Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

May21

pure potential

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I wait for the irises all year.  Same with the peonies.  There is something so extravagant, so sensuous about both that it is nearly impossible to do anything during their brief time but admire, investigate with my camera and savor.  You can’t really pick the irises.  They wilt qiickly, folding wetly inward on themselves.  The peonies are better, but also lose heart soon, dropping reams of petals, their heavy heads falling.

So I spend time outside every morning, when the dew fall is heavy, looking at them through my lens, lying in the wet grass to catch a different angle, another way of seeing.  Last year, I was shocked by the sexuality of the irises – their mouths opening like labia, the lift of their petals echoing what Georgia O’Keefe must have seen (I can feel her fierce pleasure) so many years ago.

But now they are pure potential.  Ripening, preparing, gathering themselves for that final concert of color and scent. I like to think that each day, we are also pure potential.  That we have the possibility for greatness:  great invention, or kindness, or pleasure.

This year, my feeling of that potential is fractured by the absence of my daughter.  I am missing  the resonance, depth and delicious enjoyment that she brings to my life.  It is as if the bass notes are faded, and the music of my days feels tinny and thin, painful even.  Having lost both of my parents, I can honestly say that this absence is worse than a death.  In death, there is a resolution, there is finality.  With this, there is none of that hard comfort.  It is only  unrelenting, an airless, suspending unknown.  I never knew that I was this vulnerable to an injury of heart and soul.

And yet perhaps in that unknown lives that pure potential – the possibility for beautiful resolution, for opening, for truth, for love, for harmony.  I pray, I pray.

May20

another poetry angel!!

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My friend Lisa Daigle sent me this poem-gift in response to my post Thank you Universe.  Thank you Lisa!

 Song For the Salmon, by David Whyte

For too many days now I have not written of the sea,
nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands

For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn

I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.

I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.

I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.

But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.

May18

galaxies, collisions, spells & love

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When I first met my daughter at an orphanage in Kathmandu 14 years ago, her head was cropped short against lice, as were all of the children’s.  When she turned her head I could see that she had a double whorl that looked a lot like the two colliding galaxies above.  For no particular reason, I thought, “Hmmmm, complex.”  I was right.

I was thinking about her, not the overwhelming complexity of what she was bringing with her, the galaxy of her traumatic background, her early profound losses, long years in an orphanage and her fragile sense of herself and her own self-worth.  In the exuberance of mothering, loving, nurturing, we did not focus on the scars.  We saw a valiant, brave, inquisitive, beautiful child.  We talked about her past when it came up, had therapy when it seemed appropriate, but did not dwell on the trauma.

In four billion years, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way will collide.  Astronomers also speak of them as merging or interacting.  They will become one massive thing.  From what I understand, both galaxies are strong and fully formed, so the collision will transform them, but will not destroy them utterly. Apparently the bigger Andromeda will direct the action.

When the unconscious past – in the form of old traumas and losses – rises up and collides with the present, the possibilities for destruction and transformation are both there. When galaxies collide, the starburst results in the birth of numerous “young, hot blue stars.”  However, only the very brightest and largest clusters are capable of surviving the galaxy collision, the numerous smaller clusters are destroyed by rapidly changing gravitational forces.

So we pray that our daughter is one of those bright and strong surviving clusters.  But we are seeking help.  Our Tibetan friend, Phuntsok, is asking a Buddhist priest to cast a “mo;” a divination tool used to determine possible future outcomes.  One of its uses is to help cast out evil spirits or lift an evil spell.  There are 36 possible outcomes with names like “the demon of afflictions,” “the overflowing jeweled vessel,” “the nectar-like medicine,” and “adding butter to the burning flames.”  The one that I am hoping for is “the jeweled banner of victory” and I plan to use “the great fiery weapon” of my love to move in that direction.

But really, it is up to her, this decision to move toward recovery and health, or to stay in the world of Mara.  In Buddhism, Mara represents the “unwholesome impulses, un-skillfulness, the “death” of the spiritual life. Mara is a tempter, distracting humans from practicing the spiritual life by making the mundane alluring or the negative seem positive.”  This reminds me of my favorite fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, The Snow Queen, in which an evil mirror created by trolls shatters, and the splinters are blown around and get into people’s hearts and eyes, making their hearts frozen like blocks of ice and their eyes see only the bad and ugly in people and things.  When a splinter blows into the eye of the little boy, distorting everything he sees and freezing his heart, only the tears of his sister can rinse out the splinter and melt his heart.

So, galaxies, demons, divination, fairy tales, prayers and love.  Mostly love.  Always love.