Spirit in Action
Mary Rose O'Reilley, Quaker Buddhist Shepherd with a Love of Impermanent Things
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Mary Rose O'Reilly is an author, a contemplative and an activist. Author of six plus books and many more publications, she lives with a concern for the kind of centeredness which allows us to live fruitfully and faithfully in the world. Raised Catholic, attuned to Buddhist thought and a longtime Quaker activist, she brings rich and diverse perspective to her writing. Mary Rose O'Reilly's writings include, among others, the pieceable classroom, radical presence teaching as contemplative practice, the barn at the end of the world, the apprenticeship of a Quaker Buddhist shepherd, and her most recent, The Love of Impermanent Things, a Threshold Ecology. She joins us today by phone from her home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mary Rose, welcome to Spirit in Action. Good morning. I'm very happy to be with you. What do you do with your mornings? Do you teach regularly or are you writing? What do you usually do with your mornings? Well, I'm not teaching anymore. I usually get up around 5.30. I do some meditation and some thinking and some reading, and then I tear into my writing usually, so typically I write until noon. And then the rest of the day, I tend to be doing fairly physical things, manual things. Frequently I work at my pottery, and nowadays, of course, the garden is looming. And I practice music a lot, so that's usually my afternoon. In this writing, you've got a number of publications out there. Has this been your career path all along to be a writer and why so? Well, I think I started writing before I could physically write. And then I made the rather foolish mistake of thinking that the people who get paid to write would likely be English teachers. Any English teacher who's listening will laugh at this because, of course, if you want to seriously write, you should do anything but spend your life grading papers from Don Daldasque and the sort of things that English teachers do, which I think tend to put you off of writing. So actually, when I was doing that, it was always a bit of a struggle to keep up the writing, but I always did. I really had very much of a priority of doing what I think of as a writing practice, by analogy with then practice, every day, even just for a little while. So all the time I was teaching, I certainly was writing. Is writing writing for a writing saker, what would you ascribe as your larger purpose in your writing? What are you attempting to do by being a writer? Well, that's changed over time. I think that in the beginning one writes because one can. It's the sort of thing you get praised for in school and get ribbons for, so you keep doing it like a well-trained rat. And then later on, perhaps you discover, as I think all of us do, that whatever instrument we're given, be it painting or be it gardening or being a good dog lying in the sun, whatever it is we're given to do, is something like our instrument of discernment, our way of inquiring into why we are in this life. So it certainly did change over the years. At a certain stage of life, I became very interested in personal history, not only my own, but everybody's. And I still am interested, at least in everybody's, because I just want to know, as Quakers tend to do, what other people's experience is and why they live the lives they do and make the decisions that they make. And more important, really, for me, how they perceive the daily textures of life, I think I'm very interested in history. And I always wanted to know what the people who had been here before, how they perceive this landscape, what they thought about their lives as they were going about the same actions that I go about. So that kept me going. And then I think quite late, it became for me really equal to a kind of spiritual practice, especially when I began to write poetry really seriously. So that's kind of been the path. The first book that I know that you published was called "The Peaceable Classroom." What was that about? What was the objective of it? Well, I became a Quaker in the 60s because I was passionately a pacifist and I can never remember a time when I wasn't. So that was always very important to me. I was a Catholic and also a very keen Catholic, definitely not what some people characterize as a recovering Catholic, but I started going to a Quaker meeting because it wasn't possible to be a conscientious objector as a Catholic. At that time, it is now. I should say at that time and with that particular draft board that I was working with as I was counseling young students. And so the Quaker way after I began to attend meeting is of course to examine your own life and circumstances and to see whether war is implicit in your daily actions. And so as a teacher, I was interested in examining whether the daily actions of my life contributed to war or peace. And that's why I began to write that book. Did you get feedback from that book? Do you feel like you achieved planting those seeds of that kind of reflection? I think you're referring to something that John Wollman said, look in our possessions and our way of life and see if the seeds of war are there. I think maybe both he and maybe even did William Penn say something like that too? I'm not aware of Penn, but I certainly was and am quite keenly. I'm always aware of Wollman. Yes. Did it work? Are you saying, well, we always feel I think that we fall short of what we would like to do. And it sometimes surprises me that people like that book, that young people, young teachers still find it useful because of course with such a long time ago and such a different set of circumstances. I'm not sure, you know, we never know what we are achieving or not achieving. We just kind of put one foot ahead of the other and do what we're