Translated by Daniel Ladinsky in The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, The Great Sufi Master
This poem by Hafiz is dedicated to the Mothers and Fathers brave enough to go into that private room with God, ready to be shaken for the sake of the children in your care, awakened to agape.
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By our hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
Remember how you experienced the world with the wonder and joy of innocence as a child? When everything was Mystery? Is this where the Mystic Teachings lead us toward?
On Saturday, February 12th, we sit with the Beginner’s Mind teachings of Shunryu Suzuki. To register, go to KairosCenter4Change.com. Registration closes on February 10th.
The sound of the in-breath, Sooooooo, and the sound of the exhale, Hummmmmm, rhythmically dance us all day long with the drumming of our original heartbeat, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. There is a divine “two” in constant dialogue, one not being able to exist without the other. This principle extends from breath and heartbeat to every reality that lies in consciousness: there are always two in dialogue, dancing one another, dancing us on the personal and collective level to birth life….or decline, for something else.
And so, what dances and dialogues with choice? How is it dancing us who are the third, watching, when we dare? What of Life are our choices birthing?
The conditions around choice are always relevant to the outcomes of our labors are they not? When we choose out of the condition of obligation/subservience are we choosing at all? Perhaps we need to be more specific. There can be many reasons we are operating out of obligation/subservience, too many to enumerate here. But, just to start us off…
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to the status quo (habits), what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And, what are we distilling out?
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to mindless compulsion, what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And, what are we distilling out?
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to our personal notions of “freedom,” what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And what are we distilling out?
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to the vistas of our desire that satisfy the senses, what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And, what are we distilling out?
When we choose out of obligation/subservience to a moral teaching, what are we inviting in? And, what are we activating? And, what are we distilling out?
When we bring our conscious awareness to our notions of freedom, our pallet of desires, and our vista of compulsions to the moral teachings, what are we inviting in? What are we activating? What are we distilling for the world?
At first glance, isn’t she terrifying? If your answer to the question, “Do you want to meet her?” is with an undeniable “NO!” that may be a very, very, very good and wise choice. However, as you read on, you might change your mind.
The Baba Yaga may have appeared in your dreams or nightmares a few hundred times and you didn’t know it. Can you imagine? “Nooooooooooo,” you might say. “Impossible! Not mine.” Hard to believe, but true, that there is an unconscious realm that we can be beholden to or prisoner of by the power of primordial spells that keep us encased in glass caskets like Snow White or held in a tower without doors like Rapunzel. It may or may not help to know that this is only one of her infinite forms that speaks to us, in a very real way, about where we are…. in the hidden, and what she is telling us we need to do to move forward.
This figurative Slavic, mythical, supernatural figure lives in a house that moves on chicken legs symbolizing constant flux and birthing. When she lies down, spread out, her limbs touch every corner of her home and her nose touches the ceiling! As I enter this description I am having an experiential recall of dreams of early childhood, of images expanding and shrinking, expanding and shrinking. This is actually a common nightmare of children crossing thresholds, thrusting them into the arms of parents in the middle of the dark of night for reassurance. When asked, the terror is unexplainable, the contents are all so benign. The terror is MOVEMENT itself into the unknown, commonly known as “night terrors” that trip at predictable ages and milestones when more brain areas are coming on line!
Returning to the image, as I gather myself to learn what the image foretells, I turn to the fertility of the chicken whose legs MOVE her house around, from dreamer to dreamer. “Birthing,” at first glance is a MOVEMENT, admittedly painful but profoundly beautiful …. yet the image challenges me to move further into and dwell longer in the fertility symbolism. After acknowledging the PAIN AND TERROR of MOVING through the birth canal, which we know is all good, I ask “Well, does she birth what IS good or does she birth what IS evil?” From the image I’m leaning toward the latter. Wouldn’t you?! The stories, however, say something different, building the tension of dissonance, a loss of harmony and balance assuring of positive outcome or at least of our control. Uncertainty, characteristic of the paradox of wisdom and humility, now arrives in my awareness, experientially.
