Holy Ground

March was a quiet month for me.

I had nothing to say and went deep inside for awhile.  It was as if I'd burrowed deeply into the ground to sleep and to dream. 

It was unusually cold and grey here, and felt more like winter than the coming of spring.  And I felt like there was so much upon which to reflect. 

Of course I was busy -- actually, when I was busy I was unusually busy.  And when things were quiet and at peace, it was as if the whole world had stopped.  As if the world around me, and the world within, were poised at the edge of something that wanted to be noticed.

I wish I knew what it was.

I've wracked my brain trying to figure it out.  And all I can come up with is an obscure reference in one of my journals --

My life is holy ground, and I am being asked to stop and notice.

Why is it that so often when we come upon one of those rare, profound insights that cause us to pause and really pay attention, we remember so little about how it came about -- where it came from, how we got there, the winding path through our thoughts and experience that brought us to such a place?

I am thinking this time it doesn't matter.

I am thinking this time it is simply important to stop and to notice.

I had a dream around the time I was thinking about all this.  A dream guide took me to a stone circle and there the wind began to blow.  Roots went down from my feet into the earth and grew into and wrapped themselves around the Earth's roots.  As the wind continued to blow, I noticed how dry I had become -- and my dryness began to blow away like sand.  Down to the bone. Carried off by the wind; even my bones turned to dust and were carried away on the winds. 



From where my essence was rooted, vines grew up and remade me.  I was a green and growing thing.  A force of nature came and danced around me and called on me to name all that I wanted to plant in my life at this time.

"You are the garden," he said.  And as he danced, he began to toss seeds into the air.  The winds caught them and they burrowed in and became buried among the vines that I had become.  He laughed uproariously as he watched me green, grow, and blossom.

Time to stop and notice.

You are the garden.

Spring has come and the winds are blowing.  The earth is receptive to the seeds we plant, and the tender, green shoots strengthen as we nourish and nurture them when they begin to push their way out of the cold, dark ground. 

What do you want to plant in your life at this time?

Cries of the Heart

 

 

I am struggling tonight.  I just want to put that out there.

And I am not sure how to talk about it.

These days it feels like it is one thing after another after another

and I am feeling world weary. 

I think I need some support.

And some kindness.

Very little feels kind these days. 

Much of the truth I am seeing around my own life

feels harsh and hard to bear. Hard to hold.

Softness feels elusive right now. And I am craving it.

And if one more person tells me I am strong I think I will go out of my mind.

I know that I am strong,

and being strong does not mean the heart does not feel it when it hurts.

 

 

I wrote this one day when life felt particularly difficult and shared it with a small group of friends who wrote back and buoyed me without having to know what was wrong or my having to explain myself.  I am lucky. I have terrific friends.  Their support made the difference for me that day.  Even though I had been feeling terribly alone, I knew there were people out there who care about me and who were thinking about me, sending loving energy for whatever healing and support I needed at the time. 

 

There are days when we all need that kind of support, but so often we try to soldier through difficult times without asking for help.  And we end up feeling isolated.  Isolation makes whatever we are contending with even more difficult.  Human beings are creatures of connection.  We are meant to connect with each other, with the Divine, with nature, and with our own deep interior spirits.  All of these are essential relationships that are important to recognize and nurture.  They are part of what help us to be healthy and vital.  

 

But so often we confuse strength with self-sufficiency.  And sometimes things can become difficult for us when we encounter people who project their own need for us to demonstrate that we don't need any support.  There seems to be an unspoken contract in some relationships that suggests that if one person can "be strong" when times are tough then the other person will be able to also.  And not wanting to disappoint the other person, we might be tempted not to ask for help when we need it. There is no shame in asking for help.  It does not make us weak. It does not make us a burden.       

 

Instead, asking for help can open whole horizons of joy in life.  Knowing we are connected with others and part of a web of support enable us to face the challenges in life with more confidence.  It helps us to know that we can be the central core of our own web of support and that when we are feeling shaky, there are others we can call upon who can help to buoy our spirits and hold our hurting hearts while they heal.  And then, when the tough times pass, there are people with whom we can celebrate.

 

One of my favorite responses to my request for support that day is this -- 

 







Just breathe deeply. Give yourself a break.

Know you are loved and appreciated.

We are here to be aware, not to save the world.

Take in the pain.  Let it enter your heart, then breathe it out,

and your love will transform it to a goodness.

I will send you warm thoughts of love...thank you for being you.

You are wonderful!