given to do, I think. I'm going to continue marching through your publications in part because I'm trying to trace your development with you. To some degree, your books do that because they have a significant element of memoir in them. Radical Presence is the next book that you came out with teaching as contemplative practice. So we've gone from peaceful classroom to teaching as contemplative practice. Is this mirroring some change that you're going through? Well, thank you for pointing that out, Mark. I think it certainly does suggest that at that time I was not stopping being an activist, but I was realizing the contemplative foundations of activism for it to be grounded. I was becoming, I say again, more serious about contemplative practice. I had been as a young person, very much drawn to that way of life, and in the 60s deserted it in effect to become more passionately an activist. I returned at that time much more to the inward side of working for peace and justice and found that so enriching that I began to write that book, which is still, I think, my favorite because I think it's the most useful for people. It really, I hope that it helps people to find a spiritual practice in the midst of an activist life. When you talk about teaching as a contemplative practice, does this mean that you can actually be a contemplative while you're up in front of the class when you're talking and lecturing and interacting with the class? Or is this only when you're interacting with, say, their writings or the feedback they're giving to? Where does this contemplative element come in? I think if I, myself, and I don't know if this is true of everybody, but if I, myself, am not in contemplative mode while I'm doing active things, especially in the classroom, especially in traffic, then I am just flung out into the world and, you know, really in danger of being caught off base and distracted and doing damage. So, yes, the short answer is yes, I think. It's about being in contemplative space while you're doing active work, but certainly the preparation for that is, I think, an individual's daily practice of some kind. Grounded in daily practice, one can, I think, and Ticknhat Han was the one who taught me a lot about this. One can learn to be contemplative while being very busy. Well, speaking of Ticknhat Han, the barn at the end of the world is your next publication. In 2000, you came out with it, subtitled "The Apprenticeship of a Quaker Buddhist Shepherd." That's quite a mixture. And it's quite the thing. So, you started out Catholic, and as you said, you moved to friends without feeling like you were a recovering Catholic, and I take it that's still true. And, by the way, I have the same situation. Born raised Catholic, it wasn't home for me. There's a lot that I did connect with a lot of people I respect there, but friends was a better home for me, but I don't feel like I have to recover from anything. I guess maybe the guilt and the other thing that people have. Did you go to a prokial school? I did. All the way through college. And you never had to recover from the nuns wrapping your fingers with the ruler or anything like that? Well, I come to understand that it's our own history that makes us vulnerable to the distortions of any kind of education, be it Catholic, be it Freudian, be it Darwinian. You know, one can say, "Well, I became a cruel, ruthless person because I was raised in a harsh Darwinist family, but as a matter of fact, it's the wounds if I can put it that in our own nature that make us vulnerable to that." So, no, I can't blame Catholicism for my mispent use, but rather I think that if anything, it helped me to heal those rifts in the personality, although certainly it gave me a lot of challenges. In this transition from Catholic to Quaker and with this mixture with Buddhism, Tiknat Han being a Vietnamese monk, how do you see them interrelating to one another? How do they interrelate in you? To jump to the conclusion, I would say that the common ground of those three traditions is contemplative practice. One can't stray very far from Catholicism or from Buddhism or from Quakerism if one is just sitting and engaging with that practice. But I think to put it in a more complicated way, I've sometimes said that I have a Buddhist mind because I think I approach the world analytically through Buddhism. It's got a good analytical framework for me, and I sometimes say I have a Catholic heart because I will just always have been opened by the experiences I had as a Catholic, and then I say I have a Quaker backside because that is what I position on a folding chair once a week at Twin City Friends meetings. So, I guess in my physiology, that's how I bring those three places together, but it's the contemplative center that is really the guiding point for me. I'd delighted in a number of the anecdotes that you told of your experience at Plum Village at Tignat Hans Retreat Center Village in France. I think it's southeastern France. Tell us a little bit about your experience there, how long you were there, what you were doing, why you were there. Well, I was there for six weeks, and in many ways I was not a happy camper, and I'd love to talk more about maybe some of the lessons I learned from just the difficulty of the life there, because it was not like a Catholic retreat center or even a Quaker retreat center where you tend to have a library and good food and a lot of attention paid to your nurturing, as we love to say. It was hard practice, it was cold a lot, and the food was sometimes excellent and sometimes quite bleak. I was there because I was interested in the question of bringing the active life and the contemplative life together, and that is something that Tignat Hans not only thought about a lot, written about a lot, but has lived through because he was one of the first of at least the Mahayana Buddhist