Readiness and The Embrace

I’m looking out at the green that’s near to full with this morning’s rain. True to form in Minnesota, it follows a week where the weather has been (as they say) “variable.” On Monday the temperature was on the rise and reached the nineties. On Tuesday Minneapolis was one degree shy of the record of 104 degrees. On Wednesday morning the temperature had dropped 40 degrees. This morning I’m back in my hoodie.

Change, change, change. It feels like the only constant in the physical world.

I’m feeling sentimental about this blog this morning and about all the changes that it’s seen me through. Henry was barely speaking when I started it and now he’s expressing his emotions. After being thwarted in his desire to go swimming the other day, he told his mother that she was breaking his heart. Where did he learn that expression?

In recent months, he’s been saying “I’m tired,” every time he gets upset. I’ve been encouraging him to express his emotions and to find the appropriate words, but I swear, I never suggested that his heart could break. I hope that not getting to go swimming was a gentle first heartbreak.

It awes me to see how quickly he’s grown and to begin to see exchanges between him and his friends that could almost break my heart…that knowing that he’s going to find that not all people are kind…and that he’s going to have to learn to take care of himself in whatever age group he enters.

I’ve been pondering “care of the heart” a lot lately and seeing that with all of my experiences, guidance, learning, receptivity, and many years with A Course of Love, I am only now beginning to care for my heart – to become gentler with myself and to let my experience and guidance begin to show me the way.

Even while I say this though, I want to convey my great respect for all the cycles of life we go through.

I’ve become intrigued by the notion of “readiness.” How no one can tell you, no guidance can change you, no experience can irrevocably prepare you for all of the vicissitudes of life or make you ready for a new way until you’re…ready.

I’m ready now. Why wasn’t I before? I’d love to find the answer to that question, and yet, my respect for each time of life (and life change)prevents me from expecting a pat answer, or even one that might specifically address my own long period of unreadiness.

I’ll hesitantly say I’ve been “willing” all along without being “ready.” I’d describe readiness as a specific kind of willingness…something along the line of putting willingness together with action, or maybe practice, or maybe care of the heart.

All of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done have begun as an inner need that I must meet and then the realization that if I have such a need, others may have it too. I needed to create a meditation video for myself, to care for myself, to find a way to be with the words of A Course of Love each day as I begin this new practice of remembering to love myself and care for my heart.

One of my recent actions has been to start a new blog site to go along with this new practice. I posted the meditation on The Embrace from A Course of Love there. I’d like to share it with you and invite you to see it here: http://blog.acourseoflove.com

From broken to blossoming

Yesterday, it didn’t rain all day (unusual), but the air felt wet, it really did. I’d be walking out to the cabin and get the feeling that I was getting sprinkled on, and yet not have any evidence. Coming out this morning, it’s clear the rain finally came in the night. The day is gloomy and morning slow to come. It’s cool, delicious, somber, joyful.

I feel as if I’ve come out of my cave. I’ve been in that cave, hunkered down, feeling under siege. It’s not quite been the cave of solitude but something else altogether. I was beginning to get the picture at Easter and then went to the North Shore a couple of weeks ago. All those waves pounding on the rocks matched the kind of cave experience I’d been dealing with, but began to lift it too.

I don’t know why we have to go through those under siege times that break us open, but I’ve found there’s doorways in them and that coming out feels really good. Here’s a quote and a link to an interview with Elizabeth Lesser who wrote on this in her book Broken Open.

"The phrase "broken" is a good one to start from. When the stresses of life build up to a certain point, whether it's the loss of someone you love or the loss of a job or a divorce, we all would understand when you say, "That really broke me down," meaning it was a change that ended in making us a little more cynical or scared or unable to cope. But there is this other possibility that after the breaking, we can open up more into who are supposed to be, in the way that a flower breaks out of the confines of a bud into its full blossoming."

I made a pretty simple decision while us “up north”…to quit focusing on other people and start living my life. Just do that. Just follow my own nose and see where it would take me. No decisions. No plans. Just following that inner pull. My energy has increased daily since then and I’ve been doing a little creating. One creation is of a new blog.
On it you can find a video of my trip, or you can watch it here

Spring opener

Written Sunday:

The spring opening of the cabin is like no other time, no other day, no other year. Just like the shadows are never the same, or unfuckupable man, who is, today, eating snow. I’ve got to get that on my way back in.

I swept out a week or two ago, dusted down the cobwebs a few days ago before my visitor from Maine came out, but today is the real opener. I’m here by myself and not to sweep or dust. I’m here with my laptop. The sun is shining and the slats of the chair are shadowing the seat, and I have my camera. Yes, this is it.

It’s toasty warm for the heater having been on since 12:30. Now she’s quietly resting on “auto”, the freeway noise is largely kept out by the closed windows, and the occasional tings that let me know the “auto” is working are just right – soft, like the ticking of a clock but with only one tick per minute. Time is different here.

Oh, all the reasons why we take ourselves away! They’re countless!

Spring!

Out the front window and there it is – a dark, rain slicked street glistening in the light of street lamps. Out the back door, a train whistle sounding through the morning. All the yard a glitter. Spring – on her day. Everywhere – spring!

read these leaves

Advice from Walt Whitman from the Preface to Leaves of Grass:

THIS IS WHAT YOU SHALL DO

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air of every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

I found this quote on the website of my friend, the brilliant astrologer Pat Kaluza.

