Inspiration Incarnated

Raven’s Nudging

We have taken our two dogs into the woods.

Our Rescued mixed girl, Jewel, has the largest eyes of all.

Standing rooted, severed from the trees all around

Judging the rustle of every leaf, she smells something

In a trance of the past so dark on the well-lit trail.

I could cry when she looks so lost.

Our beautiful flat-coated princess, Raven,

Has fewer boundaries to her freedom, well loved,

Rabbit-hopping into middle age, pausing,

Moving to her wounded fur sister, bringing her nose

To nose in a soft stroke as if across the check

Of a sleeping child, to awaken her.

The Child

Internal/Individual Energy of Loving-Playfulness Creates the Child

Awakened Child

Paying attention to the moment to moment unfolding of internal experience

or purpose—without acting on thought or impulse—not judging the experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn

The energy of the Child, Loving-Playfulness, often revives in us when we are amongst natural spaces. Even if we only have entrance to tiny meadows and scattered trees, even if we only know suburban landscapes, or small patches of the American woods, or parks in the city, spots very different from the mountainous grandeur of the Alps described in Wordworth’s, The Prelude, I hope the reader can remember some sense of quiet amongst the natural world, something other than the white noise of cars and human activity, some wild refuge from the anxieties of the Heart. It is in Nature we might feel a presence that looks on us with an unconditional loving gaze.

Why this painting?

When we are safe enough and quiet enough, and if we have not been so traumatized as to refuse Loving-Playful energies, inner life becomes increasingly real and important. You may have noticed a slowing of the mind, the ego going offline and noticed within that there are different pushes and pulls, right-brain emotional reservoirs and left-brain maps and plans. In Loving-playfulness, we may recognize that we contain natural fault-lines: up and down, side to side, internal and external, feeling and thought, one foot in relationship and the other in separateness. We have body and heart and intellect, and we can step back at times (playfully, lovingly) and notice it all. This is the state of Mindfulness that grows in the energies of Love and Play.

The Child is Awakened in these energies and spirit of Love and so is loving. Love is the emotional, creative viewpoint that encompasses and integrates other viewpoints.  To present a contrast, there are some people who will live their life focused on attaining ascendancy through Power, breaking through barriers, and they would portray a vastly different picture than someone focused on cherishing and embracing diversity and painting with pigments heavy with benevolence and compassion.

The Child is Awakened also in the energies and spirit of Play, and so is playful. This is another elemental energy in human experience, the urge to cavort, to be prankish, to not take things so soberly, and so be open to whatever is found to be delightful, to express sensual passion. Essentially, it’s a light, buoyant approach to the world, being willing to relax, to participate, to create and to recreate what captures the imagination. If you’re devoted to Play, you may exert great effort, and become quite detailed but you don’t lose the whole to the details of the details.

Who is this Child? An embodied character developing naturally in the state of Mindfulness with the energies of Loving-Playfulness.

The Awakened Child

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

The Awakened Child I’m describing here is not a human child but a construction of Inspiration, one identity that allows the Inspired Self to walk in the world. When you embody Loving-Playful energies over time, you have the potential to grow a well-developed masterpiece in this inner domain, an ideal vision of presence. Most can advance toward this ideal, but few will embody the Awakened Child. Few adults ever fully realize (remember) her capacities in adult human life, though we might have striking moments when we embrace the spontaneity and creativity of Loving-Playfulness.

When we’re in this Child, we’re like a new arrival to our planet, which, of course, children are. We’re filled with wonder and astonishment. The Child is quite willing to act out different imagined roles, switching them up, stepping in and out of them. The Child is a player, as in performer, thespian, for the enjoyment—not to deceive, but for the fun of it. The Child will not be conned into thinking being humorless and well-rehearsed is superior. She may reveal the half-smile of the Buddha followed by the belly-laugh of the toddler. Honest and direct, aware of what is authentic, speaking what they perceive, calling out what is dishonest not to injure but because of a devotion to what is real. They name what is in front of them, in the interest of clarity and heart-felt recognition.

Love and Play Enough

Unless you change and become like little children,

you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Mathew 18:4

As I have said, what I am calling here the Awakened Child is not a depiction of real human children. If you have had the extraordinary fortune of having children, though you may love them dearly, you may not recall them as particularly mindful creatures; quite the opposite, they were frequently selfish, demanding, and wanting what they want when they want it. In other words, they were typical infants and young people. However, though not necessarily models of conscious presence, at times they had an enviable aliveness—an egoless wonder–that seems easily lost to adults.

And counter to the energies of Loving-Playfulness, in real childhood there are things to be nervous about, clear bullies on the streets, maybe budding sociopaths, and narcissists. Maybe parents who are frightening.

Things are in the saddle and ride mankind. Emerson

Most adults do not see child adversity clearly (and may have idealized their own childhoods), but “sensitive” kids learn who to avoid. Places where we wait for the school bus aware of a psycho-dramatic tension some mornings with a backdrop of domestic conflicts. Alcoholic parents. Yelling behind closed doors. The dangers that keep young people on designated sidewalks, avoiding spaces that are “owned” by angry and impulsive “mean” neighbors. Even at ten years old, some children are already psychologists. Or, perhaps, what they have developed is the awareness of a prey animal.

But because what many of us experienced was not unconditionally affirming, let’s imagine the conditions where a child has what he/she needs to grow something like an Awakened Child inner life.

The infant slips into a world where Mother and Father are waiting. Already in love with her, parental presence conveys how much they want to (always) attend and attune. But human connection is never perfect. It is not a symbiosis. As attachment theorists teach us, healthy development of the infant depends on right brain to right brain communication with parents. They attune. Mis-attune. Repair. Over and over. In this process, the child learns to trust the reality of Love despite the appearance of intermittent disconnection.

Fearful, anxious, panicked, or angry, the child receives a response that’s accepting, curious, opening a path to a deeply intimate terrain by trial and error.

The parent asks, Are you hungry? Are you tired? Are you hurting? Is there something painful that I can help eliminate? Some act to ease dis-ease?

It’s not so important for caregivers to be right. The Heart does not worry about arriving at a specific point, an outcome, a destination that’s known at the start. And the Heart never demands flawlessness. Attachment researcher Ed Tronick found that mother and child are only in a matching state 30 percent of the time, and thus in a mismatch 70 percent. That’s good enough. Raised in the Beauty of an attunement that fades to separateness then springs again into repair and a new summer of re-attunement, season after season, over and over, in the safety of these intimate rhythms, the repetitive emotional dances, the child grows resilient.

The child grows resilient.

Sometimes therapists speak of mirroring, meaning that we need to see a reflection of our complexity in the eyes of another who holds us in their arms. This allows us to embrace the fullness of what it means to be human. We need to see our diverse powers reflected outside us. It gives us permission to be authentic, to acknowledge our imagination, our reasoning, our intuition, our sensitivities, and to know our darker impulses.

Of course, many of us were trapped as children in a different mirror, a funhouse-looking-glass of an aversive childhood that leads to something else.