The Shadows of Cages

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Brad took these photos at Columbus Zoo in Ohio and at a photo shoot in San Luis Obispo, CA.  Whether you believe animals have intelligence or not, these pictures are haunting.  The sentient gaze, the desire for freedom, the protective embrace, the encircling hand that says "I am here. You are not alone." - are all impossible to dismiss.  Sentience is the holy breath that expands and contracts us - it animates and connects all things. We are ALL illuminated by the invisible Unspoken, the One Essence.  I realize researchers learn a lot from observing animals, but the plexiglass fishbowls they house them in, diminish and objectify them. Concrete moats, fake tree limbs, scaffolding racks - is that really a fair trade? 

I remember my first trip to the zoo. On my last, glorious day of AF Basic Training, I was offered a choice of celebrations - I could go to River Walk Mall or to San Antonio Zoo.  Easy choice! I picked the zoo. Shopping is not an easy thing for me even when I have money to spend, but animals always make me curious. Having never been to the zoo, my expectations were bright yellow and aimed at the moon.  As sometimes happens to obsessive noticers, reality shifted for me, and offered me a glimpse from the animal's perspective. This was a jolt. 

My red thrill for discovery abruptly collided with black shadows, heaviness and heartbreak. The crash was sharp, a slap to the face.  It stumbled my center. and toppled the balance of my square footing, My straight edges collapsed to round, and I was rolling like a hand full of marbles, all over the ground.  Disquieted and sad, I settled on a bench to watch people instead, . .my zoo-shine, eclipsing.  I saw that children sensed the "wrongness" too. I watched them bounce joyous and hopeful toward a cage, then deflate and slip behind Daddy's legs or baby Sister's stroller. The question I heard floating across the hot steamy air most was, "But Daddy, why is he so sad?"

Sadly, parents were looking, but not seeing.  On a mission to teach, their attentions and intentions were focused solely on identifying, characterizing, and labeling a species.     

I found this photo so tender-sweet it made me sigh. . . instant tears.  Here is the symbol that paints that first experience!  The sadness, the captivity and despair.  And yet, despite it all - love, family, and community.  Lao Tzu said, "Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."  That is so beautifully captured in this photo.

Mirabai's Cure for Sadness:

I know a cure for sadness; Let your hands

touch something that makes your eyes smile.

I bet there are a hundred objects

close by that can do that.

Look at beauty's gift to us - her power

is so great she enlivens the earth, the sky our soul.

Words don't work here... but I know you can feel it.  Just sit quietly, feel it.

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"If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from."

- Mark Nepo

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"Do you know what you are?

You are a manuscript of a divine letter.

You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.

This universe in not outside of you.

Look inside yourself;

everything that you want,

you are already that."

- Rumi

Post #2, Attending the Queen

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Henry Miller said, "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."

Thich Nhat Hanh said,  “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will blossom like flowers.”

I adore Queen Anne's Lace.

This morning I am sitting in a foggy field of it. How fitting - the fog.  I am drunk with need for a pause and so wrenched by NO's, my heart feels like a Six-turn-San Diego-jam fishing knot. I need this moment of mingling with the Queen. I've felt her tap on my shoulder for a few days now, so I sense she has wisdom to share.  In my younger days, I would not have hesitated. In fact, I often got lost answering those calls. Letting go of my alienated sense of self gave me an air pocket to breathe in, so I swam deeply in the language of whatever I turned my heart toward. The Queen was a favorite subject. She polka-dotted ravines and bluffs and the sleepy fallow fields in-between. She laced herself along highways and back-roads and crossroads.  (Crossroads were mystical places to me, and I felt the significance of that without knowing how or why. After pondering it for awhile, I looked it up in the dictionary and discovered it is a place that is literally "neither here nor there".  It is "betwixt and between".  I loved that! I felt "between" myself - so I quickly added crossroads, betwixt and between to my word collection, and started a special notebook specifically and especially for all things in-between.)  The Queen lived and reigned as far as my adoring eye could see, untamed and unmuzzled, zippy and buoyant.    

"Mom, Dad and fussy gardeners everywhere - I can hear the shadowy music in your sighs; it pegs the migration of eyeballs rolling round eye sockets. I can feel the tapering slump of your shoulders, and see the question marks shaking from your head as you admonish: 'Kelly! Queen Anne's Lace is a weed! A weed, girl! A WEED!'"      : )

Maybe...but beauty and truth are born from silence, so I trust there is something to learn. And I can't help it - the queen makes my heart tickle and leap.  Yes, she is rampant and wild and uncultivated, but she is free, and she knows the merriment of Being, the Essence of Qui.  She bends, flexes and dances on the wind no matter it's shape, color or mood.  Her open palm waves good morning to me: "Hello! Over here! I'm Holding a space for you!" I take my seat and let mind-chatter drift away. Fully attending, I listen for the language she speaks. The curling wind lifts and shifts my hair around, allowing me to embody the timeless breath of God as it moves through her feathery, appreciative finger leaves. I wait quietly, differentiating music among wildflowers.  Ah, here it is! The music of this meeting: Breath of God Moving Through Green Fingers - melodious applause, sweet celebration.  

