A cou­ple of years ago, Dar­bella and I watched a movie called “Rocks with Wings.” It’s the story of a Navajo girls’ bas­ket­ball team.

I want to quote an arti­cle about the movie and where I’m going with this. The arti­cle is from “The Bea­con,” the stu­dent news­pa­per of Mass­a­chu­setts Col­lege of Lib­eral Arts, and is writ­ten by Tara Moyna. (see here)

“The film por­trays the Lady Chief­tains fall from and rise to fame in their home­town of Ship­wreck, New Mex­ico. The Lady Chief­tains are one of the Navajo’s most famous wom­ens’ high school bas­ket­ball teams. The film fol­lows the cre­ation, devel­op­ment, destruc­tion, and reuni­fi­ca­tion of the team and their coach.”

This is a feel-good movie that is also an explo­ration of Navajo cul­ture and world-view. The two themes that re-occur are:

1. every­thing is a cir­cle and
2. the mean­ing of the spirit line in Navajo weaving.

The Wheel is sim­i­lar to the Bud­dhist con­cept of Samsara

The cir­cle part is interesting—the Navajo see life as a cir­cle or wheel, and all things arise out of the cen­tre. Past, present and future are inter­wo­ven in a tapes­try of flow and movement—not lin­ear causal­ity. Thus, every­thing in the world, and every­thing in the per­son, is con­nected. There is no sense of causality—no sense that one thing has to lead to another—rather, there is sim­ply a flow of one moment into the next The move­ment flows out from the hub, cen­tre, or still-point of the cir­cle or wheel.

In Bud­dhism, there is super­fi­cially a “cause and effect” theme at play—karma—which actu­ally just means, “action.” “What goes around, comes around” is closer to the Bud­dhist world-view, and sounds a bit wheel-like, eh?

Life moves through a cycle of birth, aging, sick­ness, and death, and then the whole thing hap­pens again. Except for the point—nir­vana, wak­ing up, is the result of exit­ing the wheel of sam­sara through the door that is “right there”—through bodhi, through wis­dom. It is wis­dom that has noth­ing to do with being smart. It is wis­dom that sees through the maya, the illu­sion, that we are trapped, and that we are real. The Nava­jos have a sim­i­lar idea, con­tin­ued in the sec­ond the­matic ele­ment in the movie— Navajo weav­ing and the Spirit Line..

Quot­ing the “Bea­con” arti­cle again,

“The ladies have a dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of per­fec­tion. Like a rug weaver, the young girls under­stand that per­fec­tion should always be pur­sued but never achieved. If per­fec­tion is achieved, then what else is there to strive for? That leaves no room for experience.”

“A rug weaver always weaves one line into her rug which stands out from the rest of the pat­tern. It appears to be a flaw, but is actu­ally very inten­tional. This is known as the spirit line. This line is woven into the rug so the pat­tern isn’t per­fect. The line leaves room for cre­ativ­ity. If the weaver achieves per­fec­tion she can no longer receive cre­ative inspi­ra­tion because she’s already per­fected it. The spirit line is there to let the good spir­its into the art and let the evil ones out.”

The spirit line is the path for the weaver’s spirit to leave the rug. A Navajo weaver assumes that their spirit goes into the rug he or she is weav­ing (a lit­eral belief in “putting one’s heart and soul into it.”) Once the bor­der is in place, a por­tion of the weaver’s spirit remains trapped in the rug. So the weaver, as the work pro­gresses, weaves in a sin­gle strand that, at first glance seems to be either a flaw or a mis­take. This spirit line allows the weaver’s spirit a path of escape. The line runs (again…) from the cen­tre of the rug to the out­side edge.

Dar­bella and I also watched a movie called “Flight from Death,” based upon the work of Ernest Becker, who wrote a book called “The Denial of Death.”

The film clearly demon­strates that the result of our abject fear of death is mind­less defense of the totems of our cul­ture, and a cor­re­spond­ing increase in vio­lence against those per­ceived to be other. The idea is that rather than deal with our mor­tal­ity, we fix­ate on sym­bols that we believe will be eter­nal.
Flags, reli­gious books, polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies,
and racial stereo­typ­ing come to mind.

I watched this film imme­di­ately after “Rocks with Wings.” I saw a con­nec­tion, which is non-coincidentally a thread that runs through all of what we write and believe.

In the movie, the com­men­ta­tor says some­thing to the effect of,

“Maybe rather than fear­ing death, we should focus on how to live life.”

