LISA CHUN

Like Diamonds

This is a continuation of the writing I was doing last fall. I'm so out of it I don't have any recollection of putting it up here already. But it feels like what I want to do right now so even if I did, here it is again. I've been working this process of how to have an inner shift, how to break imbedded patterns, how to rise up and do what I've come here to do - the Big Stuff - and I want to write about it but I'm so deep in it I don't think I have the words yet.

It's a beautiful day here and at last the weather is easy. May you unfold easily into your right path, your right work, your right life.

Like Diamonds

Drive through the continued gold of fall, the gold of the cottonwood trees and the dazzling bright blue of the sky in this northern section of New Mexico. Fall lingers. It sputters and stops and starts. Last week it was off. Today it is back on. Walk over crumbling limestone to a well hidden bend in the river, stop every now and again to look at the light on the gently moving water. Like diamonds. When we stop we are situated in front of the river, mesa jutting out in front of us. Cold river water. Peaceful sounds of water. Lapsang gets in. I sit myself down on its bank. The texture of the dirt is a combination of sand and cake, more like cake. There are very, very tiny black ants running all through it. They are the tiniest ants I have ever seen. They are so tiny they don’t bother me. They run over the sand and over my arms and my legs. I don’t feel them at all. I’m exhausted. I hear the water. I take in the sun. I could call the sound of the water, the peaceful sound of the water, a kind of meditation, especially mixed with the sparkling sun bouncing over the top of it but my mind is wandering so much. This’s and that’s of the previous day. Work I’ve been doing in therapy. Lately trying to locate the trauma that caused some troubling belief I am trying to expunge. I’m exhausted. My mind wanders. Come back to the present moment, I coax my exhausted self.

Oh, the tiny ants.

I lie down and put my hat over my eyes.
I breathe in the peace and quiet of this place.
The sound of the river gently lapping over the stones and the…
I am so exhausted. I am praying to God.
Please make this easy. All these things I struggle with.
All these things I work on so intensely, every day. I surrender these things to something higher. Something that can bear all this weight. Ease the thought from me that this burden is all mine, that I need to work it so hard, make it happen. Please.
The sun is so bright. The water is flowing, it’s like music.
The mesa is jutting up all around us, as it has been, but without us, for hundreds of years.
Lapsang gets dressed and sits down next to me and we talk
about the intricacies of love and consciousness, these things that consume us.
These things we work towards that are so hard. And the only validation we have comes from each other, from talking to each other. Otherwise, no obvious or worldly rewards.
Strange looking insects spark up and into the air around us.
Smell of cow dung carried over with the wind.
At some point we each cry. Because, I don’t know about her but crying is what I do lately.
I am telling her how I’m exhausted, exhausted from always having to work it so hard, make things happen, generate relationships and work or it doesn’t happen. Does this sound like whining? I tell her I just don’t want to do things this way anymore. I don’t want to operate from force anymore, from will. My will (vs. Thy Will). With this background noise of I’m not deserving, that God can’t be trusted, that I must strive or it won’t happen.
A lineage
a family line
people who work hard from the ground up
who work without relief or big breaks. Like thinking of my dad, makes me want to cry, and my brother, how he’s kind of falling into line with this family man old school regime, fighting it, but falling into it all the same, only I get to hear about it because he’s my brother and we talk to each other vs. how I don’t talk to my dad, have never talked to my dad, have NO IDEA what his interior world looks like.  How this has shaped what men look like to me. What’s the interior world of a man look like? I wish I knew. All of it makes me want to cry.

I want to operate from flow.

I’ve been crying a lot these last couple days. Crying is what I do. Lots of things make me tear up. Other people’s hardships. My old wounds.

Do you know how you just know something sometimes?

I’m going to be plunged into a whole new reality soon.

Hopefully it’ll be like this river. Possibly a shock from the cold but then

all these peaceful sounds. Bright red insects sparking up and into the air all around me.

The light like diamonds on the surface of the cold water. The light like diamonds warming

the cold water. Warm light. Cool light. I want to scoop the diamonds of light into my

grateful net. I want to scoop the diamonds of light into my open heart of a net.

