Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The Deja View
"Along their migratory routes, monarch butterflies stay nights in certain trees. The 'butterfly trees,' as they are called, are carefully chosen--although the criteria exercised in their selection are not known. Species is unimportant, obviously, for at one stopover the roosting tree may be a eucalyptus, at another a cedar or an elm. But, and this is what is interesting, they are always the same trees. Year after year, whether moving south or returning north, monarchs will paper with their myriad wings at twilight a single tree that has served as a monarch motel a thousand times before. "Memory? If so, it is genetic. For you see, the butterflies who journey south are not the ones who come back. Monarchs lay their eggs in sunny climes. Then they die. The hordes who flutter northward in spring are a succeeding generation. Yet, without hesitation, they roost in the same trees as did their ancesors. "Scientists have examined butterfly trees and found them chemically and physically identical to the trees surrounding them. Yet no other tree will do. Investigators have camouflaged a tree's color, altered its scent. The monarchs were not fooled. Another of nature's mysterious constants. A butterfly always knows when it is there." -Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Julia Cameron on Healing
The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain – the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phases it, “unutterably alone.”
More than anything else, attention is the act of connection. I learned this the way I have learned most things – quite by accident.
When my first marriage blew apart, I took a lonely house in the Hollywood Hills.
My plan was simple. I would weather my loss my loss alone. I would see no one, and no one would see me, until the worst of the pain was over.
I would take long, solitary walks, and I would suffer. As it happened, I did take those walks, but they did not go as planned.
Two curves up the road behind my house, I met a gray striped cat.
This cat lived in a vivid blue house with a large sheepdog she clearly disliked. I learned all this despite myself in a week’s walking.
We began to have little visits, that cat and I, and then long talks of all we had in common, lonely women.
Both of us admired an extravagant salmon rose that had wandered across a neighboring fence. Both of us like watching the lavender float of jacaranda blossoms as they shook loose from their moorings.
Alice (I heard her called inside one after afternoon) would bat at them with her paw.
By the time the jacarandas were done, an unattractive slatted fence had been added to contain the rose garden. By then, I had extended my walks a mile farther up and added to my fellowship other cats, dogs, and children.
By the time the salmon rose disappeared behind its fence, I had found a house higher up with a walled Moorish garden and a vitriolic parrot I grew fond of. Colorful, opinionated, highly dramatic, he reminded me of my ex-husband.
Pain had become something more valuable: experience.
Julia Cameron
More than anything else, attention is the act of connection. I learned this the way I have learned most things – quite by accident.
When my first marriage blew apart, I took a lonely house in the Hollywood Hills.
My plan was simple. I would weather my loss my loss alone. I would see no one, and no one would see me, until the worst of the pain was over.
I would take long, solitary walks, and I would suffer. As it happened, I did take those walks, but they did not go as planned.
Two curves up the road behind my house, I met a gray striped cat.
This cat lived in a vivid blue house with a large sheepdog she clearly disliked. I learned all this despite myself in a week’s walking.
We began to have little visits, that cat and I, and then long talks of all we had in common, lonely women.
Both of us admired an extravagant salmon rose that had wandered across a neighboring fence. Both of us like watching the lavender float of jacaranda blossoms as they shook loose from their moorings.
Alice (I heard her called inside one after afternoon) would bat at them with her paw.
By the time the jacarandas were done, an unattractive slatted fence had been added to contain the rose garden. By then, I had extended my walks a mile farther up and added to my fellowship other cats, dogs, and children.
By the time the salmon rose disappeared behind its fence, I had found a house higher up with a walled Moorish garden and a vitriolic parrot I grew fond of. Colorful, opinionated, highly dramatic, he reminded me of my ex-husband.
Pain had become something more valuable: experience.
Julia Cameron
“…Writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now.
The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.
Yesterday the marriage may have ended. Tomorrow the cat may die. The phone call from the lover, for all my waiting, may not ever come, but just at the moment, just now, that’s all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.
The night my mother died, I got the call, took my sweater, and set out up the hill behind my house. A great snowy moon was rising behind the palm trees. Later that night, it floated above the garden, washing the cactus silver. When I think now about my mother’s death, I remember that snowy moon…”
Julia Cameron
The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.
Yesterday the marriage may have ended. Tomorrow the cat may die. The phone call from the lover, for all my waiting, may not ever come, but just at the moment, just now, that’s all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.
The night my mother died, I got the call, took my sweater, and set out up the hill behind my house. A great snowy moon was rising behind the palm trees. Later that night, it floated above the garden, washing the cactus silver. When I think now about my mother’s death, I remember that snowy moon…”
Julia Cameron
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