Meaning Is Strength

In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.

-- Viktor E. Frankl

Routine Disrupted

There appears to be a kind of comfort in routine.  So, it can be uncomfortable when routine is disrupted.  But, it seems, we invariably return to finding new patterns to re-establish routine, even if it is not the same.  While we like variation from time to time, predictability seems to be satisfying, too.

Are your routines changing during this COVID-19 period of disruption?  What other kinds of disruption have you experienced, that have led you to new routines?

How about this, what have your new routines allowed you to discover?

What They Want To Hear

Trust is built on telling the truth, not telling people what they want to hear.

-- Simon Sinek

This seems like a generally true maxim...and eerily timely for these days.

What Do You See?

Ever noticed...what's happening when one person sees a closed old gas station, while someone else sees a building with big doors to open and sell coffee and craft soda?

Seeing and vision can be two different things.  What factors influence the distinction the most?  Why do I see what I see?  What do you see?

Beat of the Sacred

Do we know that within each one of us is the unspeakably beautiful beat of the Sacred? Do we know that we can honor that Sacredness in one another and in everything that has being? And do we know that this combination—growing in awareness that we are bearers of Presence, along with a faithful commitment to honor that Presence in one another and in the earth—holds the key to transformation in our world?

-- John Philip Newell

Listening To The Youngest

When I was young I always deferred to people older than me and thought they knew better. And now, I feel like I'm learning more from people younger than me. It's like the whole idea of mentorship has been flipped on its head. I think we really have to be listening to the youngest members of our society right now because they do represent the future.

-- Bina Venkataraman

In April

'Poem selection' for the week -- "In April":

Again the woods are odorous, the lark 
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, 
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. 

After long rainy afternoons an hour 
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings 
Them at the windows in a radiant shower, 
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. 

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; 
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Perspectives

It is just true that other people have perspectives that are just as good as mine—some are even better.

OK.  So, what's your point...?

Not acknowledging this, by putting myself (or keeping myself) in a position where I don't experience how this is true, tends to lead to the conclusion that it isn't—and that is a problem.

Earth Day 2020 - Nature of Economy

It's the 50th anniversary of Earth Day—the cause that drew 20 million people into the streets.

This was not an anti-litter campaign.  This was talking about fundamental changes in the nature of the American economy, in some ways much more profoundly radical than the anti-Vietnam War movement.  

-- Denis Hayes

Continue here...:

Hurt Feelings

Hurt feelings don't vanish on their own.  They don't heal themselves.  If we don't express our emotions, they pile up like a debt that will eventually come due.

-- Marc Brackett

In Others

I've noticed...sometimes I can see more of myself, when I see myself in others.

When The Ego Weeps

When the ego weeps for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices for what it has found.

-- Sufi Proverb

Visual: Between

Visual - "Between":

Winona Lake, IN

The Age of Worry

...a delightful cover that has musically captured some of our family imagination these days.

COVID-19: The Way Americans Spend Their Money & Restarting the Economy

A fascinating piece on some of the economic impacts of COVID-19:

An Adieu

‘Poem for the week' -- "An Adieu" (it looks like it will take one more day before April in Indiana will give up its Winter's Sorrow):

Sorrow, quit me for a while!
    Wintry days are over;
Hope again, with April smile,
    Violets sows and clover.

Pleasure follows in her path,
    Love itself flies after,
And the brook a music hath
    Sweet as childhood’s laughter.

Not a bird upon the bough
    Can repress its rapture,
Not a bud that blossoms now
    But doth beauty capture.

Sorrow, thou art Winter’s mate,
    Spring cannot regret thee;
Yet, ah, yet—my friend of late—
    I shall not forget thee!

-- Florence Earle Coates

Moving Through Us

Human Solidarity:

I am not alone in my tiredness or sickness or fears, but at one with millions of others from many centuries, and it is all part of life. 

-- Etty Hillesum 


It can be tempting when we are afraid, in grief, in stress, or ill, to experience our bodies as a liability, a vulnerability, or the place of pain.  But we have a choice in those moments to also experience our bodies as the place of divine "yes".  To see creation taking form as we move our hands across a page to make an image, pick up an instrument, write a poem, dance in our living rooms or on our balconies, or bake bread, we are reminded that God is moving through us, this flesh, in every moment.  While fear closes us up, makes us freeze or flee, creativity and expression keeps us open, soft, receptive.  When we are open, we can say Yes to the Holy moving through us, but we can also find a way to release things that could otherwise stay stuck inside.  Whatever you do today, may you feel God moving through you. And if that isn't the case, may you know that others can experience you that way, and believe it for you, even if you can't seem to feel that about yourself.

