Labyrinth Poem

Entry for 4 November 2018:

Note: To mark the 30^th anniversary of the construction of the Murray Creek Labyrinth, I’m reprinting this poem. I wrote this originally for a humanistic psychology class at UC Santa Cruz in 1970 when I was 19 years old.  In 2000 I revised it for a self-published collection of my poems.  The poem mixes familiar scenes around the UCSC campus with Greek mythology and Joseph Campbell’s archetypal “Hero of a Thousand Faces.” Psychologically, this was an attempt to capture the moment in which I began to gather the courage to turn back to face my mortality, and in so doing began to become an adult, a process I am still working on almost 50 years later.

             1. Prologue

When I am dead, remember me,

as one who walked, often quickly,

in deep shadow under tall redwoods,

on too-bright March mornings.

Please remember this, at least:

That I knew that I was lost and afraid,

but refused to give up, and would not take

the escape of doing things the easy way,

I would not follow a childlike faith,

at simple altars in sun-bright places.

Remember me, thus, as a person

who said what he thought was true and necessary,

and did not regard the difficulty or the pain.

And thus he walked awhile in shadow,

and found some small good, and was gone.

            2. Beginnings

Who now knows the hour or the way

by which we came into this maze, our life?

Others have recalled for me my birth:

Into this cave of night I came;

and grew where fires threw their glare,

throbbing, at the roof of my small world.

These first confusions of shape, color, and words,

describe the orders of my first and present worlds.

But they are hardly the first:

Before my birth was,

I slept a shoreless fetal sleep,

wandering in an inner sea.

Who knows how that sleep began?

            3. The Labyrinth of Daily Perception

Waking, I rise and creep to the window.

Like a cautious priest I part the curtains;

a thousand images leap through the glass:

Dawn is fighting to free herself

from the tangled, clutching

branches of distant trees;

her blood has run across the sky,

and stands in pools now.

A shivering oak:

Unsteady silhouette of leaves

cuts sharp and deep into the sill.

I go outside and find:

Behind a sea of green-feathered spear tips,

an ocean swells.

And the morning moon, past full

is now waning, dying,

as the sun rises to overtake it.

Cloud-shrouded, westering,

it is caught by a swell of redwoods

like billowing nets on the tide.

The air is chill,

an asthmatic motorcycle passes,

gasps up the hill.

This place of towers and trees bemuses.

Climbing up the hill,

I am confused by faces, found in the crowd,

then lost behind.

Superreal, warning off intrusion,

uncompleted buildings deflect my glance.

Men leave their noise, pause from their work,

constructing this maze or that mountain,

to glare me by.

I stop at last beneath great cumuli,

whose movement seems to shove the sky itself.

I cannot stay, and go below to read;

but there instead I wander underground,

with furtive looks, through rows of crying books.

Cold walls oppress, drive me to the surface,

to find the world is walled

by clouds and trees,

by dark wet roads

and white stucco towers,

by sights and sounds that lose me in their maze.

At last, I am exhausted,

from these thousand leaping images

My chosen path is now an aimless wandering,

and walking seems

a way of standing still

amid the passing show of place and face.

At dusk a friend comes by my room to talk,

but in the middle of his speech,

the words go strange:

He speaks to me as if he were King Minos,

come to greet the fourteen youths

Athens’ black-sailed ship has brought to Crete. 

Then he leads me into the Labyrinth

and leaves me in the dark.

In silence, sitting in my empty room,

I feel the images fleeing, demons,

drawn through the window to the night outside;

and in their place, opening, a great space;

the minotaur eyes of the staring void.

            4. Dreaming of Escape

This is how it seemed to me,

that King Minos rules the Labyrinth

but the Minotaur holds the void.

In the silence of the center I knew he sat, and waited

for me to come to him.

There is, I had heard, some secret way,

a path that leads to true birth from the womb-maze.

And I had listened to those who claimed:

“The Labyrinth?  A nautilus shell

describes its form, and all who know

can tell the way the exit lies,

for the passage grows ever wider.”

False hope, I judged.

For who knows where shell enclosure ends

and if free sky, when reached,

is not more shell,

bright, extended into heaven?

