I've Noticed: Shift

I've noticed...that when I don't feel connected to people, my sense of self starts to shift.

Pull

I feel the pull to be what seems to 'work' for others. At the same time, I feel a resistance to it. I am coming to believe more and more that the important thing is to live attentively to what God has called me to be, whether that matches up with the expectations of others or not.

Rise Up Rooted Like Trees

'Poem selection' for the week -- "Rise Up Rooted Like Trees":

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left [God].
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Vandalism

​Sin is the vandalism of peace.

SM Brunch 6: Memory, Fragility, Poverty, and Unbelieving

​More Saturday Mornings Brunch:

We don't have good memory, which is why we need good history.

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Humanity’s particular beauty is only possible because of its fragility.  Your beauty is not in your formidableness, but in your fragility.

-- Ann Voskamp

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​Poverty...can have an unexpected way of breeding generosity.

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​Sometimes we have to unbelieve something in order to keep believing it.

Let Them Look

Must we always teach our children with books?  Let them look at the mountains and the stars up above.  Let them look at the beauty of the waters and the trees and flowers on earth.  They will then begin to think, and to think is the beginning of a real education.

-- David Polis

A Lie

A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.

-- Edgar J. Mohn

I Used To Think: Fear & Trust

I used to think...that there was much to fear inside of us.  Now I know that there is more to trust inside of us, than there is to fear.

Waiting

​Strength and waiting are connected muscles. It takes strength to wait and the blood of courage because waiting requires patience and trust. You have to be strong in your bones to trust...to wait.

...especially on behalf of someone you love.

Altitude

'Poem selection' for the week -- "Altitude":

I wonder
how it would be here with you,
where the wind
that has shaken off its dust in low valleys
touches one cleanly,
as with a new-washed hand,
and pain
is as the remote hunger of droning things,
and anger
but a little silence
sinking into the great silence.

-- Lola Ridge

Compassion

​I want to error on the side of compassion (and a strong kind at that).

If we offer anything of God correctly to the world, it just might largely be compassion.

Can we understand and embrace compassion without having personally experienced our own need for it? Our own receipt of it? Anyone who has genuinely received compassion, knows what it means to offer it to someone else. Someone who lacks it for others, likely has never experienced it from someone else.

I can listen with compassion because I believe that the very hard thing the other is going through is deepening their own capacity for compassion...what others need from all of us.

SM Brunch 5: Open Air, Worry, and Thirst

More Saturday Mornings Brunch:

If you can't get out of it, get into it!

-- Outward Bound motto

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Now I see the secret of making the best persons, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

-- Walt Whitman

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99% of the things we think will happen, never happen. We all worry about so many things and almost all of those things we stress about, we worry about, we have anxiety about, are just wasted thoughts.

-- Turney Duff

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​​Most of the time when I think I'm hungry, I'm really just thirsty.

Must Exceed

​Your deepest desire must exceed your deepest fear.

Awareness

We lack social awareness because we’re so focused on what we’re going to say next—and how what other people are saying affects us—that we completely lose sight of other people.

-- Travis Bradberry

I've Noticed: Willpower

I've noticed...​my willpower to resist goes down proportionately to the degree to which I 'give in' and then it spreads from one area of my life to another. When I give in, for example to sugar, I want more sugar. When I give in again there, I tend to become more willing to compromise in other areas.  I then notice a kind of defensiveness creeping over me. When I become more defensive, I doubt myself more and then more. It works like a series of falling dominoes.

In my experience, the opposite is also true. When I don't give in, depletion of my willpower seems to slow.

Half Of It

​The truth is the truth, but we only really believe half of it...the half we've experienced.  What I am excited about is that truth always seems to be inviting us to more...to experiencing more of it.

The Seven of Pentacles

'Poem selection' for the week -- "The Seven of Pentacles":

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
      the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

-- Marge Piercy

Service, Not Status

​Strength is for service, not status.

-- Rom 15:1 (MSG)

SM Brunch 4: Truth, Like Us, Rawness, and Pride

More Saturday Mornings Brunch:

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth. 

-- Buddha

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​It is so disappointing when we realize that almost everybody we want to be with, we like because we imagine that they like us.  Don't believe me? Go ahead and think of people you don't enjoy being with and consider if they aren't people that you're not sure like you very much.

