Flow

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My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers. ~ Woody Allen

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[Nickeson]

Hey,
After nearly 20 months, a new essay on Integral Liberties.

[Jane]

Steven,
Thank you for that beautiful, beautiful piece of writing..... I am with Marianthi's comment.... I would marry you too!
Jane

[henry]

Both Steven And Jane write beautifully . As one whose communication style is to grunt, point, and duck(especially about integral), much admiration and appreciation

[feral]

Both Steven And Jane write beautifully . As one whose communication style is to grunt, point, and duck(especially about integral), much admiration and appreciation

Eloquence, my friend. It's called eloquence and you have it in spades!

[Michael]

As one whose communication style is to grunt, point, and duck...

A man of hilarious pauciloquent obmutescent laconic brevity is our Henry.  No one hands me a laugh so consistently.   

Thanks again Steven for your fine, wise and witty writings.  Many apologies for inadvertently misspelling your name on your blog comment.  I deal with a Stephen almost daily in my work, so am prone to such error...

[feral]

Steven,
Thank you for that beautiful, beautiful piece of writing..... I am with Marianthi's comment.... I would marry you too!
Jane

I wouldn't marry you, Steven, but I'd hitch a ride with you in an 18 wheeler any time. Woo hoo!  

[jimtzu]

a nice bit of flow, Steven... like a melody that takes you on a journey.   

[Jane]

I have been considering this heart-felt sense of seamless flow, or maybe deeper than a 'sense', really the mystical knowing of our seamless connection to each other, and to the entire sheboodle.  My body is my personal sensing apparatus, and my time-space location,  the GPS coordinates of my  unique perspective.... My personal story is the prismatic lens which colours and shades and shadows this unique perspective.  Oh beware the story for it  can suck anyone of us deep into an illusion of separateness.    I can tell when my separateness agenda is fuelling itself and rising.  I feel anxious, full of content, dammed up and blocked.  It is a physical feeling which I can interpret as frustration.  It is no wonder that Pema Chodron says so fequently, "Drop the story line."  When will I heed those words, once and for all!

I come from a great story line and moreover, I am embedded in a family of interrupters(you would think they were 'drop  the story line coaches trained by Pema herself)..... you know what I mean,(those dratted people) jumping into the middle of the sentence, finishing it and taking over the direction, re-routing the conversation...'nobody can get a word in edgewise around here' is said by someone every day.  I am staying here with them now for a few months, and I keep watching  the interrupting,  watching my own reactivity to it, (and watching my own interrupting too).....  How often I want to fix them, out there, these brilliant people that I love; I want to fix them as an antidote for this, my own ratty frustration. 

My family flow reminds me of many sections of the Grand River, a river I canoe every year for a week in the summer.... This river is big with a fantastic, deep flow.....swirling whirlpools, water that suddenly piles up on the top of the surface, coming  almost imperceptibly from some tiny creek coming in from the side..... and it goes on for miles and miles, bending and tuning, sucking and spewing, happy laughing water that suddenly appears and disappears........ and in one place just above the Moonie Rapids, there is an elbow amidst a steep decent.  From that configuration there is fabulous double vortex called the Devil's Hole, and a huge eddie on right hand side.  I don't know how many humans have perished in the Devil's Hole in the 7 thousand years since the glacier receded and the river began its flowing. 

One year I paddled between the vortices, albeit kind of by accident.  The canoe that followed me got sucked in and my friend Jim went down the vortex.  Happily, the river spat him back up 40 feet  along, keeping both his running shoes and the pickles.  So evidently the devil was hungry for a different food that day, and perhaps was getting attire for new exercise regime, who is to say really.......... Rivers are so easy to see and to feel and to describe and to adventure on. 

When we see the energy flow of our lives the way this flow truly is, when we see it not with our eyes or ears and our resistances and fears, but with the eyes of the sensuous mystics we most surely and deeply all are, we see that our separate selves, fabulous and unique, are most truly merely standing waves in this energetic flow, standing waves that have learned to walk around and direct traffic to some extent, standing waves that can reach into the fabric of our molecules with intention and then tell ourselves what we might fancy doing! We have this remarkable capacity to create ourselves. This is such an amazing, breathing-taking, miracle.... it is unbelievable....... And this flow is not a metaphor for life, not something just beyond our grasp; rather and more incredibly, it is our grasp; it is our tenuous, impermanent hold in this infinited, eternal arising...... This is what we are......this is the Open Secret.....

