Author: admin

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I am a container.  I am a silver bowl.  I am a broken wooden cup.  I am a pool of cool blue water. I am a cow, placidly chewing her cud.  I am a fountain. I am a rosemary tree.  I am a cat, lazing in the sun. I am the fragrance of a blooming tulip poplar in the spring. I am moist warm black earth. I am the wind rustling through the leaves before a storm. I am the storm. I am spring lilacs.  I am a big ole dog lying on his back to have his belly scratched. I am a golden urn. I am an otter, darting through the rapids and sliding down a waterfall. I am quicksilver. I am an osprey, flying far overhead, able to detect the slightest movement below. I am a bridge. I am a vase of yellow roses. I am drying herbs, hung in a kitchen. I am a dark forest, the center of which no one has ever discovered. I am a broken-down barn, home to dozens of living creatures.  I am incense, flowing out over a crowd of worshippers.  I am a crisp green salad with pine nuts in it. I am a featherbed. I am green. I am a flow of daffodils across a graveyard. I am the aroma of a warm puppy. I am a jaguar, peering out from the depths of a jungle. I am a river flowing endlessly along. I am a high sweet voice singing “Pie Jesu.”  I am a cherry nut ice cream cone. I am a decaying body in the earth, feeding the myriad of creatures who live there. I am the elusive colors of a brilliant sunset. I am a drift of snow.  I am a pair of warm bedroom slippers.  I am a spiral. I am Mystery.  I am the Child.      

The opening sentence of James Agee’s autobiographical novel A Death in the Family,  “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tenneessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”  strikes to the heart for so many of us about what it was like to be a child.

During my back porch reveries as a child, my conversations with my imaginary playmate Learny surpassed any depth of reflection I have since had in adulthood. My childhood fears of vampires and giant army ants were an eerie premonition of the shadowy pieces of myself that I would need to face as an adult:  the self-doubts, the need to be a victim and take on others’ burdens, the negative self-image, the self-pity, blocking of creativity, arrogance, jealousy, addictive behavior.

What fears haunted you as a child? Who were the monsters in your closet and lurking under your bed?  What conversations did you have with your imaginary playmate?  What was your favorite story and your secret hiding place?  Where did you go in your imagination?

What questions did you ask?  I can remember that my favorite one must have been the ubiquitous “why?” because I recall my mother frequently answering, perhaps in frustration,  “It just IS,”  and of course my follow-up question:  “Why is IS is?”  I still wonder about that, the great archetypal  “Just Is” . . .

Childhood imagination — let yourself go. It’s back-porch reverie time again, where vampires are real (but it’s daylight now, so I’m safe), and giant army ants from Africa, as big as a house, might be coming over the hill at any moment (I’ll watch, so when I see them, I can run fast), and Learny is telling me the real scoop on why adults won’t ever tell you  “Why.”

Imagine . . .

It’s not time to worry yet.  (Harper Lee)

 

Lovely thought — not yet.

Home now, safe from

the rigors of super-highway.

Husband on the mend.

Step-daughter on the warpath.

Me on my Journey,

like we all are.

Green going up the mountain,

steel-cut oats on the burner,

tapioca cooling, covered

by plastic wrap, makes it creamy.

Too much raw milk.

Gotta be transformed.

Swiss cows on newly

green and gold grass

produce heady stuff.

Food of the gods.

Will it appease

them

this day?

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.  (Pema Chodron) is  is 

What if the very enemy who needs to be loved lies within, what then?  (C.G. Jung)

I’m spending a whole week alone at the shore — what luxury, to read and walk by the water and not be responsible for doing anything. But this morning I woke up with a dream about “something” in the basement.  Something not good, something very scary . . .  “Oh, great,”  I snarled to the half-grown cat who sat on my chest looking at me with his usual alarmed-omygosh kinda expression.  “Just another shadow dream, when I longed for something numinous and profound, like all the books have in ’em.”  Or maybe I had channeled the cat who, as the youngest member of our gang, is the original “scaredy-cat.”

As I lay there feeling grouchy at the prospect of having to do my duty as a good (even if retired) shrink, and try to figure out what this Something in my dream was all about, one of my favorite childhood games flashed into my mind, and made me chuckle:  Booger in the Cellar.

This outdoor game, at least for my sister and me and as many neighborhood kids as we could corral, could only be played in summertime twilight, and meant that the designated Booger would hide in the outside cellar-well, and wait for the other kids to meander by, and then leap forth, attacking in her best monster-booger style.  Oh, the shrieking delight of it all!

