What Inspires

“Love inspires, illumines, designates, and leads the way.” 

This is a quote from Mary Baker Eddy from Science and Health.  There is undeniable power in those words. Some phrases stick with you, though, even beyond the inherent meaning.

Today, as I move back into my everyday, post-vacation routine, I’m feeling inspired and refreshed. So the answer is easy. Love inspires.

Even when the answer is harder to find or hold on to, why, Love inspires.

When fear is a rumble of thunder in the distance, when sorrow grasps with sticky fingers, when despair makes each step leaden, Love still inspires.

“Love inspires, illumines, designates, and leads the way.”

Life is great.

Lunch Time Moments

I’m lucky enough to live only a mile or so from work, so I often come home for lunch.  My arrival home today was an opportunity to just marvel at some the changes these last two years have brought.

I used to come home filled with anxiety — what would I find?  Dennis’ depression was so unrelenting the last few years of his life that I often encountered a dark house, with hungry cats, dishes in the sink and silence fraught with misery.

I would be momentarily afraid he’d done it — killed himself — and would gird myself to check his room.

Dennis, Christmas 2007

By 2007, it had grown seriously scary.

One time, I came home at lunch to find food in the bathroom sink, his tobacco rolling equipment in the refrigerator, the front door open, and the electric stove on — with a paper plate inches from the coil. 

When I found him in his room he was so out of it he didn’t know what day or year it was, and had no memory of any of his actions of the previous couple of hours.

In November of 2007, Dennis moved into a group home because it had become so clear that it wasn’t safe for him at home any longer. 

He died in his sleep September 20, 2008. 

For many years, he’d been the light of my life, and I of his.

The darkness of bipolar disorder, anxiety and various other mental and physical issues robbed us both of that long before he died.  His death finally freed us both from that despair.

patio pots, July 2009

So, today, I came home  for lunch and picked flowers from the garden. Leftovers are reheating in the microwave, and I’m posting these reflections.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever stop missing the Dennis I loved all those years. My best  friend, husband, and partner.

But I do know he’d be really glad I’m out there picking flowers.

Corn Roasted in the Fire Pit

Yesterday I listed some of the great buys at the Farmer’s Market — but I forgot to mention fresh corn. Delicious, melt-in-your-mouth, squeaky-fresh white sweet corn. Roasted in the husk on the coals from a fire in the cast iron fire pit in the yard. Eaten at dusk, surrounded by incense, citronella candles, fireflies, cats, and the rumble of fireworks in the distance.

Little in life could have been better.

Prior to the feast, Josh trimmed some low branches around the place while I planted my new lavender, spread some compost and potted the last of the annuals in the patio containers. The air was just right, with a touch of moisture that has turned to rain this morning; the lingering heat from the afternoon keeping us moving slow and easy.

The breeze was just a touch, like a caressing hand on my face and neck, cooling and mellowing me.  I rested frequently, facing the back jungle of tree, scrub and vine. I watched a Downy Woodpecker as she skittered up and down a long trunk, stopping to tap here and there.

Cardinals, Jays, Mockingbirds, and Goldfinches were the main feeders as evening approached. They would scatter to the nearby trees and bushes when one of the cats strolled by, but they are largely blase at this time of year (ditto the cats). The Blue Jay calls the traditional warning, “Cat! Cat! Cat” and the cat twitches an annoyed ear and just walks slower, stretching insolently before leaping up on the next napping place.

It’s very quiet this morning. Just a soft rain, muted bird calls, and everyone else asleep. This is one of the loveliest holiday weekends I can remember. A perfect admixture of joy and quiet, serenity, laughter, good food, companionship, music, and only a faint nostalgic sorrow for what is gone.

Blessings to all this rainy Sunday.

And So It Is.

Not Afraid of the Woo-Woo Factor

Well, maybe a little afraid. I’m unusually intuitive and often know things without any concrete way of knowing those things. Does that make me a practitioner of “woo-woo”? A beloved friend, himself a Science of Mind Minister coined the phrase in our circles, and I’ve heard it so often since that it must resonate for many.

You know — the woo-woo is the edge just past your own particular comfort zone.  I read tarot cards, maybe a 3 or 4 on the woo-woo scale. Ouija boards — clearly a 5 or 6. Shamanic energy healing?  Way down there — hardly woo-woo at all to me.  Ditto spiritual mind treatment. But channeling non-corporeal alien lifeforms — for me that’s a clear 9 or 10. Making toothpicks dance above the tablecloth at a local coffee shop after drinking only coffee — definitely an 11+ (totally creepy to see)!

tools of the woo-woo trade

My point, if any, is that woo-woo really is in the eyes of the beholder, or perceiver or channeler. My comfort with my intuitive skills interpreting Tarot face cards and weaving a word picture from those intuitions seems natural to me, while it might give you chills as I hit the nail on the head about parts of your life.

When I get up from the table at my energy healer’s, and I feel more whole and integrated, with some bothersome physical symptom lessened —  and I’m glowing with vitality — that’s not woo-woo, that’s common sense to go back.

