Birth mandala, baby poem, and a wee announcement

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I wrote a poem for my friend, the Renaissance woman Dutchbaby, at her request for the occasion of a baby shower for a friend. Dutchbaby introduced me to the idea of birth mandalas, which take Carl Jung's concept of mandalas representing the Self, to the next level: an image for a mother to focus her imagination on the emerging identity of her baby. That's one of Jung's mandalas at the right, which I happened upon after writing the poem, with its image of paisley.

Dutchbaby colored a mandala, below (from online mandala coloring pages), in PhotoShop for her expecting friend, who has Swedish heritage. From it I feel my own connection with Sweden through Grandma Olive. The blue and yellow remind me of tole painting on a pitcher or a barn's peak, or in Carl Larsson's kitchen. Dutchbaby paired my poem with her mandala as a gift to the mom-to-be Saturday. (Bless this baby, oh universe.)

Dutchbaby did not know when she requested the poem that we have our own baby on the way. I am going to be a gramma! And so I offer this poem not only to a friend's friend, but also for my daughter Lesley, and the little poppy seed growing inside her to the great size of a kidney bean at this moment, with webbed feet, a bulging head, and joints in her/his knees. Imagine.

Don and I are over the moon, and no amount of exclamatory punctuation is enough for what I feel, so I used just the one, but picture exclam-infinity. (Bless this baby, oh universe.) How about this photo of them with my nephew's baby, Evangeline? (Bless Eva, too.)

The multi-bonus is that Lesley & Brian are moving to Michigan where he begins a teaching job in the fall (exclam-infinity). We will be close by when baby enters the world (due in January), no need for booking flights at just the right time to NYC. Just hop in the car and drive an hour and a half.

Our son Peter (right, with his sister on her 30th birthday this year) just moved to L.A. to join his band Lord Huron (all the band members are from Michigan). Such is life, the child who lived close moves far away, and the one who lived far away moves close. But we are incredibly excited for Peter and feel, well . . . expectant about this change for him.

Dutchbaby's mandala and my poem are below.

A note about koans (in the poem title): When Dutchbaby told me that the expectant mom said the baby was "sitting like Buddha" in her belly, I decided to shape the poem in koan-like questions. (The image of a sitting Buddha also made me think of paisley.) A koan is a question a Zen sage asks a pupil that does not have an answer from the reasoning mind. A famous koan is: What is the sound of one hand clapping? "The master is not looking for a specific answer but for evidence that the disciple has grasped the state of mind expressed by the kōan itself." More on koans here. Samples of koans at The Gateless Gate. If you listen carefully to the podcast of the poem, you can hear the birds that chirp incessantly outside my office window. Does a bird's song answer the heart's questions?

Koan-like Questions of a Mother to her Unborn Child

Is there something quieter than sleep?

      My whispers circle you like jasmine vine, the way

      my arms want to, when my palm will cup your head,

      my thumb in the shallow petal of your temple.

      Terrace.

Where is the pocket in the nightshirt of early morning?

      You didn’t notice just now that I turned over in bed, rolling

      first onto my right side, then onto my left.

      Leaves everywhere on blue-white cotton.

What shape are you?

      In my teardrop body you sleep, sucking your thumb —

      puzzle piece in the circle of your mouth.

      Paisley baby, paisley thumb,

      paisley me, paisley breast. Lace.

What is grace?

      I pull myself up, like a camel, into a sitting position,

      lean left, push off, grunt, rise, stand, and low into the sway

      of this me, your cradle, creaking at my hips.

      Caravanserai.

Do you remember it, that hymn from the old church

through the window as we slowly climbed the stair?

      Holding the bedpost, carved like an altar,

      my eyes closed, up from the organ

      in my chest the music — unnamed song

      through the vibrating reed of my watery throat.

      Repeat.

      Stained glass moon. Bosphorus.

Can you see me in the dark?

      My hand rests on the olive of your shoulder,

      or is that a heel? Hush, keep sleeping, don’t worry

      about positions. You are touching everything

      in any case.

      Mountain magnolia blossom.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here. (You can hear the birds outside my office window if you listen carefully.)

Poem notes: 

Caravanserai: the fortress-like hostelries for sojourners on the Silk Road.

Bosphorus: the body of water between the European and Asian sides of Istanbul; 'bosphorus' means 'throat' in Turkish; Lesley went to school on the European side, crossing the Bosphorus every morning and evening from and to our home on the Asian side.

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Nouvelle 55: Four Directions - The Star

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"Four Directions" by stained glass artist Stratoz

My friend Stratoz invited me to write a Nouvelle 55 based upon one of his stunning stained glass pieces. This poem is the result. I feel drawn to connect Stratoz' piece with art by Marc Chagall and Carl Jung (who found in mandalas representations of the Self), two people whose souls exploded in creativity, as bright and wild as Stratoz' "Four Directions." This piece is a square mandala, when most manadalas are a circle (some with a square inside). Read Stratoz' post about the healing ways of mandalas here.