So I continued to seek my own way out,

but many were the blank walls and circular reasonings

that trapped my speculations and attempts.

First my physics, then my metaphysics

did not set me free, and, in fleeing from the center,

all I found was more confusion.

And I failed even to elude the void.

From the center, it reached out at me;

when it passed, its cold touch brushed me,

it stopped me from building, quickly crumbling

all my contributions and solutions

reducing them to twistings of the Labyrinth.

For at the center of this life, my death

sits, waiting, for me to come;

he will have me anyway,

whether I will it, or not.

And at my dying, the rats will carry

my bones to him, and he will have

my marrow.

            5. Epilogue

Into this cave of night I came;

and grew where fires threw their glare,

throbbing, at the roof of my small world.

I tire of the fears and fantasies of youth,

that have kept me at the edge of life!

And so I take as my archetype,

Theseus, who took another’s place

to penetrate the maze.

                                               

And I will seek the center of the world,

whether it be made of emptiness or connection,

terror, resignation or love,

and I, too, will try to be a hero.

-Robert Elliott (February-March 1970/December 2000)

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China Impressions: EFT in Shanghai

Entry for 12 August 2018:

Six days’ EFT training in Shanghai.  I’ve flown from Glasgow to San Francisco, spending 3 days in Pleasanton and getting in a brief visit with Kenneth before flying on to China.  California is hot and dry, and on fire in many places.

First time in mainland China (previous trip to Hong Kong, but somehow feels like that doesn’t count).  Airport is full of construction; we land out in far reaches of airport; it takes bus what seems like ages to get to terminal & pick up suitcase.  Foreigners have to do self-service finger-printing before they can go through immigration.  Joyce has sent her helper Celia to wait for me and escort me to hotel.  When I finally emerge from international arrivals; she is surprised at how long it’s taken me.

Uber car to city:  Huge city: 25 million & counting. Radio is playing American pop music.  It takes us over an hour to go from airport to hotel, which is apparently toward the western end of the city.  It’s 30C but feels closer to 40, and very humid. It gets dark early, around 7.  My room on the 12^th floor has a great view of the nearby Shangfeng Park and the cityscape beyond, although it turns out that we are many miles from downtown.  Joyce & Morley meet me for dinner in the hotel a bit later.  There is no one else in the restaurant, although it’s Saturday night.  I’m so jet-lagged I can’t later remember what we talked about, except to make plans for Sunday. I take a melatonin and go to bed about 9pm.

I get up early the next day and go for a run on one of the treadmills in the empty gym facility in the hotel.  After showering and breakfast, Joyce & Morley pick me up in an Uber car (they don’t own a car in Shanghai).  They take me to the International Church in Shanghai, a nondenominational evangelical church in the ballroom of a large hotel. We have to show our passports to get in, proving that we are foreign nationals.  The first 45 min is prayers followed by contemporary praise music, nice enough, but after a while a bit repetitive for someone used to complicated Anglican hymns.

After church we grab sandwiches at the Starbucks and get picked up to be driven west of Shanghai to a “water town”: an old town built along a set of canals, with markets of little shops on the lanes that parallel the canals. We spend the afternoon there wandering around in the heat amidst throngs of Chinese people (almost no Westerners), looking in shops, while Morley talks to the shopkeepers, and we shop. We visit a Taoist temple, a rustic hotel, and an old tea-house where we eat fruit prepared by the owner, who is also a painter.  We take a canal ride, on a boat whose boatman propels it forward with a kind of rear mounted rudder/oar.  It’s very peaceful, and a great way to people-watch on a hot August Sunday afternoon.  Then it’s back into town for dinner, but on the way we have a fascinating and far-ranging theological discussion/sharing.  Dinner is at one of their favourite Shanghainese restaurants, whose ceilings are strikingly decorated with 20^th century figurist paintings of colonial Shanghai.  At every Chinese restaurant we go to, Morley orders for everyone, curating our dining experience with an expert touch.  He is particularly good at selecting a wide range of vegetarian dishes, which I greatly appreciate.  At this dinner, I meet Jennifer, who is going to translate for me for most of the week.

