A Word of Encouragement

March 19th, 2020 | Click to Comment

Excerpt from a letter to those whom I see in my practice. I offer it here to support and encourage others as well.

A windowsill in my office

This is a time to take especially good care of your inner life, just as you follow recommendations for staying physically healthy. Notice what’s happening inside and hold it with kindness and self-compassion. By supporting ourselves in this way we allow emotions to release, rather than have them set up camp and impede our lives. Listed at the bottom of this note are a few online resources you might find helpful in these times.

These days I’m making an effort to be aware of how I’m resisting the current circumstances of my life, and gently inviting that resistance to ease. I’m trying to cultivate the practices that help me engage with others in a calm and grounded way, and to make time and space for the things that help me feel more resourceful and present. Walking in my neighborhood, meditating, listening to music, talking with friends, digging in the dirt, reading, and writing all make a difference for me. I’m seeing how important it is to take a break from the news and allow times of quiet when I can rest, inviting a sense of the greater Presence.

I’m also holding the question of what I might be able to offer as we make the changes coming in the next few weeks and months. I trust that what we’re going through together can create space for reshaping of our culture in a positive way, and I’m curious about how I might help that happen. I’m open to experiencing this time of withdrawal as a chance to reconnect with what is most important. And at the same time, I’m appreciating my connection with others as a primary value in my life.

It’s important to remember that we are not alone. We are in this together, and I believe we are inseparable from the One for whom there are a thousand names. The sacred ground of being holds us in love and sustains us through everything that happens.

I hope you and your loved ones are well, and wish you peace as you navigate this unsettled time.

With love,

Susan

Here are the online resources I mentioned:

For those able to claim space and time at home, this is about creating a half-day retreat:

Blog: Creating a Home Retreat: Finding Freedom Wherever You Are [FREE Half Day Retreat Included]

This is a beautiful site operated by Irish Jesuits. It takes you through a prayer that changes daily:

https://www.sacredspace.ie/daily-prayer

This is a list of mindfulness and meditation apps:

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/top-meditation-iphone-android-apps#buddhify

This is a nine-day course called Novena for Times of Unraveling:

https://onlineretreats.abbeyofthearts.com/courses/54/overview

These are practices for cultivating self-compassion from Kristin Neff:

https://self-compassion.org/category/exercises/

These are instructions for meditation not connected with religion:

How to Meditate

These are instructions for doing Centering Prayer:

Centering Prayer

Here’s a list of virtual museum visits:

The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections

If you provide your email, you can access this list of virtual gallery tours:

https://www.travelandleisure.com/attractions/museums-galleries/museums-with-virtual-tours

These are online art lessons for kids:

http://wildfreeandcrafty.com/2020/03/15/free-online-art-lessons-for-kids/?fbclid=IwAR1ifWn6WxFdQgnvaXygweQMAciYgWv-SLgF-98qmJ31MCth2TgxBdC83WI

And with your email, a sketchbook revival virtual workshop:

https://www.karenabend.com/sketchbook-revival-2020/
Comments (0) | Cultural Climate,Finding Courage,Soul Tending Tags: , , , , ,

Coronavirus and Clarity

March 10th, 2020 | 2 Comments

Everyone has moments of feeling alone, as if we’re plodding through our days disconnected from the rest of the world. But as we watch the spread of the coronavirus, evidence of our interconnectedness challenges that perspective. Perhaps in more normal times we question our role, our belonging, our place in the family of things, as the poet says. The spread of the virus says that what happens to some of us affects all of us. We’re all in this together.

To believe we are separate is to be looking at the world through a distorted lens. We are part of a greater whole. Whether hourly workers have paid sick leave affects everyone. The struggles of small businesses to stay afloat ripple through the community. The decision of whether to stay home when we’re sick affects not only those in our immediate circles, but potentially impacts other places around the world. No one is an island.

We respond to this reality, to the world and our circumstances, with either fear or love. Our choice matters. We can’t choose the emotions that arise as we see the spread of COVID-19, but we can choose the ones we live by. We can’t control events, but we decide how to meet them. Our lives and those of others are shaped by whether we act from fear or love.

