Archive for the ‘theology’ Category

The Divine Twins, Occupy, and Us

Posted on: January 29th, 2012 by Thorn 9 Comments


We love the Dark Twin so much. S/he is very dramatic, compelling, and causes our heart to race, whether in anger or desire. S/he pumps us into frenzies of emotion, clouds our thinking, takes us over.

We love the Bright Twin too. S/he is beautiful and sunny, filling us with thoughts of love. She paints the world in gorgeous colors, and causes spontaneous bursts of laughter or dancing.

But somehow s/he doesn’t hook us in quite the same way as that dark sibling.

This was evidenced on Saturday, as I met my compatriots from the Interfaith Tent at Occupy Oakland to support the group that wanted to utilize an abandoned building to build a community center, with a library, art space, and a food kitchen. The day was filled with sun, children with balloons and brightly colored signs, music, dancing, and smiles. The Bright Twin was there.

The City of Oakland had other ideas. I cannot claim to know them all, but the first polarization was already occurring in that the City claimed the Occupiers were set on vandalizing a building, and planned to stop them. Different viewpoints were in play before the day even began. The Divine Twins walked among us.

Hundreds of photos were taken – including my own, dozens of times – of the smiling faces, the music… the Bright Twin showing hir face. Not one of those photos made it into what we call “mainstream media”. Why? The Dark Twin can seem even more beautiful than hir brother/sister. Photos of smoke bombs, tear gas, flash grenades and things on fire capture our hearts in a way that smiling children just don’t seem to. There is an excitement about it that we don’t see every day. There is money in it.

But it isn’t just about the unusual and monetization. It is about ourselves. How many times have you sat around a table with friends, discussing theology, philosophy, politics, your community, or your kids? How many times has the conversation changed to one filled with complaining? In struggling toward a world we want to live in, it is common to focus on what feels irritating or troubling. It is also common for that to take over our thoughts and conversations. The allure of the Dark Twin catches us once again.

Least you think I malign the Dark Twin here, know I do not. Both twins are gifts from the seamless whole, each reflects a face of God Herself. Without them both, showing us varying facets of this dance of life, we would have a hard time learning and growing. We need the push and pull, the tears and laughter, the lust and love, the joy and anger. We require it all to become strong.

The Divine Twins rest within each of us, and they also walk among us. They are in the riot police. They are in the children, carrying balloons. The are in the diesel party bus and the stalwart walkers. We don’t honor them enough. If we honored them more clearly, we could recognize their faces, and not begin to demonize that which we think we know. We don’t know, because we fail to see the reflections of our own faces, right in front of us.

So, at the end of a bright and beautiful day, what is left? Images of fire, and smoke, and conflict. What will I remember most? That in the midst of that, were people singing.

I am writing about life, of course, but also want to caution us to read any news with a critical gaze. Ask yourself: “How are they trying to hook in my emotions? What are they not reporting? What skews their view and manipulates mine?”

This happens all the time. I saw it on Saturday in Oakland, and I saw it last Friday in San Francisco, where every few blocks was another street party, more music and color. I saw two large bank headquarters shut down for a whole business day. I saw interfaith leaders coming together. I saw dancing and laughter. I saw courts occupied and people educated at corporations. What was reported by mainstream news? That the day was a failure and ended with broken windows and a stand off between police and protestors after dark.

The Dark Twin wins many battles in the contest for our minds and hearts. The Bright Twin has just as much strength, and is present every day, all around us. Which do we notice more? Which do we preference? Can we hold them both, within ourselves, in love?

“We are unstoppable. Another world is possible!” All it takes is love, and time.

—-
Middle photo by Stephen Lam of Reuters. Other two from my camera

EDIT with Important Update:
My post was written from a spiritual/philosophical viewpoint. Below is a really good recounting of the day from someone who was there from start to finish. I was at the march from the beginning, through the convention center and street “battle” near the Oakland Museum and left right before the marchers reconvened at the Plaza. I can attest to the truth of this report up until the night marches – which I only followed on livestream. The description of the night marches sounds accurate to me also, from what I saw on livestream and from reports from Interfaith compatriots who were caught up in the arrests. If you want more information on the activity of Saturday, please read Boogie Man’s account.

And here is a non-mainstream account of Friday’s festival in SF.

