The Bedrock of Our Being

I believe that anything in life can be turned into a mediation. Any mundane job or task, if we allow ourselves to be fully present there, can reveal chards of insight. Like an artist creating a mosaic, we can take all of the broken, seemingly misshapen pieces of our life and gather them together into something strikingly beautiful and utterly unique. When we look at our life in this way we can let go of the perfectionism that limits and paralyzes us, and instead allow our path to meander. Our job is simply to take our beautiful broken peices, the chards of our experience, and create a footpath with them as we go along.

I have been working on putting in a flagstone patio at my next-door neighbor's house. I had mentioned a while back that I really wanted to buy myself a pottery wheel and that I would do almost anything within reason to get it. A short while later my neighbor approached me saying that she would be delighted to pay me if I would help her daughter put in a patio for her. My first reaction was to say, "But I have never done that before! I have no idea what I'm doing!" Her reaction was just a simple calm smile. She said, in her native Minnasoten accent, "OOh, I'm not worried about that at all. You girls will figure it out. And I know you'll do a great job." She had seen all the amateur landscaping we had done and liked it. Add to that her generally wonderful feminist perspective, and we had a deal. We gathered all the DIY instructions, talked to some landscaping folks, and just started in.

The hardest part of this kind of project is in preparing the foundation. We had to cut the sod, pull it up, till the soil, dig up and move countless wheelbarrows of dirt, measure, level, and measure again. I'm not at all a mathematically or spatially minded person...I'm a right-brain English major type all the way. So I have more than a bit of a hard time moving from calculations to application. Inch by inch, bit by bit, we figured it out. After 3 hours of hard work this morning, we are finally ready to bring in the gravel. We're ready to lay the bedrock in which we will nestle our flagstones--arranging them like chards in a mosaic, gathering together their oddly-shaped edges to form a beautiful patio.

Fred Rogers, "Mr. Rogers", said, "It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life that ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is firm." Making sure that bedrock is firm is no easy, clean, or straightforward task. It requires that we wrestle with self-doubt, sweat, get very dirty, know when to ask for help, keep our body nourished while we work, know when to take breaks, and just plain do a lot of heavy lifting. Even before we embark on this journey, though, it often takes someone or something nudging us out of our comfort zone, smiling when we bodly claim we can't do it, and offering us a vision of what is possible.

Anything can be a meditation. Anyone can be a vessel of the Spirit's nudging. Leonard Cohen once said, "Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in." Gather up your broken pieces, your chards of insight, your misshapen edges. Love yourself, trust yourself, laugh at yourself, and go make something beautiful!

Jog n' Blog, Day 3...

I got back out there today after missing a few days. I knew it would be a great challenge to get this discipline going. I have kept up exercise by digging up many wheelbarrows of dirt while putting in a flagstone patio for my neighbor. But the jogging did take a backseat. Rather than beat myself up and make a big drama about it in my mind, I got up this morning, turned up the volume on my Annie Lennox album (she is always a revelation!) and did 2 miles, about half of which was jogging. Today was a relief because when I came to the end of my time I realized I wasn't really thinking about anything. Talk about a revelation :-) It occurs to me that beneath the discipline of our bodies lies the more important discipline of our minds. In this culture we're taught to always be productive. The shadow side of that is that we forget how to turn off our minds.

I'm working through a great book by Matthew Flickstein entitled "Journey to the Center: A Meditation Workbook". He's a psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and founder of The Forest Way Insight Meditation Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In his first chapter entitled "Insights: Happiness versus Inner Peace" he notes that "Happiness refers to a state of mind...that is always dependent upon circumstances. When our circumstances match our aspirations we feel happy, and when they do not, we feel unhappy. Contentment, unlike happiness, is not dependent upon our circumstances. It is an inner perspective from which we are aware of the difficulties or problems of our lives without being emotionally controlled by them. Contentment is an experience of inner peace."

I believe this is the journey we are all on, by one road or another. Each of us comes to this journey with our own backpack of inner resources and faith traditions (please forgive any Dora the Explorer intrusion I just created for you parents out there). But regardless of which faith tradition or spiritual resources we bring to our journey, meditation is the most valuable piece. Vietnamese zen buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us to "close the windows" so to speak...to create time each day where we don't let the frenetic pace and baffling noise of the world bombard us. Even 15 minutes each day of quiet can change our whole disposition, outlook, and emotional program for the day.

So as I walked and jogged this morning, listening to the incomparable Annie Lennox, I just put one foot in front of the other, put aside all of the emotional circumstances of my life, and let myself be carried forward. Sometimes that's all we need to do: put one foot in front of the other; walk; run; listen; gently escort our thoughts and worries out of the way; and do the best we can for that moment. Flickstein warns that there is one obstacle "which could prevent us from reaching our goal...the tendency to become lost in the drama of our minds." Meditation helps to diffuse this drama and open our eyes to the simple beauty of the present moment that lies right in front of us. Here's to the present! Enjoy this day!

