Tag Archives: hope

Oct28

trinity

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Sometimes the time just seems magic.

It has been a time of reconnection for me, of quiet conversation over food with this friend and that one, some spent alone in the quiet, clearing away the clutter in my environment and in my head.

I recognized some years ago that my recovery requires three things: prayer, writing and sharing thoughts with another person. This trinity makes itself evident most when I am seeking or providing help in our most practical and pervasive challenge: that of understanding the people around us.

My daughter is on a beautiful beach somewhere in the southern U.S., navigating a romance. One friend is walking her Path with family passed and present. Another friend is sifting through the lingering messages of addiction recovery.

Mulling over the conversations of three days in a row, what stands out is that life is a lovely wilderness with exciting obstacle courses that test our acquired skills and teach us new ones.

For those new to the Path, it is like Marine boot camp. The instructor is harsh and the tasks required of us are strenuous and unfamiliar. What I have learned is that the instructor has one goal in mind: teach us how to survive. The insults and bullying are not personal; they are edifying. The pain sustained will pass if we do not resent it.

For those of us who are challenging the negative inner voice, it is like boarding school. The voices strike at our soft underbelly, the tenderest parts of us. Here we learn to thicken our skin, to run the gantlet that sometimes brutally attempts to distract us from our goal, that of freedom.

For those who are trying to live outside ourselves and our comfort zones, it is marshaling our allies and agreeing to a battle plan: we must march in the same direction. We cannot always be on the front line, and it is important to have comrades who will allow us to fall back and even retreat when we are weary.

This requires trust, a gift from God, I am certain, because mine is in short supply at times. Yet it refills itself from some divine Source that I cannot comprehend.

The lesson I have learned is that I must not punish myself for my mistakes.

In “The Four Agreements,” Don Miguel Ruiz says, “…it is important for you to master your own dream.”

This is the basis for my role as sponsor, medium, channel, friend and partner. Easy to say, hard to do. As always, I depend on grace as my ultimate rescue when I am stuck. But I find I can access grace more abundantly if I pray, write and share.

Sep18

the freedom to be outlandish

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outlandishI am up early; the house is quiet. My editors don’t need me yet so I can sip my coffee without a file waiting in my queue. It’s a nice feeling, unpacking a brand new day at my leisure.

I cruised by Julia Cameron’s blog for a bit. She’s bookmarked in my ARTS folder. It’s the place where I park important sites related to creativity. There’s lots in there about knitting but also about spirituality.

My rationale goes something like this: if God is the Great Creator and we are made in His image, then we must be creative as well. Julia says that in all her years of teaching she has never met a totally not-creative person.

Personally, my creativity is not limited to what I do with my hands. When I was an art director I learned how to think creatively, to find interesting solutions to common problems, to turn a thing on its head, to view life through a prism. Even at the time, I knew I was living in a gift, being paid to have the freedom to be outlandish.

We’ve had a break in the weather. The sun sets sooner and comes up later. I quit knitting a tank top and started knitting a shrug. The neighborhood yard sale is this weekend: it’s a good time to take inventory and divest myself of stuff.

I’m still married to the notion that I have to hang onto things because I might have a need for them someday. There’s also the pile of objects I keep because I just like the way they look. But occasionally I play a mental game in which I am packing to move into a new space. It sort of helps me determine just how much crap I really need to take with me.

This is true of my inner residence as well. Stubborn myths and contracts remain attached to my heart even though I have chipped away at them over the years. But others have become mushy and friable and I am relieved to realize that I am no longer bound by the peculiar catechism of my childhood.

Being outlandish can be lonely. But I find it attracts people of like-minded pursuits, those who find joy in service, those who are tired of their rut, those who are pioneers. These are the ones I depend on to lend me an arm when I am limping.

So down the path I go, probably the one less traveled. Surely treasure awaits.

May7

cashing my reality check

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Some days it hardly seems worthwhile, recording my thoughts.  But I feel bereft of good sense lately; my ego voice is loud and strong and my spirit whimpers under the lash.

So I slept with the Devil.  And he is all that was foretold:  seductive, winning, glorious, COMFORTABLE.  And with little hesitation, he moved on.

But somehow I feel different.  I feel that a loop was closed, a knot was tied.  And now I set about the long, long, long sojourn into my deepest self, to manufacture means of hushing the screams of outrage against the unfairness of what was once a beautiful dance.

I have substituted physical pain for psychic pain, a computer for a life.  I am pathetic.  But I am acquiring discipline in the only way I know, one day at a time.  I’ve not issued a booty call in over a week.  I am trying to ignore the taunting judgment, “He’s just not that into you.”

Perhaps the next step is to gorge on reality.  But reality is boring.  It stares me down at the end of a straight line, a box with rigid sides.  I march toward reality along the gangplank of dying dreams, to step off into an oblivion of wasted time.

Fantasy provides me a chaotic space in which to nurture my obsessions, to strive again and again toward the past, a reckless moment of abandon, a tarantella of lost reason.

Somewhere between the two extremes must lie grace.  It is always there, the quiet sweet spot, the underlayer of promise that waits and knows no limit.  I depend on grace, for I am too confused to find my horizon.

I will say this:  I do live my life.  I don’t hold back.  I know that somewhere a sunny beach with warm sand is waiting for my body.  Mother Ocean pipes her sweet lullabye and the stars will gather to listen.

So I will try to use my time as best I can, do my job, pay my bills, nurture my soul and allow God to show me The Path.