See the Invisible Road

As I've said here before, I don't know how it is where you live but all around me here in Santa Fe LOTS of people are really, really struggling with business. And mostly people in the category of doing something they love, something meaningful and purposeful or else doing something that is almost it but wanting to take things to a higher level in terms of bringing who they are to their work. And in most of these cases: things - namely money - just aren't flowing. Why is this? What do we do about this? How do we handle these changes gracefully? And my favorite question: Is there some way to rise above the mass thought, this vibe of fear, and continue to shine and flourish despite incredible inner and outer opposition?

Sometimes the solutions we need are a combination of practical and logistical things. Those to me are the easiest because: you just do them. But I think more important than that is tending to our inner lives in the face of these kinds of challenges. I'm saying this particularly about the many, many artists that I know who have been making their living through their art (or something else that is meaningful but doesn't conventionally make a lot of money) and those that want to make a leap into this as their true expression. Art is important! It's vitally important. Not so much because it's art but because it's one of the ways the soul gets tended to, it's one of the ways we can bring our true selves to the world.

Don't give up!

It's ironic to me that when we're in an economic crisis the things that could possibly help us the most, help us as humans be better humans, get cut. Like cutting art programs in schools. I just don't get it. But this is the world we live in. Which is why it's important to keep at it. To do the work of coming awake and then staying awake. As William Stafford put it:

"For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."

Listen to your intuition!

I think the only thing I can offer in this moment is encouragement to listen to your intuition. It is how the soul speaks to us directly and by listening to it we can avert danger, we can find solutions, doors can open, miracles can happen. This is not to say that the soul won't sometimes lead us to dark places, to the Underworld (which is where I feel I've been for the last year) so we can learn and grow and one day gleam again. In that case we have to trust that we are being groomed for something we can't yet understand. There is a divine plan for each of us. Our intuition is like a map that leads us to it.

Getting Back to Work

Keep Making Art

I'm so grateful for new days.

I love how there's the gift of getting to start again - built in, every time the sun comes up.

Just seems like forever that I've been dealing with this deeper level, difficult stuff. A friend looked up my astrology chart the other day. She said, "Yeah, you've been getting hit [by Pluto? Can't say I get much of this astrology stuff] and it's not going away for a loooong time."

I said, "Yeah, that's great."

That's all I need, to have the actual celestial forces of the universe working to make things hard for me - with the promise of pure devotion for many months, maybe years to come.

I love it.

So I've been trying to apply my own advice and sit down and make some art.

It's one of those circular dances. When I feel bad I can't get myself to do it, but I know I'll feel better if I do it, but I can't, I can't...I feel too bad to do it, I think I better move to Montana or Key West, or try to raise some exotic monkeys, or start a butterfly farm. But okay, then I do, I force myself to do it - I set up the paints, lay out the paint brushes - but I feel badly, perhaps even mildly miserable while I'm doing it. Then I'm done and I'm like, that's great I did that but...whatever. Who cares. I'm all Alooooone. I say the word Alooooone out loud and it echoes, it echoes derisively. And Pluto is still casting it's unmerciful shadow on me.

It's not till later that it kicks in.

That's the good news, that the effects of that kind of effort do, at some point, kick in.

This morning I woke up, looked at all the (art) work I've been dragging my ass on for months, feeling doubtful about, was planning to start over - and I look at it and suddenly I'm there, I'm there!  I don't know why it's like this sometimes. Maybe it's some effect of moving my body first in the face of pure, unadulterated depression! and letting Me catch up when it can. Maybe it's an inability to love myself with consistency. Maybe it's that there are exotic monkeys in the world who really do need my love and I should look at raising them instead of doing this...this. Maybe it's just the natural product of hard times. I don't know. All I know is, if art is your religion as it is mine, it's important to keep

on

making

art.

I love the re-set button effect of morning when it comes.

Everybody Needs Beauty

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread."