Funny thing — I wasn’t nearly as delighted about this “something” in my dream cellar.  Because it was bound to be yet one more face of my own personal Booger that my dream was presenting for me to deal with.

Really?  Ugh.  One more time I have to do this work of looking at the less than lovable parts of me that I keep carefully hidden away in the cellar?

But I know that if I do this work of acknowledgment and acceptance of all that I am — the resentments, the petty jealousies and envies, the unkindnesses, the thoughtlessness, the careless lack of attention, and maybe worst of all the indifference and the pretending — then I won’t have to act these things out, or project them self-righteously onto some other person or group of people.  Or exhaust myself, or make myself ill trying to hold that cellar door shut.

My Booger.  I know where he came from, constructed early on in childhood out of pieces of hot anger, helpless powerlessness, frustrated wantings, frightened imaginings, aching insecurities.  The place where all our individual Boogers arise, same process, even tho’ different story-content for each of us.

And maybe this day, I can integrate a little more of my Booger by accepting that this, too, is part of who I am — accepting and understanding his origins with compassion, instead of wanting to kill him off.

Who knows?  Maybe I can even get to the point where I can actually enjoy playing Booger in the Cellar again!

 

 

 

In your personal diary a chapter has ended . . A new chapter is beginning, drawing its substance from the pages that went before.  A life has ended; living goes on . . . The person who has been part of your life is gone forever . . . it is final, irrevocable.  Part of you has died.  Grief is unbearable, heartache, sorrow, loneliness.  Because you loved, grief walks by your side.  (Earl Grollman)

 

Although the calendar is into double digit days of April, it is snowing AGAIN.  What we longed for in December doesn’t look so good when we want to be about the business of planting flowers.  But more importantly, even though it’s snowing, the hummers are back!  I saw my first hummingbird of the season, a very woebegone, snow-speckled, bedraggled hummer, and hurried to warm up some sugar water for its feeder; I hope it will return.

What its presence took me back to was a hot day in July fifteen years ago.  My husband died unexpectedly on a bright, mid-summer morning in 2003.  That afternoon as I sat on my porch, vaguely aware of the hummingbirds buzzing and diving amidst the flower garden, I registered somewhere in my numb consciousness that they seemed unusually numerous and aggressive.  I was alone; family and friends from other parts of the country, shocked and grief-stricken by the suddenness of his death, had yet to arrive.

What I was most aware of as I sat there among the hummingbirds and flowers, was that in a single instant that morning, one future had closed forever, and another had begun to unfold.  The disbelief, the shock, the despair, and the awareness that life as I’d know it was over, was overwhelming.

What followed, as all who have suffered a deep loss know too well, were weeks and months and years ravaged by the pain of grief.  Some time later during those years, I would read of a hummingbird harassing and “sort of chasing a golden eagle — a screaming-freakin’-eagle, vs. a badass bird the size and weight of a Dum Dum lollipop.”  And I would be reminded of that day in July when the hummingbirds dived and buzzed and whistled in a fantastic aerial display.

Much later, I checked out hummingbird legends, and learned that according to an Aztec myth, the earth goddess Coatlicue once picked up a bundle of hummingbird feathers that had fallen from the sky.  Storing them near her bosom, she became with child, angering her other 400 children, who conspired to kill her.  But the moment they did, a fully grown, heavily armed Huitzilopochti sprang from her wound and started cutting off heads.  Huitzilopochti was the god of war, depicted as a warrior with hummingbird feathers on his helmet.  Aztecs believed warriors cut down in battle would be reincarnated as hummingbirds, fierce courageous birds with the strongest of spirits.

Some time after my husband’s death, I found a letter among his things that urged me, should he die before I, to grieve as I needed to, and then to get on with my life, to carry the hope and optimism with which he had lived his life into the future:  to, in essence, he said, be a warrior of the spirit.  To be like those hummingbirds, I thought, who, ounce for ounce, are probably fiercer than any other creature on earth.

Could I really do that, I wondered?  Could I let the gift of the hummingbirds on that terrible July day call my attention to a way of being that would draw me out of the despair and despondency that I seemed unable to shake?  Could I move forward with my life, accepting at last that in every ending there is a new beginning?  Could I call on every “warrior” fiber of my being to find the courage to go on?