community that came out into the world to stand in some kind of contemplative practice as an anti-war activist in the Vietnam era. So he had much the same historical question as I had, and that's why I went there. I was also interested in, see if I can call it that, healing communities, the ratio of people in difficulty, to people with strong practice, because I was thinking at the time of wanting to open my house more to people in difficulty and people in need, and I wanted to explore how that went on at Plum Village. You mentioned that one of your challenges was with the cold, and I've taken some of what you wrote there and tried to remind my wife of it, she read the book first and pointed out to me. And each time that I try and remind her and myself that it's only a thought, she tells me no, it's a temperature. What was your experience? Well, I think I'm a person who's very troubled by the cold, and you know, when you can't sleep because you're cold or you have to get through the day with a lot of difficulty that way, that's a challenge. But here I am still living in Minnesota, so I guess I get some perspective on it now and then. And would you pass on the phrase I referred to? It's only a thought, what does that mean or how if you integrated that into your thoughts or your practice? He would say it's only an idea, definitely. For me, that often comes up when I am being critical, not necessarily of the weather, which I guess we all just endure one way or another, but say of more important daily things like other people, other people. He would say the thought that we need other people to cherish our illusions and support our crazy ideas is only a thought, you know, it isn't reality, it isn't a real life need. It's a thought and to think about things that way. But also my teachers at Plum Village would always be laughing at me when I carried this too far because the first thing we do when we get hold of a new spiritual idea is carry it too far. So frequently I would be lying there enduring, say, a roommate who wanted to keep the light on all night saying it's the idea that we need to sleep in the dark, it's only an idea. And when I bring that to my teacher, who wasn't tick not hon at that point, who was one of the senior teachers in the community, you know, he would just laugh at me and say, oh, you always carry things too far, you know, you're allowed to say, please turn out the light. So it's that kind of balancing that we do, I think, in all spiritual traditions between enduring and confronting. You said that you started out, you were a teacher for quite a while, you got the life lesson that you don't need to be an English teacher, and that if you are, it might prevent you from writing. The next book you wrote, The Garden at Night, Burnout and Breakdown in the Teaching Life. That's how, what was it, what happened to you? I'm thinking of Daniel Bergen's poem that goes poems like Love Come to a Dark Mood, and I think that the things we love be it relationships or vocations come to their dark times. In fact, I'm very interested in the phenomenon of what John of the Cross calls Dark Night of the Soul, Dark Night of the Professional Soul, in this case. And also, I think was really becoming aware at that time of certain kinds of systemic injustice that pervade all of our professional lives. Although teaching and the healthcare professions, I think are particularly stressed by these kind of overarching injustices because we're quite innocent we teachers and nurses and family care physicians and sort of frontline workers. We think that we've entered a benevolent system and that people have our good at heart, and I was seeing tremendous cruelty in the tenure system, for example, in the promotion system. And it was a very dark time for me. So, especially in that book, I was simply writing about my own processing of that, a student of mine committed suicide during that year, and all of us were very strained to weave that into our experience, you know, the way one is when something like that happens. So, it was very much a dark night experience. Do you suffer or enjoy the large emotional up and down? Sometimes I think that when you have a contemplative practice, it gives you more of a steady state, but maybe that isn't your experience. Does it give you a more steady state? Certainly, it gives me a more steady state. Maybe I really have to be hit with a brick in order to admit suffering into my life because it tend to be a very up person. I'm just a person that just seems congenitally kind of sunny-tempered, and so I can really be blindsided by the currents that other people might be aware of of threat or danger. I tend to think that people are going to do the best they can, and I take a quite bright view of things, so I guess I have to be really roused by sadness. You talk about the dark night of the soul, but you actually must have hit or experienced touched on that a bit. As part of this, maybe the suicide of your student, is this the dark night of the soul something you've actually lived through? Oh, I think one lives through it again and again. I'm very democratic about it. You know, I'm democratic in the sense that some people think it's only for great souls, dark night experiences as John of the Cross frequently characterizes it that way, but I think that we all live through dark night experiences. What I don't think is that they're necessarily congruent with sadness even or clinical depression. I think of the dark night experiences being essentially one of obscurity, obscurity. As a matter of fact, the other night when we had the lunar eclipse, I was sitting out in my tea house all wrapped up in blankets, looking at the moon, and it was very much, to me, the experience that John of the Cross writes about the obscurity of the landscape. And everything being up for grabs and all the animals behaving differently and