The Great Firewall of China stymies me repeatedly, even though I’ve prepared by investing in a highly-rated VPN service: they’ve blocked all Google services, including Gmail, as well as BBC news (but for some reason not NPR); Dropbox is blocked as is YouTube and Facebook.  It also turns out that they’ve recently blocked my VPN service, even though there are still web ads everywhere claiming that it works. Fortunately, Skype & Zoom still work, so I can talk to Diane & Kenneth most days, working around the 15 hr time difference.  Also, my Strathclyde email still works so I locate and install a recent version of Outlook, and have Diane scan my Gmail account and forward critical email to me.

Monday morning: Celia picks me up in taxi and takes me to Shanghai Care Corner Counselling Center, the clinic and training center that Joyce and Morley run with the help of Mary and Celia.  They have 6 counselling rooms, which they also use for skill practice break-out rooms, plus a relatively large training room that can squeeze in up to 45.  Morley embarrasses me with a totally over-the-top introduction in which he dramatically describes me in almost magical terms, with laser-like empathy coming out of my eyes. 

This presages 6 days of the most intense EFT training I’ve ever had the opportunity to deliver: 1 day EFT for Social Anxiety; 2-days Advanced Empathic Attunement; 3 days Module 2 (Focusing, Reprocessing Work, Two Chair work).  First, there are lots of participants in these trainings, ranging in number from 38 to 42. Second, they are eager to learn, to do skill practice, to volunteer for live demonstrations, and to ask questions on a wide variety of topics.  It’s invigorating, challenging, and ultimately exhausting.  It pushes my thinking forward in numerous places.  They interact in an uninhibited manner with each other, sometimes arguing and challenging one another.  Not all, but most fearlessly dive into their pain: rejecting mothers; overly strict, even abusive fathers; huge expectations placed on only children (an effect of China’s one-child policy).  Underlying much of the personal pain, is the legacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s, directly experienced or transmitted cross-generationally.  This comes out sometimes as roughness or abrasiveness, sometimes as a kind of frozenness, which can break with a large release of emotion. There are many heart-wrenching stories that emerge during the week.

They refer to me as a “master” and “teacher”.  There are endless photographs during breaks and at the end of each day. Towards the end, Morley starts running interference for me so that I can have recovery time during my breaks. They soak up what I’ve got to say, even with the sequential translation.  At the best moments, the translators and I get into a kind of rhythm, as I condense what I have to say into a series of short sentences that build dramatically to climaxes. A couple of times during the week, to illustrate a key point, I find myself sharing a highly dramatic personal story, and am startled (and pleased) when they spontaneously applaud at the end. I share my mantra: Love, courage & wisdom.  Love and courage they have in abundance; for them as for me, the wisdom part is a work in progress.

To cope with the intensity, I have a power nap each day, and take melatonin most of the week, to avoid the episodes of severe insomnia I had last time I dealt with double jet lag. As we finish on the 6^th day, I write in my Pukka Pad, “tired, drained, relieved”. I have the feeling of being filled with ideas for how to move EFT theory, practice & training forward, too many to write down so that I am left hoping that they will come back when I need them. Here are a few that I was left with at the end of this running of Module 2: (1) The Focusing input needs a major update (reduce coverage of Clearing a Space, re-do task model to reflect flexible emotion-scheme based questioning strategy, which can also be used for skill practice, emphasize use within Chairwork).  (2) Due to popular demand, I’ve written part of a new input on emotion regulation (needs to be finished, lead with emotion regulation principles; figure out good place for it in later modules, probably with first chairwork).  (3) Better integration of Reprocessing Work with Chairwork is needed, to highlight its role both as stand-alone and within Chair Work. (4) Better integration of Empty Chair Work and Two Chair work is needed, underlining the role of self-interruption conflict splits in Empty Chair Work and more importantly the integrated task of Conflict Splits about an Important Other, in which it’s useful to alternate between Two Chair Work and Empty Chair Work, as each task supports work on the other.

