Yesterday, I wrote about ikebana and discipline in my discussion of Gevurah in Gevurah. Today is Tiferet in Gevurah, and one way of looking at this sefirotic relationship is the Beauty of Form. Or Beauty expressed through Discipline. So once again, the example of ikebana seems appropriate. Or indeed truly any art form, with the accent on form. After all, a sonnet is as highly formalized as a haiku. So today is a good day to meditate on the demands of a discipline and how it channels our creativity and enables us to bring beauty into the light.
Alternatively, the energy of this day can also be considered as a time for expressing the compassion of discipline. I think of the advice given in the 12-step world: Easy does it. This is a recognition that someone in recovery needs to be easy on him or herself. After all, there is much internalized shame and judgement when one is in recovery. And there is no perfection in recovery. Simply recognizing that we are all human, that we all fall, is to experience compassion for ourselves, and for all those who fall once, or again and again. (This is not excuse making or abrogating responsibility, it is the simple recognition of that there is no perfect form)
The form of form. Emptiness of emptiness. Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles (yes a Fiddler on the Roof reference, which was also made in You Will Experience Silence, the brilliantly funny and deep queer jewish play I saw at Dixon Place last night).
So when faced with this, the 9th day, the first thing that came to my mind was my chafing under the form when I first began to study Sogetsu Ikebana, the modern school of Japanese flower arranging. Even though Sogetsu is the most modern of the schools, the beginner starts with a basic form and does it again and again. When you look at the diagram of the form, you can see it is very, well, formal:
As you can see, the arrangement of the flowers is quite fixed. And when I first started working in this most basic of forms, if I varied an angle by so much as a degree my teacher would move it to the correct angle. If I tried to improvise something because I felt it would be a little more interesting or creative, she would correct me and move it back to the proper form. I resisted at first. And then I surrendered to it.
And I learned the freedom of form. For that matter, when I realized how truly different the arrangements looked from student to student, I was stunned. When I saw how varied this one form seemed as the materials varied from week to week, I was impressed. And when I considered that no matter what, the arrangment always looked natural, I was a disciple.
Eventually I studied enough so that I became a low level teacher in the school, and exhibited in the annual show at the Takashimaya department store in Nihonbashi.
Today is the day in which we look at the structure we give our lives, and whether we follow it and feel the freedom in that structure. Whether we resist. Whether we think of it as imposed from outside or something we joyously take on and make truly our own.
In this way, I look to this ancient Japanese practice developed by Buddhist monks to inform my experience of this ancient Jewish practice of counting the Omer and meditating on the sefirotic energy of the day. Some would consider this boundary breaking — and thus destructive of form and discipline. What do you think?
Consider the potter throwing on the wheel. One hand is on the inside of the form being shaped. The other on the outside. The force on either side must be perfectly balanced. On one side is Gevurah, discipline, giving form and structure to the clay body. On the other side is Chesed, supporting and lifting up the form with a compassionate touch that understands the imperfections and limits of the clay body.
When compassion and love is expressed through structure and form, the results are beautiful. So it is with Chesed of Gevurah. This is not form for the sake of form. It is form infused with meaning. And of course, emptiness.
I remember once hearing one of my meditation teachers, S.N.Goenka, tell of how a potter in India beats the outside of a clay body with a flat piece of wood to give it form. And that there is a hand inside to help absorb the shock of the blow so that the beating does not destroy the pot. He laughed and said, when you are supporting it with love, of course you can beat it! Not that he was advocating beating anyone, but he was making the point that expressing discipline without love is destructive. Just as expressing love without discipline is destructive. As my friend Marion once wrote: Do I center the clay, or does the clay center me? For today, this clay body hopes we can all make every day of this counting of the Omer, truly count.
Psychologists Gay & Kathlyn Hendricks speak of something they call the Upper Limits Problem: when we experience a breakthrough to a new level of energy or realization, love or success and then do something to sabotage it and bring ourselves back to our familiar level of misery.
So here we are at the end of a week in which we experience Divine Love in a number of manifestations, and in the 10 of Wands we see someone who is experiencing all this as a burden. It's become too much to bear all this love, all this creative energy.
Looking again at this card, and thinking of the celebration in the 4 of Wands, I can also see this card as a man bringing the gifts of loving kindness for everyone to share at the celebration. He is the one who has taken the responsibility to gather the sparks of the shattered vessels. And in fact, you can see the 10 card as the moment when the vessels begin to shatter -- in the first week, when the sefirot are not yet in full relationship, the energy that descends becomes to much to hold.
So the question for today is can we allow our hearts to break in the reality of the world as it presents itself to us in all its suffering day after day, and then can we do the work to gather the shards of our broken hearts, the sparks of the broken vessels? Or to ask the question as Mark Epstein titled his classic book on Buddhism and psychology: How do we go to pieces without falling apart?
All of this is part of the work that will continue every day moving forward on this path.
