Thoughts create feelings. Feelings motivate actions. Actions determine results.

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How to work with your thoughts so you create the life you want and value.

“When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation, or accept it. All else is madness.” ~Eckhart Tolle

Does that quote piss you off just a little? It does me. There are things I feel I ought to be able to complain about. Things that just aren’t right, but that don’t seem to be within my power to correct. Things like White nationalism, the persistence of misogynist patriarchy, and rampant capitalism, for example. But what good does complaining about any of that do? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. At least for me.

I believe Eckhart Tolle is correct. I make myself a victim when I complain. If a situation is truly intractable, the only sane course of action is to accept it. Because the above-mentioned forces are man-made (deliberate use of “man”), they are changeable. It’s just that changing them requires such hard work and an eye on the long game that they feel intractable.

I also see in myself a tendency to complain about situations I could leave or change, if I were willing to live with someone else’s anger or my own discomfort. I blame others for my choice to remain in situations that I don’t like. We complain when we don’t want to change, or when we feel powerless because the problem is so damn big. We choose not to change because we’re afraid of the hard work and the consequences.  

I learned something in life coach training that blew my mind: Thoughts create feelings. I always thought it was the other way around. Nope. Here’s how it works:

Thoughts create feelings, which create actions, which create results, which lead to more thoughts, which create more feelings, which create more actions, which produce more results, which lead to more thoughts … on and on, around and around …

You can see how we can get ourselves pretty deep into a gnarly clusterf*ck if we don’t understand how this works.

Your thoughts create your feelings which motivate your actions which produce results. You then have thoughts about those results, which create feelings, which motivate actions, which produce more results. All of these results add up to your circumstances.

Of course, all of this is happening within the complex human ecosystem which is you. You exist within a matrix of material reality interwoven with Holy energy. And, as mentioned above, we live in a culture that privileges Whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and wealth, which certainly affects your life.

If you’re an adult and you’re reading this, your present circumstances are largely a product of your actions. You did this. Every step of the way. The circumstances in which you find yourself are the result of actions you took in response to feelings produced by your thoughts.

Although we like to blame others for our adult circumstances, unless you’re being held captive, that blame is probably not accurate. I’m NOT saying you caused your cancer or depression or whatever. I AM saying that if your cancer or depression or whatever is creating unnecessary suffering, you can allevate that suffering by taking responsibility for it. It may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility.

If you’re looking around at a life you didn’t intentionally create and you’re not thrilled about, it’s because you didn’t know about this cycle — how it works and how to create meaningful change for yourself.

How do you take responsibility for this cycle and the results it’s produced in your life? By understanding it and learning to intervene in it skillfully. To grow up is to understand this cycle and to use it to create the life you want.

Circumstances we don’t like and feelings we don’t like are where we usually notice distress, so it’s natural to think they are what we need to fix first.

We would be wrong.

Thoughts and actions are the only places we can break the cycle and put ourselves back in charge of our lives.

When we try to fix feelings without attending to the thoughts that drive them, we deny our feelings or numb them with addictions and compulsions. To alleviate uncomfortable feelings, we take impulsive actions, or no action at all because we feel paralyzed. These careless actions are useless at best, destructive at worst.  

When we try to fix results of our clumsy actions without addressing the feelings and thoughts that drove those actions, we simply recreate the same circumstances over and over again. We all know people who’ve moved, changed jobs, coupled up or broken up, gone back to school, had a baby, or something else to alleviate the discomfort of their circumstances and feelings. Heck, I’ve done this myself a time or two. Wherever you go, there you are.

Unskillful interventions create more suffering in the long run, and they don’t produce lasting change and healing.

Skillful interventions, on the other hand, reduce suffering and result in long-term change and healing.

How do we intervene in this cycle skillfully and effectively?

A good place to start is to notice what you’re complaining about. If you complain about a circumstance in your life, you’re making yourself a victim. Stop it. Stop and look at what’s really going on. Follow the cycle backwards. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What actions have I taken that resulted in this present circumstance?
  • What feelings was I having that drove those actions?
  • What thoughts created those feelings?

