Where have you BEEN?!?!

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Where, indeed.

I let this blog kind of lapse, because there wasn’t much going on. We were just kind of hanging out in limbo. Traipsing from one place to another. Getting to see lovely old friends and getting to meet lovely new people. Getting to deal with my character defects and getting to see some old drama meet its timely end. But not much to write about, really.

Or maybe I could have written about it, but, as the new year dawned, everything and nothing was changing. The day-to-day details about where we were and what we were doing were ever-changing, but the big picture remained the same. Limbo. Floating. Waiting. We used many terms to describe it, but it all amounted to nothing much.

And then we finally came to a place where it felt like it was time to make a decision.

We read a quote in The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist, which now I cannot for the life of me find to quote word for word, but I’ll try to paraphrase as accurately as I can: when we live a life of always keeping our options open, we can never choose anything.  We can never take the interesting-seeming job, because a better job might be offered down the road.  We can never enter into a relationship with a person because the perfect soulmate may be just around the corner.

That struck us right in the face.

We put the book down and immediately launched into discussion of the decisions we needed to make.  The first, and biggest: where to live.  The realization dawned on us that we’ve been waiting for the Universe to send us THE ANSWER to this question for months, and the Universe was sitting back, patiently waiting for us to make the decision.

So then we realized that we could choose anywhere we wanted.  Anywhere!  So the question then became, where would we want to live if we could live anywhere we wanted?

This set off paroxysms of fear, anxiety and paralysis in me.  Weird, huh?  It seems like such a freeing question!  But for me, having so many options increased my fear.  I was so certain that there was a right answer to this question, and having a virtually limitless number of options, increased, exponentially, the odds that I would pick the wrong one.

(I know, I know.  It’s my brain, but I’m not always completely in control of how it works.)

After tons of freaking out (my specialty), I was finally able to make a decision only by telling myself it was for the next year only.  After the lease is up, we could change our minds and go somewhere else.  It was only that that freed me up to make a decision.

So, we wound up in Austin, Texas.  I know!  We haven’t lived in Texas in a long long time (went to high school in Houston), but Austin is like it’s own little country inside of Texas.

We’ve been here two months now, and we love love love it.  We’ll see how the summer goes, but the people and the support and the Divine appointments have been nothing short of amazing.  We are more blessed than we had any expectation of being, that’s for certain.

And now for the big announcement:  We are going back to South Africa, in less than two weeks.

 

So that’s where we’ve been, a bit about where we’re going, and more to come…tomorrow.

Trying to evolve with feet made of clay

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I’ve been reading about Birth 2012 and about Conscious Evolution and man, can I relate to the concept.  A brief shorthand version:  Basically, according to Barbara Marx Hubbard, we are experiencing a crisis.  Just like a baby about to be born, we are freaking out.  Things are difficult, we don’t know what’s going on, things are painful, there’s so much we don’t know!  Is this an end?  Or are we about to be born to a new reality?

It’s an interesting idea, and it’s caught my imagination.  None of us can remember, of course, but that birth process, being born, has got to be difficult!  What’s going on?  Why am I getting so squeezed?  What’s going to happen?  This is uncomfortable!  Yikes!  Being born must actually be a really frightening process.

Fortunately for us, we don’t remember.

But according to Barbara Marx Hubbard, we are being born, as a species, to a higher frequency, to a higher state of consciousness, and that is what the Mayan calendar business is about.

Personally, I am intrigued but skeptical.

But the image has really caught my attention, and I realize that it’s a good analogy for what’s going on with me lately.  I am being called to evolve.  I am being called to let go of my old life, my old way of being, and rise up to a new way of being.  I am being called to get rid of things that aren’t serving me, stop beating myself up and accept that things are changing.

And, as usual, I’m having a bit of difficulty managing this with grace and ease.  To say the least.

More things are dropping away.  I keep telling myself they are making way for new things to come, but I’m ready for them to arrive already, and of course the Universe is taking its sweet time.  Once again–still–we are poised between the past and the future and the uncertainty–the Void–between them is gaping and frightening and empty.

