Truth

The Mystery within...

I haven’t gotten outside much this winter and the truth is I am really longing for the emotional strength and spiritual comfort past winter walks brought me.  I long for deep feathery snow that kicked up lightly or a sandpaper crunch beneath my feet, or being gently blessed by fine falling crystals from a high cedar bough.  I think its time for me to reread “God Never Hurries” for my main purpose in writing it was to always remember my heightened awareness from the everyday messages that came with each season, and everything in it.

In the section of my memoir titled Truth, the first two paragraphs read:

Light snow was falling on an early January morning when I drove my car to a neighborhood service station and left it there for an oil change.  The snow stopped as I started to walk home.  Several hours later when I went back to pick up my car, I was surprised to see my footprints still alone in the fresh snow.  No one else had walked my path.  I backtracked on my lone footprints thinking of the path I had trod the previous year and my painstaking search for truth in daily reflection and writing.

Several blocks later, I saw a woman approaching.  She walked in my original prints but didn’t know me.  We smiled as we passed each other and said hello.  I wondered:  if she reflected and wrote each day about her reality, what would her truths be?  When I reached the corner, I crossed to the other side of the street so I could continue in my tracks.  There a man’s footprints had tracked on mine.  I wondered what his truths were and could he understand my reality? 

I am currently going for physical therapy for my sore knee so I can hopefully return to a life lived closer to God’s creation were weather, skies, sun, clouds, rain, ice, wind, birds, fog, water, waves, stones, leaves, and animals and fish and so much more spoke to me in every season and let me know that I am loved.  While at physical therapy today an overhead television screen showed bedridden soldiers with horrific incapacitating injuries.  I hope they know that they are loved.

What if each and everyone one of us, everywhere, knew that we are loved?  Would there be need for injury anywhere?  

Comfort Zone

God is...

Early Saturday I attended a “Nature of Energy” workshop focused on intentionally creating an energy boundary around myself for good self-care--for protection from harmful energy coming from others.  It made a lot of sense.  For supper that night I had Chinese takeout and my fortune cookie said, “Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort.”  Sounds like paradox where truth reigns! 

At the workshop I learned a little bit of how much I don’t know about human energy work.  I’m familiar with both Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram where the goal is balance through self-knowledge.  This human energy work also promotes knowing who we each are through different defining elements of Air, Fire, Water, Earth and Nature.  Our human nature can contain parts of each element, but one element will be dominant.  Within that dominant element are both positive and negative aspects of ourselves challenging us to become more balanced. 

I found the idea of intentionally creating an energy boundary around myself comforting.  The idea that I can deflect another’s negative energy, or I can do ritual self-cleansing after being exposed to another’s negativity, felt empowering.  And probably the most important thing I learned, and no doubt will be the hardest to remember, is that I can never assume anything I say or do will be received as intended.  Plus, offering care or advice to another must always be done with the other’s permission.

I took a walk in the wood next to the river before the sun set on that Saturday.  There I became aware of the energy boundary I had surrounded myself with earlier in the day.  I intentionally removed it.  I just wanted to be one with the ground beneath my feet, the trees, air, sky, sun, wind and flowing water.  The following morning I again surrounded myself with my personal protective boundary.  Maybe it will help remind me to first ask permission to speak and do for another. 

What if the goal of all this inter-personal balancing work is leading us to a Rumi Guest House where together we will eventually balance each other within?

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary

awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably.  He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

In the Flow

God is...

Joy Cardin’s Wisconsin Public Radio, March 12, 2014 morning show, Unlocking "Ultimate" Human Performance, featured Steven Kotler who spoke of the amazing advances athletes are making by being in the flow, a mental state that maximizes human performance as they struggle to attain higher and higher levels of accomplishment.  He also used the word now, interchangeably with flow, and said it can apply to all of us as we go through life.  He cited heightened states of creativity in artists and writers as examples.     

I really appreciated Kotler's tie to non-athletes and how being in the Now relates to our advancement through struggle.  I posted a comment on the show, “Sound's like God energy to me.”  He wrote back, “Thanks Marcia.  Not sure what you mean by God energy, but we do know that there's considerable overlap between the neurobiology of flow states and the neurobiology of so-called mystical experiences.  What that means—hard to say for sure….”  I can relate.

In “God Never Hurries” I wrote: 

Tension was an almost unbearable constant for a year.  How does “the responsible one” care for her aging parents?  I devoured books on spirituality and self-help.  I paid attention to my dreams.  I prayed.  The right questions began to surface from my pain.  My relief was in my pain; my safety was in my questions.

Then at the end of May 1995 I made a promise to God that I would write something about each day for one year.  The drive to write was a lifesaver.  Knowing that I would put something of each day’s struggles, joys and ordinariness on paper focused me more in the present alongside my ache for truth.  And nowhere was I more present than in the natural world.  There the connection and comfort I felt from my surroundings seemed to be an inverse of my tension and pain. 

