Red Egg Gallery

We've moved—come with us!

2010-04-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

As you can see by the sidebar to your right, the Red Egg blog is moving. We're moving to a site that gives us the flexibility to gradually create an entirely new and more holistic online space. This new space will enable us to better announce—and actually in some ways mirror—our physical gatherings/events. As it continues to be created, this space will also enable us to exhibit and archive artists' work. Our intention is to welcome you to create and participate in this space yourself—both on-line and when we meet in person.

So migrate yourself to the new site of our Red Egg journal. For now, our current website (which we still like) is still intact. But already, behind closed doors, it's evolving into something more.

"Learn how to meditate on paper"

2010-03-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

"Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation.

Learn how to contemplate works of art.

Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country.

Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand

But when you are waiting for a bus or riding in the train..."

-- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 1962

Giraffes in Kenya

2010-03-10T23:00:00.000-08:00

A dance unlike anything you've quite seen before. Choreography by the Kenyan savannah. Music by Angélique Kidjo and videography by Debi. Turn up the volume on your computer.

Cézanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire

2010-03-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the world opens and takes you into secrets where it seems only you are meant to go.

But if we really notice—and if we really prepare ourselves, saying no to everything that has become irrelevant, and yes to the path that is ours and ours alone—then we find this opening happening more than we would have realized.

How many excuses we tell ourselves to avoid committing to who we really are—and to where the world would take us if we just had the courage to say yes enough.

A year ago we were in Aix-en-Provence,

…which means that during most of the daylight hours we were outside of it,

…sur le motif,

…walking in the footsteps

…where Cézanne had walked and painted.

We didn’t write about this then. And we almost didn’t write about it now. It means too much to us. And our words will fall short of how we really feel.

Another difficulty is with these images on your screen right now. They aren’t the paintings themselves, of course. So you can’t get the colors right. Or the genius of the touches of his brush upon the canvas.

Or the exact relationships among the colors and touches and empty spaces.

And yet if you click on these images, you begin to get a sense of them. (Click here, for example, and move around awhile. Then backspace to return.)

What a thing it is to enter such a world again.

Now we only have what he had—our vision and our imagining.

And we aren’t meant to live in a surrogate world either.

It is the actuality of where we really are—together with our imagining—that creates anything real at all. And imagining, of course, isn’t the faculty of inventing something out of thin air, as if that were even possible.

It isn’t avoidance or dissipation.

It is the faculty of really seeing—in which our own true self emerges.

But you can’t say much about this, or you will frighten her away.

“Yes, that’s what I like to paint, the absent man, but totally integrated into the landscape,” Cézanne said.

It’s like that. You can’t see the absent man anywhere. And yet there isn’t anywhere he hasn’t been.

Cézanne spent most of his life in Aix. He was born and died there.

And so his life moved around the mountain, too.

And within the conformations of his native land, each small movement, each difference in the rhythm of where he walked and worked, taught him to see differently. And so it can teach us, too.

Later in his life, Cézanne rented this cabanon at Bibémus, where he could store canvases and materials, and sometimes take an afternoon nap, in between working sur le motif there.

Bibémus was an abandoned quarry

…and afforded Cézanne mysterious angular man-made shapes in yellow ochre within the wildness that reclaimed the place.

He also later rented a room at the Chateau Noir along the Petit Rue du Tholonet.

As at Bibémus, Cézanne kept painting materials in the room to save himself the time and effort of transporting them to the places where he worked.

He wanted to buy the Chateau Noir, but his offer was refused. It would’ve brought him closer to the mountain, and he loved the wildness of the forest and grottoes there.

But sometimes the best thing that can happen is for our own plans to fall through.

And so instead Cézanne built an atelier part way up the hill of Les Lauves, outside of Aix.

It must have been while the studio was still being built that Cézanne walked further up the hill of Les Lauves

…and came upon this vista of the mountain.

In his last two years, he would paint Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves many times, moving his easel a few feet one way or another.

The mountain always changes.

The mountain is always the same.

But you can see that in these late paintings there isn’t a way to the mountain any more.

You will have to integrate the experience differently now. You will have to compose it, too.

Aix has changed a lot since then.

Cézanne had shaken his walking stick in rage when electric street lamps first arrived in Aix.

So what would he think now?

And so in a world of such development, we hadn’t expected to be able to find the mountain any more. Of course, we knew that the geological formation would still be there—but certainly the solitude and presence would have fled.

Cézanne had said, “To see is to conserve—and to conserve is to compose.”

That simple-sounding sentence can ring so many ways.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have intended the sentence in an ecological sense per se.

But he saved the mountain anyway.

He didn’t move from art into political activism the way John Muir did.

Instead, he saved the mountain by seeing it.

Every place must have its poet, Wallace Stegner wrote.

That is, they must find each other.

And for that to happen, there must be a place—and within us, too—that can still be found

…and in which we can be found, too.

Mary Magdalene, patron saint of prosperity

2010-02-18T22:36:00.000-08:00

Here is another icon of Mary Magdalene—by artist Elaine Savoie of Hornby Island in British Columbia. Click on the image.

Of course, you recognize the Red Egg.

We had a delightful visit with Elaine about sixteen months ago. We didn't realize it then, but when she heard the story of the Red Egg, this icon began percolating within her. And now here the icon is.

We just received this image—as if posting the story below had called St. Mary all the way down this coast.

Look how regal she is. This is a woman to stand up to a Caesar or two—let alone to you or me.

I don't know who these figures are beneath the Magdalen's regal, starry skirts. Are they recipients of her patronage who have commissioned this icon in their gratitude?

I do know that on the indigenous northwest coast coppers are signs of economic and social status.

And in economic times like these, all of us—including artists, certainly—would be grateful to have copper wings like these.

Why "Red Egg" anyway?

2010-02-09T17:04:00.000-08:00

The first person Christ appeared to after his Resurrection was his friend and follower Mary of Magdala. She couldn't recognize him at first and mistook him for the gardener. But when he called her by name, she turned and said to him, "Rabboni, that is, teacher..."

"Noli me tangere," Jesus said. "Do not cling to me. I must rise to my Father first."

Mary of Magdala is often confused with other women in the gospels. But she is not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. And she is not the woman caught in adultery.

She appears to have been a woman of means who helped support Jesus and the disciples. She was a myrrh-bearer because she purchased and brought myrrh and spices with which to anoint Christ after his burial. And she is an apostle to the apostles because she was sent by Christ himself to announce his Resurrection to them.

Traditions say that Mary of Magdala spent much of her life in contemplation and prayer after the Ascension. One legend is that she sailed—or drifted in a small boat—to the south of France with Joseph of Arimathea and Salome and "the other Mary" who had gone to the tomb to anoint Christ's body, too.

As the first witness of the Resurrection, she would proclaim, "He is risen!" and would hold an egg as a symbol of that transformation. One day she attended a banquet of the Caesar Tiberius.

"He is risen!" Mary proclaimed.

"He is no more risen than that egg is red," Tiberius scoffed.

Mary stretched out her arm and opened her hand. The egg was red.

Mindfulness at Home

2010-02-05T22:07:00.000-08:00

We like Karen Maezen Miller's "10 Tips for a Mindful Home" in this March issue of Shambhala Sun...

Wake with the sun
There is no purer light than what we see when we open our eyes first thing in the morning.

Sit
Mindfulness without meditation is just a word.

Make your bed
The state of your bed is the state of your head. Enfold your day in dignity.

Empty the hampers
Do the laundry without resentment or commentary and have an intimate encounter with the very fabric of life.

