Adventures

Over the last few years, people have inevitably referred to my efforts to sing English church music and visit England as "adventures."  Yet it has become clearer and clearer that it has actually been the time in between these moments -- over the course of a lifetime -- that have been the most adventuresome.  One usually undertakes an adventure as a contrast to one's "normal life."  In my case, I'd have to say that "normal"/aligned/at home with myself constitutes my year in the UK as a grad student in 1980-81, and then the multiple visits before and since then.  Most of my journey in between has been an adventure in adapting to the strange, the unexpected and, at times, the "foreign" and confusing.  Of course, a case could be made that I have learned more and grown faster in this offbeat journey than I ever could have had I stayed in the UK back in 1981, perhaps married and had boys who sang in a cathedral choir.  And returning to England on these visits, I am by no means "returning" to the person I was in 1980.  The country has changed and I have changed.  It's great, actually.

I'm mulling over all this, though, because I can also see in the lives of friends that there's an interesting thing that happens when you stake a "claim" to personal growth, be it making spiritual progress, or developing a new career or degree, or moving on in whatever way shape or form, only to "return" to the old landscape.  It becomes increasingly hard to adapt to the old place and people.  Things (health, finances, general ease of movement) don't work properly.  It's like walking through peanut butter quicksand while in a daze.  The "flow" which you've lined up with and which is working so well in the more optimum environment is simply absent.  Nothing is wrong with the old place or people, but you are simply no longer on the same wavelength.  It's a drag, literally.

Not all of this is literal, of course.  Sometimes it has to do with a new "place" physically, and sometimes it doesn't.  In my case, I know that what is crucial right now is attention to the new direction, not the old one.  And it's not so much staking a claim to a specific space, but, as mentioned last time, staking a claim to the feelings that I associate with that space: love, joy, fun, learning, abundance, and a feeling of home.  Adventures can be exhilarating and fun, whether in the old landscape or the new.  If they are not, that is when I am learning to look within and figure out "what part of me am I not keeping up with?"  "Am I headed backward, and if so, why?" If there's something wrong with the picture, that's not a bad thing.  It's good to have the warning signal, and not to spend years just living with it.  At this kind of moment, any thread of love, joy, fun, learning, abundance, and a feeling of home will do -- just follow it.  Today.

"The last day"

On this last day in England (for the time being) I just walked down to the High Street of the London suburb I've been staying in.  In the end, putting aside the grand and the glorious, it's really about the little things: the half dozen local "charity" shops (run by the major charities like Oxfam), the red buses going by, the (mostly) tiny cars shoehorned into even tinier spaces.  It's the pate, the stilton cheese, the Danish Lurpak (despite what it sounds like, it's a brand of butter...), the chocolate digestive biscuits.  It's walking through the town green, with its white cricket club, dog walkers, and nursery children playing on the grass.  It's the Victorian architecture which always makes me smile.  It's the rhythm of this place, accessing me both horizontally and up through the earth.

So yes, I've been a little weepy.  But as I become more and more convinced that there is no death, and no end to divine love, then it must follow that there is no separation from the things, people and places that we love.  All the little snapshots of these last few weeks boil down to a handful of feelings: joy, comfort, home, spiritual and musical fulfillment, and love.  Those cannot be taken away, and I'm learning not to give them away.

I may have spent only a small percentage of my life in England, but my, what an impact it has had.  My flight back to the US will be a meditation in gratitude.  There surely can't be a more fortunate "girl" in the world.

Confluence

Yesterday, on the Queen's birthday, I attended choral evensong at Westminster Abbey, the first time I have ever done so.  It was one of those hours when there was an unusual confluence of things I love.  I love the architecture of the English cathedrals, so just walking in was a joy.  They guided service goers down the north aisle, where Herbert Howells's ashes are buried, near the graves of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles V. Stanford and other composers.  There was only a moment to honor the spot before the queue moving forward pushed me along with it, in a stream leading to the choir stalls around the choir.

