The Art of God

photo by Vanessa Hill Rogers

  We are never separate from God. This is one of
  many lessons I have been learning from
  discussing my relationships with my spiritual
  masters, Helen Lordsmith and JoLee Wingerson,
  for the last 15 years (I am a slow learner). I have
  heard it said “We are God” or “We are part of
  God." Ultimately spiritual experience is personal
  and the way we frame it is unique to us. We
  decide what that relationship will be. Sometimes
  we pattern God after a wicked parent (which is
  interesting because individuals with Dissociative
  Identity Disorder also develop a personality
  modeled after their abusers).

  I feel connected to God - some Cosmic Chemical, Energetic Power, Paternal-Maternal-Fraternal Force. I like the image Marianne Williamson used of one wave saying to another wave: “Do you believe in the sea?” But, as fate would have it, humans are not created to be sailing smoothly with God in our sails. We are born thinking we are separate sinners, and our egos want us to confirm that with proof, because the ego seeks power at the expense of our health and happiness. People will treat us in exactly the way we believe we deserve to be treated – as Ego or Spirit.

Lovers and friends will come and go, but who are we between those times? Why do we give away our power to the Other as if we are not enough. When we give away our power to them, we are no longer the person the Other chose.

When I’m doing it right, my happiness is not dependent on who walks in the door on a particular day or what they are saying to me. I am totally flowing. To learn this I have kicked and screamed when someone walked out the door or didn’t appear in the way I expected. My heart has been shattered by conditions and expectations, and re-pieced. As as result, I’ve become a better teacher, mother, counselor, lover and friend as I’ve learned how to sculpt my life without expectation for the materials or the outcome. Oh how I’d like to be able to CONTROL things. Grr. My ego is a pirate!

With awareness of the fact that we are never separate from God, we are never apart from the people whom we love. We can feel them in our hearts. This is not a THOUGHT. This is something FELT and, amazingly, we can shift or morph or grow into this feeling state of being. The example I have had to model what true love looks like is my grandmother, Mutti, who died 15 years ago. I can feel her hands wrapped around me when I was a baby. I can feel her embracing me as a teen when I cried after breaking up with a boy. I can feel her braiding my hair, and I still smell her food. Her love was so total and complete. The safety I felt in her presence was so thorough that to this day she is woven into my heart and the loss of her does not throw me because I can still FEEL her. (Papa was great too but he was working long days to help support us.)

Mutti and Papa

I did not realize that this could apply across the board. The trick is to be totally open and present with the people in our lives, the people we love – without conditions. We get into trouble when we think: “I’ll only love you if you stay with me the rest of your life.” That’s a thought. The heart wants to feel. TODAY. LOVE. GO DO IT. Your kids will move out. Your lovers will leave or die. Your friends will move. Your parents are doing the best that she can. What is your personal barrier to love? Because that is the faulty belief that you are separate from God. That is the illusion standing between you and Heaven on Earth.

Heaven is a Belly Button Moon

This was a perfect summer evening: 75 degrees with a breeze. I walked the goats, Lily and Ramon, through the green field with the sun setting in a flair of coral clouds on one side and a gaggle of geese flying across a huge full moon – Lady Sky’s belly button – rising to the other side. I felt perfectly squeezed, like an orange been juiced or a washcloth wrung – since I’d just been to a 2.5 Core Power hot yoga class. The gifted and inspirational instructor had used an image that stuck with me. He had said to relax our butts into the matt in savasana like a cool stone dropped into honey. Never mind my butt, I want to kiss like that. I want to live that way… like a cool stone dropped into warm honey, because it requires that I slow down and appreciate the sweet surroundings. My kids used to tell me they imagined swimming in a large pool of vanilla pudding. It’s remarkable they grew up without food obsessions. I’m hoping it’s partly because I taught them moderation and that sugar isn’t evil. Well, it can be, but if you tell a kid they can’t eat sugar, they’re going to grow up and they aren’t just going to imagine a swimming pool of pudding – they’re going to build it!

But anyway, there I was with the goats, looking around at the awesome beauty and I cried with gratitude. I felt like a soft serve dipped in chocolate wonder. Life is delicious!

Last night I danced on my kitchen table on the Unitarian Universalist altar. Wait. I better back up. When I was asked by renowned polar bear artist, Barbara Stone, to create a dance with the theme of “family” for an event she was having at the church, I immediately thought of the kitchen table. Well, more specifically, I thought of how at Thanksgiving my grandma, Mutti, would pull several long tables out of storage and push them together in the living room (because she and Papa didn’t have a dining room in their little house and the kitchen only sat about five). She would set the tables with white cloths and beautiful dishes. When everyone had gone to bed I would sneak out with a blanket and pillow and sleep under the table. It felt like a tent, but too, the table seemed to be alive with anticipation of the upcoming celebration. For the purposes the dance, I flung myself around my own sturdy kitchen table that I brought to the church.

I named the piece “Memories of the Kitchen Table” because another memory dear to my heart is when my mother would return home from a long day of teaching, my aunt would return from school, my uncle was home from the Navy, my grandfather had just come home from a long day at Public Service and we would all gather at the kitchen table while Mutti served dinner. She occasionally pulled up a chair, but she liked to serve us. I was the only child present, so I didn’t want to be asked too many questions, but I loved to observe. I can’t remember much of what was said – I lived there from the ages 2-10, but I remember the camaraderie and sense of union.

While this event at the church was artistic and not religious, it was spiritual, as Barbara related the amazing tales that led to her original art works and a harpist played and Jeff Stone, Barbara’s ex-husband, recited poems and played Celtic tunes. I celebrated the memories of the table and did what connects me most to the divine: I danced.

Heaven is a cool stone, warm honey kiss, the tall grasses brushing my legs as I follow the goats, the white disc moon and burning sun disappearing behind the blue mountains. Heaven is the warm evening breeze and the magpies eating apples from the big tree that shades my front porch. Heaven is the hummingbird that mistook my red shirt for a flower this morning and buzzed in my face; it’s the last year with my old dog who helped me raise my kids; it’s the yoga instructor’s voice lulling us deeper into our hearts that expand if we let them, bigger than the moon or the sun, so big that we know for sure that war is an illusion and peace was all there ever was.