Wash your bowl
Rinse away self-importance and clean up your own mess. If you leave it undone, it will get sticky.

Set a timer
If you're distracted by the weight of what's undone, set a kitchen timer and, like a monk in a monastery, devote yourself wholeheartedly to the task at hand before the bell rings.

Rake the leaves
Rake, weed, or sweep. You'll never finish for good, but you'll learn the point of pointlessness.

Eat when hungry
Align your inexhaustible desires with the one true appetite.

Let the darkness come
Set a curfew on the internet and TV and discover the natural balance between daylight and darkness, work and rest.

Sleep when tired
Nothing more to it.

—Karen Maezen Miller

From the March 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.

Photo of Bet Giyorgis Church, Lalibela, by Mark Tuschman.

Red Egg—the Idea

2010-02-04T00:16:00.000-08:00

We believe there's a depth dimension—an inherent goodness and creativity and desire to connect within each of us.

We say it one way in the mantra on the portal to our website. And the tag-line above says it another way...contemplation through art into action. This doesn't mean that the movement is one-directional, but rather that each of these elements—contemplation, creativity, and action on behalf of others—is in a dynamic relationship with the others.

Each of us has integrated one or two of the dimensions more completely than the other(s). We are living, evolving organisms after all—individually and as a whole. And it isn't that each dimension deserves exactly one-third of our attention at any given moment anyway.

But still we believe that our natural movement, as we become more and more free, is towards this dynamic wholeness in which each of these dimensions spontaneously interacts.

That's who we think we are.

Meeting the Divine—January 23 gathering

2010-01-27T11:57:00.000-08:00

We lived in a Tibetan Buddhist meditation hall for two days—all alone, it seemed.

The thangkas were beautiful

…as was the solitude—and they have stayed with us in important ways.

A singing bowl still awakens us.

But nothing came all the way to life

…until you were here,

…and we sat together with a common, obscure intention,

…and the whole room hummed like a singing bowl itself.

Shree and Sushil and Pradeep and Promud hung the thangkas and set the singing bowls

…not like a shop, but like a temple.

And with her voice and singing bowls, Sharon created sacred space—within us and among us

And Emily explained—with passion and precision—Room to Read’s resolve to help.

Now all but one thangka and one singing bowl have gone.

But the sacred space is still here.

Saturday night was never about fundraising per se. But let’s do the math and see what else happened then.

With the purchase of thangkas and singing bowls and notecards and Red Egg prayer beads, we created $583 to contribute to Room to Read. We rounded that number to a neater $625

…because via one of those synchronicities the universe loves to give, we realized this morning that the Financial Times had selected Room to Read as a “Charity Partner,” which means that until January 27 (whew!), corporate sponsors will match all donations. In the blink of an on-line button, we’ve just raised $1250. We’ve dedicated that amount to Room to Read’s “Girls’ Education Program in Nepal.”

Yes, by some abstract abacus or another, we could consider this a modest sum.

But do the math. What this really means is that we’ve provided for the educational needs of five Nepalese girls for a full year.

You have paid their tuition.

You have bought their books.

You have given them uniforms

…and backpacks

…and writing supplies

…and provided their transportation. If they live far away from school, you have given them a bicycle.

You have given them female mentoring…and life skill classes and a wealth of other activities that will support them.

So when you are meditating upon Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion,

…or writing your friend a notecard,

…or wearing your prayer beads and running your fingers along them prayerfully, or absentmindedly,

…or when you are striking the singing bowl that opens your heart chakra

let it be a meditation bell

…reminding us that we are more connected than we imagine.

A few months ago, we were at the school in Nala that Shree and his brothers attended—a school with which Room to Read partners.

Even so, I don’t always remember well enough.

But let this art,

…these photographs,

…these dear faces—and our time together—help to remind us.

Note

Below is a link to Room to Read’s “Girls’ Education Program.” Here you can learn more particulars about the program’s approach and whom you are supporting.

http://www.roomtoread.org/Page.aspx?pid=284

Alchemy and Coffee

2010-01-22T01:35:00.000-08:00

I confess I’m glad the holidays have passed.

Perhaps you are, too – and for all the expected reasons.

This doesn’t mean the days aren’t important – quite the contrary, perhaps.

But our busyness and expectations can obscure the natural rhythms in which we also live.

Some of us have been living within lunar cycles as much as we can now,

…punctuated by the birthdays of dear friends

…like Emily Marley Morales -- whose grandfather is home for the occasion from Red Rhino Orphanage in Kenya.

This photo was taken just yesterday.

And we commemorate the passing of loved ones, too—like our dear friend Jeannine Benson

…because we need quieter remembrance

…and ritual

…whether we call it that or not.

“The rivers and mountains are Steve’s church,” Sharon Spiller says about her husband.

“Don’t get me started,” he answers when we ask him about fly-fishing in the Sierra or about the flies he fashions at a small table at home—near where Sharon keeps singing bowls and amulets.

And when you hear Steve describing being on a Sierra lake at dawn, you’re hard pressed to avoid using words like reverence and contemplation and solitude yourself.

“I think of it as alchemy,” Sharon says.

In this case, she’s speaking about a singing bowl in her hand, still amazed at how something like rose quartz can transform itself into such a sound.

You can hear Sharon yourself—this coming Saturday night at our second Red Egg gathering—when she chants with singing bowls to lead our meditation.

Not so long ago we wandered into the Blue Bottle Café in San Francisco.

And then we wandered into it again the next day,

…and the day after that,

…and then another day just for the helluvait

…and to guarantee that we had become habitués.

And it really is alchemical, and consciously so -- from the bowls and piping

…and measured application of heat

…that becomes light

…that becomes the drip-drip-drip of this siphoning

…that becomes a cup that looks like this

…or this.

We don’t do commercials, but we like good theatre wherever we can find it.

And then, of course, the coffee spirits you away

…back to Reykjavik

…and Autun

…and Krakow where we were exactly a year ago today

…and to Ethiopia where one friend

…and then another takes you into her home

…because all around the world, coffee can be a ceremony, just as tea can be.

And then there is café life, where even in your own city you can be traveling again –talking with a perfect stranger about a book you haven’t heard about, but which now you’re going to read.

Or you can be as happily rapt in your own anonymity as a pilgrim on a dusty road.

All of this can sound trivial, even shameful, in a world where – as I type -- people are still digging with bare hands through rubble in Port-au-Prince trying to reach the cries of loved ones and strangers.

We have to be vigilant against our own estrangement.

We live within two rounds – the smaller rituals we create and the vast human and even cosmic cycles that go pinwheeling around us. Sometimes the vast ones seem so far beyond our comprehension that we avert our gaze in confusion.

But perhaps this is the test of ceremony. Does it leave us absent in the soap bubble of our own dream – as beautiful and childlike as that might be,

…or does it awaken and vitalize -- and in the end, connect us – with others, with the earth, with all the wider cycles that sustain us and in which we have our being.

Awaken to the center

2009-12-15T00:10:00.000-08:00

There is a depth dimension to each of us. We just don’t know what to call it

...because each name we try might sound too polemical (or circumscribed) for one or more of us.

But this doesn’t mean the reality’s not true.

We tried the word sacred for awhile

…even though that sounds like there’s something holy within an enclosure of incense and prayer flags

…while the rest of reality waits outside.

There is truth in our sense of alienation

…but it isn’t our whole truth

…because nothing lies outside the pale of some great love.

Perhaps sacred is not the quality of a thing. Perhaps it’s the quality of our being – the quality of how well we have learned to see.

