Chasing joy...

I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive....

Joseph Campbell

Joy Collector

http://www.lianneschneiderart.com/Art/Digital-PaintingPhotoArt/i-Bt57d5w/A

The great American mythologist, Joseph Campbell, in one of his interviews with Bill Moyers for the PBS series, "The Power of Myth," responded to one of Moyers' questions about human search for meaning this way:

         "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of life...so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive." 

The "rapture of being alive"...how many of us have been blessed enough to truly experience that? And how do you go about finding that? Surely we can't all spend our time sitting around "navel gazing" as some have mockingly described the meditative practices that blossomed in the late '60s and early '70s when Transcendental Meditation was all the rage and everyone was looking for a guru to teach them how to reach that state of pure detachment that is "ecstasy" or joy. 

And in truth, we actually can't find it by "dropping out" or complete detachment as some envision it. We find it by the simple act of being truly present to our own lives, to the moments of our lives, being completely aware and mindful of those moments and most of all by being grateful for each one of them. Elizabeth Lesser (Broken Open, 2004) describes it as, "It is a willing engagement with the whole messy miracle of life." By that she means that one cannot find rapture or joy by avoiding the pain or the brokenness in our lives. Quite the opposite - one cannot find rapture without embracing that, looking into the face of our fears and anguish and being grateful for it. It is there, where we would least expect to find it, that we realize and appreciate the joy of living. One cannot appreciate light without darkness, become blissful about spring if there were no winter or dormant period, know love without its lack. 

Here's the lesson in a metaphor - a poem I wrote some time ago called, "The Joy Collector." 

The Joy Collector

Like a lepidopterist, I set out to capture joy in my net,

searching in all the usual, obvious places,

in the garden of blooms I’d planted to be

an enticement for the rare and fragile, wingéd creatures.

And once captured what would I do

with each uniquely beautiful specimen?

Wait for it to finish out its brief life in a jar filled with leaves,

holes in the top and then, when it was living no more…

pin it to the corkboard, fix it under glass,

this now lifeless collection on display,

catalogued and labeled for me to show off my skills

as a butterfly hunter, satisfied, self-congratulatory? 

But true joy can’t be caught like that,

remaining as elusive as a Palos Verdes Blue;

rather it catches you utterly by surprise,

comes from places and events you least expect

and seldom where you are looking for it! 

Don’t chase after it…a butterfly hunter with a net -

and when you are very still, within and without,

perhaps even looking wonderingly another way

at something beautiful that catches your eye

and fills your awakening soul with delight,

she will settle gently on your shoulder, 

flutter in your heart...and live.

  

© Lianne Schneider May 2011

Be grateful for the darkness, for the pain, even for the grief - when you can stand still in the midst of that, then you will find your rapture, your joy. In truth, one of my favorite poets, Khalil Gibran said it best nearly 1000 years ago:

I'm a Phoenix - are you??

The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.

Ferdinand Foch

Resurrection

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We've probably all seen those insidious commercials on TV for the University of Phoenix, which offers online degree programs with a number of physical campuses around the country. The spokespersons all proudly proclaim the reason for their present success - "I am a Phoenix." And more power to them - I applaud anyone with the determination and the self-discipline to undertake a degree program alone, without the camaraderie of classroom time, group study sessions and interaction with other students. But I wonder if they realize how much more powerful the story of the Phoenix really is...and whether you have thought about your own Phoenix experiences as I have. 

The Phoenix, of course, is a mythical bird,  and the myth itself is generally thought to have its origins in ancient Greece. There are, however, analogs to the Greek myth in many cultures - the Persian anka, the Hindu garuda, the Russian firebird, the Chinese fenghuang among others. There are even suggestions that a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures, appropriately in the book of Job, refers to the Phoenix as well. 

"And I said, I will perish with my nest, and I will multiply days as the phoenix (chol)" - Job 29:18. In Jewish folklore, chol refers to a supernatural bird, often glossed as, or identified with the Greek Phoenix.

According to the myth, a phoenix is a fire spirit with a colorful plumage and a tail of gold and scarlet (or purple, blue, and green according to some legends). It has a 500 to 1000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again. But it is the Egyptian interpretation of the myth I find most applicable to our own personal quest for identity, awakening and joy. The Egyptians believed that this 500 year cycle represented the bird's ongoing quest to discover his true self and "knowing that a new way could be found only with the death of his worn-out habits, defenses and beliefs, the Phoenix built a pyre of cinnamon and myrrh, sat in the flames, and burned to death. Then he rose from the ashes as a new being - a fusion of who he had been before and who he had become" (Lesser, 2004, p. 55).

