Stirring the Waters. Janell Moon
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just beginning to peek through on the trees? Is the snow covering the earth like white wool? What does your special place say to your spirit? Write down your experience using the technique of streaming.
3. Open a drawer and take out several objects at random. Using these, write about your willingness to hope. For instance, you may take out a stamp and scissors; using gazing into the waters and streaming, write about the stamp as a symbol of sending your spirit the message that it is safe to hope for a force that cares for you. Or, you may write about why it wouldn’t be safe to hope for this. The scissors may be a symbol that it is time to cut off with something, someone, or some thought. Explore what that might be.
Day 3: Faith Makes It Possible
My mom is a cloud watcher. She says clouds remind her that there is something spacious and grand beyond her understanding. She uses their comings and goings as a sign of faith: good days coming, some stormy times, some dull days. Sometimes, when she sees the clouds looking like kangaroos hopping across the sky, she knows a change is coming. She writes a prayer to her spirit each night before bed and keeps a prayer journal. She enhances her faith by just looking up to the sky.
Sometimes, after a long night’s sleep, I wake up with a bounce and an enhanced faith of the spirit in my life. Or, I may enjoy the way the mustard plant makes the grass on the side of the highway glow a neon green and use this as a reminder that the spirit is all around. Always, there is a poem waiting to be written.
Faith is what is believed even without evidence. It tells us that there is more than what we know and that good will come again. Often it is a difficult time that leads us to faith.
Other times, something so joyous and wonderful happens that it could only be a gift from heaven. However faith comes to you, it will enrich your life.
We don’t have to believe 100 percent that it is possible to live in faith; 51 percent is plenty. As Mary Jean Irions says in her book, Yes, World, “Faith is not being sure. It is not being sure, but betting with your last cent.” It is enough to move toward the belief that you are a part of the whole.
Today we’re going to write to explore our sense of faith. I find that it’s useful to find symbols to help you hold faith. Seeing a morning glory might remind you of childhood wonder. Write about that. Or, perhaps you find yourself imagining an attic in a wonderful old country house, with good smells all around. You might write about how a certain smell can make you feel more spiritually connected.
Arlene, who lives in the Sonoma wine country of California, told me at dinner one Saturday night that she loved living there in August, the time of the crushing of the wine grapes. It was a “memory smell” of her grandfather, to whom she turned for comfort as a child. She has a grape leaf journal and writes what the leaves, her symbol, have to tell her each month.
“Faith hasn’t got no eyes, but she’ long-legged.” —Zora Neale Hurston
What symbol might help a belief in your spirit as you allow it to bud and blossom? Listen to the wrens and write about faith.
Exercises
1. Look out your window and find the shape of faith. Write about it; explore the various shapes of meaning. For example, I see the Mexican sage plant’s purple blossoms, long and thin, seeming as if they are reaching for heaven. Or, in the round pot, I feel a whole, shaping completeness in the world.
2. Try gazing into the waters and determine what your strongest sense seems to be: smelling, seeing, hearing, touching, kinesthetic (body sense)? Use streaming and write about how your strongest sense helps you with faith. The simple smell of clean sheets may trigger the feeling of life’s continuity, the faith in everyday tasks. Touching a pussy willow may remind you of your little brother’s soft hair and bring you back to faith in innocence.
3. Write the phrase, “Faith enriches my life” thirty times. In Buddhism, a repeated phrase like this is called a mantra. Think of this mantra as a bookmark holding your developing faith while you read this book. Use streaming to explore how faith can enhance your life.
Day 4: Sense of Place
I know a poet who talks about the “gold-light fall feeling” he had as a child as the light fell slowly in the back room of the house where the family relaxed together. He’d tell his mother he had a “gold-light” feeling and his mother would give him pencil and paper. When you read his descriptions of light, moss-covered trees and the dangers of the swamps you can tell he loves the South. You can feel his connection to the heat and the southern ways. He has a strong sense of place in his poetry and his life that seem to bring him closer to his spirit.
A sense of place roots us, makes us aware of connection.
When I was a child in Ohio, I loved its rivers and gorges and roamed the land freely with my imagination. Living near the Cuyahoga River, I was sure I could hear the Iroquois Indians in my dreams. Later, when I learned the river caught fire, I pretended it was the Iroquois reclaiming the river. I often think the woods of Ohio helped me to breathe deeper, that their wildness allowed my imagination to flourish. I remember watching the trees and writing about the spirit rustling the leaves. I would look around me and ask myself where the spirit lived that day: in the acorn, the crook of the tree, the nest? Then I’d write stories where the little girl was saved by the spirit who lived in the acorn and how the oaks protect her.
“I was convinced you can’t go home again. Now I know better. Nothing is more untrue. I know you can go back over and over again, seeking the self you left behind.”
—Helen Bevington
Some of us have little connection to where we grew up but still find a sense of place in nature. Perhaps you have a field near where you live that you could enjoy tramping through. A vacation may bring memories of the rain forest of Hawaii or the splendor of Yellowstone National Park. A client of mine, a man from a large urban family, often talks about the solace he found on the roof of his house. It doesn’t matter where you find it; a sense of place often brings you closest to that feeling of “something more.”
Today, our writing explores place.
“I am the earth, I am the root.”
—Judith Wright
Exercises
1. Draw a picture of the house you grew up in and of your room. Don’t worry about technique. Just get the basic shapes on paper. Was there a secret place where you hid your treasures or a place you liked to play on rainy days? What about these memories makes you feel connected to your young, innocent self? Where did you sit and read? Dream? Find at least one good place if you can. Does a sense of place help you remember that you are connected to the spirit? Use gazing into the waters and streaming to explore this.
2. Use the technique of gazing into the waters as a warm-up, then write about a local place that you like to go to when you need to feel calm. If you don’t have a place, imagine how you would like it to be. How does your body feel when you are in this place? Use streaming to remember all of your special places and what these places did for your spirit.
Day 5: Patience
Henry Ward Beecher once said, “Anyone can bring down the fruit in season, but to labor in and out of season, under every discouragement, that requires a heroism which is transcendent.”
Often, we look for quick answers, a quick fix. We don’t want to do what it takes to make something happen either in the material world or in our spiritual life. Patience is what most of us have in short supply. We really do want what we want when we want it. I had one client who became terribly frustrated and impatient when he wrote about his growing awareness of spiritual connection and then about how little he lived that in his everyday life. “Never mind,” I’d tell him. “The disparity is what brings us to a spiritual search.” Impatience is just a symptom of our unexamined lives.
The wonderful thing is that