More hints or alarms are in the image. They are so loud and strong that it is hard to call them “hints.” Surrounding her home is a fence with skulls atop their posts, most of them with hair, a symbol of intellect, suggesting it had no power against their demise. A kind of ferociousness is communicated, alluding to battle or many battles past. Fences or fortresses protect and skulls lying on them tend to represent warnings of terror and certain death. And so I ask into the subject of her ferociousness, I ask about the object of her battle. I ask:
“What is she a protectress of? What does she devour? Protectress and devourer? Protectress and devourer? Of what? what? what? what? I need to know this to know if she is good or if she is bad, if she is benevolent or if she is evil. So I ask: “Is she a ferocious protectress or a ferocious devourer of life? of good” or “Is she a ferocious protectress or ferocious devourer of death? of evil?”Is it safer to go in or safer to stay out?! Does the fence keep bad or good or all people from going in…or going out?
She is clutching a limp child by her hand. “Is she a protectress or devourer of the innocent, the grieving, the weak, the children, the poor, the down-trodden?” Looking at the figure of the boy, we might easily conclude that she is a devourer of the children, the weak, after all. We might even be certain! God forbid. But, based on the tales of old, the answer to all these questions would be….yes. Such an answer amplifies the dissonance, the cacophony to new heights!
So lets suspend the image so that I may take another route to see if I am getting colder or hotter in my estimations. As the image communicates clues so does the name. What it doesn’t clarify it may affirm or disconfirm impressions already made. Embedded in her name… Baba … are the roots of pejorative attitudes widespread across cultures (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovene) who have explicitly found her in their fairytales, suggesting she is a characterless bald man or a foolish old woman, perhaps even a sweet cake, a snake, a mushroom, and even a pear. The part of her name, Yaga, has its origins in meaning of shudder, witch, horror, and anger. In sum, her name has a particular design that releases the energetics of “Wake up or else!” It has that quality of chaos where anything goes if you don’t understand. These energetics are sent on the waves of the words into our collective psychic ears to palpate the heart into territories we do not want to tread with compulsion or fantasy or….God forbid, isolation.
If we must enter with compulsion or fantasy, which inevitably we all must do because that is all we can do at most every crossroad into new life life that really counts, may we have the courage and character strength to know what we do not know or to know that we may not know anything at all before we step forward or pause before we jump in! This is the beginning of all real transformation, after all, where we are of true beginner’s mind, cleared out and naked of identity, affiliation, and agenda that serve as blindspots for spiritual engagements. Failure and ignorance (the unknowing of our hearts desire, motivation, weakness) are the fertile ground of humility and transformation.
The Baba Yaga thus may be viewed as a figure, a symbol, that points to our character strengths and weaknesses, daring us to not only know them but to speak honestly about what she shows us, knowing that when we do we may be releasing treasured goals and loves into the endless chasm between reverie and reality, fantasy and Truth. This sort of heartbreak is real and we are never prepared, using the phrase of Rabbi Lew.
May we hear the constant echo resounding through the airwaves from the beginning of time, softly whispering: “Speak to the unknowing of your heart and its’ motivations with sincerity, with courage, with a most reverent attitude.” This may be the basic, most essential, and hardest practice, hardest MOVEMENT to acquire and sustain in the effort (not the achievement). When we do, we become bound to the container and power of the secret Mysteries that stand by us and for us in our danger when faced with the towering, hideous, irate Baba Yaga.
In the stories, the ones who are not chilled to the bone by Truth and Sorrow and Injustice are the ones who she eats or who have been eaten already by Power, Greed, and Injustice. It is their skulls that lie atop her bordering fence, whose essence can no longer take claim of the young vulnerable boy finding himself now in the Baba Yaga’s clutches, limp of all that no longer can sustain him and so gorgeously full of all that will return him, again and again. So, if you have met the Baba Yaga you know, she is initiating him into what is real, into sacred belonging and eternal life. She is not the villian, she is the teacher, the midwife who births light.