 





I return to this message when I am feeling a little shaky.  It has become both poetry and prayer for me, just as my cry above has.  Together, they remind me of a Psalm -- a genre of literature in the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible) that are some of the most real and human words in the Bible.  So many of them explore the depth of human suffering and the turning of the soul toward remembering its relationship with the Divine and the love that surrounds us and fills us at all times. They were sung together by the community - a living expression of support.  My favorite is Psalm 139.  Read it sometime when you need a reminder of just how precious you are and how there is never any true isolation, no matter how you are feeling or what you are experiencing. 

 

Some of my favorite lines...

 

Beloved, you have searched me and known me.

Even before a word is on my tongue you know it completely.

Where can I go from your spirit?  Or where can I flee from your presence.

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and settle at the farthest limits of the sea

even there your hand shall lead me, and you shall hold me fast.

Even the darkness is not dark to you.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made...

intricately woven in the depths of the earth and

your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

Search me, Beloved, and know my heart... 

   

 

Caught by Surprise by the Tides

The final weeks of winter is a great time to ponder death and rebirth.  The season of Lent is a few days away and I think we've probably had our last big snow of the season -- another big storm like the one last fall, except this time we were just on the edge of it.  We were fortunate -- woke up Saturday morning to a beautiful white landscape, plowed roads, crystal clear blue skies, and the feeling that the old energies had been completely cleared and something new was coming in.  It feels ironic in the deep winter -- the time just before spring begins to green and bring forth flowers on the earth.  It feels like the time between the final exhale and the first inbreath of rebirth.

Like everyone else, I have my cycles of death and rebirth.  I'm in a pretty big one right now. Lots of change. Lots of loss. I sit by the river every day and think about what's left.  And I think this may be a problem.  Thinking about what's left.  Watching the waters flow beyond my ability to see is definitely teaching me something about allowing things just to go. It's starting to feel pretty clear to me these days that when everything goes, it's time to stop fighting it and discover something new.

I like to kayak on rivers.  I love dynamic water. This was something new I discovered eight years ago after my father died.  I'm not one of those paddlers that hugs the shoreline and looks for herons and turtles.  The first time I was on a river, the Hudson, near Rhinebeck, NY, while most of our group of first-time paddlers kept close to shore, intimidated by the fast-flowing waters that were so different from the quiet lake we'd learned on, I waited for the big boats to come by -- like bullets shot down the middle of the river and leaving turbulent waters in their wake.  Sending waves out on three sides and disturbing the comparatively quiet waters, they sent most of the group back to the shoreline the few times they ventured father out.

I loved it, though -- turning my small craft into the wake and paddling my heart out to get to the middle of the wide river, thrilled by the motion that sent me flying above the water's surface as I paddled over the waves to get to where the action of the water was even more choppy and precarious. 

 

 

You can't sit still in water like that.  You can't look around and ponder the beauty and wonder of nature.  If you do, you'll find yourself in the water instead of on it.  What you have to do is paddle as if your life depends on it with a strong power stroke.  And what I had to do while doing that was to laugh my heart out at the top of my lungs.  Just because it was so thrilling.

Sometimes on the river, though, you can forget how powerful dynamic water is.  And when you paddle long enough, you may even become so comfortable that you don't remember to plan for what you might not expect to happen.

 

 

 

 

I was on a river near Ft. Meyer's Beach, FL, paddling across the shipping lanes and into a bay that would lead me into a mangrove forest where I looked forward to a peaceful search for manatees.  And it was wonderful.  Especially crossing the shipping lanes where there is plenty of wake. The only problem was, I hadn't planned on the tides. 

Most of my paddling experience had been on freshwater rivers and I didn't even think about it.  Probably should have.  Coming out of the mangrove forest, I barely recognized the peaceful bay I'd paddled across a few hours before.  The tide was coming in so powerfully, it took all my strength to paddle within yards of the mouth of the small bay that opened onto the tidal river and shipping lanes.  I could not get across it.  I could barely keep my position.  When I stopped paddling even for a second, the power of the water pushed me away, losing ground (so to speak) in seconds that had taken so long to gain.  And once I'd lost the ground, I didn't have the strength to regain it. It's a hard lesson to learn -- that some things are just more powerful than we are.  I could not get back across the bay and into the peace and safety of the mangrove forest either. The way was closed in the current conditions and I was stuck in the middle of a bay paddling for my life to keep from getting pushed into a terrain made of trees that were mostly gigantic roots somehow anchored in the water.      