Last day: Up early, I think maybe I’ll attempt a run in Shangfeng Park near the hotel, but it’s disgusting outside,  like a steam bath: 30C already, near 100% humidity, and the rain has already started; it’s been clear and dry all week but now a typhoon is coming in.  Run on the treadmill again; shower, pack, breakfast.  Mary meets me at 10am, checks me out of hotel.  Uber car to airport, heavy rain part of way; reminds me of Ohio summer.  Long conversation with Mary about her experiences growing up. She waits with me in the queue at check-in in case of problems (they’ve taken such good care of me here!); after taking selfie with me, she leaves me at immigration & security.  The flight is two hours late leaving, but I’m pleased with the first EFT training I’ve run in China.

When I visit a new country, I make a practice of learning about and collecting some of its folk and popular music.  Hearing of my interest, Mary has kindly assembled a diverse collection of Chinese music of various kinds and ethnicities. (I think she said there were 17 different ethnic groups represented.)  Also, the other night, Joyce & Morley took me to a record/DVD store after dinner and bought me a couple of collections of interesting Chinese music.  It is going to take me quite a whole work my way through all of this richness. 

One more thing: I’ve also picked up a bit of Chinese, simple words for “thank you” (“Xièxiè”, pronounced “she-she” with a falling tone on each syllable), “OK”   (“Hǎo”), and “Right” (“Duì”). Chinese characters fascinate me, and as I return home I’m taken with the idea that the standard written Chinese for “San Francisco” is not a transliteration but is instead the native Chinese name for San Francisco from the 19^th century:

旧金山 , in Mandarin transliterated back into the roman alphabet as “Jiù Jīn Shān”

This is not a transliteration but instead means Old (“旧”) + Gold (“金”) + Mountain (“山”), a reference to the California gold rush, which started in 1849. (I think of the archeological remains of the old Chinese dam below my brother Conal's place in Murray Creek up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, imagine Chinese workers trying to extract the last of the gold from the valley.  I hope they found some...)

As the plane crosses the wide Pacific Ocean, I review all this richness in my mind.  A word from last Sunday’s sermon surfaces: It is the Greek perissos, meaning “abundance or plenty” (from 2 Corinthians 9:8).  Earlier in the week I asked Kenneth about the etymology of the word, puzzling to me because of its similarity to per- cognate with English fear.  He laughed, reminding me that that is Latin, not Greek.  Instead, per- is a prefix that means “around or at the edge of” (cf. “peripheral”).  Issos, he said is the Greek verb “to be”; hence, “overflowing being”: perissos, abundance.  That pretty much describes my week in Shanghai.

California Leaving on Such a Winter’s Day: Review and Reflections

--> Entry for 4 January 2014:

Two weeks and a bit in Northern California: First, the amount and quality of the light, so much more and more intense than in Scotland at this time of year, dazzled us.  Then, the weather shocked us: clear, no rain, day after day after day, with large daily temperature swings: lows near freezing, highs near 70 most days.  California is in its second year of abnormally dry conditions but not yet willing to declare itself in drought: The hills are still as brown as in August: only one maybe two inches of rain so far this season, setting records for least amount of precipitation.  (In Murray Creek, my nephew Patrick reported more snow than rain so far.)  So it is a terrible beauty, this endless wonderful weather that threatens water-tables and the growing of crops in one the major agricultural regions of the world.  If rice or nuts or citrus or vegetables or livestock fail in California, the rest of the world suffers. Groceries will cost more in Glasgow.

Still, it’s been an eventful couple of weeks, with many visits with family and others:

Kenneth (fellow refugee from winter, in his case Iowa) and I went on long, almost epic runs; on one, having missed the main path we struggled 1200 feet up still bicycle trails to the top of Pleasanton Ridge and saw the valley spread out far below us and into the distance. 

On the Winter Solstice we drove over the Santa Cruz mountains to celebrate with Willy and his family in Soquel, marking the nadir of the year over a blazing fire bowl in his backyard, with sparklers and the passing of a cup of 18-year Glengoyne Whiskey.

For Christmas, Brendan & Mayumi flew down from Seattle with our grandchildren Mizuki (3½) & Yuki (4 months), who charmed and bemused us.  Mizuki affectionately called me “Vampa,” making me think of some sort of affable but spooky hyperparent.  On our adventure to Mount Diablo State Park she dragged Kenneth along everywhere, pulling him by the hand, up and down the jumble of sandstone boulders in Rock City; the next day he was sore all over.