I see love in how people are taking care not to spread the virus. Careful handwashing protects not only the ones doing the washing, but those with whom they come in contact. As we learn that the virus is spreading undetected among apparently healthy people, those who aren’t particularly worried about their own health do a great service to those more vulnerable when they take precautions. Love also plays a role in discerning whether to gather and how best to look after a community.

I also see love on the part of health care workers, making themselves and their facilities as ready and as safe as possible. We all take reassurance in the fact that they show up to care for those made seriously ill by this virus, as well as the other illnesses they treat every day. They strengthen our society through the courage and generosity of their work.

Certainly fear is driving behavior as well. My local grocery store displays two new signs: “No face masks” and “No hand sanitizer.” Trading in the stock market seems as panicked as the run on cleaning supplies. Fear has shown up in the senseless suspicion of Asian people, and in the desire to place blame for the outbreak. Fear can also drive us to put our heads in the sand, refusing to live in the real world, ignoring or denying the seriousness of a situation that we do not want to face. Anxiety and fear spread more easily than the virus, another reminder of our interconnectedness.

Yet we can also share a sense of calm and love with one another. Peace in the face of challenge is something we can spread through our communities. A loving presence passes easily from one person to the next, and it alleviates all sorts of suffering—our own and that of others.

Choosing love includes taking care. It means seeing as clearly as we can what is happening, and making good responsible choices about what we will do. Depending on our circumstances, love might mean showing up, or it might mean staying home.

We tend to forget, perhaps for long stretches of time, that love exists at the heart of everything. It’s like the water table deep in the ground, supporting our lives and connecting us to one another. That ever-present source of life remains available, and the more of us who can tap into it and share it, the more readily everyone can drink from its life-giving waters.

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Moving Across the Face of the Deep: the Process of Creation

February 7th, 2020 | Click to Comment

Part of a series exploring stories and images of the Bible, and allowing them to breathe. You can read the introduction to the series here.

Genesis opens with not one but two different stories of creation. It’s a beautiful way of teaching that life holds more complexity than a single perspective can convey. It also signals that scripture is up to the challenge of dealing with that complexity.

Offering these two separate accounts makes clear that the value of these stories is not in their literal meaning. Instead, the insight they offer comes from allowing them to speak in a deeper, symbolic way. If the two creation stories were taken literally, they would contradict one another. But stewing over which is “correct” would be to miss the point.

The first story starts with the opening lines of Genesis, and describes beautifully the process of any act of creation. The Creator hovers above the undifferentiated expanse of what is yet to be, brooding over a formless void and gathering the power to begin. This state is echoed in the experience of anyone who tries to bring something new into the world. We begin by allowing ourselves to be in a state of not knowing, and to encounter what is ready to be known but isn’t yet clear.

In the story, the creative power of God is released through speech. God says, “Let there be light.” In the act of naming what is needed, the need is met. This first act of creation calls into being the foundation of life and the illumination of what exists. Light is a basic need, a longing, the energy from which all life arises. It allows us to see. Light represents consciousness—the ability to understand, as well as the capacity for self-reflection. With light, we move forward.

Like plants that turn toward the sun, we orient ourselves toward all that light symbolizes. Yet the story reminds us that creation begins in darkness. It requires an encounter with formlessness and the teeming energy of the unconscious before lifting what we can catch hold of into the light of awareness.

After God creates light and divides it from the darkness, subsequent days in this first story of creation continue to bring order out of chaos—separating the essential elements of the universe, placing them within their proper boundaries, and filling them with life. Creation happens over the course of a seven-day week, with humanity being its culmination. In this story male and female are created at the same time, and they are made in the image of God.

Creation as something inherently good was a strong statement when Genesis was written. It contrasted with the creation stories of surrounding cultures, which depicted life as arising from corrupt beginnings, whether formed by creators of selfish intent or arising from the decaying bodies of vanquished gods.

In the Genesis story, with a reassuring rhythm repeated day by day, God intentionally creates the heavens and the earth. Each new aspect of creation is good. Creativity and dignity are woven into the fabric of human life, as we are made in the image of the Creator, with calendars that echo the week in which the universe was created.

