July 21, 2015 – I couldn’t have dreamed

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This December it will have been eight years since my spiritual God Mother, Donna and I went to a day-long event at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, being given by the Buddhist meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein and Sister Mary Neill – two spiritual teachers from different faiths who are great friends. After the event, Donna introduced me to Sister Mary as my spiritual grandmother. After meeting me, Sister Mary told Donna that I needed something from her and to have me come see her. This felt strange and also wondrous. Donna told me that she only sees ministers and therapists and other people who tend to a flock, so to speak. Then why me? What did she see in me, and what would I need from her? At the time I was a real estate agent who had taken some life coach training, and had just that month been asked to show my watercolors for the first time the next spring. I went to see Sister Mary in January 2007 (check registers are great for placing things in time!) And I most recently saw her just last Wednesday. She’s now my beloved teacher and guide. She puts my life, my struggles, challenges and blessings in the context of our faith tradition and helps me see and mark my own evolution.

I could never have dreamed I’d ever have such a deep and sweet relationship with a Catholic nun. But not only is she unlike any other nun I’d imagine knowing, she’s unlike any person I know. She’s spent her life studying and contemplating the psycho-spiritual elements of human life. Her foundation is the Christian path and she’s devoted to Jesus, and she brings in to our conversations Jung, dream work and archetypes, the Enneagram, Byron Katie, the Chakras and Buddhist meditation. She’s wise and whip smart, but also funny, funny and silly and irreverent. She’s always taking my hands in hers and dancing with me as she sings old love songs. She’s fearless (sometimes so much she’s scary) and seems more free than anyone I know. No one on earth affirms me and my journey in the way she does. I just adore her. I pinch myself that I have someone like her who knows and loves me as she does. I cannot imagine the unfolding of my life without her accompanying me.

She went crazy over my painting of Twin Dahlias. She has a large framed print of it over the table where she sees her clients/spiritual directees. In our sessions, she’s always pointing to it and telling me this is God living through me – it’s my expression of God. My time spent with her has helped me come to know this to be true. We used to sing this chant at church: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” This is part of a Meister Eckhart quote that continues: “my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” At first I was puzzled by this. But she’s helped me to understand that what and how I see – how we each see – is unique to us, even as it an expression of the divine, of God. I go about my regular life and I’m captivated by something I see – a delicate flower, a look in my dog Bo’s eyes, the blue-lavender edge on the pinky-orange plums in a photo I took out at my parents’ last Tuesday – all these things are little expressions of God – and, my noticing them is God too.

I have come to see that making art – and now teaching – creating the environment for others to create their art – is my calling. And an important part of this has been to claim it as a real profession – to take the calling seriously enough, and to have the audacity to say that I will make a living at it – make it central to my life, not just a spare-time hobby. And it has been really, really hard. It’s been an on-going negotiation in my marriage to re-arrange our lives so I can answer the call. And it has taken immense energy: the festivals, the emails, schlepping tables back and forth for classes, operating in the face of that critical voice that constantly chatters negative stuff about it all – while continuing to paint and FINISHING these paintings.

I had a very freeing realization a couple of summers ago. I have lots of time to think while sitting in my festival booth. It’s rarely so busy that I’m talking to people all day. I’ve spent hours wondering why my art has not been selling while there are so many people expressing such appreciation for it. Then it sifted in: I’m not in charge. I have no say in who buys my art, when they do, how they will find me or it. If I were, I’d never have any paintings to show! They’d be all gone right away!

Summertime

While this is being posted, I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico sharing what I know about painting watercolor with a woman from Texas. In early 2013 she found my art somewhere on line – she can’t remember where – and signed up to be on my email list. Then about six months later, I sent an email update with my latest painting “Summertime” (some of which I painted while on retreat with my Sister Mary that summer). She saw it and knew this was the one. She bought the original painting, after just seeing a picture of it over the Internet. Then she told me learning to paint was on her bucket list and she wanted for me to teach her. There’s no way I could have dreamed this up. If I were in charge, this amazing connection would not have been made and I’d not be here this week.

In the time that I’ve been seeing Sister Mary, my work in the world – my reach – has grown immensely. There is an original painting hanging in Australia and I have a great fan who writes me regularly from, as she calls where she lives, the desolate mountains of Scotland. There are dozens of people who have come to paint with me and find inspiration from the environment I’ve been called to create. And even with all the successes, we are still a ways away from my making a real living at it. I still need support from my husband. But I do know that I will continue to be supported to paint and to teach. This support is part of the deal. I don’t think we are given a call without it.

I have no idea what else is in store. Just as I couldn’t have dreamed up all that has happened; I cannot dream what is to come – or when. It never feels right to take full credit for the art I make and how I help artists with their paintings. My experience is that all this comes from the source of all that is, from God – and that all that comes through us has some divine purpose. Our part – my part – is to listen for the call – and then answer it: Hello, is that you, God?

