Archive for April, 2010
Love Is As Love Does
This is the world of Grandma Minnie, the Brooklyn of my youth so full of unknown wonders and windows as far as I could see, out of which countless heads would lean and call for children I didn’t really know. But the open windows everywhere made me feel we were all connected, made me feel that each living room washed into the next. I would sit on the cement stoop and watch one drama waft into the street and mix with another two brick houses down and on up to the roof where pigeons would be pecking at something unseen. I loved that stoop. Grandma would always come out to sit with me. Just when I would be drifting away into all the unknown life, just as I felt the street turn to a clear stream that started in some other country, just as I was squinting to see where it would lead, Grandma would appear in her apron, her big warm forearms, hot from baking. She would sit beside me, drape me in those arms, and smile a smile that seemed to know what I was doing. How I loved those mornings. And how I loved Grandma…
The art of accepting disappointment
I spent the weekend in Denver at AWP. My sole purpose for being there was to sit on a panel I’d been invited to be a part of more than six months ago. I’ve been anticipating it, looking forward to it. The topic was the future of feminist publishing, and it’s one that I’m genuinely interested in and know a fair amount about, given my role at Seal Press. We had the very last slot of the conference, 4.30 pm on Saturday afternoon. I thought the turnout might not be so great, but I was prepared to dazzle a crowd of five if that’s what we had.
At 4.15, I found the room our panel was to be held in. On the door was a handwritten sign on 81/2″ x 11″ piece of paper that read: “The Future of Feminism panel is canceled. See you next year.” Needless to say, I was shocked and then worried and then, as woman after woman—many of them young, bright-eyed college students—walked up, looked at the sign, and audibly sighed things like “Oh no!” I felt completely crestfallen.
In retrospect, I wish I’d torn down the sign and presented a talk to the group. I did not do that. I instead decided to do some investigative work into finding what happened, which got me the information I was looking for, but didn’t make me feel any better. I did not accept the disappointment gracefully. I called home and vented. I sulked in my hotel and ate the chocolate left by housekeeping. I considered turning on the TV and tuning out for the rest of the night.
I ended up going out and meeting some people and having a good night and feeling better once I got back to the room. But what hit me this morning was how upending disappointment can be. It will crush you like a ton of bricks on your chest. It will get into your head like a dense fog. It will eat into your gut like acid. It will make you grasp for all the ways things should have or could have gone differently. It is not a friendly emotion.
I didn’t let this disappointment crush me. It was, after all, just a panel. But I realized its familiarity and I remembered to breathe. And when I woke up at 4 in the morning feeling that disoriented sense of something having not gone quite right, I was able to notice, accept, and let go.
When I got home tonight I relistened to my interview with Robert McDowell, in which he talks about letting go. How much we choose to get hooked is up to us. Truly, the acceptance is key. And the hard part of life, as well is the beauty, is that we get so many opportunities to practice this art.
Gratitude
We are all aware of the power of expressing gratitude and recognizing the abundance we receive and have on a daily basis. As the messenger of Heart intelligence and the second color of Faith in the Life Artist color palette, gratitude is about the wonder and joy we feel when our highest potential aligns with the highest good in the world.
Through the Soul’s Dream journey I guide, I have witnessed many people on the path of Intentional Transformation get out of their own way by healing and inspiring themselves first (by attending to their “personal cause”), and then moving on to their “world cause” of healing and inspiring others. People are filled with a deep sense of gratitude when they suddenly realize that their highest potential had been blocked by a belief, pattern, or role in their lives that was holding them back from living their lives in the unique meaning and passion of their Soul’s gifts.
The shift that can happen is living into the gratitude of having a purpose and relationships that are sustained from deeper truths rather than being grateful for all we have. When our Heart intelligence knows this capacity for gratitude, we foster faith that our consciousness is in continual evolution and that outcomes are not destinations that determine our worth, but rather pulse points for remembering who we truly are.
As Easter Passes Us
As another Easter comes and goes, I think of life in the fast lane, which leads me to think of a time when my love and I were driving in the mountains. We needed to get somewhere and we were driving fast. Around a bend we entered a long straightaway, and suddenly we were bombarded by butterflies. We punched holes in great clouds of them, one after the other, as we continued on. Only after we reached our destination did we stop, look at each other and say, why didn’t we just pull over until they’d passed?
Were we momentarily asleep, temporarily out of the moment? Of course. After asking the question of each other, did we feel ashamed? Did we experience grief? Yes. Discouraged? Certainly. Ready to give up, admitting at last that, yes, humanity is doomed by our capacity for massive cruelty and slaughter? No. Not yet. Not ever.
