Calm Under Pressure

Love Letters

Poem for the week -- “Love Letters”

Every day, priests minutely examine the Law
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by the wind
and rain, the snow and moon.

-- Ikkyu

Wandering In Nature

We are in Montana and Utah for the next several days wandering around.

Wandering in nature is perhaps the most essential soulcraft practice for contemporary Westerners who have wandered so far from nature. . . .

The Wanderer allows plenty of time to roam in wild nature, and roam alone. Maybe you start out on a trail, but if the landscape allows, it won't be long before you wander off the beaten track. Because you are stalking a surprise, you attend to the world of hunches and feelings and images as much as you do to the landscape. 

. . . You will get good at wandering, good at allowing your initial agenda to fall away as you pick up new tracks, scents, and possibilities. You will smile softly to yourself over the months and years of wanderings as you notice how you have changed, how you have slowed down inside. 

Through your wanderings, you cultivate a sensibility of wonder and surprise, rekindling the innocence that got buried in your adolescent rush to become somebody in particular. Now you seek to become nobody for a while, to disappear into the woods so that the person you really are might find you.

-- Bill Plotkin

Pleasure

​Despite a bout with pain today (kidney stones), I’ve been thinking lately about pleasure.

Pleasure has its place (there's a time for everything — Ecc), so be cautious of people who try to universally deny it.

However.... There is something about pleasure that seems to seek perpetuation. You might say, as some do, that it is (or can be) addictive. Observe the things in your life that bring you pleasure and notice the tendency about them that draws you repeatedly back toward them — something like, I want that pleasure again...and again.

Pleasure can have the appearance of expanding you, but it is also possible that it begins to only expand itself. When we are drawn into something, like pleasure, we can also be reducing other things, other kinds of awareness — like replacing fulfillment with satisfaction or a filling of self, rather than others. I have found that many pleasures tend to reduce my overall capacity, in part, because of their addictive appeals. They can tend to narrow my focus or ability to see beyond the objects involved. True capacity seems to be increased more through the denial of self, than through satisfying the self.

It should be noted, that pleasure has many forms — of the mind, of the body, of effort, of the spirit, etc.

Because of the way it has been misused, I am hesitant to join all the naysayers to pleasure. On the other hand, it is also true, that it is so easy to worship an object, rather than a subject.

LT: Encourage Leadership

Good principles are often true in many contexts.  To encourage leadership, take these for example:

1. Have a compelling mission tied to your purpose
2. Create clear roles for everyone
3. Encourage people to make decisions
4. Promote teamwork throughout the organization
5. Be transparent with information

More here....

-- Peter Economy

It's worth considering how many things in life apply to relationships of all kinds — businesses, civic groups, churches, partners, families, marriages, etc.  In other words, truth is often not confined to certain arenas.

What If: Moving

What If...because something was so big:

you thought that something still, was actually moving.

Need

There are few things that draw people to God like their need.


More than just good theory, this recitation points out the many many ways people need God. It reminds me that my need for God is not just theoretical and leads me back to the question of ‘what is my need today?’

Justice & Mercy

My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of others; in moments of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. . . .

I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. . . .

So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.

But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. . . .

Embracing our brokenness creates a need for mercy. . . . I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized. . . . We could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.

 -- Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

Midlife: I'm Not Screwing Around

Instagram: brenebrown

Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:  I'm not screwing around.  All of this pretending and performing — these coping mechanisms that you've developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt — has to go.  Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts.  I understand that you needed these  protections when you were small.  I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable but you're still searching and you're more lost than ever.  Time is growing short.  There are unexplored adventures ahead of you.  You can't live the rest of your life worried about what other people think.  You were born worthy of love and belonging.  Courage and daring are coursing through your veins.  You were mad to live and love with your whole heart.  It's time to show up and be seen.

-- Brene Brown

Not From Willfulness

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening...

-- Parker Palmer

Struggle or Adventure

We all struggle. Or, we are all involved in an adventure. Which way do you say it, to describe the challenges (or hardness) of life?

If we consider our struggle thru a lens of adventure, what does that change? What would need to change to view things through that lens?

I had an interesting conversation recently about the challenges we face in life. After discussing things a bit, we agreed that, at one point or another, we each have to face the question of who we want to be in challenging circumstances — whether the situation changes or not, whether somebody who should do something about it does or not, whether it is fair or not, whether we like it or not. Who do we want to be?

Viewing things that are challenging as an adventure can shift our sense of it from something (unnecessarily or unfairly) imposed on me to something that I can accept, work with, and determine how I can (want to) be in the middle of it. I can view it as something I can grow from, rather than as something that is stealing from me. In other words, the agency of the power involved can transition — from resentment and not asking the next question to acknowledging how powerless we feel and asking the next question.

"I have to pass an important test. I have so many bills. I don't know what my child needs. My relationships aren't working.  I don't know what is happening or why. I am so tired. I don't know what my future holds..." — things we all can catch ourselves saying.

So, who do I want to be? ...in whatever adventure I may be facing right now. Am I losing or growing?

Sometimes when you're in a dark place you think you've been buried, but actually you've been planted.

-- Christine Caine

LT: To Be Led, Too

The trick of leadership is allowing yourself to be led, too. 