An old board

I have home improvements going on. One thing keeps leading to another and another. You take everything down off your walls so that you can paint, and first you have to dust and wash. You take down the curtains and you have to wash the windows. Then you wash the curtains. Then you iron them.

It’s the ironing that I had to come write about. I started it yesterday and after about an hour, my arm was really getting sore, so I left it. Later in the day I was at the store and happened to spot ironing board covers.

My ironing board is about a hundred years old – seriously. It came from Donny’s grandma’s house. I’ve seen these wooden boards in antique shops. I love it…but.

All these years that we’ve had it, I’ve put up with this vinyl cover that is cracked and patched. One reason is I don’t do that much ironing. Half the time, if I’m just putting a crease in a pant leg, I throw a towel on the floor and iron there instead of going down in the basement and hauling out the old board.

Last time I ironed the curtains, I brought the board upstairs. This time, I swept the laundry room, moved a few things out of the way, and was doing my ironing there.

Because I was ironing sheers, and a lot of them, that cracked ironing board cover was really a pain in the neck, and so having spotted this austere item that’s not exactly front and center when you’re walking through Target, I bought it.

Today, I took off the vinyl cover. It was held together by ancient metal clips. I hated to throw it, and them, away.

Then I found a pad underneath. Maybe it’s not homemade, but it could have been, and whether it is or isn’t, it’s got these touches – this extra padding – as if Donny’s grandma was a diehard ironer and she had wanted it just so. It’s yellowed from all the ironing she did (okay...and from age). I started imagining all those white dress shirts being starched, and the tablecloths and napkins back before there was wash and wear.

I did manage to toss the vinyl, but for now I’ve kept that pad. I would have kept it on the board but the new pad wouldn’t fit around it.

The new pad is nice too. It made me want to really clean and organize my laundry room so that I can keep the ironing board set up with it’s jaunty blue cover.

It’s been amazing to me the way this thing has spiraled out of control. One minute you’re just ironing. The next you’re shopping, and the next you’re recovering, and the next you’re planning for a spic and span laundry room with neat places to put things. What’s next? Coordinated hampers?

This kind of behavior doesn’t fall into the category of being “like me.” I’m doing this spiffing up because I haven’t done it in fifteen years – and you know what happens when you let things go that long. But I’m enjoying the surprise of finding a side of myself that is happy doing it. It feels like a fresh start, and that always translates…or maybe, as they say “as within/so without,” it could even mean the new start has gotten going inside of me. There’s always much more going on than meets the eye.

Now…if only I knew what to do with that old pad!

Access, technology, and temptations

Daylight saving time has struck again, this time the spring forward part, and I feel happy with it. When I woke up it was dark. My cell phone immediately adjusted, although I didn’t know it would. When I got up at 6:00… it was 6:00… not 7:00 as I thought it would be. The computer adjusted too.

As I sit down in my sunroom for the start of this Sunday, it’s light and bright out my window, a little less dull in that wintery way of mornings full of moisture tending toward the look and feel of fog without the mist. And today, I’m still an ordinary, flawed human being, watching the world out my window as dozens of thoughts dart out in all directions – many of them of what I could write about today – like the earthquake/tsunami that hit Japan.

The images, shown over and over again on television, feel etched in those memory banks that stand behind our eyes like news reels. This force of nature happened on Friday and I watched all morning with my eldercare client, the scenes looking just like the disaster movies and making them feel like predictions of things to come. I wouldn’t have known it had happened if I hadn’t been on the computer early on Friday.

The internet is where most of us, I bet, got the news first. The news came too late for the morning paper. When I arrived at the home of my companion she didn’t know it had happened, nor did her daughter.

In that way it was reminiscent of 9/11, the first news coming after most people had gone to work, read their papers. That morning, nearly ten years ago, Mia called from the coffee shop saying, “Turn on the TV, something’s happened.” I doubt many people first heard of that from their computers. I know I didn’t have a Google page that fed me news as I logged on to get my emails.

In 2001, the cabin wasn’t built yet. When I first got it, I didn’t have access to email out there and once it came available, it changed things – like carrying a cell phone in your pocket does. All those reasons to stay instantly reachable. Available. Even when you don’t want to be.

The access is a temptation. You might miss some news. Or a call for help.

Access and availability/reaching out and connecting. It’s a conundrum these days.

Strangely enough, this very conundrum is the story behind the readings that start Lent. One is the Gospel that shares Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. The other is the creation story.

In the temptation story “the devil” (like our thoughts) tempts with the meeting of physical needs, sets the things of this world against of the things of God, and tempts us to put God to the test.

In the creation story, God saw all of creation on the first day and pronounced “It is all good.” Then on the second day, he said for the first time: “It is not good”… “It is not good for man to be alone.”

So it’s technology and access that strikes me this morning – technology, access, and the temptations of them. One idea they breed is that we can be prepared. We can have faith in preparedness, we can be tempted to have more faith in ourselves than in God – to put God to the test. Another is that if we can reach out and touch each other, see what’s going on, communicate, then we will come together and be okay.

Ultimately, the stories work well together. We use everything we know to take care of ourselves and each other, and we also surrender to God – sometimes because we have no choice – and sometimes as a choice.