I chose to listen to the book again as I hiked the mountain. This way, I could focus on how to tackle the wisdom “curriculum” — the first topic being “Presence” —
First, always and everywhere, remember three-centered awareness. This is the touchstone for everything else. “Please come home. Please come home,” as Jane Hooper so poignantly reminds us in Chapter Three: “Find the place where your feet know how to walk / And follow your own trail home.” The way to your heart begins with your feet on the ground, quietly but intensely present. Remember that “sleep” is the technical Wisdom term for operating out of one center only. For most of us in the West, that overused center is the mind. We go rolling up into our minds like one of those old green window shades that has been let fly! Compulsive thinking, daydreaming, worrying, and reminiscing carry us out of the present and out of presence. Letting yourself “come home” is usually as simple as inviting those other two centers back into the game, by something as gentle as following your breathing or sensing your feet on the floor.
“Don’t just go through the motions, daydreaming or lost in an interior dialogue of agendas. “Please inhabit your place fully,” as Jane Hooper delightfully puts it, fully present to what you are actually doing. This kind of attention is like a brisk northwest wind blowing away the smoggy awareness we usually settle for.” (The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart
Cynthia Bourgeault)
I raised my hands to the sky, breathing deeply, feeling my feet hit the dusty, rocky trail — the heat of the morning more than I enjoy. In fact, I hate it when the temperatures rise into the 90s and 100s. As I lowered my arms, I felt a sharp sting on the inside of my left forearm, which diverted my focus immediately to the black wasp that was stinging me. As I quickly brushed her off my now venomized arm, I tried to understand — focus on the here and now — the immense stinging and red speckled skin that was definitely responding to the intruder? In a way, I was amused at the test that the universe threw at me. Or maybe I was ready to try that other part of wisdom — “Surrender”
…surrender is an underlying attitude. That means it is there in everything, at the root of everything. Without it, all the other spiritual practices remain merely pious busywork. With it, even things that don’t seem spiritual are in fact spiritualized. Surrender is the way-probably the only way-to accomplish that last and most important task suggested by Helminski: “joining the mind to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.”
In Chapter Six I suggested the simplest no-frills version of a surrender practice: never to do anything in a state of interior brace. Any brace position throws you immediately into your small self with its incessant wanting, needing, and insistence, and this immediately clouds the heart. Maintaining an open, inner gentleness, even in the face of perceived threat and reversal, immediately connects you with the whole multispectrum knowingness of your heart. Surrender is always “being actively receptive to an intelligence that is greater than that of ourselves,” Helminski writes, and in that configuration we move fully into alignment with the divine dynamism. You might even say that surrender is the awakening of the heart, for the one does not happen apart from the other. (The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart
Cynthia Bourgeault)
And so I will continue my study of Gurdijieff and the “work.” (Gurdijieff A Beginner’s Guide, Gil Friedman)
The Great Black Wasp
The Great Black Wasp is a solitary wasp, rare, and only the females sting — to paralyze their victim. They are black widow hunters. This is good since the black widows have taken a strong hold here. Kind of interesting since we have been exterminating black widows. In fact, the morning the black wasp assumed I was a black widow meal for her young, my husband was eradicating black widows from the work site. I can’t help but be amazed at the synchronicity of life. How does the universe interact with me?
Like other digger wasps, the Great Black Wasp females build their nests in the ground. As a solitary species with no hive or sister workers, the female will dig about a foot beneath the soil and create a series of tunnels using her mouth and spiny legs. Each chamber is assigned an egg and a paralyzed insect to go with it. As soon as the larvae hatch, they will have a delicious meal to feed on as they develop. They develop into pupae near the end of fall and overwinter in their burrows until the following summer when prey and nectar are plenty. Once adults, the males leave the nest to mate and mated females will go on to start their own nests. https://entomology.umn.edu/great-black-wasp
I guess this must all tie into my wisdom study —
“Awakening the heart, or the spiritualized mind, is an unlimited process of making the mind more sensitive, focused, energized, subtle and refined, of joining it to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love. -KABIR HELMINSKI, Living Presence” (in The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart, Cynthia Bourgeault)
