Morning Breeze

[Evelyn DeAnn Hall]

Woodworking difficult In January, in Taos. I find myself turning to other occupations, things that I can do inside, by a fire. Painting is good. I posted the pastels I did this year.
A few years ago I began a writing project. This blog gives me a place to share it.
What motivates me to write are often snippets of poetry. Most of the time these are from Rumi and Hafiz. This starts out as a memoir, but who knows where it will go.

DeAnn Hall


chapter 1


These spiritual window shoppers
who idly ask
“how much is that?”
“oh, I'm just looking.

They handle a hundred items
and put them down.
Shadows, with no capital.

What is spent is love
and two eyes wet with weeping.

...even if you don't know what you want,
buy something...

Start a huge foolish project
Like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

Rumi


So, O.K. It's true. I am a spiritual window shopper.

I study psychology -- its something like walking through a grocery store, scanning the shelves. I check out Gestalt, Biofeedback, Jungian, Trans-personal, etc... I keep thinking I will find 'spiritual' in here.
I even consider seeing a therapist. A friend gives me a name.
“What brand of therapy does she use?” I ask.
“Spiritual,” my friend replies.

I don't quite understand what the word 'spiritual' means. I know the definition, but that's not the same thing. I feel in my bones that spiritual is different than religious, but I wonder why that is. A voice in the back of my head warns me -- 'stay away from spiritual brands--cultists, deceivers... stick to what's known,' it tells me. 'Freud for instance. That's a recognized brand. For God's sake, avoid anything that uses the word God.'

This woman uses the word God.

Sitting in her living room I have to decide. Do I trust her or not? She seems like a nice person – heartfelt. She has a soft, supportive energy and I like her, but I also see that I have prejudices to get past before working with her. For one thing, she lives in a really nice house next to a beautiful river.

Envy and resentment sit on my lap. I hate it when envy and resentment sit on my lap, but there you go. I cannot seem to find any comfortable place relating to people with money.

This woman is not only rich, she is also older, white and female. I am older, white and female, and I know that if I hold these thing against her, then I hold them against myself. I don't want to feel like this. I consider myself a feminist-- but I still assign more authority to male therapists. I am at a loss for how to value older women. I am at a loss for how to value being an older woman.

I look at this therapist. Her name is Lynn. I am glad she is older. What would a young person have to say to me? She radiates compassion. I am a parched plant yearning for water. She cannot help it that she's white. Maybe she doesn't even feel guilty about it. I appreciate the privilege that comes with my white skin, but I do feel guilty about it. Sometimes I think I try to compensate by living on the edge.

This has not worked so well.

Nobody appreciates it.

I am appalled, too, that I just implied that I purposefully stay broke, as if somebody had offered me a fortune and I said “no thanks.” I don't avoid money, I like money. Though, if I'm honest, I will admit that there is something about it that frightens me.

Money is an odd thing--a series of numbers written on pieces of paper. Move the decimal point, and life is no longer the same. What could be more surreal—or more real?

We hand each other pieces of paper –we all agree to the game. We shift numbers from one statement to another and we “own” a piece of this Earth. Only a crazy person would find this practice crazy. A crazy person like Crazy Horse.

I walk past someone panhandling in a parking lot and I look right through them. If I looked at them, I'd have to interact. Interaction requires a choice – give them money or don't give them money, and how much? I feel manipulated by guilt and it makes me angry. There is no way out. Manipulated or stingy...

I wonder. If I valued another persons age, could I value my own? Looking in a mirror the lines on my face would show character. Each stroke earned. What if race or social status did not evoke immediate stereotypes? I would wait to know them.
I could discover, in the parking lot, that small change buys a generous feeling.
What a deal!


Wake up with the morning breeze
and ask for a change.

Open and fill yourself
with the wine that is your life

Pass it around. Pass it to me first!
Revive me with your waking...