On the seventh day God rests, marking the fullness of the work accomplished and honoring the need to be restored. This ancient practice of a day of rest is as much needed now as it has ever been.   

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Institutions Come and Go; the Bible Endures

February 1st, 2020 | 2 Comments

A rich conversation a few weeks ago has me thinking about how often the Bible is abandoned in the pew when people leave the church. It’s like a painted masterpiece hidden behind a forgettable print. Lots of folks equate the Bible and the church, but they are not identical.

The scriptures collected in the Bible have spoken to people for thousands of years, even as each generation decides for themselves whether those writings continue to have value. It’s fair to ask whether the Bible has anything real and relevant to offer. The question is as old as the scriptures, and asking it keeps the Bible alive.

Exploring the question of whether scripture matters becomes easier when we become aware of the smudged lens we’re looking through. There are all kinds of assumptions and agendas we might have inherited for reading the Bible, ideas that we might want to question.

For example, we might have gotten the idea that the Bible is more or less a book of rules. But the many stories of dysfunctional families told in scripture is enough to counter that mistaken notion. The Bible isn’t a single treatise, it’s a library of books in conversation with one another.

Neither is the Bible intended to be a literal account of historical facts. The biblical writers were concerned with something much more important to the heart of life than recording particular events; they were interested in the meaning of how life unfolds.

If we learn these stories as children, we appropriately absorb their symbolic power in a naïve and literal way, touched by the story but not yet cognizant of the difference between literal and metaphorical truth. This is part of the beauty of childhood, and the delight of seeing the world through the eyes of a child.

For example, the story of Jonah contains a scene where Jonah is swallowed by a big fish—amazing! Little ones have no need to question whether this is literally possible. They identify with Jonah, knowing how it feels to be overtaken by what we cannot control and taken where we don’t want to go. It can be scary! Jonah wants to run away from God, and finds out he can’t. Yet in this story things turn out ok, and a child finds reassurance in that. Even in the frightening parts of the story, God takes care of Jonah. What a relief!

As we grow into adulthood we need more subtle levels of engagement if the story is to continue speaking to us. The child’s understanding isn’t wrong, but there is more to explore. As adults we can learn to consider the story from a symbolic perspective.

When Jonah tries to avoid what he needs to do, his life is churned up like a storm at sea. We know how scary that chaotic state can feel. Unless he faces the issues that lurk beneath the surface of his consciousness, Jonah and those around him are in danger. Resisting what life requires of him leads to nothing but trouble. When Jonah finally acknowledges his powerlessness over his situation, yielding to what feels like certain death as he stops resisting, it’s like being thrown into a churning sea. But instead of perishing he finds himself caught and held by an immense power. He relinquishes control to a mysterious force and finds it not threatening but life-saving. It takes him where he needs to go. Amazing! By submitting to a wisdom and will greater than his own, Jonah’s life is saved. As is ours. When we can release our ego’s grip on its own agenda, life will support us in ways we could not anticipate. What a relief!

If we cannot enter the symbolic meaning of what the Bible offers, we cannot fully enter into its depth and power. But we need support in learning to view the biblical writings in a fuller and more nuanced way. Without that support it’s no wonder people reject the stories as nothing but relics from childhood.

Looking at the Bible with a fresh lens brings the writings to life, whether inside or outside of church. No church holds the definitive interpretation of scripture. In fact, the Bible’s stories and teachings grow in meaning when they are lifted out of old contexts and into new circumstances, read with the lens of new experiences. We can take the Bible into the places where we find ourselves, whether or not we expect to find the church there.

Scripture is portable and always has been. It travels into new environments in a way that a particular church, which exists in a particular place and time, cannot. For better or worse, that’s why we have so many different churches and denominations. People read the Bible and bring their own interpretation to it. They see something new and want to build a community that approaches life in a new way.

Its portability has also allowed scripture and those who value it to endure massive upheaval. When the First Temple in Jerusalem was long ago destroyed and Israel sent into exile, they recorded the stories that sustained them, becoming people of the book. After the destruction of the Second Temple, when its centralized religious practice ended, the scattered nation endured by relying on what individuals could take with them: private rituals, prayer, and scripture.