I knew the real danger would be panic.  I could somehow manage the water, and the boat, but not my own panic.  Whenever you watch those "how did people survive that?" shows, they always tell you that it is panic that kills.  Like when you drive your car off a bridge or a cougar jumps on an unsuspecting you while mountain-biking.  I looked around quickly to assess the situation and saw a trail marker.  It was the only solid ground in the middle of all that turbulence -- a slender metal pole anchored in chaos.  I paddled over to it, looped my arm around it, and held on until the tide turned.  Fortunately, I'd brought a picnic lunch. I must have been a sight -- one arm hooked around the trail marker and a ham and cheese sandwich in my other hand.

A trail marker in a bay is easy to spot.  Not so, the trail markers in life.  Still, they are there.  And when we're in the middle of the unexpected, or the unplanned for, sometimes we get through by hanging on and relaxing until a way through is clear.   

Insofar As That I Can See

Yesterday I came across a famous quote, a paraphrase of a line from a Robert Frost poem:  "The only way out is through."  It was attributed to someone I know did not speak it originally. She may have used it, like so many of us have, but it did not originate with her.  It was fascinating to see the comments posted beneath -- "L. Ron Hubbard said that, but before him, I don't know."  "That's a line from an Alanis Morissette song."   Someone else thought it was a quote from the Buddha. 

Just for fun, I googled the quote and discovered that it has been used in song lyrics by another female artist, and as the name of an album by another.  I found two art exhibits with this title and one sculpture.  There was a tattoo advertised by a tattoo artist and a hand-lettered t-shirt, both misquoting Robert Frost who actually worded it slightly differently.

There was a Psychology Today article with this quote as its title and about a gazillion blog posts. Articles by life coaches.  A few pieces by writers offering this as good advice to budding word smiths.  It was even dialogue in a video game.  Most of the blogs and articles were about perseverance, dealing with pain, fear, illness, grief, and life transitions of all kinds.  There was an article about being productive in business. My favorite was an article about a 12th Century Indian poet, mystic, and saint - a woman - Akka Mahadevi.

He says the best way out is always through.
And I agree to that, or insofar
As that I can see no way out but through --
Leastways for me -- and then they'll be convinced.











"The only way out is through."  "The best way out is always through."  I prefer the original.  And I think I prefer it for the same reason that the woman who is telling her story in the poem does -- that I can see no way out but through...what other way is there?  Hence, the paraphrase.  What I really like about the original is I get to discover it for myself. No one tells me it's the way it has to be. 

That's an important part of the spiritual journey and core to waking up -- discovering the great and deepest truths through one's own experience. You can read ten thousand books by a thousand masters and see all the wisdom of the ages on the page before you, but what really matters is embodied experience.  This is the way to wisdom. 

Of course, just being does not bring us to wisdom.  We can move through life unconsciously or we can be conscious as we move through life.  Some ancient cultures describe warriorship - the way of the warrior - in terms of mindfulness and consciousness, showing up and choosing to be present.  Present to our own lives, our own experience, to each moment, thought, and feeling, and to others and the world around us.  That enables us to see.  Seeing enables us to move through the world without the blinders that sometimes enable us to get through difficult times by simply moving through something any way we can, distracting ourselves with being busy, so that we don't have to think about, feel, or see.  Not everyone would agree with me about this -- for many people distraction is exactly the way they get through the hard times.  Insofar as I can see...leastways for me...  

The way that I engage with all this is through story.  I write poetry, short stories, sermons, reflections and other devotional pieces, blog posts, speeches, retreats and workshops, journals, columns, and probably other things that I'd need to check my resume for in order to remember right now.  It's my language for moving through the landscape of our fractured-expanding-and healing selves.  It's the way I attribute meaning.  And the way I offer something to the world so that others can pause and attribute meaning as what I offer merges into an unexpected alchemy with their own experience.

In Robert Frost's poem A Servant to Servants, the woman who is telling her story describes some brutal life experience, and in telling her story, she is actually moving through her story and out of it into something new.  This is the power of sharing our stories with each other.  We gain perspective - see where we have come from, what we have come through, and the new place we have come to.  And through it all we, and the world, are transformed. 





  

Flowers in Winter

 

I go into the wilderness and rediscover the home within.

 

                                                                                               - China Galland

I was walking by the river the other day.  It was a beautiful day -- sunny and unseasonably warm for a Mid-Atlantic mid-winter.  The only green in sight are the evergreens.  The grass is brown.  The deciduous trees are naked.  There's not a vine in sight. Oddly enough, the herb garden in the middle of town has some kind of ornamental purple plants that have survived in the winter. I have no idea if this is their normal behavior, but it certainly feels weird.  Everything else has died away. 

