On to New Adventures...

Catherine and Pabla

It has been a day.  Catherine's cat Pabla has left us for new adventures.  Parting is difficult...even when my relationship with Pabla had some mixed reviews.  She could be sweet.  She could be quite catty, placing herself between "Joy", and Joy's water dish, or between Joy and the doorway, or between Joy and me.  It was the strangest thing.  When Joy first came to visit at Catherine's house, I was worried.  Joy's track record with cats...well, it is just that...she chases them every chance she gets.  The orange tabby back at the condo; "Winter", a calico cat who would stand at the patio door of my apartment, baiting Joy.  Joy would growl and run at the door.  Cats are one of the few things she will bark about.  She sounds positively vicious.  I didn't learn this fact about my dog, until I'd had her for a year.  It was as though she had been on good behavior, but then she decided I was going to keep her and so she began indulging in this cat hating behavior.  Tut, tut!

  But when we first visited Catherine's house, Pabla was the exception.  Joy was utterly terrified of that cat.  She would rarely dare to be in the same room with Ms. Pabla.  After a while there was an uncomfortable truce, but Joy never barked or chased or behaved badly around Pabla.  

    

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A wildly windy day

The day we came home from the coast last week, it was wildly windy.  It was hard to hold the camera still for this photo taken at Cape Blanco.  It's funny.  The thing I liked least about growing up on the prairies of Nebraska was the constantly blowing wind.  But ocean winds don't bother me a bit...unless it's sand in the eye.  I get quite excited about walking on the beach when it's windy and you don't know what the surf will bring in.  The ocean offers wonderful gifts on windy days.

My friend who was with me said that she loved to visit the ocean but wouldn't want to live on the coast as the sea is so restless.  I loved visiting there this time around, but it came clear to me that I probably don't want to live there.  Maybe it is for that reason.  The sea is ever changing.  She is different each day, and sometimes her face changes several times a day.  Sometimes she is all grey and silvery; misty, pea soup foggy; sometimes she is every color of blue imaginable and it makes you want to sing.  Sometimes she is wild and stormy and angry looking; her waves pounding the rocks.

Spirit is often like the sea, and her work changes from one day to the next.  Life seems chaotic and painful one day, and the next day, many loose ends come together and suddenly you see the pattern and the beauty of it all.  The stormy times often yield up some beautiful treasures for discovery.

If I had my druthers however, I think I would like a calmer existence these days where change comes more slowly, in snippets I can handle.  I like my pictures to be in focus.  I like the peacefulness of a mountain valley, where the view is expansive, yet the surrounding hills provide some protection for the valley dwellers.

Well, enough metaphors for one very early morning.

 

Gifts

Ending the War Within

This evening I began reading Oriah Mountain Dreamer's The Call, which I haven't read in several years, and the last time I did, I simply skimmed the content and the meditations.  This time my intent is to read and to do the book.  It has come at an appropriate time for me.  The past couple of weeks I have been aware that I am angry.  I haven't been sure about what to do with that anger.  It's been simmering in the pot on the back of the stove for a long time, but the heat has been recently turned up, so it's been boiling.

We are not comfortable with our own or with other peoples' anger.  Too often anger intensifies into rage and hatred.  It is the stuff from which wars begin.  It is how someone can build a bomb that kills innocent bystanders.  Anger, if not dealt with appropriately, can turn deadly.

So most of us, simply push our anger down; pretend it isn't there; and in the meantime it grows more formidable.

Despite all of that however, anger in and of itself is simply an emotion.  It is not a bad or a good thing.  It simply exists.  What we do with our anger is what matters.  And sometimes it is what we don't do with our anger which matters.  Ignoring it can allow it to grow.

In the meditation after Chapter One in The Call, the author asks us to consider the things which we work so hard at.  How would we like to stop "doing."  Thinking and struggling with is doing as well as working.

Ending the Wars Within

Authority, Agendas and Alienation

"Although I have spent a lot of my life in jobs that require me to speak for God, I am still reluctant to do it for all kinds of reasons.  In the first place, I have discovered that people who want to speak to me about God generally have an agenda.  However well intentioned they may be, their speech tends to serve as a means to their own ends.  They have a clear idea about how I should respond to what they are saying.  They have a clear destination in mind for me, and nine times out of ten it is not some place I want to go."  from An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor

This author is a good one.  If you haven't read her work, you might check out some of her titles.  One of my favorites is Leaving Church.  I heard her speak one fall in upstate New York, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. 