So I’m not afraid of woo-woo. I am afraid of being accused of practicing woo-woo. No, that’s not it either. I’m afraid of being accused of not practicing woo-woo well enough.  So go ahead and call me crazy, just be sure to mention that I’m really, really good at it.

Sacred Sentiments

Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness.

This incredibly lovely sentiment is from the blog called bird on the moon, by a local Asheville blogger, Jay Joslin.  I ran across his blog at BlogAsheville — a great site that combines all that is wonderful, bizarre, artistic, political, whimsical (and did I mention bizarre) about Asheville. If I could claim a motto as my own, I think these lines would be it.

Just perfection, and worth repeating:

Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness.

Twitter Poem 1

A post by Earth-House-Hold led me to try my hand at a new artform: twitter poetry.  Earth-House-Hold quotes actor Hugh Laurie on tha banality of most tweets. While I haven’t twittered, the concept of a haiku-like rigid limit (140 characters) fascinated me.

Here’s my first effort, dedicated to birders everywhere:

Where is God but in a bird?

The flexing bright muscle, voracious feeding, rapturous flight:

sweet song, flashing feathers, earth and flesh and sky, vitality abounds!

Birds & Hope

“If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.”

This Chinese proverb symbolizes both the reliable, yet fleeting, nature of joy and the eternal upwelling of hope to me. I haven’t blogged on my love of birds before, but it struck me tonight how much a touchstone they represent to me. I can depend on their song, a flash of scarlet wing, a cocky tilt of a chickadee’s head, the liquid trill of a wren. These moments transport me out of everyday consciousness — out of misery, depression, sorrow, exhaustion, fear, doubt, loneliness — into the power of the present (or the Power of the Presence, if you will).

Something in the juxtaposition of fragility and vitality that a bird is, takes me to center and balances me there. What an amazing gift they are to the world. I always wonder just what it is that makes them move me so — from the hummer feisty vitality to the majesty and power of the hawk, they have an instantaneous transforming effect.

Or maybe it’s just that you have to be looking upward to see them…

Finding My Focus

The last few years have been challenging in so many ways. The decline of Dennis’ mental health and his death last fall; my own health issues which were exacerbated by the stress of caring for Dennis. Financial crash-and-burns, self-induced and otherwise. There’s been a deeply embedded sense of being overwhelmed, of just hanging on by my fingernails.

I claimed the old Zen story as my own — the man is being chased by a hungry tiger, and falls off the edge of a cliff, catching himself on a branch. He is dangling hundreds of feet above a raging river, the tiger swiping at him from above. The branch he clings to is fragile and will  break any moment. The man sees a berry growing just within reach. He plucks it, eats, and says “how delicious!”

I lived in the moment the best I could, but the past and the future gripped me, holding me immobilized. All I had was the berry, moment to moment. How delicious, indeed. Yet, how exhausting and frightening too. The man felt all that one would feel —  the terror, the pain, the pounding heart and straining muscles. His choice — to focus on the one piece of beauty and delight in his world — is so admirable; so perfect, and yet, so futile. Any second the tiger will pounce, or the branch will break, and he’ll perish. Will the taste of the berry linger past that doom? I always have chosen to believe that it would indeed remain, a burst of beauty and life carrying one into the next future, the next path. Kind of a divine pat on the back for not giving up the quest for joy.

Now, I am in a place of getting to choose. I’m choosing joy, and freedom from old patterns and fears. I’m choosing a third future, without the tiger or the river. Living from crisis to crisis is just too tiring, too draining, and no longer serves me.

As I transition to choosing from love, choosing for joy and for the deep pleasures of order and peace, I have a great deal to let go of. I wrote this short mantra, or prayer, to help me keep this new focus. To help me stay out of the tiger’s path of the past, and away from the terror of the coming torrent:

I honor the past – and release it
I honor the future – and embrace it
I honor the now – and experience it

And So It Is.

Yearning or Having?

I was sick for several days last week and recovering has left me delighted with life. Colors are crisper and brighter, bird songs are sweeter, flavors more intense. I know the “real world” hasn’t changed since last weekend, only my perception, but exquisite perception!

The opportunity to change our view and absorb more joy from life around us is always present. What is it that prevents us from making that shift? Dennis would have immediately gone to his Buddhist thinking and said it was attachment, and he wouldn’t have been wrong. I don’t think it’s only that, however. Certainly we cling to the familiar, and to the desirable; but we also yearn for the new and potentially even more desirable. Lately, I’ve begun seeing the state of yearning as the thing to which we seem addicted. Once a goal, a dream, a thing, is obtained, it loses its luster, and becomes the known — and more important — the owned. We then turn our eyes to the next thing, in an endless quest for more. It’s not, for most of us, the acquisition, but getting that is juicy and addictive.

So what do we do? Get sick periodically to refresh our delight in the now and the accessible? Maybe. Maybe we try to recognize how fleeting the moments of contented bliss are, and turn our striving towards that state of being, of nonstriving. Turn our yearning to happiness and joy. They are always there, just ahead, just out of reach, just a stretch of a hand away.

Look! I’ve got it…. ahhhh.