The Gift of Life

One of Barb's best portraits ever -- herself!
  

            March 1 marks the one-year anniversary of the death of my friend Barbara Stephens, great artist:  photographer extraordinaire.  And why was she such a great artist?  Because, I think, she was a great lover.  To love was her joy, and joy was the signature note of the tune of her existence.  A love object didn't have to be overtly joyous -- smiley-faced -- to give her joy.  It was beauty that did it, not air-brushed beauty but slight signs of love alive in hearts, moments of love flashing heart to heart, glance to glance, fingertip to fingertip. Or the simple Creator-love miracle of a wolf spider.  (Not that I personally saw much to be happy about in the wolf spider.)

                  She caught those moments and miracles, exalted in them and exulted them.  She was a fabulous portrait photographer, not just of people, but of everything that rang that note of joy within her.  No matter how grim her prospect -- dreary housing, cancer, empty bank account, ailing offspring  – she always came across something that rang the joy bell. If her photography mojo, as she called it, wasn't up to snuff, she'd simply find a subject, any subject.  She'd see a fly, even a mosquito, magnetize it with her lens, study it, look it up, learn its name and habits.  

        I was a bit spoiled by frequently opening emails from her to find gorgeous or at least intriguing images, but now and then I'd find myself face to face with a housefly (multiple eyes), or a deceased field mouse (lovingly bestowed upon her by her cat, who was her familiar).  I couldn't grant bugs and dead mice the Jainite respect that Barb gave them, so I think part of her joy in emailing them to me was that they annoyed me.  

            She was deeply mischievous and humorous, loved to tease.  Also loved to kvetch and worry.  Nothing of the saint about Barbara Dee Halpern (her given name).  And if her mojo failed and there were no fascinating hair balls (or something) around -- look out.  She could drive you crazy.  Now and then I got mad at her.

        And so we come to the nub of this little remembrance.  During the year when Barb was dying I got mad at her for a few weeks because I thought she was being "unspiritual" about her upcoming death.  Such a material girl.  She was enjoying to the hilt each moment of life that she could, and that included a lot of what-the-hell type shopping online.  With time I saw that she was savoring every chance she got to shower her love on the loves of her life, especially her son and daughter, her grand-daughter, her brothers, and others of her family, and those chances grew as they spent more and more time visiting and nursing her.  I also eventually understood that she was quietly dealing with her own inner torment at having to say good-bye to them and to life on earth, which she adored in all its materiality, its rawness and its exquisiteness.

            Some years before, she'd written me an email that I'd printed out and put in one of my prayer books.  It was about love.  While I was mad at her for dying -- because that's what I was really angry about -- I ripped up that email.  And I had no copy of it on my computer, or anywhere else.  So, later, when I wanted it on around March 3 or 4, 2011, shortly after she died -- 

          What's an idiot to do?  Gone is gone.  Then, one day I was meditating, doing that mindfulness thing where you sit and get with your breathing in its regular rhythm, and I felt illumination from within:  love light.  I thought, "This is what Barb was talking about in that email."  But what did she say?  I couldn't remember.  When I read it, I didn't really understand it.  I just wanted to understand it.

            For a few days I wondered how to verbalize the love-light.  I realized I'd perceived it while thinking about Joshua.  I was feeling a bit unsure of how to be his mother since he'd married and had a child.  While meditating you're stilling and quieting the mind, so you look at thoughts and let them go, no matter if they're highly charged or neutral.  But you acknowledge them.  So I had said to myself, "Here's Josh.  I just love him."  That's when the light shone.

            Love.  My love for my son.  My love for whatever and whomever I love.  It's not their love for me that gives me strength -- although, that too, and thank God for it.  But it's not their bad moods or bad feelings on some occasions that weaken me.  It's my love for them that is my power for good, salvation, refuge.

            After thinking this over for some days, I wrote something I could equate with Barb's lost email:  Love what you love with your whole heart – a sky, a leaf, a child, a cat, a friend, a lover.  Have favorites.  Dote on them.  Don't be afraid to admit how much you love, to feel how much you love.  If you're afraid to admit and feel how much you love, that's because you're afraid your beloveds won't love you back.  But they don't have to love you back.  The love in you and emanating from you is enough. Let your love widen and deepen and brighten; it's whole and nothing can fragment it, complete and nothing can diminish it.  It can only augment, it can't decrease.  When you grieve it teaches you wisdom, when you're afraid it gives you courage.  Simply love.  Trust your love, be your love, love your love.    Such love is intrinsic in life.  It's the love of life.  It's life itself.

            However, that isn't what Barb wrote.  That, I can never get back.  Like her, it was irreplaceable.  I can only thank her for writing it, but, more, for living it.  Thank you, my forever friend.

March 1, 2012

Edible Ephemeral Art, Permanent Patterns

Uchhapur, India. A woman paints her wall in prayer to Lakshmi. 

