Tag Archives: Gratitude

KEEP FAITH WITH ME

1 Reply

March 6, 2015

KEEP FAITH WITH ME

“Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life reveals just the opposite: that letting go is the real path to freedom.”  – Sogyal Rinpoche –

In a swirl of snow and roiling clouds the color of ashes I skiied across the ballfield and headed into the woods. With nine inches of new snow, I could break trail and go wherever I wished. The trees writhed and groaned as the wind tore through them, leaving only its tattered bits behind to brush against my cheeks. Inside myself a storm also raged, a nameless darkness boiling and screeching.

I found three chairs sitting in a circle of birch trees, holding space around a buried campfire. I stood and watched them for awhile. I became aware of the Circle within mySelf; except the chairs are not empty. And the fire has not gone out. A bit of Winter lingers, but the storm is quieting.

I skiied down the hill. Well, mostly I sat on my skiis and slid down the hill, the feathery snow flying in my face, washing away all trace of tears and leaving me breathless and laughing. I found a clan of cattails alongside the trail and picked one that was only beginning to release its seed to the world. I tucked it into my hand with my ski pole. As I skiied down the trail, little helicopters of cattail seed streamed out behind me, riding the frigid currents of air.

I followed a deer trail back up into the woods. The wind had dragged off most of the piles of dirty clouds and the sun was spilling through the openings, a raging fire against the deep blue sky. Cresting the hill, I wandered off the trail into a natural basin ringed with birch and a huge boulder. I sat and leaned wearily against the boulder, gazing up into the drama in the sky as the last of the fuzzy clouds were blown out over Gitchi Gummi, somewhere beyond these forested bluffs and ridges.

“Keep faith with me.”

Such a quiet, unobtrusive thought to slip in between the ragged clouds slowly dissipating in my soul. “Keep faith with me. Keep faith with yourSelf. Trust.”

I have clung so tenaciously to what I want for my life, to what I want to do with my life, to what I want to do for others. Year after year I struggle against obstacles and hurdles and although I make headway, it seems so little–so far removed from the thriving life of abundance that I desire to create. I get tired. Discouraged. I feel abandoned. I get angry.  And then I feel guilty and ashamed because I have been blessed with so much that is good, and so often experienced the love and support, encouragement and direction of that which is beyond the veil of what my human eyes and ears can see and hear: God, Ancestors, Angels, Light Beings who guard and guide me, the Divine Soul within me. Shredded to tatters like those clouds, bullied about like these trees, my courage and faith are at the mercy of the dark winds of Fear–the Saboteur. And then I cling tighter…I will to create and manifest the life I not only desire, but feel I have been purposed to live. But all I do is tread water, and wait, and grow weary.

I see mySelf now, laying back against that boulder in the snow, all the weariness draining slowly away into the rock and the snow and the earth beneath. My spirit flies away to another scene where I am clinging with my little boat to a tiny bar of earth and rock in the midst of the River of my Life. I am nervous in the rapidly increasing tumble of white water. I insist I cannot continue without assurances of safety–either calmer waters, or a better boat–something! I design a map and wave it about, asking for assurance that the path of my River will conform to this map.

I’m told that all my requests have been received; there is no need to continue waving the map about and shouting out my litany of desires, requests and intentions. “Trust the benevolence of the Creator; of ‘God Inside’. Trust the flow of life that is indeed shaped by your intentions. Trust that the journey will unfold as you allow it to. Get back in the boat and release your fear-filled grip. Let go of the map, let it melt into the Energy of Life that surrounds and fills you. Breathe! Fill your lungs with this sweet Light that is the very Power of Creation, the Power of Life–a Power fueled by Love–a Power that dances with the Joy of Consciousness. Sing! And with trust and gratitude move again into the flow of the River of your Life.”

I won’t know until I go.

This is paddling down the River of my Life: acting upon what I DO know and keeping the promises I’ve made to mySelf, to my Creator and to others. It is honoring the Gift I have been given by developing it and sharing it with the world. It is focusing my energy and love upon the work I’ve been given, embracing joy and gratitude each day. Stroke by stroke, I move down the River, in the flow, the flow of Life that allows more Life.

I don’t know if the path of this River will conform to the map I carried in my head; perhaps it won’t and perhaps I will be glad because there is so much I do not know. Keeping faith with the Creator of the Universe? What a terrifying and awesome request–to trust enough in the benevolence of the Creator to let go of my control, releasing my expectations, and relaxing into Love.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2 Replies

January 17, 2015

LET’S MAKE HAPPINESS THIS YEAR

2015. OMG…we have indeed made it all the way around the Sun again. Joni Mitchell is singing in my head…
“And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the Circle game…”

The New Year has risen over the horizon, flooding the skies of our lives with rose and purple and apricot and gold; a gazillion potentialities wait to be selected and woven into the life we are creating.

