I know many people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. That's the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The more you give love away, the more you get.
-- Warren Buffet
I've noticed...that physical proximity is important to me.
Something isn't quite complete when I don't choose location, physicality, touch — in other words, actual experience in addition to cognitive understanding.
How we become convinced of something is not as straight-forward as we think.
Faith without doubt is just belief — though often doubt is the bridge we cross to get from belief to faith.
Religion too often is the attempt to codify God…which is a kind of impossibility from the onset.
Doesn't it all come down to what you trust in and whether trusting in yourself is, in fact, your best option?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
'Poem for the week' -- "Winter: A Dirge": (does it not feel this way sometimes?)
The wintry west extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or, the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw:
While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.
“The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,”
The joyless winter-day
Let others fear, to me more dear
Than all the pride of May:
The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,
My griefs it seems to join;
The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine!
Thou Power Supreme whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here, firm, I rest; they must be best,
Because they are Thy will!
Then all I want—O do Thou grant
This one request of mine.—
Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,
Assist me to resign.
-- Robert Burns
I have 3 posts unfinished posts started for today. So, right now, I'm chiding myself with "Hey, how about a little focus here...?!?"
It's not really working, as I'm still not landing the plane of my mind. Perhaps, sometimes it's better to just notice what is (rather than try to scold it into any particular shape)....
I have been thinking a lot about our habits — how they enable us, but also how they ensconce us.
I've also been thinking about proximity — how differently we see things when we are actually close to them.
And, I've been thinking about the role of surprise in the discoveries of my day-to-day life — how often it actually is an unanticipated by-product (perhaps of things like our habits and proximity).
Today's mash-up may be a likelihood because of things like my recent viewing of the movie "A May Called Otto", a powerful sermon I recently heard on the healing wisdom of grief, the house-fire of a co-worker, more mass-shootings, the personal disruption of the last year, a desire for change, a future I can't force my way into (but can still walk towards), etc. So many dynamics, both of kind and nature.
So, I sit here in the middle of it all — sometimes naïve, sometimes bewildered, sometimes frustrated, sometimes enlivened, and sometimes scared...often more powerless than I prefer to be (feel).
When I write like this, I've noticed that it is often in the revisions where the better stuff lies or, at the very least, where the clarity is. One thought or way of expressing something leads to another, which opens up another and which leads to an eventual return to the original one, but at that point with a quite a bit more nuance and flavor in tow.
Sometimes, this can go on all day (even if I can't actually get to the editing at the time). Today, I'm experimenting with the model here. I'll add and subtract, tweak, revise and supplement as my engagement allows. Let's see if and where it lands after all....
So here's a subsequent thought (approaching final descent?) — what if surprise is related to my proximity to...continue here?
Ever noticed...the more open you are, the more interesting people you seem to meet?
More snow day pics here....
Most paths lead somewhere; at least somewhere somebody else has traveled (here's a link to path-imagery I've collected over the years).
In spite of the undeniable history of abuses committed in the name of religion, the monotheistic faiths [Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] offer innumerable points of access to the realm of love. We would do well to revisit the teachings and practices so carefully engineered over millennia to invoke the God of Love and bring [God] into our midst. By saying yes to the best of our own heritage and entering the holiest grounds of one another’s faith traditions, we may be able to usher in an age of love within our own lifetime. We can only do this together. Through a process of perpetual discernment and “prayer unceasing” we may dive into the well of each faith and emerge with the treasure that connects us all.
-- Mirabai Starr
Despite appearances, politics is not about what you believe or even what is true; it is about narrative...and the power that wields.
Everybody should probably be an agnostic for a season (and nobody should pronounce how long that season should be for someone else).
It seems more conspicuous as we age, that we have to make more decisions without the predictability of specific outcomes.
How comfortable are you with trust right now?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
My whole life has been preparation for this day.
While perhaps a bit laden with overtones of productivity and singularity, there is some truth to this notion. At the very least, it is not too hard contemplate such an observation.
Against a backdrop of some kind of grandiose revelation, closer to the truth is the likelihood that any related revelation like this may be something like awareness and presence in the moment. Each moment and the experience of it is, at least, related to a prior, as well as to the next, one. In terms of days, each one adds one more element to that possibility — just as the past has informed my experience of today, so today will likely do the same for the future. What a vision to potentially live from, weather there is any particularly specific assertible claim associated with it or not.
Does this understanding change my experience of the current moment? Does it create more opportunity to be present to it? Or, does it move me away from it and present me with the constancy of the future, and the oft inadvertent attempt to live there, always anticipating, and never present?
Always there; never here.
When this is prevailing upon us, do we forfeit the very thing that allows us to be more capable of being prepared for whatever the future does bring? If the moment we are in is not being actually experienced, the growth that can come from it can be lost because we aren't actually participating in it. We are too preoccupied with our efforts to try to always be anticipating the next one.
Do we arrive then in the future, relatively unprepared, because of this habit to rarely more fully engage in our current experience and what each moment can teach us in the present?
Growth and development seem to be predicated on our ability to experience what is happening in the now. It is often solidified by subsequent reflection on what that experience afforded us (even if that is different than what we thought it was at the time).
Some examples?
What informs me in my current job are some of the experiences in my prior jobs.
What helps me in a conversation now often comes from what I've learned about listening from previous conversations.
My ability to engage with someone unfamiliar to me is...finish here.
On the other side of suffering, you trust yourself.