Rumi


I wake up, make coffee, build a fire, prop myself up in bed and stare at the wall. This is about as close to prayer as I have managed so far – staring at walls. I figure I'm meditating. The wall has a window, and outside, apricot branches have just come into bloom. This morning there is snow. I watch the light shift from dawn to day and slowly, life dramas flood back in. But for a minute, when the sun and moon trade off assignments, there is a crack in the world. I keep wishing to hear the voice of God in my ear, but you know, I'd completely expect Him to speak English, and if He did, I wouldn't trust it at all. Why should God speak English? And why should He be a he? Who could trust that?

All this thrashing about has let poetry sneak in –who would have thought. I never liked poetry. But there is something contagious about some poems. My favorites so far are Rumi (from whom I have already snatched fragments) and Hafiz, (fragments of which I intend to snatch). When I read their poems I see images of swirling dervishes and I want to catch their coat tails and go for a ride around the sun, into stars. You can see it in someones eyes when they have been infected by this type of poetry. It's like a secret language. My inclination to work with Lynn shot up 500 points one day when I quoted a line from Rumi. She lit up like a Christmas tree.

Lines from these poems are always weaving in and out of my thoughts. Their words are like a trail of crumbs left behind for people like me, to help us find our way home. Hafiz and Rumi. I love these two guys. They are always writing about God and prayer.

Lynn has no problem with praying. She's asks for the assistance of any beings who love me, and there you have it. It doesn't bother me when she offers prayers like that. I feel carried by it. I couldn't accept being prayed over by a Bishop or a Priest. I'd argue with them.

Born in Salt Lake city Utah, a child of pioneers, I would be prayed over by a Mormon Bishop, mostly likely my Uncle Bob. But all churches, to me, feel like a Boy's Club. God is male, Jesus is the worshiped male child – they even think the Holy Ghost is male.

Maybe its not just the gender thing. I don't know that calling God 'She' sits any better. Maybe I don't know about personifying God, period. I worry that its a little egotistic, condensing God into human form. But then how is a person supposed to create a relationship with something that is not personal?

I ask Lynn this, in one of our sessions, and she looks at me like I have just asked her a question as wide as the sky. She looks at me like she hopes with all of her being that I find an answer.

I just seem to find more questions. What am I doing? Am I setting up conditions for connecting with God? I will listen to voice of God only if it comes through in certain terms?

I resolve to listen openly. God can speak English, that would be O.K. Bird Song. I can accept that. Quality of Light? Whatever. Please God. Let me be open, and please God, could we maybe develop a personal relationship? I yearn to find meaning, to feel connected. It is too painful to be adrift. I am exhausted with trying to figure this out.

I do get a voice. It says, “I am with you always.” It sounds to me like a thought.
It is a thought.
What is thought, and who said that?


...Think of the one who gave you thought.
Walk toward whoever gave you feet.
Look for the one behind your seeing...

Rumi

When I was a kid every time I asked about God I was told he is the Father in Heaven who is Perfect. As as adult I have trouble with the word “perfect.” Perfect implies a state of completion. A fixed state. It cannot change, move breathe or flow. Life, creativity, cannot exist in a fixed perfect state. I need something that is alive.

There is another description of God – I find it in a Seth book. (The Seth Material is not an acceptable Scientific book). Seth says:

This absolute, ever-expanding, instantaneous psychic gestalt, which you may call God if you prefer, is so secure in its existence that it can constantly break itself down and rebuild itself. Its energy is so unbelievable that it does indeed form all universes, and because its energy is with and behind all universes, systems and fields, it is indeed aware of each sparrow that falls, for it is each sparrow that falls.

I feel like a sparrow.

An energy which constantly breaks itself down and rebuilds itself is not holding still. To connect with this source a person would have to be on their toes, listening, open to something new – all senses on full alert.

(Be wide as the air to learn a secret), whispers Rumi

Something clicks. A phrase I hear all the time..”be present.” Is being present something like being poised on the tip of existence, not having any answers or preconceived notions? Is it the willingness to listen, to let whatever is present tell you what it has to tell you, right then, in that moment? How could anything as vast and creative as God ever hold still? Is this being poised on the tip of existence what prayer is?