It is interesting that the service sung was the glorious Stanford in C -- he was one of Howells's teachers at the Royal College of Music.  So that sense of being quite literally immersed, not only in a place of extraordinary history and majesty, but in the specific musical river that is so dear to me, was overwhelming. It's like you sit there with the happiest glow in your face, quite unable to believe it.

Yes, this is my element.  Leaving it for any period of time, as I will early next week, has been hard in the past.  But as I've said, I think I will have a better ability after this trip to bring these peak moments with me, and use them to empower a happier and more settled future.  Focusing on confluence, love, happiness and joy -- wherever I am -- can only bring more such moments in life.  I feel extraordinarily privileged to have experienced as many of them in the last few weeks as I have!

An Unconditional Life

It is usually about this moment in one of my visits -- about a week or so before returning to the US -- that I begin to realize I will be leaving.  Exile is looming.  Once again I will be "cut off" from the music, the architecture, the historical context, the landscape I love only to return to a place where my life energy seems to dribble down to nearly nothing.  And, of course, with what Abraham-Hicks calls "pre-paving" like that, this is what has usually been my experience.  On a certain level, I've given up my power and happiness to a very specific condition, and looked to even narrower conditions (getting into a certain choir or educational program, finding adequate research material for a specific article) as a path to achieving the larger happiness I want.

Of course, I haven't been studying law of attraction material for a decade for nothing.  I know in my head that it is necessary to work on inner happiness so that you draw to you more and more happy outward conditions (not to mention to present a positive gift to the world around you.)  Mike Dooley's "Matrix" material offers a compact explanation of why trying to achieve a specific condition for happiness (a certain job, house, spouse, financial or health situation) so often yields only that condition, not a larger sense of peace and happiness.  My life has been an illustration, it would seem, of trying to "play the Matrix" from the wrong end of the chart!  And yet some of us have passions that are genuinely site-specific.  An oceanographer might not be able to do his or her work effectively in Oklahoma.  An astronomer needing the clearest possible views of the heavens would be unlikely to spend an entire lifetime based in Manhattan.  We all try to gravitate eventually to the condition where our passions have the easiest time of it.

I had kind of a double "aha" moment Saturday night.  First of all, I took responsibility for having created a scenario where my conditions for "happiness" have largely been an ocean away.  I didn't try to understand or explain it, I just accepted that this habit came from within me, as a first step towards moving forward more unconditionally.

And it was at that moment that I think I took my passion for this place into my heart in a way I never have.  I just fully embraced and loved it.  I realized all of a sudden that wherever I go from now on, it is coming with me.  I am not going to leave it on the other side of the world or see it as separate from me.  If at any given moment I don't happen to be standing on England's "green and pleasant land," then I still have the power, creatively, to express what this place means to me through writing, art and music.  I can turn this condition inside out and love my passion wherever I am.  I have that power.

Not surprisingly, I was much calmer Sunday morning as I headed out to Hampton Court Palace to attend choral matins, an organ recital, and choral evensong at the Chapel Royal.  In between events, I sat in the formal gardens and wrote in my journal.  I can't remember ever being happier. I was utterly, utterly, in my element.  I was proud of myself for not comparing it to the past or the future.  I just know I will take that day with me in my heart and draw on it.  The inner feeling of happiness was, in the end, more important than the specific outward condition.  All the spiritual teachers say this, but wow, isn't it fascinating, the individual journeys we all have to take to really get it?

More Evensongs

When you have a "thing" about choral evensong, the great thing about the UK is the variety of venues, choirs and services.  Because of the timing of this trip, during the Easter holiday, I haven't been able to attend quite as many services as I would have liked, but I'm grateful nonetheless for, so far, three very different experiences.

At King's College, Cambridge, I attended Maundy Thursday Eucharist, Good Friday Evensong, and Easter Festal Evensong.  As a teenager, I listened to every recording from King's I could get my hands on, and the chapel's four-second reverberation became (unfairly, of course!) my standard for the men and boys' choir sound.  What always astonishes me when I attend a service there is that the reverberation is real.  Quite literally, you hear the choir's sound heading up to the (fan-vaulted) heavens.  You never quite know when you are in line for the service where you will be able to sit, but if it is anywhere near the choir (in the parallel stalls facing each other across the chapel's center aisle), there is a unique sense of belonging that you don't get in churches where the "congregation" is in the center and the choir is singing from the front, the side, or a choir loft.  I suspect that quite apart from the King's choir's excellence, this will always be my favorite place to attend evensong.

