ all those well adjusted people out there.

 

In the last year, however, I have learned a few things. About 18 months ago I started weaning off my medication. I wanted to test and try some of the stuff I had been reading about…and there is a LOT of information out there on how to overcome depression. At first, those types of things worked, but slowly my body and my mind sank down…and this time I went lower than I ever remember going. 

 

New aspects of depression, which I had never before dealt with were my nemesis.  I stopped being able to nap during the day. This was a way that I could turn off my brain for an hour and truly rest…most people have a way of doing this…mine may not have been the healthiest choice but it’s better than some. However, I became increasingly angry that I couldn’t sleep to escape.

 

And I became anxious. I had dealt with anxiety before, after my accident, but this was worse in a way. Worse because I didn’t seem to know why…there seemed to be no reason for my anxiety.  More disturbing to me, I couldn’t control my thoughts, they had a life of their own and they were dragging me deeper and deeper…if I couldn’t control my thoughts how would I change my thinking to be less ‘depressive’?  

 

I was deeply afraid and two things were driving my fear. One was my sense of failure in parenting. I felt most anxious when I didn’t know what to do with an issue and of course, until you learn how to deal with something, life keeps dishing it up for you to try again.  Knowing this, I kept searching for understanding…but felt as though my wheels were just spinning in the mud.

 

The other thing was that I was going through a paradigm shift in my faith. Ever since my accident, and my ‘near-death’ experience I had been seeking to understand more fully and more deeply who this God was that I believe I met in the garden…tangled in a tiller. This God who blew open my head and my heart with a blast of Love that was more powerful than a hurricane, more beautiful than creation, more gentle than a feather floating down into my being. This God was so much bigger and more real than anything I had ever imagined. And since that event my paradigm has been shifting and changing as I saw more and more how I can’t put God in a box. And I desperately wanted a manageable God, a cozy God, an understandable and comprehensible God. I was on a hunt for truth…still am…but Mystery won’t reveal itself so easily…that’s part of what makes God so, well, God like…that our Creator is mysterious, unmanageable, unboxable.  And that made me really mad, too!

 

So I was working hard on two things that I felt no progress in…and felt a failure…and things were dark. And so, I went back on medication. And it took many months to start to feel normal again. Looking back on this year I can see I’ve learned oh. So. Much. One of the most important things I think I learned is that, for whatever reason, my body chemistry needs some help. It is, in a way, broken. With advances in science and technology I can see how, one day, my chemistry may be improved without medication…but for now this is my best option and I am grateful for it.  However, it seems I needed to learn this lesson the hard way, by living through the consequences.

 

In spite of this, there are things I have learned about my faith, my God, my world view that I don’t think I would have learned if I had been on medication.  But those things don’t really reveal themselves while we are deep in depression…they reveal themselves as you emerge into light…on the edges of the forest as you walk towards the open light of better well-being you can begin to learn the lessons from the dark of the forest. In that forest, it is too dark to see, to understand. For that you need some light filtering through the trees, lighting the path.

 

The parenting journey has begun to lighten as well. For that issue I can again say that the lessons learned in the dark were very, very hard. I stumbled and fell over and over. And when you are only doing this to yourself it’s not so bad, but it is so scary when you feel that you are dragging your children with you as you fall. Again, the lessons came slowly, and my children have been my loving and patient teachers. Giving me the same lessons over and over until I finally started to learn what they are here to teach me. Miracles have happened along the way that I am so grateful for. I feel the light on my face as I walk out of that forest also…and I know that there is lots left to learn and I am so grateful for my children and all they have taught me and continue to teach me…and I’m sure will teach me all my life.

 

And so here I am, at the bottom of a mountain of tasks. I’ll make it up there…I always do. But last year the top of the mountain was shrouded, and cold. And this year the sun is out, and the view will be fantastic, and I am so looking forward to this family adventure that we are about to embark on.

 

Things may look similar from the outside. I still have procrastinated like crazy as the picture shows my jumbled mess of a staging area. I still have so much to do before we leave. But inside things look so different. I have learned so much. I have so much more hope. Life is good.

Flip Flops

She actually created this the same day she saw the wedding invitation…it just took me a few days to get it uploaded.

Amazing Wedding Invitation

Thanks to my friend Monica for posting this…check out her blog at musings and ponderings or her tumblr site. Love reading her blog!

My daughter, Ali, is really into stop motion stuff…she has scads of stop motion stuff with a clay person…check it out.

She’s got tons of this stuff. I just produced a tiny little snippet of what’s stored on my hard drive. She’s also done a whole bunch of stop motion using playmobile figures…pretty funny stuff, too. After watching the wedding invitation with me this morning I have an inkling she’ll be working with clothing next. Can’t wait to see what she creates!

What can happen right after hearing “I’m bored, mom”

Kids amaze me. How they can come up with something creative and entertaining to do in almost any situation. Too bad the ideas don’t always fit with the circumstances (ie. tag in the china shop). Over the past few weekends at the cottage they have devised several ‘games’. Here you see them working together to put a potato chip on a fishing line (no worries, there was no hook). And then the fun began…fishing for siblings:

Seriously, a chip and a fishing rod. It’s brings to mind the image of the kid playing with the pot and spoon as the new drum sits beside them. And another game…try to hit your siblings with water drops flung from a duster: 

Then, just this past weekend we were invaded by hordes of flying insects…not sure what they were. Some said they were baby fish flies, others said male mosquitos…they blanketed the boathouse, the dock, the grass and there were clouds of them in the air. At first no one wanted to go outside…but eventually the kids came up with games for this situation as well. One was to run down to the dock and sit in the swarm for as long as possible…and they would start settling on you pretty quick. The other was scoop up as many as you can with a stick and burn them in the fire.  Yuck and double yuck!

Our kids can be pretty rambounctious and some would say they are down right wild. I know not everyone appreciates their… shall we say…’spunk’ and ‘passion’ but they rock when it comes to creative play.  I love that about them.