Sun has crested Tree-line and his clarity burns through the fog. A thousand queens lift their faces to him, mask-free and grinning from ear to ear. Stretching ever taller, the only intention is to be nearer, closer, connecting. A field full of floating white plates, rich offerings of bare naked joy - totally free of the need for approval or identity.  The queens speak the language of humility. They simply offer all they have, all they are, without desire for outcome. Utter devotion, all-embracing gratitude.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said Scatter Joy - and the Queen passes that vision, that "un-story", directly to me.

Her tiniest blossoms echo miniature bird nests, tightly woven and drawn inward, protecting. But the tender warmth of Sun's kiss inspires softening, and so, they begin the task of opening. I witness the depth and focus of their concentration. I sense the paradox of resting while striving, of doing by not-doing. A memory of Aesop's story, The North Wind and the Sun, bubbles up from within. Is it a message from the Queen?

I look even deeper. There are worlds within worlds here, dimensions of reality most people go lifetimes without noticing. "To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower," William Blake wrote. See with your heart, get a new context. Herein lies the magic, the Qui: Tiny shifts about what is possible piggyback on fresh perspective. The most minuscule shift in perspective opens the door to small acts - and any act of adapting, no matter how small, evolves us. We are changed forever, ushered to profound leaps of imagination and intuitive breaches of insight. We are brought home to our souls, back to awe and wonder and our own inner knowing. I lengthen my breath, pleased that my deathbed review of life will carry a checked box next to the line that reads "attending the queen".

Breathing in, breathing out, I feel a sliver of softening unfold in my clenched and fisted heart.  Surrender is moving through me, loosening twists and knots and expanding me from the inside out. The NO's acquiesce toward Maybe, and separation blurs. For a time, we smile at Sun. We waltz on Wind. We offer up all we are under the gentle caress of Blue Sky. There is no "I" - only attendance and appreciation, and now - a YES.

I went into the field with plenty of knowledge. For all my troubles, I knew "what to do".  I had squadron-sized columns of words marching and beating drums through the hallways of my mind - and they were all dressed up in relevant suggestion. But robotic description leaves me feeling even more paralyzed. This act of simple sitting - of attending the Queen - catapults me over and beyond Mind's lifeless heap of chatter and into the field of silent experience. The field of wisdom and inner knowing. Experience is confrontation, participation - and I can embody that.  It is the "conversation with".  It is the Essence of Qui.

I rise and bow to the Queen. No words are needed. I lay my baggage at her feet and walk away. She has done her magic, helped me sort the seed from the dirt. Her essence of un-story has washed away my tiresome definitions, my flimsy rationalizations, and softened my jagged NO's. She calls out to my heart - reminds me that wisdom calls from unexpected places, and living wisely requires attending to that call - when it comes.  Next time, I vow not to shrug it aside. 

"Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.” 

- Janet Fitch, White Oleander

Essence of Qui - First Post!

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Photo by Bradley M Smith

On these humble pages, I hope to share moments of Qui with you.  Let me begin with the name, Essence of Qui.  I love the letter "Q"!  It's quiet and quirky simultaneously, and that feels like me.  Quiescence has long been a favorite word because it's tastes like violin music on my tongue.  So, I thought "Yes! Quiescence is the perfect domain name!"  Well...Imagine a  tire going flat and you have the perfect visual for my spirit deflating when I discovered the name was already taken.  Now what?  I decided to talk to my youngest son about it. He's home from college for the summer, he's a great writer - time to brainstorm!  I explained my dilemma as we drove to an appointment.  "Okay, define quiescence for me - that might inspire a new word."  Hunter looked thoughtful, fingers to chin...."mmmm...Quiescence is... (wait for it!)... the essence of qui."  He laughed, only joking.  But I loved it!  It was sunbeams spilling through cloud cover!  And I had this knowing inside that it was already mine!  A few hours later we made it official. Thank you, Hunter!

As I said in the Overview, words don't reach where Qui lives - EVER.  Qui lives beneath words.   Happily though, there are soul-inhabited words that cast light on its shadowy threshold...words that drift in close, and speak the language of stillness and keyholes.  Words that offer a wee glimpse of the essence of things.  I'll do my best to find those words, to speak that language.

