I awoke before dawn, ventriloquist lips
Blossoming haiku; funbled light, scribbled,
Fell asleep again, mind-gathering photos
For my spring collage.

Woke next to grey morning, seeing
Eyes I knew were closed, wide with love
And trust, smiling in at me where I sat
Enwrapped in my tea ceremony.

On the third awakening, a playful sunbeam
Tugged at my lids. I teased resistance
For a heartbeat, then arose,
Eyes turned back again
Into the world.

 
RAD 3/31/09
Photo credits
 

Let's see, I think for me this question can best be answered by responding to each of the hidden questions individually. Here goes then. This is going to be like a Thursday Four. :)

Are you an introspective sort?
Always have been.

Can you predict how you'll behave in certain situations?
Yes, but it's something I'm working on. To my way of thinking, it's better not to be able to predict my behaviour. That way, I'll be sure to act from the heart rather than the head. I find that if mind isn't allowed to get in the way, heart has the perfect response for every occasion. And remember, even if a situation looks like same-old-same-old, it is always new and therefore rates a new, heart response.

Do you know what you love, or what your calling is? Again, I'm splitting this into two questions:

Do you know what you love?
I love peace. Not peace in the sense it is often used in the world, of forcing individuals or nations to (pretend to) get along, e.g., by figuratively bashing their heads together, or by manipulating them into some sort of pseudo-peace that ends up never being more than a temporary cessation of outright aggression. The peace I mean is the one that comes from integrity, from me living out of exactly who I am, and you living out of exactly who you are, so that when we meet it is my heart meeting your heart meeting mine... Heart-meeting, not mind-meeting, not the kind of pseudo-meeting that results when we meet while holding onto projected images we have of each other. No ulterior motives and no agendas, spoken or unspoken.
Yeah, okay, let's not say peace. Let's say, integrity. I love integrity.
Living a life of integrity does not necessarily result in peace in the world outside the individual. It does mean the individual is at one with herself, acting out of her centre.
Peace in the external can only be actualized between beings with integrity.
By integrity, I mean (not exclusively) wholeness, authenticity, guilelessness, ...

Do you know what your calling is?
There have been times I thought I knew what it was, in terms of living in this world, in this lifetime. Those times have always led to dead ends, to stuckness. In order to get unstuck I had to back away from my so-called calling.
My calling is to simply be. In every breath, in every moment, in every action and interaction, to be 100% genuine so that the purest in me can reach the purest in you. My calling is to do everything I do (and that includes breathing) with integrity. Ah, there's that word again. I guess these two parts fit into one question after all. :)

 

 
[Photo source]

 
RAD 2009

 
I am neither Christian nor Jew ..., so wrote the poet Rumi many years ago. Like Rumi, I don't consider myself as belonging to any particular religion, or faction, or really, group of any sort. Nor do I consider myself an activist, although I been called a radical on the basis of views I voiced in the past.

Early last year I began a process of withdrawing, through action or circumstance, and not always consciously, from much that had previously driven and occupied my life and attention. There was a feeling of endings, of something passing, giving way perhaps to a new way of being. And so the cleansing process began. Over the ensuing months I let go of, or changed my way of dealing with, a great many things that had held me: family issues; allowing people around me to develop new strengths by finding their own way; not doing for others in the same way; not being a solver of problems and situations that were not of my creation; all while still caring and offering underlying support, and doing whatever I felt led to do, if I felt led to do anything. I am not Atlas, it does not serve me or anyone else to carry the world on my shoulders. Helping its citizens and members of my communities to help themselves has always been, in principle if not practice, more my style. I have come now to a place in my own life where I feel, as Gandhi once put it so eloquently, that the best way for me to activate or set in motion change in the world is for me to be the change, to live it, and to let it radiate by osmosis to every corner, through every nook and cranny, of the world.