(A coach or other careful listener can be really helpful here, because we’re often blind to how the cycle has worked in our lives. If we could see it clearly, we’d make different choices!)

Actions: If you’re choosing destructive actions to alleviate feelings you don’t want to have, stop it. Are you overeating? Overdrinking? Overspending? Yelling at your kids or your spouse or the driver in front of you? And recognize that simply ceasing an action without attending to the feelings and thoughts that drive that action is unsustainable in the long run. Will power isn’t infinite.

Feelings: Uncomfortable feelings won’t kill you when you feel them. Feel your feelings all the way, and they lose their power. You’ll discover that you can feel your feelings and survive. Learning to feel feelings without needing to act on them in ways that are destructive to your life and your integrity – that’s freedom. That’s maturity.

Thoughts: The most effective and sustainable place to intervene in this cycle is with our thoughts. This is the bulk of the coaching I do, because most of us need help hearing our thoughts and changing them to thoughts that serve us.

Here’s an example from my own life. I feel embarrassed to share it. I also believe many of you can relate, so here goes.

I often crave potato chips, even when I’m not hungry. The cycle goes like this: I see potato chips and I think, “I deserve those today, I won’t be able to stand not eating them now that I see them, and a few won’t hurt me.”  So I want them, I eat too many of them, and I feel overfull and not proud of myself. I haven’t acted in my own best interests and according to my values. This is what I did just a couple of days ago.

I could have interrupted this cycle in two places. I could have noticed the wanting, felt it all the way, and not eaten the potato chips. This is what I usually manage to do. The most powerful place to intervene, though, is with the thought, “I won’t be able to stand not eating them.” Because I know if I can just let that craving be what it is, it will eventually dissipate and I’ll be fine. The craving is just neurons firing in my brain, after all. Although it feels lethal, it’s not. This is getting easier and easier for me to do as I rewire my brain. I hardly ever eat when I’m not hungry anymore.

Now, for most of us, potato chips aren’t the end of the world. But sometimes, because we don’t know how this process works, we make choices with destructive consequences that are life-altering.

Looking back on my life, I can see how I’ve gotten where I am, both the good and the bad. I can draw a line from the circumstances in which I’m living now, back to the actions I took to manage the feelings I was having, and then even further back to the thoughts that drove those feelings, and the circumstances that created the thoughts, and so on and on and on.

Here in my 60s, I can see how choices I made when I was in my teens and 20s have resulted in a life that doesn’t fit in important ways. I can stop doing the things that hurt me, but it’s working with my thoughts that has created and continues to create lasting change and healing.

Because of what went down in my childhood family, I believed I wasn’t worthy of living my own life on my terms. My choices flowed from that core belief. The only way I’ve been able to heal is to examine those tangled beliefs, and to begin to learn to think different thoughts. It’s not easy. Lasting change rarely is.

Now that I know better, I can do better. So can you. Start with where you’re complaining, and work backwards. Contact me if you want to talk.

“Put Down the Duckie”

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See the cage for what it is, and unlock it.

“The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let the dead things go.” That’s a quote from Maya Elious, and how poignant it is. We had snow last Saturday here in Bend, and now the trees are letting go with a vengeance, dropping leaves and fruit all over the place.

Do you remember the song Sesame Street’s Hoots the Owl sings to his friend Ernie, who desperately wants to both play his saxophone and keep ahold of his beloved rubber duckie? Hoots sings, “Put down the duckie. Ernie, put down the duckie. You gotta put down the duckie if you wanna play the saxophone.” (Watch it here.)

I grew up in a family with alcoholism and physical violence. My parents eventually divorced. When I was in high school, my mom married a man, a family friend of many years, who touched my body and said things to me that no stepfather should say to a stepdaughter. When I protested, he told me I was wrong. My mom did not protect me.

