Category Archives: love

Inaugural Intentions

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Things are feeling a bit dark again…  Reminds me of October, when I got emotionally hijacked by current events and found myself anxious and angry, but wouldn’t admit it for a while.  On the eve of a new presidential administration taking office, tensions run high once again and I’m challenged to avoid a similar decent into despair.

It really helped to take the Holiday Break and write to my friends.  I did it by hand, with colorful pens, stickers, and rubber stamps (I love rubber stamping).  I intended to connect more personally, and that’s exactly what it felt like.  As I see and hear expressions of fright, dread, sadness, anger, and pessimism among them, I intend to continue corresponding by pen and paper.  There’s just something more tangible about it, more intimate and permanent than email, text, or Facebook.  I have included excerpts below—the ones that felt particularly inspired.  They represent my intentions for managing myself in the coming years, of reinforcing my core values and focusing on my highest aspirations.  As Simon Sinek posted once:  “Fight against something, we focus on what we hate.  Fight for something, we focus on what we love.”

To my friends who have expressed, “get over it,” and “stop whining,” I respectfully request that you try to empathize with those of us who feel despondent.  Nothing will improve if we keep ridiculing and belittling one another.  If you experienced this from ‘us’ before the election, remember how it felt.  Rise above our worst collective behavior and help us overcome our fears and disappointment by showing us that we really do share more love and connection than we might think.

Unity and true indivisibility require all of us to pitch in and reach out.  I hope that by one year from now, we can all look back and feel proud of the connections and relationships we strengthened, from left to right and otherwise.

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What a crazy year…  All bets are off, no one can possibly predict what will happen now—so much anxious uncertainty surrounds us all over the place!  …And yet I feel hopeful and optimistic.  This is the time for our best selves to truly shine—the perfect opportunity to call on everything we have trained for—all of the grit, the kindness, the curiosity, the openness, the brave vulnerability~~~all of it, in service of connection, mutual understanding, and forging a way forward to a BRIGHTER future!  Because we now know, again, in humanity’s history, what darkness looks and feels like.  We can’t stay here, and we won’t—we can each shine a light.  And if we stand close, the light amplifies exponentially.

So thanks for being a fellow light shiner, (my friend)!  May we keep our connections with each other and our other fellows ever close—we need us—the world needs us—now more than ever!!  Keep it lit, my friend.

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…Hope this card finds you well and HOPEFUL.

Because I have decided that that is what we all need to practice more now than ever—HOPE.  Those of us who strive for conscious living and more connection than the superficial have TRAINED for this moment in history—to PRACTICE OUT LOUD and IN FRONT of everybody—to lead by example and make the difference we were born to make!  We don’t need to do big things—we just need to keep the faith and stay the course!

’Small things with great love,’ I think Mother Theresa said?

Please know I am here to support your efforts, as I know you are for mine!  Let’s get together and hold each other up again soon!

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…Because I know so many people whose core values represent the BEST of our shared humanity—equality, compassion, community, connection, love, and forgiveness.  The world needs these qualities and practices by us more now than ever—so if we hold each other up, we’ll all be able to do the work better—TOGETHER!!  So here’s to long friendships and deep love!

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I received this handwritten response from an old friend today.  It warms my heart and holds up my hope:

“While we may snarl a bit at anticipated political shenanigans, let us remember we have strength in numbers and determination to keep life in this country respectful and fair—simply by the ways we live and interact.”

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And finally, I’m also encouraged that our international leaders express a similar optimism:

Angela Merkel: “I am very much convinced that we as partners benefit more if we act together than if everyone solves problems for themselves, and that is a constant fundamental attitude on my part.”

Peace to all of you, dear friends.  Let us manifest our best every day.

A Holiday Break

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Happy Holidays, friends!

December flies, does it not??  What is it today, the 18th?  Holy cow!  The kids are off for winter break, holiday greetings have overtaken snail mail (Yippeeeee!!), and now that NaBloPoMo has concluded, I am back to scrounging for blog post topics again.  How fascinating…

2016, what a long, strange, CRAZY trip!  The moments (periods?) of shock and disdain stand out, but there were also times of profound inspiration, learning, and connection.  2015 did not see any holiday greetings from us, a lapse after at least 15 consecutive years of not only composed letters with photos and personal notes on every one, but also often a craft of some sort.  I was just overwhelmed with other stuff to do, though now I can’t recall what all that stuff was.  This year I contemplated the annual year-in-review letter.  I have also proofed a bookmark on vistaprint.com.  But the mass-produced, conveyor belt greeting feels unsatisfying right now.

We have all witnessed the escalating anger, division, and destruction of relationships, both individual and between groups, these last 12 months (really, much longer?).  The emotional hijacking took me over for a while, too.  After all we’ve been through, I feel an urgent need to connect with friends and loved ones more intentionally, personally, and directly.  Many on my ‘list’ have known me most of my life, and I want to take time to write to them.  I used to write them all the time–I went to college with 100 postage stamps freshman year, and used them all.  I feel a need to tell people one by one this year how much they mean to me, how they have shaped the person I am today, what I admire about them, how I see them contributing to our world.  I want to encourage them, hold up their optimism and hope.  Most of all, I mean to reinforce my connections with them, so we may all help one another soldier forth in a world of increasing uncertainty.

We cannot control what others say or do.  But we can call out the hatred, illuminate and inform the ignorance, and stand up for core values of love, connection, inclusion, equality, compassion, and justice.  We can do this all the better if we support one another in action.  That support must be cultivated, tended, and protected.

So I’ll take a break from regular blogging for a while, to write by hand (with fun-colored gel pens on cute cards, and lots of stickers).  We’ll see if I break my tardy record for holiday greetings, St. Patrick’s Day…  I think it’s okay–never too late to make a meaningful connection.

Please share your intentions for the new year here, if you like–the community I have found here lifts me every time I open the window or the app.  Thank you for your engagement and encouragement, and Best Wishes to you all this season!

 

 

On Experiencing and Expressing Gratitude

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NaBloPoMo 2016, Letters to Patients, Day 23

To Patients Seeking Words for Gratitude:

I found them!

As we head to gatherings tomorrow and seek words to honor and express the occasion, I’m particularly grateful today to see the post below by David Whyte.  Where, you ask?  Why on Facebook, of course!  Back tomorrow with my own original words.  Until then, peace and gratitude to you all!

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GRATITUDE

is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face across the table, of a son’s outline against the mountains, is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit even stranger inner lives beneath calm surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s strange world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.

Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets and fully beholds all other presences. Being unappreciative, feeling distant, might mean we are simply not paying attention.

…

© 2015 David Whyte
from ‘GRATITUDE’
In CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2015