And perhaps what appears to lie outside the pale of the sacred is only what we haven’t learn how to see and love well enough.

Sacred might be a great adventure.

It might be a relationship we cultivate.

Art is a great adventure, too.

We go spiraling inwardly like a shaman

…but our eyes and other senses are wide-open to this world, too.

You can even speak to us – and we might even make a little sense.

But it is the thread, or connection, that the artist returns with that awakens us.

Red Egg began when Debi began writing icons.

She discovered the meditative practice in such an art

…and realized that each tradition cultivates its own practice in order to drum steadily into the heart of what is real.

Maybe there are a thousand ways to pray or meditate.

Or maybe there’s only one.

We’ve lost count.

But even the artist who breaks out in hives at a word like sacred has already discovered his or her own means.

You can hear it in music, can’t you?

It’s a refuge.

And you can live here.
But it’s also not an accident that many of us are travelers

…because if you travel well enough, you can’t help traveling within yourself.

Then you aren’t a tourist any more. Then you aren’t just visiting your own life.

But this can’t be navel-gazing. You aren’t going down to the same place twice.

You are moving – and the world is moving, too.

And the world is weeping. Even when it’s laughing, a corner of its eye is weeping, too.

And certainly we’ve heard.

There is a map within us that mirrors the map of the world,

…and wherever we descend, another corner of our soul awakens, too.

In this sense, we aren’t going anywhere else at all.

And certainly we’re not visiting exotic people who live far away from us.

Instead we’re awakening to a connection that has always been.

So let’s roll up our sleeves again.

There’s real work to be done.

And not out of any sense of privilege or pity.

It’s like Thomas Merton said: my brothers and sisters,

…we are already one.

We just imagine that we’re not.

Attributions...

While many of the images above are Debi's, others are from...

Melissa Lofton – Big Sur.

Tsering Pasang – Kathmandu.

Frances Law – Perthshire, Scotland

Joseph Cartoon – Nairobi

Mark Tuschman – Palo Alto

Cape Dorset Cooperative – Kinngait, Nunavut

Maria Simonds-Gooding – Dingle Peninsula, Ireland

Brian Taylor – Los Gatos

Claudia Bernardi – Berkeley, Argentina, El Salvador

Everest Thanka Gallery – Kathmandu (who will host our next gathering in January)

Visiting home

2009-10-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

No one ever said it should be easy,

…coming back home again, that is.

You thought you understood it – that you weren’t just making a trip this time,

…but had become a traveler instead.

But perhaps it’s only now, when your old/new life welcomes you back in,

…that you realize how much the road has crept into your bones

…and that there’s a pilgrim-self within you that desperately wants to stay alive.

So we still haven’t unpacked all the way. And there are packages we mailed home to ourselves that we haven’t opened yet.

And for the longest time, I couldn’t bear to put away my open travel bag.

We’ve heard so many good questions since we’ve been back.

One of them our good friend Greg asked…

“What is it that you think you really miss – the places you visited, or the self you became while you were traveling?”

“They’re bound up with one another, aren’t they?” I said at last.

“Yes, they must be,” he said back.

Our friend Dave Saunders, back home for a little while from Red Rhino Orphanage in Kenya, was at table this night, too.

“All I know,” Dave said, “is that I’m my best self when I travel.”

Not only have we seen Dave since we’ve been back, but our friend Shree Gopal Shrestha from Kathmandu, and his friend Sushil, have visited us, too -- and two good friends from the south of France.

It is like our journey has been visiting us this time.

“If we don’t really practice now,” Debi and I said to one another on our way back home, “ we might lose it all.”

So Debi’s been sitting every morning since we’ve been back,

…“sweeping the garden, any size”

…to keep away the clutter

…so that the real can find its way back in.

But you know how difficult that is – clearing up the clutter within yourself

…as the real goes around knocking on all the doors and windows.

In fact, maybe it’s because the real is everywhere that it’s so difficult.

Maybe we’re terrified of it.

Maybe we’d just prefer to go back to sleep and let that slippery entity, the self, continue to preen and posture as if it’s really some fixed thing after all.

It’s the habituated eye and heart – and not the world -- that closes the door on everything.

And we habituate so easily.

It’s understandable, after all. We need to create a familiar space. We want to wake up in the middle of the night and sense that things are just where we had left them.

You asked us. “Tell us the truth,” you said. “Tell us what it’s really like now that you are back.”

OK, take a good deep breath. Certainly, we can tell the truth to one another after all this time?

But the first thing that wants to jump out of my mouth is this: that suburbia can be a neat comfortable trap.

And that all the things most appealing about it – its orderliness and cleanliness and efficiency – can be ironically what pins you in the most.

But certainly we don’t miss the antithesis -- the poverty and pollution and pell-mell raucous street noise

…of Addis Ababa

…and Nairobi

…and Kulithalai

…and Kathmandu.

Or do we?

Because isn’t part of what we miss

…the open air raggedness

…of a daily life

…outside of any walls at all?

The patterns of our old life close back in as easily as some old suit.

But the truth is: I don’t want my old life back. Not all of it anyway.

And certainly not those barbs that the soul can get caught on as by an old ranch fence where she hangs and withers and disappears in the noonday sun.

And I don’t want to confine you either -- within my own presumptions of you it is you’re supposed to be.

On the road, you invent yourself – or the road invents you – new each day.

You’re no longer the CEO of your own life. There’s been some insurrection.

“Throw the damn fools out,” someone has called out.

And now you’re not quite sure who you are.

You need to splash water on your face in the morning and ask the day itself to tell you.

Look over in the corner. There’s a travel-bag that’s lived a whole lifetime in just one year. And it’s just as dusty and eager as you are to head out that door again.

On the road, the furniture whispers “hush” and rearranges itself differently each night.

It just wants to surprise you.

And some damn things it just moves all the way out the door

…without even bothering to tell you where the familiar might have hid itself

…because it understands

...that you don’t really need to know.

The Journey to the East

2009-07-17T15:49:00.001-07:00

Perhaps you’ve already made this journey,

…or did you think the opportunity had passed you by some time ago,

…perhaps lost back in the 60’s along with so many other things,

…when you were reading Herman Hesse in your dorm room, or a decade or so later, Thomas Merton’s The Asian Journals?

Or perhaps the archetypal East has already traveled west to visit you.

And actually we’re mid-air ourselves right now, even as we type,

…wearing the khata the Tibetan Guesthouse gave us

…when we left Kathmandu.

Just the day before, I had picked up this Smithsonian magazine from the reading table.

“Look at this place,” I said to Debi. “Why don’t we go here next?”

But in the meantime, ever since we had been in India, we'd been mulling over the question of the ashram.

“What is an ashram?” artist Jyoti Sahi asked. He's been asking himself this question for most of his life.

In India, we stayed in three ashrams. Actually, two were not-quite ashrams – which brings us right back to Jyoti's question again.

Shantivanam in Tamil Nadu is a Christian Ashram, founded by French priests Parama Arubi Ananda (Jules Monchanin) and Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux).

But the most recognizable figure associated with Shantivanam is Benedictine monk Fr. Bede Griffiths.

Father Bede arrived in 1968. With Bede’s presence and teachings, Shantivanam became known around the world.

In 1980, Shantivanam became part of the Camaldolese congregation, which makes it particularly dear to us.

We will have more to say about our own connection with the Camaldolese in future blogs.

The aim of Shantivanam is to establish a contemplative life that is based both on the tradition of Christian monasticism and on Hindu Sannyasa.

