A Year In Sedona: Only Connect

    Chapter 8  
Only Connect

                Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
                                                  -- E.M Forster
 

            The climate in Sedona was typically mild enough for year round encounters with nature and hiking was one of our favorite ways to meet the muse. The red rocks never failed to live up to their reputation for awe inspiring adventures in the great outdoors.  When winter arrived and the days grew cold enough to curtail daily excursions on nearby trails it was a mild shock. I missed the warmth of our happy golden Arizona sun and fell into a minor sulk about having to stay inside. Louis, my placid sidekick, recommended we just settle in and read classic novels. As usual he'd hit upon a winning idea.

           We drove the mile over to the town's very good library and found some old treasures, among them E.M. Forster's Howard's End. This turned out to be serendipitous. In reading again the sumptuous tale of tangled relationships gone awry only to get set right in the end, I was impressed anew with the heroine's eloquent and persuasive speech about connecting prose and passion, heart and head as a way out of the isolation of living in fragments. Pondering this verity made me feel  a) hopeful about there always being a way to resolve life's thornier dilemmas, and b) motivated because it pushed me to try to spend more time working on my own book about finding new connections in the present by honoring the ancestral spiritual lineage.

         Cozy in our favorite chairs in front of the fire, we read our respective books and afterwards fell naturally into the time honored activity of doing what people used to do in the old days, talking to each other about what we'd just read. Conversation fell on the divine to mundane spectrum, alternating between philosophical musings, metaphysical inquiry, political rants and raves and plain old piddling trivialities. But then that grew tiresome as we got bored with with only each other to discuss ideas about timeless and universal questions such as how to make the world a better place as well as more mundane matters like where we could we get some really good barbecue for dinner.

       The truth was that we needed other people to get a really good discussion going. But where? Fortunately the muse appeared in the mailbox the next day when the latest catalog from OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learn Institute arrived. "Look at this!" I said, tossing Louis the snazzy little publication with scads of innovative educational offerings for the over-sixty set. One workshop sounded particularly intriguing, "Dialogue As a Spiritual Practice" explored how Taoism and other less well known approaches to spirituality might have practical applications in daily life. If we signed up we might learn how to make new connections with heretofore unrelated things and people, plus we would be part of a group of inquiring minds interested in the same things we were.

           At the first meeting we met bright, educated, enthusiastic baby boomers with the time and resources to pursue interesting, affordable opportunities to keep the mind challenged and spry. Since the point of the class was to foster dialogue of a spiritual nature, we were assigned spots in groups small enough to allow for intimate discussion. Our group had five people, all with a different reason for being there. Exploring dialogue, spirituality and the Tao obviously had a certain esoteric overlay so of course the group conversation wandered out of ordinary bounds, with everyone's comments lending a unique but broadening perspective. Louis, fairly taciturn, spent a lot of time listening and pondering. He'd been an undergraduate philosophy major and from time to time pulled up a quote from one of his favorite thinkers. The group responded appreciatively. When it was my turn to speak, I mentioned my book in progress, explaining that one of the things I'd hoped to get from the class was an expanded perspective about the book's subject, connecting with ancestral spiritual  lineage through memoir and personal narrative.


           When they heard 'personal narrative', some in the group politely expressed weariness with the genre, disdainful of something they felt had in recent years become hopelessly trite. Undaunted, I spoke up for it though, I thought an examination of the journey of the soul was a crackerjack tool for lifelong learning as well as a generally useful way to meet one's muse. Put that way, the idea seemed more attractive and Ellen, a feisty sixtyish woman who had taken several OLLI classes over the years, shared her story. She'd reached a time and place in life when learning to connect with her grown children had taken on an urgency, matters of health, she said. She'd hoped this workshop might help her figure out how to move from the superficial and predictable to a deeper and more meaningful conversation with her children and grandchildren.

      "I came not really knowing what to expect," she told us, "but I didn't want more classes in how to talk to your grown kids. What I'm looking for is a way to share with my children on more of a soul level. I've got a garage full of boxes, letters, pictures, mementos and several years worth of journals. I've wondered if I could find a way to use all that, maybe open a new dialogue with them by sharing the story of my own spiritual journey, showing them all the stuff I've saved over the years, not just mine but from the whole family tree." I offered my perspective and experience, said I'd found conversation with my adult children much easier and gotten a new perspective when I communicated in a way they more easily understood. Images, photos and pictures, symbols, objects and mementos told a better memory story than mere words. Imagery could bypass rigid verbal cues, allowing instead a more creative approach to generating internal and external dialogue. A perfect way to broach the subject of connecting to ancestral lineage. Ellen's eyes lit up at this, maybe she'd found a piece to the puzzle of how to engage in dialogue as a spiritual practice.

