Poetry

The Senses Declare an Outrageous World!

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If someone stopped you on the street and asked you, “How many senses does a human being have?” you might wonder why they stopped you on the street for such a silly question… because of course you’d probably answer with the number most of us grew up learning: “5.”

Thanks to Aristotle, we’ve grasped that there are 5 basic senses: Sight, Smell, Hearing, Taste, and Touch.

But what if I told you the human had 21 senses? And that these included such subtle senses as Pain, Motion, Balance, Temperature, Joint-Awareness, and even Breath (oxygen levels – the sense that we need to breathe), or Hunger (blood sugar levels – the sense that we need food). Check out a chart here with lists of these 21 different senses.

But what if that person asked you a second question… “What’s your favorite sense?” Would that strike you as a bit… odd?

In the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, an ancient yoga manual for meditating through direct lived experience, the Sanskrit word used for “the senses” is Indriya, which loosely translates as “companions to Indra” (king of the gods), or “companions of the divine.”

The senses are divine!

The Radiance Sutras is Dr. Lorin Roche’s poetic translation of the Vijanana Bhairava Tantra, and speaks beautifully to the divinity of the senses. Formatted as a conversation between Bhairava, or Shiva, the Supreme Consciousness, and his lover/consort Shakti, the energetic Embodiment of Creation, the text is comprised of several verses, or “sutras,” and each one is a way to dive into meditative awareness; and, as opposed to other meditative philosophies that speak of shutting out or denying the senses, The Radiance Sutras is all about the senses.

Consider the opening lines to sutra 9:

The senses declare an outrageous world –
Sounds and scents, ravishing colors and shapes,
Ever-changing skies, iridescent reflections –
All these beautiful surfaces
Decorating vibrant emptiness.
The god of love is courting you,
Light as a feather.

The Radiance Sutras (2014), Sutra 9

By allowing ourselves to encounter the world through the senses, and to enjoy what we encounter, we’re able to mindfully connect more with ourselves and with the world around us. For those who are more spiritually minded, this is a connection to the divine within!

But just listening that opening line, about the “outrageous world,” brings to mind all the taboos against sensuality. What are we allowed to “enjoy”? What are we not allowing ourselves? What if something feels too “worldly”? Too “sexual”? Too “sinful”? Think of all the messages we tell ourselves about the senses. “Guilty pleasures,” we sometimes call them. What message are we sending ourselves when we can’t even enjoy full sensory experience?

One of my favorite people to follow on Instagram right now is Colin Bedell, aka @QueerCosmos, and a good friend of mine highlighted one of his posts to me recently, about desire. Talking about the recent Mars transition into Gemini, he quotes Esther Perel, psychotherapist and best-selling author, who defines desire as the “owning of the wanting.” What “wants” do we have that we’re afraid to “own”? Colin asks, “Are there particular wantings in my life that I need to own with more self-acceptance and authenticity?” Recognizing that we need to make space to acknowledge ways in which policing and surveillance have taught us not to act on certain desires we wish we could express, he takes the astrological opportunity for us to give voice to desires by asking ourselves, “Who do I want to be? To do what I want to do? And to have the results I want to have expressed?”

Colin’s point applies brilliantly to much more than the subtle world of the human sensory experience, but I felt the connection! There is joy and freedom in encountering the world through the senses and allowing ourselves to give in to that “outrageous world” that we might otherwise shy away from, shutting off some of our own potential and growth. How does my experience with and interaction with the world of the senses reflect who I want to be? What I want to do? The results I want to have expressed?

So… What’s your favorite sense? What’s your favorite sensory memory? What senses do you love that others might find “outrageous”? What have you been calling a “guilty pleasure”?

Allow it! Close your eyes and breathe it in. Marinate in it. Find that brief meditative experience through your encounter with “an outrageous world.”

Give yourself permission to luxuriate in all the senses this week!

A New Year’s Meditation

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Happy New Year!