In the face of overwhelming grief, each of us does have to find a way of keeping on.  Obviously how we each find the courage to do that is as multifaceted as an individual personality, with each of us drawing resources from our unique wellspring.  As perhaps you’ll remember from previous writing, one of the things that had always fostered my own capacity to keep on keeping on had been snippets from literature, stories, quotes, songs, and bits of poetry.  I had clung to these as a lifeline during that long, dark time of grieving.  Clinging to the light left by others’ words who had walked the same path before enabled me to find enough warrior spirit to go on.

Since that time, so many years ago now, I have lost two parents, also suddenly, and three beloved friends.  Each death shook my foundations, but none more so than that initial terrible loss that taught me so much about what dying — and living — are all about.  What I learned is beautifully expressed in the following excerpt from A Song by Shaibh Glaz Al-Qusabi.  Perhaps it is what the hummingbirds came to teach me on that July day so long ago.

— we die — we sail into the end without pausing to say good-bye; our dreams, hopes, loves come to an end like footprints in the sand chewed by the desert.

— we live — we live each instant to its deepest core, collect its treasures, trifle with its secrets, love ourselves within its ecstasy.  

Of death and life I shall a sad, sad, happy, sad Song sing . . .

We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home.  And we have no one to guide us.  Our only guide is our Homesickness.  (Herman Hesse)

If I didn’t dare to speak to you, or follow the blackbird’s song, or stay in the overwhelming silence, God never would have appeared.  (Mark Nepo)

 

It was during the darkest periods in my life that I learned the most.  And what I mostly learned was that the whole plan of life is pretty simple.  You show up.  You check out the scene, and you listen very carefully.  You respond and do the things that seem to be presented to you to do.  And you follow the meaning, the Path that just seems to unfold in front of you  . . . you don’t have to worry or obsess about it (easier said than done), or try to make anything happen, or control events . . .

I learned that there is a Grace in life that can be trusted to carry us.  In the words of Rumi:  Birds make great sky circles of their freedom.  How do they learn it?  They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.

I don’t think that anyone really has a happy childhood.  At its best, it’s a time of magic, and wildness, and terror, most of which we keep to ourselves, because we learn early on, or at least I did, that there’s really no one around that we can tell it all to anyway, even if we knew how to “tell” it.  It’s not a tame time, it’s a time of high drama, fraught with fears of vampires and ants and orange trucks and elves, and maybe even clowns, and for sure, monsters in the closet . . . And it’s a time of wild abandon, and joy as sharp as that first lick of an ice cream cone, and the heart pounding excitement of trying to go to sleep on Christmas Eve, and the cloud in the sky that looks exactly like Prince Charming.  Or a dragon.

And for some, it’s a struggle for survival.

It takes years of work to forget that wildness.  I gave it a good try.  I studied.  I performed.  I did good.  I forgot.  Whoo-hoo, I was grown up.

And then life happened, as it does for us all.  We all gotta take that journey.  Light and dark, labyrinths, night journeys, twistings and turnings.  Disappointments, triumphs, broken dreams, betrayal and loss.  Ordinary life co-exists with brokenness and despair and loneliness, and gradually you surrender that magical belief that someone is going to save you, protect you, or show you the way  . . . if you had ever been lucky enough to believe it anyway.

But then, if you listen very carefully, you hear the rustle of angel wings, and gradually you realize that those “angels” have arrived to summon you to the adventure for which you have longed always.  That long-forgotten “wildness” from childhood is returning.

But the angels don’t often arrive in quite the way we imagine.  They arrive in the middle of an enormous storm, one that we fear may blow us so far outa Kansas, like Dorothy, that we’ll never get back.

Remember the old saying about turning to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them?  How very true that seems to me.  How can we not love a Being that cares that much about us, that would create a storm of such magnitude in our lives that we would have to pay attention . . . bringing us what we need rather than what we think we want.

Maybe we resist because the “little me” believes I’ll have to surrender everything I’ve come to believe about myself, the story I’ve told myself all these years . . . it might not be a great story, but at least it’s comfortable and familiar!  Who knows what might happen if we choose to believe something else??  The proverbial wolf arrives, “huffing and puffing, and blows our house down,” and what you have spent years carefully building can be destroyed overnight.

That “wolf” has come in many guises for me, and the deconstruction of those stories that I told myself about being who I thought I ought to be rather than who I am is an ongoing process that I suspect will last over a lifetime.  Thank God.

The eternal cry of childhood, familiar to any parent, and still heard in the depths of our own hearts, is “I wanna go home.”  Home is the place where we belong, where we can truly be ourselves, without pretense.  Perhaps we can, at last, “come home” to ourselves, and know who and where we are.

