Tag Archives: philosophy

Fire and Rain and Answered Prayers

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The morning after our house burned down three years ago, we sat in stunned silence, taking in the wreckage and work that lay ahead. In a weak attempt to cheer everyone up, I joked, “I’d better watch out what I pray for, because my prayers are powerful, and I’m afraid I’ve been praying for more excitement, and more time with my family….”

 

As our losses faded with time and our lives returned to our various versions of normal, my feeble “night-before-the-fire-prayer” attempt at humor has become family lore, growing to include (retroactively) pleas for time off work, for new stuff, stronger muscles, weight loss, unique topics of conversation, time in nature, novel experiences, interesting stories to tell my future grandchildren, new learning, and more patience…. And yes, I received all that.

 

The chaos and tragedy on the Gulf Coast can be in no way compared with our relatively tiny little personal loss (no one was hurt, we were insured and financially secure, our neighborhood, jobs and support systems were intact.) Hurricane Katrina’s suffering victims have endured the irremediable and irreparable tragic losses of loved ones—family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers. Many have been injured, and most have lost all they ever worked for, and must begin rebuilding again from nothing. Many lost their jobs and their livelihoods, all their social support, the towns they grew up in, everything they might once have fallen back on. Everything, in fact, except God.

 

What prayers, the night before such a devastating storm, could possibly have been answered by Hurricane Katrina?

 

I’ll give it a try.

 

Dear God,

 

Help me to appreciate my family, friends, and neighbors, my faith, my character, my education, my memories, and my two strong hands. Help me appreciate all that I have—my home, my possessions, my comforts, my pleasures.

 

Help me to see with new eyes the good in people, and to remember that the highest value is the value of human life everywhere. Help me to focus on helping, not hurting, and to learn to give as freely as I have received. Help me see clearly that mankind is one family, that we are all neighbors, that we are all, in fact, one, completely dependent upon one another.

 

Help me to drop my childish barriers toward differences in education, social classes, races, colors, religions, and nationalities, and to see only the face of God in everyone, especially those in need. Help me to support a proud, reliable, world-class American disaster-relief system available anywhere in the world, at a moment’s notice. Help my country avoid adding to the sum of human misery by turning forever away from war and every other form of political violence. Help me to work to build a wiser global energy future, and international and domestic harmony.

 

Help me become part of creating an exemplary, environmentally-inspired American Gulf Coast, and a safe, modern, compassionate New Orleans retaining all her unique greatness, spirit and traditions.

 

Help me remember that it’s always darkest before the dawn, to look for silver linings in dark clouds, and to accept that the Lord works in mysterious ways.

 

Help me to remember that you are my strength, my hope, my ever-present help in times of trouble. You maketh me to lie down in green pastures, you leadeth me beside the still waters, you restoreth my soul. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me.

 

Amen

My First Big Mistake – #6 Insights Series

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I once decided that living well was mostly about being tougher than a very tough world. Life during my younger adulthood was harder than it is now, and a lot scarier, though I was very proud of the fact that I endured stoically, so to speak. I’ve always searched for answers, and having found some, I was know-it-all stuffy and rigid about them. You’d think an American citizen of good family and good health, comparatively well-off and with many advantages, might be more positive. But I thought, no, I’m just being honest and realistic, and (as we used to say in Texas) maybe just a little hard-assed.

 

Now I think that living well is about accepting and loving all that is. And though I still have my problems, resisting the way things are isn’t a biggie anymore.

 

I concluded, sometime during my college years, that I was fundamentally alone in the world. Despite “friends” and “family,” I made up my mind philosophically and spiritually speaking that I was basically on my own, up against a demanding and challenging and chaotic world, with no plausible higher power who could possibly have any interest in me.

 

I spent a lot of hours defending myself against what I now see were a lot of self-created negative results. I thought if I wasn’t close-to-perfect, then I wasn’t lovable or worthwhile at all. My primary comfort was in sniffing that, well, certainly no one else was, either.

 

As we used to say in Texas, I’ve learned different….

 

I’ve replaced my lonely old ideas about “self” with a new, more descriptive, more accurate and less narrowly-constrained identity. I’ll admit that the new “me” isn’t self-evident or obvious at first, and it’s definitely not culturally intuitive.

 

My new “self” isn’t a separate thing at all, not in any way an independent being, and certainly not a body, all wrapped up in its own short ugly brutish life and messy death….

 

Instead, I’m a beloved and eternal creature who is “one with” her loving creator, a unique and precious part of a greater higher “self” who comprises all his(?) lovable and very natural creations.

 

I’m pretty embarrassed about this new spiritual perspective, this new identity of mine, since I used to take great pride in being the most rational, argumentative, two-feet-on-the-ground, scientific type-o-gal. I can hardly talk about it, in fact, without ducking my head and shuffling my feet and mumbling under my breath, because I used to make fun of people like me. I thought they were weak and silly and irrational and dreamers-in-denial and well, just not honest with themselves or with God, who if he did exist, certainly wouldn’t dream up a counter-intuitive reality.

 

I still reject anything in spirituality which isn’t consistent with science, or which is in conflict with anything in nature, although I take an additional leap of faith to get where I am now. And, without a doubt, my new conclusions go against most familiar western cultural teachings about reality.