For the most part the days have been grey, so this sunny day felt like a huge gift to me.  Grey days make me feel a bit blue in winter.  When there is sun, no matter how cold it is, I tie on my hiking shoes and head outside to walk briskly in the sunshine and watch my steaming breath pour out into the cold air. 

The skies are so blue and the clouds so huge and white and puffy I'd begun to wonder what season it really was.  It was one of those sublimely beautiful days that do not feel quite real, but enable us to feel more fully alive than usual -- simply because they feel so unexpectedly good.  And as I walked, I began to feel fully alive.

And this was a huge surprise for me.  But, then, days like this almost always catch us by surprise.

Winter is one of those seasons that so often feels like we are sleeping -- but in our culture we work against the natural cycles and tend to push as hard through the winter months and to be as productive as we are the rest of the year, when what we should really be doing is allowing ourselves to lie a bit fallow so that we can rest before another growing season begins.  We need more sleep in the winter when there is less light and many of us get sick.  We need time to reflect, to draw near to our hearth fires and be quiet.  To come home to ourselves. 







And it's easy for us to do because it feels like a wilderness outdoors.  Snow, ice, sleet, freezing rain, icy chill days and nights, and winds that bite the skin as they blow through can feels as rough and uninviting as a desert or scrubland.  Winter days make many of us feel like there is anything we'd rather do than go outdoors.

But on this winter day I found myself being drawn outside.  The air was brisk but far from freezing.  The winds were more like breezes.  And the sun was shining so brightly it felt almost warm on my face.  It felt good to be outdoors in the fresh air and to leave the stale indoor air behind for awhile.  I was outside walking for a good, long time in the cold.  And on my way back, I looked down into the brown grass and saw a golden yellow face smiling back at me. A dandelion beginning to open...there on a winter's day in mid-January.  I breathed deeply and felt like springtime was filling up my tired wintry spirit.  Suddenly filled with energy, I came home and put the flower in a small vase, where hours later I walked by and it had fully opened there on my windowsill.  Meanwhile, instead of being productive, I used the energy to ponder some things that have been knocking around the corners of my mind. 

I am reminded of a day last winter when I wrote a poem that begins,

There is forsythia blooming today --
Four little bright yellow blossoms on a wild branch
That has reached through the fence between
My neighbor's yard and mine --
A long, trailing branch....
I just saw her dancing on the breeze

I remember being surprised that day also.  And smiling deep down in my soul. And writing in my journal with wonder, how in the middle of such cold, a sunny day or two can bring out flowers in winter.     







  

No Resolutions this Year. Take Time to Dream Instead.

Go confident in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

                                                                                     Henry David Thoreau


So, I am musing on the new year -- it is just hours away.  For some, it has already arrived with the rising of the new sun.  I just saw a post from a friend in Australia of the first sunrise of 2013 and it is glorious.  Of course, it is also summer there.  Here it is a bit grey as the sun is beginning its early descent in the winter sky.  But glorious, nevertheless, a luminious pink that is spreading its tendrils among the clouds over the river.

As I was musing, my thoughts naturally turned to resolutions. 

I have mixed feelings about New Year's resoultions.  I understand what we try to do with them, but I find them a frustrating exercise at best.  Usually, we try to do the same thing year after year -- the very thing we never seem to be able to do, whether it is losing weight or exericising more or being smarter about our money.  And year after year we make a list, probably saying to ourselves, "Well...maybe this year..."  Hardly a great start to something we really want to do.  Sometimes I wonder if the things we "resolve" to do are actually the things of which our dreams are made.  Or whether they are simply the things we think we should do, for whatever reason, that we never seem to be able to do -- probably because we are not really very commmitted to them in the first place.

Winter is a difficult time for me to find motivation.  The grey days and the cold make it very hard for me to feel positive.  I am more of a sunny, warm day kind of person -- and the amount of sun really does make a difference to my temperament.  Reading posts from my friends in Australia and New Zealand, I am noticing a lot more positivity.  And I find myself saying to myself, "Self -- you really need to get it together.  What is wrong with you?"  And somewhere deep within a whisper, "How about a nice walk in the sun?  Give me a little of that and I'll give you some feel good."  Perhaps the deep mid-winter is not the best time to try to fund the motivation needed to make the changes that will help our dreams to manifest. 