I try not to think about it too much.  But sometimes, like tonight, it comes calling and I have to think about it and I don’t like it.  So I write it out to share with you all and I feel less alone.

Thank you for reading.  I’ll try to make the next post a little uplifting or something.  Jeez.

Art Shows and Ego Overthrows

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So since my last post about stories I’ve gotten to work on my own stories, letting them go, sometimes hundreds of times each day.  Seems I’m not as good at it as I want to be…like a lot of things.  The Universe gives me the gift of getting to grow, and sometimes that really sucks.  Like really.

We’ve been reading A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.  What he has to say about ego and how we identify with things and situations, we call them “mine” and that’s really just the ego playing its games.  Because nothing is mine, and nothing external defines me.  I am not my car, my computer, my iPhone, my roles in life, none of it is me.  And so those things can come and go and not lessen what I truly am.  But sometimes that’s really hard to remember.

It’s really tempting to get caught up in ego when something happens that you think is totally unjust and unwarranted.  It’s really easy to get all wound up about the story.  And we were seeing the ego in ourselves, at the same time that we were trying to disengage from it–and it was really very hard and painful.

But despite the flailings of the ego, desperately trying to take hold and run the show, we’ve managed to remain calm and carry on.

We’re in Lawrence right now, and today I got the privilege of putting a few of my photos in an art show.  I’m really proud of them.  They are photos of some of the dozens and dozens of native South African plants that were in full flower while we were there (which was springtime).  I’ll probably be putting some of them up on a page here later.  They’re really awesome, or I’m biased, or perhaps both…

We’ve been offered the opportunity to go speak to the Youth of Unity chapter at Overland Park Unity this weekend.  We’re really excited to share the images and videos of our trip and what we’re planning next.

And all around me are evidences and personifications of how very much we are blessed.  From the beautiful weather here today, to the songs that pop into my head as I’m driving around and around looking for a parking space in a parade (“Joyful, joyful, we adore thee…”  You’re welcome for the earworm) to getting to spend the day surrounded by art and artists…  I am so blessed.  I could not begin to ask for a better life.  I cannot imagine a better life.

There’s something about coming out of hard times that gives you such gratitude for the everyday blessings of life.  Like when you’ve been in physical pain and all of a sudden it ends, and you feel this rush of release and gratitude for something as simple and formerly taken for granted as no pain.  Today, I feel no pain, and peace, and loved, and blessed, and valued, and understood, and accepted.

I release the hard times, and take in the blessings that life is offering.  They’re always there; we just forget to look sometimes.  Take a look around–what blessings are you overlooking today?

Our stories

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I’ve heard some stories.  Stories which, in at least one case, I wish I’d never heard and can’t get out of my head.  Awful stories.  I’m not telling them, in this blog or elsewhere.  There are lots of reasons for that.

I wish I could unhear them, I wish I did not know what I now know.  Even more, I wish that, instead of wiping my own memory clean, that I could erase that event from the lives of those it happened to.

But of course, I can’t do any of that.  And for a long time, as I wrestled with it, unable to forget, painful to remember, excruciating to visualize, I wondered how I could come to terms with it.  Even more so, how do those to whom it happened come to terms with it?

How do we come to terms with our stories?  We all have them.  We have the stories of what has been done to us, in violence or anger or with carelessness and neglect.  We have our wounds.  We bandage them and pretend that they are not there, we nurse them, maybe we trot them out regularly to show our scars and gain sympathy.  Some of us are luckier than others, some of us have stories that are small and mild and easily forgiven, some of us have horrendous stories which devastate our faith in others and our view of the world, most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

I’ve been struggling to come to terms with these stories, and in doing so, had a moment of clarity:  We are not our stories.  We are NOT our stories.  I only know the story, I don’t know which person it happened to.  And I wondered–if I did know which person it happened to, would it change how I viewed them?  And I realized it would.  I would see in them a victim.  And that is my fault, not theirs.  They are NOT their story.

The person is so much more than the story.  Even though this is the most awful thing I think I’ve ever heard, it is not what defines this person.  How does one story define them?  Their divine spark is still there.  They are still a divine creation, a child of God, an innocent light.