Buildings and institutions come and go, but the issues wrestled with in scripture endure. The writings deal with archetypal forces that impact human life, a full range of emotion and experience. The deep history of these ancient writings speak to the deep reaches of human experience. The stories explore everything from humanity’s struggle with power to the call of what our soul longs for most. They’re as relevant today as they ever were.

In the next few weeks I’ll be mulling over some of the stories I love from the Bible, and sharing brief reflections on them here. Whether or not these stories are familiar, I invite you to see them anew and hope you’ll find in them some connection with your own journey.

Susan Christerson Brown

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Moving into the New Year

January 6th, 2020 | Click to Comment

It wasn’t until I took down a favorite piece of art last week that I felt the poignancy of leaving my office of the past two years. I had been caught up in details—boxing things up, trying to pack for the move while keeping the place presentable, and looking ahead to how I might arrange my new space. But removing the enso print that I’ve regarded so often over the past two years touched me. This good place would soon be part of my past.

Fortunately, our office suite is making the move together. I’m able to continue sharing space with wonderful people. It’s a positive move, the new space is beautiful, and I’m happy to be going there. But change, even when it’s good, can be bittersweet.

The office I’ve created has been a place of growth and healing—for me and for others with whom I’ve met. It has been a beautiful space, filled with books and art and light and comfort. It has been a safe container for the emotions and the realizations that come forward in the midst of sacred conversation.

In addition, the person who offered his services in this space before me was one of the few professionals in Lexington familiar with the Enneagram. I always appreciated that sense of continuity as I work with the Enneagram as well.

As the boxes and furniture are carried down the hall into the new office suite, I feel gratitude for the good things that have happened in this space. As I leave it behind, I take with me what I’ve learned here. I look forward to creating a new space of welcome and sanctuary. And I trust that my practice will continue to grow, building on all that has come before.

May the movement of the Spirit continue bearing all of us forward. May we retain the wisdom we’ve gained as we leave behind what doesn’t serve, and may we move with grace into the new year and the new places where life will take us.

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Winter Solstice and Newgrange

December 19th, 2019 | Click to Comment

It’s easy to feel how near we are to the winter solstice. The exact time of the solstice occurs this Saturday night, December 21, at 11:48 p.m., but we each have our own internal sense of reaching this turn. As the days grow shorter and the dark descends earlier there’s a twinge of dismay. We know better than to worry—the days will lengthen soon enough—but nonetheless we light candles and extra strings of lights to ward off the dark. The hustle and bustle can be a welcome distraction from that instinctive unease.

A dramatic marking of the winter solstice was built at Newgrange in Ireland around 3200 BCE. At the solstice sunrise, the first ray of light above the horizon pierces the center of a long, narrow passage, illuminating a small, womblike room deep within the structure. There is just enough space to stand along the circular stone walls surrounding the chamber’s main feature—an enormous stone basin resting on the ground. The shaft of sunlight at the winter solstice shines directly onto a spiral design carved into the far wall.

We hold much in common with those who built this magnificent structure. Though our culture has made huge advances in science and technology, we are reliant on the same earth and the same sun to give us life. With the growing dark, we are subject to the same ancient sense of dread stirring deep in the psyche. We may not believe that our rituals cause the sun to return, but we wait expectantly and experience a sense of relief when it does.

The festival of lights in this season is something we need, whatever our religious traditions may be. In the midst of it all, there’s a pagan soul within me that insists on marking the solstice. The winter solstice is the herald of the new year.

This year, I’m remembering the wide stone bowl that fills the chamber deep within the mound at New Grange. When I was there, I had the overwhelming feeling that the basin was a place to give birth.

At the solstice this year, I’m holding that basin in mind and asking: What wants to be born in the new year?

What question are you holding here on the verge of the solstice?

Comments (0) | Ritual,Seasons Tags: , , , , ,

Radical Advent: The Old King and the Voice in the Wilderness

December 10th, 2019 | Click to Comment

Fairy tales often present an aging king and the search for who will take his place. These stories remain fresh because they describe a cyclically occurring crisis in the lives of individuals and of nations.