On Boxing Day (not celebrated in the US as such but noted as the 2^nd busiest shopping day of the year), we made a pilgrimage to Murray Creek.  We found the place transformed:  Late last August, a goat-herding couple named James and Loraina had fled to Murray Creek to escape the Great Yosemite Fire with their herd of 27 goats and other animals.  After four months, the goats had (b)eaten back the encroaching army of star thistle and were well along in bringing the undergrowth under control. During the day we spent there, I visited with Joseph and his kids Ayla and Erhan and helped him with creative parenting; we watched James and Loraina herd the goats hither and thither, assisted by their big and enthusiastic white dog (who terrified Mizuki); we met the lonely llama in the upper pasture, mourning her dead partner and recently-miscarried baby; we walked the labyrinth with Mayumi and Mizuki; Louisa and Natasha blew in from Auburn for an intense visit, gift exchange, and meal.  Along the way, we discussed the future of Murray Creek:  Do we want to fill both houses with people who can help keep the place up and create a community/collective?  What happens when the family wants to visit?  Does anyone have a better idea?  No one really knows what’s best, but in the meantime, I think it’s great to feel the renewed energy and see what James & Loraina have been able to do.

On the penultimate day of 2013, we went into San Francisco to see the extensive and often-magical David Hockney exhibit at the De Young Art Museum, featuring primarily portraits and landscapes, many quite large or whole-room installations depicting the four seasons in the artist’s native Yorkshire.  Marjorie, Kris and I were quite taken by the room with the 4-panel X 16-camera video installation, each wall showing a drive down the same forest road in a different season, as if we were a giant gliding insect with many-faceted eyes, each oriented slightly differently from the rest. (This just made Diane and her mom queasy, so they moved rapidly on.) We’ve been following Hockney’s work since the 1980’s so it was very interesting to see the evolution of this protean artist, to be inspired by his continuing embrace of new technologies, and to appreciate his generative cycling between old and new media.

After a quiet New Year’s Eve, on the first day of the new year we drove down to Paso Robles for a brief visit with Anna, Jim and Luke, to catch up and mark the New Year.  Anna treated us to tortilla soup, while we brought each other up to date. Once again, I brought along my bottle of 18-year old Glengoyne whiskey, so we passed the quaich to mark the New Year.  The next morning we had patitsa, a favourite Christmas bread from our mother, which led to many reflections on times past.

Now we’re headed east again, for a bit of time in the frigid Midwest, dreading the large new snowfall and record-low wind chills predicted for Toledo over the next few days.  It’s been cold and rainy in Glasgow, but two weeks in gorgeous California weather have more than undone the winterizing effects of our previous Scottish conditioning, so now we are about to go, as you might say, Cold Turkey into the depths of Winter.

Looking back, there have been many high points to this visit to California, and it has been a surprisingly busy time.  No wonder I still haven’t finished reading that 800-page edited book on Gestalt Therapy that I’m supposed to be writing a book review on! 

However, the least expected of this winter’s California Adventures was my visit with Ann Weiser Cornell, who had sent me a message on Facebook when she saw that I was in California.  Ann is a well-known and highly talented Focusing trainer whom I’ve known for a while and whose formulations of focusing and self-critical processes I’ve found very useful over the years and particularly with the socially anxious clients I’ve been working with in Scotland for the past 6 years.  So it was that on New Year’s Eve, I drove over to Berkeley where I spent several hours of highly enjoyable and stimulating talk.  Ann proudly showed me her workshop in a converted warehouse loft space. We talked about training, large groups and all the different people who we knew in the Person-Centred-Experiential therapy world.  We discussed her new book, Focusing in Clinical Practice (2013), including the role of focusing in EFT and role of emotion in Focusing (it depends on what you mean by “emotion”).  After lunch at one of her favourite cafes, she drove me out to the Berkeley Marina; there we walked out to the end of the pier, where we could see the new Bay Bridge, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin and so on, and as we walked we talked about our lives.

