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.
As I have become wont to do now on an annual basis, the last day of the calendar year offers another opportunity for reflection on both what has turned out to be and what may be to come. It feels like we have, in fact, continued our growth towards being in the moment we are in...which has made it more obvious how much more opportunity for that remains.
And, so, this now routine Saturday collection both caps it off and signals a lean towards the start of the next one:
Whatever we think, matters much less if we take no action.
Change happens best when you recognize that things don’t stay the same — it happens fastest when you realize that things can’t stay the same.
Next year, which do you want more — to improve in some way or to just be?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
"Buckle up, Dana!"
Looks like 2023 will be a ride of changes…for me.
Now I get a fresh chance to see what I really believe about it (like the difference between talking about something and actually going through it).
The only really scary thing about roller-coasters is how you feel on the ride — the outcome is rarely really in question. That's the thrill of it (for some people), experiencing something that feels like it will kill you, but never really does.
Change can often feel like that — the end of something you hold on to can feel like death, but it really isn't. In fact, it often creates a new forms of life.
The only real question is how it feels in the process. Am I alone and in a final kind of jeopardy or am I not actually in any real jeopardy at all? We often feel aware of both, don't we?
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea.
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, at times it's only me.
-- Bob Dylan
I woke up with this thought running through my mind:
We often seem more aware of our limitations than our capabilities.
Besides being a bit sad, why would this be the case? I think there may an answer, but it may take a while to develop it.
First of all, there is the whole notion of awareness. How do we become aware of something? When and why do we become aware of things? It seems observable that some of the answer lies in our development. Kids, for example, may not be aware of certain things that adults are because they haven't experienced them yet. On the other hand, watching a child closely reveals that they are hyper-aware of so many things; they are just very focused on what those things are. They are deeply absorbing what is around them — figuratively and literally.
As adults, we've learned different approaches to what we are aware of or to what we maintain awareness about. In fact, we are actively receiving and dismissing information all the time; using it as needed or not.
But another dynamic emerges in our development cycles as well, a type of calibration of what we can and cannot do well. This is another kind of awareness that engages not only what we're aware of, but also what the consequences are of that awareness. In other words, there is a social dynamic that becomes involved as we negotiate what we need to be aware of. Now there is a value that is being attached to what we aware of and we use that as a factor in our equation of determining who we are and what we need to be.
And (here is the sad part), perhaps it is somewhere along the middle-part of this part of the process that we form conclusions about ourselves based on this value-system. This shifts the dynamic again as we fiddle more with our own sense of agency than with the content involved.
Our awareness is still important and actually quite capable of continued development, but we have started another process related to how to orient ourselves to what we feel capable of. While this step can still have some healthy components to it, we often end up using it to manage something. We unconsciously feel a need to manage for something — to get something we want, to avoid things that could be painful to us, etc.
At this point, we are developing skill at using data to support our efforts to manage our existence in the world and this skill seems to lead us towards a kind of fork in the road. Data is used to enhance a widening view of our relationship with the scope of life or it is used to narrow it. And it is the latter that seems to foster our habit of focusing on what we can't do, rather than what we can.
To be clear, we are not...finish here.
It is only the poor and hungry, those who know they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas.
-- Oscar Romero
Ever noticed...whether your capacity to love is expanding or contracting?
Wouldn't the very nature of Christmas indicate that it should be the former, rather than the latter?
I would hate to limit its application in any way; but, perhaps some ways to consider the question could include:
Everything lives on, just not in the same proximities — something the very nature of Christmas represents.
Both the historical and cultural experience of Christmas has a way of working with how we relate to life and its meaning.
My own daughter is 'expecting' this Christmas; so many things wrapped up in this moment and in the future it is tied to — like a collision of the vulnerabilities of both the now and the anticipated.
Have you ever been overcome both by uncertainty and wonder like Mary was?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
But she was much perplexed....
-- Luke 1:29
It is not that the Annunciation leads Mary out of doubt and into faith; it is that her encounter with the angel leads her out of certainty and into holy bewilderment. Out of familiar spiritual territory and into a lifetime of pondering, wondering, questioning, and wrestling.
-- Debie Thomas
Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!
-- Luke 1:45
True bravery is being exactly who you are, imperfections included. Vulnerability is the most precious gift you can give.
-- Sara Bareilles
Something is happening.
At face value, of course (it always is). But, at another level, we sometimes have a sense that there are too many things that we are aware of which signal that things aren't (can't) going to stay the same.
Sometimes our fears engage this awareness. Sometimes, though, there are just too many signs that something is moving, even if we can't fully identify it.
I'm still thinking about my reflection earlier this week; about what agency looks like and, especially, what it needs to look like...for me.
Part of what makes this apparent to me is the degree of pondering (to borrow some terminology from our Christmas season) going on in my heart. It could be the mood of meaning that is often created by this season. It could be time-of-year reflection, as one year recedes and another emerges. It also could very easily be a part of how aging works on us, on our psyche.
More pragmatically, it could simply be that our life-cycle dynamics and demands are changing — i.e., I'm getting older. In this context, I also feel aware of my increasing need to be more proactive in taking care of my mental health. I can handle some things better than I used to and there are some things that I can't handle like I used to.
This last year has been, to put it mildly, a LOT of things. One of which is...rough (you can follow a thread back through it starting here). Like many others these days, I am exhausted. And, I am facing some big, imminent decisions career-wise. I wake up earlier and earlier each day, my mind in a whirl...trying to navigate a path towards something I can't fully see.