Suess: Don't Leave Home Without It

Dr. Suess' brilliant book "Oh, The Places You'll Go" should be required reading at each new stage of life. For kids it speaks frankly to their sense of being at once exhilerated, terrified, bored, and overwhelmed by the whole host of emotional experiences that fly at them like a missle in a 3-D movie.

For teenagers it perfectly illustrates the emotional/spiritual roller coaster that life is, and the whiplash-like speed with which outward and inward change comes. For college-aged people it highlights the impasse reached when restlessness and the weight of big decisions merge.

As adults we move in cycles through all of Suess' "Places", but we do so with a whole armor of defense mechanisms, and while carrying a heavy load of baggage. For us adults the scary places, lurches, and bumps don't always come as so much of a surprise as they did when we were younger and more inexperienced. But they can often cause deeper, subtler, longer-lasting pain since we don't always have a grown up to kiss our boo boos, take us in their arms, and soothe us with a comforting conversation. Sometimes adult suffering can't be soothed with a simple kiss. As adults the voices we attend to are sometimes comforting, but more often than not the messages we hold onto are the more critical ones.

Too often we are subject to what 20th century psychologist, Karen Horney (pronounced Horn- I), called "The tryanny of the shoulds." When we're holding onto all those morally perfectionistic expectations, each new "Place" confronts us not only with the challenges and obstacles inherent to that place or stage in life, but also with the burden of our grown-up second-guessing of ourselves. Dr. Suess refers to just this kind of struggle saying, "I'm afraid that some times you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win 'cause you'll play against you."

Suess describes life as "A Great Balancing Act" and warns to " just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And NEVER mix up your right foot with your left." As advice goes, this may seem kind of lame and insubstantial relative to the size of life's mountains. In fact, though, it's some of the best spiritual advice anyone could give. In other words, Know yourself, know where you are, know where you stand, but be flexible. As adults we tend to leave behind the fundemental wisdom of our childhood books, forgetting that between the rhyming phrases and wild illustrations are spiritual diamonds in the rough. Sometimes the best life-advice we can possibly hear is this, "be your name Buxhaum, or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, you're off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So...get on your way!"

Jog n' Blog: The Training of a Sometimes-disciplined mind, Day 2

When the alarm went off this morning I could feel that pull--that seductive voice that accompanies the ache of my sore muscles saying, "just a few more minutes. It won't hurt if you rest some. You need rest. You deserve it after doing a good job yesterday." They (you remember the all-knowing "they") say we should trust our instincts, listen to our body. Well, that's the thing about the widom of "they"...like anything else it can be proof-texted, taken out of context, and used to rationalize things that ought not to be rationalized. When you're starting an exercise discipline, consistency is key. Barring some kind of serious self-torture, you need to get up and go and ignore that voice. Having been through this process of starting and stopping exercise disciplines before, I wore my running clothes to bed, set my coffee pot to auto-brew, and charged up my ipod the night before. "Know thyself" is the key to everything (I know I said getting up was the key to everything yesterday...that's true. There are lots of different locks on the door into our proverbial "self-care house". Therefore there are lots of keys :-)

I took my 10 year old black lab, Maya, with me for the first half of the run, then put her up and finished by myself. To bring the dog, or not to bring the dog...to listen to music or not to listen to music. It's really the difference between solitude and accompaniment. As a mom, it's difficult to figure out what I need at any given time. On one hand I love the quiet, the luxury of no bickering, not being asked for things, not being asked to "watch this". Silence takes on a whole new kind of fullness and presence of its own after you have kids. It's a beautiful thing just to be able to rest in the absence of noise. On the other hand, I now live in a place where I don't have the social connections I once had, or the adult conversations I once took for granted. So, on days like today, music helps. When I exercise, I always try to listen for a word, a phrase, or some kind of noticing that comes to mind that I can carry with me throughout the day. That may sound wierd, but I use exercise as a kind of meditation; a way to encourage reflection to rise to the top of my consciousness, after it has been stampeded by the sheer volume of other stuff to attend to in a family.

On my run this morning I was listening to some hip hop and kept hearing the phrases "compassion in action, devotion in motion (MC Yogi)." As a minister I'm often disappointed by how we "religious people" often manage to take very mystical encounters and turn them into very cerebral concepts, stripping them of their mystery and spirit and putting them in a box, securely fastened by our fears. Compassion and devotion are not static. They are not ideas. Compassion and devotion are ways of being that necessarily require openness of spirit, vulnerability of soul, and the willingness to step out of our comfort zone and enter into the experience of the "other". When Jesus said that the second greatest commandment was to "love your neighbor as yourself" he was immediately asked, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus didn't answer with an idea or a bumper sticker-ready platitude. He told them a story of a guy who had been left for dead in a ditch, beaten and bloody. In this story person after person walked right past the man, more concerned with their own cleanliness, their own safety, their own security, than with the pressing need of the bleeding beaten man. In fact, it was the purity laws of their faith which kept them from extending their help. The Samaritan, one who was himself already on the fringes of society, one who was already considered an outcast by religious authorities, was the one who got in the ditch with the man, lifted him up, used expensive oils to clean him, and looked him in the eyes as he did it. When asked, "who is my neighbor?" (in other words, "how far do I REALLY have to extend my love?") Jesus told this story of compassion and devotion. Compassion in action, devotion in motion. As we go through our exercise disciplines, granted the priceless gift of motion, let us be reminded of the higher purpose that drives us. Let us be a people of action and motion, not just the mindless motion of distraction and diversion, but of purposeful movement toward the mystical encounter of compassion. Let us be devoted to actively loving, actively seeing one anther, actively helping those who aren't easy to love or to help. Let us set aside our need to box up and corden off our love, and instead give it away freely. After all, it's not ours to keep anyway.

