Sunday, October 25, 2020

A Canon of Conflictual Contentions?



 "I don’t care how spiritual you are. How long you can melt in the sweat lodge. How many peyote or ayahuasca journeys that have blown your mind, how many master plant diets you’ve done or how well you can hold crow pose. I don’t care what planets fall in what houses on your birth chart, or how “silent” your meditation is. I don’t care how many crystals you have or how long you’ve gone without sugar, salt, spices or sex or how vegan your diet is.

I want to know how human you are. Can you sit at the feet of the dying despite the discomfort? Can you be with your grief, or mine, without trying to advise, fix or maintain it? I want to know that you can show up at the table no matter how shiny, chakra- aligned or complete you are- or not. Can you hold loving space for your beloveds in the depths of your own healing without trying to be big?
It doesn’t flatter me how many online healing trainings you have, that you live in the desert, forest or in a log cabin, or that you’ve mastered the art of tantra.
What turns me on is busy hands. Planting roots. That despite how tired you are, you make that phone call, you board that plane, you love your children, you feed your family.
I have no interest in how well you can ascend to 5D, astral travel or have out of body sex. I want to see how beautifully you integrate into ordinary reality with your unique magic, how you find beauty and gratitude in what’s surrounding you, and how present you can be in your relationships. How do you hold the ones you love in the midst of conflict? How do you take responsibility for your part? How do you make amends?
I want to know that you can show up and do the hard and holy things on this gorgeously messy Earth. I want to see that you can be sincere, grounded and compassionate as equally as you are empowered, fiery and magnetic. I want to know that even during your achievements, you can step back and be humble enough to still be a student.
What’s beautiful and sexy and authentic is how well you can continue to celebrate others no matter how advanced you’ve become. What’s truly flattering is how much you can give despite how full you’ve made yourself. What’s honestly valuable is how f***ing better of a human you can be, in a world that is high off of spiritual materialism and jumping the next escape goat for “freedom.”
At the end of the day I don’t care how brave you are. How productive, how popular, how enlightened you are. At the end of the day, I want to know that you were kind. That you were real. I want to know that you can step down from the pedestal from time to time to kiss the earth and let your hair get dirty and your feet get muddy, and join the dance with us all."
~ Dolores Cannon

http://www.dolorescannon.com/?fbclid=IwAR1dCfMzY0zawIhvgizJAu6B_01VZ9s94m0auGtOjgeLEGX84bCiwAc1d8w




Thursday, October 8, 2020

Garnering The Grail

 


We search. Some know not what for. Some have a clear idea. A thing can preoccupy our energy. Be it a horse, or a buggy, or a book, or an 'other'. Something outside of oneself can represent The Grail, and our pursuit of such may become an obsession. We can discard communication, huddle into ourselves, and search seemingly without distraction for the object in mind. We want what we want. And as the saying goes, “Be careful what you want; you just might get it.”

Others may pay the price for our perseverance. Others can be left on the sidelines, kept in the dark, and be not privy to our peregrinations. The Grail takes on so many meanings. It becomes a symbol, a stand-in for the actuality of the ancient vessel (purported to be used by Jesus at the Last Supper.) Medieval knights made it an enduring relic, ephemeral, insubstantial, and ultimately unobtainable. No one person could own it; it became the stuff not only of 13th century legend, but of the present journey toward enlightenment. And as such, throughout history, it became an object in itself, without which we are bereft of fortune, destitute in our dissatisfactions, and incomplete in our journey. We forget that the present is the time warp of temporal disintegrations, in which an infinite present coalesces with the future, as well as the past, always. And whilst en route in our search for such a Grail we may too easily forget our friends, our companions, our family, and even our other interests  

Give me leave for digression. When directing for theatre I was at liberty to insert ‘the mystical object’ onto the stage. In Little Women, to give a reason for entering the room, I had Marmee come in with one slipper, tapping her free hand with it as she searched while dispensing advice: “I'm not patient by nature, but with nearly forty years of effort I'm learning to not let it get the better of me.” In Pirates of Penzance, I had 20-year-old Frederick come off the ship with his teddy bear, the which he protected, until he met Mable. In Camelot, I had Pellinore, the rusty knight in search of The Grail, emerge from the forest with his pet dog, a makeshift of rope and sticks; (not with a real dog, who stole the show in the professional production I once saw with the famous Richard Harris.) And in the Savoy Opera, Iolanthe, I again had a teddy bear, searched for and then lovingly found by Private Willis, the lone Sentry, as he sings: “When all night long a chap remains on sentry-go, to chase monotony he exercises of his brains, that is, assuming that he’s got any. Though never nurtured in the lap of luxury, yet I admonish you, I am an intellectual chap, and think of things that would astonish you.”

The point is, The Grail, for each of us, has a different value. And given the now for now of our lives, we obtain, grow used to, take for granted, and even discard the many grails of our passage as we grow in years, yet not necessarily in wisdom.

Symbolical, intuitively unobtainable, The Grail is understood not so much as an object, but as that quality of being ‘happy’ with what one has found; or even better yet, at peace with where one is at. It is as the poet, Robert Browning, puts it: “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”

Still, the contention is, one would be better off not entirely to be fixated.  The solo journey of a Pellinore of Camelot renders him a little ‘mad’ and comical; and harmless though he is, he becomes unsure of Arthur's new ideas for a new order of chivalry, being against "... any new ideas" on principle. No, one is best to keep moving, rather than resting on one’s laurels, indeed.