In many ways, these realities are common to human existence. So, it is not unlikely that the precipice this can feel like is just another of the realities that enable us consider what our ultimate sense of self and existence is really founded on.
All true — but, nonetheless, something more to walk through than simply to think about.
As I grope for an answer...finish here.
I'm wondering...about how much we make happen vs how much we let happen. How much do we create for ourselves? How much of what happens is a function of us learning how to join what is already happening?
The reality is that it is likely both, especially at different times in our lives. But, there are times when it feels more like either or. In other words, one OR the other — like sometimes we need to make a choice.
Crisis' seems to leverage our choice-making — difficult as they are, they also force an issue.
But, outside of crisis, choosing can feel even more challenging, especially as we get older and our awareness of implications seems higher.
So the question becomes (at least for me), what is the degree of our own agency?
Thank God (and I don’t mean that flippantly at all — seriously, be grateful) for those who can still thoughtfully and sensitively articulate and relate timeless and transcendent truths of existence to current realities. They are such a gift to the world. Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren, Jason Miller, and others come to mind; those who expand our imagination for not only what could be, but for what actually already is.
We need to become much more cognizant of the impacts of our cultural performance-based identities — just because we're used to it, doesn't mean it's healthy.
People get there at different times and in different ways — but, they get there.
Christianity has a timeless message for the changing world; message — not behavior (which invariably follows).
Surely, our faith descriptions and traditions don’t have to be exactly the same, do they?
'Poem for the week' -- "Do you hear what I hear?":
Said the night wind to the little lamb
Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, little lamb
Do you see what I see?
A star, a star, dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite
With a tail as big as a kite
Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy
Do you hear what I hear?
Ringing through the sky, shepherd boy
Do you hear what I hear?
A song, a song, high above the trees
With a voice as big as the sea
With a voice as big as the sea
Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king
Do you know what I know?
In your palace warm, mighty king
Do you know what I know?
A Child, a Child shivers in the cold
Let us bring Him silver and gold
Let us bring Him silver and gold
Said the king to the people everywhere
Listen to what I say
Pray for peace, people everywhere
Listen to what I say
The Child, the Child, sleeping in the night
He will bring us goodness and light
He will bring us goodness and light
-- Noel Regney
Maybe it's because I'm not as aligned activity-wise with the traditional activities that used to both excite and comfort me about the season (no Christmas Tree, for example, except for what has become my outside favorite, see below). Maybe it's because of the overwhelming residual fatigue from this last year (beginning last Christmas) and the pervasive emotional out-of-breathness we have felt ever-since. At the very least, I hope it's not overall cynicism.
And, maybe, it’s not just me. Ever noticed that, from the increasing commercialization of the whole holiday season, you rarely find real joy? Sometimes you still find pockets of happiness, perhaps from the nostalgia, sentiment, and even occasional connection with people (although, most of the time, people describe the season more in terms of stress than anything else). But, where is the collective joy these days?
Even if it tries to sell meaning, there is so little of it in commercialization because its content is largely consumable, not to mention vacuous — commercialization has no real soul. And, for me, this year things have really started to sound pretty tinny.
It seems to me that, like many things related to God, everyone must come to identify whether or not they believe that Christmas is basically a human construct. Most certainly an awful lot of it is (not that that, in and of itself, makes it automatically bad). But, so are most cultural things anyway.
But, if at its core Christmas is not (exclusively a human construct), that changes everything. The incarnation of God is as profound as it has ever been. Commercialization hardly (sorry, pun-intended) holds a candle to the depth of this significance. Perhaps even greater, at least on the cosmic scale, is that even the inevitability of death in the human realm does have the final word (but, that is for another holiday in the Spring). The divine choice to submit to enfleshment, in solidarity with us as human-beings, is not only astounding by most measures, but also engrossing to consider. God with us.
But, ...finish here.
In a competition between someone who knows the most and someone who is willing to learn the most, the edge usually goes to the curious and empathic professional, not the one who is simply protecting what’s already known.
I've noticed...I don't have the stamina I wish I had when I perceive that people are accusing me of something, especially of who I am (or, more likely, am not). I can too quickly retreat rather than stay in and believe in something more (about myself...and about them). When I don't live out of a deeper kind of strength, I can be taken down surprisingly easily by these kinds of things.
Even worse, when my 'retreat' strategy doesn't work, I can also quickly go into 'attack' mode — still not believing in something greater in the other person, because it feels so necessary to protect myself. This can be very close to a 'fatal flaw' for me. Sometimes I can feel so weak standing in the face of adversity, especially when I fear it will cost me something too significant.
Either strategy gets in the way relationally with others; creating a kind of distance (while the retreating version may be hard for them to describe...or maybe not, the attacking version is quite easy to). All because, I don't take punches well. I wish I did, because when I don't for my sake, I can hardly ever see things for the sake of others. I can often be patient, but much less so when I feel threatened by how I am viewed.
Is all of this just some kind of veiled attempt at making a virtue out of navel-gazing? I don‘t think so because self-awareness can enable me to ask new questions. Questions about who I really want to be; questions about who I really am.
And, such understanding can actually develop the kind of strength that is helpful as I relate to others, to receive criticism (even accusation) in more constructive ways — to embrace where they may even be right at times.
Imagine where we really end up without such stamina.