being puzzled. So for me, the dark night experience is that, I believe John calls it Oskura, Oskura, and he has a perfectly good word for darkness, but he happens to use that word obscurity. So it's when everything you thought you believed suddenly becomes called into question, and what was important to you is no longer important, and the priorities you had seem foolish, and the people you depended on are turning out to be complete screw ups, and your own resources aren't working very well either, and besides your dog doesn't like you. How's that? I can't believe that anyone could be so bad that your dog doesn't like you. You don't know my border collie. I'm rather ascribed to the prayer that says, "Lord, please make me as good as my dog thinks I am." My dog knows I'm a screw up. It's just very high standards. I'm wondering how what you're doing, again, interfaces with the world, and I think for a lot of people they do think of the contemplative as going up to their silence, such a dull or whatever it is. They're pulling themselves apart, and they're not interfacing the world. Do you want to try and help the world have some positive change? I think that is important to you, and how do you go from contemplative and affect the world and what you're doing? You know, it's hours and hours of answers. First of all, I think we have to confront the fact that sometimes the contemplative life can be a place to hide out from the world. That certainly can be the case, and I think that our own inner compass needs to tell us when that is happening, so it's not an unfounded idea. I have a number of simple answers, but I think I'll just go for the answer that's emerging for me, which is probably more complicated than I can say. But the answer that's emerging for me is that when you engage in a contemplative vocation, it's not an easy place to set. Let's just note that. I work as a spiritual director, or as we say in Quaker World, more of a spiritual companion, and I work with people who are living a contemplative life, and I see the difficulty of the path that they take, so it's not an easy path. Why is it not easy? Exactly because of the usefulness of the work, which is that when you sit in meditation, you are calling up from your own unconscious, tremendous pain, and bringing it into the light. Tiknad Han has a way of saying this. Father Thomas Keating, who writes about Centering Prayer in the Catholic Church, has a way of saying this. He's a psychiatrist, I believe, by training and talks about how we churn up this subconscious ocean, but the healing gesture is to bring this pain into the light. And I think that as we go forward on this path, we begin to bring into the light not only our own suffering, but it feels like we bring up the suffering of the world and sit with it and open some way, the heart of compassion in ourselves. And so we are training ourselves in a daily way in compassion. That's a bit of a complicated answer. Perhaps just in simpler ways for the passionate activist, it helps us not to scatter our forces, it helps us not to become depressed by the failure of our best efforts. Because I think that the contemplative path has to teach us through this obscurity that we go through, that we don't necessarily know the right way. You know, we learn to sit, I think, where this may not be the best way to practice non-violence, this political alteration that seems so important to us may not be wise. This candidate may in the long run not be the right one. You see, otherwise politics, as I keep telling my children, can break your heart. It isn't that we should stay out of politics, but that we should learn how not to have our hearts broken by it. You describe yourself as an activist. You have a strong activist attraction. How do you see that activism is acting out? I mean, is it just by your writings or are there other concrete things that you do that people would recognize as activism? Well, I always say that much of my life in what used to be called the movement was in making sandwiches for the revolution, particularly because back in those days, when dinosaurs walked the earth, women were not in the front lines of the world that I was being engaged with. So I made a lot of sandwiches in a lot of church basements, and I still make a lot of sandwiches in church basements. I show up. I tend to be one of those people that sort of swells the progress. I show up on the bridge with my signs. My partner Robin and I are doing a lot of music right now as part of various social action agendas. So I think we're not all called to be rhetoricians, and we're not all called to be public leaders, but we do the very small thing that we ourselves do. For me, I make music. Robin and I make music. Robin makes art. We do the best we can with the kind of craft that we are given. And what kind of gatherings, activism, are you likely to show up for doing your music or making sandwiches? What are the concerns that are clear to you at this point? Has this evolved over time? Has it evolved over time? Well, there has always been, I think, the anti-war part, and there always seems to be a war to be anti. So we show up here at the Lake Street Bridge demonstrations every now and again. We certainly have been involved in that. I think I have been perhaps more drawn in the last 10 years or 15 years into issues around homelessness, things like that, social justice issues. We have typically been bringing our music to homeless shelters and feeding programs and things like that, just assuming that people would like a little fun, you know, a little entertainment. We've become lately interested in working with music and hospice programs, so that's where our feet have been showing up. I know that you have some concern about urban sustainability and environmental issues again. Sorry, I forgot about that. Yes, that's a great passion of mine, urban