Explicit Growth

“Our thinking mind controls our internal process of thinking and knowing as well as our reflective physical behavior. Therefore our thinking mind cannot and will not accept the Intelligent Design of our Spirit Consciousness, until it is willing to open itself to thinking as an internal process of self-reflection as it studies the philosophy of its own explicit growth with each life experience in each physical lifetime.” (4, Spirit Consciousness: Our Intelligent Design by Kathy Oddenino)


Certain words conjure energy images that teach me how to know the energy of my reflections. When I have felt a thin veil of “resentment,” the word “prelate” came to my mind with it, and I have this energy-image of a man moving in just such a way, in robes, his hands in a familiar pose, that quiet dignity that is a reinforced dignity, a more physical stacked-up sense of dignity than a true internal strength. There is a smugness in him, mixed with the satisfaction of truth, so the process of change is mixing the mortar of it all.

This is the way he moved, smoothly but not quite gliding, because gliding brings with it a naturalness of movement that is poetic, that recalls leaves, water, wind. When taken this way, his moving revealed an effort underneath, a wooden way just visible that belied that assurance that may first be taken for dignity and the reserve of patience and kindness.

As the public spokesperson for a body such as the “world church,” this man had assumed a mantle with the weight of centuries, but in ways he did not yet understand. The mouthpiece that took sounds already formed and strived to carry them forth into the world moved slowly as a long train full with cargo.

What is his explicit growth in that moment? Moving down that wide road or aisle, smoke rising, the incantations low and steady, he is hypnotized in his own robe and miter-walk, the steady drumbeat of time. The air within and around him has a hint of sulfur, and the strong scent of oiled wood.

Then there is lightness, a freshness I see, with a young woman moving through groves of trees in early morning sunlight. She is happy, with dark curls, alone. The dappling sunlight bathes her face and her bare arms. There is nothing else to the world in that moment but her happiness, which encompasses and comes from the pulse of the earth, the air, the speaking green of those trees.

The realm between these scenes is the energy of change which comes with explicit growth and the internal self-reflection of thinking.

Echoes

“The origin of the map is lost to history.”

“For years I had been the greyhound chasing the rabbit of permanent solutions.” (37, Paul Hawken)

“The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.” (16, Rachel Carson)

A woman named Sarah reluctantly accepted the idea that came to her for the millionth time – she could save only herself. Why reluctantly? She wondered. It was as though each time the thought came, it came with the roll that made the hill she tumbled down as a little girl, gathering clover. Or it came with the pebbles she saw on the drive ground into glass by the tires of the car she rode in. The sky was bright with clouds and shattered with sun. Leaves from every tree fluttered in her, and they felt like butterflies. With each moment the thought of renewal, of rising from the yeast of Earth, of the groundwater always on the move, rose in her until she felt the sky itself inside her. Sometimes the thought came as a dream, and she felt tiny bones break and blood form, feathers rustle. Speckled eggs rested in nests, watched over, and heartbeats began. With wings to fly, she floated through history, stepped through battlefields made of grass and sometimes four walls, and the throat of history opened with its eyes for her, the yawn and groan and laughter of all voices calling out to be heard. The sharp voices were like swords. When she hung her head, she saw her feet webbed, she counted coins, she knew the hemp that made the ropes, the cloth that formed the sweeping sails. Overland, over the endless sea which tossed and turned, her organs and entrails, every cell, felt its journey through time, finding the poetry and pain in birth, the perfection like a song in each death. Was she ever alone? There was no time without this thought of spring eternal, the ground water always on the move. Poisoning one spring poisons all. The mind must know how it moves and changes, through shadows and bright sun, with the groundwater moving so deep and far.

Reluctantly, it seemed, because somehow the lingering sense of loss hung on to her shoes, her feet, her joints, and when she slept, her heart seemed to open like an accordion. She awoke on a raft in bright sun, gentle waves rippling into a past and future beyond her horizon. No alarm clock needed, time clicked away while caves opened, rocks started avalanches, coral reefs formed. Reluctance turns to liquid crystal, glittering, even with twisting roots.

A boy she remembers touched her like she was something new, a first wonder. Another’s voice came to her like the wind, whispering, whistling, humming, even as a metronome, sweet as strings. The man he became had eyes that welcomed the world in – she saw him in cabins deep in woods, scribbling on pads, whittling. Wood smells, shavings, branches were strong, then switched to steel girders blinding with sun as they turn on a cable, strong as a lullaby. Plate glass, concrete, stone embedded with ground glass and more, the elements surround him, planed differently than what he remembers. Then the sister she remembers, the echo of love which made her lean into the dance with her eyes closed as if she could scarcely believe what she held, this simple beauty of a moment when such a homecoming held together. She remembered, then, what another friend said, with that wish in her voice – My mother, my husband, never there to just hold me and say, Everything will be alright. Sarah’s own mother, a French aristocrat a few generations removed, would wave her silk scarf and say, Ah, life is much more than a dream.

