For Joseph...on his commencement day. For all the graduates...

Joseph, my youngest child, graduated from Eckerd College yesterday - as we all watched the virtual celebration on our screens from Greenboro, St. Petersburg, Amelia Island.  (And my arms ached to hug him.) There are a billion ways my heart breaks open at this milestone, but for now....

For a New Beginning

by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

From John O’Donohue’s book
To Bless the Space Between Us

From shitty first drafts to digital gardens...BE FOUND

My brilliant and thoughtful f(F)riend and Quaker theologian Wess Daniels talked to me the other day on a walk in the woods with the ever dazzling Maia Dery about a place he's found between shitty first drafts and more fully formed thoughts.  He more eloquently put it this way on his wiki sight "Nurse Log notes" (can be found on his blog-link above - and what an incredible name for that wiki site eh? Look up Nurse Log):   "A digital garden is a place in-between your personal notes and final publications on blogs and articles.  It's a place where ideas get worked out, articulated and grow into something more useful later."  

I hope that I can tend to my garden here - it has really been neglected.  I've been afraid of fertilizing it, because maybe it just won't grow anything (or maybe it will).  I have always had hopes of this digital space being a community space - hence "a beautiful web" title.  Anyway, I'm not sure the words below fit into the "digital garden" space exactly yet - they may not be quite ready to move from shitty first draft to that space, but I'm tired of not starting.  And you have to be present to be found...

Be found..

Pausing long enough to accept the sun's morning light touching my cheek as it finds its way over and through the terrain of the backyard, through trees now embellished with leaves,  which backs up to parking lots, which backs up to streets and fields and neighborhoods and dumps and forests and creeks, and, and, and...

The leaves on the trees in this yard are playing with the sun's rays like a keyboard on my cheek.

I am being found - I am always being found.  Today I consent to it, embracing the disruption, dropping out of the noisy, bumpy, dangerous? roller coaster ride - pushed out, sought out--it doesn't matter (but it does).

Sounds are finding me.  I'm not alone.  I'm surrounded by birds (and so many others), but the birds are loud.  The many distinctive songs are finding my ears  - my body is available enough to hear the individual strains of their community chatter.  My voice can't ever compliment or harmonize or blend if my body isn't available to hear.

Being found - by my friends, the human ones too - is happening.  Quieting down, turning the volume down on the internal noise--really, letting it go.  Presence can meet presence then.  There is so much presence.

Things we say/I've "chanted"  for a long time without really knowing the truth of the words, now become clearer..."If I could only get out of my own way."  

Be found - I've (we've) been found all along.

Colors find me, plants find me, humidity, wind and breeze have waited patiently for me. How to express gratitude for having a body that's found?

Every leaf in the canopy of this little yard as far as I can see has a relationship with the sun.  So much is happening in the alchemy of their meeting.  Expanding, shimmering, fortifying their whole - our whole.  Isn't that amazing?  The sun is doing that with individual leaves.  There is so much more than leaves!

The fragrance from the Star Jasmine plant next to me on the patio takes me
time-traveling to other places, even other ways of being.  Without smashing my nose into the blooms (which I want to do as often as possible because of the time traveling ride that it takes me on) the fragrance finds its way, wafting across my face - to me, by me, finding me.  I catch the fragrance that finds me.  I can't hold it or keep it any longer than I can be available to it.  I can only ever so slightly hold it - like a song note - just suspended in my senses.  And then it's gone - but not really.

Rough pandemic notes March 28

I dreamed about a warm embrace last night and I savored it.

My Dad called me on Facetime for the first time.  There was something about that moment that made my heart break.  His willingness to try something new,  his fascination with the technology, our pulling together as the pandemic pulls us apart, his aging in this time and what it must be like to already feel some diminishing of body and scope of day to day life - and now this.  Now this.

There was a need for gentleness and connection yesterday with work folks - the calls all took a turn from the compulsion to get out ahead of the unknown, to chatting with deeper breaths-  about day to day things, to laughter and wondering together right on top of all of the fear.

And from my Wisdom Course work, someone offered this post.

Message from the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers
http://www.grandmotherscouncil.org/

"As you move through these changing times... be easy on yourself and be easy on one another. You are at the beginning of something new. You are learning a new way of being. You will find that you are working less in the yang modes that you are used to.

You will stop working so hard at getting from point A to point B the way you have in the past, but instead, will spend more time experiencing yourself in the whole, and your place in it.
Instead of traveling to a goal out there, you will voyage deeper into yourself. Your mother's grandmother knew how to do this. Your ancestors from long ago knew how to do this. They knew the power of the feminine principle... and because you carry their DNA in your body, this wisdom and this way of being is within you.