Magic Words

In the very earliest time,

when both people and animals lived on earth,

a person could become an animal if he wanted to

and an animal could become a human being.

Sometimes they were people

and sometimes animals

and there was no difference.

All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic.

The human mind had mysterious powers.

A word spoken by chance

might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive

and what people wanted to happen could happen—

all you had to do was say it.

Nobody could explain this:

That's the way it was.

Translated from the Inuit by Edward Field

I have collected magical words since I was a child.  Yes, I had a word collection. Silly me.  While my friends made a mad dash for the latest barbie outfit, I cuddled against trees, loving the slick feel of a new notebook, and the soft, bumpy scrape of a fresh page under my palm.  I started collecting them because I found I had to make pictures in my mind about things in order to understand them. Only the magical words helped me do that. They offered immediate, concrete understanding as sound, scribbled shape, and meaning converged from fragments into wholeness.  I adored the soft shimmer of silence wrapped in the hush-a-by plushy feel of harmony - so every time I found an enchanted word, I copied it into a notebook.  Every time I added a word glistened by soul, I wondered why we needed any other kind of words at all.   

Many words are impotent - useless chatter and bang, but magic words zero in on the target, they pull our inner vision toward true north, toward essence - away from label. They express a "conversation with" not a "conversation about".  With that in mind, my specific hope is to tap your ear with a touch of magical word music, and offer you a look through my kaleidoscope of quiet.

Photo by Bradley M. Smith

Quiescence... It's pleasing music rolls off the tongue perfectly wrapped in circles. When things are wrapped in circles, to me - that is the sign of a gift.  Circles and spirals speak the language of breath, life force, love, eternity. They originate from silence, they know the essence of things.   Quiescence IS  its sound. Say it and you'll see what I mean.  There it goes, precisely hushing away noise and distraction while introducing its inner essence of stillness. All those velvety sounds and shapes converge, and it's barely a whisper of a word...and it points the way to presence. I love the embrace I feel in that union, the contentment in that hug of a word.  It speaks of paradox, of a merging that is at the same time, a detaching. It invites my shy soul to come out from behind the curtain, to throw open the doors and windows and experience the gift of eternity that waits in each moment.

Art, photography, and music also speak to my soul. There are works that bring tears to my eyes, I feel them so deeply. They are magic carpets that carry me beyond ordinary fields of experience and hover me nearer to the threshold of the in-between - that magical, luminous reality where pause is the keystone, and presence is the only requirement.  God rests there, in the tender, strong place of that Mingling.  William Blake believed that Imagination is God in man.  Alex Gray, author of "The Mission of Art" wrote that art can be a bridge to the "spiritual in everyday life." He explained the transcendent touch and pull of soul-filled art as follows: 

"The viewer first encounters a work of art as a physical object seen by the eye of flesh. Secondly, the eye of reason sees a harmony of sensations that stir the emotions, and a conceptual understanding of the art arises. Third, and only in the deepest art, a condition of the soul is revealed, one's heart is opened, and spiritual insight is transmitted to the eye of contemplation."

The word rule sticks true here too - magical works of music, art and photography are lampposts lit from inspiration, from God's own breath. They illuminate. They point to the essence of a thing.  My soul spins circles round the floor of my heart when I encounter a tender, soul-stirring delicacy. No wonder ancient artists believed a beautifully crafted work drew down divine presence to inhabit it.  My husband, Brad, captures this magic in many of his photos. His gift holds a candle to the keyhole. It takes my chin, and adjusts my view.  I am pulled in - Alice, falling down the rabbit hole. Away from my self-stories to the Essence of Qui, where life is thick with beauty, brimming with miracles, dancing with possibility.     

Photo by Bradley M. Smith

In one of my favorite books on writing, If You Want to Write: A Book about, Art, Independence and Spirit, Brenda Ueland highlights the true magic of a moment captured by art:

 “When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all.  He sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh's, it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art.  Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were.  And you were extremely careful about *design' and *balance' and getting *interesting planes' into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *academical' tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.”

I love that.  It illustrates how the creative impulse arises from mingling with the essence of things. It is God waking up in us, an incandescent thread that weaves delight with spirit and flesh into the breath of becoming. Do you feel the truth of that? The beauty of that?  I don't know about you - but it drizzles and fizzles me with that lemony, giggly, ticklish feeling of meteor showers shooting across my skin. And that's my sign that I am unfolding in the right direction, feeding my soul the right food. Rest and fall inward. Witness. Repeat.

So, walk with me a while.  Let's sit with the essence of qui.