Jog n' Blog: The training of a sometimes-disciplined Mind, Day 1

Well, as you can tell from the seemingly millenial period that has passed between my last blog entry and this one, my writing disicipline has been undisciplined. As coincidence might have it, so has my exercise and self-care. Yes, it has occured to me that perhaps this is a bit more than a coincidence. Like so many stay-at-home-moms I have fallen into a pattern of excuses for my lack of self-care. Let's see if I can some up with a few that some of you all might recognize: I need to sleep in; It's the summer; I just need to veg out and relax after cooking, cleaning, washing, etc.; once school starts and the kids are back in school it'll be easier (Yeah, RIGHT!!!). Okay, that's enough. I'm annoying myself just putting it in writing. But, while we're on the subject, putting things in writing is something I have also come up with a million excuses not to do. For the sake of balance, here we go: At the end of the day my mommy brain is just too tired to put two words together; without an office, it's too hard to focus; without much time to think, whatever I write will crappy anyway, so why bother?; Whew! That's enough. I think we all get the point.

So I have decided to take my two "growing edges", as it were, and merge them for one colossal experiment in learning discipline. "THEY" (you know, the big "they" in the sky who study everything and report everything so that we can all be definitively assured that what we're doing is "right") say that it takes about a month for something to become a habit. So, like so many other people in their mid-thirties trying to find some order in the joyful madness of parenthood, I am commiting to 1 month of jogging and blogging. I'm going to forget about whether this writing is crap. I'm going to try not to think about how bad I look in my jogging clothes. I'm going to force myself to get out of bed every morning at 6 a.m., before the kids get up. I am going to walk/jog/run rain or shine for 1 hour everyday. In true Amy form, I'm all jazzed up about starting this discipline today, but I *KNOW* the joy of the kick-off will wear off and I'll be pulled steadily back into the vortex of excuses and apathy. So be warned, when I do you all will have to listen to me whine about it while I try to push through and keep going. In the meantime, while I'm on my project-starter's high, I will go with it and spew a little of what occured to me as I jog/walked (okay, more walking than jogging...who are we kidding) today.

First, get the right clothes and shoes!!! Especially when it's sticky and humid. Get what I'm saying, ladies??? Keep moving. It will get boring, especially if you have no running partner. I chose not to listen to music today just to see if my frenetic mind could deal with the silence. But when I let my mind go, there were so many sounds: dogs barking, birds singing, the routine open and shut of car doors and starting engines as people left for work. These are beautiful sounds. They're the sounds of life. They're the sounds of life happening in all of the ways we take for granted until bad stuff happens. They are the sounds of daily rhythms. So, for today, I tried to appreciate them as I panted, got annoyed with my dog who couldn't seem to choose a side of the road to run on, and as I reminded myself to buy the right running clothes:-P Yesterday in church, during the Invitation to Communion, our rector read the same words he read every week, "Come, those who come to this table often, and those who haven't been in a while; those who have little faith, and those who wish to have more..." I had been used to thinking about those words as referring to two different groups of people. But as I listed this time, thinking about my own frustration with disciplines, it hit me: in each of us is always both persons. Some days we have little or no faith. We wonder why life has dealt us a bad hand and why so many others "have it so good." We can't muster up the energy to do the laundry, much less feel inspired to any great pursuit. And on other days we feel like we're on that runner's high. Creative ideas are easily flowing, we actually notice the poetic beauty of the smiles on our kids' faces, we make lists of things "to do" because we are excited about living. In each of us is both persons. One other thing our rector said during his sermon, which was about "the Art of Living" was that "each of us is the most perfect work of art God has created." What if we all thought of ourselves that way, even for a few moments each day? We're each a gift...a cherished creation. When we receive a fabulous gift for our birthday we take care of it. We maintain it. We enjoy it. We smile when we look at it, thinking of the thought and care that went into its choosing or creating. So, as I plug away at this new "jog n' blog" discipline, I'm going to try to think of myself in this way. I have little faith. I have much faith. But I am the best art God has made and I will come to the table regardless of how I feel. Will you be my virtual partner on the journey?