 

My big important intellectual (or non-intellectual?) leap was taking a single first small step into prayer/meditation, through which I gradually moved away from my cold, impersonal universe toward my new one in which I’m eternally safe and loved. My new universe is ultimately benevolent and peaceful, created by a God of love who is far more interested in my happiness than I am.

 

And all that bad stuff in life? All the things I and others have done and haven’t done? The chaos and cruelty in the world? In the eternal scheme of things, they’re now a more forgettable blip. They somehow matter less because, well, they’re not what's real and lasting, they disappear. In an eternal sense, they never even happened, sort of like all the rest of our bad dreams. When we all finally wake up, we’ll see that all we ever have is an eternal “right now,” and that all our fears about scary pasts and futures don’t really exist. Love is always the only thing left, the basic stuff of eternal reality.

 

So all that good stuff in our lives? All the peace and fun and kindness we gave and received, along with every other kind of love? All that good stuff goes right on forever, and keeps on multiplying….

 

For a weary lifetime, I sadly resisted any such peaceful possibilities, trading my desire to be happy in for a proud insistence on being “right.” My mind was made up early, and I was sticking to it. I looked only for evidence of what I already thought. In all that I saw and read and heard, I carefully picked out the parts that reinforced that life was fundamentally about the random meaninglessness of solitary bodies colliding and competing and dying.

 

Now, having exchanged realities, I’m blinking in the light of childlike, newly-opened eyes. All I see now (with occasional lapses and gaps) is love and all its permutations. Because love is all that I’m looking for now, all I want to see. I feel as if I’ve lifted up an old dark veil of meaninglessness that I once carelessly draped over everything and forgot about, and now for the first time I’m peeking at all the beauty beneath it.

 

So I made a mistake. So I spent a lot of time looking into dark cobwebby corners. So I was wrong. Hey, what the hell, I’ve got eternity now, and a patient, loving higher power who likes to help me get it right….

 

So I’m getting over it. I’m still a know-it-all, and I still want to be right. But I hope I’m a humbler one with a better sense of humor, less interested in being right and rationalizing and analyzing than in having fun and being happy and sharing my joy. All I’ve lost, in any practical sense, is my misery. At the very least, I've finally realized that sad and mad and tough can’t be any kind of smart conclusion. I’ll take happy over smart any day. I’m ready and willing to see all things differently, newly. I’ve moved on, and I like where I live now.

 

No harm done, and lots of good, since I changed my mind. If I feel momentarily lonely, I ask for help in remembering that I’m forever joined in an endless circle of giving and receiving with God and with every part of his beloved and lovable creation. And help always comes….

Finding Closeness in Relationships – #5 Insights Series

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My siblings, parents, extended family and friends sometimes used to tell me I didn't give them enough of myself. One dear relative commented resignedly that our relationship survived only because she had ratcheted her expectations way down.

 

And sometimes it seemed that I gave too much time, or at least too much worry, to my children and my husband, while still feeling I should do more.

 

I wanted love, acceptance and support from all of them, and I wanted to offer it back to them too.

 

What I didn’t want was to feel guilty so much of the time, to feel like I could never do enough. And I especially didn’t want to feel that I needed to keep all my relationships “even,” or to fulfill any given individual's expectations, in order to fend off hurt and loss.

 

I suffered most when I got into the mindset of living a temporal life and having temporal relationships, because from that perspective, my life seemed way too short, and my list of the things I ought to do so impossibly long. Yet no amount of rushing and cramming provided any relief or solution.

 

My relationships have functioned better since I exchanged my perception of the time I have “left” (limited? temporal? fleeting?) for God’s very relaxing and infinite eternal time—expressed in life as “right now.” I’m learning to stay in the present (eternity’s earthly disguise?) and remember that there’s no rush. Love isn’t going anywhere.

 

I’m also doing better now remembering that I don’t have to come up with all the answers to my issues about relationships, but instead can rely upon God’s surprising solutions and opportunities.

 

One other time-related thing I found most challenging in long-term relationships was always feeling stuck in the past. Too often, my good times with others got mired in past-oriented stuff–guilt and fear–guilt that I hadn’t been loving enough in the past, and so should use the present to make up for past stuff, and fear that if I didn’t give more or differently, I’d hurt or lose everyone.

 

My painful focus on past deficits (both real and imagined) in long-term relationships always pulled me away from happy, present-oriented, guilt-free interactions in the present moment. Whenever I was stuck in fixing the past, distracted by guilt, or remorse, or self-righteous indignation, I forgot about the good I could do and the fun I could offer right now.

 

Attempting to rewrite history—compensating, comparing, complaining—during the time I’m with my nearest and dearest is the very devil himself for me, the very thing that most pulls me away from my best self, my highest goals, my kindest heart.

 

Sometimes I even worry that the time I spend with my higher power or with casual acquaintances competes with my long-term relationships. As if my spiritual growth could diminish my value to my dear ones….

