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Back to Overview of all sculptures in the fourfold library of "InteGRATion
into GRATeFULLness"
InteGRATion into GRATeFULLness
Fine-tuning to my Presence
2007_07_29; last update: 2012_01_25
[re-studied and still not understood entirely - on June 6, 2010]
SHAME'S TASK and CURSE
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night before the day of "Nebo-Let-Go"
in "Succah
in the desert", on July 15, 2006 I wanted to spend near the altar-like rock on the "Hill of the Angels' Flight" (see above), where Irene Sonnabend, my pupil, friend and very first Succah-guest, used to sleep in the cold month of February 1990. Towards the end of the night I had a dream, which had to do with a louse crawling on the genitals of my baby-daughter. The genitals were closed!.  During the 3 weeks between that "Hammer on my Head" on June 26, 2006, and the declaration of my Letting Go of Realizing my Desert-Peace-Vision on an exterior level, Irene Sonnabend suddenly started to learn using e-mail and wrote to me, 2 letters, before the contact got interrupted again. But her intuition as to what I was experiencing, helped me immensely. The metaphor of my new state-of-being was sort of "encoded" Nebuchadnezar's Dream, Daniel 4, which suddenly came to my attention. She wrote about the task and the curse of SHAME: "Aber daß es so ist, daß der Mensch das Tier, das Spezifische des Tieres auch in sich selbst, verachtet, das hat vielleicht zu tun mit seinem Wahnsinnig-werden-müssen und mit der Scham, die dann nicht mehr Intimes und Heiliges schützt ( ich denke, ihre originäre Aufgabe), sondern lebensverhindernd und lebensvergällend wirkt" |
I began to
understand, that despite all my observation of the pain of shame, -
its task was still a secret to me.
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2013-05-14- I'm quoting from
"Hidden in your face" |
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| the shame
color strangely staining the beautiful composition between "crater" and mountain, but also bridging between them. |
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I have been wondering,
In any case, following the re-reading of my diaries
and letters in July 2006
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The first example is one of the last experiences:
It's my friend Yanina's seventieth birthday:
I make an enormous effort to travel to her and be with her for 2 hours.
The meeting is deeply satisfying and fulfilling.
Its main content:
the
song that had created itself -
a celebration of our friendship of 41 years.
I combine singing with studying the biblical connotations in the song.
I know Yanina yearns for the way, I understand the biblical wordings.
Though I could have known, that a time of grace is a time of grace,
I stretched it, back home I sat for hours and hours,
to sculpt everything we had learnt and talked together, in writing,
in
an appendix to the page of her song.
I added photos from my archive, mainly about our twins.
I sent her the link.
I was eager to go on with that deep communication ,
to go on with sharing the mystical connection between biblical words,
the exact Hebrew words, so washed down, distorted in translations.
And then - it happened again, it happened even with my closest friend:
emptiness, nothingness, no understanding or even the motivation to understand.
And then - guilt, embarrassment, and an awkward appeasing on her part.
This is the last thing I want someone to feel towards me.
It's the very opposite of what I want somebody to feel with him/herself.
So I fell into the abyss of shame.
I had done it again!
So eager to share myself,
so fervently wishing to teach what helps me to live,
so ardently desiring to be understood and received,
I did it again!
I overwhelmed my friend.
And I felt naked, red with shame,
as if I had acted like an exhibitionist.
Indeed, that was a term, my husband attached to me once:
"exhibitionist!"
The second example are two Powerpoint Presentations I made in July 2002
for the birthdays of my children-in-love, my sons' wifes and my daughter's
husband,
sharing-teaching what for me was and is the most important learning in this
life-time and time-period,
sculpting it on the background of beautiful photos of mine
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As if I had to drive this feeling to the extreme,
I made another Powerpoint Presentation, a week later, for another birthday,
for another grownup child-in-love, Efrat.
Though the first presentation was dedicated to all three children-in-love,
I e-mailed it only to Uri, my daughter's husband , to his birthday,
and I never mailed this or the one for Efrat to Ra'ayah, my son's wife.
Shame had, by then, taken over completely.
Efrat, my eldest son's second wife, is closest to me in understanding nowadays,
- I stress "nowadays" - for there were times of deep understanding
with both, Uri and Ra'ayah,
but still, looking at this poor effort of sculpting a little manual for "Vibrating
Feelings" for her,
I feel ridiculous and pathetic even now:
"A proposal how to train feelings for my daughter-in-love"
The vibration of moon-light on the waves of my
Salt Sea is one of my best photos.
The caption I chose was : "Vibration of
Feeling".
This photo and the next ["Star Dust Clouds"]
are from "Webshot". The text on both is an adaptation of Genesis
2:6
"and [he] blew into his nostrils breath of life, and
the man became a living soul"
"and she blew into her feeling breath of life
and the feeling became a living being"
Come, my daughter-in-love,
recruit your body
to breathe in and to breathe out
your feelings.
This is actually a nicely sculpted wisdom:
"Don't try to get rid of your
feeling,
and don't push it to make it change,
only vibrate it, so it may live."