Nevertheless, the New Year is upon us and it is the ultimate time of fresh starts.  Great opportunity. New Beginnings. The time that there is quiet activity going on deep in the Earth that prepares her for her bursting forth in spring.  Even if everything on the surface around us seems dead, we know that there is invisible work going on deep within the Earth, and our annual practice of bringing in evergreens is a reminder that times that feel dead, ironically, are filled with life and living things. Actually, considering the Earth cycles, it is a great time to begin to do the deep inner work that is needed for change and manifestation.

I'm just not sure that resolutions are the way to go.

A friend posted a note the other day -- here is what she said:

"Please consider taking just a half hour per day during this next week to clarify your wishes and dreams for the coming year.  You will be amazed at what visualization, commitment, and clarity will do for manifesting what you truly want."

And there it is. Forget the resolutions. Dream instead. Make a wish. Create a vision for your life.  Where do you see yourself at the end of 2013?  Or in the middle, or a month from now? What does this new year look like?  What is the image you see in your mind as you think about where you want to be?  Does it excite you?  Is it compelling?  Does it lift your spirits and tease out your passion? 

Where are you now?  Where do you want to be?  What will it take to get there?  What is your next step? 

The thing that usually keeps us from our dreams and most compelling visions are the limiting beliefs that are formed by a lifetime of unconscious, negative thoughts.  They wend their way through our neural networks like old, deep paths in the forest. And we keep walking upon them.  It takes our considered attention to change these thoughts and turn around these limiting beliefs to be able to manifest something different for ourselves. I like what Henry David Thoreau said around this -- 

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.  To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. 

As we dream new dreams and create compelling visions for our lives, and as we believe that we can make them happen, we naturally do the things that will get us there.  Instead of a list of resolutions for the New Year, we can create a list of new ways of thinking and begin to create new pathways out of which new ways of living can unfold.

The Glorious New Form Emerging from the Old

When you come to the end of all that you know, you must believe in one of two things:  there will be earth upon which to stand, or you will be given wings...

 

                                                                                 Author Unknown

 

 

I have always been fascinated by cicada husks. There's something very death and resurrection about them for me. There's something about the way they are broken open that sparks my imagination and always causes me to stop for a moment, notice, and think.

 

When we come across them they feel a bit like a mystery, reminding us to leave behind our old forms. Here's the why: the glorious new form emerges from the old...

I am writing today, inspired by a photograph I came across the other day. It has simply captured me.  I remember as a little girl, finding the dry husks of cicadas on trees and feeling like I had come across one of life's great mysteries. It took me a long time to figure out what this creature might be.  It obviously was not alive, or was no longer alive, but I also did not remember ever seeing anything that looked like it in my forays in the woods. I could never figure out how those slender legs could support them. I loved the way they looked like they were crawling up the tree, and I wondered what had happened to stop them in their tracks.

As I looked more closely at them, I noticed how they were broken open. And I thought, "Ah, here indeed is a mystery!  What was in there, and what came out?"  I remember coming home one day with my small hands filled with them and my mom relating them to familiar summer evening insect sounds. And, of course, to the prismatic jewel-toned bodies I occasionally saw flying by or lying dead on the sidewalk. 

Periodically throughout my life I have come across the dry, broken open husks of cicadas. They have always seemed to be a message from nature for me.  What must be released so that something new can emerge? 

The timing often has been uncanny. And so often I will have found myself being broken open in some way -- with some new insight, some new understanding, some new knowledge, some new condition in life that has caused me to leave something behind in order to embrace something new.



The mystery of the cicada has continued to unfold for me.  Some years ago I learned that they live underground in the cool, dark earth developing, and it is only when they are ready to emerge in their new form that they make their way to the surface, and the light, to break open and emerge, leave their old forms behind and try their wings for the first time. 

When I came across this photograph I was stunned. How can such a large, juicy, and beautiful creature be contained in so small and dry a husk?  Look at those huge, wide-open eyes and how they are looking straight ahead at the new world into which she is emerging.  Look how straight and tall the cicada is as he emerges? I imagine the cicada flying away, not giving the old form another thought as she lives fully into the new.

All of this is instinctual for the cicada -- a normal part of its life-cycle. The whole point of its life cycle. Death and Rebirth. Death and Resurrection. Shedding what no longer serves and leaving it behind to embrace the new. For us, this may not feel like a natural process even though it is every bit as natural to us as it is to the cicada.  And as with every other issue related to being powerful in our lives, we must be aware around our thinking and feelings so that we allow our natural cycles of awakening, growth, and development. Allow the glorious new form emerging from the old.