sustainability. Having failed to manage to become a farmer, because farm prices are constantly going up as we know, at the same time as one ages and energy declines, I have lately been very much engaged with what some of us think of as urban sustainability that is issues around what can you draw out of a small piece of land and how can you protect the yard, as it were, that you're given, and how can you make it into the very best habitat for plants and animals and all the creatures that might cross that path. So I'm very much involved with that kind of thing right now. I think some of you may be familiar with the permaculture movement, and that is what I am quite keen on at the moment. Is it possible in City of St. Paul to have sheep in your backyard? It is not currently legal to have sheep in your backyard that I know of, although there is a little flexibility in that if you have enough land, and particularly genial neighbors, but certainly not going to be possible for me to have sheep, but I'm hoping to start raising angora rabbits for their hair, for weavers who like to weave angora rabbit hair, so they wouldn't have to be eaten for meat, for example, and they can be grown sustainably, and their lovely rabbit pellets can fertilize my garden and so forth. I'm just really interested in studying those interrelated systems. When you mention that you do music, you and Robin are performing or sharing music with folks, what kind of music are we talking about here? Well, that has certainly changed over the years. Robin is very much into old-time music, the progenitor of bluegrass, I believe he would say, and we have together been very interested in Scandinavian music, so we do a lot of Swedish music together, and lately we've become very keen on the pentatonic scale. We love the pentatonic scale, and we love the old hymns, many of them in the pentatonic, like Wondrous Love and all those old Protestant hymns. Those are the ones that the old people know, so when we're bringing our music to people who are elderly and sick and confined, they like to hear that and we like to play it, so that's what we're doing. What Wondrous Love is this? Oh, my soul. Oh, my soul. What Wondrous Love is this? Oh, my soul. What Wondrous Love is this? That caused the Lord of bliss to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul, to bear the dreadful curse for my soul. When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down, when I was sinking down, sinking down. When I was sinking down, beneath God's righteous frown, Christ laid aside His crown for my soul, for my soul, Christ laid aside His crown for my soul. To God into the Lamb, I will sing. I will sing. To God into the Lamb, I will sing. To God into the Lamb, who is the great I am? While millions join the theme, I will sing. I will sing. While millions join the theme, I will sing. And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on, I'll sing on. And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on. And when from death I'm free, I'll sing and joyful be. While eternity I'll sing on, I'll sing on. Throughout eternity I'll sing on. That was Wondrous Love, but it was not done by Mary Rose Riley and her partner Robin. It was a song that Mary Rose and Robin could well have performed, but this version was sung by Annie Grishup and Mike Ross, some of the voices of Hopkinton. Check the link to them on my NorthernSpiritRadio.org website. I'm Mark Helpsmeet and you are listening to a Spirit in Action interview with author Mary Rose O'Reilly. Her writing has included memoir, poetry, and social change instruction. Catholic Raised, Buddhist Learned, and Quaker practiced, Unactivist and Contemplative, Mary Rose covers lots of territory with lots of style. We'll go back to the phone now with Mary Rose O'Reilly in St. Paul, Minnesota. You mentioned your involvement with spiritual direction and spiritual companionship. Would you let our listeners know what that means because a lot of them probably haven't had any contact with it? Spiritual direction is a model that was always very much a part of Catholicism, although it tended to be directed, as it were, by priests or very senior nuns, to aspirants and people that wanted to live a more committed life. So it's a model that's drawn out of monasticism. About 25 years ago, it began to be imported, I think, first into the more liturgical religions, and then into Protestantism as a way of leading lay people, by lay people, into more profound spiritual connections. And in the tradition that I was trained in at Shalem in Washington, Washington, D.C., it's very oriented toward helping people to engage with a contemplative life. I think that because people began to study Buddhism, what typically happened was that they looked back on their own tradition and thought, as many of the people who come to me say, "Oh, I discovered that there is this tradition in my own family religion, so I want to go back more deeply into that." So those are the people that I involve with. When you say a phrase like spiritual direction, I think it evokes for people a sense of a hierarchy, and as we know in Quakerism, there's not much in the way of hierarchy to hence you speak of spiritual companions. In that practice in Catholicism, is there a sense of hierarchy? Is this person knows and can tell the other one which way to go and do? In my experience of spiritual direction as a young person, there was certainly what I experienced as a benign authority. I would go and talk to father, and father would tell me wise things. And in fact, he did fortunately tell me wise things, and it was a very profound and important relationship, that one of spiritual direction. And over my lifetime, I've had several spiritual directors who were truly gifted, but that's not my way of doing it, and it's not the way I was trained. And when people look to me for that, I have to have a