Two other notes: I was teaching all day Sunday/today so did not make it to the Plaza, but heard that the Bright Twin arrived in the guise of a large contingent of ministers from a local African American church who came to show solidarity and bless Occupy Oakland. Also, one of my interfaith compatriots spoke at the gathering. She was thrown to the ground by an officer who ground her head into the sidewalk, leaving a large red welt. Her offense? While in the kettle, she asked him what he was doing. One of our interfaith group was not yet released from jail as of this writing.

May we work with love and peace, for justice.

Don’t Give Up

Posted on: January 23rd, 2012 by Thorn 10 Comments

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Let your soul rise to meet your life. Let body, emotions, and mind shift toward this matrix of union. You can be whole, and reflect a more clearly ordered world. You can weave the chaos into light. When you choose to be continuous, you choose to change the world. You choose freedom over complacency. You choose revolution over comfort. You choose to shine instead of hide. You choose to polish the places where grit has accrued, and learn something in the pain and joy of polishing. You are gorgeous and complete. Let your pain and suffering become places where the waters meet the shore. Things live in that liminal space that live nowhere else on earth. Let these things grow. The context for your life is the cosmos. The iron in your blood comes from the stars. Stop thinking small, unless you think of atoms. Dive toward that sort of smallness, ever multiplying, so small it becomes vast. The small view that causes us to forget both stars and atoms is a smallness we can no longer afford. We are simple: part of Hir body. We are human. We are those who know and those who perform tasks. Angels and demons, animals and Gods. We are everything, if we allow ourselves to be. Look inside, and look around. Can you gaze on self and other with eyes now cleansed by love? This is how we heal, repair, and grow: we allow that which has been ruptured to come home. Home is everywhere.

The Material is the Spiritual: Occupy

Posted on: October 11th, 2011 by Thorn 21 Comments

I listen to the rain and crows outside my window and feel thankful. Thankful as I always am not only to have a home and employment, but thankful also for all of the people gathering in the rain by choice. There are many who are out in the rain not by choice, year after year after year. Some of us try to offer them food, or safe haven, but it is not enough. The cultures we make together have too many bricks fired with greed and inequality. It is time now, to rebuild.

These are times of bright lights and large shadows. Brightness and shadow are in each of us, and in the cultures we create. It is up to us to notice when things have become out of balance, and try to redress. This isn’t, for me, about force fighting force, this is, for me, about reaching out to join hands in the realization that we have been separated for far too long. It is time to come together and create something new. We must stand for something. We must stand for what we love.

Years ago, as a young anarcho-feminist, I took a job on the Pacific Stock Options Exchange in order to try to accomplish two things: I would pay my rent while getting an education in how the US economic system worked. See, I dropped out of high school to go to college, and then dropped out of college because it was too large a struggle to work full time, study, pay my bills, and pay for school, when I wasn’t sure what getting a degree was useful for. As a working class/working poor kid, I had no knowledge of the ins and outs of student loans, nor did my family have the funds or knowledge to help me. So I decided, as usual, to educate myself. Working in the “belly of the Beast” I would hopefully learn about a system I thought I hated, while buying the food I needed to survive.

On the Options floor, I saw people who were scared, people who were angry, and people who were kind and coined a phrase to express the dichotomy I felt: “He’s a nice guy, but he’s an asshole.” I figured out that no money in our system was clean, that the bike messengers outside still delivered packages to Shell Oil, and that our economic system was rooted in gambling. Huh. I never knew before then that my father, who struggled with addiction his whole life – first alcohol and then gambling until his life’s end – was part of a larger system of economic theory. Too bad it never helped him. My carpenter father wasn’t a high stakes player like the traders I worked with. The traders I worked with, however, were mixed bags, just like my father. Just like me.

I recall one man who treated me well, recognized my intelligence and was amused by my blue, flattop mohawk and motorcycle boots, who’s face grew purple with frustration when I refused to buy South African Krugerrands in that mid-1980s Apartheid time. Word spread like wildfire around the trading floor and the one African American trader came up to shake my hand and thank me. On another day one trader quite proudly stated to me, “Commerce should be free of politics” when I, at nineteen, knew that was impossible and argued so. Commerce and politics were inextricably linked, but we humans, in our quest for clean compartmentalization, tried to pretend it was not so. That was a key moment for me – an epiphany on the cold grey trading floor lit by glowing green screens – that realization that we purposefully dis-integrate ourselves, and therefore dis-integrate all of the systems that we build, separate ourselves from our environment, from our monetary and political systems, and from each other. We had forgotten that spirit and matter are one being. We had forgotten that we could be whole.

