Graham Brown's refelctions on Invisible Connections

I remember that unmercifully dry and barren summer of 2001, in the usually quaint and pastoral towns of Southern Ontario.  I was working an organic plot in my gap year, and the drought demanded of us patience, submission, relentlessness and an inhuman quantity of energy that nearly wore us to the core.

What Martina did not say in her Invitation is that among the 1600 hormone-infused children she herded daily, during her life as a high school teacher - before this epic of life lost and life found begins - there was a small but fortunate group of students who looked to her as more than a favourite teacher.  She was a woman of wisdom and power, a healer, and everything that we would have wanted from a perfect parent.  She acted with sensitivity, spoke with gentleness and insight, and was possibly the only person in our adolescent lives - so starved for meaningful experience - who believed we each had a soul worth nurturing.

We, none of us, expected her to be challenged with the death of the soul closest to hers.  She had certainly done nothing to deserve it.  And those of us who kept faith with her in the days that followed that tragic morning were all forced to do a lot of growing up and realize that justice is nothing but a human ideal.  Providence neither rewards the virtuous nor punishes the unmindful.  Rather life, the plaything of time, endlessly challenges us to lose the graven image of our temporal self, so that we may remake it for the next moment, only to see it dissolve again.  Unto every passing moment we must die, and with each new breath be born anew.

The problem with life, which I didn't suspect as an adolescent, is that things happen to you which are irreversible.  When we hunger for experience, we often get what we wish for.  And the more difficult experiences we accumulate, the more difficult it becomes to understand ourselves as one cohesive unity - an identity, so to speak.  This is of cardinal importance in Martina's lesson of living with the paradox.

I have been privileged, in reading this manuscript, to relive Martina's journey through the abyss as seen through her own eyes, as experienced inside her heart and mind.  It is a rare gift of intimacy for an author to appear so naked before her readers.  Her book is a holy book - not a book of lessons, or a self-help book, not a how-to book, or an inspirational book, (even though it is also instructive, therapeutic, practical and inspiring) - Martina's memoir of her most challenging years is an honest and uncompromising record of the soul experiencing all the divinity and the horror of life.  You don't need to sharpen your awareness, or try to understand the poems as literary puzzles constructed with set meanings.  Just let your experience collide with hers and allow it to transform you.  Afterwards - will you grow wings, or roots, or seven heads?  No.  Maybe.  Probably not.  But you will be a deeper person, more appreciative, more loving.

Read this book as a mystic reads a sacred text: do not seek to understand the philosophical construct behind the image of the nothingness being full of love.  But keep the image in the treasure chest of your mind, and let it inform and illuminate your real experiences as it may.

Martina is the most real person I know.  Her compassionate, loving nature and nurturing presence come not from an ideal of how the world ought to be, but rather from an absolute honesty and a conviction to be true to her whole self - body, mind and spirit.  And then to manifest that integrity in all aspects of her life.

Martina is intelligent and well-read.  You can see her literate soul plucking the pearls from an ocean of text, and holding them up to the light to awe us.  They echo and converse with her own deep experience, as companions on the journey, warm and friendly hands stretched across space and time.

Left to my own devices, I would likely make Martina into a Buddha or Dalai Lama figure.  (And it is true that her journey echoes the transformation of Siddhartha Gautama through his close encounter with life's iniquities.)  But Martina would not allow this - and it would ultimately be doing her a disservice.  Her memoir does not mythologize her experience.  It is frank and real.  And yet, it is also infused with the transformative power our imaginative and creative consciousness has on our life's events.  It does not lose the distinction, as some religious traditions do, between material and symbolic consciousness, but rather demonstrates how weaving these stands delicately, one over the other, can make up the resplendent tapestry of the fullness of our understanding.

But I see I am harping on the heights, when in all honesty, where I feel most resonant with this work is in the depths of the chapters that make up the Descent.  This shows me where I am in my own understanding.  I also understand from the Phoenix Rising chapters that there are places my awareness can go that I have not yet dreamt of.

What you take from your encounter with Martina's inner journey is apt to be different from my experience.  For me, what she says is powerful - yes - but I am more focussed on the how and why of what she does.  And that is honour and care for her soul; honour and accept her experience for the truth of what it is, no matter how painful; honour her relationships and life events by investing them with a value and a meaning that is singular and honest; and finally, question her faith, and all that has ever sustained her, even unto willingness to lose her life, in order to find it.

Graham Brown, April 2009