-- Hillary McBride

Knowing some about her holocaust diaries, adds dimension for me to Etty Hillesum's observation above.  Hillary McBride brings into perspective what I think it takes to survive (anything) in a healthy way.

Experience

Experience is our best teacher—the question is, what are we learning?

What are we learning, right now?  Time (or times like this) is not something just to get through, to some imagined better state in the future.  Time is something to be in right now.

If we aren't present to now, our teacher is ineffective, because we aren't actually experiencing this time—we are simply rushing through it (or, just waiting for it to be over).

Not Our Abilities

It is not our abilities that show who we really are, it is our choices.

-- Albus Dumbledore

Andrea Bocelli: Music For Hope

...sometimes music just shoots right through (whether you understand the words or not).

Easter: Jesus’ Resurrection

The larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met have all died before they died.

It is true that you are going to die, and yet:

“neither death nor life . . . nothing can ever come between us and the love of God.”

-- Romans 8:38-39

Every small death in my life, has enlarged me.


Nothing is the same forever, says modern science. Ninety-eight percent of our bodies’ atoms are replaced every year. Geologists, with good evidence over millennia, can prove that no landscape is permanent. Water, fog, steam, and ice are all the same thing but at different stages and temperatures. “Resurrection” is another word for change, but particularly positive change—which we tend to see only in the long run. In the short run, change often looks like death. The Preface to the Catholic funeral liturgy says, “Life is not ended, but merely changed.” Science is now giving us helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged with mythological language. Myth does not mean “not true,” which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always and deeply true!

God could not wait for modern science to give history hope. It was enough to believe that Jesus “was raised from the dead,” somehow planting the hope and possibility of resurrection in our deepest unconscious. Jesus’ incarnate life, his passing over into death, and his resurrection into the ongoing Christ life is the archetypal model for the entire pattern of creation. He is the microcosm for the whole cosmos, or the map of the whole journey, in case you need or want one.

Nowadays most folks do not seem to think they need that map, especially when they are young. But the vagaries and disappointments of life’s journey eventually make us long for some overall direction, purpose, or goal beyond getting through another day. All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don’t believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead. I have met such people from all kinds of backgrounds, religious and nonreligious.

Personally, I do believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus because it affirms what the whole physical and biological universe is also saying—and grounds it in one personality. Resurrection must also be fully practical and material. If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal, and when the creed says, we believe in the “resurrection of the body,” it means our bodies too, not just Jesus’ body! As in him, so also in all of us. As in all of us, so also in him. So I am quite conservative and orthodox by most standards on this important issue, although I also realize it seems to be a very different kind of embodiment post-resurrection as suggested by the Gospel accounts.

-- Richard Rohr


Christianity can help us realize that death and resurrection are part of the evolutionary path toward wholeness; letting go of isolated existence for the sake of deeper union. Something dies but something new is born—which is why the chaos of our times is, in a strange way, a sign of hope; something new is being born within. Out of chaos, a star is born. Breakdown can be break through if we recognize a new pattern of life struggling to emerge.

-- Ilia Delio

Holy Saturday: Smashing Idols Through Pain

On what might have to (symbolically) be the darkest day of the year, Holy Saturday; a metaphor for the times in our lives when all hope seems dashed. There is, though often undetectable, something still very much alive—something we can only learn through what seems like death.

Divine Solidarity:

Instagram: aaronieq

If I will trust that what comes to me in life is for me, not against me...it breaks my idols, my isolation, my sense of independence.

-- Barbara Brown Taylor

Holy Friday: Suffering

On Holy Friday (original meaning of the 'good' in Good Friday), a reminder—even as much as we try to avoid it...suffering IS the path to transformation:

For more on the thoughts referenced above for each day noted, click here....


And then, there is T.S. Eliot's version...The Sharp Compassion.

"Take your time...it's not your fault...there's no rush."

Dear friends, look at the real heroes who come to light in these days: they are not famous, rich and successful people; rather, they are those who are giving themselves in order to serve others.

-- Pope Francis

Instagram: kellycorrigan

"Take your time...it's not your fault...there's no rush."

Unwelcome

About a year ago, I experienced a little of what it feels like to be unwelcome.

I have to admit, I’d never known what that feels like, at a pervasively social level.  ...that says something, in and of itself (about me or, at least, my experience).

Unwelcomed-ness comes in many forms, but one of the most demoralizing is when it comes from those in power.  Because power, theoretically, should be the resource that is needed to enable the good that should be happening.  Too often, though, it is used for the opposite effect.

Often, institutions have power.  And, people often use power given to them by institutions.  And, sometimes those same people used to be friends.

Power can be maintained in a number of ways—based the color of your skin, the way you act, the way you talk, or just the way you look. But, perhaps most significantly—often in religious contexts (spiritual or otherwise)—it is maintained based on what you believe.

