Whole Hearted Courage
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar…
~~Raymond Lundquist
Hello all 🙂 Blogger Slacker returns…
I took this pic a few months ago in a remote place called Cathedral Canyon, in The Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri. To reach this place, you have to leave all that is familiar, drive 2 hours from a major city, then hike even further into the more-middle-of-nowhere. I must say~~ it was totally worth it. The pic doesn’t do it justice. I spent a few days in that part of the world, totally off the grid and reconnecting with myself. It was lovely in a million different ways. During that time, I pondered why it is that I often have to leave all that is familiar on the outside to reconnect to what I love that is familiar on the inside. But that is another blog post for another day.
I was thinking today about all of the tragedy and environmental disasters we’ve had in the last year, reflecting on the impermanence of everything we think is familiar, all we hold dear. The funny thing is that as things change or become unfamiliar, the human tendency is to engage in our familiar patterns that often don’t serve us….old patterns of shutting up or down, lashing out or in, running away instead of running toward the change. Yet there is so much change happening all the time and that’s what we call life. When we like the changes we say things are going well, when we don’t like the changes we say they aren’t. But that’s familiar too. I think it takes real courage to go with all the flows of life, to swim through what might feel like a tsunami with an open heart. I’m amazed by how many people are able to do just that and I’m grateful when I can do it myself.
This is a time of deep prayer for some…fasting, prayer and reflection. This is a time of loss and horror for others…unprecedented, horrible loss on a scale I can’t even begin to comprehend. This is a time of joy for others…birth, new jobs, new homes, dreams coming true. This is a time of death and illness for others and on and on the list of changes goes. No matter what the circumstance, it takes courage to face it and walk through it with an open mind and heart. And in the middle of it all, in the middle of all the magic and all the tragic, we all crave connection with others. I have come to believe with my whole heart that the only way I can have a connection with you is if I have a connection with myself first. And, at least for myself, I feel most connected in a helpful way to myself if I feel connected to the Divine and all of the ways in which God moves within.
All of this made me think of Brene Brown and her work. Brene has done some very interesting research in the fields of courage, compassion, shame and how to live with a whole heart. She speaks of the original meaning of the word “courage,” meaning to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. Her research is very interesting and beautiful, I’ll post a clip at the end of one of her TED talks. It’s well worth the 20 minutes or so it takes to watch.
As you ponder courage and living life with a whole heart…If you are so inclined, please remember those for whom this is a hard or tragic time. If you are further inclined, perhaps you could hold yourself and others in the gentle and loving space of a whole heart, or at least hold the aspiration that you can do so, for yourself and others. We are all we’ve got, sweet friends. And I think it’s important to remember we are all enough. YOU are enough. Yes, you. May you go forth with that knowing and the courage of a whole heart of peace and kindness toward yourself and others.
With that, I leave you with Dr. Brene Brown, her bio and video.
Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. Brené spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness. She poses the questions:
How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to recognize that we are enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Qm9cGRub0&feature=player_embedded]
The Mountain Remains…
I am always with all beings, I abandon no one. And however great your inner darkness, you are never separate from Me. Let your thoughts flow past you calmly. Keep Me near, at every moment. Trust Me with your life, because I Am you, more than you yourself are…
Hello all! Blogger Slacker returns like a thief in the night, surprise! A lot has been happening, and the truth is I’ve been living this life instead of blogging about it. But I wanted to come by so the Spirituality blog and our dear readers don’t get too lonely 🙂
We signed my mom into hospice last week and I’ve been coming and going a lot. I was thinking about all of this stuff the last time I was down there, and this post was the favorite of many, so I’m going to re-run it. I wrote this post last summer and the funny thing is that not much has changed, but everything has changed. Not much is different, but it’s all so different. And such is the nature of life. And so the mountain still remains…Enjoy 🙂
~~~
I spent the last few days with my parental units, in a little town in Southeast Missouri. This is an area I blogged about last week when I was thinking of my grandmother and my memories of smells, heaven and so on. Lest I sound too romantic, the other reality is that this area located in the buckle of the bible belt boasts some pretty startling stats: Highest illiteracy rates in the state. Nearly 30% of children and seniors live below the poverty line. A neighboring county claims the state prize for the most arrests for operating meth labs and is rampant with child abuse and domestic violence, drug abuse and alcoholism. It is literally in the middle of nowhere, a dot on a state road map in the foothills of the Ozark mountains. My cell phone doesn’t work because it is so far from civilization and if there is ever an emergency, there is no ambulance service. You buy into a 911 package that allows a helicopter to transport you to a hospital about 50 miles away.