The story of Israel — of Jews, of Arabs— of the great conflicts that never end, was made more poignant for me this morning when I read that the large Arab population in the Galilee region of Israel is predominantly Druze. Some believe that the Druze people descended from the Tribe of Zebulun, one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Oh that the tribes of the world could be joined as skillfully as Stratoz melds the living colors of his stained glass, and as Chagall did his stained glass, and as Jung did the colors of the unbreakable self.

The Star

prompted by Stratoz' "Four Directions"

Break the mirror.
Four-square hands
reunite in sacred sand.

Gather saturation,
arrowed imagination

east-ended by the sea
a sky-blue Galilee

in the colors of this dream.
Gate my red
leaf-paint the green

Bright my heart—
     good this art
circling the sacred soul apart.

Pull into light, my star—
Self, borne into near
and far

Lithograph, by Marc Chagall

"The Tribe of Zebulun"

from The Twelve Maquettes
Of Stained Glass Windows
For Jerusalem, 1964

found here

The Red Cross, Carl Jung's illustration from The Red Book

Nouvelle 55 is a flash fiction written in exactly 55 words, based on a piece of art. 

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synchronicity

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Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity for "meaningful coincidences," or acausal connection of two or more psycho-physic phenomena. Here is the most famous of the stories from his book Synchronicity:

"A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer, which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."

Carl Jung Resources explains that Dr. Jung developed a treatment for this patient, ". . . this coincidence is not senseless, a simple coincidence. By using the amplification method, Jung associates in connection with the scarab and comes to the concept of death and rebirth from the esoteric philosophy of antiquity, a process that, in a symbolic way, the patient should experience for a renewal and vitalization of her unilateral personality, the cause of the neurosis she was suffering from."

Some are skeptical that coincidences are ever meaningful, and others are ecstatic when events seem to collide with sparks and intrigue. If they aren't meaningful, then so be it. If they are meaningful, what difference does it make?

When my brother Bennett died suddenly in 1996 at the age of 47 of severe arteriosclerosis (all four arteries were blocked), a series of events unfolded in the following weeks and months that could be mere coincidence, but for my family and me, were stunning occasions of conjunction. I want to tell them to you, and I am guessing you want to hear them. I know I have a human curiosity to hear stories that touch on magic and miracle, with a chink of light from beyond the veil of the unknown. The half dozen or so other occasions are eerie and chilling, but I'd like to share two of the quieter, less macabre and dramatic ones, to honor Bennett, who sometimes teased me while he laughed, "Ruthie, I just love how dramatic you are!" Moo, hee? (my mother's exclamation, for Who, me?)

One such moment was when we went to a high school play my nephew was in. The week before the play, a dozen of us were cleaning out my parents' house where Dad had passed away the year before and where Mom no longer lived, having moved to an assisted living home with Alzheimer's. At lunch we calculated that we were going to be one ticket shy of the number needed for our family members attending my nephew's play the following week. Bennett, who went by "Ben" with all his friends, said, I don't need a seat, I'll be video-taping it from the back of the auditorium anyway. That night, in my parents' empty home, Bennett died. Without a lick of furniture to lean on, we mourned and paced and lay on the rose-carpeted floor, in shock. The following weekend, as we sat in the high school auditorium waiting for my nephew's play to start, some sitting, some standing, we were chatting, and I leaned over the as yet unoccupied seat in front of me. I looked down at the dark green cracked leather, worn from decades of student assemblies, and there, scratched in the leather, was I ♥ Ben.

One other of many more such stories (which swell in their cumulative effect) is this. As the executor of my brother's estate, I made arrangements to sell the beautiful country acres he owned, where he had built a log garage and had just received all the materials to build a custom log home, by himself. He had laid out his gardens on grid paper, meticulous to a delicious fault. After Don and I left the property sale closing in September of 1996 with the new owners, and after we'd had a beer with them and raised our glasses to Ben, Don and I knew we had to drive out to the property one last time. It was the place where Don, our kids, Bennett and I had lain under the stars one March night, watching for a meteor shower that never materialized. Bennett was an avid amateur astronomer. I've told you before that he was also a brilliant amateur photographer, and his avatar was this grasshopper he shot somewhere. Don and I walked the property, peeked in the windows of the garage where his memorial service had been held on a very cold February day earlier that year, and we climbed back into the van to leave, windows down on that warm September evening. As Don inched along, both of us reluctant to leave, I happened to look down at the ground. Just at the edge of the tall grass by the drive, on one stalk of timothy grass, perched a lone grasshopper, swaying in the breeze. We stopped then, for a while longer. What are the chances of a grasshopper sitting on a blade of grass in the country on a September night? Probably astronomical. But maybe the chances of me looking right there, right then are a bit less.

What does it mean? I suppose it doesn't have to mean anything. But because we were heavy with shock and loss, all of our attention was riding close to the asphalt of what happened around us. We saw the connections, which felt as if they were more than the average, and more intense. But really, aren't we always connected to everything? If we were but to pay closer attention, and feel the wonder of the miracles in a blade of grass that stands up straight though it's as light as a feather, and bends when a breeze blows, not breaking, would we be amazed? And a grasshopper. Have you seen how far and how high a grasshopper can jump, and land on that exact stalk of grass that just happens to be in the perfect spot, and hold on? Is that not magic?

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