Things aren’t always what they appear to be, at first glance. What a tragedy, indeed, if you have not met the Baba Yaga in your dreams, while awake or asleep in the dark of night . Is it not?
When we stop looking toward the Oneness, even for a split second, we may become trapped in blindness, in darkness, and lose our hands. Often it is a decision we make that feels ordinary, trivial, invisible, unreal, entitled, or even non-optional and heroically self-sacrificing. Support and imagination are wiped clean, the messages of truth bent to fit the masters of despair. This universal message is in the world mythologies as well as our modern storytelling and evening news. This message is timeless, repeating on the transistor radio in a tower on a deserted island reaching only those seeking to get off the island. When we know this, truly know the light of the message, how could our justice system stay the same? Are we “woke” to redemption? restoration? forgiveness? love?
“Motion and rest” are signatures of the divine working within us (Gospel of Thomas v. 50) as we move toward “the one and become two” (v.11). Each figure in the clip from the movie Shelter sloughs off the garments of the world, one by one until truth is laid bare, naked. All escape doors shut. Sorrow swells into awe. Hope is borne. They return the garments of the world and fall into the arms of freedom, the bridal chamber of the eternal.
Intentional observing gives way to a special kind of remembering. This remembering is an opening penetrated with reverence or exhausted surrender. It rushes in like an unexpected wave… transforming, protecting, and guiding the surfer through the pipeline of her life to the shore where she begins again, invigorated with all the possibilities that lie in waiting. No, she is not reminiscing. No, she is not revisiting a timeline of events. She is remembering something that is essentially and uniquely her yet she has never known: the third.
“And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this” Mordecai said to Esther as she faced the critical crossroad that intersects with all of humanity. “In such a time as this” can you sense the wisdom energy held in the story of Esther and Vashti? calling you, in your position, whatever it may be, to wake into the movements of wisdom. Can you hear her rumbling and quaking above and below us all? The thunderous rumbling “No!” above us making the way for the quaking “Yes” in the ground below?
We can trace these holy yes’s and no’s throughout time and space, from the beginning. To trace these movements is to connect to the continuous and subtle movements of birth and death that are at first seemingly futile and meaningless but at last, breathtakingly beautiful to behold even a fragment of its’ light; the flickers of the golden ratio revealed in a mustard seed.
Emerson (1803 – 1882) writes: “….of progressive souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do you love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy with the same happiness;”
This thread seems to be a dominant thread in “such a time as this.” Is it not? A rising concentration of new estrangements from family, friends, and community in recent times. Are we possibly entrained in the mythology of the Queen in Snow White, reading and listening to the news and social media for reflections of ourselves? to find happiness in the mirror? Such is the complex that Snow White circumambulates until her essence is awakened and the spell of sleep is broken.
Emerson continues, “but presently one of us passes into the perception of new truth;—we are divorced, and no tension in nature can hold us to each other.”
Wheeldon’s After the Rain Ballet
Divorced?! This word incites the tragic loss and emptiness that a broken love, a broken sacred vow, a broken family of two or more leaves behind. Is it such a grief stricken emptiness that he points? What does he mean when he says, “No tension in nature can hold us to each other?” Perhaps he is pointing to the absence of anything in God’s creation or of our own creation that can hold us up “in such a time as this.” Through the absence, is he pointing to the unceasing struggle with our Creator? The lifeline that supports us from that transpersonal realm, even in our denial?
Kierkegaard (1813-1855) reflects on the “one concentrated moment” between Abraham and God, his Beloved, on the mountain in the land of Moriah. He asks, “Who is it that snatches the staff from the old man? Who is it that demands he himself must break it? Who is it that makes a man’s grey hairs disconsolate? Who is it that demands he himself must do it?” Who is this other to whom Kierkegaard points? And is the space of “no tension” our personal Mount Moriah where the movements of Truth are revealed, faith is born? in the here-and-now?
Emerson is one of the many poets in time who have held the “Yes” and the “No” in their solar plexus and left their lipstick kiss on our cheeks, helping us wake up! and grow up! He tenderly goes on….
