Circling the Ancient Tower
September 1, 2007
I guess you could say I’ve been circling the ancient tower for many years. Trying to find the answer to the mystery questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Who runs this place? How do I get back to where I came from? I can definitely relate to Rumi’s request “Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.” This month’s peace reading is a poem by Marie Rilke:
I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
...........I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
And I still don’t know if I’m a falcon,
or a storm,
or a great song.
Rainer Marie Rilke
I see circling the ancient tower as practicing ancient spiritual rituals that bring us deeper inside ourselves and closer to Spirit: yoga, meditation, various forms of prayer etc. Maybe it has been only for this life time, maybe I’ve been doing this for thousands of years. Still, the questions remain and right within the moment they are asked, I strongly feel as though the answers are right in front of me floating around the edges in a blur that keeps me staring.
I also like to read essays and poems written by other spiritual practitioners that circled the tower more intensely than I have. September has been programmed into my body from childhood as a month to begin study. The days are beginning to get shorter, the air cooler. I will soon begin my walks again and there is nothing like coming home from a long walk and settling down to tea and a good book.
A couple of books that have peeked my interest lately are: Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master. While surfing the internet I came across a picture of Dipa Ma. She was a small plain Indian woman, but for some reason, I could not take my eyes off of her photo. Maybe some of her extraordinary qualities were speaking through her picture. This books reveals her quiet yet phenomenal life.
I also once more want to begin to explore the journaling exercises in Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest by Christina Baldwin. For a while I engaged in art journaling. I enjoyed it immensely once I got started, but found it extremely hard to attend to it as often as I’d like to. Blank page and paint equal mental block. Now that we are in the process of moving I’ve packed away all my acrylic paint, stamps, watercolors and mixed media scraps. Only two simple tools remain: pencil and paper. Writing is much easier than drawing for me, but drawing images and using colors always takes me deeper. Hopefully I’ll write my way into a lot of source material for art journal pages in the near future.