The Vedas, Christian scriptures, and other sacred texts are all studied,

…while the community follows the customs of a Hindu ashram,

…wearing saffron-colored robes,

…sitting on the floor,

…and eating with the hand,

…according to the character of voluntary poverty which has always marked the Hindu sannyasi.

We fell into the rhythm of Shantivanam easily and with delight -- so perhaps now we can say something about Jyoti's question after all,

...namely, that an ashram is a place where meditation can begin to permeate your whole life

…so that even jaunts outside the ashram, like into the nearby village of Kulithalai,

…become just an extension of that ashram life.

At Shantivanam, liturgy holds Hindu and Christian resonances together naturally,

...so that prayer and meditation and yoga all feel like one integral practice again -- native to one's own place,

...and you realize once again that a life of common prayer carries you along much more surely than an airliner ever could.

And you remember everything --

…the sandalwood paste in the morning on your face or hands,

…the purple powder, Kumkumum, symbol of the third eye, at midday,

…and ashes, Vibhuti, when daylight has closed its own eyes, too.

And each day, everything – each of the four elements and your own body, too – are offered back to their Creator in one great prayer of fire,

…within this rhythm in which friendships

…bloom as easily

…as flowers.

Actually, we’re right back in India even as we type this line. But perhaps you think that a lounge in the airport at Delhi – where you’ve landed in transit from Nepal – is a far cry from ashram life.

But we still haven’t answered Jyoti’s question, have we?

We also visited the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.

We don’t have the time to explain all the dimensions of Sri Aurobindo’s thought and life. But perhaps you know yourself

...that Aurobindo was an important revolutionary figure in the early part of the 20c in India.

He was also a poet, a breakthrough interpreter of the Vedas, and the developer of what he called integral yoga.

He held together both India’s ancient non-dual mysticism, which he believed was his country’s unique gift to the world, and a western view of the evolutionary nature of human consciousness.

When the rising elemental shakti energy rises through the chakras, it will be met by the descent of a divine consciousness that Aurobindo called the Super-mind.

This descent will mark an evolutionary quantum leap in human consciousness.

In the last decades of his life, Aurobindo withdrew into seclusion to dedicate himself to bringing this event to life within himself.

We visited Aurobindo’s Ashram, but we didn’t stay there. We stayed at Auroville instead.

When Aurobindo withdrew into seclusion, the day-to-day direction and teaching in the ashram passed to “the Mother,” Aurobindo’s spiritual consort, whom both he and their disciples believe to be an embodiment of the Universal Mother.

Auroville is the Mother’s dream of a place dedicated to Aurobindo’s principles – and a place where a community might live in a kind of geometry of peace...

…a place that might await -- and rise up, as it were – to meet the descent of the divine.

So we hung out

…and bombed around Auroville awhile.

It is an agreeable place to be

…with enough creature comforts to keep westerners appeased.

It is true, though, that even the abstract idea of a guru makes many of us nervous ipso facto -- let alone when the Mother is gazing out at you so ubiquitously in Auroville.

But you don’t exactly take exception to anything you’ve heard her say. It must just be the sense of devotion to a human that puts your teeth on edge.

And Auroville can feel like a soap-bubble separated from the poverty of the Tamil villages that surround it,

…separated in a way that Shantivanam never is.

The center of Auroville is the Matrimandir – a place for concentration, for consciousness alone.

Yes, from the outside the Matrimandir looks like a slightly flattened golden golf ball, but its interior is an architectural wonder.

You aren’t allowed to bring cameras inside -- and you must follow certain step-by-step requirements even to be allowed inside yourself – so Debi can’t regale you with photographs of the interior.

And long as we surfed, we only came up with a one or two good pirated interior photographs.

And here’s a sketch of an early plan of the interior. Perhaps you get the drift: the long spiral ascent, the spareness inside, the opening through which light can always descend to strike the crystal in the upper, inner chamber.

The Matrimandir is supposed to be a place left free from any religious practice or method. Leave all that outside.

Sit in the inner chamber and concentrate on your consciousness alone.

Inside, you might feel a little like you’re wearing a white-jumpsuit in some futuristic Woody Allen world. But the Matrimandir’s cool. Literally.

The inner chamber is air-conditioned. And in Tamil Nadu towards the end of June, just before the monsoons hit, this is no small matter.

We could have meditated in that inner chamber for a long, long time.

Though it sounds like we're only writing tongue-in-cheek now, that isn't altogether true. Yes, we did smuggle in a couple (Christian) mantras of our own.

But we found the Matrimandir a good place to sit, quite on its own – and our own humble practices were helped by it.

By the way, as we’re typing on board a plane again, the flight path now reads with names like these: Kabul, Samarkand, Tashkent, Ust’ Kamenogorsk, Novosibirsk.

Are we at least hovering around Jyoti’s question? What is an ashram anyway?

We visited Jyoti and his wife Jane as our last stop in India.

Jyoti is an artist who has always been concerned with the interplay of art and spirituality.

He was with Bede at Kurisumalam Ashram before Bede had came to Shantivanam, and he has been friends with people like Lorrie Baker, the Quaker architect who overturned presumptions about what waste really means in housing designs

…for the affluent

…and for the poor.

Among his many interests, Jyoti has studied the idea of ashram, which is a word that Rabindore Tagore’s father first used. Jyoti has studied Tanner communities and sarvodaya, Gandhi’s “village-based ashram movement of social transformation.”

The aim of sarvodaya is “an awakening of everyone.”

It was these Gandhian communities that brought Jane from Britain to India when she was 18. She made one return-trip to Britain, then came right back to India, where she and Jyoti have created this life together in the village of Silvapura outside Bangalore.

There are four stages of ashrama, Jyoti says, that match the stages of our own life.

Student-life comes first. This is the stage of gaining the necessary knowledge for both our material and spiritual life.

Then comes householder-life – when we raise and care for our families.

The third stage is vanaprastha -- a pilgrim’s life, a life of semi-retirement from the world, the forest-wanderer’s life.

Merton thought he was in this stage when he made his journey to the east in 1968, that momentous year -- the year when Bede had come to Shantivanam, too.

“Is this the stage we’re entering, too?” Debi and I asked ourselves.

The fourth stage is sannyasa, the great renunciation of every worldly tie and aspiration so that one can make the final turn towards God alone. One assumes the kavi habit then.

On our way to India, we were told, “You have to visit Jyoti’s art ashram.”

Did that person misspeak – or not?

“We haven’t been an ashram,” Jane says, “ but we like to think we’ve kept a certain openness.”

Indeed, friends and guests, often artists, have come and stayed for months and years --in one case, for fifteen years.

Jyoti and Jane created an art center for artists and students,

...and in 1975, they built a school for the village that Jane continues to direct, raise funds for, and teach in herself.

When we met her, she had just returned from a two-week trip visiting schools in Chicago, Seattle, and San José.

Their grown children have gravitated back to this extended home. One son and his wife direct the art center now.

Another daughter and her husband are wood-sculptors.

And she teaches art to inner city kids who come from Bangalore.

The gravitational center of this life has always been a focus upon the meeting-point of art, spirituality, culture, and education,

…and from a relaxed concentration upon this meeting-point – and from Jyoti's and Jane's differing but compatible personal gifts -- a life has emerged as organically as any Matrimandir.

Perhaps this is the practice, the integral yoga, for householders such as we are.

And Father Bede, for one, believed that householder-spirituality would be crucial for the world's future.