Before
Why the sinking down at late day?
Before the will, there was always
A way, a way in or way out.
Before the match a world
To burn, before the barn
A field of wild grass and chickweed.
Before you, there were others,
So many you could not hold them
In mind. Before the mind
No trick mirrors, only wind, sun,
Stars and night, only these
To say all is well, and right.
To See and Hear
I couldn’t keep the damn glasses
clean. Kept wiping them and curs-
ing them. And my left ear was get-
ting worse. Those across the room
were shouting secrets behind a water-
fall. But I wasn’t ready. Kept wiping
the damn glasses. Kept trying to make
sense of things I couldn’t hear. I didn’t
feel stubborn. And I want so very much
to see and hear. Then after a long un-
folding, the cocoon my soul was eating
through gave way and I arrived in this
newness I can’t explain. Without put-
ting it all together, I realized it was
my eyes not the glasses. And the
waterfall was in my head. When the
optometrist flipped her lenses in the
dark, something deep inside let go.
When she reached the one through
which I could see, the tumblers in the
lock that is me fell open. When the
kind audiologist tucked the hearing
aid in my ear, the waterfall ceased. I
began to cry. Like the Wizard of Oz,
we become smaller and softer
when our curtain is pulled.
Our shared spirit of humanity
In the movie As Good As It Gets, the character Simon Bishop, played by Greg Kinnear, says to Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt), “If you stare at someone long enough, you discover their humanity.”
That scene has stayed with me since I first saw the movie 1997, and will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. It so poignantly captured something I had noticed but had never been able to articulate—that every single one of us possesses a depth of humanity that’s so overpowering in its greatness and grace that it simply smacks you upside the head at times. I usually have this experience in the most unexpected moments. Perhaps that’s the only way they come.
On BART recently, a disheveled elderly man with a gray unkempt beard, wearing a bright red headband, sat across the aisle from me. I wrote him off as eccentric, possibly homeless, until a young African-American woman got on the train with her three small girls to ask the passengers for money. She explained how she was in an abusive relationship and how she wasn’t hurting anyone by asking. As I reached into my purse for a stray dollar, I watched the old man hand a $10 bill to the youngest girl, no older than four. Humanity.
Last summer as I prepared for my backyard wedding, I felt the growing anxiety of what to do about our neighbors, two Indian families who share a house and have five kids among them. The boys are rambunctious and loud, and I kept playing out how I would ask them to be quiet on our very important day. I’d spent many days painting the cottage in our yard, up on a ladder with direct view into their yard. I saw the women, the mothers, often, but we never spoke. As I finished up one weekend I heard a voice. One of the women came to the fence and handed me a plate of food. I thanked her, but that was the extent of the exchange. Still, her hand waving to me over the fence was one of these moments. Burned into my mind like a stare. Humanity.
President Obama this weekend delivered a speech in which he said, “While we worship in different ways, we also remember the shared spirit of humanity that inhabits us all—Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, believers and nonbelievers alike.”
If today and this week can remind us all of our shared human spirit, then what a celebration indeed. This, the holiest day in Christianity, and a holy week across much of the world, is an opportunity to remember the generosity of the human spirit. It almost always will surprise you, showing up in unexpected places and through unexpected encounters. I think this is what struck me about the line from As Good As It Gets—that every single person, no matter what you think of them at first glance, is part of the mystery, the depth, the grand design.
What are some moments you can recall experiencing humanity in unexpected places?
Dreaming
In the Life Artist color palette, dreaming is opening our Spirit intelligence up to “muse” with the Universal Intelligence. Dreaming in this context is less about our wish lists and fantasy lives and more about opening the portal of our consciousness to sacred time and space. In this place we allow our egos to rest in a way that too few of us from Western cultures are accustomed to.
We create with the Universal Intelligence instead of forcing or driving our desires to manifest. The three colors of Faith are dreaming, gratitude, and remembering. Dreaming is the color of Faith that initiates the creative lifecycle by opening our energy to the Universal Intelligence and allowing us to believe that there are compassionate and loving resources in the cosmos that are ready to collaborate with us and inspire our highest good.
When we allow ourselves to dream, truly “magical” things start to happen in our lives. When our consciousness is grounded in the trust of self and others, we are not grasping for things, or inclined to “fake” Faith. In the movie, “Bright Star,” based on the story of the poet John Keats, Keats’s character at one point says, to summarize, It may look we’re out in the fields doing nothing, but we’re actually courting our Muses.
As Life Artists, it is essential that we court our Muses, and dreaming is the pathway not only to invigorating your Spirit, but to saying “yes” to invoking the mystery rather than fearing it.
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