The choices we have made in the days and weeks and months and years that trail far behind us have left their mark and set us on courses that would be difficult, some even impossible to alter at this point. But even in the middle of the story in which we find ourselves, we have the beautiful gift to choose what we want to experience this coming year. We have the power to create how we will experience life and even what we will experience to a degree most of us can barely comprehend.

For several decades now I have been running around trying to make sense of an idea I kept stumbling upon. I would hear it in a presentation, read it in a book, find it buried in a story, have it leap off the screen in a movie, find it cropping up in online conversations, find it winking saucily from quotes-of-the-day in my inbox, hear it on TED Talks. It is this: I am always choosing and constantly creating my experience of life–even most of my circumstances. I kept hearing that life doesn’t just happen to us and isn’t orchestrated by some other Force, benevolent or otherwise, nor by other people. “How could this be true?” I would ask. But slowly, as I focused and allowed myself to set aside my defenses and open up my mind and heart, understanding began to bring focus and clarity.

I began to understand better the mental constructs we build as individuals, communities, religions and cultures. Because they “are” doesn’t make them true or even real except to us who built them, or inherited them, and have continued to live within them.

I began to understand that everything is energy and everything exists in its particular form because of it’s vibrational frequency. It took awhile, but I finally wrapped my brain around the fact that “like attracts like”–that the magnetic resonance of an energetic frequency attracts to itself other things of a similar vibrational frequency.

I started having more Aha! moments and fewer WTF explosions. Now I can say with absolute certainty that even when it seems like I have no control over my life and am simply subject to the whims of others and the will of the gods, if I look at mySelf honestly and look deeply inside, I will find that my mental constructs and the emotional resonance that my energetic vibration has allowed has called to me what I am experiencing, including that which I do not want to experience. I am reminded of the Native American story of Rabbit, a creature who can teach us much about fear. Rabbit would see Eagle soaring high above the woods and fields and terrified that Eagle would swoop down and gobble him up, he would run out and holler up to Eagle, “Eagle, please do not eat me! I don’t want you to eat me! Did you hear me? Eagle! Eagle! I’m talking to you! Don’t eat me! I really would not like to be your dinner–I have a family to take care of, you know. Did you hear me, Eagle?” Eagle ignored him for awhile, trying to enjoy his afternoon soaring on the thermal updrafts. But Rabbit only grew more frantic and continued to run about the field hollering up to Eagle, “Don’t eat me, Eagle! Please don’t eat me!” Finally, completely distracted and exasperated, Eagle swooped down upon the silly Rabbit and yes, ate him for dinner. Rabbit’s incessant fear and focus on what he didn’t want brought it soaring down upon his head. I love this story.

I recently listened to a presentation that addressed the Universal Laws that govern when and how benevolent help from those Spirit Beings we might call Angels is allowed. The speaker intimated that help and interference is not permitted unless we humans first ask, and then allow that help to come to us. Unfortunately, he said, most of us don’t ask. When we do, we often don’t let into our experience the help that comes in response, either because we have a misplaced sense of our unworthiness, or we don’t like the form the answer comes in. We know the joke about the person who prays, “God help me be more patient, more loving, more compassionate, more forgiving!” and then suddenly is confronted with opportunities to practice these virtues. In the New Testament Jesus said, “You receive not because you ask not–or you ask amiss.” I used to think that meant that I could only ask for spiritual things, lofty things. But now I realize that asking amiss is more about asking for things or experiences that are not in alignment with what we are vibrationally in resonance with. If I ask for money to pay my bills, all the while figuring I don’t deserve it or that this kind of request is wrong or that of course, a miracle like this couldn’t possibly happen to me–well, I’m not exactly in energetic, magnetic, vibrational resonance with receiving the money, or the opportunity to earn the money that the Creator might well wish to provide me with. I have set up a roadblock.

A roadblock is a great image to call to mind when we feel that our prayers are unheard and definitely not answered. All the provision and answers have been sent our way when we first asked, but due to the roadblocks we’ve put in place, the supply train can’t get through. It’s stalled out, parked on the side of the road, waiting…waiting…waiting… Are we willing to examine what these blockages are that we so habitually set up? Will we have the courage to remove them? They can be pretty insidious. Like the creeping charlie and snow-on-the-mountain that can take over a lawn or a garden, the roots of our old and often unconscious beliefs can run deep and develop sophisticated root systems that spread underground for acres. We yank them off at the top, even dig down beneath the soil a few inches, chopping and hacking and pulling. And then, a few months later, or next season, there they are, smiling evilly at us. I once dug up a six foot section of my garden, 18 inches deep, to finally, permanently remove all the roots from my snow-on-the-mountain. Similarly I have had to dig down deep inside my psyche to find and expose the roots of beliefs that do not serve me, beliefs that aren’t based in truth. I have had to look in the mirror everyday for many months and tell myself what is true  in order to cut off life to the lies that lived inside me.