Photo by Stephen P. Huyler, Meeting God, p. 67

       Looking at the photos in Painted Prayers: Women's Art in Village India, a book by Stephen P. Huyler, I'm dazzled by the edible, ephemeral art.  In some areas of India, each day before dawn women make paintings on the ground in front of their houses to fete a domestic goddess.  In other places they paint outer walls and doorframes during certain holiday and festival times, all in honor of her.  They use paint made of rice powder.           

       The art doesn't last.  Things eat it.  A young woman interviewed in the book says, "This powder itself is auspicious.  It feeds birds and small insects.  Holy puranas tell us to be good to other beings.  By these kolams (the daily designs made on the earth) we are sharing our food."

         The paintings aren't just effaced by hungry creatures; they're smudged by movement, the flow of existence.  Life doesn't stop because the art is there.  The rice powder paintings, whether white or colored by natural dyes, quickly disappear.

         Following custom, women make new paintings at the appointed times.  Paradoxically, the patterns for the paintings aren't edible and ephemeral.  They're handed down from mother to daughter, generation to generation.  They travel with brides from village to village.  They constantly change in individual hands.  In some regions where the women's art is particularly vital, women keep notebooks of patterns and are constantly creating and inventing.

         All in honor of Ma.  That's one of the names of the domestic goddess;  she's different in different places but she's one in her spirit of abundance and protection, and Ma seems to me a good universal name for her.  A primal syllable, frequently the first uttered by infants crying for nurture, protection, sustenance, guidance.

        Edible ephemeral nurture -- permanent patterns of existence -- spiritual and physical requirements – we ask those blessings of our Immortals, our guardian spirits.  Always, the old prayers; constantly, new prayers.  Admiring the ancient forms that make the designs for India's "painted prayers" I'm reminded of the Farsi alphabet, so I write --

            The Persian alphabet – letters waving

            o's and curves at me, words wending their

            way to me from right to left – knits new

            patterns for an old pet prayer,

            "Bestow upon me a heart diamond-

            bright," and i add, "that I may be like

            King Jamshid's cup of immortality

            and lift up my heart in turquoise hands."

This apple is long gone, but Apples remain.

The Young Hero: Dreamer of Dreams

Dreamer
collage, jr-s 1998

           Today, from my Persian Poets Augury Box, I randomly picked a little paper roll-up, unrolled it, and read:

            The old man ran from the young hero's bow

            Straight down the mountain quick as he could go...

                   Ferdowsi, The Book of Kings, (transl. Dick Davis)

Persian Poets Augury Box
jr-s, 2011
                

         How apposite.  Lately I've been thinking about a certain cultural figure: "the young hero."  The Persian term for the young hero is javanmardi.  I came upon it while reading Peter Kingsley's In the Dark Places of Wisdom.  Kingsley equates the term with the ancient Greek title kouros (a word older than the Greek language).  For the young hero, chronological age is beside the point.  He's "needed for prophesy," Kingsley notes, "for receiving oracles, for the magical process of lying down in a special place at night to obtain messages from the gods through dreams."           

            Dreaming is a gift of the youthful spirit.  One who is old in spirit will talk a dream to death.  But the young hero (who may be 19 or 100 years old) can shoot down a visionless oldster (who may be 19 or 100 years old) in an instant.  So the oldster flees the young hero's bow. Which reminds me of Athena, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom.  She's the best archer, hunter and warrior. She never loses a fight and is an eternally pure, flashing-eyed, beautiful maiden.  She/he -- doesn't matter – the javanmardi is evolved "beyond time," gone "to the heart of reality" to find "what never ages or dies," Kingsley writes.

            I'm glad to discover the expression javanmardi because it clears up one of the mysteries of my life:  I always wondered why the Bab and Baha'u'llah, even when past the age for it, called themselves and each other Youth. Now I have the cultural root:  the tradition of javanmardi or, in Arabic, fata.             

According to my current Farsi teacher the javanmardi spirit is passion, specifically bravery and the willingness to give oneself entirely, to be a sacrifice.  Javanmardi is a virtue, a godly attribute.           

            Javanmardi animates Tahirih's verse and that of her brother and sister mystics who have that spirit.  Someone always has that spirit.  According to tradition, true javanmardis live as earth lives, "often ignored and almost always misunderstood," to quote Kingsley, but they "keep existing because they have to."  We're never without them.  We can open our eyes, look through past and present time and find them.  One of my favorite poems, Ode, by young Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881), says it well.  It's a one-hit-wonder, but it's all O'Shaughnessy needed to do –

            We are the music-makers,

                 And we are the dreamers of dreams,

            Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

                 And sitting by desolate streams;

             World-losers and world-forsakers,

                 On whom the pale moon gleams:

             Yet we are the movers and shakers

                  Of the world forever, it seems.

            With wonderful deathless ditties

                 We build up the world's great cities,

             And out of a fabulous story

                  We fashion an empire's glory:

             One man with a dream, at pleasure,

                   Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

             And three with a new song's measure

                    Can trample an empire down.

            We, in the ages lying

                    In the buried past of the earth,

             Built Ninevah with our sighing,

                    And Babel itself with our mirth;

             And o'erthrew them with prophesying

                     To the old of the new world's worth;

            For each age is a dream that is dying,

                     Or one that is coming to birth.