Frankly, I know why I like cyberspace....I can sit down here and write away, and release some of the content that builds up in me .....god knows, I need to practice the delivery of it in a place like this before I make my way into the day to day of familial flow.  There, I am engaging in this relentless compulsion to elbow into the conversation....sometimes I do get the floor space for a moment or two......I spew it all out in perfect, practiced egoic pitch and then hilariously and repeatedly, I expect resonance and acknowlegment and understanding!  Ha, ha, what a training ground this world is!..... of course, instead  of applause, I get these dumb, confused stares reflecting back to me....I can't make it any simpler..... and as is the Way, I am sucked into the vortex, I am back in my story line practicing watching my frustration arise as it does.... Now thanks to modern talk shows, I can hear Dr. Phil saying in his southern drawl, "Is whacherdoin' gettin' ya whachawant?"  It is no wonder that God is laughing.....

It is an gorgeous day here today, and I am off to the hill to ski for the duration.....

Thanks again Steven.... for the beautiful reminder.
 

[feral]

One year I paddled between the vortices, albeit kind of by accident.  The canoe that followed me got sucked in and my friend Jim went down the vortex.  Happily, the river spat him back up 40 feet  along, keeping both his running shoes and the pickles.  So evidently the devil was
When we see the energy flow of our lives the way this flow truly is, when we see it not with our eyes or ears and our resistances and fears, but with the eyes of the sensuous mystics we most surely and deeply all are, we see that our separate selves, fabulous and unique, are most truly merely standing waves in this energetic flow, standing waves that have learned to walk around and direct traffic to some extent, standing waves that can reach into the fabric of our molecules with intention and then tell ourselves what we might fancy doing!

I love this Jane. I'm thankful for the gift of your words, of Steven's words...everybody's words. I was just saying to Michael this morning how strange it is to find that a great silence is all that bubbles up in me lately (well, silence and limericks, I guess.  ) It's kind of strange, but more contented than strange. Meanwhile, I truly do sit back and applaud and swoon at all the beautiful words and wonderful stories that are spun here and elsewhere in my life. It moves me and I thank you. Will you marry me Jane? 

[Jane]

Okay, then..... I will.... if it is some sort of a spiritual, polygamous affair.  Maybe we could get Henry to join in too......  It would suit me fine....especially since you and he are into the silence, or in his case the monosyllabic grunt, mode,  hey, then I could just babble away to my hearts content.......room at last!  nice to see you back Rhondananada!  You and Michael sound adorable.
love Jane

[henry]

henry put the us in polyamorous . maybe we should pause for a season before taking the leap

[Nickeson]

Ah, my gracious friends,
Thanks for your comments here and on the blog. You are the folks to whom I write.  (Except when I am writing love poetry to Marianthi.)

Before we get serious, I have a little story inspired by Jane's account. Marie was my neighbor, she thought of me as her son, so we were partners in various crimes off which we made $300 an ounce (back in the 80s) and we were joint owners of two boats, an 8-man river-going raft and a two-man inflatable kayak called a Sea Eagle. (I would never do a regular kayak in northern NM because I knew too many whose faces were battered beyond recognition by rocks while tied into one of those, upside-down in a rapids.) So we were shooting the Rio Grande Race Course one morning in the kayak when we came up on Big Rock Falls and there was a queue at the head of which was a canoe and behind that two rafts. The two guys in the canoe were trying to psych-up and set-up for running the falls. The two rafts behind them were back paddling against the easy current in the pool above the drop-off. But there was no room in that pool left for us except to get washed up time and again until we would be swept away off one of the big rocks that gave that falls its name.  So after the second time of scrambling to keep from being high-sided against that rock I yelled to Marie (she being in the bow and deaf as a post...I had to shout really loud) "Paddle right! Paddle right!" And so she turned and grinned and dug in her paddle...god, she had so much trust and never a clue. And we pulled off that rock and paddled hard through a back eddy and into a totally different downstream current far to the left-bank of the falls. And then Marie saw what I doing and she screamed back to me, "But we're going into the Toilet Bowl!"

The Toilet Bowl is a fairly small but notorious boat-eating hole to the left of Big Rock Falls. We had no choice but to take that chance so all I could reply to Marie was "Go! Go! Go!"  And she dug in and I did too and we shot off a falls maybe 4 or 5 feet vertical. But we cleared that point where we would have stuck the bow to the bottom and landed flat in the toilet that was filled by the Rio Grande 360 degrees all around. We sat there for ever and filled up with water...God did we ever get wet! And then with a boat full, the current lumbered us out through the narrows down stream where we floated 20 yards, chest-deep in the river to a majestic flat boulder in its middle onto which Marie clambered out of the kayak like a sea turtle going ashore and hauled us onto to something dry. We salvaged our lunch and turned the kayak upside down behind us and waited for the canoe to make its break through the falls. And we waited and waited until they finally got psyched-up enough and dug in and head down and disappeared from sight before they were even over the crest. The two canoeists bobbed up right at the bottom of the falls, but the canoe didn't show. I was yelling to Marie, "In the fall they'll have to dive for that canoe," but it slugged to the surface abreast of us on the rock with most of the starboard gunwale torn totally away. The lead paddler was yelled to the heavens as he swam onward. He had borrowed that canoe with the promise that it would be back unscathed.