The wounds we hold within us heal, cell by cell, thought by thought, love easing the skin together. She will pay tribute, plant a flag along the way, note the garden path, cry when she feels the heartache that lingers through time, looking for the History of Everything. It’s a red book, and very useful. The pages are blank, and each thought fills them with feeling. Ink spills over like water and runs like a river into holding ponds while we study causes and effects. She has the book of life always ready now, by the piano, or beneath the tree branches that hang heavy. The alphabet of life is always ready to be read.

Each day she drives, her car windows down, and the green and heat bring the world home to her. As her friend cut flowers and gathered them into bouquets, she went to a place inside with a meadow which held memories of every friend, some forever fresh.

Milltown Memories

Shadows cross over. I read about a man abandoned as a boy, hiding under floorboards after his father and mother were bullied and left in blood, not knowing where he was. They dreamed on, not knowing until beyond that moment, into more. Moments are imprinted as they pass – today Sarah sat on the hillside, in clover, with a plastic wine cup, a cheese wedge, crumbles. That man, Mark, sat nearby, plate full. The cropped hair, that glance that held what, the clouded over memory of labors of love, home renovation of historic proportions, fireplaces large as closets, heavy doors, thick floors, walls thick with bricks. The whisper of a held hammer, the wind blowing, now the river sound in his ears as he sleeps with windows open in the high loft of an old mill nearby.

This is how memories go.
A waterwheel turns, and the sound of endless drops together makes a roar, then a river, then a flow of wind somehow that brings birds and memories of their flight.

Sarah remembers the first day she saw him, the way those eyes narrowed when they looked into hers, from across a small hill, with people in between. Such a glance can fell trees, slicing through trunks, or winding up into branches and pulling with a force that is undeniable. She smiled, though, because there is no more fear of the forest and only a deep ocean she hears inside of her, that is as expansive as the sky full of stars. Her little girl self skipped and rolled with the other children down the hillside, in and out of shafts of sunlight backed by the bright green grass and the sound of music from strings and the lively voices on the bandstand. Her mind twirled with the laughter of the children, and the deep well of it inside her. She could pinpoint the day they married, the way the hem of her dress dragged in the dirt, the way her flowers smelled, the way his face seemed to be absorbing the whole day as a lifetime itself, until death do us part.

She knew their children intimately of course; the way Jenny’s hair fell across her face, the way her smile crinkled into a bright open sunflower face, the way Jane’s curls dropped from her head, bouncing in light. Moments like these passed in and out of her screen, her body, and she sipped the wine from the plastic cup, nodding with the beat and hearing more.

There is always more, and the night air thickens before the rain. That woman, Sarah, remembers the way her hands felt as she opened the door to their house that last time. A dull gold key with deep ridges, before he was gone.

Mark looks up to the grey sky, and he smiles a little, with a laugh about coming home again, only a few miles from where he was born.

They will go on. And remember nothing except the way this coming home feels, this coming and going.

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My Minority Report

Have you seen Spielberg's The Minority Report (2002)? I happened in on it recently, well into it, and watched to the end as Tom Cruise as Det. John Anderton, Max Von Sydow, and more streamed, leapt, and dragged to an ending that somehow still left lingering that great resounding truth of "You still have a choice." Pre-crime, pre-cog, faces with expressions that captured both the plastics of synthetic ("not real") and human emotion, and the snappy suits of both past and future - what a whirl we live in.

After I saw the movie I had an experience that reminded me of the challenges we have in opening ourselves to the fact that we are both energy and matter, and the way we have both worshiped and used "pre-cogs" among us. As I looked into someone's eyes as they streamed through lifetimes of memories like first a back-lit screen then the water of time right here and now, the pre-cog image came back to me - that movie pre-cog shivering, crouching, seeing, waiting, hoping. Three of us stood by a swimming pool after dark and the frogs were loud as a train symphony. The pool was cool blue. As I leaned backwards into the pool complete with clothes, I thought, we change the future as we change the past. We change the present and our eyes change with us, thankfully without the retinal scans and the awful eyeball replacement and having to carry those orbs around in a ziplock and worry about losing them. Languages come and go like threads, ropes we pull on or tie together. The words identify themselves as we choose them, let them be, and the language of love nudges them gently into view.

This dark is very different. The Minority Report in the film refers to "alternate futures." I've seen it - choice by choice, moment by beautiful moment.

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