-- Nelson Mandela

I couldn't agree more.  More thoughts on Mandela's leadership here....

Another

I've noticed...one thing leads to another.  And, that it can take a while.

A Father's Job

Instagram: bobgoff

I think a father's job, when it's done best, is to get down on both knees, lean over his children's lives, and whisper, 'Where do you want to go?' Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure.  It's not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us.  God asks what it is He's made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, 'Let's go do THAT together.'

-- Bob Goff

Why Your Brain Needs You to Read Every Day

Reading puts your brain to work.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to your body.

It gives us freedom to roam the expanse of space, time, history, and offer a deeper view of ideas, concepts, emotions, and body of knowledge.

Roberto Bolaño says, “Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”

As you read these words, your brain is decoding a series of abstract symbols and synthesizing the results into complex ideas.

The reading brain can be likened to the real-time collaborative effort of a symphony orchestra, with various parts of the brain working together, like sections of instruments, to maximize our ability to decode the written text in front of us.

Reading rewires parts of your brain. Continue here....

-- Thomas Oppong

Thirsting

Poem for the week -- "Thirsting":

It’s not that the old are wise
But that we thirst for the wisdom

we had at twenty
when we understood everything

when our brains bubbled
with tingling insights

percolating up from
our brilliant genitals

when our music rang like a global siege
shooting down all the lies in the world

oh then we knew the truth
then we sparkled like mica in granite

and now we stand on the shore
of an ocean that rises and rises

but is too salt to drink

--Alicia Ostriker

From the author:

“The thirsting described in this poem comes from the experience of aging. With age comes physical depletion but also, at times, mental and spiritual depletion. When we were young we thought we could change the world; we were self-confident to the point of arrogance. And now, even if we know that self-confidence was illusory, we still yearn for it—and the world still needs changing.”

Inferior

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Give To The World, But...

You should give to the world.

But just know, what you should give should come from the uniqueness of who you are (not from what is expected by others).  And, learning what this is can take a while, perhaps a lifetime.

In the meantime, your best route is to just start giving — which will lead you to learn about your gift...to the world, and to yourself.

After all, you can give something every day already.

LT: Truth, Not Greatness

Leaders seek truth, not greatness.

-- Oleg Vishnepolsky

What If: Flat

What If...because something was so big:

you thought something flat, was actually round.

Visible

Jesus did not come to make God’s love possible, but to make God’s love visible.

-- Unknown

Running Out Of Sand

​

Breaks My Trance

G is for gratitude. When I'm in gratitude, if I even stop and make a list of the things I'm grateful for, that's a form of prayer. It breaks my trance of misery or self-absorption.

-- Anne Lamott

What You Intend

[There are] moments when it is clear—if I have the eyes to see—that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. 

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen to what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

-- Parker Palmer

Midlife: Painful Irony

Instagram: brenebrown

So it's searchable:

Midlife is not about fear of death.  Midlife is death.  Tearing down the walls that we spent our entire life building is death.  Like it or not, at some point during midlife, you're going down, and after that there are only two choices: staying down or enduring rebirth.

It's a painful irony that the very things that may have kept us safe growing up ultimately get in the way of our becoming the parents, partners, and / or people that we want to be.

-- Brene Brown

LT: Direction

Directions are instructions given to explain HOW. 
Direction is a vision offered to explain WHY.

-- Simon Sinek

Leaders often have vision.

Faster = Less

I've noticed...the faster I keep moving, the less imagination I have for others.

Shouldn't Say Everyone's Invited

Instagram: bobgoff

We shouldn't say everyone's invited 
if we're going to act like they're not welcome when they come.

-- Bob Goff

Why Do You Look For What You Do?

Have you ever wondered about why we see what we see?  Or, isn't it a little conspicuous that we tend to only see what we're looking for?

At one level, it's just obvious.  Is this really news?

But, why?  Wouldn't it be important, even helpful, to consider why we look for what we do?  ...because it so obvious that we do it, whether we do this or not is hardly even the question.  So, why do we do this?

I'm going to make this post a little more 'live' today — like adding to it, as my contemplation on this question comes and goes:

• I often see something, especially when I look for it — that could be interesting, even good.  But, very problematic, too. (10a)

• Two people can see the same event, read the same book, be at the place...and see, perceive, and feel very different things.  How does that happen? (11:50a)

• Is there just one reality of something?  Only one 'real' occurrence, idea, or truth? (12:39p)

• What influences such perception?  Is it built-in, like gravity? (4:14p)

• Is it sociological, like air? (7:36p)

• Is it experiential, like muscle?  Mental, like memory?  Spiritual?  Conditioned? (8:54p)

• Do we look for certain things as a means of reinforcing our sense of identity?  As a mechanism for our credibility, our survival. (9:48p)

Or, is it more simple than all of this — humans just tend to look for what we're familiar with and not we're not?  So, just let me be; I like what I like, what I'm comfortable with.

The problem, though, is when our disposition to wonder stops looking for (and, therefore, seeing) anything different...and the challenges that differences bring to the table — the openness that is required — we also lose other things, like the capacity to genuinely imagine who someone else may actually be (rather than just how we see them or want them to be), not mention to love them in the differences they represent.

So, how can 'what do I look for' change...to 'what can I look for'?

The Seven of Pentacles

Poem 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