Listen.  Can you hear the rustling of angel wings?  They’re arriving to “summon you to that adventure for which you have longed.”  They’re calling you home.

Despair made the deserts and hope shaped the oases.  

Our worlds can be very large and also very small.  We see only what our hearts can hold, whether we sail the seas to distant lands, or live out the whole of our lives in the village where we were born.

Don’t be spilling your troubles on the ground for other people to trip over.  (Anne Bishop)

So, what did I learn in Ireland?  To travel lightly.  And I don’t mean that literally, altho’ that’s a fine idea, too.  I learned (for the umpteenth time) to watch carefully the thoughts that fill my heart — because  the landscape that we see with our eyes is also the one that actually lives in our hearts.

Our inner landscapes are made of structures or stories that we created early in life in order to try to make sense of our experiences.  Most often it is these old stories that create and shape the life we’re living today.  The way we tell our stories, what we believe to be true about ourselves and the world, determines in large part, what our outer “landscapes” look like.

For example, the ‘voice’ or negative thought associated with an old story might whisper to the heart:  Yes, the butcher has cheated you, put his thumb on the scale to charge you the full price for less meat.  But you are nothing, nobody, insignificant.  No one will believe you if you accuse him — and if you do accuse him, he will not sell you meat anymore, and your family will go hungry.  And the Light in that heart will grow dim, replaced with the despair associated with those thoughts.  There would be less kindness in that heart today, and the ripples of unhappiness would be felt by every person that person encountered.  Those hearts would also be dimmed a little.  And the threads of Light in that particular outer landscape would become a little weaker, making the Dark more powerful.  (Anne Bishop)

The inner landscape that we carry within us determines the outer landscape that meets us.

It is your life.  Your journey.  Your choice.  Your opportunity.  In many respects, you are creating your own reality, your own perception of the world.  The landscape you look out your window and see is a reflection of the inner landscape you hold in your heart.

What was my own experience on my Irish journey with my inner and outer landscapes, my “old stories” and the Ireland I encountered?  Glad you asked . . .

— A big-bucks coastal cottage full of old crumbs and webs and spiders (one of whom set up housekeeping immediately upon our arrival in my bellybutton, occasioning embarrassing itching throughout our stay, and for a shrink, giving new meaning to the term “navel-gazing”) . . .

— A repeatedly dinged rental car because we misread (badly) the width of the narrow rocky country lanes (making me gnash my teeth at the thought that pretty soon we were gonna have to buy the danged car, and look at what we were already spending for that blankety-blank cottage) . . .

— A husband who refused to leave the cottage except for trips into the village (both because he was so in love with the book he was writing and so NOT in love with those narrow rocky lanes) . . .

— Repeated busloads of German-speaking (why German??) tourists being dropped off in our yard for lengthy photo-ops of the standing-stones altar down the cliff from our cottage (making me cynically wonder at their bravery in climbing over thousand year old blood-stained rocks for said photo-ops) . . .

— And on and on . . .

Remember a long time ago I talked about studying Irish fairies?  No need to find them in the outer!  What with my resentment over old crumbs and webs; un-mowed grass and canny winking caretakers; narrow lanes and badly dinged cars; newspapers full of murder, mayhem, corruption, and political shenanigans; angry husbands; dollar signs mounting up; and lovely sights not likely to be seen, I had spriggans and pixies and phookas aplenty in my own inner congregation, wicked little critters who wanted to carp and complain and create mischief.

Yep.  My inner landscape pretty much created a lot of the thoughts I had about the outer landscape of Ireland this time around.

The truth?  Ireland is and was for me a world of dark enchantments, captivating beauty, enormous ugliness, callous superficiality, humor, mischief, joy, inspiration, terror, love, tragedy . . .  It is the home of my ancestors, the place of my old stories, for good and not-so-good.

 

Wisdom is found not in humans alone; it is found in all places and in all beings — etched upon the fabric of land — in the tracks of animals — it speaks in the stone, the sea, and the stars.  (Druidic belief)

. . .and in the snow . .

If this photograph doesn’t look much like Ireland, you’re right. It’s from my own back yard, as yet another nor’easter goes up the coast. I sat down to write more of Ireland today, but found myself so enchanted with the beauty and unusual nature of this snowstorm on the first day of spring that I didn’t want to be anywhere else other than where I am.

Which in a way is ‘right peculiar,’ as my Scotch-Irish mother would have said.  Because that’s exactly what I learned in Ireland. Not because I loved it (Ireland) this time around, but because I didn’t. But more of that later.