On the way back to her office, Ann asked me about my sense of the coming year:  Recognizing this as a Focusing question, I paused, reflected, remarked that this was a very appropriate question for New Year’s Eve.  Then I said: First, to continue to take care of my health by resisting the push to overwork.  Second, to progress my long-delayed book Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action, which Les Greenberg and I have a contract to do.  And the, third, surprising myself, to move toward the emerging reality of retiring and leaving Scotland in 2.5 years and eventually (we hope) returning to California.

But before all that, of course, there is a concentrated blast of wintry weather to face.  Between the drought of California and the frigid cold of Ohio, I’m pretty sure we will be left feeling very glad to be back to the damp but relatively mild Scottish winter. Lang may oor lums reek!

Another Conversation with My Mother

13 October 2013

A vivid dream-vision wakes me:

I am working at my computer

When you come to me, thin, in your nightgown,

As you were in your final  illness last year.

I turn awkwardly; you hug me and

I feel your bony shoulders poking through.

“I love you”, you say, more than once,

Making sure I understand.

                                                   “I love you, too.”

I say, and do  know this is true.

Then you say: “I want you to understand this too:

You are the culmination”.

                                                   Then you’re gone.

I awake in the dark; it’s not even one am.

What does this mean?, I ask your absence:

Was that Culmination with a capital C?

Or some commonplace, lower case culmination?

How each of us carries all who have gone before;

How the self I am now culminates my earlier selves.

I think again of my father, seven years gone:

Wise, caring peace-maker, with ready humor.

As I wend my way through the many complexities

Of friends, family, colleagues and clients;

Impossible work-loads and interpersonal tangles,

I pray for courage, love and wisdom.

For most of my life, I’ve been brash and direct,

More clever than wise, defensive, jealous,

Moved by fear more than love.

Now, however, there’s something emerging

That’s more and more like my father.

And you of all people, living or dead,

Can see the full moon behind the clouds.

My Mother’s 84th Birthday/Science My Mom Taught Me

Entry to 7 April 2013:

I’ve been working late to finish a grant proposal, so it’s well after midnight in Scotland, Monday, the 8^th of April.  In California, however, it’s still Sunday, 7 April, my mother’s birthday.  Last year, my siblings and I gathered at Anna’s house on this day to celebrate our mom’s 83^rd birthday.  We knew something was wrong then, and we also knew at the time that she believed that she had reached her last year, her 84^th, the completion of her 3^rd Saturn Return.  What neither she nor we knew then was that she would be dead by the end of June, a few days past the summer solstice.  So tonight her children are marking what would have been our mother’s 84^th birthday by reflecting on her passing.   A little while ago, my brother Conal and sister Louisa checked with poignant reflections about both of our parents.  This is my contribution to the process.

A year ago, on her birthday, I read her 75^th birthday poem to her again and gave her a mobile of multi-coloured butterflies made from bird feathers to represent the final image in the poem.  After she died I brought this mobile back with me to Scotland to remember her by, and it’s in my living room now, a bit of her. 

I know that she and my dad are in my head and heart, a part of me.  They are my psychological and spiritual DNA and of course their actual DNA is in every cell of my body. (And my mitochondrial DNA?  That’s all my mom’s, matrilineal descent, you know?)  Nevertheless, I still miss her physical presence and the opportunity to experience the unpredictability of her continuing evolution.  So tonight it’s a kind of intermediate stop on the way to her year’s mind, an interim Kaddish at which I, along with my siblings, remember fondly, longingly, and with deep gratitude and joy for what she gave us.  Bittersweet, like the strong chocolate that she loved.

I can’t think of a better way for me to remember her than by offering again the poem I wrote 9 years ago for her 75^th birthday:

Science My Mom Taught Me

(For her 75^th birthday, April 7, 2004)

1. Science as Love and Relationship

A good place to start is that ancient photograph,

Recently rediscovered, from 1950:

There the two of you are, the same age

As the youngest of my grad students. 

Both of you are tall, almost toothpick thin.

He is looking at the camera, tight jeans and shirt,

Like a rebel with cause to smile.

But you are looking down, through large glasses,

Your face framed by billowing hair,

With toothy grin, and your arms

Awkwardly but carefully wrapped round

A very small bundle.