What do falling leaves, Hoots the Owl’s song to Ernie, and growing up have to do with each other?

As a daughter in my family, a student in the public schools of the 60s and 70s, a girl in a persistently patriarchal church and misogynist culture, I picked up a few beliefs. They might sound familiar to you.

  • Be small, hidden, camouflaged.
  • Be silent. Stay quiet.
  • Do as you’re told.
  • Keep your wants, opinions, thoughts, and feelings to yourself, because they don’t matter.
  • Whip yourself into shape.
  • Be who we want you to be.
  • Look to others for direction, validation, affirmation, approval.
  • Put others’ needs ahead of your own.

Be nice, sweet, cute, pleasing, funny, smart but not too smart, helpful, compliant.

In short, be a good girl and don’t bother us.

It was safer, when I was a child, to just go along with this. I wasn’t big or brave or powerful enough to go it alone. And after a while I forgot who I was. It was easier to forget than to keep feeling the pain of remembering.

I’m remembering now. I’m learning to truly see the ways my visibility, clarity, voice, value, integrity, intrinsic motivation, self-compassion, self-regard, and self-trust were taken offline, uninstalled by my family, my culture, and my church.

Now that I see, I’ve gained the ability to choose what to do. I can choose the discomfort of reinstalling those original blessings and rewiring (unf*cking) my brain, or I can continue to stay small quiet nice cute sweet reactive other-focused because that’s more familiar and feels safer. I can hang on to last year’s leaves, or I can choose to let the dead things go.

Wholeness, healing, and new life lie in the direction of putting the damn duckie down. Relearning is uncomfortable and scary. But staying locked up in this cage of smallness, silence, and compliance is no longer an option for me.

Now that I see the cage for what it is, and I know I hold the key to my freedom in my own two hands, how can I choose to remain a prisoner?

If you’d like some Bible alongside Sesame Street, here’s Paul writing to the church in Corinth: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” (I Corinthians 13:11)

Holiness wants us to grow up. Holiness wants us clear and articulate and powerful.

We gotta put down our childish duckies if we wanna play our grown-up saxophones.

You may not want to play the saxophone, but I know you have dreams. Goals. Desires that just won’t let go. And if you haven’t achieved them or let them go, there’s something stopping you. There’s an obstacle in the way, almost certainly a belief or a cluster of beliefs that no longer serve you, if they ever did.

I can help you see where your childish beliefs are holding you back so you can change them and be the grown-up woman you want to be. Contact me for a free consultation.

Photo by Peter Conlan on Unsplash, edited on Canva

How to feel joy.

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Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance. ~Mary Oliver

This is the piece I was ready to post last week. And then “A letter from God to her daughters who resist joy” showed up and wanted to be shared instead. Here’s my more cerebral, left-brain answer to the question, “Why do we resist joy?”

Two weeks ago I wrote about how to feel sad, and I heard from a few of you who were grateful for the encouragement and instruction. Today I want to encourage us to feel our joy.

Joy. Why would we resist feeling joyful and happy? It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Pushing away sadness makes sense. Sadness, grief, sorrow – they hurt. Joy doesn’t hurt, right?

Well. Maybe, maybe not. We might not resist joy like we resist sadness. We resist joy in different ways – we might rush past joy, not stopping to take it in.  We might hold on to it with a death grip, grasping and needy, not trusting that there are moments of joy yet to come.

We might believe that if we let joy in, it will only make our inevitable sorrow more acutely painful.

And we’d be right.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Kahlil Gibran

Feelings are unpredictable. Feelings ebb and flow. Feelings arrive, fresh-faced or tear-stained, without words, yanking on our skirts and distracting us from our to-do lists. They require our attention at inconvenient times.

Feeling our feelings, all of them, is a choice. We don’t have to do it. We can numb and distract and talk ourselves out of our feelings until we die. Many lovely people choose not to feel their feelings. You probably know a few of them.

Our dominant culture excels at teaching us to ignore our true feelings.