After my "encounter" with Julian two weeks ago, I headed over to Norwich Cathedral for evensong.  On this occasion, I found myself seated right behind the visiting choir's bass section, and I was the one reverberating! This was a big mixed choir and they did a fine job of some very big music, the Blair in B minor and the Naylor Vox Dicentes. 

And then yesterday, in London, I attended evensong at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, on Trafalgar Square, which is an 18th century building in a more traditional church style, without parallel choir stalls.  Their choral scholars, arrayed in a semi-circle up front, sang a gloriously beautiful service -- the two young women sopranos had perhaps the purest voices I've ever heard anywhere.  After evensong at a college chapel or cathedral, you usually exit into the quiet confines of a quadrangle or close.  What was interesting at St. Martin was exiting to the absolute pandemonium of Trafalgar Square, which must be one of the busiest few acres in London. That contrast between the peace of the service and the bustle outside was acute.

In Norwich, I sat next to a man who must have been well into his 90's, and I noticed during the psalms that he was silently lip-synching with the choir (something I have to force myself not to do.)  After the service, I asked if he had been in a choir and he said yes, as a boy.  He said he still wishes he could sing.  Yesterday, there was a twenty-something man doing the same thing a row ahead of me.  How many services are attended by former choristers who almost cannot not sing along to the music they love?  From what I gather (and from video clips I've seen from the 1950's and early 1960's), the standard of singing continues to get higher and higher over time; perhaps the "inner" sound of retired singers is adding to that spiritual intensity and musical excellence.

The Scale of Things

One thing that never fails to hit home when you're an American visiting the UK is the scale of things. 

I am visiting friends near London, with a back garden ("yard") the size of a proverbial postage stamp.  I dare say nearly all of them in this area are about the same size.  Yesterday, their late afternoon chores included mowing the grass, which took (and I timed it) about two minutes with an electric mower which was plugged into the kitchen outlet.  I thought of the average home in nearly every place I have lived since New York City, from Vermont to the Adirondacks to Montana, and the enormous time commitment involved in taming the grass in a yard that is often half wilderness anyway.

That's the thing about English gardens.  Each of them is almost England in miniature...tiny, cultivated, groomed, beautiful, with a wall or fence (instead of the ocean) surrounding it.  Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of formal gardens writ small dot this country.  Compact little flower pots and flower boxes and small patios create visual and textural variety.  There often seems to be a little "Wales" or "Northern Scotland" at the back of the garden, a little spot where less time and effort has been taken to keep things pruned and neat.  But the sense of peace, self-containment, and security in such a garden is unlike anything that I think I have ever experienced in the US.

Having said that, the world beyond is evident.  Planes are circling overhead, neighbors are noisily extending their garden sheds or raising a roof, and the sound of sirens wail in the distance.  Miles upon miles of what Americans would call "row houses" and their miniature gardens are interwoven with the rest of the world as are, indeed, America's more open, unconstrained self-standing homes and back yards.  It's just so fascinating how these outside spaces seem to illustrate who we are and how we approach life.

Musings on Marriage

I attended a wedding this weekend.  Not a "Royal Wedding," just an English registry office one, the kind which is undoubtedly performed hundreds of times a day all over the country.  Yet it was a moving event, and the vows were beautifully written.  In all the excitement, I did not find out whether they were standard issue, or provided by the couple.  Either way, beautiful.  There was a line to the effect that, marriage is the best way for humans to experience the next level of the power of love.  That, plus sitting up close to a couple clearly beaming with happiness, helped me understand love and marriage in a way I never have.

There was a moment (perhaps at age 45 or 50) when I just accepted that this was not going to happen for me.  I think the institution suddenly shifts away from you, across a chasm, and becomes something that other people do.  It's not likely, it's no longer possible, and it becomes a rather surreal concept like flying to the moon.  Self-protectively, one might even question marriage's validity.  Why would anyone sacrifice their freedom?  Why would anyone risk slowing their personal spiritual growth?  I'm fine on my own, kind of thing.

