WORKSHOP/SALON X: Bells, Juke Boxes and Treehouses
Blessing the Work
Recently before a meeting with a group involved in a creative process, we decided to do a smudging, since we all had traveled a ways to get to the meeting in New Mexico. We needed to reorient and focus on the task at hand.
I offered to smudge everyone present - the Native American tradition I learned about in my years in the Southwest - as long as one of them would smudge me too. It’s a good way to cleanse yourself, to remind yourself to brush away distractions and dust and imprints and be in the present moment. I used a smudge stick from Taos, made of sage - a scent that traditionally signifies "home", which is an excellent scent to help ground yourself to the here-and-now - and "brushed" the smoke onto each person in our group. To do this I used a very old, sacred feather bequeathed to me, and then, when done, let the ashes fall into a shell also bequeathed to me.
One member of our group had not been smudged before. We each closed our eyes while being smudged and just felt, smelled and heard the person smudging us as they moved around us. He laughed at one point and said, "I like the added touch of the little bells."
At first I wondered what he meant and then realized that my silver bangle bracelets were tinkling as I "brushed" the smoke toward him with the feather. It had not been an intended "effect" or part of the ritual, yet it ended up being one that enhanced his experience and gave me a wee chuckle.
Even when an experience includes elements already in place before we arrived, we still bring to it our own interpretation, our own understanding of what was intended and what was serendipity or synchronistic . That is where our creation of our experience takes place, where our personal symbolism begins to form and transform.
When things start skidding and feeling out of control, tension and stress and fear start driving my personal vehicle...I need to stop and remember to smudge myself, my path, my environment and those in space with me.
(My husband Bob laughs at my smudging and always rushes to find out "what’s burning!?!" but then, on the other hand, maybe his own habit of going outside to have a cigarette is HIS way of "smudging" the world, albeit I would say it is a perverse way. He will indulge me with a rolling of the eyes when he reads this!)
I believe we each need to stop and "bless our work" periodically, to get the human-mind-clutter out of it and enable ourselves to touch the source again, be with that "source" or "Source". And, at the source, to listen to the things that grab our attention.
Two things keep coming to me lately, grabbing my own attention. These two things need reconciling. I will try now.
The Dream Juke Box at the Jet Lag Pub...
One is a bar we spent time in, our last evening in the U.S.A. in July. We didn’t want to navigate Houston traffic, so had decided to keep ourselves to the one road leading into the Houston airport, on which our hotel was located. We limited ourselves to whatever restaurants or diversions were right there, those last few hours before we departed. We found a hotel bar called "The Jet Lag Pub" and decided to check it out.
It was on the second floor of the hotel, in the back, and felt like a set for a Tennessee Williams play. Very funky, very oriented to the airport employees in the area. It was a quiet mid-week night, so business was light. Airplane models hung on strings over the bar and the bartendress (a debatable "real" word, but the Urban Dictionary calls a bartendress a "female bartender with moxie" and that is exactly who this lady was!) had a sense of humor about and "ownership" of her place there. A couple of old guys (baggage handlers? maintenance crew?) were playing a game of pool in one corner and it seemed they had played thousands of games with each other over the years. At a nearby table two bored women wearing wedding rings played dominos, until a very handsome pilot-type male joined them and the flirting began.
The back wall of the bar was all glass, looking out into an interior courtyard that had seen better days and a few hurricanes. A huge aqua-colored swimming pool below – and since we were there for a few hours, as it grew dark the pool became neon aqua, the only source of light outside - surrounded by ragged-looking palm trees, a few hotel windows facing us on the other side. Near our table, outside, were some large bowls of restaurant scraps - not too appetizing to see while we ate our supper but the bartendress explained they were for the feral cats and racoons that would come by later. We did see the cats and a possum, but missed the family of racoons when we finally had to leave. We gathered that our bartendress was a serious cat lover and animal rights person; she was very partial and attentive to her little menagerie at the door.
The juke box was enormous and, it turned out, FREE! I thought of it as my Dream Juke Box, the ultimate Juke Box in the Sky, the one that has everything on it that you love and plays your selections instantly, you don’t have to wait for the last guy’s awful choices to play out! The bartendress proudly told me the selections on it were "some of my own choices, others that our regular clients have requested over the years". It had a great selection of classic country, classic country western, 1950s-1980s rock, jazz piano, blues, etc. Happily I fed it invisible quarters and played out all the decades of my musical memories, to my heart’s content. I was particularly pleased when I found it had an old country song from my youth, Lefty Frizzell’s "Saginaw, Michigan". Just the night before, I’d been trying to remember that song for Bob, in our discussion about whether - in the Simon & Garfunkel song "America" - they meant the Saginaw in Michigan or the Saginaw in Texas. This juke box had a lot of the old country and rock songs I used to listen to on my transister radio in my military brat childhood night beds in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas back in the 1950s.