 

But it’s never been the amount of time I spend or don’t spend with them that matters most, but rather the worry, fear, and guilt that I bring to the present out of our past, killing off all the good present moments that could still be. It's those past-seated resentments, and the struggles to justify and rectify our imperfect past relationships, that separates us during the present moment–far more than our mutual histories, which aren't real anyway–they just don't exist anymore.

 

When I am focused on loving, appreciating, and enjoying my dear ones in the present moment to the best of my ability, it’s always enough. All I have to do is let go of the bad stuff arising from our long, past-oriented lists of deficits–of what I owe them and what they owe me. Whenever I focus on the past, my relationships go wrong. Whenever I let go of the past, my relationships go better.

 

So it's not the imperfect past at all, but my focus on it, which is the most insidious and subtle competitor with the good I have to offer my present relationships, whether long-term or short-term, whether we're talking about my relationship with God, or my relationships with all the people in my life.

 

Right now, both my long and short-term relationships are better and more filled with possibilities than they’ve ever been. I feel loved, accepted, valued, appreciated by them, and all these same feelings arise in me toward all of them in return. What could be better than that?

 

Surrendering my life to my higher power, and broadening my circle of loyalty and devotion (the circle comprising all I consider “mine,” “family,” and “near and dear”) to include all of mankind, has had the surprising result that it has increased my closeness to all my lifelong and long-term friends and relations.

 

Since I’ve begun to learn to let go of my own role and history-based demands, expectations, and resentments and to stay in the present, I’m finally beginning to see and learn and hear and respond to all the people who are really before me, here, now.

 

I’ve expanded my definitions of mother, father, sister, brother, husband and wife, children, parents, teachers, students, even neighbor and countryman, to include everyone I meet, everyone there is–and yet my long-term relationships haven’t suffered.

 

As long as my time and affections were limited to a small circle of special relationships, my energy on those few precious relationships was all about expectations and limitations. Now those special relationships are free to be about limitless giving and receiving.

 

In this crazy world, where so much that appears to be so is not so (and vice-versa) a move from the honored position of spouse or mother or sister or daughter, or even neighbor or countryman, to the formerly worthless position of “human being,” would be considered a radical demotion. Wouldn’t you think that such a diminution in honorific status must surely entail the loss of all privileges, expectations, attentions, and duties traditionally conferred upon the select group of people in each life upon whom long-term relationship status is assigned?

 

But when every single person in this world deserves the highest respect, honor, attention, help, kindness, giving, acceptance, and forgiveness, certainly my inner circle is also very much included. Am I likely to suddenly care about them less? Will my dear ones be relegated to sharing only the crumb that’s left of me after dividing myself into eighty gadzillion pieces, among pesky and pushy strangers who will push them from my life?

 

That was, in fact, once my own fear, my own source of guilt–that my devotions and attachments to my higher power and others would compete with my closest relationships, that I'd have to give them up, that love was an either/or thing: either I loved my family and friends, or I loved God and humanity indiscriminately, the one kind of love necessarily excluding the other.

 

But it’s the other way around. As long as you exclude even one person from your circle of love, as long as you leave one person in the dark outer space where all your fears are, your love will be incomplete, inadequate, insufficient. Fear and love can’t coexist. If you accept one, you have to let the other go. Love is all-or-nothing, wholehearted, undivided, if it is love at all.

 

All expressions of love are maximal. And love is a limitless resource, a bottomless well, infinitely renewable. You can’t run out of the love you have to give. There’s always enough. The more you give, the more you have to give. As Romeo’s Juliet said, “love is as boundless as the sea, and as full.”

 

My love of my higher power and my global neighbor make me better able to love and serve the ones closest to me. These days, I’m more present during the moments we’re together, more accepting, and more forgiving. And I spend far less time than before in conflicting illusions about past history or future fears.

 

Now that I find all of mankind lovable and worthy of forgiveness and acceptance, my dearest ones can relax, because although they'll always make mistakes just like me, they will always be enfolded into my all-inclusive circle of love, which includes mistake-makers…. They know they’ll always be lovable to me, no matter what.

 

Focusing on just a few people, I used to set traps for both myself and for those few I called “special.” For when I called someone “special friend,” they were suddenly heavily obligated to me, and we quickly got into the business of weighing out our giving and the receiving. When I called someone “mother,” I ran the risk of narrowing my appreciation for other potential sources of good, resulting in so much less of me for a mother to love, and so much less love for me to give my mother.

 

When I called someone daughter, how heavy the burden of my expectations for her to carry, and how hard for both of us when she loved others as well as she loved me. When I called someone husband, yet refused to take the rest of the world (metaphorically) into my arms to cherish and comfort along with him, I risked someday becoming a clinging, needy, frightened ghost from his past, with nothing but sad past comparisons and fears of the future, when I could have poured all that love and energy out into a thirsty universe, while he was also offering himself up to others as well.

 

These days, I try to greet each person I meet (whether a long-term friend or a stranger) with no thought of the past to drag us down, no burden of history or future expectations, no role-related duty or expectation or responsibility or fear or guilt that might hold us back from the present moment. Into that present moment I try to pour all the love I have, and for that moment, this person is my father, mother, child, sister, friend, teacher, lover, neighbor, countryman.