Love,

Cara

July 14, 2015 – Starting with Surrender

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Making a commitment to write every week has taken a leap of faith. I so feared that I’d peter out, leaving my abandoned online journal as evidence for all the world to see that I’m not able to stick with things. And, I keep worrying I’ll run out of things to write about. This week my faith is being tested – no clear ideas were coming to me. Yesterday morning in a conversation with my dear friend Vicki the word “surrender” came up and then it echoed in me throughout the day. But what to say about it eluded me. This morning I woke with a memory of being in an African American church in San Francisco a few years ago and experiencing surrender in a way that I’d hadn’t ever before. From there, thoughts threaded through about my spiritual evolution, including how I have come to see myself as thoroughly Christian. And then the thought: are you really going to go there?

It’s so loaded, that word Christian. The word Christianity seems less so – within it is tradition and history and ideology – more heady words. But to call myself Christian has me need to explain to you what being Christian means to me – which is very particular – in case reading this has you make things up about me. Because I would have made all kinds of things up about someone calling themselves Christian in my earlier life!

Our family is culturally Christian in the way that many Americans are, we celebrate Christmas and Easter – but we are not religious. We almost never went to church. I think once we went to an Easter sunrise service when I was a kid growing up. I remember having a sleep over with a new friend when I was junior high age and going to a Catholic church with her family and her. The holy water inside the door, the sign of the cross, the kneeling at the pew, I felt so far outside of belonging in this place, so uninitiated. It was foreign and scary. Except for travelling in Europe in my early 20’s where I visited churches as historic tourist attractions, this was my experience of church.

In the first months of our relationship, Joe got very sick from the chemotherapy and had to be hospitalized. Someone needed to handle the payroll for his employees, so I called his bookkeeper. At the end of the conversation she asked about me and I burst into tears. She suggested I call Sara Vurek, the pastor at the Fairfax Community Church. I moved aside the protesting thought – call a minister? – and I called Sara. Her voice was warm and real – she seemed so normal to me. She put Joe on the church’s prayer chain and connected me with Unity to put him in their big prayer network. Though a spiritual life had awoken in me out of my divorce, it was more new-age. I really didn’t really relate to what prayer would actually do, but it was comforting in some way that is hard to articulate.

Not quite two years later we were planning our wedding and we needed someone to officiate. Sara came immediately to mind. Joe saw her Birkenstocks and discovered she’s a fervent San Francisco Giants fan and he was sold. The ceremony Sara created with us was just right for us and through the experience I fell completely in love with her. At that same time I found myself hungering for a spiritual community, a spiritual home. Two Sundays after our wedding, I went with a friend to a service at the Fairfax church. I was unable to even say the word church out loud; I wanted to mumble it behind a brush of my hand across my mouth. It was all so foreign to me and I had all these ideas about brainwashed people who spoke straight out of the Bible – which made them completely un-relatable to me.

This 1950’s era church was in the middle of being remodeled, there was paper all over the wood floors – it was hardly an inspiring sight. That Sunday Sara was away. I don’t remember who the woman was who presided. Besides offering us a blessing with water she’d recently brought back from a trip to the Holy Land, I have no memory of what happened. But I knew I was coming back – something called to me. Through Sara’s reflections (they were not called “sermons”) I found a way in – a way to understand the teachings of Jesus and the traditions of Christianity that were actually applicable to my own life. In retrospect, I see the enormous impact that the decade I spent with this little church has had on my personal evolution – my leadership capacities were incubated in this sweet community. But what’s most precious to me now is that, along the way, I discovered the part of me that is deeply devotional. There is a place in the center of my chest, in my heart that longs to long, to revere, to surrender, to worship even – something greater than me.

I’ve done a couple of silent meditation retreats within the Buddhist world. Loving-kindness meditation is a beautiful and effective spiritual practice. But to me it doesn’t feel devotional. I don’t feel that place inside me of surrender, giving myself over to the presence of the source of infinite love. And then there’s the iconography. Images of the Buddha and Quan Yin and other eastern spiritual figures are interesting to me, but they don’t enter in like seeing St. Francis in my dad’s garden, or Mary, the Blessed Mother, Guadalupe in Mexico. I surprise myself as I realize that there is even a way that the image of Jesus on the cross can enter the deepest part of me now. I used to be incredulous as to how a spiritual tradition would use execution – what looked like torture to me – as its primary symbol. Eckhart Tolle (the author of The Power of Now, A New Earth) helped me see how Jesus on the cross symbolizes the emotional pain that we all experience in living a human life. I’ve come to understand that it is when this pain is most intense, it strips away our fallback coping mechanisms and has us open a space for another way to see. This allows our consciousness to expand to hold all that the present moment contains and it is how we are resurrected from our own crucifixion. Ok, now I can allow this symbol to mean something to me.

For the first 30 or so years of my life I lived within a shell that had me believe I could use my agile brain as a way out of any struggle. The little crack in that shell that started with leaving my first husband has become so wide it’s hard to see the edges of it in my spiritual peripheral vision. Through this bigger space I pour in the thinking and teaching of Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault, who seem to me to be the growing edge of Christian thought. I’ve heard and read them say things that blow my mind in the very best way – things that have been almost entirely missed in the stories of Jesus and Mary Magdalene – at least in the mainstream understanding. The clearest truth for me is that Christianity is a relational faith – as much as the source of infinite love exists in each of us, is each one of us – it’s most potent as the connection between two or more of us. I have a hard time putting words to my experience of it. It’s a feeling in my body. I have the sense that the center of my chest is expanding. Love is being received as well as emanating out from me. It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking all at the same time.