                                            John Muir

I remember how in my early 20s the genuine pureness of my feelings really came out in the art I was making. I had at that time, the same roots of addiction that I have now only now I'm on the good side of that process and then it was only beginning to percolate and it was going to take several rounds of hitting bottom - oh geez - before I could snap out of denial and begin to change. But what got me through all the confusion around who I was in the world was who I was in the art that I made. I wasn't concerned with schooling or status or any of the external measures of success sometimes associated with art. I only wanted to know who I was through it, and sometimes because of it. This is how art became linked to a spiritual process for me. It got me by, it got me through, it helped me cope, I got to make things - I was doing very much what I'm doing now, making cards and poetry books and putting together spiritual/art events and taking photos - and these things which I also felt the urge to get out into the world were an instinctual way for me to communicate who I wanted to be (or who I intrinsically really was that was so heavily clouded over) in contrast to who I was by birth and circumstance and all the things I felt held back by. I was in a lot of pain and it felt out of control and I didn't know where that was going to take me. I needed beauty. I made art so I could tangibly give this to myself. Mostly I wrote poetry. My specialty was the love poem. My primary addiction was love so this was very fitting. It's taken me a really long time to see how what I was trying to get from other people could not be gotten that way.

I just finished reading On the Way to the Wedding by Linda Leonard, a Jungian analyst who also wrote Meeting the Madwoman and The Call to Create. She writes about transforming love relationships and the work we do to get to the wedding - including an important one which is the wedding on the inner level, the wedding we have with ourselves. There's an outer wedding that happens, too, usually in correspondence to what is happening on the inner. 

"What Beauty discovers, symbolic of the feminine spiritual center, is that her real beauty is her courageous vulnerability, her readiness to open to the mystery of the unknown." (from On the Way to the Wedding.)

Everybody needs beauty.

once i went to spain

 


  
 

 

The Wind

Yesterday was so windy. There's always a spell of this every spring here in our corner of the world. This year it's super late in coming and so it feels prolonged - this torture. It feels like we're constantly assaulted. One friend is having nightmares of being attacked by strange men. Another friend was in fear mode about her boyfriend and called me at the same time I was on the phone consoling a friend who was in need in being calmed down about the assaults she was getting at work.

It's hard to trust yourself when you're being attacked...by the wind. The nebulous, uncontrollable wind that you can't attack back. Or crouch behind the bushes waiting to fulfill your suspicions of its unfaithfulness. Or whatever.

So again, the still center. Being in our center even while the wind is howling furiously all around us. I must have turned a corner yesterday myself because I was out walking and it just stopped bothering me. In the morning I'd been thinking, in the style of one who is tortured, oh my god I've got to MOVE. I can't keep doing this and I can't keep living this lifestyle where I work outdoors (selling my wares on the weekend) at the mercy of this evil thing: The Weather. When I turned the corner of my weather angst my whole inner dialogue about it, the push and pull of my resisting the moment, just went away. It's hard to explain. I stopped reacting and it stopped being a problem. And the wind kept blowing and blowing. I didn't really "do" anything to make this happen. It's like I slipped through the wormhole. I suppose you could call it grace. I don't know. What I do know is that my thoughts suddenly allowed for the warm, loving voice of intuition to emerge again and I knew then that I could trust my clear feelings about things. I didn't have to argue with those clear feelings. I didn't have to launch any kind of campaign to convince someone else that my position was right. I could just be in my own still center, trusting it, going about my business...cause that's the right business to be going about. I'll do mine. The wind can do it's thing. We're all good. I won't go as far as saying we're going to be good friends but for the moment we can agree to live in the same place. Well really, we're all just passing through. And maybe that's what the wind is saying - screeching and howling sometimes - we're all just passing through.

Intuition is Easy

Learning to hear our intuition – and then follow it – is a very important part of the process of – well, living – but also of knowing the way to our right work, our right path. Intuition is easy. But because we live in a world ruled by logics it can seem confusing. Intuition, or guidance, can speak to us in the form of dreams, signs, a clear feeling or a knowing, a bodily sense, synchronicity. Because we’re feeling beings and because a lot of us are not used to listening to and honoring ourselves in this way we can think that what is actually a fear based response is intuition. I think I’m speaking mostly for people who are in the work of recovering from addictions, who come from dysfunctional backgrounds. We get set up in our foundational years to negate this knowing, to do what we need to do to adapt and to survive. It’s this work of rewiring – that can be a process of many years, if not a lifetime – that makes what is really an easy, innate system that we are born with, seem so complicated and hard to decipher. And even if we got born into ideal circumstances with the right kind of nurturing and support we still live in a social system that is inherently addictive – so we’re all bumping around backwards to some degree. (see “When Society Becomes and Addict” by Anne Wilson Schaeff to learn more.)