Now the flight-path on the screen in the plane reads: Reykavik

…and Baffin Island,

…which means we’re spinning west and homeward once again,

…though we’ll have to discover what home means to us now, since we’ve come to believe, as Basho writes, that

“Each day is a journey,

“…and the journey itself is home.”

Don’t we always live in two worlds at once? – Lalibela, Ethiopia

2009-06-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

The first world is deforested, and there is small cause for hope.

Priests are bored and vaguely resentful

…that they must lift up their church’s ancient cross for you -- in return for ten birr or so.

Sometimes no photographs of the second world seem possible at all.

After all, a camera around your neck is different from a cross,

...but Debi's warmth can draw the second world up towards the surface anyway

...because the second world we live in is always a relationship.

This woman might have carried firewood for four hours

…to sell it in the town

…of an utterly deforested land.

In the second world, walking is as natural as grace,

…and the scent of frankincense and smoke rises from the same firewood,

…and the scent of the roasting beans rises, too,

...in a coffee ceremony meant entirely for you

…when someone invites you into their home.

In the first world, street kids lie to you.

“I am a student,” the young boy says. “I want to be a lawyer. To end corrupt.”

You know what he means. And he has learned well the rhetoric that someone like you would want to hear.

“My examination is in several days. But I don’t have pencils or books.”

But in the first world, if you buy them for him, as soon as you round the corner, he returns them to the store, and in collusion with the shop owner turns a neat little profit, perhaps for ch’at or beer.

And he continues to learn that begging on the street brings more quick money to hand than long hours over those same books.

In the second world, children go to school,

…perhaps even a traditional Ethiopian liturgical school,

…where many of the brightest students in Lalibela go.

In the second world, peers read to a blind student – the young man on the right

…in the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge’ez,

…and the young man learns the liturgical texts and songs by heart.

In the first world, missionaries, even those of good intent, don’t critique deeply enough the cultural and political assumptions they still import.

Perhaps the church still looks European

...and white to them,

…and they build compounds and empires, large and small, to protect themselves from a history they, and we, have helped create.

Perhaps you recognize them. Perhaps you’ve lived in one of them yourself.

In the second world, the church is indigenous.

It has had its own relationship with Jerusalem and Alexandria -- and with the trade route through the Red Sea between Greece

…and India.

That is to say, it has had a history of influences and engagement as has any land,

…but no one has painted its faith

…in the color of someone else’s face.

Rumi is one of the poets who has written of these two worlds -- for instance, in his poem “Tending Two Shops.”

“The only real rest comes
when you’re alone with God,” he says.

“Live in the nowhere you came from

“…even though you have an address here.

“You own two shops,
and you run back and forth.

“Try to close the one that’s a fearful trap
getting always smaller.

“Checkmate this way,
checkmate that.

“Keep open the shop
where you’re not selling fishhooks any more.

“You are the free-swimming fish.”

So let’s go back a second time through the rock-hewn churches of Lalibella,

…quietly and alone this time.

We’ll enter through the portal called Adam’s Tomb -- because we must pass through death

…and the underground,

…and the way is circuitous

…and never all the way apparent in any single glance,

…no matter in which single place you stand at any given moment.

Nonetheless, you’ve already been intuiting as you walk

…that these rock-hewn churches of Lalibela,

…form some map of your own soul.

“Are you a Christian?” I am asked in this second world by a man with good English who, like me, is circling the Medhane Alem on the feast of the Redeemer,

…prayers beads through our fingers,

…small Ethiopian crosses around our necks.

In the second world, there is only understanding

…and the beautiful cross of the church, which the priest is eager to show you now, has become even more beautiful still,

…and in the second world, he sits

…and prays beside you.

There have been paths

…and doorways all along the way,

…and in the second world, no door is really closed,

…and there are no dead-ends anywhere, no matter how things might first appear.

Later, when all the churches have been closed, you cannot count the prostrations a young man makes at the doorway of the Biet Emmanuel far below you.

He thinks he is praying all alone,

…but in the second world, the unseen is always praying with you.

There have been crosses all along the way as well,

…forms

…that have come

…from everywhere,

…and yet each belongs exactly here.

When you hear rock-hewn churches, you might think this just means they are made of stone.

And sometimes this is partly true.

But more often they are monolithic, or semi-monolithic. This means that they have been carved from one block of stone as a whole.

Think of that a moment.

This means that a church like Biet Giorgis is not a fabricated building at all.

Rather, Biet Giorgis is a sculpture,

… carved inside

…and out,

…from one great single stone.

In the second world, all of us are pilgrims,

…and when you emerge from an underworld like this,

…back into a town that has never stopped surrounding you,

…no matter how single you might have felt,

…you find friends passing and greeting and acknowledging one another all along the street,

…and since you do not press for eye contact long yourself,

…friends greet and acknowledge you as well.

There has been a funeral on this day, too,

…down in the River Jordan that runs through the churches of Lalibela.

It is called the River Jordan because the churches of Lalibela are understood to form an image of Jerusalem itself,

…and the journey which you just have made

…has been from an historical Jerusalem

…to the cosmic New Jerusalem.

It will take you two more weeks to understand this -- without ever really understanding anything -- because at the same time that you were walking through the underworld of these churches,

…your dear friend Jeannine was making this journey in the most profound way of all,

…so that only now do you understand that your own pilgrimage,

…from darkness into light,

…through the threshold of death

…into some new life,

…has only ever been the necessary foretaste and preparation

for the difficult

…and blessed journey

…that each of us must make.

Prayer beads from everywhere

2009-06-09T08:16:00.000-07:00

Before we began this journey, Patrick Adams gave us this Buddhist mala

…which we 've carried all along our way.

The figure is a Thai bhikku – a forest-wanderer.

“Perfect,” I thought even then.

And the mala has felt like a talisman of our whole good journey.

You may remember the Turkish women on their way to Mecca who gave us their Muslim tisbehs -- while Debi gave them her ring-rosary in return.

So we have had a portable home altar with us all this time.

And this is an altar that our friend, Big Sur artist Missy Lofton, made for a workshop at Esalen.

But don’t we find prayer-beads and altars everywhere we go?

Some point towards a wild unknown -- even as they bear our own form

…while others lead us into the center of ourselves

…and into the center of everything.

But we aren’t observers of these cycles.

They move within us, and we move within them, too – like prayer beads our fingers,

…keeping time for us

… and remembering who we are – even when we might have lost track of that ourselves.

Pilgrims leave them at St. Brigid’s Well with prayers and tears for loved ones,

...and we have been leaving our prayers for Jeannine

...at all these holy places, too.

You see a tisbehs with verses from the Qu’ran on a cabby’s windshield on the busy streets of Cairo

…and swinging from a rear-view mirror heading out into vast desert spaces.

A rosary-ring helps a farmer in monastic fields in Tanzania remember,

…and they sway as gracefully with someone’s stride in Nairobi

…as they do in Istanbul.

And sometimes they don’t need to move at all.

So, considering this, we were delighted to visit Kazuri Beads in Nairobi,

…especially since we respect their mission so much.

The clay for Kazuri’s beads comes from around Mt. Kenya, and women shape it

…by hand

…to create forms

…like these.

They make pottery out of the same clay

...and paint the pottery and beads lead-free glazes

…and fire them,

…sometimes as many as three times,

…since some beads are re-painted with layers of glaze

…to produce iridescences like these.

Then the beads are strung

…according to patterns that the women have also devised.

The morning before we went to Kazuri Beads, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, idly spinning Patrick’s mala on my finger. Suddenly, the mala burst apart and beads went flying everywhere.

