Incomparable Sweetness

Can't ya just smell 'em?

When I put my nose in them, my whole body turns into one, huge, Kool-Aid giggle.

Where the Rainbow Touches the Ground

My blogging career (ha!) began when I was knee-deep in social activism.  I had a point, a purpose, a focus.  Since then, I've been morphing and bending and twisting into what, I don't know.  With Michael's diagnosis, the need to spend a lot of time with Mom, and other assorted chocolates, I am less active in the world out there.  Still, I stand in silence for peace every Saturday, as I have for many years, and I participate in an interreligious group.  I feel that the interreligious group contributes to world peace as much or more as any vigil or march or letter to my congressperson could.  Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about when I say that.  How can anyone know?

One of the members of our interreligious group asked me to write something about the group.  I had no clue about what he wanted from it, but as I stared at the blank canvas of the page, this is what came out of me:

A Jew, a Muslim, and a Catholic walk into a bar…

No, actually, they walk into a room where they meet with a Sufi woman, along with a man whose spiritual path is a smorgasbord of varied, but, on many levels, interrelated beliefs. 

Every two or three months, I join a handful of men and women from different spiritual traditions in coming together to deepen our own spiritual paths while learning about the paths of others.  None of us are clergy or any other type of leader in our faith community, and our meetings are not focused on the academics of the teachings.  Instead, we speak to how our spiritual paths inform our personal experiences.  Over the last two years, we have investigated numerous topics ranging from holidays to prayer to death. 

Why would we take our commitments to this group so seriously?  I can only speak for myself when I say that these gatherings have made me a better human being.  The more I participate in our group meetings, the more I learn about myself and the more I can understand just a little of what others see as they practice in their spiritual traditions.  I find the many ways that we are alike and the few ways in which we see the world differently.  I do my best to set aside judgment while noticing that these friends are doing the same for me.

Each time this interreligious group meets, we use a different topic as a starting off point.  The topic keeps us focused, and it ensures that we cover a variety of aspects of our lives.  At our last meeting, our topic was “pain and suffering”.  At the time, I had been experiencing a lot of sadness and confusion over the recent cancer diagnosis of my husband as well as the even more recent death of my dad.  The opportunity to delve deep into the teachings of my tradition regarding pain and suffering, and then to share those and hear the view of others, was a salve on my perceived wounds.   

We humans tend to gravitate to “our people” – either family members or people who align with our views of the world.  That is normal and comfortable.  But our growth comes from either the stretching that life asks of us or our willingness to choose to go beyond the comfortable.  I believe that by making the effort to connect deeply with people who we consider to be “other”, we become more of ourselves and we help to create peace in this world for our children and their children.

Through finding the Divine behind our facades of differences, the above joke may evolve until it becomes, “A person of the Jewish faith, a person of the Muslim faith, and a person of the Catholic faith walk into a room where they find people of every faith that exist on Earth.  There, a woman from the Buddhist tradition asks the host to “make me one with everything”, and every mind in the room suddenly recognizes that, no matter what path we travel, we all come from the same creator.

May it be so.

The Secret of Life

I love this:

You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when grown-ups came in and explained everything important to the other kids. They said, "Look, you're human, you're going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, and have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of the fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life." And then they told the children who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don't know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.

But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instruction. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren't there the day the instructions were passed out.

 
- Anne Lamott writing to her new grandson in her book, Some Assembly Required

I stole it from here.

And then I went to my library's website and ordered the book.  

A Great Gift

On my Healing into Life blog, I recently posted a list of things to remember as I go through this incredible journey with Michael and the diagnosis of Mantle Cell Lymphoma that he has been given.

A few days before I wrote that post, I had visited with a friend – a good friend, one who I look up to for many reasons – and that friend had said things about cancer and Michael’s choice of treatment.  I took it all in and by the next day, it was throwing me into a tailspin. 

It was not pretty. 

I felt scared and confused and totally depressed.  I don’t know how much the decision to decrease my hormones at that time had to do with my extreme black mood.  I wasn’t suicidal, but I did warn Michael that I was going to work my way through all of this, and if I did get to be suicidal, I wanted him to do something to stop me.

After two days, a good nap, and the release of negative ions that a gentle rain offers (we don’t get those moments often here in Colorado), I came out on the other side.  I was still not happy about what the person had said, but I could once again see the sun shining.

Still, I set up an appointment for today with a therapist I had worked with in the past.  I realized that the next time I spoke with my friend, I didn’t want to lay my stuff on him as he had done with me. 

But last night, everything changed.  I suddenly saw that my friend had only been holding a mirror for me so that I could see my fears regarding Michael’s diagnosis.  If I hadn’t been afraid already, my friend’s fears would have only been…. well HIS fears.  I would have felt compassion that he was so scared.

He gave me a wonderful gift!  The gift of having my worries all spread out in the open, on the table like a breakfast buffet. I could either keep living with them or clean up that table. 

I don’t want to live in fear.  This moment is absolutely wonderful, precious.  I have no idea what the future holds, and I don’t need to make up stories that probably won’t even come true.  I choose to show up fresh, clear, and loving RIGHT NOW.  THIS is what I have.

I was an easy study for my therapist today.  I had already done most of the work.  We took a few minutes to see if anything on the buffet was even real food - it wasn't.  It was all made up stuff about what might happen in the future.  So we threw it away. 

We never know how our friends will help us out, do we?