Apr16

Fight Back

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Write the feelings down on a piece of paper, fold it into an airplane and make it fly. Play music and dance. Trace the outline of your hand on the wall and color it in. Tell someone you love them. Sing. Pray. Be visible. Be alive.

Apr15

Scott Bennie’s Thoughts on Depression and Anxiety

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… depression is a disconnection of one’s emotions from the real world. It isn’t just melancholy or feeling down, it’s your emotional telephone dangling off the cradle while your hands are too weak and useless to put it back where it should be.

Attempting either to give pep talks or use “tough love” to people who suffer from depression rarely if ever works. If it was that easy to get people out of it, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.

Anxiety is taking the panic button in one’s head, that impulse that tells you that you’re about to die, and holding it down. You have no idea why it’s being pressed, you feel incredibly weak and stupid and foolish that it’s being pressed, to the point where you feel useless and worthless — and it still won’t go away.

A prolonged anxiety attack is the closest thing to a living hell that I know. They’re a scream that doesn’t stop which drowns out all sounds except the panic and the accompanying feelings of worthlessness, and it’s nearly impossible to get any message through that noise until the trigger stops being pressed.

~ Scott Bennie

Mar19

on the nature of tuesday

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What I believe today is that the answers to my most puzzling questions are found through interaction with others.

I have a new teacher. The reason I know this is that I talk to him a lot, in my head and in real life. And i think about stuff he has said and whether or not i believe it.

So today there are lots of people crossing in and out of my headspace, and there’s a lot of staccato on the wires. If you sit very still you can hear them whispering.

It occurred to me today that I was thinking about my interactions in terms of survival. It appears that most of the people I meet are behaving either as if they are predator or prey, or both. And while it may not look like it, I’m trying to be an observer.

I’ve been watching “Fringe,” and if you’ve watched it, you know all about the Observers. There’s one of them, September, who feels compassion, and doesn’t know what it is, because those around him see it as a handicap. And it truly is; he’s ostracized because of it.

So I think my new teacher and I are looking at our predatory nature, both together and separately. And he says things like, “I don’t want to hurt you,” and that both makes me laugh and pisses me off, because I think, what an arrogant statement.

But in his defense, that’s a line that seems popular these days. And is it because we are all such predators/victims? Is there space for Observers here? And must the consequences of that choice be loneliness and incomprehension?

I think not. I think there are other non-Observers who wish to evolve, who are just winging it on a daily (or hourly) basis, and who have lost so much that they have nothing left to lose by just putting it out there.

It takes tremendous courage, I think. The risks seem huge and the reward iffy at best. But maybe it’s just about the ride. As my teacher said, “You are welcome on my rocket ship. Just understand that we may crash.”

And I said, “It’s like Apollo 13. You wonder if you’ll survive reentry. But look at that moon in the window.”

Feb19

reassembled

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I feel like I am finally getting back to the little spot of now, the quiet sweet spot that constantly changes but never moves. When panic erupts it shatters me into fragments that land all across the spectrum of time, and through love and grace, I am reassembled, a little weary, but hopeful.

Jun18

Affirmation June 18, 2012

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I am coming to know myself as a living example of God’s mercy.

Jun3

Precursors

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I just walked into the house after a morning drive. More on that later.

I’m having sort of a freefall of the senses; something in it very reminiscent of the one and only time I jumped out of an airplane.  Gravity and direction seem sort of vague, and I feel something that whispers both of euphoria and of panic.

I’m current on my meds and my blood pressure is probably just fine.  I am short of breath and my heart rate is rapid.  I noticed on the drive home how wretched my distance vision has become — it was kind of alarming to notice that I couldn’t read the street signs until I got right up on them.

I came across a small journal recently and found several pages outlining the symptoms of a bad fibro relapse.  It was interesting to read it while I’m essentially in a remissive phase.  There were days when I would get up and run an errand, go back to bed; get up, complete a short assignment, go back to bed.  I would sleep up to 14 hours a day and still feel tired.

People suggested I was sleeping too much.  Hell, I knew that.  I also know my body.  I know the difference between the malaise that comes from sitting around too much, which exercise will remedy.  I also know the bone-crushing exhaustion of fibromyalgia when it surfaces as chronic fatigue.

These weather precursors that I experience occur 1 to 2 hours before a front moves in.  The more dramatic the symptoms, the quicker and more violent the weather becomes.  When I was very ill I would pass out, as if from an attack of narcolepsy.

Now the precursors are less possessive, and are similar to the sensation I have when I’m approaching a channeling state.  It’s hard to describe, but it’s sort of a feeling of vertigo, a gentle pleasant humming in my head.  My sense is that I can almost touch the spirit guide that is present.

Sometimes I can channel the guide through writing or typing, but the session is always best when I’m channeling on behalf of someone else.  When they are receptive, they contribute their energy and their bandwidth, so to speak, to the communication.  And sometimes remarkable things happen.

My mission today was to pick blueberries.  The weather has been lenient of late and I practically missed the strawberry season, and blueberries just started.  So I sped off to Nesbit, only to find that there’s no picking on Sunday and Monday.  But I had a nice chat with George, stopped at the Dairy Bar for a vanilla shake and made my way home slowly up Highway 51.

The sights and sounds of the country nearly almost always sprout hope in my heart.  I see little rundown shacks and I think, I could live there.  The Capricorn in me points out that I couldn’t live there without Internet access and a lawnmower, but surely that’s manageable.

But there was something about seeing the clusters of blueberries on the bushes, thick as grapes, still green, that feels like money in my pocket.  They’re just waiting for me, just like the angels.  I just need to reach out a little.