I was taught to pray with my hands folded and my head down. I was to say “Our Father in Heaven”, but I have to be honest. I cannot say these words without walking into a wall. I sense in them a whole host of preconceived concepts. The main one being the Boy's Club theme. For some reason Heaven is masculine and the Earth, the physical world. is female, (good ole Mother Nature). Almost every religion I know about relates to the physical world as being corrupt and in serious need of transcendence. How can this be?
I refuse to believe that its possible to disdain the physical world and love God.
It's like loving 'wetness' but hating water.

I keep reading Seth, hoping that I don't hit some wall with him too. He says that prayer


contains its own answer. And if there is no white-haired kind old father-God to hear, then there is instead the initial and ever-expanding energy that forms everything that is... this may sound impersonal to you, but since its energy forms your person, how can this be? If you prefer to call this supreme psychic gestalt God, the you must not attempt to objectify him, for (s/he) is the nuclei of your cells and more intimate than your breath.


To create relationship, doesn't there have to be an Other – something outside of yourself? Is creating an image the same thing as objectifying?

Images are fine, I think, answering my own question. They just need to not hold still. A personal relationship with God can be found in the Wind, in the songs of birds, Sunshine, Frogs, --the cut healing on my finger....


...Lo, I am with you always means,
when you look for God
God is in the look of your eyes...

Rumi

Sometimes I think prayer is every little bit of awe and wonder we can accommodate. Maybe that's what a Saint is, somebody who absorbs the incomprehensible wonder of each detail and who maintains that perception. Is this how I should pray? By Absorbing details? Or maybe I should make lists....

Hafiz says “Ask the friend for love, ask him again.” So, I chant in my head. “I ask for love, I ask for love, I ask for love.” Not sure to whom or what I am addressing this, but Hafiz says it's a friend and I trust this poet. Hafiz has a sense of humor. He mixes up his pronouns. He describes God as “the Wild Holy One, whose beauty illuminates existence...”

So, Wild Holy One, I ask for love I ask for love I ask for love....
and somewhere in the middle of my chanting it begins to occur to me that while I am starting out asking to get love, to be loved, I am also chanting simultaneously for the ability to give love. To offer love. Love is a word that goes both ways at the same time.

What if I got what I was asking for?

There would be no turning back.

What if that required something of me that I was not willing to spend?

What is spent is love.
I ask for love I ask for love...

If I ask for love, am I going to have to be willing to spend it? I feel a certain amount of alarm at this realization. I can't spend it. I don't have enough. I need to get it first.

Please God, I ask for love, to be loved. How can I spend love? There is no change in my pocket. I am poor. Ask someone who is rich, it would not hurt them. This would cost me. I only have 34 cents.

Shadows with no capital, the poem says, pointing its finger at me.

I am a spiritual window shopper.

Think of Santa Claus my thoughts quickly tell me, not wanting me to get depressed. Think of how, as a child, you just wanted to get presents, but as an adult you realized that the real gift was watching someone else light up.

What is spent is love and eyes wet with weeping
Eyes wet with feeling.
What is spent is feeling. I can do that.

Even if you don't know what you want
buy something.
Love something.

Start of huge foolish project like Noah,

Well, O.k.
Writing this book should qualify.




Chapter 2

This place where you are right now
God circled on a map for you.

Wherever your eyes and arms and heart
can move against the earth and sky
the Beloved has bowed there,

The Beloved has bowed there
knowing you were coming...

Hafiz



This place where I am right now is Marlin's house. I am house sitting. Her house has two rooms, one just big enough for a bed and a wood stove, the other a kitchen area that also serves as a way to walk into the bedroom. On good days I feel like I am living in a cabin in the woods. On bad days, I am positive goats would insist on better living conditions.

This places does have electricity though, and good reception. There is even a well. For years Marlin, Robert, and sometimes me, hauled water up the hill. Three years ago Marlin moved to Colorado with her latest lover. They seem happy together. She left this house empty.