And then add into the mix being at one's core a contemplative or mystic.  My Christian heritage traditionally required singleness, even celibacy, from people with callings in this area.  That imprint runs deep, even for this more spiritually open 21st century woman.  Yet, tradition aside, I don't think I could ever have navigated the twists and turns of these last few years in a partnership.  Having been single entering "The Void," and having such a unique set of influences and goals, the path has been almost impossibly narrow even for me on my own, much less for two people walking side by side.

Yet life presented two powerful moments almost in tandem this week -- the opportunity to embrace my solitary contemplative side at Julian's shrine, and the opportunity to embrace the validity of marriage.  How on earth to reconcile these two?

The only thing that I have come up with so far is this: even in the modern world, it may be necessary to go through the "eye of the needle" alone and without encumbrances, in order to efficiently come home to a love of self, love of one's self's true gifts, and to come home to a love of and trust in the Source of those gifts.  But since love is what everything is all about, perhaps once you've reached a new plateau (or stretch of river), new expressions of love become possible, even impossible to avoid.  Perhaps there is some way in which solitude and marriage are not mutually exclusive after all. May I just keep my heart open to that possibility.

England Miscellany

It is so interesting how someplace can feel so easy to be in, and then out of the blue, there's an illustration of how different you really are.  I was at the post office last week, and several of us in line commented on the fact that the clock on the wall showed the wrong date of the month.  But by the time I got to the window, I had forgotten about it and didn't bring it to the clerk's attention.  So I went to the same post office again yesterday, and was rather surprised that the clock was still showing the wrong date.  Someone in line pointed this out to an employee, and they said that they could not do it themselves, that a requisition had gone in for a repair.  Perhaps it was something that needed more than an easy re-set, but my American "can-do" spirit was -- what? -- amused I guess. 

My encounter with Julian of Norwich has been quite life-changing, really.  When you can finally answer a question that you've been asking your whole life, it changes everything.  When I get a little further down this new stretch of river, I may come to realize that the question was less about "where should I live?" than "how shall I live?"  And of course this has been suggested to me many times in the past. But we all need to figure these things out ourselves, when we are ready.  The timing was right and the place was right for the life lesson, and finally I really love who I am, no matter what the circumstances or situation, and understand how I want to live.  I'm leaving Cambridge tomorrow to visit friends in the West of England, and yet it's hard to imagine topping this part of the trip.  It has been sort of a Dorothy moment -- when you finally realize "home" was in you all along.

"I Sing a Song..."

Yesterday, even as I wrote about wanting as a child to be a "saint," I worried that this might seem kind of preposterous.  I mean, that's a label usually attached to someone long after they are gone.  Yet the model I was influenced by was not that of utter perfection and formal saintliness, but rather the one illustrated in the childhood hymn, "I sing a song of the saints of God," which I still love.  The message of it is basically that saints are everywhere -- at school, at sea, in trains, shops and at tea (yes, the author was English!) I personally believe that the vast majority of humans are saints or angels.  Most of us are doing our best to do the right thing, and we intervene in surprising and sometimes magical ways to help others, at times without even knowing it.  I cannot count the number of angelic humans who have been in my life!  And most of our less angelic moments have to do with fear, not active "evil."  The relatively small percentage of people utterly lacking in a connection to the Divine wreak disproportionate havoc on our world, but it always makes me sad when people say the world is evil, or getting worse over time.  I don't believe it is.  In fact, I think it's getting better.  It's just that some people can't keep up...