 

Nothing could be more out-of-control than my previous attempts to control my relationships. The only thing we've lost are the sad chains of history that we used to drape over each other.

 

I’m still sometimes very unreliable and unpredictable and inconsistent (i.e., human) in applying what I’m trying to learn. But I’m doing my best to always be right here and right now, and I’m far less likely these days to run away from my relationships, fight them, resist them, repel them. I no longer have any use for harboring or indulging in anger, attack, defensiveness or guilt.

 

Feeling closer than ever before to both my dear ones and to brief acquaintances these days, I know it’s because I’ve surrendered my life to my higher power, and remembering that I can only know and love his children as one, right now, in the present moment.

Proof of a Loving God? – #3 Insights Series

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How do I know that a higher power exists, and that he or she or it is good, godlike, and even more impossible, that s/he/it cares about me?

 

No one could ever know the answer to this question through rational thought. Smarter people than I have written heavy tomes offering very thorough rationales both for and against the existence of God. I’ve considered both rationales, and I’ve finally concluded that reason is not sufficient either to explain God, or to explain God away.

 

So I rely on my own personal experience. Here it is:

 

When I ask my higher power for help, I receive it.

 

And when I ask him to heal a situation through me—a relationship, a hurt, an anger, an injustice—God does that too.

 

I can see that he exists in the light in my friend’s eyes, the light of gratitude for what has been powerfully accomplished for him that I could never have accomplished on my own.

 

This amazingly creative higher power has achieved things I could never have dreamed up without him, and has healed things I feared were unhealable. I could never have come up with a blueprint for my uniquely suitable and lovable husband, or my children, or my life for that matter, my work, or any of the amazing twists and turns my life has taken since I turned my life over to “him/her/it.”

 

On my own, I pretty much made a big mess of things—my own life and the lives of others close to me. I have a pretty chaotic history. If anyone looked back at my early life as a journey, at the decisions I’ve made on my own, they would see paths strewn with the detritus of a refugee who carried enormous burdens and scattered them, exhausted, randomly and helplessly as I barely trudged along toward—where, I had no clue.

 

What I know is, before I began asking my higher power for help, my life did not work, and now it does. I have faith now, that as long as I stay (figuratively) on my knees, as long as I stay humble before my higher power, as long as I keep asking for guidance and strength and help, my life works.

 

What I know is, whenever I ask to be an instrument of his love and healing, power and achievement—far beyond my small abilities—flow through me, and I am able to help myself and others….

 

And that’s all the faith I need.

Love and Sacrifice – #2 Insights Series

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I’m giving up on sacrifice. I’m finally seeing all sacrifice as manipulative, as an attack on others, as selfish, harmful, and unkind.

 

What do I mean by sacrifice? I mean all the stuff I’m going to feel bad about later, that I’m going to resent, resist, and in fact, probably would end up not doing anyway, or doing poorly, even if I did believe in sacrifice. That’s the kind of sacrifice I’m giving up.

 

I don’t mean I’m giving up on loving others, or giving up on putting myself out for them. But that’s not sacrifice.

 

I want to be loved as much as anyone else does. Everyone wants the safety and comforts of life. Every human being who ever lived wants people to love and care for them. But people don’t love and care for you because you sacrifice yourself to them.

 

Sacrificing just doesn’t work. Doing things that make you mad later doesn’t work. Setting aside what is most important to you to please another person is in the end, plain and simple, downright mean, manipulative, and rude.

 

Sacrificing isn’t really about being loving at all. It’s about making a tit-for-tat trade—you take care of me and I’ll take care of you. I’ll be nice to you and you be nice to me. Exchanges in kind. I’ll do this if you’ll do that.

 

Sacrifice has nothing at all to do with giving without expectation of return. Sacrifice is a cold tradeoff—a gift given with a clear expectation of return.

 

You know how it works: I give you such-and-such, and now you owe me. I do these things and so now you have to do those things. I sacrifice myself and subjugate myself and do without and do what I’d rather not, and damn it, now you’d by-god-better-do the same for me.

 

So with sacrifice, what relationships come down to is tricks, traps, and snares. Webs of trickery and deceit which we catch others in, and which we find ourselves hopelessly tied up in–caught, entangled, stuck.

 

To complicate things further—and make them worse–sacrifice and guilt go hand in hand. Whenever you sacrifice, you can expect to feel guilty too. Because frankly, I don’t really want to do all that unfair stuff that sacrifice seems to require—and neither does anyone else—certainly no one in my life does. But I have to do it (or so I sometimes think), just so you’ll have to do it back for me.

 

But then we’ll both feel resentful and angry about doing whatever, and we’ll both feel guilty when we don’t do it. We’ll both spend our lives angry with each other for not reciprocating adequately, for not living up to one another’s expectations, or for not handing over (kicking and screaming) equivalent sacrifices.

 

What a mess. Is this what relationships are supposed to be all about? Could this be love? The relationships we’ve heard so much about, spent so much time fantasizing and hoping for and wishing for? Could this be sisterhood and brotherhood? Romance? True love? Is this what being a daughter, or a parent, or a friend or colleague is supposed to be all about?

 

Of course not.