My letting go process also included unsubscribing from almost every newsletter and e-letter I had subscribed to over several years. I still hold a few subscriptions, I follow my heart in this process of letting go. And sometimes publications I had thought I'd stopped still pop up in my inbox. I watch this process with interest, mostly I put it down to synchronicity. I don't feel at all closed to anything I had subscribed to, and if one I thought I was done with pops up, I pay attention. Perhaps it's a single issue, perhaps a single sentence, phrase, word, that calls out to me. But my premise is that if it pops up, there's something for me to notice.

This morning, what popped up was the latest issue of Jewish Voice for Peace, and it was the subject line that arrested my attention: Passover. Next year, in a united Jerusalem. Oh yes! With all my heart!

So, again following my heart, I post the short letter below, not to convince you of anything, not to persuade you to do anything, but just to show you, if you want to see, what I saw and what gladdened my heart and increased my sense of that which is possible in the world. And it is a possibility. Peace will not come as a one-time, big-bang event. It will come little by little, as heart by heart opens itself up to change, to the possibility, desirability, necessity, unavoidability of change, and essentially, to each of us taking up the challenge of being the change.

The letter follows in its entirety:

Dear Ruth,

Every year we sit down by the Seder Table with friends and family and ask ourselves, Why is this night different from all other nights?

We ask this as we follow ancient rituals and create new ones, designed to remind us of the bitterness of slavery and the sweetness of freedom, and we consider how all of this might be relevant in our world today.

Some make the connection to the Israeli occupation; others hold it in their hearts, but do not bring it up for fear of the response they might get.

This year should be different. This year all of us should ask and listen as well.

Why is this year different from all other years?

Because there is a new government in Washington that opens the door, ever so slightly, to a diplomatic agreement.

Because there is a new government in Israel, with a hardened heart, that intends to close that door shut.

Because so many Palestinians have lost their lives or their homes in the last year in Gaza.

This year is different. It will be different if we make it so.

We have asked Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, co-founder of Shomer Shalom and a member of JVP's Advisory Board, to reconsider the 4 questions in light of the struggle for a just peace in Israeli and Palestinian. The result is this powerful one-page Haggadah insert that you can download, print out and read at your Seder.

We can't imagine a more powerful place to start asking questions.

On behalf of all of us at Jewish Voice for Peace, we wish you a Chag Sameach!

Happy Holiday!

Jewish Voice for Peace

Download the passover insert as a PDF here.

 

Peace is possible in the world, I am convinced of it, I am overwhelmed with the joy of it.

Thank you for reading,

Ruth
 

Well, I looked out my window earlier and saw these little fluffy somethings floating from the pear tree branches down to the ground. Too small for petals, and anyway, the tree is still in bud, blossoms not opened out yet, although getting closer every day. Turned out, what looked like fluff was bits of the husks falling away, and you know what that means---the blossoms are pret' near ready to pop. Hurray!

Having satisfied my curiosity on that point, I turned back to my work and spotted a small black speck against the white page. I was reaching to brush it away when it scurried away as fast as its eight little legs would take it. Yup, it was the teeniest, tiniest spider, not much more than visible really, to the naked eye. But so beautiful in its perfection.

A 96-year-old woman with AMD (age-related macular degeneration) who I visit biweekly to help with computer work, resewing on buttons or stitching up a tear, or generally being eyes for her, has recently joined the same volunteer association I volunteer through. She visits less-abled peers who live in her complex or nearby, and makes good morning phonecalls to others who still live in their own homes but need to be checked on.

RAD 4/17/09

 








Notes:
1. The raga begun in the video is continued in "Santoor Bansuri Duet at Carnegie Hall 2" and "...3", available from the Replay window as well as from the links I've provided here
2. Image of bansuri obtained from Wikimedia Commons

 


RAD 4/25/09

The way I see it, there is no higher, no lower, no this, no that, with something I might call *me* sitting in the centre as guru/buddha, or off to the side, head bowed low in deference, ears lapping up golden nuggets falling from the tongue of some supposed highest form of beingness.