Call on it. Call it up. Invite your ancestors in. As the yang based habits and the decaying institutions on our planet begin to crumble, look up. A breeze is stirring. Feel the sun on your wings."

Heartbreak

When I turned 60 I started to take photos and post them on Instagram every day in an attempt to honor each one - to just be able to remember - to pay more attention to how I'm spending my days.  

On November 22, 2019, I didn't imagine days like this - even as 60 put into sharper focus the realities of chronos/linear time.  I have spent hours, days and dreamscape times thinking about my life, my legacy, my work to do before I die, hoping and praying that the Universe will show me the way to go and that I'll have the courage to get into the arena everyday.  Third chapter, relevance, aging. 

Now the days of being 60 have intersected with the days of living in the pandemic - days of the plague.  Everything, everything, everything is different - and - this everything was always so:  we are bound by our humanity, our fragility. We have hearts that break.

Today I remembered a podcast that I listened to from Parker Palmer about heartbreak.  He said  "A brittle heart will explode into a thousand pieces, and sometimes get thrown like a fragment grenade at the perceived source of its pain — there’s a lot of that going around these days. But a supple heart will break open into a greater capacity to hold life’s suffering and its joy..."

I think of the moments when I've felt the closest to something bigger than me-to a Divine presence - all moments of heartbreak: those moments that are so bitter, piercing through your breastbone into your literal and spiritual heart space, drawing everything-- body, mind and heart --to circle around that pain, and also...to  unbelievably bask in the burst of beauty, sweetness and solidarity that lies there with it.    

My heartbreak this week came  in the small, personal moments, in what friends were sharing,  and in the global suffering:  pleads for medical supplies, disinfecting items from the grocery store, the hopefulness of a young man overjoyed about starting Guilford College in the fall, dreams of an embrace. 

Heartbreak is politically powerful. In The Politics of the Brokenhearted  Parker Palmer talks about holding the tensions of democracy:

"The capacity to hold tensions creatively is the key to much that matters—from a life lived in love to a democracy worthy of the name to even the most modest movement toward peace between nations. So those of us who care about such things must work to root out the seeds of violence in our culture, including its impatience and its incessant drive toward control. And since culture is a human creation, whose deformations begin not “out there” but in our inner lives, we can transform our culture only as we are inwardly transformed."

I found this especially helpful today - you can read the full essay here:
http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/politics-of-the-brokenhearted/

Palmer shared this poem from Mary Oliver, in his podcast, where the poet invites us into heartbreak " — not because she wants us to wallow in suffering, but to help us become more open and responsive to a suffering world. 

Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Finally from Palmer, "So here’s a question I like to ask myself: What can I do day-by-day to make my heart more supple?"

Peace - and thank you for making my heart more supple.

Writing attempts

Dear friends, I am thinking about you all in these strange, scary and challenging times. I have decided to share this blog - reluctantly, and a little fearfully - again to original friends in the group and new friends.  (It's been hiding as a link on my Facebook profile for all these years!).  I invite you to comment, respond, and share your own thoughts/feelings, questions, prompts, things you are reading/finding supportive, resources, etc.  as we write and connect.  

This was our first prompt in an online "retreat" led by my dear friend Maia Dery this week called: 

Riding the Waves: Deepening Why and the Opportunities of This, Now

I share the prompt from our retreat with you now - and offer my response as the first blog post that I have written in many years. 

Who are you in this moment? 

Thinking about you all.

Love and Light and Peace.

Who am I in this moment?  

Riding the Waves...3/22/20

Who am I in this moment?

A reluctant leader

A worried mother

A careful daughter

An eager friend

A student of students and a "teacher" of students

A student of horses 

An appreciative colleague

A 60 year old

Filled with fear, confusion, questions, anger, guilt, and gratitude.

This past week has been like one long, rolling and building wave of information, absorption, reactions- becoming- pro -actions, fear, the unknown and more.   I'm now using words and terms like "unprecedented," "synchronous and asynchronous learning", "virtual," "remote" in my everyday vocabulary at work. I'm also hearing words like "flexible, forgiveness, thank you, self care, concern, safety, support" at work a lot too. (“Work” sounds weird - I am at Guilford College and it’s a community, a calling, and a work - so that’s what I mean when I say “work.”) I experienced an openness from colleagues and others allowing for deeper and more frequent moments of connection, where what ultimately matters is winning out over the detritus of all that really doesn't. I noticed  bigger, wider, expansive space and grace for each other's "shitty first drafts" of ideas to come forward -because we crave and need them. We need the effort, we need to try. It's okay to stumble. There's so much to learn from taking a fall (yet I fear for all who fall and can't get back up - all who are suffering, terrified, lonely, overwhelmed).