The scary part is that to really live life requires fully accept­ing our mor­tal­ity, not as an abstract con­cept, but as a present real­ity— and to live life with­out the props of exter­nal res­cue.

One of the sci­en­tists notes the mean­ing­less­ness of life, and that we are ani­mals who will die, decay, and ‘are no more.’ We use exter­nal props, and often reli­gion, to avoid deal­ing with this stark reality.

Yet, as Marx noted, “reli­gion is the opi­ate of the peo­ple,” he real­ized that “mind­less reli­gion” was an avoid­ance mech­a­nism designed to numb us from the stark real­ity of the absur­dity of our lives. This is not to say that we need not or should not con­struct val­ues and mean­ing. It’s just to indi­cate that to suc­cess­fully live a fully human life, we have to find and acknowl­edge and let go of the root of our anx­i­ety.

Sim­ply put, the loca­tion, the locus, of both our fear and our sal­va­tion is right there in the cen­tre of our being.

Just like a Navajo wheel.

Zen has a way to exper­i­ment with all of this. It is this: sit down, and have a breath. In other words, come fully into this moment. This moment, like the cen­tre of a wheel, is con­nected to all of the other moments (which we call past and future) — yet past and future are not real — they only exist in the present moment, with the present breath.

We cre­ate the fic­tion of past and future to numb our­selves to the real­ity that we exist only in the here and now.

Zen says, be present in the breath. If you do so, if you remain present, you elim­i­nate the need for some­one (some god) to come to the res­cue – to tell you what to do – to make your owies all bet­ter. The fear and the ter­ror and the ennui all dis­ap­pear in this moment.

In a sense, then, the escape from the dark fear of death is as the Navajo describe—from the cen­tre out­ward. Rather than being “meat pup­pets” (a favourite expres­sion of my brother-in-law) we see that what sets us apart from other ani­mals is our cre­ativ­ity and curios­ity, topped by our tow­er­ing intel­lects. Focused on the mys­tery and joy of sim­ply suck­ing breath, we are set free from the walls of mor­tal­ity and given the gift of spirit.

I know that many of you hold fer­vent reli­gious beliefs, and this is not to den­i­grate them or to sug­gest that you dump them—although they may fall away of their own accord. It’s to say that reli­gion does not deal with the fear of or denial of death. It pro­vides an escape by mis­di­rec­tion. Rit­ual becomes solace, and cheap faith leads to unimag­in­able cru­elty, war­fare, death and vio­lence. Just have a look around you, and have a breath – don’t be defen­sive – just have a look at the root behind much of the war­fare out there today.

The gift of the spirit is peace and focus. In Chi­nese med­i­cine, spirit (energy, chi) is cre­ated in the dan tiens. Energy enters the body and is refined in these energy fur­naces. The path of this energy is up and down – along the spine. Chakra the­ory states some­thing similar.

One exer­cise we teach is to breathe into the lower dan tien, which is located 2 inches below the navel, and 2 inches inside the body. If you visu­al­ize this area and direct your breath to there, you can actu­ally feel an increase in energy. You can then direct the energy, say, to your hands, and use the increased energy as you do Body­work on a friend.

Another inter­est­ing thing – you can direct the energy up your spine to your heart. The exit point of the heart merid­ian is in the palms of your hands, so you can then breathe the energy to there. This energy chan­nel is hor­i­zon­tal. (If you are standing.)

Notice – just like with a Navajo rug, there is a warp and woof. One run­ning ver­ti­cal, one run­ning horizontal.

The goal of our indi­vid­ual exis­tence is to take what is inside and direct it out­ward for heal­ing and peace-making. One of the best ways to trade heart energy is to send it out through the palms of your hands, with a hug!

Life changes when we bring our atten­tion inward, let the exter­nal world off the hook (no blam­ing, no look­ing for res­cue) and sim­ply focus on the immense energy of being alive. We can accept our human­ity and mor­tal­ity, and use the power of the here and now to change the only uni­verse we have a say about – our inter­nal uni­verse. We can focus our atten­tion, with each breath, to the build­ing and strength­en­ing of our cre­ativ­ity, direc­tion, mean­ing and purpose.

We may be fleshy, mor­tal, dying, and with­out mean­ing, but with the right focus, even rocks can fly.

This week, notice how you dis­tract your­self from your­self – and from your gifts. Cre­ate a heart and a spirit line in your life, and embrace it all. There is no exter­nal escape, and death awaits us all. So, in the mean time, put your heart and soul into it – and live!