Since we were at our crossroads then, I couldn’t help wondering: did this mean that our whole journey was bursting apart at this same moment, too?

But the bhikku-wanderer wasn’t worried. He had lost none of his own humor and resolve.

And anyway, the scattered beads spurred Debi to a new idea.

“Hey, let’s make Red Egg prayer-beads,” she said,

…and so the designer many of you know so well

…went right to work.

And we called our prayer-bead board of advisors into session.

This is Debi’s brother Chris, the central of these three Zen priests. He has just been ordained at Sonoma Zen Mountain Center.

And we consulted Patrick Adams, too – and Camaldolese friends Cyprian Consiglio and oblate Yvonne Rose.

…and Lama Rodney Devenish (Lama Karma Kunzang) -- on the right,

...our friend who's the head resident lama at the Tibetan Buddhist hermitage of Kunzang Samten Yangtse on Denman Island in British Columbia.

With their advice, we happily went back to Kazuri Beads

…to search for the right forms and colors,

…and once we had found them, women at Kazuri strung three prototypes for us

…for a Muslim tisbeh, a Buddhist mala, and a Christian rosary.

We know there are many other possibilities from other traditions, and in future years we can create them -- because there are prayer-beads everywhere we go.

A few weeks ago our friend Pam Peck emailed about the eventual ending of this journey...

“You have given me a world I didn’t know existed, a world I never would have experienced except for your eyes and your stories. With you, my senses are on point. I taste, smell, hear din and solitude, revel in the hues and colors, watch sparkling eyes and shy smiles and take people I never would have known, to heart…

We don’t have a photo of Pam right now, but this is her beau Mike Caplin, at their home at upper Rocky Creek in Big Sur, our neighborhood, too.

“Do you know how amazingly and wonderfully you are imprinting us with your vision of a world we never would have known otherwise? Thank you. As glad as I will be for your return, I will be sorry when you are home – my adventure will be over.

“But that’s not true, right? Thee will be more pictures and stories and maybe a dinner or two, and a treasure to hold in our hand from a special place, and…”

And…so these women at Kazuri weren’t making prayer-beads just for us.

They’re making them for you as well.

Kazuri will create a custom Red Egg “guru” bead,

…and we’ll need to find three talismans.

But we’re not worried about that.

Perhaps we’ll find them in Ethiopia

…or in India.

Or back home -- or anywhere else in the world where you, or we, might go.

Since Kazuri will have our prototypes and will custom-make the Red Egg “guru” beads, once we send them the talismans, they’ll send us back the completed malas, tisbehs, and rosaries in the fall.

The proceeds of sales will benefit Kazuri Beads and Red Egg Gallery.

The second side of the gift card will say something like:

“When you purchase art through Red Egg Gallery, you are supporting and participating in a connection among local communities and their traditions all around the world.”

Because, yes, Pam, this journey isn't meant to end. Or at least it's not supposed to end just because two of us come back home.

And these prayer-beads can be one way to remember – and to practice – connections that include us everywhere.

And just to let you know, we’ve been taking your financial suggestions to heart,

…and have even implemented a few.

So now the saddlebags are loaded up, and we’ve hit the road again,

…for Tanzania

…and Ethiopia,

…and, in fact, we’ve just landed in Pondicherry, India.

Patrick’s mala is intact again – not that anything had ever disturbed that bhikku-wanderer,

…and the home altar only grown.

And always…

…the circle of connections has been there ahead of us – before we could even imagine what form it wanted to take next.

The God-trodden mountain – Sinai

2009-05-03T00:22:00.000-07:00

Some places feel like dreams now,

…both faintly written, as day turns into day,

…but also with a haunting vividness should one have the courage to summon up the images again.

Perhaps that’s one reason for our reluctance to glance backwards

…because there are beauties and questions that linger on, and which at any moment can break your heart again,

…and who is so eager to open that Pandora’s box?

But, of course, dream-images are also gifts.

(You didn’t know that Debi was thinking of becoming a nun, did you?)

She’s just not quite certain to which order she’ll belong.

As long as she has been writing icons,

…in fact, perhaps as long as she’s known what an icon really is,

…she has wanted to come here,

…to St. Catherine’s Monastery

…at the foot of the God-trodden mountain,

…Mount Sinai.

It is the oldest continuously existing Christian monastery in the world,

…built upon the site of the Burning Bush.

It is also the only Christian monastery in the world to have a mosque within its walls.

God might not be descending quite so dramatically right now.

Still, you might want to take your sandals off. Isn’t everywhere holy ground?

Sometimes it must sound like only rhetoric – the way we speak to you in the second person

…as if you’ve been on this journey all along.

Except…hasn’t this been true?

This is Judy Delany. She and Debi have known each other for forty years -- and in addition to her friendship with both of us and emails brimming with energy and support, she makes comments here as "Schweetiecakes."

Notice her "Red Egg" necklace.

Since our last blog, many of you have sent generous notes and new ideas.

Sometimes your ideas seem like they’re arising at the same time as our own, and sometimes, like with Peggy, it seems you’re half a step ahead of us.

Here is Peggy O'Farrell two years ago in the Philippines.

Dennis Gobets has been keeping the home-fires burning – and doing his own gallivanting, too.

He's been helping keep an eye on Rocky Creek and

...inviting us to go with him to the southwest when we return.

So while we’ve been at our crossroads, he’s been contemplating his own descent into a canyon.

Steve Tryon has been with us from the beginning, every step along the way. Without him, the Red Egg website and these words and images wouldn’t be appearing – or not the way they do.

He writes, “I think you are in the perfect position…”

…and offers to help even more what he calls the beginning of “a yours-become-ours journey through mind, matter, and connectedness.”

Shall we say that again?

It has become a new mantra for us.

Or better yet, can we keep saying it to one another – because we are saying it to you just as so many of you have been saying that to us.

This is Debi’s neo-Coptic icon teacher Stephane Rene and his wife Monica – when we were with them in London.

We had assumed that crossroads meant: that either we’d come home earlier than we had thought, or we’d travel on awhile more.

But what if you’ve been teaching us

…that somehow it’s possible to do both things at once?

But enough of that for now. We still have a mountain to ascend.

Our Bedouin guide Nasr understood at once and had chosen the least-traveled path to the mountain.

In fact, sometimes it appeared to be no way at all.

But hasn't that been the point all along?

This has never been a tourist-trip

…even if sometimes it might appear that way.

After a few hours, Nasr led us up a draw where he knew rainwater would be pooled.

We gathered brushwood for a fire there.

OK. Two of us did.

Debi and I have backpacked and hiked a lot -- but we have never had a hiking-lunch like this.

Nasr kneaded and rolled wheat-flour and water on the stone

…and built the fire.

The bread went right into it – because in the Sinai, if you’ve gotten the sand hot enough

…it will not stick to even bread.

He roasted eggplant for the baba ganoush – and cut peppers and tomatoes and lemons,

…while Debi helped with the garlic.

Nasr always brings black tea with him,

…but he also gathers herbs to add to it.

His tobacco is from the desert, too. He knows all of Sinai’s plants

...and Sinai is the most bio-diverse place in Egypt.

Nasr gathered more plants after lunch

…and made our soap as well.

“Food always tastes better in the mountains,” I said afterwards.

“Everything is better in the mountains,” Nasr says.

We did pass a few other pilgrims along the way, it is true,

…but they were all occupied more or less as we were.

Two days later I went up the mountain on my own. It wanted to take the Sikket Saydna Musa, the steepest route, the one tradition says Moses had taken himself when he climbed alone to meet the one who had told him here, I AM.