I have more to say. Where I’m called to go next is to share with you how I relate my faith, my spiritual evolution to my work – my painting and my teaching. But this is a whole post in itself. For that, stay tuned to next week.

Love,

Cara

July 7, 2015 – Being is believing

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This past weekend was our annual summertime county fair. The Marin County Fair has a very fine Fine Art Exhibition – people involved in putting it on say it’s the best in the state – or even the country. I have no idea how true this is, but I do know it’s always an exceptional show. Juried by artists from outside our area, it receives thousands of pieces of artwork from artists from all over the Bay Area and a much smaller number are accepted for the five-day show.

This is where I first publicly showed my work – Paris Roses was accepted in this exhibit in 2006. My watercolors have been so very well recognized in the years since. I’ve been Artist of the Year, received the special, Barbara McQuaid award, received three First Place, Watermedia ribbons, a Second place and a number of Honorable Mentions and sponsored awards.

But this year was by far the most gratifying for me. There were 26 watercolors that were accepted by 12 of the artists who paint with me. Twelve artists! Some of them have had work in the fair for longer than I have, but for some of them, this was their first time entering. My mom and I each had three pieces too, bringing the number of watercolor paintings in the show to 31 that were connected, in part, to 537 Magnolia Avenue in Larkspur – where we gather to paint almost every week.

It was almost surreal for me to walk through the exhibit and see all this beautiful artwork that I witnessed coming to be – and even more incredible that that the artists who painted them entrusted me to ask for my input along the way. It occurred to me through this experience that we have become a community.

So, we’ve been playing with calling ourselves the “537 Magnolia Painters” inspired by Dave Egger’s 826 Valencia in the city (San Francisco), the space he created to support young writers. The recognition that we are a community has come from outside us too. Charlie Barboni, the Fair Manager has invited the group of us to do a floral show in the large passageway outside the fair office where the Showcase Theater is. For any of you who went to the fair, it’s where the art chair exhibit was this past weekend. We’re going to have our first collective show this summer!

This September will mark four years that I’ve been leading these groups, which has given me the opportunity to observe the inner process that we all go through as we make art. I’ve also read some of what others have to say about it. Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art” sparked the idea that we don’t choose the art we make, it chooses us. What seems to have happened now, is that I’ve formed a philosophy about how we are best treated as we go through the vulnerable process of learning our craft (which is never-ending) allowing us to reveal the artwork that is in us. And I am certain that this has helped to form the community that has gathered at 537 Magnolia.

All of this has connected to something that I read in a recent Kelly Flanagan post. He wrote about friendship and the impact of someone believing in him. It changes who we are and what we are capable of to have someone believe in us. I see how strongly I believe in the artists in this community – often before they believe in themselves. I’ve written plenty in this space about the voices in our heads that seem to interfere in the process of our making our artwork – which can be especially intrusive at first, before we have any proof that there’s any reason for our efforts! Believing in ourselves when we are starting out can be really hard! Having a strong desire to make art that is really pleasing to us just makes it harder. We care a whole lot about the outcome, and our early work can sometimes be far from what we want it to look like.

I know I’m not alone in being constrained by the “who are you to…?” voice inside. That voice has its place – to keep us safe. But it makes believing in ourselves impossible at times. I don’t go it alone either. I’m part of a coaching group that meets over the phone every other week to share our challenges and successes as we create our work in the world. My coach, Lissa Boles and my coaching “sisters” – as we call each other – believe in me before I can in myself.

And, what is occurring to me now is how it has changed me to believe in these artists who form this community. It seems rather natural to believe in someone who believes in themselves. There’s a confidence, a flow to enter into. But, it takes boldness, even audacity to believe in someone in the face of their not believing in themselves. There has to be some-one doing the believing – to have a sort of internal solidness to anchor this position. I get to say that I you matter to me, and what you are up to matters to me and that it is absolutely worth your doing – and then sharing it with the world.

I was introduced to the idea of sovereignty by Mark Silver, a business coach who is also a Sufi master. And I love this idea – a state, a country, of me. I looked it up – here are some synonyms: autonomy, independence, self-government, self-rule, self-determination, freedom. Maybe because I’m a feminine creature, oriented to what’s outside me, and maybe it’s just how I came through in this life, but I’ve spent most of my life so far from the idea that I could be sovereign. It’s a remarkable experience to be growing into it now.

I feel a sense of real strength – a sense that who I am has impact – as I embody my philosophy of how artists are best supported and by believing in them. It even helps me know that I exist in a more real way. I know I am because I’m someone who believes in others. Sunday I spent a lot of the day organizing photos on my computer. I take pictures of everyone’s paintings each week, as they are in process. Among them were many work-in-progress photos of the same beautiful paintings I saw on the walls of the exhibit hall the day before. It is such an honor to be witness to all of this – the unfolding of the paintings and their creators. I can’t imagine a better way to spend this life.