 

Instead, I’m letting go of both sacrifice and guilt, and trading them both in for doing my best to be loving, both to myself and to others, in the present moment, trusting that my best is enough.

 

Who would be crazy enough to stick with me, stand by me, help me and love me, while I wallow in self-sacrifice, guilt, anger and resentment? While I refuse to allow myself to be or become what I know I can be, and instead spend my life sacrificing myself in order to somehow insure that I keep what I imagine I already have?

 

Let’s see, on the one hand, a life of sacrifice, guilt, resentment, and anger … .  Hmmmm. Or, on the other hand, a life of loving and caring and striving…. Which one shall I risk?

 

When I’m trusting my higher power to take care of my life, I can relax and focus in the present moment on chipping away at the details of being my best self and going after my best goals. Surely this best self will be more useful and helpful and attractive and appealing and desirable and loving and giving to anyone I might want to share my life with, than the miserable self-sacrificing, guilty, resentful jerk I could work myself up into becoming if I were running my own show….

 

Sacrifice isn’t really love at all. Sacrifice is a fear of love, the love inside myself, the love of my higher power, the love in others. Sacrifice is what I insert whenever I fear that there’s not enough love to go around, and that I won’t get enough or give enough to sustain and support the relationships and goals I care about.

 

Love doesn’t equal sacrifice and guilt. Love equals nothing but love. Love can’t even co-exist with guilt and sacrifice. Whenever I choose one of these others, I know I’m quite deliberately choosing to let love go.

 

Love is releasing others from guilt and sacrifice (which has the nice added affect of doing the same for me.) Love is accepting myself and others exactly as we are, and loving us all exactly as we are, with no expectations.

 

Love is letting sacrifice and guilt go.

Fear Thoughts – #1 Insights Series

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I’m learning to put away my scary, sad, or upsetting thoughts (I call them collectively, “fear thoughts”) the very moment they arise in my mind. What I call “fear thoughts” are all the little (or big) nagging and negative memories or possibilities that seem to pop into my mind out of nowhere. I used to give them on-the-spot great importance and attention, thinking they were urgent warnings that needed immediate action and thought–portents even–that I needed to attend to in order to fend off the looming bad stuff coming at me out of my past, or pushing into my future.

 

Whenever I had fear thoughts (a lot of the time), no matter what I was doing (sleeping, working, playing, loving, whatever) I would immediately start to time-share–i.e., I would ponder and analyze them while continuing to do the interesting present stuff. And of course, I would soon no longer be focusing on whatever process I was doing in the present moment, but instead would be replaying all those fear thoughts (whether big or little doubts, angers, resentments, put-downs, mistakes, guilts, whatever.) I would work them and work them over in my mind, poke them and prod them and examine them and project them every which way I could, rehearsing a self-righteously indignant and defensive range of responses and explanations and attacks.

 

Needless to say, I spent most of my present moments working over fears and negativities based in the past and the future.

 

Now why would I do such a thing?

 

Why would I make myself miserable in a perfectly good present, with oppressive thoughts about the past or future? I’m sure I did it because I thought that intensively analyzing my fear thoughts was my best defense against their future potential offense—in other words, I believed self-analysis to be a necessity. I endlessly massaged my fears and doubts in hopes that mental manipulation would gradually protect me from potential pain.

 

To the contrary, not only did all this unhappy work carry me away from whatever perfectly interesting present process I was involved in; worse, my tiniest little anxieties would get all blown up from all the attention I was giving them, growing eventually into monster fears. Even the smallest, least significant little worry would gradually puff itself up and up, growing tentacles that extended and burrowed deep into the underground of my subconscious, hiding there in darkness, to emerge later, powerfully, in a multitude of new ugly forms, angers, actions, and emotions.

 

Whatever I pay attention to in my life grows bigger within it. These days, I attend more strictly to my most positive impulses, my most loving thoughts, my enthusiasms, my highest aspirations, my goals, my values, and my happiest processes. Let them grow bigger!

 

Whenever fear thoughts arise out of nowhere, I brush them aside, like ephemeral cobwebs, because I want to leave room in my mind for the positive things with which I would rather fill it. With my higher power’s help, I push the unhappy thoughts away and fill my mind with better, higher, happier thoughts, and into those more peaceful thoughts I put my energies and time and power.

 

Best of all are the times when I have no thoughts at all, but am caught up in the flow of some present-oriented involvement. (Zen masters say, “An empty mind is a divine mind….”)

 

The happiest lives are those lived fully in the present. The unhappiest lives are lived in the sad, worrisome and angry thoughts about a threatening, punishing past and future.

 

I like the old saying, “I’ve had a lot of troubles in my time, and most of them never happened.” I also like Jesus’ teaching, that “Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.” He also taught, “Consider the lilies of the field. They neither toil nor spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was never arraigned as one of these….” And again, Jesus assured us that we cannot add one hair to our heads by worrying….

 

All the good things that will ever happen to me, all joy, all achievement, all the giving and receiving that will ever happen in my life, my creativity and delights, will only happen in the present moment, or they’ll never happen at all.

 

Fear thoughts are never about the present. They’re always (only) about the past and future, which are just concepts—they aren’t real things, they don’t exist. “The past” and “the future” are abstract nouns. They’re nothing. The present, on the other hand, is something you can experience, somewhere you can be.

