On being nothing...

Am reading The Book of Secrets by Osho. In hinduism, the difference between a yoga and a tantra (from a tranta-ists perspective) is that a yoga involves the repression of all desires while a tantra involves the full expression and experience of all desires until they no longer serve you. Like eating too much chocolate cake and pushing the plate away?

The only alternative to using a methodology, either a yoga or a tantra, says Osho, is to surrender. We choose to use a methodology because surrender is the hardest thing to do. The only way to surrender is to discover who you are. Show me who you are, he says. So the student meditates and learns that she is not her body. She lives in her body but it is not who she is. She meditates some more and learns that she is not her mind because her mind is only the rantings of her ego which only has one belief - that she is not god. So I must be my soul, my atma, she says and goes to meditate on this some more. Then she learns that the atma, the soul, is only a collection of philosophies, doctrines and teachings. And to her horror and delight she learns that she is nothingness, a blank slate, clear air, the space in-between. Now, says Osho, you have learned surrender. Now you can be filled up with god-ness.

This seems too big to digest - I guess I will keep reading the 112 tantras given by Shiva and Devi on how to be free.

This little piece of nothing/everything had a delightful evening last night at the inaugural meeting of a new book club. We met at the Vault in the Pearl District. We're going to read The Color of Water by James McBride. Every woman at the meeting is at least 10 years older than me. Four of us are Aries and carried giant red purses. They are beautiful, every one of them and I sat there in that loud bar feeling how cool it is to be a woman and have woman-ness in common with both those I "connect" with and those I don't.

Today I am meeting Deva Kelli at the tea house here at home. It is beautiful and serene and Victorian and I can't wait to sit there sometime and write. My stories seem both blatantly at odds and at home with the puritanical surroundings and the raging hormones of the Victorian era.

I continue to fight daily with the to-do list in the back of my head. Even when I am peacefully reading or joyfully painting, there is an underlying guilt about what I am not doing. It is a learning process, this being instead of doing. What is it an artist does in order to BE an artist? What is a Deva does in order to BE a Deva? What does a mother of two with a messy house, a dirty dog, an at-home job, and a husband who constantly worries about money DO in order to be a Deva? I don't think the answers come by brain storming a giant list of the things one does in order to be. It comes from relaxing into the being. Its a flow rather than a schedule. Sometimes I will BE doing the dishes. Sometimes I will BE sanding a board or painting a wall. Sometimes I will BE reading a book by a Hindu mystic or writing down the stories of a woman's fantasy life. Sometimes I will BE at the computer working on economic development. So, there is no to-do list. There is only a to-be list.

Last week I Be'd a gardner. Here is a picture of the start of one of my "lasagna" garden beds. This summer it will Be lettuce and chard and tomatoes and cucumbers. No one will make it a to-do list. No one will tell it how to do in order to be. It will just be it.

Having a very deep Red Day,

In Grace, (that ever flowing, ever abundant field of joy that you can never do enough to earn, because it is your birthright)

Kell