Love,

Cara

June 30, 2015 – The Space for Grace

“Faith” – Uncle Bill’s roses

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I did the San Anselmo Art and Wine festival this past weekend. It’s where I showed my work for the first time at a street festival in 2007 – this is my ninth year running. On Sunday morning, I was walking down Magnolia Avenue to my booth to get it all set up again for the day. My body felt so tired and my mind was telling me that I really need to consider whether doing these shows is still worthwhile. Many years ago, this particular festival was a really nice one. It was filled with all kinds of really nice art. As have many street fairs, the economics are such that the majority of the vendors are not fine artists – in fact many are not even crafts people. I’ve had dreams of it returning to its glory, so I’ve been sticking it out. Saturday I had sold some mugs and cards, but only two small prints all day. Walking along I was asking myself if it is still worth it. I even called my dad on my cell phone asking him to remind me of how hard this is on me when I think about doing another show.

Then I heard somebody call my name. It was a friend of Joe’s. We call him “Uncle Bill.” He’s a big bear of a guy – a contractor who is does just beautiful woodwork – and he’s a big love. He lives on Magnolia – I’ve painted one of his roses, the painting I call “Faith.” As we stood there on either side of the beautiful new wooden gate he made, he told me about someone he golfs with – a man named Gordon who is in his 90’s. Gordon told Bill that he actually pinches himself every morning when he wakes up – to check to see if he’s still here. He reminds Bill that every day on this side of the grass is a gift. Ok, that’s my reframe. I get to go share my art with the people who come to the festival today.

Minutes later, I started taking down the side-walls of the canopy – forty feet of eight foot high plastic tarps that zip together to close up the booth overnight. I was standing on my stool (I forgot to pack the step-ladder!) as I’m shaking out the crumples, attempting to gather it all to fold it up, when a woman walks by, very nicely dressed, lovely in black and white, a hat, heels and pearls. With a smile and an offer to help, she picked up the other end of the tarp, immediately intuiting how I wanted it folded. Instead of my fumbling around by myself, her help made it quick and easy. What a Godsend! I asked if I could offer her some notecards or a mug in appreciation. She said, “how about a hug?” Wow. Such graciousness and it wasn’t even 9:30 in the morning!

A few hours later a couple came in, they were looking at all sizes of the prints of August Bounty as they talked about walls and spaces. They seemed happy discussing between just the two of them, so I let them be. Then he handed me a credit card and said they’d like that one. I asked what size – they said no, the original painting. OMG! It’s still surreal to me when this happens. I hope I never get over the excitement of someone giving a home to these pieces that I spend all these hours on, putting so much of myself into. After we agreed I’d take it to them after the show, they left. A while later they came back by and he said to me that he feels like he just gained a new child – huge smiles. So happy! Ok, so by now I have a completely new perspective on whether or not these festivals are “worth it.”

Saturday evening – the night before all of this – at my mom’s recommendation, I watched President Obama’s moving eulogy at the service of Rev. Clementa Pinckney – the pastor at the church in Charleston who was gunned down. He spoke powerfully and with great heart of “grace.” I heard our president actually speak these words: we don’t deserve grace, there’s nothing we can do to earn it – we are all sinners. Not what I’d expect to hear from the leader of our country. This is potent and evolved wisdom that’s not easy for many to hear much less take in. I hear the same message from one of my spiritual heroes, Father Richard Rohr. We are all deserving and undeserving. Deserving by virtue that we are all an expression of the divine – every single one of us. And undeserving because it’s not a meritocracy. There’s no need to do good deeds to be eligible for grace. Grace is even bestowed upon those who appear completely undeserving – as the families of the shooting victims demonstrated in their refusing to hate their loved-one’s suspected killer – instead, in their unspeakable grief, offering him their forgiveness. I was just stunned by this.

People who are very close to me are in recovery groups – 12-step programs. Through them I hear of others who struggle, who have a really hard time staying clean and sober. I think about this often. How is it that some people hit bottom, end up in recovery, work the program and experience real transformation? One day at a time, they seem to never look back. And others want to, but still struggle to get and stay sober? It’s not willpower. It seems to me this is where grace comes in. Grace allows the spiritual shift in perspective that enables us to pick ourselves up from within our darkness and seek the light. It’s grace that helps us change our minds and hearts and see our connection to everything, it’s grace that opens a crack in our defenses – which keep us safe, but also keep us isolated.

The painting I call “Grace”

Talking with Uncle Bill, being rescued in my chore of folding up the tarps and having August Bounty find its home were all tiny acts of grace in my life. Not exactly life-changing – like forgiving heinous acts of violence or someone taking the steps toward sobriety or my finding the courage to leave my first marriage, but it is this-moment-of-life-changing in a complete shift in my perspective on a Sunday morning. Grace is delivered through those around us – and church can happen anywhere.

But it seems that there’s no need for grace without the lack of it, without suffering – without addiction, without harboring hatred, even without just a grumpy mood. This is one of these deals of incarnation. It comes with the territory of living a human life. We will suffer – in small ways I can suffer daily! I find myself stuck in the point-of-view of my small self. Grace will come to my rescue as long as I let it. As long as I am willing to open a space, surrender my small-self from being “in charge” and allow it to seep in, soften me and expand my heart and thus my perspective. It’s my experience that grace can become a habit. Now that I’ve experienced it enough, the shift from stuck to grace can happen more easily. And I’m so grateful for everyone in my life – including you reading this – and your deliveries of grace to me. Thank you.