 

If I stay in the present, I have no fear thoughts at all. (And it’s perfectly possible to work in the present on reasonable and necessary everyday plans and future goals, without dwelling on bad stuff….)

 

In meditation/prayer, I hand over my fears and negative emotions–en masse–to my higher power, to deal with however he sees fit. I feel especially humble and grateful to be able to do this, knowing my fears will be attended to in the best possible mysterious wonderful surprising ways for all concerned, which I certainly couldn’t have thought of myself. I let all of them go. (“Let go, and let God.”)

 

He waits for us to ask him because he seems to want us to be at choice. And although asking is humbling, in every other way it's quite a bargain.

 

I don’t ever need to analyze, worry, fret, plot, project. Instead I can relax, and focus on having a loving and positive present, do my best, and turn my life over to my higher power, trusting that he is now transforming my past into something useful and good, and carrying my most positive and productive present into a powerful, joyous, and giving future.

 

What I've Learned About God in My Garden

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In this season of spring, renewal and rebirth, I’ve been thinking: what have I learned about myself—and about God—from being a gardener?

 

From studying his work I’ve come to know the workman. I’ve come to better understand his garden, his creation, his creatures.

 

I’ve learned that each of God’s flowers, however imperfect, is perfect to him. God doesn’t make mistakes; he doesn’t make junk. Like every thing in my garden, and like every other creature in God’s garden, I’m perfect as is. I was meant to be as I am, as I have been, as I will be. Through me and through all his creations, God expressed his will, and declared it good. I am his will, and I am good.

 

I’ve learned that God loves diversity, or else why would he have created anew each flower and each snowflake? I’m different from every other creation, and my uniqueness is holy. When asked what he had learned about God from his studies, Darwin replied, “God seems to have had an inordinate fondness for beetles” (the very diverse species which Darwin particularly studied as a young man.)

 

I’ve learned that God doesn’t mow down dandelions because they’ve been bad. I’m not individually judged, targeted, punished, or rewarded. God’s world works the way it works exactly as he meant it to work. Along with every other creature, I’m subject to his inexorable laws of cause and effect, laws he quite deliberately set in motion. Sun shines and rain falls unpredictably and arbitrarily on all of us, and there’s an inexorable and unprejudiced justice in that. God’s not in the business of interfering with cause and effect.

 

I’ve learned that God is in the business of nurturing the processes of life, and of celebrating life’s cycles. Like all his creations in his garden, I was supposed to be born and I’m supposed to die, and—if I’m lucky—I’ll have some time in between to grow.

 

I’ve learned that I’m expected to turn toward the sun and try hard to grow bigger and stronger and smarter, to understand God’s laws and live fully within them. I’m also expected to accept disease, decay, and death as a natural part of life.

 

I’ve learned that I’m loved. God is bounteous, and provides richly for each creature whatever it needs to live the life he expects of it until its time to die. If I ask for something and God doesn’t give it to me, I don’t need it.

 

I’ve learned that I’m not just a unique flower; I’m also the air and the soil and the nutrients, the rain and the light and the whole ecological system supporting me. My identity is dual—I’m both an individual and an integral part of a whole. I’m a unique self and a larger self.

 

I’ve learned that, just as each creature does its part to support all of life, it is supported in return by all of life. I am meant to support all of life just as if it were my self—which it is. I do unto life as I would have it do unto me, I treat others as I would like to be treated. Life blesses me, and I bless life.

 

I’ve learned that although flowers die, life is eternal. When my unique body/identity/self dies, my connected self will spring forth renewed, born again. I’m part of life, part of God, one with God—and life/God/self go on forever.

 

I’ve learned from my garden to let go of my insistence upon fairness and equality in earthly outcomes, and to accept instead whatever God offers. Life abundant and life eternal are God’s precious and generous versions of love and justice. I tend his garden humbly, contributing my own invaluable and unique gifts in appreciation and peace.

 

Happy Easter, happy Purim, happy spring to all! Happy season-of-welcoming-new-life-birth-rebirth-cycles-processes-growth-nurturing-beauty-and-joy! And happy gardening….

An Appreciation of Gardeners….

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Many people take a gardener’s work for granted. They shouldn’t! Here are twelve of the important roles a gardener plays….

 

First, a gardener is a laborer.

 

You work, lift, haul, dig, sow, reap. You eat bugs and dirt and pain and sweat and cold. You love the outdoors, sun, water, and the feel and smell of dirt.

 

You turn to your garden to create, not to consume. You know that work is the one prayer that most deserves to be answered. You feed the hungry. Your work is sensuous and sensual, and you find joy in its direct experience. You are close to the soil and fully connected to the earth. You are here, now. Your work is love made visible.

 

A gardener is a good neighbor.

 

You’re a giver—of bouquets, bulbs, jam and apples, of cucumbers and conversation and kindness, of assistance and advice. You’re a teacher of both the old and the young. You know that a single seed in a paper cup holds a world of science and wonder.

 

You’re prepared to pass on a whole lifetime of gardening traditions—in times of prosperity, or in times of disaster. You decorate your community. You spread beauty and knowledge.