“I know how delicious is this cup of love,—I existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child’s clinging to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber; to keep the picture-alphabet through which our first lessons are prettily conveyed.”
I turn my attention now to the film Melancholia (2011) where we peer into the specter of the nuptial chamber such as the one described by Emerson. Through stunningly haunting imagery we experience the power of the “No” manifesting pre-verbally, against the egoic will clinging to toys. One glimpse into this imagery renders the desire to return to the picture-alphabet altogether understandable.
The new perception enters and is about to collide with the outworn on a global scale. Such is the handiwork of eternality.
Melancholia (2011)
In the story of Melancholia (2011) Justine utters the mysterious “No” amid her celebratory wedding banquet. No one understands but, clearly, everyone feels the weight of despair in the air nonetheless and defensively respond by leaning into propriety, tradition, complaining, begging, ritual of candlelight and cards, hubris and niceties, and wine while Justine becomes an object of escalating hate and ridicule, separate now from the herd. She becomes a burden, unable to eat, barely able to speak or walk. She is powerless and “too much,” the personification of frozen energy. Some might call her a nuisance, yet slowly she emerges anyway. No one can look at or see her meaning until …. they awake to the collective inescapable truth of their mortality. She meets them, without dogma or prescriptives, without complaint or ritual; rather, she merely leads them into the moment-to-moment “Yes” funeral walk into the “magnificence of nature” that is clearly not ours to command or possess, but to nurture and steward, eyes open to the end.
“I am not God” is the realization that breaks most, yet finds some. From this awareness I understand Emerson’s use of the short phrase “once abroad again” in the next lines to mean dis-identified from God, dis-identified from omnipotent control.
“The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the outdoor landscape, remembered from the evening fireside, it seems cold and desolate, whilst you cower over the coals; but, once abroad again, we pity those who can forego the magnificence of nature, for candle-light and cards.”
Yes, Emerson validates the “delicious cup of love” that is the “happiness with the same happiness” we find in particular sorts of kinship that mirror our likes and dislikes. However, he describes this sort of happiness as candle-light and cards compared to what lies beyond it.
John 4: Jesus talks with a Samaritan Woman
Lying in the next chamber of the nautilus is a different sort of conversation with the true subject of “Conjugal Love.” Inside this real-time conversation eternality is revealed, isolation is broken, and a deep courage is claimed. If you have heard the gospel of John you might here the message of living water at the well: “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” Who is is that we are asking for water at “such a time as this?”
Emerson moves us away from the yolk of literalism and any confusion about what is sovereign, reminding us how easily we are compelled toward or tricked into following what is false, what is dead, what is escapist reverie, what is wrong. Why? Mostly because of what we have forgotten and what we have lost in false sincerity and broken vows. The finding of the sword wielded by Other that breaks literalism and hubris, ignorance and sentimentality, cowardice and greed, is through, only through.
“Perhaps the true subject of the “Conjugal Love” is conversation, whose laws are profoundly eliminated. It is false, if literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bridegroom of the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple of one thought, and part as though we parted not, to join another thought in other fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine in the low and proprietary sense of, Do you love me? it is only when you leave and lose me, by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than both of us, that I draw near, and find myself at your side; and I am repelled, if you fix your eye on me, and demand love.
In fact, in the spiritual world, we change sexes every moment. You love the worth in me; then I am your husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the love; and that worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond me. Meantime, I adore the greater worth in another, and so become his wife. He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, and is wife of receiver of that influence.”
When we trace the divine “Yes” and “No” that we have been traveling on since the beginning of time, we notice how we “change sexes every moment,” we birth and die every moment, we shift from being a drop in the ocean to being the ocean …. continuously…. moment-to-moment. These continuous and subtle movements are at first seemingly futile and meaningless, frustratingly trying, but at last, breathtakingly beautiful to behold even a fragment of its’ light; the flickers of the golden ratio revealed.
Chambered Nautilus The Golden Ratio
“Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Carlyle, Thomas. The Complete Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Collected Works (p. 127). Bybliotech. Kindle Edition.
