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Placement
| Inner
focus |
feet |
| Outer
focus |
natural micro-universes |
| Color |
violet |
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Welcome
Feature from Minneapolis, Minnesota
Dreams of Placement
Why Feet?
Book Recommendations
Placement in the News?
Who’s
Who in Placement
The Child's Garden
Poetry
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From the Editor |
This month we focus on Placement, the first of the Ascending Principles (numbered 0-9). Placement co-emerges with Movement as a fundamental aspect of the realm of form, represented by such words as “repose” or “pause.” It is essential to our existence on every level, and at the same time difficult to capture. This month, observe how many ways you discern and use Placement in the course of an ordinary day.
NEWS! We’re happy to announce our forthcoming online class:
SPIRITUAL PARENTING: Your Child’s Invisible Garment
Beginning March 1, a 16-week series of classes and online discussions will be led by Connie Kaplan and Tamar Frankiel. These two mothers – who raised 8 children between them – will share the resources they have gathered from studying the 30 spiritual principles to understand the development of children and teens. Limited enrollment! Go to our website at www.generosityincorporated.com for details.
Thanks to Cammie Doty and Carol Bucklew for their help on this issue of our newsletter!
Tamar Frankiel, Editor
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Feature Article from Minneapolis, Minnesota |
This month's principle is Placement. One of our dream sisters with Moon in Placement describes her experience of the principle this way: |
Placement works in my life every day. I am very conscious of how my house is arranged and who is arranged in it.
My husband and I do a lot of entertaining in our home, and I love to give dinner parties. It is meditative and ceremonial for me. There is nothing I love to do more than chop vegetables, make sauces, and iron cloth napkins. I do my best thinking and praying during these pre-dinner prep times. I love to create a space in which magical things happen for my guests. I consciously prepare the party space with my guests in mind.
People often ask me how I do it, how I put it all together and manage to take my house from a state of total chaos to an environment that is organized, comfortable and beautiful. I don’t really know. It’s easy for me and it just unfolds. I can see the principle of Placement and its colors at work in these moments.
Placement tells me how to arrange the table, arrange the seating, and helps with timing. I think Placement is what brings different combinations of people together into the right place at the right time so that amazing things happen.
Violet, the basic color of Placement, is the ceremonial frequency that guides me as I bring order to the chaos. It is easy for me to plan the menu, time my cooking, determine the shopping list, set the table, figure out which dishes and wine glasses to use, and design a musical playlist to match the menu.
One of my favorite things about entertaining is that after the food is prepared and the table is ready, I like to get out of the way. My house is perfect for this. Our living room, dining room, and kitchen are all one big “great” room. This arrangement allows me to work in the kitchen without being away from my guests. Like a fly on the wall. I can be quiet, observe, listen, and hold the space for my guests, yet my guests never feel that I am stuck in the kitchen. Placement makes room for everyone.
--Jen Kitzenberg
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Dreams of Placement |
We
can learn about the principles by examining our dreams.
Here are two dreams of Placement:
At a busy beach area where Melrose hits the beach [in waking life this is not correct geography], three groups are gathering, arriving from different places. I’m trying to get them all to the same restaurant, and I don’t know the exact directions. One group ends up having burgers at the “Buddha Image” while I’m trying to get everyone to the “Baba Buddha.” And when another group finds out there are burgers, they want to go there. After many cell phone calls it seems we’re all headed for the Baba Buddha.
The dreamer is trying to orchestrate Placement, with aspects of an enlightened being as “x marks the spot.” The use of “cell phones” suggests the outer focus of Placement, namely “natural micro-universes.” Cells, whether intrahuman like muscle or bone cells, interhuman like terrorist cells, or technological like the cells that connect our telephones, are resonating, communicating, and organizing our world.
Placement exams. I had to take two of them. I thought they were two hours each, but in the second one I find out they are two hours total. I have to finish by 10 a.m. and I have only five or ten minutes left. I finish one question quickly. Now I have to read a magazine article of the New Yorker type, and describe eight of the ten people mentioned there.
The Principle announces itself directly in this dream. Interestingly, it turns out to be full of numbers, mentioning four 2s, three 10s, a 5 and an 8. Sometimes such dreams are alluding to the numbers of the principles, but here they seem to suggest various dimensions – quantity (number of exams and people), ordinality (first, second), and time (minutes and hours). The “exam” seems to be an initiation into a multi-dimensional universe.
Look
in your dreams for references to the feet, walking, or dancing
... to finding one’s way in complex settings . . . to the colors violet or rose.
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Why
the Feet? |
“The paradox of the foot: the basis of stability, and at the same time dynamic, with a complex motion in which the vertical and the horizontal interact” (Avivah Zornberg, The Beginnings of Desire). Placement is paradoxical like the foot: it locates us in space and time, yet there is no static place; everything in the universe is in motion. Moreover, as a spiritual principle, Placement is also the point at which the vertical and the horizontal interact, where Divine energy intersects with human community, human creations, and human celebrations – temples, labyrinths, pyramids; ceremonies of moon cycle, sun cycle, and life cycle.