The two of you look like nothing

So much as a couple of computer nerds

From half a century in the future.

Code geeks, rolling out your first promising program,

Ready for beta-testing.

But the code is genetic,

The language is life,

And the program is … me.

 

2. True Science is Risky

Although I learned magic from my dad,

It now seems clear to me that it was you

From whom I first learned science,

To which I have now devoted so much of my life.

But yours was never the normal, safe kind,

Digging away at the coal face

In the mines of knowledge,

Like Disney’s happy dwarves.

No, not that kind, but instead

The one that goes off to Far Tortuga,

Toward distant Galapagos unknown,

In search of the evolution of the human soul.

For you, big ideas have never been too big:

The nature of reality; the journey of the soul;

Jung’s famous paper on flying saucers;

The archetype of the Mandala: As without, so within.

Instead of Aristotle … Plato’s forms;

Instead of Archimedes … Pythagorus’s numbers;

Instead of Moses’ law … the Kabbalah’s secrets;

Instead of chemistry …alchemy’s transformations.

Oh, you did chemistry, too, at least early on:

You would disappear for hours,

Into your laboratory at the back of the house,

Full of strange smells and odd bits:

Broken glass, mosaic pieces,

Rolls of wallpaper, bolts of cloth,

Cans of precursors and catalysts,

When plastics was new technology.

And you would emerge from your lair,

To confront your family with some new concoction,

Sometimes lovely, or quirky, or primitive;

At times, a disaster, but always something new.

No, for you, science has always been risky:

Working at the edge, making something new,

You have become an expert in the peril of experiment,

And I have followed you, where I could.

3. Science as Inspiration and Passion

Your mother (my grandmother) taught me many things:

How to travel and how to be in a new place;

The importance of hard work and getting up early;

The ninety-nine percent of sweat that makes up genius.

But you taught me a far more valuable lesson:

The one percent of inspiration that redeems all the rest,

The moment of epiphany, the pattern opening,

The intensity of the new connection breaking through,

The science of cutting to the center of the world,

Of seeing what others don’t choose to see,

Of waking to awareness when others sleep,

And the flow of following the spirit far into the night.

When I see these things in myself, I recognize you.

The passion of discovery is too powerful to resist,

Even if we wanted to; the daemon must be honored;

It is ours, and we must let it speak through us or die.

4. Science as Always Starting Anew

I find it odd that I describe my dad in a series of narratives,

But you as a set of ideas, a paradigm, a model.

There is, however, one story that is always you,

The story in which you are always re-inventing yourself:

Child of the Depression with a single mom;

Big city girl; prep school party-er;

Young, anxious mother and seamstress;

Small town society woman in a flat land.

But your life makes a strange turn: You take up philosophy;

You quit smoking just because you feel like it;

You return to religion and start teaching Sunday school;

You become a small business owner and a writer.

Years pass: You’re CEO of a large and raucous family,

With the habit of taking in strays (both human and animal);

And you’ve gradually evolved into a spiritual leader

Of a small but loyal group of friends.

Then, your life turns again:  Warned in a vision

Of the impending end of civilization, you become

A gentle survivalist and take your family

Into the mountains, like Noah waiting for her flood

You seal several tons of wheat into cans,

Which are still there after twenty-five years.

Well, we can’t get everything right, but now you live

In a beautiful little valley: Murray Creek.

Now you are matriarch to three generations and 60 acres.

A combination of Ariadne, Daedalus and Theseus,

You become a labyrinth designer and unwinder

Of ritual journey spaces of stones, words and image.

Reading widely and deeply, you map the interweaving

Stories of your own and humanity’s spiritual development,

Join a religious order, become a spritual director,

And finally, start a Crone Circle of wise women.

Curiously, all these things somehow fit together:

Clearly, you’ve never stopped starting over;

For you, science is leaving behind what no longer works,

A selfsame process of adding on, differentiating, elaborating,

Just as you are always the same person,

The passionate, intellectual adventurer, the one

Who keeps transforming herself, like an endless succession

Of butterflies, emerging one from the other. 

Photo by Conal Elliott, Upper House, Murray Creek, 27 March 2013, by permission.