Does God make us feel welcome because of what we believe?  Didn't God love us 'while we were yet sinners'?  Why, then, would introducing 'unwelcome' based on belief after-the-fact feel like a necessary thing to do?  But, it often is.  And, unfortunately, the church often simply borrows the same methods of control, as society does, through the use of power—through the use of the social-power of a group.

I am sure that my experience of 'unwelcome' pales in significance compared to its many more brutal forms.  And, I am also sure that I have been complicit at times by extending it to others myself.  The memory of my experience of unwelcome towards me still lingers today...affecting how I view myself and impacting how I think about (treat) others.  Recognizing this, I am trying to allow it to reveal to me how I perpetuate unwelcome-ness.

Because, you are 'Unwelcome' here...is not the way of love.

LT: Dirty Hands

Leadership is a not a fancy quote, an academic understanding, or something you just talk about; it is something you actually do...on a daily basis.

Leaders don't just show up once in a while, for a few minutes when it's convenient.  People not only see leadership, they feel it—it is something they know because the leader is in the fray...doing the work of it, with them.

If there's dirt involved, a leader's hands have mud all over them.

More True

Ever noticed...that volume doesn't make things more true?

...neither does repetition.

...neither does passion.

...though, all of these can be used to drawn attention to what is true.

Completely Worth It

Instagram: sarcasticlutheran

And this is it.  This is the life we get here on earth.  We get to give away what we receive.  We get to believe in each other.  We get to forgive and be forgiven.  We get to love imperfectly.  And we never now what effect it will have for years to come.  And all of it...all of it is completely worth it.

-- Nadia Bolz-Weber

Epic Cell Phone Choir

Some Good News

Moods and Actions

The way we feel can be triggered by outside events.

And that can change how we act.

And the way we act can reinforce how we feel.

Of course, the opposite is true as well, and far more in our active control.

How we act always changes how we feel.

This is a perfect moment for upskilling. For a sprint in learning something that’s difficult to learn. Not because a teacher or a boss made us do it, but because we chose to. Not only do we get to keep that skill forever, but the act of taking control and expending the effort will change our mood.

And this is the perfect moment for generous connection. Going way beyond the news of the day, we have the chance to create intimate digital interactions that last.

It’s a significant posture shift, one which might change who you see when you look in the mirror.

We might not be able to do anything about external events, but we have control over our actions. Sometimes, it’s hard to stare right into that opportunity, because it comes with a lot of responsibility.

What will you learn today? Who will you teach?

-- Seth Godin, Moods and actions

...emphasis added.

Why vs What

Those who know WHAT they do tend to work harder. Those who know WHY tend to work smarter.

-- Simon Sinek

Finish Line, Q1 2020 - Whew!

Remember all this?

Ninety days ago we stepped into a new decade arguing over whether it was actually a new decade. Today, we’re in a much different world. As Q1 2020 reached the finish line, let’s take a collective breath and rewind:

January 
President Trump ordered a strike killing Iran's top commander, Qassem Soleimani. Oil prices and geopolitical tensions soared then fizzled out.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said the asset manager is doubling down on confronting climate change, a watershed moment for the environment's role in business decisions.

Trump signed a "phase one" trade deal with China, calming two years of tensions, as well as a North American trade deal. The U.K. finally Brexited. And China locked down 56 million people as the coronavirus spread. 

Kobe Bryant's surprise death on Jan. 26 united grieving fans from all over the world. 

February
The Iowa caucuses were a technological disaster. Tesla went on a stock run for the ages. Feb. 7, the Fed said coronavirus could pose a risk to the U.S. economy. 

Facebook changed its political ad policies in the wake of Bloomberg memegate. Weinstein was convicted. And Bob Iger abruptly stepped down as Disney CEO. 

By late February, China was slowly getting back to work after many weeks of quarantine, while the U.S. prepared for an outbreak.

March
Joe Biden took the lead in the Democratic primary, while competitors like Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren ended their campaigns.

Saudi Arabia started an oil price war, and the U.S. began acutely feeling the coronavirus. Companies started WFH. Sports were canceled. Universities closed. Trump's Oval Office address sent travelers scurrying home from Europe. 

In an emergency move to save the economy, the Fed cut rates half a percentage point. March 9, a stock plunge tripped the circuit breaker. Two days later, the Dow entered a bear market. March 16, it logged an almost 3,000 point loss. 

By mid-March, the private sector had mobilized into a wartime economy. Nonessential businesses were closing. 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment in a week. And the government passed a record $2.2 trillion stimulus package.

Looking ahead...with 2.8+ billion people around the world under some kind of lockdown, many of us will experience Q2 from our living rooms.

-- Morning Brew