Love,

Cara

June 23, 2015 – Books that pulled me along

My 25-year old self. Young, lovely and on her way.

Recording of post coming soon.

I was married for the first time when I was 25. My college boyfriend and I asked my dad’s oldest friend, Jerry Lucey to perform our ceremony. He was incredibly well-read, could recite Irish poetry and had an amazing presence. He was a Universal Life Church minister and ours was not his first wedding to preside over. Since neither one of us had any affiliation with any minister or judge, having Jerry marry us made perfect sense. When we met with him in his flat in the city (San Francisco) to talk about the ceremony I told Jerry I wanted no mention of “God.” God meant nothing to me – or my fiancé. The Paul Stookey song “There is Love” was the only way God was mentioned on June 27, 1987. As I look back, this stands out very clearly to me as ground zero in my spiritual journey. The next eight years played out with alcoholism and co-dependency, the pain of which brought me to my knees. And it gave me my inner life.

I get many of the inspirations for what to write on Tuesdays when I’m lying in bed, just barely awake. Yesterday I was thinking about the dozens of books that have contributed pieces to the unfolding of my inner life, my growth. I thought I’d share a few of them with you.

I have no idea how I was led to the first one, but I read “The Celestine Prophecy” in 1994. This book dawned in me the awareness of other dimensions of existence beyond the physical world, as well as other forces at work beyond my conscious mind and will. It was here that I first heard of “energy” in its new-age sense. Shortly after that, I was lead to Marianne Williamson’s “A Return to Love,” her book on The Course in Miracles, which helped me start to realize that I there might be a point to how hard my life felt.

I was still in Burlingame – where I lived in my first marriage – when was introduced to Pema Chodron! I wish I could remember how I was led to “The Wisdom of No Escape.” Thumbing through it now, it’s astonishing that I encountered this wisdom so early in my process. I imagine my self-back-then reading this passage: “We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness. … Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other.” All I saw at that point was that it was all “bad” – that there could be something “good” for me in it helped me see that my panic attacks could be telling me something.

Of course this list includes Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way.” Because of this book, I wrote Morning Pages for the five years from about 1995-2000 – from just before leaving my first marriage until Joe and I were married. These were years I chose my self, I chose my life – which I don’t think would have been possible without Morning Pages. And I still take strength and direction from this passage: “Anger is the firestorm that signals the death our old life. Anger is the fuel that propels us into our new one.”

The crack in my belief that life was “being done to me” started my transformation. The next few years included separation, divorce, living in Paris, and then coming home, facing my loneliness – I had the hardest time being single. And then in 2003-2004 infertility spurned a second big “wave” of change in me – leaving a career that was so far outside my feminine soul’s call.

Sue Monk Kidd talked about her fears in her spiritual memoir, “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.” She had a successful career as a Christian writer, which had become her identity. But then there was this voice. “There is this other clamoring in me, too. The desire I’ve carried around but never dared. The thing I thought I could never do. Now here it is. The urge to create characters and stories. The ones that are mine to tell. Fiction, the passion tells me. Fiction. …I cannot stop thinking how brave I will have to be to follow it.” And what came out was the New York Times bestseller, “The Secret Life of Bees!” Ok, I get it, these voices must be listened to! And I must listen to mine!

Ekhart Tolle’s first spiritual blockbuster “The Power of Now” played a part for me – life is all about our consciousness unfolding. In his book “A New Earth” it is this passage that has me understand why so many of us are drawn to flowers: “Earth, 114 million years ago, one morning just after sunrise: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opens up to receive the rays of the sun….Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness.” I’m now fully validated, painting flowers is not trivial in any way, it’s in fact right at the center of our evolution! Oh, is that all?

The pink plumeria tree from the garden where we stayed in Kauai last month. Future painting … stay tuned.

I love skipping to the end of newspaper articles, magazine stories and books. I have read Steven Pressfield’s “The Wart of Art” all the way through, and much of it over and over, the end is worth reading all on its own – it’s a call to answer our call.

“Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it. It may help to think of it this way: If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God. Creative work is not a selfish act, or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every living being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

These are just a few of the passages that I keep going back to. There are many more books that have made their contribution to me. A few more follow at the end of this post.

It’s incredible for me to reflect on the woman I was 28 years ago this coming weekend. The God that my 25-year-old-self had no place for was a God based on my outsider’s understanding of Judeo-Christian religion. The God that is now at the center of everything for me is a God that is so much bigger, so much deeper and integral to all that is. I’m truly grateful for all the pain and suffering that has loosened me from my dug-in stance that all the answers come from my rational brain and has allowed me to progressively surrender to a knowing that I, you, we are all expressions of this energy, this force, expressions of God. And our lives, our joys, our suffering – including all we create – are a reflection of our progress towards our true nature – our beauty. God is in and through these books. I’m grateful to their authors for bringing them through.