But somewhere within the heart-whole of this being that is not-it, not-me or -I, not-this or -that, not-anything and not-nothing, there lives a deep knowingness that has nothing whatever to do with knowledge, and a timeless sense that in the same breath there is nothing to know and nothing that is not known, nothing to want and nothing that is not available.

A separated self can never have enough, ask enough, know enough. It always wants more, is never satisfied, never feels complete. But right here in the now, where all is one, there is contentment. No, that's not quite it---it's difficult, in a world where duality rules with such an iron veil, to find the words to describe what that world would be like with its veil torn away. But let me try...

For contentment to have meaning, there has to be, or has to have been, discontent. Not only that, but there is implicit the feeling that discontent is still a possibility. Off the seesaw of duality, such opposites do not exist. What exists is balance, and even balance begs the question: balance between what (opposites)? Balance, I think, is duality's attempt to define oneness. So, what there is, is isness. That's about it.  In isness, there is nothing to think about, nothing to compare anything to, and so it is impossible to think in terms of better/worse, richer/poorer, higher/lower, etc.

So, to answer your question, I think if the higher self wants something for me today or any other day, it can only be this: wholeness, integration. And for itself, a deep longing to not be thought or spoken of or treated as a separate entity, because to the extent that it is, the sense of separateness will prevail.

  


It is late April. The pear tree, old and proudly rugged in her natural, unpruned state, does not care in this moment whether her fruit, if any, will be sweet or hard, soft or bitter. She does not concern herself with what she has no way of knowing, like “will be,” like whether there exists time past this here-now moment. What she understands, and could write volumes about—has written volumes about for those who know how to read her—is simply this: a lifetime of now moments.

There was a now last summer when she experienced the loss of her dearest friend and longtime neighbour, the ash, to the chainsaw that felled her. In the next now, the pear understood that she herself was being spared, for some reason, a similar fate. She did not see either event as fate or as a bad thing, she simply registered it as event—event, as isness, as yes—yes. I see her nodding her head even now.

Now is when the pear tree holds out for all to see her arms overflowing with clusters of creamy white blossoms nestled in among their birth-green leaf siblings. For an eternity of now-moments leading up to this one the pear had held the flower- and leaf-buds a little closer to her breast—they were new and tender still. They wore protective husks. Their tongues of pink flame teased at the tips and edgings of their swaddling clothes. Now, as blossoms emerge and mature, a hint of their birthing pink remains at individual petals' edges. And now that the pear is in full blossom, I see her gracefully nod and wave to some of her children, already floating to earth. Goodbye, goodbye, they flutter as they give themselves to the lazy breeze. Thank you, thank you, she breathes, and giggles when they tickle her exposed roots on landing. She feels the plushness of the blanket they tuck around her feet. She senses more than feels the press of finer roots against her strong ones, and hears the tinkling of bluebells voicing their gratitude for warmth shared.

A few months ago, alone, she lifted bare branches in praise to earth, to life, to
whatever made her what she is. Before that she permitted crows to test the ripeness of her fruit, humans to lean their ladders against her trunk to pluck what remained before it fell and splattered, all plump flesh and sweet juice, for mother earth to soak up the nutrients that would spread to the roots, ensuring the continued health of the tree. Around the same time the pear allowed the crispness of autumn and its strong winds to turn her leaf children golden or greenish yellow (not unlike the colours of the fruit), to wrench them from her unprotesting arms, to swirl and blow and waft and hurl them to earth, where humans of all sizes and shapes swept them up into neat piles and jumped and played in them, foraging squirrels and mice rustled through them, until eventually they all disappeared from view.

The pear does not wonder now why, at this time of year, people stop longer to gaze into her branches. In every moment she simply offers what shows up for her to offer. In this moment perhaps she feels the weight of new leaves and blossoms. But I am certain she does not feel they weigh her down. She accepts what is there for her to accept, and as willingly lets go anything that is ready to leave.