Tag Archives: spirituality

Let’s Stop Comparing Ourselves to Trees.

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It’s fall in the Northern Hemisphere.

You know what that means, right?

Yup, pumpkin spiced everything.

And also blog post after blog post about letting go. Relaxing into the dark. Transformation. Transition. Change. About how we should be like trees and gracefully let the dead things fall away.

I’ve been guilty of it myself. (See header image.)

And yet. We’re not trees.

Please stop comparing yourself to a tree.

Humans and trees diverged very early in life’s evolutionary journey. Humans went on to evolve a large brain, with a cerebral cortex that knows it’s housed in a body that will die, and so the mind fears. A lot.

Maybe trees have fears, too, when fall comes and they feel their dead leaves drop away. Maybe they resist, too, just like we do.

I’ve been exploring ways to navigate transitions more kindly. My kids are self-sufficient adults, so I’m transitioning from active parenting to empty nester. I’m actively exploring nature-based spirituality, so I’m transitioning from Episcopalian to who knows what. I’m an entrepreneur, so I’m transitioning from fitting into a defined job to being in charge of my own work. My body continues to age, so I’m transitioning from young-ish woman to juicy crone.

Dying and rising and doing it all over again comes pre-installed in Earthlings. All Earthlings. Trees. Rocks. Water. Ravens. Humans. Change is not optional.

I’m finding that knowing who I am, having a sense of my core identity, the essence of “me,” is helpful. Knowing and staying in touch with my heart is one key to sane cycling and changing.

Just as a tree’s identity remains when it stands bare to the winter winds, I will still be “me” when outer identitifiers (mom, teacher, Christian, young …) fall away.

My heart identity lives in my body.  It makes sense to me, then, that deeply knowing myself and living from my core starts with loving and paying attention to my body.

Who you are lives in your body. Deeply knowing yourself and living from your core starts with loving and paying attention to your body, in whatever form that takes for you. I suggest regular body scans, baths, movement, sweaty work, long walks – whatever feels delicious. “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” (Mary Oliver)

Be warned, though. Your body is wild. Paying attention to your body means feeling your feelings. It means sitting with your pain and your joy. Giving yourself the gift of self-compassion.

We are not trees. For humans, with these brains that scream fears night and day, it helps so much to know and trust our hearts. To know that our bodies tell the truth, while our minds often don’t.

When we know who we are, the stuff we cling to that isn’t ours anymore, perhaps never was ours, can fall away like last year’s leaves.

(Would you like to explore navigating the changes and seasons of your life with kindness? I offer a free discovery call. Click here for details.)

 

I Want Transformation and I Want It NOW.

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The waiting part of transformation is HARD, at least for me. I want to just do the change, and do it quick. Unfortunately, that’s just not how transformation works. Unlike our get ‘er done culture, what happens in that chrysalis can’t be rushed. (See this previous post for more about change, transformation, and the difference between them. Today’s post goes deeper into #5, about the predictable pattern of change.)

My hypothesis is that the obligatory waiting phase is why I resist necessary transformations. I hate that in-between thing so much. (And if I haven’t done the grieving I need to do with any change, transformation pretty much stops.) All those messy feelings, when we just want to feel bright and shiny and good at life, right?

I’ve been finding these words helpful when I feel myself resisting the necessary waiting phase of transformation. It’s an excerpt from John O’Donohue’s blessing “For the Interim Time.”

As far as you can, hold your confidence.

Do not allow your confusion to squander

This call which is loosening

Your roots in false ground,

That you might become free

From all you have outgrown.

 

What is being transfigured here is your mind,

And it is difficult and slow to become new,

The more faithfully you can endure here,

The more refined your heart will become

For your arrival in the new dawn.

 

I love that the poet speaks of enduring faithfully. I love that he speaks of loosening roots and becoming free, and how he acknowledges that it’s a difficult and slow process to become new. Mostly I love that he describes the interim time as a time when our minds are being transfigured.

Stay present here and now, in your body. Spend time in nature, and pay attention to how this amazing Creation in which we are embedded actually works. A flower blossoms when it’s ready, and not a minute before. Hold your confidence. Allow your roots to loosen. Faithfully endure and allow your mind to be transfigured. You are becoming new, which is a holy enterprise.

Be faithful to your metamorphosis.

if you’d like to explore how I can help you navigate change and transformation, I offer a free 60-minute consultation. Fill out this form and we’ll set up a time.