Intuition is easy. It’s a clear, good feeling, a sign of which way to go, a confirmation that the path you are on is the right one, it’s a flash of insight or packet of wisdom and this kind of information is always coming to us. When it comes for me it tends to come complete, like a gift wrapped package, and it never has confusing thoughts around it – I get to layer those confusing thoughts over it to my liking and by my choice later, after the fact, or discredit it or try to send it back to the receiver because I don’t like how it looks. But most often I receive it as a gift that I am learning to trust more and more is not going to explode in my hands should I choose to open it. (Seriously. I’m always waiting for some kind of explosion or some big bomb to drop because I'm taking the unseen path, the invisible path. This is not usually reality, that’s why it’s called being in recovery.) Building trust in listening is very much like getting to know someone new and over time becoming intimate with them – but it’s becoming intimate and learning to love the higher self, our soul selves. "Recovery" is building a good, intimate relationship with ourselves and Life (God).

It’s the same process for receiving the substance of what makes art – in my opinion – truly Art. In the deepest sense. In the sense that one is communicating something from the True Self, something that has the possibility to endure because it is based on inner truth. Something that is as clear as I can make it, as uncensored and unclouded as when it first came in. This is an intuitive process, a process for living. When people ask me to teach a workshop or talk about techniques I don't do this because I think techniques and skills are good and they are necessary but the real skill, the one that is very hard to teach is this - and this inner process is the one I'm most concerned with. For me it’s the spiritual process that matters most as a foundation, and it's not easy, it's a real commitment, not just to art making but to life. You need the techniques and the skills to execute the pure ideas into the physical. But the techniques and skills end up being easy, it’s just work and practice and time. The tricky part is being the Self at work, clearing and honing the path for what wants to come through you and only you. There's a lot of work here. We just take it a step at a time and receive all that we can with our open, beautiful hearts.

This Place I Go To

Here is an excerpt from some writing I did last fall. I'm pretty sure I haven't posted this already - but I'm not entirely sure!

This Place I Go To, This Place I Live

Santa Fe is such a small town. I grew up just outside of L.A. I love New York, London and Paris, or at least I used to. I loved to travel and then, five years into living here, suddenly I didn’t. Now I have no taste for it. A friend, a former Santa Fean, says the Santa Fe kachinas are holding me captive, they’ve got me in lockdown and she’s waiting for my release so I can come visit her in Seattle. And yet the big city still lives somewhere inside me. I’m used to and feel at home with the freedom, anonymity, and variety one finds in these cosmopolitan, urban landscapes. But that’s not where I live. I live in this town where, if I’m in a restaurant and I want to tell someone something juicy, I look over my shoulder to make sure that someone I know, either a little or a lot, isn’t sitting right behind me and can possibly hear what I’m saying and then – oh my – possibly know something about me that could then be used in some bad way?

I was sitting in a local Asian bistro with a friend who is acutely sensitive in matters relating to her privacy, even more than me if that’s possible, and we had just come up with code names for people so we could talk freely in public. Men get drink names. This one is Bud Light. This one is Gin and Tonic. This one is Whiskey Sour. I crack myself up with this. To know me is to know I do.

So, if men are like cocktails, and in some ways I hate to admit there is a grain of truth in this, then women are like…herbal tea?

So let us call my friend of the Asian Bistro Ultimo Privacy, Lapsang Souchong.

And let all women henceforth be known by the names of smoky, aromatic teas.

And all men known by the names of potent, mood altering bar drinks.