This is an area about an hour from a hospital, an hour from a major grocery store or movie theater, an area settled centuries ago by native mound builders and which later experienced some fierce fighting and plundering during the Civil War. The Trail of Tears was prominent all through this area and various Indian tribes lived there for centuries before the Europeans arrived. Much of my ancestry can be traced to the Irish who settled there then married Cherokees who managed to escape from the Trail and find a new life in those rugged hills. An old Civil War road runs along a ridge toward the back of their property, a heavily wooded area full of deer and other game, birds and bugs and snakes of all stripes. In the cemetery where my father’s mother is buried, about two miles back on a dirt road, there is a large hand carved stone, noting only that it is at the head of a mass grave of slaves and Indian mound builders. No one seems to have other information, but it has always fascinated me. So it’s not exactly Heaven on paper, but I actually believe Heaven is within, regardless of where I may or may not be. And besides– God I love it there. It’s nature at its best; the people, landscape and its inhabitants wild and untamed, with rolling hills and valleys, which in this part of the world are referred to as “hollers.”
During this trip, we made pickles and tomato juice with ingredients straight from the garden, ran a few errands and I worked in the yard some. This is my favorite part, the garden and cutting acres of grass. My father has some big lawn mower things that are nicer than one of the cars I owned in college, a ratty old 4-speed copper colored Datsun my friend Tom affectionately referred to as “The Turd.” I learned pretty quickly as a child that if you are cutting grass or doing dishes, people just leave you alone to do your own thing. This remains true even now. So I like to cut the grass.
Going to their place is always an adventure. The drive down takes close to 3 hours and rolls through some gorgeous country, through little towns and hamlets named after characters and areas from the Bible, after people long forgotten other than a passing through their creeks or farms. Yet these mountains and valleys remain, solid witnesses to the passage of time. I thought of my grandmother a lot on the way down and her uncanny ability to predict the weather, among other things. She swore that if the cows were laying down (which they were on Thursday) it was a sign of “falling weather,” and to expect rain or snow or whatever seasonal precipitation falls that time of year. For the record, the cattle were all sprawled out like college kids after a drinking binge, but the skies were sunny and earth-bound blue, with no rain in sight.
So these are things you can’t help but notice on the way down. Part of what I like about going is that I’m never sure what I might end up doing while I’m there. My mother is not in good health but is in this Energizer Bunny Holding Pattern, just sort of plugging along. My clinical brain knows that one of these days, probably sooner rather than later, the batteries in the Bunny will stop working and she’ll sign into hospice. When that time comes, I’ll go down there for the duration, but for now I just come and go and do what I can. And when I can, I cut the grass and admire the rolling hills, these foothills of the Ozark mountains.
So I tooled around on the Cadillac of lawn mowers, very Zen-like. Well, Zen-like other than being lost in thought. But at least Buddhist in the sense of mostly being really present to the moment. I love watching the birds dive into areas I just cut, scooping up the bugs that bounce around like kids in bumper cars, scattering wildly to escape the whirring blades. I love watching the clouds come and go, love hearing the cicadas sing their bluesy summer songs, love the heat and sun, love the ways the earth seems to stand still and move so steadily at the same time. The snakes really will leave you alone if you return the same courtesy and they provide the valuable service of keeping the mice and bugs away, so there is a general sense of “live and let live,” which is fine with me.
So I cut grass and soak up sun and sometimes I’m so present to the moment that it aches. So many people I know are feeling apart from the Divine right now, so apart from who they believe themselves to be, so soul-weary. I watch my own mother and remember the hundreds of people I worked with in hospice, knowing that you can hold onto life for a long time, but eventually you just become a weary traveler wanting to get home. I was thinking of the verse from the Gita I listed above and many others, just letting the blades whir around and letting the sun melt some of my own thoughts away. The Gita is part of the Hindu Scriptures and translates as “The Song of God.” I love the passage that says God is more me than I am. I love thinking that I am One with the Divine and those mountains, with all that is happening, all that is so big and small, so real and so surreal.
