Fullness and the Feminine

I used to act as though the realm of possibility were in my head.

That was actually a realm of limits.

Possibility has no limits.

And I am nowhere (or everywhere)

in it

I think it is safe to say that we have all stood before something that completely blew away our sense of self-identity, ideas, beliefs, and everything we thought we knew for certain. It comes in all forms big and small — from the ant that visits a prisoner to the elephant that sways to classical music. From the birth of a child to the death of a parent. From the way sunlight plays on a trickling stream to the flash of sun off the tip of an iceberg. Share one of yours in the comment section below if you like.

Meditation, prayer, and other contemplative practices bring lots of those experiences and make one more prone to experiencing them. So does creative endeavour, gardening, and playing with young children. The painting above is an attempt to capture one of these experiences. I opened the front door of my house to step outside and go for a walk with Rios. It was one of those still summer days when the wind suddenly picks up and shakes the leaves in the trees. The many birch and poplar trees around here sound like bubbling water and the scotch pines whisper. But in that moment, there was only sound and it was like a symphony. No me, no trees, no wind, no names, or exclamations. The painting is Untitled because there is no name for that experience, really. The Buddhists call it emptiness, other faiths might call it God. But to name it limits it.

In Buddhism and in the Tao, this deep wisdom, this infinite source, is feminine. In Taoism it is referred to as a valley spirit and primal mother and in Buddhism, prajnaparamita, the Great Bliss Queen. (Ursula LeGuin has a translation of the Tao te Ching! Here is an article about her understanding of the feminine aspect of the Tao.) There is the ancient greek goddess, Gaia, and feminine wisdom to be found in indigenous traditions among others. But my education and socialization was dominated with the masculine voice. It is refreshing and resonant to find this feminine wisdom in the depths of historically male-dominated traditions. Even so, 2,600 years ago, the Buddha only reluctantly agreed to admit women (and they were his own family!) into the emerging Buddhist monastic system. While this was a radical move, the nuns were treated as second-class monastics and in the scads of Buddhist scripture, only a relative handful of their poems remain: the therigatha.

In this lino-block print, I cut out a koan about the whisper of pine trees in the wind. Who isn’t arrested by that sound? It is neither pine nor wind that whispers. It is both together. And it’s that un-namable thing that makes us stop. It seems I’ve been trying to name it since my twenties. Here’s a poem I wrote then:

Time. Money. Pavement.

Yes, but, lines of notes
to string together these
lines fluorescent,
lines darkly red,
strings sunset golden,
strings grey, blackened.

Thread them onto a frame,
weave them into a fabric —
we wear the songs of our lives
through which our souls are heard.

And are not our songs
inklings of truth, like
the towering silence of a white pine,
the spiralling swim of a sea lion,
or the flight of a gull that takes wing with
morning’s first light.

Sleepy countenance slain,
senses awaken today,
weave the truth and beauty that come
when we lift our heads,
and live, and sing.

Today I might write “resonant whisper” instead of “towering silence” and “soul” is too tangible. Here is another take a couple decades later, The Voice of the Universe:

Conditioning informs me that
Your gods are not my gods.

But my new eyes show me that
Gods are not bound by our conceptions.

Existence is an infinite miracle;
Our understanding is finite.

Until one slows enough to be still,
Breath, wind, birds, cicadas, or song
Will never be the voice of the universe.

Couldn’t it be that the spirits of this land
Will visit anyone who listens for them?

Have you met one who listens deeply?
Well-guided and filled with grace?

Your wise heart reflected in their eyes
Urging you to listen for the breath of life.

That is, the bubbling water sounds of poplar leaves, the whisper of pines, the laughter of a baby, the tender words of love — especially in times of hardship. No amount of wisdom rings true without compassion, whatever the source.

When I’m guiding meditation on the breath these days, an analogy that comes up is of the wind playing in a field of grass and that field of grass supporting a big wide-open sky. These meditations lead from attention on the breath, to feeling the whole body breathing, and refining the experience of breathing to mere sensation and movement. It’s a smooth slip into the analogy then, feeling the sensations of the body breathing as that field of undulating grass. This gentle movement supports a wide open awareness as the waving grasses support the sky. In that sublime quiet, there she is. Genderless really, but that limitless valley spirit is there. The source from which the fullness of life springs unconstrained by the limits of a conditioned mind.

This morning, I also put a smile in the sky, in the heart, and in all the cells of the body. In the same way compassion must accompany wisdom, however we listen, we can never go wrong with a smile.