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Book Recommendations |
Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock
Looking for Atlantis or some other ancient civilization may not appeal to you as it does to Graham Hancock. But whether you like that idea or not, this beautifully photographed book of important archeological sites will pull you into the magic of Placement as the ancients saw it – that the arrangements of heaven should be mirrored on earth. With diagrams and good explanations, Hancock shows how constellations became the maps for earthly temples.
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
A New York Times best-seller, this book of romantic fiction grounds itself in three locations: Italy for eating, India for praying, Bali for loving. At the same time, the external places reveal internal places for self-discovery.
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Placement in the News |
Great places these days seem to be either taken over by tourism or sites of religious conflict. But, on the West Coast, we found a couple of examples of Placement attempting to manifest in a spiritual context:
- Headline: Community Peace Labyrinth Walk
Berkeley Partners for Parks (www.bpfp.org/news) has invested in Placement symbolism in a major way, currently using a Peace Labyrinth and creating a temporary “four directions/four virtues” installation. On December 16th, a Peace Walk will take place at the Community Labyrinth; at the winter solstice, guests can enjoy an introduction to the art installation in homage of Cesar Chavez. “The North and wisdom are common metaphors associated with Winter,” BPFP says, “as is the Tolerance needed to face the conflicts of life peacefully."
Photo of the Willard Middle School labyrinth at http://walkingberkeley.wordpress.com/2007/08/17
- Headline:
Unusual Public Artwork Makes Seattle First City to Have Ley-Line Map
http://www.geo.org/qa.htm#tof A group of artists identified 60 ley lines and 44 power centers within Seattle city limits. They regard these energetic structures as significant “because they can affect consciousness and uplift the human condition, the time-honored missions of art." Funded by the Seattle Arts Commission as one of three new projects designed to represent what Seattle as a city might become, the ley lines art project has aroused opposition by people who find it too much associated with religious or spiritual ideas.
Let us know if anything like this is happening in YOUR neighborhood!
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Who's Who in Placement |
Famous people through whom Placement came to life - these have Sun in Placement:
- Jeffrey Immelt, 1956-
CEO of General Electric, having assumed that position four days before 9/11 – a crucial placement in space and time. Immelt has kept his private life closed to the public, and considers his biography unremarkable.
- Diane Feinstein, 1933-
U.S. Senator from California, formerly mayor of San Francisco, who in her life has been the “first woman” in many political positions.
- William Shatner, 1931-
Canadian-born actor, best known as Captain Kirk, commander of “Starship Enterprise” in the Star Trek television series and later films.
- Gene Kelly, 1912-1996
Known for his energetic and athletic dancing and indefatigable rehearsing, Kelly ’s work was considered “the fulfillment of dance-film integration in the 1940s and 1950s."
- Sir Laurence Olivier, 1907-1989
Generally regarded as the greatest actor of the 20th century, Olivier was famous for his Shakespeare performances. Also a director, he founded the British National Theatre.
- Christian Dior, 1905-1957
French designer famous for creating shapes and silhouettes, using a huge amount of fabric, and making Paris the fashion center after World War II. He is quoted as saying, “I have designed flower women.”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930
British writer famous for his detective stories about Sherlock Holmes, he was also in his later years an advocate of Spiritualism (hmm. . . six planets in his 12th house). The epitaph on his grave says, “Steel True, Blade Straight – Patriot, Physician, Man of Letters."
- John Muir, 1838-1914
Scottish-born essayist, naturalist, conservationist. After walking from Michigan to Florida in 1867, he came to California and began traversing the Sierras. He is perhaps most famous for his writings on Yosemite, which he described as one of the greatest of Nature’s “special temples."
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7.
The Child's Garden |
“It’s so great to have my own place,” my son said to me over the phone a few weeks ago. “I woke up the other morning, with nothing to do except hang out here, and I just felt very, very happy.” Sam had felt terribly uprooted when we moved away from his birthplace at age 5, and again when we made a major move at age 10. Each time he complained bitterly and grieved for a long time. He created his own space in a garage when he was thirteen, and virtually lived there for a year. For the ten years after high school he was living in dorms, then back with the family. When he had the chance to get his own apartment with a friend, he eagerly took it on – then spent five years paying off the debt for furnishings, technology and the regular bills. Finally, in 2007, he had an apartment to himself and he could pay for it!
As a parent, I worried about what seemed his extreme attachment to places, his desire to withdraw and create a ‘cave’ for himself. The reason he moved back into the house from ‘his space’ in the garage was that our family therapist insisted it was not good for him; he was feeling too disconnected from the family. Then later I worried about the debt he had accumulated. The therapist may have been right – or not. Our son may have gone overboard – or not. She may have been right – or not. But I wish I had known, in those difficult moments, that he has Jupiter in Placement. To have his own special spot was to him a great blessing. When he’s there, he feels supported by the universe. --TF
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8. Poetry |
In honor of Placement, this month's poetry is an excerpt from T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943) , I: “Burnt Norton.” Available online at many sites, we used www.poetry.poetryx.com.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. . . .
. . . Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
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