Byzantine monks laid down the stones of this path fourteen hundred years ago.

Why have stones been so prominent all along our way?

Stones and sin. Gathering them sometimes

…and at other times casting them away.

Remember Iona then?

The Sikket Saydna Musa is also sometimes called the “Stairway of Repentance,” or the “Stairway of Forgiveness.”

There is a repentance gate as well that you must pass through,

…and both before and after this gate, pilgrims have built cairns everywhere.

So I built my own as well.

How can you not be mindful passing through a repentance gate, especially since beyond it Elijah stayed, and that beyond even that, Moses still climbed?

(Please excuse the photographs in this little stretch. They’re the best I could muster on my own.)

The real photographer was occupied otherwise at the time. She and Nasr had gone to visit Bedouin families.

Impossible to choose who had picked the better route, isn’t it?

But I was hurrying on then. I wanted to make the sunset from where Moses stood.

And sometimes you’re just in places that take the photographs for you anyway.

And each of us – Debi and I – ended up where we were meant to be that day.

Do you believe that -- that each of us is always where we’re meant to be?

There are no photographs for my descent at night. Actually, I got lost for a little while. But a Bedouin saw me and put me on the right path again.

Up by the summit, there are Bedouin huts that offer pilgrims tea and coffee by day. Most of those were closed up by now, but from within a few, firelight spilled out across the path, and soft voices rose in prayer and conversations.

And, oh, the stars.

I wish we could pour those stars into one another’s open hands right now.

Certainly, if there is any solitary journey, it must be this one, the Sikket Saydna Musa, where Moses walked alone to meet his God. The mountain had been cordoned off for Moses’ journey, and it had been decreed that anyone else who touched the mountain then must be killed.

What could be a more solitary way than this?

We had asked Nasr, “How many nights a month are you out in the mountains away from your family?”

He thought awhile.

“Most nights,” he said.

But even this solitude is a kind of illusion, too,

…because actually Nasr rarely goes out into the mountains alone.

“Bedouin like to talk,” he says.

After climbing the mountain, we told Nasr we wanted to go even deeper into the desert. We presumed we’d have to be driven from one place to another and make day-hikes from where we stayed.

“Why don’t we just walk the whole way instead?” he asked.

“But what about our travel-bags?”

“Schnapps can carry them,” Nasr said.

But that’s a story for another day.

Let’s go back to Moses’ journey one more time -- when the mountain was cordoned off to everyone but him.

Isn’t even this journey, which seems so absolute in its solitude, only a thread in a story bigger than any single life can ever be?

How big a story is Exodus after all?

And how many people, for how many centuries, have seen their own lives writ large in it?

Like this man.

“I have been to the mountaintop,” he said. “And I’ve seen the Promised Land.”

“I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people

“…will get to the promised land.”

Because even this repentance-and-forgiveness path,

…this whole pilgrimage, in fact,

…even for the stretches we experience as a stony, narrow path,

…even then,

…it is not really a journey we are making on our own.

Notes

1. The title of this blog-post is stolen from the title of a beautiful article/reminiscence written by our friend, the Dingle peninsula artist Maria Simonds-Gooding (cf our March 21, 2009 blog-post) -- "On the God-Trodden Mountain" -- based on her own experiences at St. Catherine's.

2. And for a beautiful account of people finding their own stories within the frame of Exodus, you can listen here…

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/exodus/

3. Our blog doesn’t discuss political and economic realities for Bedouin people. But we recommend an excellent story on the subject that was appearing in the March issue of National Geographic just when we were in the Sinai ourselves.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/sinai/teague-text

East or West – what comes next?

2009-04-23T23:23:00.001-07:00

Why this reluctance to begin to take a backward glance?

Is it because the future still beckons with promises and hardship?

A rainbow and a Kenyan post-election refugee camp – what could be more ambiguous than that?

Or is it simply because the present has such pressing requirements

…that none of us can afford to take our eye off that?

Still, here we are like a dancer with one foot inclining home

…and the other still needing to complete the arc it’s begun.

We’re also out of money, which isn’t beside the point, but it’s also not the only reason for this natural pause...as we plot how to raid our own slender retirement

…either to come home sooner than we might have thought

…or else to take the next turn ahead of us -- towards the east, towards India.

Our friend Cyprian emails: “…while everyone else in the world is worrying about the financial situation, you’re liquidating your retirement fund! That’s my kind of living!”

Or else it’s just plain foolishness.

We’ll find out, won’t we?

Either way, it seems like the perfect time for another yarn-- full of radiant faces

…and exotic topography.

So load up the saddle bags

…and brew yourself a tea or coffee.

A story from the Sinai desert is coming next.

Red Rhino Orphanage, Kenya.

2009-04-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

This is a contemporaneous blog. That is, right now, we’re right where we say we are: in Kenya.

Specifically, we are in Lukenya, Kenya – about 45 minutes outside of Nairobi -- with our dear friend Dave Saunders.

Dave is the on-the-ground lead person for creating Red Rhino Orphanage here.

The mission of Red Rhino Orphanage is to create a sanctuary for orphans that provides children with the safety, housing, medical care, and education that they need “in a loving, structured environment on a long term, permanent basis.”

The west often presents itself with a face of Africa that is the face of a suffering child.

There is truth in this image

...but no more truth than the face of beauty and promise and strength.

Dave has been a close friend for 25+ years. Chris and Dave taught together at Bellarmine in San José. Our sons Matt and Nate virtually grew up with Amy and Allison, Dave (and Pearl’s) daughters.

And there are layers and layers to our friendship.

And yet as well as we know Dave, we are amazed to see in person the dimensions of the work he is directing here…through all the bureaucracy and corruption and colonialist history – and through the sheer weight of the need.

Dave has been here working on this project for 3+ years now.

There has been an amazingly intelligent and industrious base of leadership and support back home – specifically in the community of Stockton. We can’t adequately describe that whole matrix here.

But we heartily recommend to you Red Rhino’s own website and Dave’s blog. It is perceptive, sharp, witty, literary, hip.

http://www.rrop.org/

Brit Stockert is also here, volunteering for four months. Brit was formerly in the Air Force, but has been moving from that experience towards pacifism. Here in Kenya she is working towards achieving NGO status for Red Rhino, and she has also been volunteering in an existing children's home.

Today on Good Friday we prayed the Stations of the Cross through the streets of Nairobi

...and spilled into the basilica until it was filled with several thousand people.

We remembered and venerated Christ's passion and death

...and prayed that by accepting suffering ourselves

...we might grow into a community

...who would serve one another more lovingly.

We are connected with the Red Rhino orphanage project not just because of our friendship with Dave and other friends at Red Rhino, but because of this shared belief that we need to build communities in which we each support one another more lovingly.

We have been traveling for 6 months now. From the very conception of this trip, no single place on our map has been as earmarked and dog-eared as being here with Dave and the Red Rhino Orphanage has been.

God willing, nothing else was going to stop us from getting at least this far.

“Uncle Mehmet isn’t here…”

2009-03-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

You look at any one of these earth-forms

…and they could be peopled still.

The soft tufa – volcanic ash mixed with sandstone – makes it possible.

In Cappadocia, early Christians carved vast underground cities out of it -- where they could hide for months at a time from Roman soldiers.

Centuries later, they hid again from Arab invaders.

Here at Keşlik Manestir the tufa mounds seem both to congregate and to be on the move at once, as if each of them still has something it wants to say,

…which may be true since manestir means monastery in Turkish. And Keşlik is thought to be one of the oldest monasteries in Cappadocia, which means it was one of the oldest monasteries anywhere.