All this is a long way of saying that yesterday I went with my friend, Lapsang, on a hike. We walked for a long time in the shadow of the canyon. It was shady, heavily treed, leaves recently blown loose and covering the path and everything around it. We should have walked somewhere there was sun but instead we walked in what felt like the buildup to a fairytale. Like something was going to happen, something involving a red hooded wolf and two little kids, one named Hansel, one named Gretel. And a great ominous wind might gust out of nowhere foretelling a crisis. Of course, none of this happened. We walked to a rocky overlook where suddenly the light was loosened and spilled over the tops of the canyon and it was all beauty and warmth and a pervading feeling of peace. Light hitting the edges of the pine needles, light saturating all the in between spaces of the lichen covered rocks, the twisted branches of the trees, the waterfall below. We sat in a peaceful silence for a few minutes, ourselves getting saturated by the gentle warmth of the sun, the otherworldly light.

Lapsang turned to me and said, “Something beautiful is happening to my heart.”

After feeling the richness of the silence there at the top of the rocky overlook, after soaking in the soft gold light and the gold of the breeze we talked about how lovely this place we live in is, as if words, as if words, could even. How we could drive just fifteen minutes away and feel like we were so deep in nature, to have the “experience” of being deep in nature, really connecting with it. And she was talking about how we have beauty in each of the seasons and the strong light, how her mother lives in Cologne, says it gets so dreary in the winter there, the light is so weak. We talked about how beautiful it is here, even in the winter. How the sky is so bright and the snow covers everything and there are little droplets on the…

Last year, for the first year in ten years, I did not go away for the winter. I emailed my friends, the ones I stay in touch with who live in the cosmopolitan cities I once lived in too, and said I was going to take a “vacation” in Santa Fe, to try to see this place as someplace I had traveled to, to observe it as someplace new, and to write about it. Because of course it was someplace new. I had a new life, in almost every way you could think of except for work.

In the mornings, or whenever I could, I sat in front of the IBM Selectric that I bought from an old guy (Schlitz) who repaired copy machines and typewriters, and I wrote. And it was beautiful.

And the pain was so sharp.

And the days were so long.

And then the numbness came.

And I wrote through it all. And I took pictures. Of the sharp blue sky and the white clouds and the white snow and I got all the way through the winter like this and then it was spring and I wrote about the late snow on the pear blossoms as clusters of ice, as the dashing of my hopes that winter would break. Oh my. The beauty and the pain mixed together, enough to make one gasp.

Almost another year has gone by, or it’s about to go by, I don’t know – where does all this time go?

We were sitting in the soft late sun that was hitting us
at the top of this canyon that overlooked the waterfall.

We were so full of the beauty.

There was room for only gratefulness and for love and ease.

The light in a soft halo around the pines. 

And more talk of the inner world, how it draws us
how it’s all that matters
how I can’t go backwards anymore
there can be no talk of it
no matter what the fear of money or loneliness is
there is no going back
because I’ve tasted the sweet life
and hormones aside
this is what is making me cry lately
this is what is making me want to weep
in the open
in quiet rooms
it doesn’t matter
the sweet urgency of this inner life calling and calling me
the inarguable beauty of it
the pain of having refuted it for so long
forsaken it for things that in the end were not worthy
except in the bittersweet sense of what I made of it.
As in spinning straw into gold.

Something so unexpected.

This deep rooted happiness.

Returning to the shaded path leading back to the car it was incredibly cold so we ran almost all the way back, enjoying the cushion of the pale leaves beneath our feet and then, at a point nearing the end: a field of barberry shrubs, with deep, brightly burnished tiny orange leaves and one cholla and behind it some taller bushes with wild clematis draped over it and their fluffy white seed pods bursting into the dimming light

light still clinging to the edges of all of it
clinging as for love: don’t go away, don’t go away
let’s enjoy this sweetness together just another moment
another moment, another moment.

Then we moved on and there was the light again,
spilling golden
golden onto the side of the canyon
golden like in a painting
good leaf flaking off a Klimt in sheaves
unreal gold, and bits of clouds
in the cool blue of the sky and birds everywhere
birds migrating into the unreal
unstill gold of it
the gold and orange leaves of the slender oaks at the side of the road.
Turning, turning inward before going completely still.

This deep rooted happiness.

Laughing, exhilarated, feeling so free on the drive away from the canyon as the sun set deeper, not needing anything more, not needing a future to unfold into, not needing security in its usual forms

so full

of gratefulness and openness and love.