On this snowy day, from my own fireside with the snow swirling outside, I wish you may Be exactly where you are.

There is an indefineable, mysterious power that pervades everything.  I feel it, though I do not see it.  It is this unseen power that makes itself felt, and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses.  (Ghandi)

As I write, St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish — shamrocks, copious quantities of beer, leprechauns, the wearing of the green — are almost upon us.  I first visited Ireland about twenty-five years ago, and found it delightful and charming, whimsical, right up my alley.

My next trip was another story.   Last year, my husband and I took a month-long trip to the southwest coast of Ireland, he to do research for a book he is writing, and I, as I glibly told friends, to “study fairies,” since I would have lots of free time while I was there with little to do.  The Irish always seem to have more fairies than anyplace else, I thought — leprechauns, goblins, pixies, will o’ the wisps, phookas, Puck, hags, kelpies, water selkies, brownies, a myriad of flower fairies, tree sprites, wood elves, undines, spriggans.  I already knew a lot about them from my mother, so — piece of cake, says I.  Toadstools, flowers, trees, water, twilight, mist, hollow hills, fairie rings, crossroads, their special habitats, attracted always to the realms of creativity and the emotions of humans — a world of dark enchantments, captivating beauty, enormous ugliness, callous superficiality, humor, mischief, joy, inspiration, terror, love, tragedy.  Described as mischievous, spiteful, malevolent, ever governed by a code of ethics far different from our own, bestowing good or ill luck at will, worthy of careful respect and handling, unpredictable . . . . tricky, merry, envious.  The more fanciful (at least so I thought) of the literature I explored before going suggested that the world of fairies was a world to enter with extreme caution, a “thin place,” where the veil between this world and the Other world is thin, the Other world is more near, a place where the rewards are enchanting and the dangers are real.

Some time after returning home, I would write:  more than ever, I know that the inner ‘landscape’ that we bring with us determines the outer landscape that meets us.  More than ever, I know that the realm of fairies lies not only without, but within, which can make for a fairly crazy world . . .  In the weeks to come, I’d like to share some of what I encountered and learned during that journey to Ireland.

Before I left, a friend gave me the the following Celtic blessing as a good-bye gift:  You shall receive whatever gift you can name.  This writing that I do here is my attempt to do that naming.  In the meantime, I leave you with images of our trip.

 

         

       

        

           

       

           

        

      

        

       

 

Contempt is indifference or disdain for the behavior or hurt of others, due to their perceived lower moral inferiority or general unworthiness.  Because the experience of contempt is fueled by adrenalin, it makes you feel temporarily more confident and self-righteous, but at the same time, less humane, and to the extent that it violates your deeper values of kindness and compassion, more vulnerable to unconscious guilt, shame, and anxiety.  ( Steve Stosny) 

Contempt:  (meaning):  Lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense scorn.

This morning a nor’easter is heading up the coast, so, weather freak that I am, I arose early in hopes of catching a few snow flakes myself, and to enjoy the semi-hysterical weather news. Hunkered down, wrapped around a quilt and a hot cup of coffee in the darkened living room, I was prepared to enjoy.  The weather news, in its best disaster-mode-form was indeed suitably satisfying, but I made the mistake of watching the rest of the news as well, and ended up (again — will I ever learn?) enraged by the proclivities of our leaders.  Immediately, fueled by the adrenalin charge we always get from the experience of feeling contempt, I took care of all the indoor animals (who were delighted by such early morning largesse), and then went out to the barn and kicked all those animals out into the cold, snow-chilled air (they were not so delighted to be awakened so early, squawking loudly in protest).  Then I made a big breakfast, and from my lofty perch of moral, emotional, and intellectual superiority, sat glaring at my hapless and sleepy husband.  You can imagine how well that went.

Oh, crap. Indeed our leaders could probably stand to clean up their act, but here I am, projecting again, furious at someone else, because of what I despise and fear in myself.  And even worse, now I’m anxious and depressed since I’m violating my deeper values having to do with kindness and compassion — it’s almost impossible, I find, to like yourself as much as you deserve when you’re feeling contempt.

And so I’ve spent the last hour chewing humble pie, reminding myself of the human fraility that we all share.  I know the antidote for contempt, and the resulting separation I experience from others, is compassion and appreciation, and simply wishing happiness, health, well-being, harmony, love, safety, and protection to others in general, and especially to the object of my contempt.  But sometimes I just willfully want to hold on to my “mad.”  It’s hard to be grown-up.