I thought of this while sending a shipment of rain ponchos to Occupy Wall Street last week. The people on the streets see imbalance and are trying to speak to it. The ponchos were asked for, and needed, yet I have no idea how they were made. Were they made by people working in dreadful conditions somewhere? This is likely. Does my action in sending them do more harm, or more good? I do not know. Every action requires a willingness to risk. There is a light and corresponding shadow everywhere. Nothing is clear, and clean, and in a little compartment. Life is messy and intertwined. Light and shadow are not discrete beings, but bound to one another. Within us, they can make friends, and we can learn to see things in a different way.

The Occupy movement is a movement about material things: jobs, food, housing, money. For me, this makes the Occupy movement about spiritual things. There is spirit in the movement, and the spirit moves through bodies of flesh in a world of matter: concrete, grass, buildings. There is no separation between the spirit and the matter, only our minds make it so.

pic taken by me in Baltimore MD

I see large patterns at play on this planet as in country after country, people rise up. Perhaps it is all random, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. Nor does anything feel fated. Change is in our hearts and hands. Change is in my heart and hands. Change is in us all.
Can we come together?

Changing culture is up to us. Tomorrow I will march with Occupy San Francisco as an act of solidarity and hope, and as a sign that my lot is thrown in with my brothers and sisters. I do not think for a moment that my marching will change our systems overnight, but I do think it is one small action toward that end. I teach and write in order to help change culture and I change myself first, to facilitate this work. Marching tomorrow is a symbol that what I hope to help bring together is so much larger than I can ever do on my own. It takes us all, each of us, to look inside and say, “Where can I begin?”

Weaving (our Place in) the World

Posted on: September 15th, 2011 by Thorn 6 Comments

We weave the fabric of life together in a grand process of shifting pattern, color, and design.

Included in this pattern are all the ways in which we affect one another: humans, animals, ancestors, plants, microbes, stars, Goddesses, Gods, birds, fish, germs. We affect each other whether we can be seen with eyes, measured with instruments or not seen or measured at all. Some things are only sensed by the pricking at the back of the neck, or by the space they leave between things. Some beings are measured by presence, and some by absence. All of these – large or small, measured or unmeasurable – weave with us.

Then again, some things exist only in our heads. These things affect surroundings too, as our shifting psychology and emotional content shifts our choices, our energy, and our relationship to humans, animals, plants, and even what we call linear time.

We can forget this and project out that we are all part of some huge cosmic battle, or project that the only battles are within. We can forget this and say that we are pawns of stars, or Gods, or the slow decay of matter, or we can say that we are centers of the universe and our decisions are the only things that matter.

The truth is in between. It is not psychology vs substance. It is not grandiosity vs shame. It is recognizing that we don’t know all the answers but we can do our best, each day, to weave our thread into the fabric and make space for others to weave theirs into a pattern that is as beautiful and harmonious as we can possibly make it. We can do our best, each day, to ensure that patterns of discord and snarled knots of greed do not take over the scheme of our weaving. We do our best, knowing that we cannot control the whole, knowing that the pattern is far too large and complex to be seen, knowing that the pattern creates itself as it is woven, knowing that today is just another day, and yet, today is.

Tomorrow is what we – and a billion trillion other beings – make it. Let us not get caught in grandiosity or shame. Let us also not get caught in thinking things are simply as they seem. They never are. Let’s keep our minds and fingers nimble, watching for gradations in texture and color, seeking out chance meetings of complementary weavings, even when they come at angles to our own. These nexus points of things we could not plan set our work into the larger whole. We are not just living our lives, ordinary and small, we are weaving part of a vast cloth of which we can see neither beginning nor end, nor even the glorious now. However, we can see the immediate pattern, feel the warp and weft, and help create the cosmos as we go.

Find what feels helpful, and remember: magick, life, and art are all in process, and you are not alone.