Each apparently blank form could be…

…someone’s interior castle

…or the church itself

…carved out of tufa

…and winding in tunnels

…through one story after another of good earth

…until perhaps it disappears entirely underground

…only to connect with all the others in ways we can no longer perceive.

And you begin to suspect that there’s no end to the subterranean passageways that connect all of us in some vast lost time we don’t understand either.

Sometimes the signs are virtually effaced, and human art melds easily back into earth’s forms and colors again.

Sometimes a human hand has painted a chapel with wild and archaic forms.

And sometimes it seems as if the Byzantine fresco painter just walked out yesterday and left the pigments to dry on the wall behind him.

The landscape helps decide what should be preserved – and for how long and in what form.

But it is also true that Turkey’s population is approximately 98% Muslim now,

…and there hasn’t been a Byzantine monk living in any of these caves in more than 700 years.

And yet their presence is still so strong that our friend Torrey says he became a Christian because of them.

So what else should we do, but look for these monks ourselves?

We stopped to ask a farmer for directions to Pancarlik Manestir. He wouldn’t tell us.

Instead, he packed up the dried apricots and mulberries in the back of his truck and came to show us.

This kept happening. At each turn we’d make a new friend, like Pinar in Göreme

…and Unal who drove us to the most hidden monasteries he knew.

Angels would make themselves visible on city streets if that’s what it took to show us where to go next.

But when we had arrived at Pancarlik Manestir, there was no one to open the chapel for us. It wasn’t yet the season for visitors.

But still the tufa was swept,

…and there were flowers and candles on the altar inside.

So each of us wandered off on our own to imagine a community of monks and caves and stone. It was easy to do since the place was so well kept.

We met a guide walking along the sandy road.

“Who’s the man who keeps care of the monastery?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Uncle Mehmet…”

“He must be a good man.”

“He’s a very good man,” the guide said. “I’m going now to buy some tea and sugar to give to him. He always makes tea for his visitors.”

“Would you buy Mehmet some tea for us?” we asked.

“Of course.”
From Cappadocia, we made a long bus ride to Konya, the home of Rumi.

The woman in front of us was reading the Qur'an.

She was also reading perfect English.

Konya is a big and conservative city. Hülya took us by the hand, led us from the bus to tram, bought our tickets, and took us downtown.

We went to her mosque, where she prayed, and we did, too. Then she walked us to our hotel and gave us her phone number and asked us to call her if we needed anything.

It’s true that we couldn’t find a beer or glass of wine in Konya.

It’s also true that each person we met was kind and generous with us.

Conservative, we learned again, isn’t a synonym for extremist or fundamentalist. In Konya, it seems to mean something closer to faithful instead.

But we couldn’t find Rumi either -- moved as we were to pay our respects at his tomb.

“You won’t find me here,” he said.

“What dome could you build for me that would be better than the open sky?”

“My grave will be in the hearts of the wise.”

His Friend, Shams of Tabriz, went even further.

“I will go somewhere where words will never find me,” Shams said.

When we visited Shams’ turban...

...a couple of people were praying quietly in the small mosque.

But as we started to leave, four men were coming in. The man who takes care of the mosque smiled and nudged us back inside. And just then, one clear voice rose into the air in a long beautiful stream of praise and poetry and prayer and song.

The voice must have spilled outside because soon women began following it inside and crooning in a low undertone of prayer themselves.

The Sufis are here, the Sufis are here! they must have been saying.

Afterwards the Sufis told us, “We aren’t from here,” as they gestured to the city streets all around us. “Do you understand?”

They were from Bosnia. But that’s not what they meant. They meant they weren’t from this realm of commotion and inner noise.

They wanted us to come with them to their "Sufi place" at Menzil.

“We want to push you into the ocean,” they said.

But we had a bus to catch. You can’t say yes to everything.

So we bowed and shook hands and touched our hearts and went our separate ways.

"We'll fall into the ocean anyway," we said.

Later, on our plane back to Istanbul, we were sitting among a group of thirty, mostly women, buzzing with excitement at beginning their pilgrimage to Mecca.

We laughed and gestured and touched our hearts many times with them, too.

“We’ll pray for you,” they said. “Please pray for us, too.”

They had already given each of us their prayer beads.

In Cappadocia the 4c was the century of three saints: St. Basil the Great, his brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend, St. Gregory of Naziaranus.

Had we met Uncle Mehmet, he probably wouldn’t have parsed their mystical theology for us.

But we hadn’t come for that anyway.

We had come here for the tea he served.

Maria Simonds-Gooding

2009-03-21T09:27:00.001-07:00

Why do you turn this way and that, love,

…north, south, east

…and west of west, further than the eye can see?

“It isn’t given us to see the soul,” Rumi says.

And so she lays out a golden thread before us, which we can follow or ignore.

But what is it about these islands -- off every western shore?

“We have a plane to catch tonight,” we said. “We don’t have time for any more of this. You’ll have to beckon to someone else instead.”

And anyway, no one lives here any more.

Certainly not on Sceilig Mhichíl where Celtic monks once built stone cells out of a stone island.

Nor on the Blaskets, off the Dingle peninsula, a refugia for an oral literature once so rich that late in life Tomás O’Crohan was persuaded to learn to read and write so that more of us could have his stories.

His sole purpose in writing, he said, was “to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again.”

Is that what we’re straining for – some curraich that could carry us back there?

“Well, what if we just go for a little drive?”

“There were those engravings we saw in Dingle…”

“But we don’t even know who the artist is.”

“Nor if he or she even lives in Ireland, let alone near here.”

“I love this one.”

“’Going into the island’ is what it’s called? What could that mean?”

We leaned into the west

…as long as there was any light at all.

But still it wanted to show us more.

And then in the winter-hail, on the headland, one small light came on.

It was Ionad an Bhlascaoid MhóirBlasket, the Blasket Heritage Center – but it was closed for the winter, too.

“Come on, let’s snoop around a bit,” we said.

And when we knocked on one of the doors, Micheál de Mordha appeared, the director of the center. He was working on a paper late at night, and on his walls were engravings like those we had seen in Dingle.

“Oh, that’s Maria Simonds-Gooding,” he told us. “She lives up this road.”

And so we knocked on her door, too.

And beneath a vault of shining stars, Maria invited us into her cottage and led us through it

…until it opened up into the studio she has built.

And, oh, the work…

We had walked into the middle of new work in a new medium.

Maria has discovered big surfaces of aluminum which she etches and inscribes and roughly brushes and polishes until forms and textures change with each movement of your eye.

“I’m a halfway house between a sculptor and a painter,” Maria says.

And we talked about our pilgrimage as well.

Maria encouraged us to go to Cappadocia, where we’ve just been

…and to Ephesus

…and to St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, where we are now. Maria has a special love for this place, too.

You can see how there’s stone and solitude in all of this.

“I have to go right to the place itself,” Maria says.

“Give yourself the time for anything to happen,” Maria also told us.

And we’ve been following her advice ever since.

“Didn’t we feel like friends as soon as she opened her door?” we asked ourselves afterwards.

In Athanasius’ life of St. Antony of the Desert, he speaks of Antony’s inner mountain,

…the way that Blasket islanders speak of “going into the island.”

Maria has been there many times herself and has known well the last residents of these islands.

And if in the heart of winter you can’t find a pilot for a curraich to carry you across these waters,

Maria’s work can help to take you there as well.