My journey of discovery and learning, of awakening and transformation has been long and arduous. I feel triumphant. I have stayed the course. I stand here now just inside the threshold of this new year–2015–and I am so excited. The winds have shifted; new adventures are unfolding. Looking at my goals for the year I wrote:

  • Choose, CHOOSE, CHOOSE everyday to be happy and offer gratitude for the rich and beautiful life you inhabit!
  • Enjoy your life! Consider each day to be a pearl given to you to thread upon a silken cord–precious, rare, never to be repeated in your 3D linear dimension of Time/Space.
  • Whether you have little money or loads, enjoy today and do the things you love that fill you up with joy and love and light. Sometimes this will require discipline to achieve the result you want; it may even be painful or require sacrifice–but if the end result is beautiful and delicious fruit, then stay the course and find joy in the experience.
  • Give no place to the Dark Energies of Fear and Despair–there is no place in your life for Dementors and Bogarts. No matter how you feel in the moment or what appears to be manifesting or not manifesting in your life, give them NO PLACE. Stay the course of gratitude, love, faith and joy.
  • Allow the sorrows of the past, the regrets, the harm you caused and the hurt you endured to become the stuff of alchemy–rich threads of gold and purple, iridescent blues and greens, woven into the tapestry of your life. Look upon these experiences with compassion and grace-filled tenderness. Forgive yourself and others and release those scenes and chapters as a dove into the blue of a summer sky.
  • In humility and gratitude and with joy and delight work diligently every day to bring forth the Gift hidden inside you that you came here to give. Write. Just write. Write your way to the answers and straight into the River of Life and into everything that has been holding its breath awaiting your arrival. Write.
  • Oh yeah, and did I say, “Be Happy!”?

A FALL OF DIAMONDS

1 Reply

A FALL OF DIAMONDS

October 31, 2014

Bottle green she runs relentlessly at the shelf of cobblestones and the slabs of boulders. She falls back white and frothy, scrabbling at the pebbled beach, the stones rolling and bouncing. Along the slabs and towers of boulders she takes a run and heaves herself high into the air–ten, fifteen, sometimes more than twenty feet.  She falls back, a shower of sun-drenched diamonds filling up the grooves and gullies.  Exhilarated she bounces off the waves retreating from the shoreline and others coming in for their run. Like swaggering boys chest bumping, like two antler tangled stags, the waves collide and throw more diamonds into the sky. And the cobblestones roar and the waters crash and the diamonds fall.

Waves inside me roll and crash, battering the boundaries beyond which I cannot go–I cannot touch–I cannot control. Fear collides with compassion and all is reeling and roaring and colliding on the surface of my consciousness–throwing diamonds in the sky.  But deeper down, under the posturing and the macho chest bumping, the tumbling and twisting, I detect a  stillness. Below the chaos there is peace.

Perhaps in this now I can be happy.  In this now, and in the next now, stringing them together like buttons and beads on a thread, I might find many things for which I am grateful and awestruck, I might dare to believe that all will be well.  Once the chaos on the surface settles down what remains behind might be different than it was before–rearranged.  But maybe the changes will not be about loss, or destruction.  They could just as well be another way to see.  Something new to experience.

The Sea just rolled in a 20 foot jumper, showering me with diamonds even here below the tree where I thought it safe and dry. “Come and play!” she roars.

EXHALING

1 Reply

September 26, 2014

EXHALING

I take a deep breath, hold it in for a second or three and let it slowly out, a balloon collapsing inside me. I turn the corners of my mouth upwards in a smile. I suppose it looks like a smile. The knot in my solar plexus stops tightening.

IMG_2602I nudge myself. Okay, okay—yes, the sun is shining through the dining-room windows lighting up the giant jade and the spider plant and all the other green growing things that share this space with me.  The prayer plant has opened wide and turned itself toward that light. The living-room has filled up with a rosy glow and through the windows there I see the maples flaming across the street.

IMG_2616

Deep breath in, hold, slowly exhale. The knot inside loosens a bit. I turn the corners of my mouth upwards again as I notice they have slipped back into a tight-lipped line, matching the tightness in my eyes. Softening, softening.

I take a long pull on my green smoothie. I taste apple and mango and banana. It is thick and sweet and dark green with spinach and kale and chard and powdered greens. Next to me is another glass filled with cool water. I hear the shower running in the bathroom. I hear the dishwasher swashing in the kitchen. I think of women who are trudging blocks or miles this morning to fill a dirty bucket with water to bring home to their children so they can have a little to drink, a little with which to cook their meal, a little in which to wash.

Unpaid bills stare at me from across the desk. There is no money today with which to pay them.

I inhale the crisp autumn air of early morning. I exhale the last of the knot in my gut.

I am cutting brilliant chrysanthemums from my garden.  IMG_2607

My eyes are smiling.