Set the World on Fire

Posted on: June 6th, 2011 by Thorn 7 Comments

There are many books written on self-love, probably more than are written on selfishness, though we could likely debate that.

I’m not here to debate that. I am here to enjoin us toward the love of self that enables us to better love each other. I’m here to ask us all: are we not part of God Herself? Are we not an integral part of creation and the unfolding of the patterns of life? Really. Why are we here? We are here to find and follow our destiny. We are here to listen to desire. Even if the call is faint, let us pray. Every time we show up to another friendship, we are seeking to follow the path of desire. Every time we go to another workshop, ritual, art gallery, concert, forest, or beach, we are seeking desire. To seek desire, is to follow desire. What connects us? What draws us forward? What brings us back to relationship, again and again? Desire.

Desire is the fire beneath us, that keeps us moving forward. Desire is the fire at sex and heart, that illuminates our lives. Desire is the sparking of the mind, that spurs our thoughts toward creation. Desire flames in the cauldron of our belly, giving us the will to carry on. The people I love most in life are guided by desire. They listen to their God Souls and this tugging force of destiny and fire. They light up themselves and the world around them, in ways that might seem simple, basic, but are driven by deep choice. And some of my friends? They set the world on fire.

What is your way? Are you still dousing the fires of desire with self-loathing or indecision? Are you sinking in and training, in order to live a life that feels bold? Are you listening to the great silences, and coming forth renewed? Are you speaking to the wind, and to the rain? Desire draws all things together, and draws still others, on their way. Each peptide in our body forms itself to do its work. What is your work?

These things that help us know, and will, and dare, these things that rise from stillness… all of these, too, are part of the flowing of desire. Let yourself feel it. Let yourself taste it. Let yourself live.

The journey is ever moving onward. The process is never someday but always now.

We can begin to change the world.

Posted on: May 18th, 2011 by Thorn 5 Comments


“For me the shift is away from the idea of love as a feeling to the sense of love as an action, love as something that I have to do rather than something that I could get by with just feeling. I had to be transformed in my actions towards others and the world.”
- bell hooks

I thought I was going to sit down today to write about the dangers of granting autocratic power of endless war, and the implications of unannounced police invasion of people’s homes and what this means to me as a magical practitioner, citizen, and member of the cosmos…

But before I could get up on my high horse and ride, this message came through: “Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Call back your energy. Continue with prayer, with practice, with opening to knowledge.” It was one of those that I clearly needed to post, because someone out there needed to read it. So I did. Within seconds, the responses began on Facebook and the message was resent on Twitter. Right. What does this tell me?

This tells me that it is a good thing that, despite a head cold, I did some yoga, breath and energy practice, soul alignment and centering this morning, because this arranged a field of stillness and silence within me, despite the ongoing troubles in government and the world. It tells me that listening is the precursor to right speech. Always. Now, my rational brain wants me to strike out that “always” word because surely sometimes the right words come off the top of one’s head, in the heat of the moment, on the fly. Then I put the word back, and am reminded that when the right words come in those situations it is because listening is happening in an even deeper form: there is connection between you and the other person, there is a conduit from your God Soul to your mouth, something bypasses the need to carefully craft words because your energy field has been present, listening, and now you can simply speak.

While riding public transit Saturday, en route to an appointment after sitting zazen for two hours with my Buddhist brother and his cohort, I sat next to a man on his way to work. We began one of those random conversations that sometimes happen with strangers. At one point he said, “The world will be safer now that bin Laden is dead.” Fresh from three rounds on the cushion, I was able to immediately reply, “Until humans change ourselves, someone else will always arise.” Listening and presence. Presence and listening. The power of silence within me was able to speak. To connect.

So in a strange way, in these times in which so many of us are troubled – out of work, struggling, bereft, angry, heartsore, tired – the message that came through this morning was exactly the right response even to the things I wanted to write about. The topics of endless war on terror with the rights of a sovereign monarch to be given to an elected official, and the rights of police to enter your home with no cause but their own decision, all can be faced somehow. We face them first from forgiveness: we all know what it is like to feel impotent in the face of injustice, and we also know what it is like to feel fear. Next comes the calling back of our energy: as long as we give so much over to worry, to rage, to circular talking about world’s ills or governmental transgression, we don’t have the proper energy left to act when necessary, and to create the beauty needed by our souls. Then comes prayer, practice, and opening to knowledge. These help us to grow into our best selves. They offer us aid from our altars, our meditations, and our Gods. We will not simply think, awash in a sea of information, but we will deepen and come to know. We will connect to each other in ways that are just right, finding effective action and speech rising naturally from the core of our beings.