talk with them. Because much of what I do as a spiritual companion is to support the other person in their silence and in their contemplative involvement, which we all try to get out of. We'd love to get off of just sitting there quietly by doing something probably stupid. So the direction that I do is to always lead them back to that silent place because I think that that is where all that they need to know arises. If people can really be supported in their quiet listening to each other and to themselves and to the world, that's a much more productive direction. If you want to use that word, then my telling them. In fact, I have to truly work at not telling because one has one's own urge to do that, and then worse yet, people support you in that they want you to tell them what to do. It's very hard to resist sometimes, as we all know. Way back when we started, I talked about going through your publications. I have not all the way through them. The next one is collection of poems, and I do see poetry as spiritual practice. Poetry, spiritual direction, your contemplative life, how do these interrelate in your life? Poetry, I guess, is... I was going to say the deepest place I know how to go, but music is equally a deep place to know how to go. I think also they're a place of wordlessness, although you think of poetry as having a very lot of words in it, and indeed it may, but it's a place for me of waiting for a kind of well to fill, either with words or with silence. And I'm very aware of silence in poetry, of the places where you stop. I was just brooding this morning about how to get the reader to stop. One of my great mentors, the Native American poet Barney Bush, used to say that the poetry shows, well, he would say, "When I read your poems, I know where you breathe. I know how you breathe." And he said, "This is true of any transaction of poetry. We know how the other person breathes." And so that great soft in and out of our own breath is very much a part of poetry. I was chatting with Mary all over the other day about some poems that she was looking at of mine that she'd asked me to send her, and she said, "Too many collars! Too many collars!" And so we got into a discussion of how you get people to stop without road signs, and, you know, use the end of the line to create a silence or a space. So it's a very important way for me to be contemplative. In 2006, you came out with half-wild poems. Do you happen to have the book handy, and could you pick out a poem to share with us? Wow, what a good idea that would be, and I don't know if I have it at all. Here, I've got it. Do you want me to read one? One or two? Just pick out something that shares some of the fruit that you're passing onto the world. Well, actually, I just opened it up, and I came upon one that does, I think, talk about the sort of jump off into silence. Although, like all of my poems, it's just grounded in the natural world, and you could think about it just as a poem about driving to Northfield. It's called Snow Blind, and it is about driving to Northfield, Minnesota, in the middle of winter. Driving back roads to Northfield in drifting snow, losing the lay of farms and the lift of sky, I'm forced to enter the prairie. Sun's glare erases the margin. It's all white to you then. A rapture like divers feel, leaving air, memory of land, loves hands, the gray cup of a junco. Surrendered to longing, a flare opens under the bone, a wound you pour from into the prairie light. So that's just about going off the road in the middle of a blizzard, you know, in that sort of strange way the sun glares off the fields. But it's also kind of about, I'll just say, because I'm not going to explain the whole thing, though, Robin always asks me to explain poems, and so I do. But, you know, it's that erasure of the margin between what you know and what you don't know. Do you have any poems in there? I guess, say, relating to activism. Everything can be related to activism. I understand that. Obviously, I'm quick or too. Here we go. But anything that addresses your experience with that explicitly. You know, there certainly are, and let's see, which ones would there be? Hmm, this one about being in the Catholic worker shelter. Oh, and there's one about, yeah, this one about Gene Donovan, who was the meringel missionary murdered in El Salvador. It's called Flamenco Dancer. Would you like to hear that one? That's great. Okay, Flamenco Dancer. The man who played the guitar has died or gone home, and when she goes to the edges, she goes alone. Not even a line of music under her feet, a rhythm that breaks as she heads for the margin of dance. There on the brink of motion, finding a gash in the wall, art, has to look for an exit. Now she has gone too far. Becoming the space love asks for, the threshold, the door. Wow, that one talks about approaching that threshold. We call death. Having your Catholic, Quaker, Buddhist background, how do you end up thinking of death? I'm interested. You know, I write poems. My critical sense is very divorced from my poetic sense, I guess. I never think about poems again much after I write them, so I always am kind of surprised when somebody points something out. Or I notice it when I read two together, and in those two poems I notice that in both, there's a concern with this sort of threshold space or liminal space, which we can think of as the leap into some kind of mystical intuition. And we can also, I think, see it as the dissolve, which I think I write about a lot, the dissolution and dissolve of consciousness. As we die or fall asleep, whichever falling asleep is what I know, obviously. So how do I think about that? I think about it all the time. My friends say for such an upbeat person, you're always thinking about death. How do I think about it? I don't think about it, I guess. Well, I just said I did, but I observe it. I observe