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.