Writing this is a small example - a true shitty first draft for sure.  I have a blog that I started for a small group of friends 12 years ago -(some of you are here).  I wanted to put it out there as a way to connect - hoping that the small group of friends would offer their responses as comments for a sort of co-blog experience.  I gave myself the freedom to do that writing as I came out of a dark and scary but expansive time. But as days, weeks and months went by, I shrank again and got more and more critical of my writing and more fearful of other's responses to what I had to say. The last post was in 2015.  Just this weekend, and because of this prompt, I dug into google, found the blog and dusted the thing off.  Back then I called it "A Beautiful Web - writing for connections." This “bio” will be the next post.

In this moment, I am also a student in a Wisdom School introductory course online, spending time with a new practice called Centering Prayer.  My new and brief experiences have been powerful this week from this simple, available, and deep practice.  Centering Prayer is about noticing engagement with thoughts whether they be brilliant and revelatory or monkey-mind chatter, and welcoming them all as opportunities for gentle release/letting go to clear the way to becoming available to a divine presence--setting an intention to (and I love this phrase) consent to the action and presence of the divine.  1000+ thoughts in my head? Well then, a 1000+ opportunities to let go and become available, connected to the universal presence.  This seems to be a time and opportunity (to borrow a quote from my class) for living our way in to new ways of being (vs. thinking ourselves into new ways of living). 

I was helped this week by a piece that columnist David Brooks wrote for the NYTimes, and it reminds me of so much that was shared by you all in yesterday’s call.   In that piece he wrote "There is a humility that comes with realizing you’re not the glorious plans you made for your life. When the plans are upset, there’s a quieter and better you beneath them."  He goes on to say..."Judging from my social network, the absence of social connection is making everybody more ardent for it. People are geniuses at finding ways to touch each other even when they can’t....  Have you noticed that music and art are already filling the emotional gaps left by the absence of direct human contact?"  I have been overwhelmed at the ways that people are sharing their gifts virtually, singing from  balconies in their apartment complexes, in school buses giving meals to students,  free classes of art, writing, music, yoga, fitness, supporting each other as parents and teachers and so much more.  Reaching out, reaching out, reaching out. We are all being called to offer what we have to give. As Maia said yesterday, what is the world asking of you - only you?  What is the question you are living? What wants to happen?  

One last quote from Brooks' piece:  "Through plague eyes I realize there’s an important distinction between social connection and social solidarity. Social connection means feeling empathetic toward others and being kind to them. That’s fine in normal times. Social solidarity is more tenacious. It’s an active commitment to the common good — the kind of thing needed in times like now...a belief in the infinite dignity of each human person but sees people embedded in webs of mutual obligation — to one another and to all creation."

Meanwhile, who I am day to day in this moment is someone living with 2 sweet dogs and no other humans, in a neighborhood that hasn’t been very connected (and now we are waving on walks and the waves and greetings are really different).  I live within a mile walk to my 91 year old Dad’s house, who also lives alone. I am involved in new and wonderful changes at Guilford in support of student and alumni/community connections and purpose driven, integrated academic and career planning - taking new shape now by the hour.    My adult children are both in Florida -holed up together now as they physically distance from their friends and others - yay). I miss them and think about their lives and futures in a different way now. Julia (26) is working remotely (and already had been) and Joseph (22) is a senior at Eckerd College - finishing out his college career in new, disappointing and strange circumstances -along with all the other college and high school seniors who were planning to celebrate their lifetime of work as students. I have a brilliant and amazing group of friends all over - many of them Guilfordians or with Guilford connections and of course FOM (friends of Maia’s).  In April, I was planning to attend a workshop on equine therapy training up in Marshall, NC - now postponed. I ride a horse every week if I can, and crave horse-y connections, and want to learn everything they can teach me about connections and energy and healing.  

Turning 60 this year has ramped up my ponderings about my own relevance, my own "work" to do in service to my vocation/career and community, and the time wasted on not feeling "good enough" or "prepared enough" to lean in and take risks. It's time to start living knowing that this is our Kairotic moment (thanks again Maia).  I'm so glad we've come together again.

Love and Light.