-- Jen Hatmaker
Martin Luther King Jr. defined agape love as willingness to serve without the desire for reciprocation, willingness to suffer without the desire for retaliation, and willingness to reconcile without the desire for domination.
-- Richard Rohr
Part of wisdom is knowing which stories are yours to tell, and which ones are not.
We only pay attention to certain things, which by implication means we aren't paying attention to other things — that's not necessarily bad, but being unaware of it can be.
It is often change in circumstances that usher us into opportunities, not to mention ideas, that we may never have considered before.
Have you ever felt way more like a function, than a person?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
A recent walk in the woods affirmed something for me.
We are co-existing with things that are living and dying all around us...all the time.
What does that tell us?
Among other things, this seems to indicate that living AND dying are actually quite compatible with each other...as opposed to being mutually exclusive and something to be resisted.
Such understanding changes our relationship with this reality. It moves us from a posture of resistance to a binary characteristic of it (that we so often presume) and toward the implications of something that we actually can (need to) cooperate with.
Living and dying is often positioned in the context of parameters, like bookends, as if the essence of living or of life itself is ever actually truncated. A more holistic point of view would likely demonstrate that living of all kinds is perpetual and that dying is just part of it. What changes is more its form than anything else. Somehow, we’ve accumulated something close to a conclusion that the sustenance of life is predicated on the resistance to death. And yet, nothing could be further from the reality that we observe all around us — that the two are mutually inclusive and that they cooperate with each other, even in harmony. The loss of one form is really just a transference to another form, and the sooner that we can both recognize and become comfortable with the sheer nature of this reality (and I do mean nature), the more capable we become of perpetuating something good about what it means to really live, even as we die.
Everywhere we look, we can see that nothing lives forever…and, if it did, there would be some real problems in the general ecosystem, in overall existence. It’s also true that we can recognize, without even trying too hard, how something lives on even after some part of it dies. We can see this, for example, in our natural ecosystems, like in a forest. We can see this in terms of family. We might often observe (if not comment on) how a son is like a father or a daughter like a mother. Any study of history shows that so much of what lives on does so across generations. Things live on. Death doesn't prevent life — in fact, it might actually perpetuate it.
We can even see this in the context of ideas — they come and they go and often return again. As it has been said, there is really nothing new under the sun. Most certainly, there is at least rediscovery, even to the point where the rediscovery often looks more like something brand new.
It is so apparent that there is...finish here.
Listening is not simply hearing the words that are spoken.
Listening is understanding why the words were spoken.
-- Simon Sinek
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
-- Jack Kornfield
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
-- Eckhart Tolle
The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself, everything that you want, you already are.
-- Rumi
You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift—your true self—is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.
-- Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
'Poem for the week' -- "I Went Out to Hear":
The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before
the air troubled above
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly
still. I knew this was
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.
-- Leila Chatti
From the author:
“While at Annaghmakerrig, an artist’s residency in Ireland, a novelist I had become friends with encouraged me to stop working like ‘an American’ and leave my room sometimes. One night, he came and told me there were bats out by the lake which I should go and see immediately. As dusk was coming down, I was struck by the enormity of the silence, a quiet I have never since heard. The moment was lovely and so easily missed, like most miracles. Beauty everywhere, and it’s so brief, so absolute, it fills me with a tenderness that is, at times, unbearable—this miracle of living for a little while to see it.”
Did you feel full from the holiday season (several ways to feel that...)? Perhaps by way of contrast, how are you feeling now — empty, bummed or...optimistic?
Whatever you're feeling today, it seems that so many of the various rhythms of our lives could be described by the dynamic of expansion and contraction.
Expansion, followed by contraction. Growth and excitement, invariably followed by doldrums and apathy. We experience things that really matter and then seem to go through times when it feels like nothing does.
But, over time, it is hard not to notice the repetitive nature of this dynamic.
Like the seasons themselves, there are times when things feel rapid and vibrant and then, sometimes from sheer fatigue, we have to slow down or stop, to rest or recover.
January seems a bit like that for me, especially coming off all the indulgence of the holiday season. We almost instinctively need a time to get back to basics, to live within our means...to contract a bit in reaction to all the prior expansion.
And, after a while, we will start to wish again for some activity; for re-emergence.
We will exert ourselves again, get tired, and need to slow down again. Each cycle driven by something different, but also in a relatively conspicuous pattern — expansion and contraction...again, and again.
Acknowledging this reality and accepting that unabated expansion is not even really feasible is both necessary and helpful. Further, it seems like we actually need these kinds of rhythms because each contributes something good to the true nature of existence.
Ebb and flow. Rise and fall. Even, back and forth. All of these are normalized realities. They, in fact, are healthy for us. It is fantasy when we imagine that constant rise is either necessary or realistic.
Recognizing these realities can...finish here.
We are called to be fruitful — not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness.
-- Henri Nouwen
I try to practice forms of awareness (since it seems to include a conscious kind of effort). For example, every third week I'll ask an Ever noticed? question about something I've noticed about the world or our collectively shared experience. On intervening weeks, I'll make an observation about something I'm wondering about and one about something I've noticed about myself, like this one for today:
I've noticed...that one way to stop an undesired habit, is to replace it with a different one.
For me, staring it down and just trying to not do it, doesn't seem to work very well.
I link them each time, so I can trace a history of the threads more easily and to notice how I evolve over time.
Continuing this practice in 2023 — will see where it takes me.