All the sounds on these two presentations got
lost, so I don't know, what Efrat was supposed to hear, while watching this
sunrise above my Salt Sea.
Fortunately people tend to soon forget my
shameful "outpours",
But my problem is - what is the task of shame?
Because if I don't understand its task, I'll forever experience it as a curse.
But first the third example - which occurred in May 1992.
It was in May 1992, and Ram
Eisenberg wanted me to take a rest.
"I'll act as host of the many Succah guests around
Independance-Day,
and you just take a time out with yourself - in the desert - for three days."
He took the Succah truck and drove me and our newly
invented and fabricated pyramidal tent
to Nakhal Kabir, a beautiful wadi, lonely, because it belonged to the "Firing-Zone"
of the Army.
There I let go a bit of all the suffocating pressure of my vision and work.
And it was in this solitude and quietude that my three old friends visited
me,
Moses and Eliyah and Jeremia.
A
song created itself - an exquisite composition of three painful destinies,
and the promises of the One, who held them in his claws, or so they felt,
the promises, that there would be partners
and peers around them,
who would stand at their sides and carry with them their burdens.
Promises....
I was totally shaken by this song, and I still am, whenever I sing it.
But why "for Heaven's sake" did I need to share this upheaval of
my soul?
And with whom?
In a letter, which I wrote right there and then , in the pyramidal tent!
To people, who had been very nice guests in the "Succah", nothing
more.
I don't even remember their names.
An elderly couple from Naharia, from the old German-Jewish community there.
Maybe this was the connection that my yearning soul was tempted to try:
the communality withh people from a similar cultural background.
What happened?
A short reaction, I don't know in what way, if on the phone or on a post-card,
in which the elderly woman expressed her uncomfortable feeling,
"Befremdung" would be a good German term for that,
"why did you share this with US?"
Meaning: "are we that close?"
And I never heard from them again.
Oh that rush of shame-blood all over my body and soul....
Isn't the shame-color the harbringer
of dawn and day?
Das Erwachen des Schamgefuehls des Kindes,
ist es nicht das Erwachen des Bewusstseins seiner selbst?
Adam's Sich Schaemen war es nicht das Erwachen seines Selbst-Bewusstsein?
Aber ist nicht das Selbst-Bewusstsein aus dem Scham-GEFUEHL
das, was uns das Annehmen des Fuehlens so schwer macht?
Some spiritual e-mail:
"WE don't have time for fear, we don't have the luxury of self-doubt"
Well, I, Christa-Rachel, do have time for fear and the luxury of self-doubt
and even and most of all for SHAME
and the fear of SHAME
and the fear of causing people to feel SHAME because of ME
The Shame-Color in the Aurea Borealis, the Northern
Light, and in a Nature Scene in Oregon, USA
A Sharing of Shame - August 4, 2006 - between 20
year old M. and 68 year old Rachel
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In my letter to Martin Fincke 1974 I wrote: "Offenheit, |
Andarean
Theory p. 500
Often, when we follow the inner path, we have a tendency to have our fellowship only with those who have like minds, drawing to us a battery; drawing to us those who can help support that which we can believe. (Likes attract likes law). It is appropriate, however,
to go outside and to take chances; |
to former
sculpture of my present
to next sculpture
of my present
September 3, 2011 -
see "Heaven-to-Earth"-5
"By chance", there was some free space (maximum
1300 kb!) on this page about SHAME.
I discern the color pattern not only of the cat [see the 'shame-sculpture'
on Sept.3],
but how it merges with the gouache colors on the covers of my veranda-mattrasses:
"Look, Rachel! This cat has simply entered our
court-yard", jubilated
my landlords' kids, Lior and Amit
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 On the short path through my desert-soil-garden On my veranda mattresses, colored by myself, finally on my only tree - the pomegranate tree. |
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Since Irene Sonnabend, with whom I had a challenging
encounter in
Ireland in summer 2010,
is so much connected to the "Shame-Theme" of 2006,
I'm inserting some re-discovered pretty images of Irene in the Succayah
in 1990 and 1991..
see more about the work with palmfronds in "Integration
of two Periods in my Life"
She had been our first guest, before even all the succahs
were built, and lived in a succah, which flew away in a storm.
She came again at another time, with her friend Karin, and I still enjoy the
blanket-covers, which I had asked them to bring me,
but which were "Germany-sized" and too small for the "Israel-sized"
blankets we had in the Succayah.
 This was probably the third time, Irene came to the Succayah, in 1991, since on the original picture- next to the guest Irene is listening to, I'm discerning the hostess Judith, one of my first volunteers. See more photos of Irene in the "Integration of two time-periods" |
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Note on September 3, 2011:
After the sculpture of that cat above, I'm not suprised
to detect Larqa, my dog, on the last picture on this page, a picture taken
21 years ago..
They are teaching us now , more than ever,
the pets and the cows and the birds , all over the world at these changing
times...
to former sculpture
of my present
to next sculpture
of my present
2013 May-June
There's again contact between me and Irene, started by her,
and in honor of this communication - difficult as it is -
I want to insert a letter by Irene, written in 1987, when she was 21