Ordination

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Swallowtail on thistle

 

ORDINATION

You say you’re waiting for permission.

You say you’re waiting for direct orders from an irrefutable voice.

A voice from Heaven:                                                                                                         This is my daughter, in whom I am well pleased.                                                                     Listen to her.

An ancient ritual, laden with pomp and circumstance-                                                   Proper form and order.

An ordination with weighty words and codified gestures,                                           Performed by men wearing heavy gowns and rings of gold,                                             Who seal decrees with wax.

You on your knees                                                                                                               On the floor of a long narrow dusty hall                                                                            Ruled by straight lines.

 

My love, that’s not how this works.

My ordination comes through rock and stars.

This holiness is swimming in the mighty river welling up in you that will not be dammed.

This holiness strips your old tough too-small skin from your body with gentle-edged hands you’ve forgotten you had.

This holiness is living in new thin porous skin permeable to excruciating joy.

I consecrated you with blood and salt water at your birth.                                                      I bestow upon you daily ordinations.                                                                                        I tell you of your belonging every moment.

Hear my voice in the pine wind, songs of birds and frogs, and laughter.                             Feel my hand as butterflies and bees, sun on skin, feet in cold river.                               See me in seasons’ spiral, cycles of day and night, everyday dying and rising.

Your sweat and tears taste like ocean.

You know my wordless urge and tug in a baby’s cry and the need of a friend.Or a stranger.

 

Here’s your permission:                                                                                               Daughter, you are here.

You’re flesh of my flesh and                                                                                              bone of my bone.                                                                                                           Breath of my breath.                                                                                                         Blood of my blood.

I feed your body with my body.

Anoint yourself with oil and honey.

Stand up, and walk.

Do your work.

Relationship is Fundamental

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Armenian Genocide Vigil

Armenian Genocide Vigil, Trinity Church, Boston, April 23 2015
Photo Credit: Tricia Harvey

We’re commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.  African refugees are drowning by the hundreds in the Mediterranean. Closer to home, Nancy, a much-beloved member of our church and dear friend to many, is actively dying. Her family and friends are at her bedside, feeling her light and witnessing its waning. Jerry’s cancer has metastasized to his bones and he has just weeks to live. Bill is in his last days and he’s terrified. Even beloved cats are dying. I sometimes feel like I’m immersed in suffering and death.

I wonder: What’s one White middle-aged Oregonian gonna do about all of this? What’s my job here?

 

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. – John Donne

 

 

Modern cosmology is proving the truth of Donne’s poetic statement. As Judy Cannato puts it in Radical Amazement, “All creation has come about through a single cosmic event, often called the Big Bang. Creation is not a static fixed event, but a cosmogenesis, an ongoing act of creation and creativity. Because all life is part of this single cosmic event, all life is connected at its most basic level.”

 

“The theory of holons suggests that everything is a whole/part, that nothing is separate and distinct. Life consists of nested holons of increasing complexity. Relationship is fundamental.”

 

A friend posted the photo of the Armenian Genocide memorial service in Boston last night. This is what we can do for them: light candles and remember them. Remember that this thing happened, and that things like it continue to happen. Know that as this thing happened to them, because we are all connected, it has happened, is happening, to us.

There’s where I find hope in our connection. I don’t know how to help African refugees except to make peace where I am, to live as peacefully and compassionately as I know how, which includes giving to organizations with boots on the ground. What I can do for the dying is be present with them and with those who mourn, with my whole witnessing heart. And because we are all connected, as I live intentionally, knowing that how I live makes a difference, the world will change. Thanks be to  God.

“The Sweet Confinement Of Your Aloneness”

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Today is Day 29 of our Camino. The Way has felt hard. And I feel so blessed to be here. This poem of David Whyte’s has bubbled its way to awareness these last two days as I have walked through western Spain — over mountains, through tiny villages and cities, and among vineyards and cherry orchards.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

— David Whyte
from The House of Belonging
©1996 Many Rivers Press

The Camino has provided space and opportunity to realize that I have cluttered my life with things and people and activities that do not bring me alive. The Way is so huge that the smallness I have allowed is starkly apparent. I am seeing into my heart — seeing glimmers of the things and people and activities that are life-giving for me. I am learning in my innermost being that my heart, Earth’s heart, and God’s heart are one and the same.

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