And maybe, on this day, I can take a lesson from the barn-yard and my animals about compassion and empathy. I once had a cat, a beautiful silver Angora who shared graduate school and early married days with me. She matched a foul temper with a tender and exquisite sensitivity to my moods, and would sit nearby and cry real tears when I was distressed. When my husband and I had the first fight of our married life, she carefully and deliberately proceeded to shred his trousered leg.  No brooding on anger and injustice for her.

And we have recently acquired a new gaggle of guineas, a quirky bird, I’ve found, that takes a strong exception to being corralled or domesticated.  Loud, goofy-looking, and flocking, they are critters that truly dance to their own drummer.  For a long time, Mr. Guinea was our lone bird, the only survivor of a previous gaggle destroyed by foxes, and he freely roamed the farm, patrolling, giving warnings, keeping the vehicles safe from attack and sometimes use-by-owner (he was a little overly attached to looking at his reflection in hubcaps).  When our new crew arrived on the scene, he raced in circles around the carrying crate emitting loud raucous guinea-shrieks of  what seemed like amazed delight.  And he relinquished his prized freedom-to-roam, voluntarily following them into the confined pen in which we’re keeping them until they get used to it as a “home” to which they can return when we let them loose to roam the land also.  He cares for their hysterical distress in being in unfamiliar digs by gently stroking beaks, and murmuring what sound like reassuring purrs.  I notice him at times standing at the fence, looking longingly at the early spring grass, but he never tries to escape or leave his new “kin-dom.”

What do my cat and this quirky character with a brain the size of a lentil have to teach me about empathy and compassion?   Surely, if she weeps for me, and he can give up so much for the sake of relationship, if he can care gently and with seeming compassion for the foibles and unpleasantness of his “others,” surely I can look beyond my own self-righteous sense of  how things oughta be in my world.  In the pursuit of justice and balance, I do not have to demonize another.  I CAN choose tenderness, patience, consideration, kindness, and compassion, rather than giving in to  contempt and the need to be right.

 

 

Wisdom lies in engaging the life you have been given as fully and courageously as possible, and not letting go until you find the unknown blessing that is in everything,  (Rachel Remen)

        Perhaps this is the moment for which you have been created.  (Esther 4:14)

In The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron tells the story of a woman running away from tigers.  She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds onto the vine. Looking down, she sees there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass.  She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly, the most exquisite strawberry she ever tasted.

For millions of people on our earth, trauma, loneliness, horror, suffering, and despair are a way of life.  Tigers above.  Tigers below. None of us, no matter how blessed with safety and security we may find ourselves, can remain untouched; all of us are faced daily with somehow dealing with reports we hear of trauma, suffering, and despair without being overwhelmed and despairing ourselves.

As Chodron reminds us in this wonderful story about tigers and strawberries, we could get depressed, negative, despairing, probably rendering ourselves physically or emotionally incapacitated, or at the very least, pretty unhappy. We could numb ourselves emotionally, and engage in some good old-fashioned denial.  OR we could fully appreciate and delight in the preciousness of having been called to this single moment in our lives — perhaps this is the moment for which you have been created.  A moment in which our compassion, our empathy, our awareness might make us truly capable of effectively being present in a way that is healing.  A moment that might make a difference, if only to one person.  Or animal.  Or ecosystem.

The wisdom of the present moment . . .

The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand new sun.  It’s born every morning, it lives for the duration of that day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again.  During the darkest period in my own life, acknowledging the preciousness of the present moment was one of the things that helped me walk through the despair. On my desk, I have framed a “Credo for the Rest of My Life,” (adapted from various sources whom I cannot credit, but for whose inspiration I am so very grateful), which even in this present moment reassures me.  Perhaps it will speak to you as well.

The dawning of this day is filled with countless possibilities for amusing anecdotes, profound turning points, provocative choices, and pursuits of passion. Hold nothing back. Engage fully with what you are doing at this very moment.  Focus only on the thing right in front of you. Live in the present, not the past or future.

Realize the specialness of being alive and having this particular moment. This is a time to enjoy the pleasures of being in the world and being yourself in it, knowing that your body and mind will not last forever. It can be a time for creativity, for play, for work that is play, for travel, for inner exploration, for whatever it is that calls to you. 

          I release the past, with gratitude for all that has been.    I bless the present moment.    I surrender to what will be in the future.    I accept my Path.