It’s time to hear from Jan Phillips again. It is hard to catch up with her these days. She has been on the road constantly with her creativity, message and love across the country.
I was looking for some seed ideas to pour forth into my current creative project and this is one of her phrases that took rest in my heart: …”Me falling into this featherbed of forgetfullness,…” from Jan.
So here is a short section of her poetry and prose I am offering from her latest, best-selling book, No Ordinary Time, the Rise of Spiritual Intelligence and Evolutionary Creativity, pages 74-75.
“To create is to make something whole from the pieces of our lives, and in the process, to become more whole ourselves. It is a healing act, a leave-taking from the chaos as we move from the choppy surface toward the stillness of the center. What was the last thing you created? What pieces were you putting together? Was it healing?”
(Yes, for Sue, it was healing. For in my doing of this one small piece of creation, that very act simply let me know I had not forsaken the completion of the whole project that has had a long standing calling in my soul).
It would not become, as the lyrics of one of Anne Murray’s songs said: …. “before the children of my mind become the orphans of my soul.” This creative child work will be born whole at some future date.
“Into your hands, I commend my failures,
my rash judgments, my criticisms,
my proneness for separation,
my harsh opinions.
Into the bowl of your cosmic lap
I heave my ten thousand undigested sorrows,
my tempests of thoughtlessness,
my ramblings of misery, chaos, lonliness.
Lies, lies all of them!
Me falling into this featherbed of forgetfullness:
Oh, what a sight!
Remove all mirrors when I flail like this,
when I become a lost one
wandering in the dark.
“Imagine that when we’re born, each one of us comes to earth with the radiance of, say a hundred watt bulb. That’s our natural state — 100 watts. As we go through life, our job is to maintain that brightness, and even improve it if we can. What dims it, we learn through experience, is negativity, anger, resentments, regrets. What brightens it is harmony, balance, joy.” (Jan Phillips)
I fly on these words of Jan to the upstairs bedroom in the old Wisconsin farmhouse where, as a young grandchild, I enjoyed all the gifts a real featherbed had to give.
And reflecting on Jan’s words, I think the image of a featherbed of forgetfullness is a great place for my negativity, anger, resentments, regrets to fall…..For my drama to be swallowed up… for my chaos to disappear…for my ramblings to be drown out…for my undigested sorrows to take flight and leave me….for my thoughtlessness to be converted by the softness of the feather quills…. for my lonliness to fall through the depths and width of the feather filling….and for my misery to vanish in the feathery, forgiving down that accepts and molds to my body’s form.
Be gone, all you lies and in the morning I will replace you with a new dawn of harmony, balance and joy. Let me arise with true love for myself and for others as is the Will of the Divine. Let me think like the 100 watt bulb and experience the radiance of it. Let me speak the words of good I want fulfilled in my life and the good I want to see created in the world.
I am lucky enough to know, in child-like fashion, the sensual loveliness the feather bed provides. What an open invitation it held for a child at night, weary from the day’s field-roaming adventures. What a playground, it was as though fluffy while Cumulus clouds were my playmates as I sprang about it.
It is nice to think of a feather bed wiping away all the ill-effects and results of forgetting who I truly am — the results of feeling lonely, critical, confused, judgmental, miserable and sorrowful — just as easily as it accepted and comforted me, the small child.
I can lay these defects of character down gently, or even with the celebration of a big leap, landing right in the middle of them, knowing that I can awaken and remember — in any new moment — the Truth of who I really am.
That’s putting the pieces together. That’s healing.
Napkinwriter 