 

A gardener is a horticulturist.

 

You’re a student of plants, a botanist, a collector, a taxonomist, a geneticist, a specialist. In order to care for your plants, you study their whole world. You understand losses and surprises, setbacks and triumphs, persistence and patience.

 

A gardener is a scientist.

 

You enter your garden not to escape reality but to observe it more closely. You compare. You take notes, keep records, write journals. You analyze your failures and improve on your successes. You inquire and experiment and expand your knowledge.

 

A gardener is a naturalist.

 

Your expertise is not only in plants. You know soils, weather, birds, insects, fungi, microorganisms and micronutrients, pathogens, pollution, and pesticides. You recognize your biological reflection, your genetic double, in every garden creature and plant.

 

You celebrate the messiness of evolution and sex and spring and birth and rebirth. You’re an ecologist, a biologist, a zoologist. You know the connectedness of creation and your place in the web of life.

 

A gardener is an activist.

 

Your garden shows that you care—about healthful food, clean air and water, and earth-friendly horticultural practices; about soil conservation, wildlife habitat, about smaller and larger ecosystems, about native plants and species extinction.

 

You understand that the one power you have that will never corrupt you is your power to make something lovely. You’re a bioethicist, a political animal, and a steward of our children’s future.

 

Your garden is a statement of how you relate—to the land, to family, neighbors, community, to the present, past and future, to your country and to other countries, to your planet. You found out, in your garden, who you are and who you want to be, what you stand for.

 

A gardener is a creative artist.

 

You nurture the beauty in each plant. Your garden is an expression of your individual style, your philosophy, personality, your personal rules and directions and themes, your knowledge base, experiences, and interests. Through your garden, you give form to chaos.

 

You paint picturesque garden compositions. You demonstrate that substances obeying their own laws do beautiful things, and you demonstrate that there is no beauty anywhere that is not totally dependent on relationship. You co-create living masterpieces.

 

A gardener is a traveler on a mythic journey.

 

You venture through a beckoning gate into a mysterious world of uncharted paths, on a timeless hero’s journey through secret passages and hidden turnings, to your life’s destinations….You sometimes stop to smell the roses, and maybe slay a dragon(fly) or two.

 

A gardener is a philosopher.

 

A garden is a philosopher’s church, a place to worship Mother Nature and the mysterious workings of the universe. In a garden, you seek, find and create meaning.

 

In your life, as in your garden, your purposes and interests and opportunities change with the seasons. In your life, as in your garden, you live and make choices within a limited framework, with considerable constraints, making the most of what you have, and working what is already there. In your garden, you see reflected your own birth, reproductive urges, decay and death, your battles with disease and disorder, your struggles to grow, to compete, to seek light.

 

Along with your garden plants, you share the tender mercies of rain and sun and nourishment. You dance a ring around your rosies, your pockets full of posies. You come from dust, to dust return. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

 

A gardener is an historian and a storyteller.

 

Your garden tells, not only your story, but its own story—how you made it, what your plans and impulses were. Your garden reveals all the things you can’t resist doing and all the things you never got around to.

 

Perhaps your garden tells the history of the land itself—its geology, topography, its last owners and previous uses. Your garden may reflect memories of beloved childhood gardens, as well as gardens you’ve visited in your travels, through art, literature, and in your imagination.

 

Last, a gardener is a mystic.

 

In your garden, you can be a dreamer, a spiritual seeker, maybe even a monk. In a garden, you accept life’s mystery, and attempt to recreate it.

 

You accept God’s grace, and his fierce, unexplainable logic. In a garden, you know God, for by the work, you know the Workman. Your work is your worship, gratitude, communion, and offering. You live in that infinite time, space, and distance that is the present.

 

Your smallest flower contains a universe. You are that flower, and you are the universe. You are the gardener and the garden, the fruit of the vine and the harvest.

 

(Thanks for insights, inspiration and images to: Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life; Michael Pollan, Second Nature; Joe Eck, Elements of Garden Design; Ed Whitney (watercolorist); Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman and One Man’s Garden; Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet; The Holy Bible; and Mother Goose.)

A Bunch of Unreallistic Dreamers and Kooks–and Me

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A ragtag bunch of unrealistic dreamers and kooks shared our home while passing through Frederick on their trek from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, headed toward the United Nations in New York City, where they will join a rally for nuclear non-proliferation in early May.

 

Or were they a serious, hard-working, disciplined, organized, committed, and spiritual group of unique individuals taking small peaceful steps toward greater sanity in a nutty world?

 

Arriving after a 20 mile walk from Lucketts, Virginia, the group took a scheduled rest day (once every seven days) in Frederick, welcomed by members of the Frederick Friends (Quakers) and several other local groups, before walking off toward a night hosted by two Thurmont churches.

 

What did I experience? A disparate but remarkably purposeful and caring group of believers and non-believers—Christians, Buddhists, activists of many stripes, the old and the young, walking for a day or a week or a month or for thousands of miles in many countries. They are black, white, Asian, native American, from the U.S., Japan, Australia, and many other countries.