Have you ever had a wonderful friend who is very good at being present along the way, but then suddenly seems to acquire an agenda for you,  giving advice, rather than just "being with" you along the way?  I suppose friendships have to go through such times.  Sometimes those agendas have to do with that particular friend's fears or his/her own values, and sometimes it has to do with something s/he observes in you and wants to help you change because it will make you more acceptable to others. 

People who speak for God, are especially prone to advice giving.  It seems quite ironic to me, because if there is anything  that calls us to be fully present to our lives, to this moment, to the people we love, it is God.  Advice giving plugs up the natural flow of things.  Having the "answers" for someone else according to your own small view of the world, can prevent Spirit from working freely in that person's heart and life. 

One of the books that has always moved me is Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak.  In that book he speaks openly of his depression, and how so often, people with good intentions would say how beautiful the day was, encouraging him to open himself up to it.  It only served to make him feel more outside the norm, more isolated.  He could see it was a beautiful day.  But the depression kept him from drinking it in.  One of the things that helped him the most, was this friend who came to sit with him in his despair, and who just rubbed his feet.  He could still feel his feet, and the gift of that foot rub.  And it fills me with emotion just writing about that.  That friend didn't have an agenda, except to be with his friend, and if offering some service could help his friend reconnect with the world, then that was what he would do. 

Organized religion often alienates people when it tries to put them on a leash, leading them in a direction they don't want to go, and in fact, are often not meant to go.  Church "authority" is called into question a great deal these days.  People have left "the church" to find their own spirituality.  I think I've wandered back into the church to remember mine.  I appreciate some of the structures and traditions of the denomination in which I've decided to root myself.  Sometimes we need the structures in order to feel safe and to keep moving forward.  But there is always a limit and personal boundaries. 

Being a feminist has given me a different take on what church authority means.  And losing oneself to service...well, there is blessing in both giving and the ability to receive.  Being always in the role of "giver" keeps us from recognizing our own limitations as human beings and our need for others in our life.  It can actually be a very controlling thing to be always in the role of giver.  It can also wear you out completely and utterly, sucking all of your life energy, and then throwing you away when you're used up.  Living a life that is balanced is essential.  Knowing how to give and to have a servant's heart is essential.  But knowing how to stop and allow ourselves to receive from others is every bit as important a spiritual practice, which restores us to ourselves.  An imbalance...never giving or never receiving, leaves us stunted in some important ways as human beings.

Last week the doctor put me on a low dose of prednisone.  He told me that if the symptoms I was experiencing disappeared, then I have lupus.  I started on Saturday.  I forgot about it.  But I got up Sunday with a surge of energy and happiness.  I smiled and sang all day long.  I got projects done, started writing a novel and wrote three chapters and then at the end of the day realized I was utterly pain free.  This was something I had not experienced in many, many years.  Whoosh...the reality hit home.  This was Lupus in my body.  So I was finally given a diagnosis of what I've known I've had for many years.  As a result of the Lupus, I also have Fibromyalgia.  It has brought up many emotions for me after many years of knowing something was wrong, without having been given a name for this thing which was so deeply effecting my quality of life.  I am feeling down at the moment.  Not because of the disease so much, though that is a difficult reality.  It has to do with being dismissed...not being heard, not being truly seen for so many years in visiting the doctor's office.  The symptoms of lupus have been there since my 30s.  The last few months the disease has been flaring up, causing much fatigue and discomfort.  And much of the time I soldier on, with a fairly good sense of humor intact.  But pain has a way of exacting its toll, and I don't smile all the time.  I don't feel much like engaging in everyday kinds of conversation.  I feel cranky and frustrated to the nth degree at times.  And I wish that I could go back to feeling the way I used to feel...the way I felt earlier in the week.  Energetic and happy and filled with clearness of thought.

Okay, so my suffering is a drop in the ocean of human suffering.  And I will search out ways that I can still serve others, even with my limitations.  There are always ways we can bring joy to someone else, or some comfort, or some peace.  But this is not an easy disease.  Pacing oneself is the only way to continue on the journey, and journey it is. 

Maybe I'm sharing all this because I want to encourage you, whoever you are, that we all have limitations.  Some of us more than others.  Let yourself receive the love you need in the ways you need it.  And if you are able to be present to someone else's pain, consider it a privilege.  We don't realize the great privilege it is to serve others, until that privilege is taken from us. 

Let's set aside our agendas for others.  We don't know what it is to live in their bodies or in their lives.  But when we are present for each other, it can be the most extravagant gift ever given.  Anyone for a foot rub?