Later, as one storm after another brought the most ominous looking clouds and dark skies, pounding rain, thunder and lightening vibrating the house and illuminating the mouth of the George Ward Holler (I have no idea who George Ward was, but the storms always come through the valley of his old farm) near their home, I thought of my grandmother and of how the storms in our own lives just roll through like that. Some sun, some rain, and usually some warnings for dark skies if we are paying attention, even if that is cows laying down on a hot afternoon. But then that passes through too, dripping with much needed nourishment for the soils of our souls, lit up, maybe even shaken or stirred a bit. This weekend reminded me of all of these things, and I thought about it a lot. Mostly the skies in this life are clear, but clouds pass through, that’s just part of it too. But doing this inner process in deep communion with the Earth makes it more do-able for me and reminds me of a passage from the Prophet Isaiah,
You shall go out in joy, and be led forward in peace; the mountains and hills will break forth before you in singing, and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands…
So I thought about all of that while I mowed and cleaned and made sweet pickles and tomato juice, trying to soak up time like a sponge, feeling it slipping through the hourglass, knowing you can’t hold onto anything or it just cuts as you try to grasp it, feeling time pass with a sense of Amazing Grace. I find the only way to do this time (or any time, for that matter) is to be present as much as possible– so present that it aches a little…but there is also so much joy there, and that grabs you too. The Buddhist word for that place is Bodhicitta, which the Dharma teacher Pema Chodron describes as “the soft spot.” Volumes have been written about this, but it’s basically that soft place inside all of us that holds some pain, some joy, some tenderness, like an old scar that never fully heals. And all you can do is touch it lightly, like painting a prayer on a cobweb, holding it all in the tenderness of a mother with a sick child, knowing that you are the mother and child all at once.
There is something powerful about that soft spot, knowing it is as eternal as the mountains and valleys, knowing that mountain remains in spite of its own soft spots and pounding rains. There is something really comforting about the eternal yet so very temporal nature of time and the passage of it, something so very comforting about the deeply personal nature of this time and the universal nature of it as well. At some point we all experience death–hopefully we all experience a life. That’s really my primary aspiration with all of this, to be so present to all of my life that it aches, but to take this life, as shaken and stirred as it may feel at times, and really live it.
The poet Li Po pondered these same things, as we all have throughout lifetimes and the ages. Yet the mountains remain, a witness to our grief and joys, to knowing no matter how dark it feels, we are One. Nearly 1300 years ago in China Li Po wrote, possibly on a weekend like this one,
The birds have vanished into the sky
And now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
Until only the mountain remains…
So tonight I sit, honoring mountains and time, watching the clouds drain away. And like clouds in the sky, we all pass through, changing forms and moods like the weather, always changing, always eternal, always One with All That Is. And the mountain remains.
Night moon.
Night stars.
Peace 🙂
Stop the Junk Mail!
“Americans spend 8 months of their lives dealing with junk mail.” …. Stat from the World Watch Institute
You must be the change you wish to see in the world… ~~~Gandhi
Hello all! There is a lot going on in the world right now and I could focus on any number of things, but today I am thinking about our friends experiencing such crazy and destructive weather. I have family in some of the hardest hit areas of southeast MO. It is very sad and stressful there. They are already experiencing flooding, the Army Corps of Engineers is talking about blowing a hole in a major levee and it’s raining again now. The above pic was taken a few months ago in that part of the world, a glorious and beautiful but rugged and wild part of the state. I’m sure it’s now flooded, along with the near-by St. Francois River. We wish all the folks there and further south some dry days and send some big hugs. If you are so inclined, perhaps you could also consider sending your own prayers or happy thoughts as well.
I don’t at all want to politicize this blog, but I do want to pass along some basic info on a small thing that is actually a really big thing. A lot of you may not know that Blessings Enterprises is a Certified Green Business, accredited though Green America. It was a major commitment I made when I started this business and each year I renew the accreditation. We can all make a difference for other people and the planet, even with small actions. Words and choices matter.
I think that in times of great crisis or environmental disaster, such as we are experiencing now, it’s easy to fall into a defeated mindset and think there isn’t much that one person can do. I beg to differ…in addition to prayer or the Red Cross, in addition to lending a hand or volunteering with clean up, there are individual things you can do as well. As odd as it may sound, one of the things you can do is sign up to stop your junk mail. It takes about ten minutes and makes a huge difference for the environment. Some stats tell us that over a million trees a year are cut down each year in the Brazilian rain forest just to make direct mail catalogs. You didn’t get to choose to opt in to all the junk mail that comes to your house, but you can choose to opt out!
Here are a few stats from websites I like and I included the links. You can also go to this link and find several other links as well, from opting out of Val-Pac to other direct mail and marketing sites. They have a lot of cool info on their site. What follows is a cut/paste from several other sites, I tried to consolidate them into a usable format.
Hoping this finds all of you warm and safe and dry. Thanks for what you all do for people and the planet. Have a great day 🙂
Stop the Junk Mail Monster!