We finished our run and headed back up the highway to the put-in and we stopped above Big Rock  and walked down to the little vantage point to see how the late-comers were doing. The day was advanced and the level had dropped so the run was an easy go. But there was this guy down there at the lookout who must have stopped over for hours. He turned to me and shouted "Aren't you that guy who took that little Sea Eagle through the Toilet Bowl? God damn! That was the nicest thing I've seen all day!" Of all the compliments I have ever received that stands to be one of the highest.

Seriously. I liked your stories, Jane. My family was a little different than yours. Of the four immediate, only my mother was a talker. And the other three of us just let her go while we went on about our business. There were days on the ranch where the only the communication between my father and I would be a glance, a nod, a grin, or a wink  or the inevitable question at lunch time: "Ya wanna 'nuther beer?"

Jane, you write, We have this remarkable capacity to create ourselves.

This where it gets serious. Don't it just...? But, then too, this is where it gets fun.

Jane, I don't know if you ever read this ..an old, old post on my blog and if the rest of you have gotten tired of me dredging it up, you don't have to read it. But various things that Jane wrote today brought it back to mind.

Later,
S.

[Jane]

Steven, I've enjoyed reading all your river pieces...... Maybe everyone might benefit from weeks or months or lives on rivers........ there is such a resonant  flow from the river, it becomes pretty impossible to ignore the soul flow as it bubbles up. 
This conversation has me thinking about my river travels with the Innu, and then about the spiral dynamic model, about how when the Innu(and me too when I am with them) live in the country, they live in  the magic-mythic stage and immersed 'in the flow'.  When they move to the community, they live in a ruthless tribal phase with the gorgeous flow of country life replaced by the brittle, egoic flow of the monied economy rife with all the pitfalls of fear and power and greed.   It seems so right to me to consider the alcohol and drug dependency of most first nations communities, as really the best effort that many people are able to make in an attempt to get 'the flow' back in their lives.  And I am pretty sure, this is true for all of us, caught up in these 'lives of quiet desperation.'

I love traveling with the Innu in the country.  Usually, at first, my causal mind is overwhelmed by dissonance. I watch the haphazard disorder of the canoe trip in the planning phase.  I long for the lists, and the commitments and the plans.... and then at the put-in spot, it all comes to a head. I despair at the wrong paddles and the crappy canoes, and the piles of store-bought toxic food.  oh brother.....and then there are the life-jackets that have gone missing, or don't fit, or have no proper zippers...the lack of dry bags, instead there are sleeping bags in garbage bags tied with a rope, and nothing ever tied "properly" into the canoe..... and I watch the seemingly endless trips back to the remote supply store for cigarettes and chocolate bars......(last year, three young men went back up the river for a day after we had started to get more).....this hapless band will never survive, my rational mind chirps, like a smoke detector..... and then, somewhere, a little while later,  the flow starts, quietly and persistently, almost imperceptible at first.  The layers of my controlling mind begin to disintegrate, my judgments rise and fall like rocks emerging out the river and being left behind....and what is is what is.......the fish jump on hooks, the ducks come out of the sky, there is a beaver, and a caribou and a bear...... and all of life rises to support this beautiful effort of Being......It is intoxicating......

The allegory of Adam and Eve, the expulsion from the garden, is a tale of our rift in the perception of flow--the story of human consciousness abruptly shifting from the presiding perception of wholeness and connectedness to the perspective with separateness and disconnection...from a time when we were all unknowingly mystics, to a time more recently when mystics have been few and far between, and as often as not counted as madmen......and now it seems, we are heading for  time, when we are called to not only be mystics, but know that we are so...knowingly mystics.....

I love that piece by Jill Bolte Taylor on the TED talks as she describes opening to 'the flow'.

From what I can tell, this whole deal is all really a grand adventure to 'know flow'..... Every resistance to every horrible event can be recognized as an new invitation to braille deeper into the middle of the muddle and switch on this perception of flow......and even more, we are invited to lean into the flow, to protect it, to surrender to it, and to be carried away by its awesome, gorgeous mystery, and to play in it......

Oh, I long for this..... to hang out in a tribe of conscious mystics..... sometimes I feel certain that this tribe is not far in the offing.

Jane