We are addicted to ourselves and the things others do for us.​

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We often don't recognize our underlying sadness until we see the forms that cover it in their own rawness.

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The hidden cost of pride:  Isolation

-- Bob Goff

Not To Be Reduced

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

-- Maya Angelou

Grumpy

Grumpy and bitter isn't a place we begin. It's a place we end up.

People don't become selfish, hateful and afraid all at once. They do it gradually.

We are always becoming, and we can always make the choice to start becoming something else, if we care.

-- Seth Godin

I Used To Think: Wounds

​I used to think...that wounds only weakened us.  Now I know that from our deepest wounds come our best gifts to others.

Real Mistake

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

-- Henry Ford

Mysteries, Yes

'Poem selection' for the week -- "Mysteries, Yes":

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

-- Mary Oliver

Wholeness vs Perfection

Spare me perfection. Give me instead the wholeness that comes from embracing the full reality of who I am, just as I am. Paradoxically, it is this whole self that is most perfect. As it turns out, wholeness, not perfection, is the route to the actualization of our deepest humanity.

Inconsistencies, imperfections, and failures to live up to ideals are all part of what it means to be human. What seems to distinguish those who are most deeply and wholly human is not their perfection, but their courage in accepting their imperfections. Accepting themselves as they are, they then become able to accept others as they are.

The richness of being human lies precisely in our lack of perfection. This is the source of so much of our longing, and out of that longing emerges so much creativity, beauty, and goodness. With appropriate openness and humility, it is the cracks that let in the light.

-- David Benner

SM Brunch 3: Play, Patience, Discover, Could Go, and Do Understand

More Saturday Mornings Brunch:

We are not meant to be “perpetually solemn”, we must play.

-- C.S. Lewis

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Do I need to be more patient with others...or with God?

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Do not always rush the nature of truth with the words of truth. Some things need to be discovered.

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I mostly know how far I can go because of how far I have gone.  ...makes me wonder how far I could go.

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Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those that I do understand.

-- Mark Twain

Sharing More

My neighborhood is a bit odd, in that a few dozen houses share one swimming pool. This is because fifty years ago, one large property was subdivided and the developer left the existing pool intact. He specified that all houses would jointly share in its usage and upkeep.

Very few people aspire to share a pool with a few dozen neighbors. Instead, people want their own pool.

After fifteen years of sharing, I can tell you that sharing is much, much better. You pay less for upkeep, yet enjoy a bigger pool. But that's not even close to the best benefit.

Having the pool created a culture of sharing in our neighborhood. When my kids were younger, our neighbors approached us with a proposal. Our swing set was getting pretty shaky, and our kids had mostly outgrown it. So our neighbors offered to buy a much nicer new one that we would share, but - because they didn't have a flat spot in their yard - they asked to put it in ours. We agreed.

Then another neighbor bought a trampoline, that everyone shares. Another bought a soccer net. Same deal. Today, the swing set is long gone but we share a garden with our neighbors.

I'd like to think that this is where we are headed as a society: sharing more.

You don't need a venture capitalist and a programming team to start sharing. You just need to adopt a sharing mindset. Once you do, don't be surprised if you discover that sharing is contagious.

-- Bruce Kasanoff

Weapon Against Stress

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

-- William James

I've Noticed: Normal

​I've noticed...that what I think should be normal is heavily influenced by my experience.  And, when I don't acknowledge this, I seem to have less capacity for understanding differences, for what is normal to others.

Release

​Mercy is a release from the confines of the self.

-- Joe Chaney

Poem in July

'Poem selection' as we exit mid-summer one more time -- "Poem In July":

I felt perfected along the rectangle
By its ragged side

Fences trees and mist dropping
Some space for the flowers

I set an image in my head where
Bushes in their out of focus

Made a green dearth about the door
I wanted to do a book on

Pages left in the heat or rain
But my desire seemingly disappeared

Picked up by a car in the middle of
A pack of cigarettes

This trip into the forest
The trees trading with memory to

Frame the various breaks
The pleasures of small laws cut

Behind the mower with my eyes
Running the grass blades

We don’t really get any older
I can see what that means

-- Samuel Amadon