Elizabeth Lesser, in her book "Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow," contends that we each have to go through the "phoenix process." We are each incinerated in the painful fires of life and have the ability to rise again, to be renewed and reborn if we are only willing to throw the old self - the past, the fears, the angers, the failures - onto the fire. "Our lives," she says, "ask us to die and to be reborn every time we confront change." We can, as I mentioned in an earlier blog on brokenness, recreate ourselves as something new and more beautiful out of the shattered pieces that are all that seems to be left after a painful and difficult time in our lives - heartbreak, loss, grief, failure. Those are the ashes from which we are called to rise again. Then we, too, can proudly proclaim, "I am a Phoenix." 

Long before I read Ms. Lesser's book, the promise of my ability to bounce back from heartache, defeat, sadness and grief led me to write this poem and to create the artwork you see above.

THE MOMENTS IN BETWEEN

The miracles happen

in the moments in between –

between life and death,

between breathing in

and breathing out,

between beginning and end,

between one light burst,

one photon, and the next…

in that in between space

where there is nothing…

and there is everything -

where all potential,

all possibility exists.

In that waiting space,

in the now of resurrection

all is transformed.

In that moment in between

all illusion falls away.

Death, the great delusion,

dies a final time and

new and sacred truth is born.

I am pierced with my knowing

that all is one, that seeming

opposites make me whole.

In the crucible of awakening,

in the cremation of ego,

I discover what has been

inside me all along –

within my fear…joy,

within my loss…gain,

within my darkness…light,

within my grief…grace.

  

Rising from the ashes,

the smoke of my resurrection

stirs the trees, becomes a breeze

lifting into the Cosmos.

Then it is that I am your song, 

the song of the Universe –

a song of Love, pure Love,

an energy that creates,

a new music that inspires,

a melody in which I’m

a necessary harmonic note.

O Spirit of the spheres,

in this moment in between,

sing your song in me.

©Lianne Schneider July 2012

* Lesser, Elizabeth. (2004). Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. Villard Books (a division

           of Random House), New York, New York. 

Are you mended with gold???

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful - Billie Mobayed

 We Are Glass

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/we-are-glass-lianne-schneider.html

I've read in countless spiritual guides, self-help books, motivational guides that we are all "broken" in some way. Throughout the course of life, events conspire to break us - we suffer losses, disappointments, heartbreak, failure and sometimes what feels like endless struggle. Someone I love dearly is having a "breakdown" - that's what they call the loss of touch with reality that comes from a steady diet of psychological pain. Even if the situation is not so dire for us, we've all experienced moments, perhaps days or weeks when we felt just shattered by circumstances. But the question for me has always been whether being broken means broken down or broken open. There's a huge difference and I've written numerous poems about that thought over the past few years. It seems to me that if we are all broken in some way, what counts is how we put ourselves back together! 

What if we could see ourselves and others as perfectly imperfect...patched with the gold of the lessons we've learned and the vulnerability we've accepted without the shame that usually haunts us because we're "not good enough" or we're "weak" or "afraid?" What if we could see ourselves as more beautiful because we're damaged and imperfect and because we've been broken open by our suffering, exposing the deeper heart and soul of who we are and finding that lovelier than we ever knew was possible? What if we could accept our wounds as important and even possibly necessary aspects of our own "soul" development? (You don't have to believe in the religious definition of soul to understand what I mean but if you prefer, use spirit or heart or just plain human). What if we could accept that as Leonard Cohen wrote in the lyrics to Anthem, "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in"?

"Pain is the great teacher," said writer May Sarton, so what if we could study the lessons and find the gold or the light that makes us more beautiful than ever. This is how I expressed it in the poem I wrote at the same time as I created this image:

IN THE SHATTERING

Shattered -
the fragile glass of me is shattered,
crushed and broken into tiny shards
now reflecting, diamond-like,
a thousand points of light -
magnifying what had once been
but a solitary beam, diffuse, opaque -
as if in the final breaking,
the small, soft, subtle glow,
so long and well contained within
the shape that was the whole of me
is now free to sparkle all the more -
brilliantly, blindingly more -
each crystal sliver multiplying
radiance only dimly shown before.

How could I have known
when I was whole and empty
that it would be in breaking
that I would shine so brightly,
be more luminously transparent,
with a glory all out of proportion
to the pain of the shattering itself?
How could I know that I held
a million different joys inside
just waiting for release?
How could I know that I
was never meant to confine
the light of the Divine inside
but was always and eternally
envisioned in the mind of God,
as each of us is truly meant,
to be at last its sacred shine?

                     Copyright Lianne Schneider 2014

All art and poetry unless otherwise noted is the intellectual and artistic property of Lianne Schneider and may not be copied, reprinted, reblogged in its entirey without the express permission of the author.