So, why bother? Why feel at all? Why rock our little human boats that we try so hard to keep afloat and on an even keel? Why make life harder than it already is? Why choose to feel deeply? Why not leave well enough alone?

Why choose to get back in touch with our emotions? Our emotions live in our bodies. When we cut off our emotional lives, we cut off our embodied existence. We live from the neck up, dragging our bodies around like machines controlled by our brains.

You may have vacated your body and moved into your head at some point, probably in self-defense. It was the best strategy at the time. Vacating your body was how you got through the painful stuff.

If so, it’s time to come back home.

Why? Because, when you cut off your embodied feelings, you also cut off your connection to Soul. Our souls and bodies are intertwined. Your soul does not live in your brain or your mind.

Feeling your joy and sorrow is how you reconnect with your body. Reconnecting with your body is how you connect with your soul and your soul’s Source.

Cutting off your body because it hurts too much and you feel uncomfortable is to cut off your connection to God. Refusing to be in our bodies severs our connection to Holiness. Your holiness. My holiness. Earth’s holiness. Holiness Itself.

Besides, it takes so much energy to keep stuffing and resisting our feelings! Just think what you could get done if you just let your feelings move through you and got on with your day?!

If you want a less woo-woo, more sciency reason to feel your feelings, consider the neurobiology adage “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In the words of Rick Hanson, “Passing mental states become lasting neural traits.” He’s got some good instructions in this 13-minute TED talk.

When we pay conscious attention to joyful moments, experiences, and memories, we heal our brains. A healed brain is more resilient and flexible. A healed brain is more resistant to stress and the cascade of destruction and disease caused by stress.

We inhabit our joy only when we also attend to our sorrow. They walk together.

Mary Oliver:

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider

the orderliness of the world. Notice

something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow cricket

whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,

shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.

Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,

like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world

and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

Does this resonate? Want to explore further? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!

Photo credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A letter from God to her daughters who resist joy

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Smell a rose for me. This is the only worship I require. All my love, God. (Photo of paint-covered smiling girl.)

Dear Daughters,

This letter is for you who resist your joy.

You have your reasons. I get that. I really do.

Joy feels dangerous. Joy feels vulnerable. Joy feels disloyal to those who are suffering. And there’s so much suffering, isn’t there?

You must comprehend this truth. I can only heal you, and others through you, when you’re willing to inhabit joy and allow sorrow.

When you resist sorrow, you resist joy. When you resist joy, you flee your body. When you flee your body, you cut off healing.

I heal you and your world through your body. We connect, you and I, through your flesh. This is what Emmanuel – God with us – means. Me being with you is not abstract. It’s the most concrete thing of all. Every one of your cells is holy. Every single one.

Take a deep breath. That’s me.

Feel your heart beating and your blood moving. That’s me.

Wiggle your fingers and your toes. That’s me, too.

I am always here.

You are sacred. You are holy. You are indescribably dear to me.

Let sorrow flow through you like water. Sorrow  will furrow and deepen and make of you a fresh channel.

Then, let joy flow through you like a river. I promise there will be more than enough. My rivers are full of water.

Let me feed you with my world – bread and wine, sun and rain, sky and dirt, lover, sister, friend. Your delight is my delight.

Let me make you wholehearted.

Let me make you healing and healed.

Let me live in you.

Live your holy life.

My darlings, feel it all.

Smell a rose for me.

This is the only worship I require.

All my love,

God

Photo by Senjuti Kundu on Unsplash

©barbmorris.com

How to feel sad.

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"Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer... when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings." Pema Chodron

Are you feeling sad? I am. Lately, I’ve been feeling sad pretty much constantly. I have abundant reasons for sadness these days – gun violence, climate chaos, divisive politics, and the accumulated losses of my last six decades among them.

But I don’t enjoy feeling sad. I’d really like not to feel so damn sad. But not feeling sad doesn’t work. If I don’t feel my sadness, it just keeps hanging around asking for attention, getting more and more demanding.