and observe and observe it. I guess that's what I would say. I don't go beyond just writing what I see, be it of the death of an animal or the finding of a long, buried piece of roadkill, or any of those fascinating, natural objects, or being with somebody, as I have been many times who's literally dying. It's just a being with. That's what I guess I'd say, better than observing, a kind of being with. I have nothing to report back from that side. Well, of course you do, because the next book that you wrote was called The Love of Impermanent Things, A Threshold Ecology. Tell us about what that book's about, what are the impermanent things, and what's the threshold ecology you're addressing. I think we never know, at least I never know. I shouldn't say we never know, because lots of people know very well what they're doing when they're writing a book, but when I'm writing a book, I'm always just feeling my way into a lot of issues. And the issues that arise in that book, many did in fact have to do with my mother's death a few years ago, but around that was just a lot of preoccupation with impermanent systems in nature. For example, literally the class of Ephamorata, as it's called, the very earliest wildflowers, as we might call them, that we see, and the animals that live only for a very short time, the insects like the mayfly. So it was interested in just the whole phenomenon of impermanence, which of course also has Buddhist echoes, I think, the contemplation of impermanence and the passing of everything. So it was about a lot of reflections on that. Now how does that become an ecology, a threshold ecology, that is an observation of things, first of all, that are just outside your door, over your threshold, and also things that are kind of liminal or mystical, that is the more metaphoric sense of threshold as a place where you pass from world to world, a threshold space. And in terms of ecology, these spaces of course are all around us. And for me again, as I work very practically now, because I am, you may be surprised to know a dead practical person, establishing systems in the garden that work, that speak to each other, that support each other, spaces where all kinds of things can pass over and die and be born. So, that sounds like a very, very notion of what the book is about, because actually it's quite practical. I always begin with the concrete, and I don't really say much about the mystical. I like to carry people to the edge of that place where they can jump off if they want to, but if they don't want to, they can just stay in the garden. And when you talk about impermanence, I want to come back to my question, you know, Catholic or Buddhist or Quaker, Buddhism I think includes the idea of reincarnation. Christianity generally is thought not to include that, although there are some people who have a different point of view on that. Having hell kind of thing, Quakerism, when my early Quaker friends told me, well, you know, maybe she believes in heaven, certainly doesn't believe in hell. What are your thoughts about that after life or rebirth or whatever, as a complex mixture of parts of your body and different religions, your heart and your seat and your Buddhist mind? Do you have some points of view on those that are your own? Oh, my goodness, I'm not a great speculator on such things. And the word "believe" is becoming increasingly vexed for me because what I'm teaching myself to say when I hear the word is "believe," is what do you commit to. In fact, this is what Marcus Borg talks about the word "believe" as meaning. Beloving, he takes it back to the root of the Anglo-section word for "beloving." So what do you want to be loved? What do you want to commit to? Well, I'm not sure I want to commit to a discussion of afterlife because I have no clue. So I commit to my life as a practical down-to-earth gardener, ecologist, gardener/ecologist, and I keep looking and observing. I don't know how a person can say I believe in reincarnation, for example. I guess I could say one has evidence now and again, although not a lot of personal evidence, in my case, for some kind of ingrained memory. You know, the sense that one has when it's a little ahead of the game because somehow, while I'm thinking about a little boy who once said to me, I played the violin before I knew you. I thought that was one of those extraordinary comments that sometimes children make as though they had been here before. This boy was very gifted, and as I say, he was a little ahead of the game with his music. So, you know, you sort of pile up information like that and say, "Well, that's interesting, but I could never bring it to the status of "believe." You said that you were very engaged as a Catholic, way back in the '60s when you were coming of age. Had you ever considered going and becoming a nun? Well, I think it's all there in the books. I was in the noveget for two-and-a-half years, so I did, in fact, try that out, found it not to be for me. You said two-and-a-half years. I think noveget is typically three years. What led you to pull out of that? I'm really trying to find out what your spiritual path is. Because related to activism, I think that nuns and priests are some of the great activists I've known. They are, and my children would echo that they went through Catholic schools, and their idea of Catholicism is nothing like what we learned in school. If you say the word Catholicism to either of my children, they will think activism, nuns on the barricades, you know, they're very well brought up in that by the nuns, and I'm really grateful for their education. Nuns weren't terribly activist when I was in school, and I was torn, as I think I said earlier, between what was called in those days, strictly the cloistered or contemplative life, which is what I really wanted to do. I feel very called to that very young, and an