A king who no longer has the strength to serve, in a fairy tale, represents longstanding ideals that have lost their vitality. When these guiding principles cease to inspire, they need to be reinvigorated. When they no longer spur people to offer their best, or to strive for the highest good, these crowning values need to be replaced. We need ideals with real power to remind us of what matters, and to lead us forward into life. We need inspiration that connects with our lived experience.

In fairy tales it is not the powerful or clever candidates who pass the tests to become the new ruler. It is rather the one in touch with instinctive and even naïve insight, able to stumble upon the right answer or to find help in an unlikely place, simply by following his nose. When ideals have lost their power, we lose our way. we need this kind of humble, grounded energy to gain vitality and aliveness.

Listening to the gospel reading on Sunday, I realized that this search for revitalizing energy is what John the Baptist exemplifies. He is part of the move to release what no longer inspires us, and to search for what has the vitality to replace it.

John the Baptist goes into the wilderness and lives like a wild man. He leaves civilization behind—no garments of woven cloth, no bread, no roof over his head. He wears animal skins and eats locusts and wild honey. He knows that something new is needed to bring meaning into people’s lives. He is radically open to what comes next, but does not yet know who or what it is.

John the Baptist is important in this season of Advent. His was not a quiet waiting, but an active preparation. He stirs the pot, and things begin to happen. Jesus comes to him to be baptized and then makes his own journey into the wilderness. When Jesus returns, he brings a new teaching and a new reality that changes the world.

When the old is no longer working we must face the frightening task of letting it go. It’s a time of going into the wilderness, of being willing to inhabit that vulnerable place of not knowing. We must set aside our barren practices to allow the vital life force to inhabit us again and propel us forward.

To do this wisely means being open to guidance greater than our own calculations. Instinctive energy reinvigorates, but it can also be dangerous. It is incredibly powerful, able to overrule reason. On the path forward it can be the one step back before the two steps forward. We need connection with both our highest and best ideals as well as the material realities of our lives.

John the Baptist is a shocking character. He shows up when a shock is needed to get things moving. When change is crucial but we don’t yet know what will be, we hear his voice crying in the wilderness.

When a wild man wearing animal pelts arises, change is in the wind. It’s time to answer his call and to make our own journey into the unknown. We need to listen for true wisdom and guidance, whether individually or as a nation, to find the compelling new vision that will lead us forward.  

Susan Christerson Brown

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Learning to Thrive

September 30th, 2019 | 1 Comment

A couple of years ago when I was visiting a friend, I confessed my ineptitude with houseplants. I didn’t understand what they needed, and it seemed like too much trouble to learn. Yet I found myself longing for green and growing life to enjoy indoors.

“You can do this,” she told me, taking up a pair of scissors. She reached into the luscious greenery trailing across her kitchen counter and snipped the end of a branching vine bearing two leaves. “Just keep it in water,” she said as she filled a clear plastic cup. “It will root. That’s it.”  

On the long drive home I carried the little starter plant in the cup holder of my car, hoping that if those simple instructions sufficed we just might have a future together.

I kept that snippet of greenery with me as I moved several times over the following months, eventually transferring it to a substantial coffee mug that wouldn’t easily spill.

Along the way this hardy little plant produced a slender new cylinder of green, much like the pale stalk from which it grew, and within a couple of days a tender leaf unfurled. Rooted only in water, it was growing. Amazing.

Once, in an efficiency apartment with almost no counter space, the heat from a burner singed one of the leaves. I felt bad about that. For almost two years, seeing the dry, brown scar along its edge brought back those cramped quarters. This plant and I had a history.

But a few weeks ago the singed leaf turned yellow and dropped, as if the vine were letting go of an old wound. Why now, I wondered. The remaining leaves stretched toward the sunlight as always, their roots resting comfortably in the only nourishment they had ever known. And I finally understood that if this tenacious plant could live and grow on nothing but water, how much better it might fare with its roots in real soil.  

The vine is thriving now. Lovely as it was before, in recent weeks it has lengthened its reach and opened new leaves. It managed to get by for a long time, but the earthy nutrients it needed have brought an abundance of life. Perhaps it will grow as full and lush as the plant it came from. Certainly it can spare the snippet I cut for starting yet another new vine.

