A Vast and Fruitful Loneliness

"Life may be brimming over with experiences, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inward in prayer for five short minutes."

--Etty Hillesum

RESOURCE:

An Interrupted Life: the Journal of a Young Jewish Woman, 1941-1943

Henna and the Art of Matrimoning

My dear friends are to be married this coming weekend and I am so blessed as to be part of the preparations. This included a bridal gathering last Sunday for teatime British style, complete with tea cookies and cakes (there was a small pie called a "Bridesmaid") as well as some decadent Indian sweets. I was given a box to bring home as a party favor and spent the rest of the evening tasting the varicolored sugary goodnesses with my roommate. Sweet!

The main event of this tea party was to have the women close to the bride decorated with henna tattoos. The bride, Nina, is half East Indian and will be donning a special made sari at the ceremony. She herself will be decorated in henna art up her arms and legs. I at first assumed this was in reference to Hinduism's predominance in India and a way for Nina to embrace this part of her cultural heritage. However, as it turns out, bridal henna is a ritual in several religious traditions. There is even reference to ceremonial henna in both the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. This marks my cultural expansions and learnings for the week ...
Above I've included an image of the henna tattoos I received at Nina's party. Natasha from Kent was the artist and she has crazy tattoo skills. She mentioned that she'd done over one hundred hands last week! While painting me with the all-natural plant paste (it was dispensed from what looked like a cake frosting tube in small, dark fecal-esque lines), I asked Natasha what the significance of the design was. She said none, that she'd just made it up. It was awesome watching her work her creative magic over all our arms, each of us presenting hands with our age or youth, soft and dry, a rainbow of complexions. None of us received the same design from Natasha, and yet the honor of coming together to be adorned in honor of Nina and Joe's wedding was touchingly unitive.

The stains supposedly last two weeks and will be their near darkest this weekend at the wedding. I've been walking through my regular week routine with hands that invite glances and comments, and tell the story of ritual, celebration and love. But I must admit that after three days of henna hands I have come to wonder a few things about the meaning of it all. And I mean that in the loosest sense. To what extent is this white lady committing cultural appropriation? Certainly there is no harm in honoring the heritage of a bride and partaking in the ceremonial adornment. I believe the significance will be felt fully at the wedding. In the meantime, I fear that I am rocking some quasi-offensive hand gear. It's mostly my whiteness that brings me pause, but admittedly it is also my Christianness.

I once took a spirituality course that touched upon the question of meditation and yoga as a Christian practice. A guest speaker visited us and we prayed the Lord's Prayer with coinciding yoga postures. Aside from feeling like a child in a school concert that performs hand motions to corresponding song lyrics (skid-a-marink a dink a dink), I felt a little adulterous. Here I was moving through the sun salutation with my body and the Our Father with my words. It was confusing. We repeated this several times and it did begin to feel less uncomfortable, but the questions remained. Traditionally, yogic practice is preparation for prayer. It is prayer. So perhaps there's greater error in doing yoga as an exercise regimen than as a prayer exercise. Regardless, the union of East and West in this white Seattleite feels always a bit dishonest and forced. Which then leaves me with one practical and boiled-down version of all these questions: Do I wear my cross with my henna?

My Harshest Critic

Oh, the expectation and guilt of (not) blogging. I've wanted to make this canvas much more alive with my presence on the page, especially since I have completed school and am often bored as of late. There is not one decent excuse for not updating Our Fodder on a bran-fueled regular basis. And so therein lies the problem. In an habitual and tired attempt at self-sabotage, I've simply stood in the way of articulating my own life, and for damn good reason.


Life these days lacks action or passion, and is quite frankly vacant. Not that thoughts aren't swirling around in my dream and waking lives, but I am encountering a tendency towards pettiness that is unbecoming, if not downright stupid. My mind wanders to such spiritually uninspiring topics as television's The Bachelorette and sometimes settles on the most unhelpful insights therein--for example, that because Ali chose Roberto that means that Chris L. must necessarily be available for me to ride off into the sunset with ... sadly, that's a waking thought. At the opposite extreme of this sort of hollow pettiness, my consciousness tumbles down convoluted paths of fabricated worry. Exhibit A: "Was I impolite with the grocery clerk? Am I impolite in general? What sort of word is impolite? Does my roommate find me impolite? Oh dear ... and what must her cat think!" This typically results in me interrogating the cat once I get home from the store, to no avail.


Ultimately, I need to chill the (insert your favorite four-letter word here) out and stop obsessing about reality television and the unknowable opinions of a certain long-haired feline. I need to stop obsessing about not having anything worthy to write about. How lovely it would be if I could bring my mind to rest on something lasting, how spiritual, really. Rather, I shall work to direct it towards streams of greater depth, streams that hopefully yield some sort of contribution to society, or more realistically, bring my mind to think think think 'til my thinker is sore! Then perhaps there will be silence.


RESOURCES:
My pathetically narrow noggin.

Beneath All the Masks

We all tend to wear masks, the mask of superiority or of inferiority, the mask of worthiness or of victim. It is not easy to let our masks come off and to discover the little child inside us who yearns for love and for light, and who fears being hurt. Forgiveness, however, implies the removal of these masks, an acceptance of who we really are: that we have been hurt, and that we have hurt others.

Forgiveness of ourselves, then, implies an acceptance of our true value. The loss of a false self-image, if it is an image of superiority, or the need to hide our brokenness can bring anguish and inner pain. We can only accept this pain if we discover our true self beneath all the masks and realize that if we are broken, we are also more beautiful than we ever dared to suspect. When we realize our brokenness, we do not have to fall into depression; when we see our true beauty, we do not have to become proud as peacocks.

Seeing our own brokenness and beauty allows us to recognize, hidden under the brokenness and self-centeredness of others, their beauty, their value and their sacredness. This discovery is sometimes a leap in the dark, a blessed moment, a moment of grace and a moment of enlightenment that comes in a meeting with the God of Love, who reveals to us that we are beloved and so is everyone else.

As the desire grows in us to be whole and to struggle for this wholeness in ourselves, in others, in our community, and in the world, and as we desire to be free in order to free others, a new energy is born within us, an energy that flows from God. It is as though we are crossing the Red Sea from slavery to freedom. We can start to live the pain of loss and accept anguish because a new love and a new consciousness of self are being given to us.

RESOURCES: Becoming Human by Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, an international network of more than 100 communities in 30 countries for people with intellectual disabilities and their assistants.