In my 60s, I’m learning to accept that sadness and her cousins grief and pain are necessary ingredients of this whole embodied enchilada.

I’m starting to suspect that sadness will be my constant companion for the remainder of my journey, and the healthiest course of action is just to plan for that.

Because to reject sadness – to numb it through distraction or addiction, to push it away – is to reject Joy.

Sadness, pain, and grief are necessary companions of joy and love. They walk together. They’re a package deal. We simply cannot have the good feelings without the awful ones. It just doesn’t work that way. We don’t work that way.

Yes, sad or mad or scared feelings are uncomfortable. They hurt. They make us cry and rage and cower. They feel terrible. And most of us weren’t taught how to live with the discomfort of so-called negative emotions. We were likely taught to push away sadness, fear, and anger in all their permutations.

But resisting our uncomfortable feelings makes us brittle and mean. Resisting our uncomfortable feelings makes us less compassionate toward ourselves and other beings. Resisting our uncomfortable feelings turns us into pale ghosts of who we could be – shadows afraid of our own shadows.

So, let’s learn how to feel the hard stuff. Let’s be the bad-ass warriors we are, and learn to be with the emotions that make us dig deep and grow up. Learning to be with sadness, especially, is how we heal.

Not wallowing. Not denying. Just giving sadness a place at our abundant table.

Feelings are meant to be felt, not rejected, stuffed, and numbed. Your emotions will not overwhelm you if you feel them. Feelings are simply sensations that carry information.

You can survive a feeling. You can be with yourself, all of yourself, and receive the gifts of your uncomfortable feelings.

Here’s one way to be with a painful feeling (adapted from Dr. Tara Brach’s RAIN process):

  • 1. Notice the feeling. This is often the hardest step, because we’re so used to pushing painful feelings away.
  • 2. Allow that feeling to be what it is. It’s surprising how quickly feelings pass when we just allow ourselves to have them without judging ourselves.
  • 3. Give kind, curious attention to the feeling. Where does it show up in your body? Is it hot or cold? Heavy or light? Open or closed? Does it have a color? A shape? A message for you?
  • 4. As the feeling wanes, give yourself kindness. You might want to mentally tell yourself you’re safe, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m here. You might want to put your hand on your heart. Experiment to find what words and gestures bring you comfort.

And why do we do this, again? Why would we choose to feel challenging feelings?

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön puts it this way:

When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.

In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things, the genuine heart of sadness.

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet when we don’t close off and we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.

Only when we embrace all of ourselves, including uncomfortable feelings like sadness, fear, and anger, can we truly embrace other beings. Only when we embrace all of ourselves can we be a true fountain of healing water for our thirsty world.

Some Resources:

Buddhist Psychologist Tara Brach’s RAIN of Self-Compassion, from whom I’ve adapted the process above.

Pema Chödrön: When Things Fall Apart

Contact me if you’d like to explore feeling your feelings further. I offer a free, no-obligation consultation and would love to walk with you through this process.

Photo by Aliyah Jamous on Unsplash, edited on Canva

Suburban Chicago, Late May

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Barb Morris Camino de Santiago

I’ve been steadily writing a novel for over two years – a blink of an eye in novel-writing time. The first scene came in a dream. I crafted my own NaNoWriMo in March of 2017, using the dream scene as a jumping-off point. That writing was “pantsed,” writer-ese for “Screw planning! Let’s just see what happens!” What happened completely took me by surprise. You can read some of it here. Following those crazy days, I introduced planning – crafting a coherent narrative, introducing additional characters, and writing missing scenes. The first draft is almost finished! Here’s the opening chapter of Lost and Found: A Journey on the Camino de Santiago (working title).

Suburban Chicago, Late May

Martha handed in her keys for the last time and went home to empty her closet and dresser. She took all the sensible clothes, the khakis and cardigans and school spirit t-shirts and sturdy shoes, to Goodwill that afternoon. She kept only a few pairs of blue jeans and two t-shirts for gardening.