And if I try really hard, I can also see their perpetrator as a divine creation too.  This is harder and I can’t hold the vision for too long, because my desire to blame and my anger cloud my vision, but it’s there and I’m working on holding it.

Steve Bolen, the minister of Unity of the Hills in Austin, said it best this last Sunday.  When we fall short, when we beat ourselves up, we cry out to God, and God responds, “I don’t see it.  All I see is what I have made.  A child made in my image and likeness that is pure love.”

I have a hard time seeing this, seeing past all the bs that makes up our stories, but I’m trying.

I’ve seen stories on TV, I think we all have, of people who survived immense tragedies and came to forgive the people who did it to them.  Inspiring stories on Oprah.  Those people know this.  They are not limited, not defined by their story.

We all have them, we all choose how we respond to them.  Are you letting your stories define you?  I know I have done so, for a long time.  I’m learning to let the stories go.

On fixing and helping and serving and judgment

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Thinking about the poverty and the prosperity and how closely they exist in South Africa, and how easy it is to feel bad listening to our stories and looking at our pictures.  How can we complain in this country about not having the latest gadget when these people are not sure where their meals are coming from?  How do we live with ourselves and our prosperity in this country when people are going hungry?  The guilt of being prosperous while others suffer is too much; perhaps it’s better or more just to remain poor ourselves, since the need is so great that we can’t begin to fill the vastness of the gulf between us.

I’ve been thinking more about Robin’s guest post, where she talks about fixing and helping and serving.  To summarize, fixing comes from a place of superiority.  I am superior to you–let me fix it for you.  It’s like what you do for a child who can’t tie her own shoes.  You say, “here, let me do that.”  And you tie her shoes.  Her role is to hold still so that you can do it for her.

Helping is similar.  Helping also assumes a kind of superiority, that I am better placed to take care of your problem than you are.  Helping is tantamount to rescuing you from drowning when I have a boat.  I have access to resources you don’t, as in, a boat, and you are in danger.  You are right to hope that I will help you, but you are expected to try to save yourself.  You don’t stop swimming until I get there with my boat, you try to keep yourself afloat and I help you into my boat.

Serving recognizes that each of us is already whole.  We serve each other food.  When I serve you food, I recognize that you are capable of eating it yourself, I don’t need to feed it to you like a baby.  If it’s a restaurant setting, I am recognizing that you are capable of paying for the food I’m serving you.  You are already capable of solving your problem (being hungry), it is my job to facilitate that by serving you the food so that you can feed yourself with it.

In the context of South Africa, and poverty, serving is a hard headspace (or perhaps I should say heartspace) to maintain.  People appear to be in such need.  It triggers a desperate desire to make it all better as quickly as possible.

But as Robin has pointed out, and I saw for myself, for the most part we are not talking about people who are starving.  They are hungry, oftentimes, and that is a shame and a sadness.  But, as much as they may need a bowl of food, they need more to be seen, to be known as human and divine and capable and whole.  They do not need my pity.  They certainly don’t need my Westernized viewpoint that says that they must be miserable because they don’t have a standard of living that I recognize as acceptable.  That’s just my prejudice talking.

As for our perspective on stuff and ownership and commercialism, of course that has changed.  We were at the mall the other day to visit our daughter at work and decided to go ahead and do some shopping.  It’s getting colder; our supply of warm clothes is a little low, since we’ve both lost a bunch of weight and given all our old clothes away.  We went through several stores.  I saw some cute things.  But every time, I put them back, because, you know, I have enough.  I am blessed already.

And the judgment?  I am working on that.  I know this about myself, that I tend to be very judgy.  Spellcheck is telling me that’s not a word, but yes it is.  I label experiences, situations, and yes, people.  They’re not always negative labels, often I’m judging something or someone positively–I like to think I look for the good more often than I’m looking for the bad.  But they’re all judgments.

“Judge not, lest ye be judged”.  I’m trying.  I’m trying to remember that we’re all human and divine and whole and capable.  Including me.  Including you.  Including everyone that you meet today, and everyone that you don’t meet today.  It’s a heartspace I’m trying to maintain today.

Blessings.

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