Anyway, the issue for all of us is to figure out our best role or vehicle for doing good in the world.  There are more and more potential roles all the time as the world becomes more complex.  It's just figuring out which one is right for you, and doing the thing you are really good at, not as a vacation from your real job, but as your job.  I realized last night that at most every turning point in my life, I instinctively went on "retreat" -- but then left the retreat to find a "real job," very few of which lasted.  Finally, I am realizing that the work I do on retreat is my real job.  The thinking, learning, praying, and new understandings that come to me -- then writing these things down -- is my real job. Trying to figure out how the Universe works and what life is all about is my real job.  Making connections between things is my real job.  Those piles of journals reflect years of hard, valid work.  It's not for most people, but a small percentage of women and men through history have played this role in society (and in some cultures they are formally honored and "housed," as in Julian's day) so I guess what I was trying to say yesterday is, it's a relief just to accept my personal song and start to sing it. 

Phew. Now it's time for a cup of tea.

Julian of Norwich

It can be illuminating to find out what people "wanted to be when they grew up."  And yet when that question comes my way, I still often find some way to sidestep it.  Even I am a little embarrassed by the answer, as I may have already mentioned in a previous blog.  Inspired by some 1930's-era English children's prayer and saints books (probably from my father's own anglophile childhood) -- and by my budding interest in English church music -- my earliest dream was to become a nun or a saint.  As it is, I have been somewhat ridiculed over the years for being "goody-goody-two-shoes," and during my teens and twenties when other young people were doing the hippie thing, I was listening to records of Anglican chant.  Once I hit "the real world," I did my utmost to hide my spiritual and musical interests for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that they were not going to pay back my student loans or pay the rent.  It is only now, when I am no longer even embarrassed by how incompetent I have been navigating the waters of the real world, that I am willing to go back to the nun and saint piece.  What did it say about who I am? 

I know relatively little about Julian and have not read her Revelations of Divine Love.  A BBC program last week referred to her, however, and it struck me that I needed to visit her site and find out what she might have to tell me.  So on Sunday I bought a Cambridge to Norwich bus ticket and away I went.

Julian was alive during the late 14th-early 15th century.  There is evidently some question as to whether she was actually a nun, but there is no question that she became an "anchoress"; in doing so, like other anchorites and anchoresses, she literally chose to undertake a ritual death, being bricked into a small cell against the side of a church for the rest of her life.  There would likely have been only three openings in the room; a small window to the church and its services, an opening through which food could be passed to Julian and through which she could send waste back, and a window to the street, which might have been used by outsiders asking for spiritual advice or comfort.  It is in this cell that Julian did extensive writing, most notably Revelations of Divine Love, which may be the first book written in English by a woman.

As I thought about it during my bus ride to Norwich, I have to say that I found the anchoress metaphor to be really quite troubling.  Women of too many generations and nationalities have been involuntarily imprisoned, constricted, left invisible.  Why, even 600 years ago, would a woman voluntarily make that choice?

The actual church and cell were destroyed in a bombing raid during World War II, and subsequently rebuilt.  The side chapel on the site of her cell is nondescript, really rather grim.  And yet when I walked in, I literally (and quite uncharacteristically) fell to my knees and burst into tears.  What on earth?

Eventually, I got up and sat on the hard bench on the side wall of the chapel, wiping my tears, glad that no one else was there.  It dawned on me where this emotion was coming from.  I realized that truly she was a woman after my own heart, and not only because she evidently made similar conclusions about love to those I have made.  In that cell, she had all the basics that I yearn for.  I want to be anchored and at home in one place, not constantly moving.  I want easy access to choral evensong services.  I want a simple day-to-day life of writing, good food, and a ton of solitude.  I want to wake early and go to sleep early.  And yet I don't want total isolation -- I also want to be at the heart of things, where I can connect at times with other musicians, creative people and spiritual seekers, and be part of that communal energy for change and the creation of beauty.

Julian and I speak somewhat different spiritual languages, and I certainly don't seek physical imprisonment.  But after a lifetime of considering (and either not pursuing or not succeeding at) a bewildering array of modern options for women, I guess I fell on my knees in the presence of the only one that has ever made sense for me.  Finally, a life model that I "get."  Last fall, I was beginning to see this part of myself more clearly, yet the tinny, modern, "I need to create a website and make money" consideration was distracting me from something important.  Yesterday, on the floor of that drab chapel, I looked at the contemplative nun and saint in myself, and finally loved her. That's what had been missing.

Thank you, Julian.