A bright yellow t-shirt and lime green skirt were hanging in the Goodwill window. They went fabulously with the plastic flamingo pink flip flops in the shoe section. Martha bought them all.

The next day, the books. All gone. She’d left her classroom library and best practice books for the bright shiny teacher taking her place. She fully expected the new teacher to throw the texts away, but held out hope that some kid someday would read Wizard of Earthsea. She took all the self-help and the novels to Goodwill, too.

Two days after her last day as a sixth-grade teacher, Martha walked out the front door of her mostly empty house and climbed into the waiting cab. She carried only a backpack that held two changes of clothes, a few basic toiletries, her Goodwill purchases, and her trekking poles. Inside the backpack was a smaller bag with a paperback book, passport and credit cards, and 300 Euros donated by her former colleagues at her retirement party. She hadn’t wanted a party at all, so it was a small gathering of team teachers and a couple of principals. She was the last of the group that had started teaching together 25 years before.

She was flying United to La Guardia, then Iberia to Madrid. From Madrid she’d take a train to León and the bus to Pamplona, where she’d start walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

Santiago de Compostela, the terminus of many Caminos – routes from all over Spain and from a few cities in France. And from Portugal. Even from England, although that route was mostly the ferry from Portsmouth, then three days of walking in Spain.

Martha thought, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, that she was crazy to be doing this. She was 62 years old, healthy but not in perfect physical condition. Her Spanish was rusty. And she was alone.

What better way to mark the end of an era? What better way to tend the ending of her working life and to invite in whatever was next? You see, she didn’t know what came next. When her retirement had become public knowledge, the Camino was a handy answer for the inevitable question at staff meetings and in the teacher’s lounge, a place she usually avoided. Martha had asked her principal not to tell anyone until the new teachers for the coming year had been hired. She didn’t want her retirement to be a distraction for the last couple of months of school. She just wanted to teach – to pay attention to this ending as fully as she could.

The questions. Oh, the questions. “So, Martha, what are you going to do next year when we’re all back in school? Do you have plans? Are you going to get another dog? It’ll be nice to spend more time with your kids, won’t it?”

She’d answer, “Actually, I’m spending the summer in Spain, walking the Camino de Santiago.” She liked the surprised look on their faces. She’d enjoyed surprising someone for a change.

The inevitable follow-up question was, “Who’s going with you?”

“No one,” she’d say. “I’m going by myself.”

“Is that safe?” they’d ask.

“A lot of people do it, so I hope so. It’s fine. Joy is meeting me in León for a few days in the middle to check on me. I’ll email the kids when I have wifi.”

She would see the doubt cross their face and find it mirrored in her own thoughts. What the hell am I doing?

Yet there Martha was, at Chicago O’Hare, checking her backpack, carrying on only a book and the small bag. The ticket agent wished her a good flight as she handed over her boarding passes. She went through security to the waiting area, sat down, and fought the rising panic that had become her constant companion. Fear’s voice with its predictable litany once more took a run through her head: This is a batshit crazy idea. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t have to do this. I could walk right through that door there and catch a cab back home. I could be in my house tidying up and tending the garden. I could start the kitchen remodel. I could paint the study. I could wake up in my own bed. I could get in shape for this. Train for it. Do it next fall when it’s cooler. What the hell am I thinking? 

Somehow, she kept her seat. She let the voice yammer on, and sat. She stayed in her seat until her flight was called, when she stood up and walked down the jetway and onto the plane. She found her seat and, once again, she sat. She didn’t speak. She didn’t trust herself to speak. If she talked, she’s not sure she’d ever shut up. I’m alone on this fool’s pilgrimage, she thought. No conversation with strangers will change that. Just for a moment she pondered taking a vow of silence for the duration of this journey. She could hang a sign around her neck that said, “In Silence.” Tempting.