"I like the added touch of the Dream Juke Box," I told the bartendress. She just shrugged. To her it was nothing particularly amazing, just a juke box.
At the bar was a laughing woman, who laughed loudly the whole 3-4 hours we were there. She never lost her sense of humor and everyone who came in joined her and laughed along. I was never quite sure at what she was laughing but it made a pleasant background for our supper.
I relaxed in the Jet Lag Pub, I felt terribly American, I let go my usual discomfort at a lot of alcohol consumption. Hell, it was our last night in America for another year.
There was enough of a merit to that evening that I have not forgotten it and smile fondly when I recall all of it - the bartendress, the laughter, the possum and cats, the pool players, the juke box. And, mostly, the quiet time to laugh and talk and ponder with Scottish Bob about all the things we’d seen and done in our summer in the U.S.A.
Treehouse in the Nunnery...
Counterpoint: The Holy Isle of Iona. How do they make that place so serene? It just MAKES you slow down, calm down, sit down on a bench in a place called the "Quiet Garden" with its gurgling fountain and flowers, and stare out onto the Sound of Iona. You find you become still inside.
I’ve been there twice now, the second time for 48 hours, and it feels like something takes my humming, brooding thoughts and worries, places them on a shelf, and hands me a nice soft globe of light to insert into my brain for the time that I’m there. Reading, walking, just sitting.
Watching the sheep, the seagulls, the crows, the cows. Realizing the sky and light there is every bit as incredible as it is in New Mexico. Walking once again to the 12th century nunnery garden/ruin and sitting on the damp grass there, feeling I have truly managed to escape every distressing and disturbing thing about myself, other people and our planet.
This time I am, according to plan, standing in the nunnery ruins during the hour of the fourth year anniversary of Rick’s death. As I walk around the nunnery gardens, right at the stroke of that hour, I pass a large tree overhanging into the grounds from someone’s backyard. In the tree is an old dilapidated tree house, just big enough for one child. It’s moss-covered and the boards are rotting in places, tied together with bits of rope. It makes me smile instantly, remembering Rick’s story about a tree house in which he and his brother used to play chess.
"I like the touch of the old treehouse," I say out loud to the spirits of the ancient nuns.
I write down my prayers in the church at Iona and put them in a prayer box, feeling very comforted by the fact that the brochure says that, on Tuesdays, these prayers are pulled out of the box, read aloud, and added to the prayer circle. Some well-intended strangers are going seriously focus on a spiritual solution to my problems. And they have never met me, nor I them. That feels good to me!
I have my dream, the night before we leave, of the woman with the message of Hope (I already described this in our last workshop). I leave, as I said before, feeling I have left my prayers and taken away a dream of Hope. A very fair exchange.
Discerning our Needs...
I find equal validity in my experiences at the Jet Lag Pub and at the Holy Isle of Iona. They each speak to different aspects of myself, and to the dichotomy of my life. And in each of them I found "those bells" as did my friend when he was smudged in New Mexico.
There are times when going into a peaceful "escape" of serenity is the correct response, for me, to a particular situation, and times when it is not.
There are times when going into a week-night pub and relaxing at a surface level is the correct response, for me, to a particular situation, and times when it is not.
It becomes a matter of discerning which is appropriate for which time, which part of my creative being needs the serendipity or synchronicity – of the juke box or the treehouse.
WHAT ABOUT YOU?
Can you remember a situation you entered into, a place, a person, a book you were reading, a painting you saw - which contained a serendipity element (or synchronistic element) that made the experience personally significant to you and your creative process?
Especially when you were least expecting it?
If it has stayed with you, have you answered the call of it yet? Maybe it needs writing down...or being sketched...or sung, or planted in your garden?
Or is it just fine, inside your memory, serving its function there?
Some of these questions, I think, play back to Outlaw’s questions toward the end of our last workshop. With her indulgence, I will reprint them here for you to consider further...
"Hope and creativity.
What is it we hope when we create something with our hands, brains and hearts?
Something lasting that will be remembered?
Something to soothe one's own soul?"
Here's to your own appreciation of your own bells, juke boxes and treehouses.
DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU DO!
Michelle Miller Allen (c) 2006
http://www.greenphoenixproductions.com
posted by Spiritbear @ 7:17 AM
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