When Marlin left I was living in my house in Los Cordovas –the land of sage and sky. Marlin's house is in Arroyo Seco—the land of apricot trees and alfalfa fields. When I heard Marlin was leaving town I offered to house sit. She agreed, on one condition – no changes.

At first I chafed at this, being a compulsive re-decorator, but deep down, this requirement was just what I wanted. I was happy to leave things alone. Unfinished walls and cracking plaster had nothing to do with me. My house in Los Cordovas, being new, had endless requirements. It insisted on finished detail. There were lists of things needing to be done that all cost money and would not shut up. They followed me around, insistently whispering in my ear.

Moving into Marlin's house not only gave me a reprieve from my lists, its also cost next to nothing. I covered utilities and the place was mine. Well, most of the time. Marlin and her lover came down for occasional weekends. When they did, I stayed elsewhere.

Marlin's resistance to change holds time still. In her house I am still the 22 year-old-girl who moved to New Mexico and roughed it out. I did odd jobs then, everybody did. It was hard to find work. In a way it was good thing, because pushing each other out of snowdrifts, mud bogs and collecting firewood took up the majority of our time.
Marlin actually liked auto mechanics.
She owned a chain saw and a '56 international pickup.

On the wall in the bedroom, next to the panned window I stare at in the mornings, there hangs a small, slowly disintegrating Navajo style weaving. In its center is pinned a post card of Our Lady of Guadeloupe. She is standing on a crescent moon. This weaving and this postcard were hanging in this same spot twenty-five years ago when I first fell in love with Marlin.

At the foot of the Sangre de Christo Mountains I am eight-thousand-two-hundred feet high. Winter here is cruel if it catches you unprepared, but, if you have firewood, if you collected bundles of newspapers, and if you have stove pipes that do not blown down in the wind, then winter is a friend. A warm friend. I remember waking up to three feet of fresh snow.. We put on skis at the front door and took off.
High on the rim mesa adjacent to Marlin's land, there are several acres of grass and alfalfa fields. Where the mesa drops off an ocean of sage opens up to the West. Blue mountains rise up in the East. In the winter we lived in long johns, wool socks and snow boots. Pinion splits easiest on early winter mornings. The ax blade wings down and wood cracks apart. Frozen pitch glistens. In the early morning air smells like ice.

A royal blue wood door stands between the kitchen and the bedroom. On it pictures are attached with clear tape. They have always been there. One of them is a picture of Conchos, the buckskin gelding Marlin rode. She is sitting on him bareback, out in a field. It's a black and white snap shot, kind of fuzzy, but it catches something. It catches a memory of Marlin swinging herself up onto his back. It catches the definition of her arm and leg muscles and the slim boy like body I always envied. It catches memories of horseback rides along side rushing streams running beneath towering rock faced cliffs.



The wheel of heaven
circles God
like a mill

If you grab a spoke,
it will tear your hand off.

Turning and turning,
It sunders all attachment.

Rumi

Alright, I admit it. I am attached to the land near the foothills of the mountains.
I am attached to the sound of water running in the ditches.
I am attached to standing out in the fields wearing rubber boots holding a shovel, watching water flood over my feet.

I would have bought land there if there had been a way to do it, but the cost of land in the foot hills was way beyond me.

An application for a low-income loan came through. I bought land south of town, in the sagebrush. When I first moved here I planted twenty-five Russian olive trees. It was five years before they showed their faces over the surrounding sage.

My house is modern, well insulated, with passive solar windows and a cement floor that is level. There are electrical outlets every few feet. It has indoor running water and a toilet, a bathtub and and shower. Most of the time it feels like a palace, but sometimes, when I'm depressed, it feels like a condominium.

I want to appreciate my new new home. I know I am lucky to have it. But I cannot seem to let go of Arroyo Seco. Some essential part of me stays there when I leave.

[Beverly VanBuren]

Just beinning to read you. will tune in again soon. We are older,whiter and speaking for ourselves