Love,

Care

A few more books:

• The Millionth Circle – by Jean Shinoda Bolen – the hundredth monkey story is worth the whole book.
• Eat Pray Love – by Elizabeth Gilbert – ok, so who spends months in Rome and only goes to one museum, the Museum of Pasta!? I love the permission to prioritize pleasure!
• A Path with Heart – by Jack Kornfield – I once did a short meditation from this book for about an hour while on a bus returning home from the city. I got off the bus and all the flowers were extra clear, sharp and vibrant – it altered my consciousness!
• Wouldn’t Take Nothin for this Journey Now – By Maya Angelou – her sovereignty emboldens me.
• Gifts from the Sea – by Anne Morrow Lindburg – just poetry.
• The Naked Now – by Richard Rohr – the idea of non-dual thinking has brought immense peace.
• All of Anne Lamott’s non-fiction – every single one. Bird by Bird’s chapter title “Shitty First Drafts” allowed me to let myself write – something I told myself I was incapable of.
• Art and Fear – by David Bayles and Ted Orland – this book affirms everything I observe in myself and others as we make art and even attempt to live a creative life.

June 16, 2015 – Dancing with dying

I was a happy baby too!

Listen to this post:

When I was a baby I was really sick – I had a heart defect. When we are in utero, there is a shunt in the circulatory system that surrounds our hearts that is supposed to close shortly after we’re born. For unknown reasons, mine didn’t. This set up an abnormal blood flow around my heart, that meant that any little cold or other bug I got, collected in the shunt and sent a germ-bomb into in my lungs, which gave me several bouts of pneumonia. Five times I ended up hospitalized in an oxygen tent. My family’s pediatrician, Dr. Stan Mogerman at Kaiser in San Francisco most likely saved my life. The normal protocol was to wait until the child is five, to see if it may still close on its own, but he insisted that I have the surgery at two and a half. The surgeon, who operated on me – the first ever done at Kaiser SF, said that I would not have made it to five.

When I was about 30 I discovered that my grandparents had taken a life insurance policy out on me. They were afraid that if I died, my parents wouldn’t have the money to bury me. My dad was finishing college and our family had no extra money. Wow, it was serious! I have only one little memory of any of it – I was in the hospital with my mom and was given a sugar donut and a small carton of milk. I have a big scar in between my ribs under my left arm that goes up toward my shoulder blade. My heart has been evaluated a couple times and it seems I am completely normal.

But I have been really, really in fear of dying a lot of my life. I have no idea if this fear came from the trauma that my little being experienced, or if the fear developed and I associate it because of hearing about all that happened to me. My intuitive sense is that it’s the former. Regardless, the fear has been very real. For a few years after a car accident, I had flashes of terrible car accidents while I was driving. I am not comfortable in airplanes – not so much that it prevents me from flying, but enough that I am very relieved when we land. And this is a bummer – my husband is a pilot! More recently, with all the changes in my body in menopause, I have fears that I could be having a heart attack or stomach cancer… Being afraid of dying has been so tiresome.

All that life gives us, though, is fodder for spiritual evolution. In early 2001, I did a year-long program with my church based on Steven Levine’s book “One Year to Live.” Our pastor, Sara accompanied a small group of us on a year living (as much as we can, artificially) as if it were our last. I was hoping to make peace with my mortality. A sentence I read in the book has stuck with me and consoles me: “Dying is safe.” The group was a great experience, but it didn’t erase my fears.

About two months ago, I was having body work done at the hands of Kathryn Hood, a structural re-integration practitioner who has magical hands. I was so deeply relaxed in a way that I don’t ever remember being, and I had the thought that I hope that dying is like this. I seemed as if I could just float off in that moment, away from the physical plane and it would be just fine. Sweet even. She is a gifted healer (she’s the first person in over 50 years to notice my surgery scar and think that the tissues around it might need some attention!), but I it was wonderful to realize that I could experience that level of peace and acceptance about my own death – that I could think about dying without this fear that has plagued me so much. The fear is not gone, but I can draw from the memory of this experience. I know this peace is in me. And I love what Kate said when I told her. She holds that this level of deep peace can be how we live!

It seems that it’s every couple of weeks these days that we hear of someone, a beloved of someone we know, who has died. Some have lived a full, long life, but many are not that much older than I am. It can happen really quickly. Not just accidents, but heart attacks and even some cancers can kill us in a few months. It’s impossible to not consider my own death when hearing this news. What comes to me now when I consider dying anytime soon is: but there are paintings in me! I don’t have so much a bucket list of experiences, as the sense that there is work in me that needs to be created. I don’t know exactly whose “need” this is – but I feel it. Creative work is connected to the life-force, to the spirit that animates all life, everywhere – the entire universe. I deeply believe that as long as we are alive, we are a channel for this creative force. It is my experience that it is imperative to our well-being, to our well-living to give this force an outlet – especially once we have awakened to its presence in us.

There is a balance. There is a duality inherent in our lives: we will all die, and in this moment we are alive. I don’t want to fearfully obsess on death, but a wholesome presence to it gives me the capacity to hold the preciousness of this life I’m living. From there I am much less apt to get mired in all that doesn’t matter so much. And I can hopefully choose to spend my time in a way that honors its finitude – mostly this is about remembering to be grateful for the moment I am in. Like this one: Bo is softly breathing next to me on the bed, my fingers adept at typing on the computer, thinking about my husband out doing his day. And – thinking about you who will be reading this later. It’s also about anticipating my life to come – living expecting to keep on living.

The photo that is inspiring my new painting.