What if we could all accept our struggles in the Now and know eventually they will lead to growth, transformation, and forgiveness?

Who's in Your Neighborhood?

God is...

Using science, technology and evolutionary theory, David Sloan Wilson listens to and reflects on his city of Binghamton, NY. His reflections lead him to ask the right questions and to develop a survey for which he enlisted the help of an enthusiastic school superintendent who is interested in helping children become healthy, productive adults. This allowed Wilson to survey thousands of public school students. He asked them to rate themselves anonymously on a scale of 1 (this doesn’t describe me at all) to 5 (this describes me exactly) with the following statements:

I think it is important to help other people.
I resolve conflicts without anyone getting hurt.
I tell the truth even when it is not easy.
I am helping make my community a better place.
I am trying to help solve social problems.
I am developing respect for other people.
I am sensitive to the needs and feelings of others.
I am serving others in the community.

Wondering if students would honestly describe themselves on the survey, Wilson did a GIS (Geographical Information System) map of the city. He rated such things as Halloween and Christmas decorations and activities; he left ‘lost’ stamped letters lying in neighborhoods seeing which ones were subsequently put in the mail; he took photographs of different neighborhoods and noted garage sales. Social games were played with the school children who took the survey with game titles such as Dictator, Ultimatum and Prisoner’s Dilemma. The web of causation connecting survey results, holiday decorations/activities, lost letters returned, photographs of neighborhoods, and social game results all correlated.

Reflecting back on my own life has led me to know how critical it was to ask the right questions to change the direction of my life, even leaving the church of my birth. Wilson states: “The eternal conflict between benefitting oneself and benefitting one’s group, which suffuses religion and literature, also suffuses the biological world.” But he also notes, “Religious believers aren’t just exhorted to obey the dictates of their faith; they are locked into a system that makes it difficult to do otherwise. In just the same way scientists and scholars are locked into a system that makes it difficult not to seek the truth.” They question.

I shall continue reading “The Neighborhood Project – Using Evolution to Improve My City One Block at a Time.”

What if we all learned the right questions to ask that lead us to become more healthy and productive citizens?

Learn, Know, Master

God is...

Attached to the strings of my Yogi tea bags are brief fortunes.  I look forward to reading each one upon opening a bag.  One of my favorite ones says:  “To learn, read.  To know, write.  To master, teach.”  Over the years I have grown to understand the implications of each action. 

In my search for truth, when struggling with my father for my mother’s care as she descended into Alzheimer’s disease, I read many books on spirituality, psychology, and self-help.  The most important learning from all that reading was that I was worthy of a voice, good self-care, and I came to understand the importance of true forgiveness.  My writing during that difficult time focused me in the present.  There I came to know that each moment had something to teach me about overcoming my troubles. 

This past week as I was preparing to present my memoir, God Never Hurries, to a large group at Cedar Ridge Apartments for Independent Living, I understood to master challenges me to teach others what my reading and writing did for me.  Working to synthesize 175 pages of learning and knowing into a coherent forty-minute presentation has its challenges, but then all mastery is challenging.

What if we each challenged ourselves to share the different things that difficulty taught us for the good of all?

  

Both/And Thing

God is...

David Brooks, in his OP-ED NY Times April 22, 2013 column titled “The Confidence Questions” posed several questions, two of which I can personally relate. 

“A generation after the feminist revolution, are women still, on average, less confident than men?”  First I would like to offer that one generation is an extremely short period of time to achieve parity in issues that go deep back in time.  My mother was born in 1916, prior to women winning the struggle just to be able to vote.  I was born in 1943, twenty some years before Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, of which I am a direct beneficiary.  Overcoming oppression is slow, hard work, but I can say from personal experience it is a blest effort which I proudly wrote about in “God Never Hurries—A Memoir.”  And I continue to progress in speaking my truth in this weekly blog.

In response to David’s last question, “In society generally, are more problems caused by overconfidence or under confidence?”  I can confidently respond “yes” to both since life got a whole lot easier when I understood that everything is a both/and thing.  Over or under confidence get equal billing in my book as troublemakers.  And I am getting some insight into their origin, namely that we are not taught about our own inherent goodness.  What if we all knew the original blessing we are—could we then more easily speak our truth, and have no need to inflate our importance?

Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955) the great scientist/priest/mystic saw man’s embrace of woman as consummating a union with the Universe, and in turn, growing to a world scale.  Whenever I needed a boost to help me find my confidence, my voice, I would pull out an old Xeroxed copy of Chardin’s prayer, “Above All Trust in the Slow Work of God.”  Today you can Google it.

We are still birthing Chardin’s vision of the future.  What if we learned to first listen intently to one another and then engage in respectful dialogue?  Would that bring us closer to Teilhard’s vision?