The prayer I had this morning in the bathtub, before the sun was fully up and I could hear the benign crunching of someone’s footsteps on the gravel outside the bathroom window, thinking it was the neighbor, then hearing a car door open and close and then drive away, has got to be the neighbor, I was praying, help me with the writing, oh the benevolent forces of the universe, let me bring through very clearly what needs to be said, let me be a clear channel for what needs to be expressed through me.

Oh yes.

In God Mind.

That’s where I want to be when I go to writing.

If there’s a place to go, then I’ve just located it on the hidden map.

If there’s a destination for me to get to, then this is it.

Patience

I actually wanted, since yesterday, to write about Process. But this hinged on me finding a quote that no matter what I did I could not find. So it seems apt that the next thing that would occur to me to contemplate is Patience.

Patience is not my strong suit. I think I've said this here before. I want big things and because I'm in the category of people who think in visionary terms, I want me and the whole world to change - instantly! I mean I have really big dreams! I've had some of these dreams since I was very, very young, ideas about what I've wanted to do. I remember driving with my folks in the car when I was a teen, riding in the back seat of the car while we cruised up the 405 in LA, and I was already thinking: look at this world, what would it look like if people did what they loved, how would all of this be different?

And in high school I had flashes of wanting a different life, wanting something that didn't seem to be the accepted thing. I wanted to be an artist and a business person even then. But I didn't want to do even that in the conventional way. I wanted to find a path that was uniquely mine and take whatever risks were inherent to tending this. In my case I wanted to write poetry! (All I heard all day long was how that wasn't possible and it just fired me up even more.) I wanted this so badly and I wanted to convert other people to this, too. I wanted to start a revolution! Do what you dream of doing! Do it now!

As I reflect back on this now a couple things have been occurring to me.

One is that these urges, these dreams that never go away over the course of a lifetime, these must be the desires of the soul. They call again and again and you want to talk about patience - the calling that comes from the soul is infinitely patient. Even when I am not. It lets me go off track - for years even - and when I'm exhausted and possibly ill, this persistent voice quietly, lovingly comes back.

This morning I was thinking of a conversation I'd had with a friend who is a good 10 or 12 years older than me and who, same as me, still experiences the root desires she had when she was much much younger. When she connects to this passion she also wants to start a revolution! In her case, she wants to revolutionize education.

Which brings me to my second point, and back to the topic at hand: Patience.

It hit me the other day that the other aspect of this call of the soul that I feel so strongly and which never leaves me, sometimes is patient and loving and waits for me, but lately shouts at me if I get too off course - is the work of my lifetime...it's not something I need to achieve in one day or something that I can set a number of goals to reach and then I'll know I "Got There." It is, rather, an accumulation of all of my efforts, that one day after I'm gone will hopefully be looked back at as the sum of what I came here to do that matters. Because at the root of these soul desires are much, much bigger things. Total paradigm shifts, a vision of a better world - for me a better world where the soul is valued in the workplace, in how our money systems are structured... and art is valued too, not as a sideline, but as an important expression of what the soul needs to say. And in my ideal world this is given priority and in this way the whole of life is reorganized. If it were your rightful job to be an artist there would be a place for you and there would be support and there would be a map - in this system (that I've just made up in my mind) which supports the rightful expression of the self - and you would feel like you could get somewhere instead of feeling like you were rooting around in the woods, in the dark, for all your life, saying to yourself as is imprinted upon most of us from the beginning, I don't know how this could be possible, I don't know what to do, I need to make money so I can't do this true thing, or if I do it will be that i am very squeezed and feel like I am constantly swimming upstream.

So these are big things that the soul wants for us, sometimes for all of us. I realize I don't have to get there tomorrow. That all my good thoughts contribute in the direction of this and get added to the works of other people who are adding significantly or insignificantly to this forward motion. And it all matters. And it's all good. And maybe we won't see these big changes in our lifetimes and that is okay. The way it's going, we probably won't. And then I'm back in the moment again, as I'm always talking about, and I'm glad to be here doing what I'm doing right now and I don't have to compare what I'm doing today with what I should be seeing by tomorrow. It's getting there but somehow managing to be relaxed about it...