In a few minutes I’ll get up and get out for some exercise with Bo. As I imagine my day, I probably won’t think much about dying. The painting I’ve just started is calling to me. I will work on it, and I will work with my Tuesday student. I will post the painting I just finished on my website and pay the credit card bill that’s due. Later, I’ll cook food for us and cuddle with my Joe and my Bo. It’s almost hard to fathom how we can have the capacity for both: to be contemplative – present to the preciousness of life, we don’t know how soon, but we will die – and to do all the things on the list – as well making our list expecting tomorrow. What I’m grateful for at this point in my evolution, is that in my best moments, there is the capacity to hold both at the same time.

Love,

Cara

June 9, 2015 – The gift in our unlived life

Hiding under the bed…

Listen to this post:

It was the summer of 2003. Joe and I had spent the weekend at a little beach house at Stinson Beach – on the coast of Marin County near where we live. He went home to work on Monday and I stayed two more days by myself. It was a tender time – we were in the middle of sorting out whether or not to do a course of in-vitro fertilization. It was a cool late afternoon – the fog was coming back in. I wrapped the little blanket I was sitting on up over my bare legs. The cell coverage was better out on the beach than in the beach house. So, it was there I talked to the fertility doctor for the first time. He was very gentle but matter-of-fact. This was going to be expensive, not covered by medical insurance, and at my age – (I was 41), we had a far less than 50% chance of success. I got off the phone with the fleeting thought: this might not work – I might never have children. It’s remarkable how protective denial is. I was so emotionally ill-prepared to handle that very real possibility that I had the capacity to just put it out of my mind – like it was an awful sight that I could avert my eyes from. I just couldn’t go there. Buried in that denial was the fear that the disappointment, the grief I’d feel, would completely devastate me.

You know how this story came out. We did IVF and I didn’t get pregnant. Four eggs were harvested from my ovary, one four-celled embryo was implanted in my uterus (we have a Polaroid picture of it – labeled “Greenwood-Brown”). It didn’t take. And the grief came. I felt it and avoided it and then it stalked me, until I felt it some more. I’m nowhere near as raw as I was then, but if I go looking for it, it is right there. I suspect that it might always be. As a woman, I have all this amazing physiology that I will never use, never feel my baby kick inside me, never endure the agony of childbirth, never look into that brand new little human’s eyes or ever be called “Mommy.”

If you are wondering, yes, we thought about adoption and yes, there are plenty of other children that I could have given (and still could give) my love and attention to. And, I completely get how parenthood brings with it a whole lot of hard work and even grief of its own. Neither of these places are where I’m going here.

There’s a book in my collection by Dawna Markova called “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life.” She awoke in the middle of the night, the exact moment when her father died. What came to her in this moment was: “I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire….” It goes on. The message of the book is powerful – “Reclaiming Purpose and Passion” is the subtitle. I’ve read this book through, have shared from it and quoted from it. It’s been part of my unfolding.

But, the thing is, I think we all do have an unlived life. My dad recently told me that he missed out on the going-away-to-college experience. My mom has always loved technology – she had the domain name niz.com in 1995! But, because someone at IBM in 1959 told her she had no aptitude for it, she shied away. Can you imagine what my force-of-nature mother might have done if she’d gotten involved in tech when it was in its infancy? Two of my spiritual mothers have lived each other’s unlived lives: one the sensuous marriage to her soul mate, the other a life of contemplation and spiritual exploration. My unlived life is motherhood.

It may not be so for all of us – but I am still very conscious of the life I didn’t get. On the practical level it left space and time to focus on something else. But it also brought with it a well of painful emotion that has fueled me to persevere towards something else meaningful. The circumstances in my life and my internal wiring were such that going back to a “real job” retained a serious pull on me for many years. This immense disappointment sat right over my shoulder, waiting to come barreling through if I were to cave in on living a more fulfilling life.

It has done its job. I could not have made this up. I had no idea this art was in me and would end up saving my life – or that I had the capacity to accompany others in the process of their art saving their lives. But now it’s hard to imagine there’s anything else I am better suited for.

Sunday afternoon I had a two-hour talk on the phone with Brenda, my friend of 30 years. It was a fierce conversation. In the most loving way she admonished me to care for my endeavors – art, teaching, my work – as if it were my child. She said that my allowing myself to be pulled away by other demands upon me was like neglecting to change my baby’s diaper. It was Brenda who watched me pull a plastic bag of unframed paintings out from the dark and dusty space under my bed. She told me that I had to get them framed and hung for people to see. I had been afraid of spending the money to do this – didn’t know they were worth the investment. She said I must. The paintings above and here were the ones that were in hiding.

It’s long since time when having a baby has even been possible for my body and I am at peace with that. Sometime last year I spent a few hours with my dear friend Julia’s toddler. We had the best time, reading books and drawing. When Julia came to get her, as they left, I noticed that I was ok, I was good. I no longer longed. That part of life had passed by. I felt like a grandma – in the sweetest way.

I believe that this unlived life has wrapped itself around and through my lived life. None of this would have come to be without what I did not get in this life. Unlived lives have energy and power. They call upon us to honor them, to listen to them. Mine is very real and clear to me. It has demanded my attention. With the help of my dear friend, it reminds me to fully inhabit what I got instead, and points out the incredible richness of the life I am living. You are part of this richness. As I write this, I am washed over with a wave of gratitude that breaks me open.

