The Grace of Change

Life Is A Garden, Not A Road

So here's something to chew on:

What if life is a garden, as this poem says, and not a road? What does that say about the directionality we all assume about our lives? I, for one, sure behave differently in a garden than on a road. Makes me realize how imbedded that Western notion of "going somewhere" is in this heart and mind.

I'm planning to play with this for the next while - anyone care to join me?

life is a garden,

not a road

 

we enter and exit

through the same gate

 

wandering,

where we go matters less

than what we notice

 

~ Bokonon ~

 (The Lost Book)

Just Because

There I was, knitting happily away on a freeform piece I was going to felt into a bowl, both cats curled in my lap. Life was luscious until the Usefulness Tyrant in my head stomped into my awareness and demanded: What the hell are you doing with this lumpy pile of yarn? And why are you doing this?

I look down at the teal yarn and my happiness deflated like a pricked balloon. Ssssssssssssssssssss.

Taking up the Usefulness Tyrant’s line of interrogation, I echoed, Yeah, why? This isn’t earning me any money. It’s not useful. It probably won’t be pretty (my first felted bowl was a tad misshapen. Friends kindly suggested I could use it for a hat “or something.”)

I lamely argued back that perhaps my felted bowls are Spiritual or Healing or at least Transformative. I convinced no one. The truth is I love to make them just because I love to make them.

The Risk It Takes To Blossom

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~Anais Nin

I made 55, as we New Orleanians say, last Sunday.

I remember the day my mom made 55. I called to wish her a happy birthday, and reminded her that the speed limit was 55. This was a sure sign, I teased, that she was supposed to slow down.

When I hung up my legs buckled. I needed to sit down.

I realized (this is a 31 year old talking, remember) that my mom was OLD.  I felt terrified. How could my own mom get old? How could that be? And if she was getting old, it meant some day she could die. Again, how could that be?

Fast forward 24 years. And whoa ...  I'm 55 this week, not my mom. And my mom is now, indeed, dead.

How did this happen? All summer I contemplated this moving into 55, surfing big internal waves of change.

I'm Giving Up Polyamory

I know polyamory is in, sisters, but I'm out. Polyamorist no more.

OK, so maybe I'm embellishing a little. I'm not really a polyamorist, at least not in the "biblical sense."

But I sure am with my attention. And it's plumb wearing me out, not exactly a place from which I experience pleasure or joy.

I've realized that whatever is in front of me to do, in some sense, is my lover. And my attention is the way I make love with the weeding, the bill paying, the knitting, the person I'm talking with.

Looking For Trouble

When I took ice skating lessons in my thirties, I met an older woman who was having a ripsnorting time falling on the ice.

Intrigued, I asked Karin why she was having so much fun looking like a fool.

She grinned and replied, simple: as a rank beginner she felt more alive than she had in years.

Say what? There I was busting my gut proving to the world and myself that I was competent and powerful. Why in tarnation would anyone be happy to be so visibly ignorant?

When I took ice skating lessons in my thirties, I met an older woman who was having a ripsnorting time falling on the ice.

Intrigued, I asked Karin why she was having so much fun looking like a fool.

She grinned and replied, simple: as a rank beginner she felt more alive than she had in years.

Say what? There I was busting my gut proving to the world and myself that I was competent and powerful. Why in tarnation would anyone be happy to be so visibly ignorant?

First, The Bad News

First, the Bad News: Pleasure won't protect us from pain, death, loss, or illness. Pleasure cannot inoculate us from our own pain or the pain of the world. Pleasure isn't a magical amulet we wear over our hearts to prevent them from breaking.

Opening our hearts and souls to pleasure guarantees that our hearts and souls will be open to pain, too.

But wait, all is not lost.

First, the Bad News: Pleasure won't protect us from pain, death, loss, or illness. Pleasure cannot inoculate us from our own pain or the pain of the world. Pleasure isn't a magical amulet we wear over our hearts to prevent them from breaking.

Opening our hearts and souls to pleasure guarantees that our hearts and souls will be open to pain, too.

But wait, all is not lost.

Fifty is NOT The New Forty

And, while we're at it, Sixty is not the New Fifty.

I had a fabulous time last weekend leading a retreat for 20 wonderful women (and one fantastic man!). At one point, I looked around the circle of middle-aged faces, radiant with love, experience, and full living, and thought: These are the gorgeous faces of 50 and 60 year old women...

So what's this craziness about Fifty being the New Forty? What cultural mishigas is it that the finest compliment we get is that our aliveness makes us seem 10 years younger? Why is growing older conflated with loss of beauty and draining away of power and delight?

Know what it makes me think of, ladies? A chocolate covered slug. Rich chocolate covering-that's right-a juicy northwest slug. Yuck.

Honoring Your Own Sabbath

I've been experimenting, and I love what I'm discovering.

Remember the Sabbath? Growing up that meant Sunday School (boring), lunch at my grandmother's (a little less boring), and then sitting around all afternoon (how boring can you get?). Sabbath meant, well, arrgghhhhhhhhhh.........

Fast forward almost a half-century (can that really be so?). Take one boomer woman, frazzled from decades of doing, doing, doing... Marry her off to a guy who actually loves  taking naps (me, I'm an abject failure at it-I actually bought a CD that promised me ultimate 20 minute naps, but I fidgeted my way through it several times and donated it to Goodwill).

Have her realize, one Sunday afternoon when husband is napping and she's washing windows, that she's spent an ungodly amount of her life worshipping at the altar of her to-do list. Even gardening and meditating had become about Getting Stuff Done; plant the bamboo, check. Morning meditation finished, check. Unremitting busyness cramped my spirit and made me cranky.

The Anniversary of My Death

Sometimes I wake up and wonder, is this it?

For The Anniversary Of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

—W.S. Merwin

No More Secondhand Life

OK, I admit it: I'm a recovering self-help junkie.

My drug of choice was books that told me how to become happier, healthier, thinner, sexier (though I never actually did the programs). I felt comforted to know that if I just worked hard enough, I could make myself over into a loveable, wonderful me.

That changed at around 50. I just got plumb tuckered out from trying so hard to make my inside (and my outside) match up to the expert of the moment's Prescription for a Happy Life. What started engaging me a whole lot more than being the ultimate with-it woman was learning how to nurture and celebrate me. Kinky, marvelously imperfect me.

I remembered the story told by Rabbi Zusya many hundreds of years ago to his students. He said something like, "You know, in the world to come, God's not gonna ask me 'Why were you not Moses?' or 'Why were you not Abraham?' No way. What God's gonna ask me is 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

What a question! What if we ask our sweet selves the same question, not in the hereafter, but now?

OK, I admit it: I'm a recovering self-help junkie.

My drug of choice was books that told me how to become happier, healthier, thinner, sexier (though I never actually did the programs). I felt comforted to know that if I just worked hard enough, I could make myself over into a loveable, wonderful me.

That changed at around 50. I just got plumb tuckered out from trying so hard to make my inside (and my outside) match up to the expert of the moment's Prescription for a Happy Life. What started engaging me a whole lot more than being the ultimate with-it woman was learning how to nurture and celebrate me. Kinky, marvelously imperfect me.

I remembered the story told by Rabbi Zusya many hundreds of years ago to his students. He said something like, "You know, in the world to come, God's not gonna ask me 'Why were you not Moses?' or 'Why were you not Abraham?' No way. What God's gonna ask me is 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

What a question! What if we ask our sweet selves the same question, not in the hereafter, but now?