OGT DAILY -Day Sixty Eight INSPIRATION

Okay so sometimes I am less than inspired. Today I could not get myself out of bed, but had to because of the dog who barks because she's thirsty.  Or she has to pee and she's blind so she needs help and I have to get up.   But even walking down the stairs, I'm still asleep and then standing at the door I can't keep my eyes open and it's sooo cold.   23 F this morning.  It is too late to go back to bed so I do stretches hoping to wake up slowly, but I cannot seem to activate my body and my mind is both busy ruminating and cloudy - Intelligence Committee, Manaforte, Nunes, Ivanka in the White House.   Meditation is just as bad.  It's brief.  My hands are cold.  I can't seem to wake up or get warm and energy is not there.  I do a little Qi Gong exercise to get the energy level going and that helps, but as I have learned, "This is how it is right now."

I chose words for myself randomly from cards I have and they were: Oneness, Patience and Inspiration.    Seems I'll need patience to find any kind of oneness or inspiration today.  Joan Boryshenko's Pocketfull of Miracles suggests thinking about the shadow, a Jungian concept about the dark unseen parts of self.   The previous day was a meditation on The Thunder, Perfect Mind - a poem found in the Nag Hammadi - Gnostic Gospels - a poem from an unknown prophet in a distinctly feminine voice - or is it?:

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

For I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am strength and I am fear.

I am war and I am peace.

A mysterious set of contradictions similar to words spoken by Jesus; speaking in the voice of an all encompassing divinity.  Scholar Nanna Liv Elkjoer Olsen (1) describes this scriptural text which is a full seven pages of prayer like riddle as both utter nonsense and deeply profound; that is presents a voice of God which is hard to pin down and characterize because it is constantly contradicting itself:

I am the bride and the bride groom,

and it is my husband who gave birth to me

I am mother of my father, and the sister of my husband, 

and he is my offspring.

Olsen goes on to say that the constant affirming of opposite makes for a God who is beyond any category.   The poem takes the form of riddle which invites the reader to search for the identity of its author, only to end up deluded that they could know anything about this identity.  Though the text makes no literal sense, Olsen suggests that taken as whole the poem has meaning as performance, as a prayer that tells us something of the unknowable and all encompassing quality of God and existence.  There is the "oneness."  The notion that we are all part of the same consciousness and that consciousness is essentially unknowable so just give up and give into it.  All very cosmic.   There is such subversive meaning in this text found in the second century when Aristotelian logic was at the fore.   The non-linear emotive power speaks to the right brain, the mythos female aspect as opposed to the male logos or logic   Finding it today reminds me of my mother who was always reading books like "When God Was a Woman," by Merlin Stone.    Speaking of women and divinity: Dorothy Day's grand daughter Kate Hennessy just published a new biography of her life, "The World Will Be Saved By Beauty."   Dorothy founded the Catholic Worker Movement, which believed in living out the liturgy of the bible by acting on good works on feeding and clothing the poor and homeless.  Before becoming a Catholic, she was a journalist, a communist, and a suffragist arrested for protesting a woman's right to vote in the 1920's.  She was a social activist all of her life, an inspiration to my parents, who were part of the movement, and a good friend of my aunt Ade Bethune.   The Catholic church wants to canonize her as a saint, a distinction she apparently eschewed as nonsense.   My grandmother used to knit her sweaters and present them to her. Then she would promptly give them away down at the original CW House shelter on the Bowery where my aunt described her as, "Sleeping on the floor on newspapers." Now she was an inspiration.

Dorothy Day 

My aunt Ade Bethune on left and Dorothy next to her at the Catholic Worker House 1934

Thunder Perfect Mind – or How Nonsense Makes Sense
Nanna Liv Elkjær Olsen (1)