active order, which is a teaching order. I entered an active order, a teaching order, because my family would have been just heartbroken if I had "entered" the cloistered, because they thought that was such a waste. First of all, and they also thought they would never see me again. They just didn't understand it. And I was only 18 years old, so I definitely went into the teaching order thinking that that would be the best of all possible worlds. It really wasn't for me. I never quite felt congruent with it. And when I left in my mistress of Navasas, who was a very prescient woman, she said, "I don't think that you're cut out for this life." She said, "I don't think you're cut out for marriage either." And her thought was that I was just so, I mean, so obviously an artist. I was so modern maniacally involved, always, in some project that would keep me up all night, so I was always overtired and found it difficult to live by a rule, which wanted everybody to do the same thing at the same time. It was a very bad none, in other words, much as I loved it and respected it. I have a chapter in one of my books, I can't remember which one, called "Failed Navas." Interestingly enough, back in the '80s, when I was looking down in Milwaukee, part of the Friends Meeting there, out of our group of 20, 30, 40 people, there, three were women who had stopped by the end of their novicia to it. And then Catholic nuns and then stopped, so you're in a lot of good, quick accompaniment. I think I am. Well, let's go to one more facet of your life, and that is pottery. Tell me about what that is and what's that related to your spiritual practice and your activism. I found myself writing about that a lot in the love of impermanent things because it was at the time that I had become truly immersed in my pottery, in my learning to be a potter, that the war came on the scene. I had been doing that since college, but about 10 years ago became obsessed, as I tend to do with it, and was particularly in awe at that time and still of the work of Warren McKenzie, who emerged somehow during that terrible time around 2001. You know, the person who just kept doing his craft, he was having a fair number of exhibits just then, and he used to just go and look at that craft, and it was just as nothing else could comfort any of us, I think, during that time. Just seeing, to return to an idea, I've expressed already, a man doing what he does with absolute integrity. That was a great witness for me, just that act of making. Now, of course, there's lots of metaphors you could attach to pottery, it has to do with grounding and the earth and all of those things, and in fact, I think all of those are important. It's also a place where, when you've done it enough, although not at first, you can, I think, truly lose yourself, yourself, and just become some rhythmic motion, some motion of spirit, some motion of the earth. And now that's just very, that's very lovely and comforting. It's the perfect antidote to mind chasing itself. One of my thoughts is that our world is entirely too busy, too focused on get, get, get, you know, the rat race type thing, and you seem to invite people in the area of contemplative, whether it's by your pottery, by your music, or by your writings. You're inviting them in that direction. Is that your critique of society? Or what do you think, you know, what the world needs now is fill in the blank? My goodness, the world acts like it has intelligent purpose. I'm using the world in the biblical sense in the sense of being a sort of trap for the spiritual aspirations of people. The world acts like it has an intelligence, and I would say a malevolent intelligence that's bound to make people work too hard to distract them from their inner lives and from the joy of simple dailiness, just a cup of tea, or the word was a friend, or the extended conversation instead of the conversation on the cell phone that is multitasking. It acts as though our capital W world is driving some purpose to take us away from ourselves, and I think most of us think at least that we can't avoid this. You know, I mean, I love my physician and my male carrier. I don't see how I can say to these lovely people, "Well, you really should sit down on this street and meditate for a while because they're very engaged in the work of doing what they have to do." So I don't want to preach about it, but yes, I think that whatever space we can allow into our lives, whatever quiet we can allow into our lives, and if we don't, you know, we're starving. It's as though we're in the midst of this world that offers so many spaces of beauty and transcendence, and we're just -- we're like anorexic toward the world. We are not eating the dinner that's put before us, but as I said, I'm not preaching or blaming. I think there's something in the spirit of the world in the bad sense that's driving people toward this, and they almost come into a state of addiction and can't any more discriminate out that they are being driven and compulsive, but they think that this is just the way things are. It's not the way things deeply are. Well, it's great to have your books here to remind us of some of our options, the choices you've made and the things that you write about, the things that you care about are inspirational to us. I want to thank you, Mary Rose, for sharing them with us through your writings and with us here today on Spirit in Action. Well, thank you, Marcus, and my great pleasure. That was Mary Rosa Riley, my guest for today's Spirit in Action. She's author of a number of books and other publications, including The Peaceable Classroom, The Barn at the End of the World, the apprenticeship of a Quaker Buddhist Shepherd, and a collection called Half Wild Poems. Her latest release is The Love of Impermanent Things, A Threshold Ecology. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.