Love,

Cara

May 26, 2015 – Caring about caring

[I wrote this post while on an airplane to Kauai over the weekend. I’m posting it from here, while listening to the Hawaiian birds and feeling the balmy air on my skin.  I am taking a break from recording an audio version while on vacation.  I’ll resume when I’m back.]

On election night in November of 2008, while waiting for the outcome, I painted. I was finishing up a painting I ended up giving the name “Blossoming Hope” and listening to a conference call.  Ali Brown, a business coach, was interviewing a woman named Alison Armstrong. The talk was billed as:  “Stop Trying to Be a Man in Your Business! The Power of Femininity in the Workplace.”  I was hungry to understand – and (still am) seeking to fully grasp how I can be feminine – be in the feminine and still pursue my endeavors in the world.  Since building and growing are inherently action-oriented – squarely in the masculine, being an entrepreneur in a way that is grounded in the eternal, the yet-to-be manifest, being receptive and expectant continues to be somewhat an elusive balance!  After that, Ali Brown drifted away for me, but I’m forever grateful I was in her world for a while, as it was she who led me to my beloved Alison.

My relationship with myself, my husband, my work, with so much has transformed because of Alison and the distinctions she makes and shares with the world.  Many of these distinctions have to do with the masculine and the feminine – a theme that seems to have captivated this lifetime of mine. But some of them are more universal, more generally wise and always spiritually sound.  Somewhere along the way I heard her talk about caring. That caring is a resource. My idle thoughts the past few days have picked up on this idea.   What we care about: where we put our concern, our interest – our hearts – seems like something useful to explore.   It seems related to another idea I came up with myself years and years ago.  It occurred to me that how we pay attention and what we pay attention to has an enormous impact on who we are.  Think about it; if you watch for it, you can see it everywhere.

My husband loves baseball.  He reads – pays close attention – to the sporting green and follows along with lots and lots of games. His knowledge of players and their histories and performances is positively encyclopedic!  The games are often on the TV or radio when I’m around, and the sporting green is there for me to read too, but I don’t.  I don’t pay the attention he pays.  I don’t care like he does. But I do care about his caring, so I pay enough attention to engage with him – and I am wearing SF Giants orange fuzzy socks as I type this!  It’s the same with old movies, aviation information, the technicalities of how music is made – largely he is who he is because of what he puts his attention on.  People who pay attention to incidents of crime are more concerned about security; people who are interested in the very best food are more discerning in their tastes than someone who is just fueling their body. What we care about, we pay attention to and it shapes us.

Looking through old photo albums when my college friend Randi was here last year, among the photos of all of us drinking huge margaritas in Tijuana and roller skating in Balboa Park in San Diego, were photos of orchids. I took photos of flowers when I was a teenager!  I noticed them, I paid attention, I cared enough to stop and take pictures, even as I was studying computer science. Some of what we care about has always been there – which for me is flowers and color.  And sometimes it develops over time.

Last week, I talked about how our vision changes, it’s not so much that our eyes alight upon the world differently (though I am still curious about this possibility) as much as it is our attention attuning more carefully than we had in the past.  Part of this is intentional, especially at first, but then we do it unconsciously.  The desire to paint has us learn to see, which then changes where we put our attention in the rest of lives as well.

Caring also gives us capacities we wouldn’t otherwise have.  Doing something that challenges us takes something extra-ordinary from us in order to stick with it. Often, it’s just easier to quit.  The artists in my weekly groups who have been coming to paint, week after week, show an enormous amount of care to their work – in how they work.  If the painting isn’t right to them, it’s not right. Somewhere inside them is an often elusive vision for what the painting is to be.  When they ask for feedback from me, near or at the end, I often hear “am I done?”  They have paid so much attention to the painting that they are often tired of it. And I see over and over again, even in the face of “I’m so sick of this painting” the willingness to go back in and do one or two more things to make it really sing.  Without that caring, the work does not see its full potential.

Caring about our work, and paying attention as we do it, so that we can learn the skills to realize our visions in art, enables us to make work that pleases us and that we can be proud of (or become proud of – see my post about the unwanted within).  And when our work is appreciated by others can fuel the caring in us to make more work.

But caring is not a limitless resource.  Caring takes energy, it’s an investment of our selves.  “Paying” our attention to one thing means we can’t “spend” it on something else.  We cannot possibly care and thus give our attention to all that would benefit from it.  This is not a justification for burying our heads in the sand to the world’s problems as much as it is a call to consciously choose how we do pay attention.  And to know that our caring matters.  What we care about, put our attention to, invest ourselves in is a reflection of us.

I am constantly in the conversation with myself whether I do enough to make the world a better place.  I care about the environment, I care about my relationships with Joe, my family and close friends.  I care that beauty is valued in the world, I care that people feel safe and are free to express themselves.  Looking at what I care about, I see that my life is a reflection of it.  I don’t know how to know if this is “enough.”  But for today it seems like it is.  It’s worth asking ourselves – where do you put your precious attention?  What do you care about?

Aloha,

Cara