She didn’t get up until the plane landed at La Guardia.  Her flight to Madrid didn’t leave for three hours. Three hours. Three hours to change her mind. To come to her senses. Her backpack would go to Spain without her. Then she remembered the empty closet. The empty bookshelves. The almost-empty house. Her empty former life. What had she done?

Her phone rang. Her son.

“Hi, Matt.” So much for the vow of silence.

“I’m fine. I’m sorry I didn’t call. So much to do. You know. Yes, I’m in New York between flights. The Madrid flight will be boarding any minute. You got the itinerary I sent you, right? I’ll check in when I have wifi. Yes, sweetie. I promise. Give Flora a kiss for me. Spain is a first world country, dear. Thank you for taking care of her. I’ll miss you. Not going to back out now, dear. I’ll be fine. I love you. Mwah. Bye.”

Martha silenced her phone and put it away in her bag. She sat, unmoving, until her row was called. She got up and walked to the gate and down the jetway, onto the big plane that flies across oceans. She found her seat, shoved her little bag under the seat in front, buckled her seatbelt, looked out the window, and smiled.

All I have to do is put one foot in front of the other, and walk. Babies do that. I can do that.

She’d had so many ideas about this Camino. So many theories. So many thoughts. Now it was here. She was suddenly aware that she didn’t know anything anymore. She didn’t need to know anything. All she had to do was walk. All she had to do was follow the arrows and walk to Santiago.

But first, she had to get to Pamplona.

The Cathedral and the Well

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(Act One)  The setting is a desert which, like all deserts, has to be crossed. In the middle of this desert is a well, fed by an underground spring of fresh, loud, rushing water. This particular well is fortunately located just at the point where thirsty pilgrims need refreshment if they are to survive and continue on their way. So in those days news got about that it was relatively safe to cross the desert as long as you listened for the sound of the spring and stopped to drink from the well. Generations of pilgrims were able to cross the desert and head into the wilderness — which is where God’s people were usually traveling.

(Act Two)  Many years later news spread of a building in the middle of the desert, a cathedral of great beauty. Throughout the years pilgrims, when they passed, had dropped stones (some fancier than others) to mark the location of the wellspring, an improvement which they hoped would show their respect for the well. Soon a cathedral stands in the middle of this desert, one stone buttressing another. Pilgrims stop, look up, and admire the cathedral from a distance. Yet most of them are close to death from thirst when they approach. They can neither hear the sounds of rushing water nor see the well, now covered by stones.

(Act Three)  Centuries later, in the same desert, one very thirsty pilgrim dares to approach the cathedral, now overgrown by weeds after years of neglect. She (most late medieval pilgrims were women) notices that a stone is loose. Pulling it out, so that she might replace it correctly, she hears the sound of rushing waters! She rediscovers the well and invites her companions to drink of its life-giving waters. Soon news spreads of the cathedral and of the well. The cathedral was imperfectly built, always standing in need of repair; the well, which stood in its midst, is free-flowing. Future generations of pilgrims, sighting the familiar landmark of the cathedral, draw close to the well, drink of its springs, and live to cross the desert.

If this parable of thirst, courage, and spiritual renewal speaks to you, here are some possible ways to interact with it.

1. Ponder where in your life the living water flowing from your Source into your soul has perhaps become blocked. Are you requiring certainty before you move? Are you taking literally what was meant metaphorically? Are you resisting the next step on your journey because you feel afraid? Are you trusting external authority at the expense of your own experience?

2. Use the story as your text for Lectio Divina.

3. Put yourself in the story. Be the thirsty pilgrim crossing the arid desert and approaching the cathedral. Be the thirsty pilgrim pulling aside the loose stone and hearing the sound of water. Hold the stone in your hands. Drink deeply of the cool, living water. What do you hear and feel?

4. If you’d like to chat about what this story may be saying to you, contact me for a free no-obligation consultation call.

Friends, may we drink deeply of the free-flowing, life-giving water of Love.

~Barb

Photo by Rubén Bagüés on Unsplash

*Parable source: Fredrica Harris Thompsett in We Are Theologians