More than 41.5 billion pieces of mail advertisements were produced and distributed in the U.S in 2005, according to the Worldwatch Institute. It took more than 100 million trees to create all this bulk mail – that’s the equivalent of deforesting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every four months. Even though most junk mail can be recycled, 5.8 million tons of catalogs and other direct mailings ended up as trash in landfills or incinerators in 2005. And all this comes at a cost to our climate as well: The production and disposal of junk mail consumes more energy than 3 million cars.
Each of us will spend an average of eight months of our lives dealing with junk mail. It’s time to reclaim our resources, our time and our mailboxes by stopping junk mail early and often by following these ten easy steps:
| 1. Remove your name | 6. Catalogs, charities & contests
7. Cover your tracks with all the direct marketers |
The Most Versatile Blogger Award
Hey, check this out! The Blessings Blog was nominated for The Most Versatile Blogger Award.
The Versatile Blogger award’s three requirements are:
1. Thank the person who gave you the reward.
2. List seven random facts about yourself.
3. Nominate fifteen new bloggers for the award.
You can read all about it, including some very random facts and nominations here.
Enjoy!
peace
The Versatile Blogger Award!
Well, well. How cool is this? The Blessings Blog was just given The Most Versatile Blogger Award by our fun friends over at Fodder4Thought! So first, we thank them for the nomination and for including us in their friends to include! Lol, the six of you reading this should go check her out! 😉
The Versatile Blogger award’s three requirements are:
1. Thank the person who gave you the reward.
2. List seven random facts about yourself.
3. Nominate fifteen new bloggers for the award.
Having fulfilled requirement numero uno, we move on to #2…
Random facts…hmmm. Most of my life is fairly random, and I’m not sure how factual it is. But I’ll do the best I can.
1. I think dark chocolate is its own food group. If they could come up with a chocolate-coffee-cigarette, I’d probably never leave the house (except to go get more chocolate-coffee-cigarettes). I quit smoking so all that’s left is the coffee and chocolate. Both come from beans and are therefore health food. 🙂
2. I have a fairly severe gardening disorder which kicks into high gear this time of year. I love having my hands in the dirt, love feeling the life in Mother Earth…it’s like partaking of Eden to plant seeds in the earth and then see new life manifesting weeks and months later. It is part of what is so healing about this space.
3. I almost joined the Peace Corps and moved to Guatemala before I bought this house and started this biz. I’m sure the Guatemalans are grateful I stayed here, now that I think about it.
4. When I worked in hospice, I love sitting with people while they were dying. It is the thing I miss most about working in traditional healthcare.
5. Many years ago, when I was really having a hard time, I prayed Sai Baba would send me some Vibhuti. It arrived in the oddest way and within days 2 more people had given me some more. I have passed it on to many others but still have some in the healing room, it just never goes away, there is always more. I was thinking of that just yesterday then I found out he died Easter morning.
6. Darshan with Amma was one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life. I’ll never forget it. If you ever get a chance, go see her… Here’s an article about her if you’d like to learn more about Amma, The Hugging Saint.
7. I love getting to do what I do and I’m simply fascinated that people show up to read these random babblings. But I’m glad you do and I’m grateful for the many ways in which we can all be connected. Thanks for sharing the journey with me (bow).
Onward to nominations!
1. The Virtual Abbey …For the modern monastic.
2. Indigo Wild …Any more natural and you’d be naked.
3. The Awakened Reconnection…Our good friend Maya, the Holistic Nutrition Goddess!
4. The Gluten Free Goddess…Karina has the most amazing and healthy recipes.
5. Mellow Monk Teas…check out their stuff…take a deep breath, sip, relax, repeat.
6. North Shore Meditation & Dharma Center…in Chicago and the St. Louis Area.
7. On Being….Krista Tippett, what used to be called Speaking of Faith.
8. May I Be Frank…Transformation, humor and a sincere potty mouth. What’s not to love?
9. The Green Belt Movement… GBM Founder and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai. If you don’t know about her, she is an inspiration.
10. Seed Savers….A non-profit organization of gardeners dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds.
I will ponder other fun blogs to nominate in the future, but for now, thanks to all and enjoy!
Peace 🙂
No More Monsters in the Closet
Hello All!
Many fun things are happening these days. In the middle of all of that, I wanted to continue my “Favorite Vids” series with another fun video from the ever creative folks at The Fun Theory. These fine people are trying to prove you can make anything fun. This video is about getting kids to clean their rooms. This video is just over a minute long, well worth the watch!
You can see another fave Fun Theory Video about getting people to take the stairs here.
Hope this finds all well and having fun!!! 🙂
Seek and ye shall find
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