         There were others in the group with very different reasons about why they'd signed up. Greg, a retired hydrologist, was a scientist on the way to discovering himself as a mystic. Looking for alternatives to traditional explanations of spirituality, he was delving further into the mystique of what has drawn seekers of all kinds to Sedona. Unlike Ellen, he had no pressing family dialogue issues to grapple with and simply wanted to explore new ways to connect and converse with others about the things he loved most. Befuddled in the beginning by the instructor's very Zen/No Mind approach to dealing with the unfolding and flow of the class, Greg slowly found ground, his alive and curious spirit well served by embracing the intent of the class to let go of logic as answers arose intuitively. Learning to be more fully present, practicing non-judgment, opening to minute-by-minute experience, and coming to recognize unconscious skills and instincts began to make more sense to him as the class unfolded. Maybe he was learning that to find the holy grail, aka wisdom's edge, called for a different way of thinking. Or non-thinking.

        Robert, a computer programmer, hailed from back east and had been a winter resident in Sedona for several years. He told us he liked to keep his mind sharp during the off season by looking into topics that at first glance seemed completely unrelated to his primary work which was teaching a college computer course. Robert was someone not afraid to go full on for something totally out of his comfort range. Like others in the group, he wanted an experience that promised to fling open the doors to a wider perception and appreciation of life and give him information and maybe skills to forge better relationships. He thought this might happen by learning to connect with his own as well as others' spiritual traditions. At the end of the class he had retained his initial openness and his 'all things are possible' approach as he promised to stay in touch.

       As Ellen, Greg and Robert talked, the unspoken subtext was that at some point they'd each made a decision to set out on the road to wisdom's edge. Though all had a different tale in the end they told the same story of a readiness to meet the muse and live in fragments no longer. In a profound way their presence validated Forster's perspective that connecting to others by sharing one's soul story invites the prose and passion inside emerge from its waning isolation. Our group dialogue ended up being a kind of spiritual practice in itself, a useful and elegant way to meet the muse. At the end of the workshop Louis and I knew we'd come to a turning point on the road to wisdom's edge. It had been a very long time since we'd been this happy about going back to school. 


                                       Meeting Your Muse:  A Spoken Image  

                 Let the muse lead the way to reveal a story of love and compassion, a warmer and more nurturing ancestral lineage brought to life using image, artifacts, photos, mementos as well as words to portray personal heritage and history. Experiment with your narrative, what you end up may surprise you. A tribute to ancestors can highlight inherited spiritual qualities such as strength, peace, honor and courage, qualities that can be passed on to future generations. Once composed, the story is initially honored and validated through sharing with a silent witness. Later, sharing with a wider audience and family can be immensely rewarding. Here's your guide to composing A Spoken Image:

  Greet...lineage members through their photos, assembling your tribe together in a rough collage. Sit with this awhile until the photo montage calls out for context. For instance, I added the Buddhist Lovingkindness peace prayer after meditating for a bit. I love the beautiful expressions of cultivating tenderness, offering forgiveness and finding strength. If you choose this approach, sit for a few minutes as you allow the ancestors to find voice through these images. Offer up the strong, sweet words of Lovingkindess to your ancestors, then listen for a response.

Boundary...the sacred space you are creating by experimenting with shadow, light and color, barely there strokes of pencil or colored pen to delineate borders, fashion icons, add designs, your own illustrations, anything that helps delineate sacred space. After the images are respectfully boundaried in this space, create a written schematic with family tree connections, remembered relationships and carefully constructed memories.

    Write...a descriptive sentence about each ancestor. Tracing lineage back as far as you can within the collage. Clearly, the further back you go, the less you know so fabricated description is acceptable. This isn't as cavalier as it may seem. There's something very powerfully creative and revealing about encountering a photo image and sitting with it as you open your thoughts and feelings about the photo image. Oddly enough, you begin to realize you know more than you thought. 

    Draw...a visual representation including a timeline, a family tree, geographical map, showing connections between the photo images and you as well as with one another. The unfolding image will put you physically among the ancestors, seeing, feeling and hearing them as they were.

  Write...about these characters in the lineage and connect yourself to them by describing the complex of connections, facts, feelings and events that had to occur to bring you to a life in this place at this time. Write about the person you think you are now because of the influences of your ancestors.  Again, it's OK, maybe necessary sometimes,  to imagine, make up, surmise or guess when the unknown looms. Imaginative excursion is after all, the key to writing great stories. 

Tell the Story... to somebody.  I told my husband. And my cats, one dead and one alive, cats that is. Yes, speaking to the dead is a valid and even encouraged avenue to finding your way among the departed ancestors. Feel free to speak to a lineage member or a life heroine/hero that has passed on. The listening partner is silent, there only to honor and bear witness to your arrival at wisdom’s edge.

          

         

                                       

         



           
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