We can offer each other hope. Hope starts with stillness, then connection, and then moves to speech or action. I wish to remember that ordering of things which brings me back to a place where love can become like a radiant sun. We do not have to court disconnection, we can court that radiance instead. We can be of help to ourselves and to each other. We can begin to change the world.

When Pride Meets Our Despairing…

Posted on: May 5th, 2011 by Thorn 7 Comments


Just by walking into a room, you can change the world.

I believe this, and have experienced it. We affect one another. Every day, we cause subtle or large alterations in the fabric of reality. Sometimes, though, we forget our ability to shift the energies around us by our actions, by our attitudes, by our words. We forget that some people have a sheer presence they’ve built up through years of practicing being fully who they are, and that standing next to them helps us be who we are, too. We forget that this is how change happens: in the conversation that changes the course of a person’s life work; in the gift that makes the difference between hunger and fullness, hope and despair; in just being, and giving another permission to be.

This week, these thoughts are present with me as I approach the meditation bench. This week, I keep working and practicing, and yet, this week has also been tinged with a sense of despair. Despair because some denizens of this gorgeous continent I live upon have seen fit to pump fists in seizures of American Triumphalism, they have seen fit to rejoice in killing. It isn’t that I cannot wrap my mind around people who have felt afraid, or hurt, or in deep sorrow, feeling some sense of relief that the person they feel was the source of this pain is gone. It is the jubilance that jars me so, and a sense that some of us wish to slide back into an attitude of “America on Top” when our empire has failed us, and failed the world. No, I’m not saying that everything we’ve done is wrong. Empires always fall because things change. Empires and upstarts both contribute good and ill to this planet, just like everyone and everything else. I do harm. You do harm. The finches and cats in my yard do harm. We hopefully try to reduce the harm we do.

This week’s coming and going of despair arose from wondering if humanity actually has the possibility to change, and wondering therefore if my work in the world is worth it, and whether or not it has any effect. In other words, I inflated my own importance in the cosmosphere, and forgot the role I do play. This is something I’ve taught over and over to others: we do what we can, where we can. This week was my time for the lesson.

In running the Iron Pentacle this morning, in tuning in to the energy flow between Sex, Pride, Self, Power, and Passion, I noticed that Pride felt like a bit of a cypher. In thinking that my work has to affect the world all at once, or even the people of one continent, and in entertaining even for one moment my escape fantasies – about going back to work full time at the soup kitchen, or selling shoes, or something that felt like it had a simpler, more tangible effect – I forgot that my place is here. Now. And that yes, I expend way too much jet fuel and need to work on cutting back. And yes, thank the Gods my students and clients come to me for my strengths and skills and put up with my weaknesses and the things I have yet to, and may never, learn. I do the same with my teachers. We do this for each other, and together we hold up and make the world.

My definition of pride is “Knowing your place in the world.” I forgot my place, off and on this week, or at least parts of my soul did. My God Soul is a constant, a beacon of centering and expansion. But these other parts struggled, in their despairing of humanity, and sometimes failed to remember that we each do the best we each can do, and try to affect the world immediately around us. This ripples out. Some of us act on a bigger stage, like the folks who work for Greenpeace or Medicines san Frontier. And yet, reality is, each person in those organizations have to do well or ill each day just like the rest of us. They too, have to settle for changing the world in that one conversation, that one gift, that one moment of being.

This musing is not about whether or not you or I approved of the killing of Osama bin Ladin – that is just the thing that spurred my mood shift and contemplation. This musing is about our ability to keep showing up to our lives, to our work, and to love. This musing is about discovering our place in the cosmos and doing our very best there. And therefore, for me, this musing is about the constant returning to the practicing of life. How else can we evolve?

Shunryu Suzuki said, “The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your own two feet.” That, to me, is pride. May we practice today, whether that feels good or not, whether that feels like failure or success. May we take our place.

When pride meets despair, our souls return to wholeness. Therein lies the world we seek. Blessed be our Center, which is the Circumference of All.