 

As I juggle my own daily logistics, I wonder how the peacewalkers manage to arrange nightly lodging (on the floors of welcoming libraries and churches) how they eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, get medical care, manage personal possessions and sleeping bags…. But all seems smooth and organized. Every day they rise for interfaith prayer, and are walking by 7 a.m. They walk fast, carrying peace banners from many nations, smiling and waving and sharing their energy and positivity, even after walking fifteen miles. They are efficient and tidy, leaving their accommodations spotless.

 

I expected to host exhausted walkers who would collapse until noon in every corner of my home. No, they rose at dawn for prayer. One visitor, a Buddhist nun, magically produced from a small suitcase, a portable office. She spent the morning using her brief “rest” to email and call far-flung colleagues, and to plan a future walk converging in South Dakota. Willing hands produced a light breakfast and a feast for lunch. The young people wanted to explore Frederick’s downtown, while the rest shopped Goodwill, mailed pressed flowers and letters home, and then planned their evening presentations for curious townsfolk–about why they joined the group, why they walk, why they’ve stayed.

 

After everyone had left, I thought about what their work meant to me. I was most struck by how reversed I now felt about who and what is crazy.

 

Although I always have respected the peacewalkers’ cause—nuclear non-proliferation—I admit that I invited them despite a feeling that this was a crazy bunch of people choosing a crazy life and a crazy goal.

 

Now I’m thinking about cutting out sugar and caffeine and alcohol, as many of them do, for more energy–and maybe I’ll start fasting, too. I’m considering rising a little earlier to meditate and pray, and I’m asking myself what example my way of life offers to my children, and to others. I’m thinking again about moving forward on some impossible dreams of my own, thinking about taking the next step and then the next, as the peacewalkers courageously do each day, keeping the faith in humanity and possibility.

 

I’m thinking that maybe the life I see on TV, the commercial life, the fast life of the contemporary west, my life, is perhaps not the best context from which to decide who is crazy or not, nor from which to determine what is a balanced, healthy, useful life. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll try to shake myself free of contemporary culture just long enough to reconsider the possibility that nuclear tragedy isn’t necessarily inevitable, nor that working for change in our government policies isn’t necessarily a waste of time, and that joy and meaning and energy may come more readily from a purposeful, disciplined, giving, hardworking, kind, and open life.

 

I’m thinking I’ll keep an eye on the internet for the next time any peacewalkers come anywhere near my town again. I’ll download their schedule and join them in solidarity and respect, for a few days, or maybe I’ll plan a vacation around them. Maybe others will do the same, and maybe someday, as they hope, huge throngs will crowd around them in appreciation and support as they stride purposefully, idealistically, determinedly through the towns of the world. Yes, it’s true, they’re dreamers. But they’re not the only ones.

When Eggheady Experts Are Kept Out of Government, Education, and Science…

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We have a two-party political system in America, so conservatives hope we’ll take their next logical leap and compress the wide range of contemporary intellectual thought into two primary worldviews—conservative and liberal. For if conservatives succeed in framing the free exchange of ideas inspired by our constitution into a dichotomy having two equal perspectives, one right and one left, they can feel encouraged in their demand for an equitable fair share of the teaching and research slots in America’s institutions of higher education.

 

But even if one felt an obligation to divide the universe of knowledge and opinion into two opposing sides (one doesn’t) it would make more sense to label the two approaches “closed-minded” and “open-minded,” or perhaps, “conservative” and “all the rest.” For although political conservatism is well-financed and influential in America, within the scope of contemporary intellectual thought, conservatism has the status and weight of a fringe cult–because while there are innumerable ways to be a liberal thinker, there are only a handful of ways to be a conservative.

 

The dictionary definition of “liberal” is: “Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.”

 

The dictionary definition of conservative is: Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.”

 

Conservatives hope that Americans will ignore the minor nonsense-correlation evident between two statistical factoids: one, that most of our nation’s well-informed, well-educated, and broadly experienced professorial “experts” identify themselves as “liberal;” and two, that these same pointy-headed experts are the very ones we need to bring their knowledge, complexity, and sophistication—i.e., “expertise”—to contemporary American problems.

 

Just as lifetimes spent inquiring into the significant body of evidence, experimentation, and thought we call “science” generally lead scholars to conclude that evolution is a broad, reliable, predictive scientific theory explaining the history and biology of life on earth…

 

So, too, do smart, well-educated, well-informed, and open-minded investigators into today’s broad universe of knowledge,  unsurprisingly referred to as “the liberal arts,” generally draw logically-connected, broad-based liberal conclusions about the way the world works.

 

Too many Americans,  unfortunately so ill-educated as to distrust fancy-talking experts as “others” and “outsiders,” elect legislators and presidents who themselves distrust experts, with the unsurprising result that we get bumbling, inexpert political decision-makers who create truly bad foreign, domestic, environmental, monetary, and defense policy.

 

The last thing conservatives want, though, is our nation’s acknowledged, highly-respected experts—who’ve spent their lives studying history and culture and policy and education and diplomacy and economics and science and all the other fields of knowledge—mucking around in their administration’s policy-making…

 

Because the conservative mind is, by definition, closed to all new views.

 

Because the conservative worldview was already made up, once upon a long long time ago in a land far far away.