Today marks not only the first day of 2019, the birth of a new year, but the rebirth of countless people around the world who strive to keep “New Year’s Resolutions.”

Funny – Humans have been making resolutions in some form or another for at least 4,000 years, writes one contributor to the History channel.

Back then, the Babylonians (whose year began in what we’d consider mid-March, when crops were planted) made promises to the gods, expecting good fortune if their promises were kept throughout the year.

The Romans adopted this idea, as well, and the very month of January is named after the Roman god Janus, the two-faced god who faces both into the past and into the future, perhaps symbolizing both the reflection on the past year and the hope and promise of what the next year might bring.

Janus, god of beginnings and passages

The 1700s found Christianity adopting the practice of keeping night vigils of prayer and reflection, lasting all night into the morning on New Year’s Day – A practice that is still found in many communities, today.

We’re hardwired, it seems, to see beginnings of any kind – such as the start of a new calendar year – with mixtures of awe, hope, apprehension, and reflection. And, though now a secular tradition, we still strive to make promises to ourselves. Only about 8% of people keep their resolutions, apparently, but it’s striking that after all this time, we’re still making them, even if we know many will fall by the wayside.

The marked passage of time must affect us on a deep level, to spark the desire to make such promises.

This brings me to a poem by a favorite poet of mine, Billy Collins. In his brilliant way, he captures the universal with the mundane, and questions this new year’s day, and what it means to us all.

Is it a second birthday? Is it a day to dread, or to look forward to?

To me, it’s a time I know I can meditate on and re-dedicate myself to living wildly, blooming where I’m planted, showing gratitude and love to the Universe and to those around me, and keeping fresh and new the love I share with my husband.

What about you?

May you have the happiest of years, starting today. Happy New Year!

New Year’s Day by Billy Collins
Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year’s Day—

a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
that is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.

“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,

New Year’s marks nothing but the pure passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little ocean of roiling water.

I like to regard my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence,
probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.

And as an only child—
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a bright, colorful room—
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and celebrate my presence here on earth.

And would it not also be a small consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X drawn through a number
in a square on some kitchen calendar of the future,

the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,

party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.

from the book, “Ballistics,” © Random House 2008

A Morning Meditation

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Good morning!

As we begin the day, and especially in light of the heavy and difficult post I wrote yesterday, I wanted to take a break and share something that popped up on my timeline on Facebook, from 2012.

I was going through a difficult time, then, and was trying to reinvent myself. I had just rediscovered the Unitarian Church, a humanist fellowship, without dogma, whose belief in the “interdependent web of all existence” is a favorite concept of mine, and I had started walking every morning from where I lived in the Paseo Arts District of Oklahoma City, to the First Unitarian Church.

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The steeple of First UU in Oklahoma City. Image taken from their website.

I’d been gifted a UU Hymnal from the Unitarian Church in Norman, where I’d first discovered Unitarian Universalism – my boyfriend at the time was a piano player (much better than I was) and we’d been given the hymnal in the hopes that he might play for the church on any given Sunday. He didn’t, but when we parted ways, he left the hymnal behind. Only a year or so later, and I’d be opening it again, and start poring through its pages every day, posting quotes and readings online as often as I could, in an effort to channel more positivity in my life, and send gratitude out to the Universe (thank you, Louise Hay)… hoping to find healing for the challenges I’d been facing that had broken my spirit.

The following poem, written by Mary Oliver, and first published in Dream Work (1986), doesn’t appear in the hymnal, but was read aloud from the pulpit at the beginning of one of the services I attended at First Unitarian, in Oklahoma City.

In the midst of the other poems and readings I’d been posting on Facebook, I posted this poem, exactly five years ago, today.

Every morning
the world
is created. 
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

Mary Oliver, Dream Work (1986)

May you each have a wonderful morning and find the chance to share your gratitude with the day – in the hopes of receiving it back, tenfold.

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Morning on the Quiraing, Isle of Skye, in Scotland (from our trip there in October 2016)