We’re made to survive, and we can live a long time—perhaps even a lifetime—on the watery nourishment that gets us through. But what about those times of knowing that life should feel more abundant?

Things change when we put down roots in the soil of our own true heart. When we meet whatever we find there, with gentleness and compassion, our presence transforms the part of ourselves that we encounter. We touch the ground of being that supports us all.

We don’t have to wait for circumstances to get better, for issues beyond our control to resolve. The nourishing love placed in the depths of our own true heart is available right now.

Where do you find the soil that allows you to flourish?

Comments (1) | Inspiration in the Everyday,New Possibilities,Paying Attention,Soul Tending Tags: , , ,

In the Heart Space

August 1st, 2019 | Click to Comment

Sometimes the only writing I accomplish in a week happens with my writing group, when we spend a few minutes responding to a common prompt. Balance, Not About Me, and What’s Difficult were three of the possibilities to get us started last week. The writing is done quickly to get past the inner censor, and it’s infused with the energy of the conversation we’ve shared. This is what it sparked from me:

The Three of Swords from the Rider-Waite tarot deck

Not only is it not about me, I don’t even know where I am. So that’s an indication of my Enneagram type structure showing up. It means I need to go into the body, find what’s present there. And what I find is a heart that feels assaulted by the realities of this world and its leaders, by the ways people run over others, by the trauma each of us has lived through, endured, survived, and risen above. We move forward even if parts of ourselves were left behind in those devastating places, wounded and powerless, split off from the self that had to keep going.

I feel all of that as a sensation of weight and constriction in my heart. This sense of a heavy heart seems to be both for myself and for others. I asked for an open heart earlier this morning, and confessed in conversation that this is my work, my growing edge, the center of knowing I need to explore. But it hurts, and everything about me doesn’t want to hurt. I want to shut that pain down.

But I’m not able to just move on from it, and I don’t want to deaden it (mostly) because to do that is to deaden myself. So I sit here with this felt sense that sounds like a country song, like my heart was run over by a Mack truck. It brings to mind a song title, “You Done Tore My Heart Out and Stomped That Sucker Flat.” And somehow this, this makes me smile.

This calls for the laughing barrel that Maya Angelou describes, leaning into the barrel to let loose with the laughter forbidden to slaves, the laughter that says this world is f*ing crazy, these circumstances are absurd, but here we are and we’re alive. Alive! And the life showing up in us is bigger than the rules, or the hurt.

There’s a power, a life force holding all of this. Something bigger is at work. And yet my life and yours, my pain and yours, are not less than any other part of it all. I matter. So do you. I’m not separate from the flow of all that is. I’m in it.

What was God thinking, making this world with so much energy unleashed in ways that allow people to hurt each other? It’s like giving a toddler a sharp knife. Who does that? And yet here we are with our knives and our wounds, the cuts we make and the cuts we bear, the scars where we have healed, marking what we’ve learned, the compassion it has taught us, and the tender places we protect.

Hendree—my priest, my friend—says Love is All. He dwells in the heart space and he is my teacher. Maybe all heart types are my teacher. It’s the knowing that feels farthest from me. Grief at the loss of connection drives that space on the map of the Enneagram. Earning back the connection in different ways is what happens there. In my space it’s impossible to believe I can earn that connection, but maybe I can invite it.

For me, opening the heart means being undefended, allowing what messes with my sense of peace and harmony. What makes that ok is remembering and trusting that I’m held, that we’re all held, by Love bigger than anything I can try to recreate on my own.

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I’mportant

June 29th, 2019 | Click to Comment

This morning I had coffee on my front porch—a rare pleasure that takes more time than I can usually afford. Or so I’ve long convinced myself. Apparently I believe there are more important things to do than taking in the abundance of an early summer morning. That belief has probably caused me to miss out on a lot of other good things as well.

There are so many things I can’t take time for, I tell myself all too often. I have important things to do. I’m portant. As if goodness and value is something I need to manufacture.  As if there were not something more vast and wise and powerful that wants to show up through me.

The sure sense of what’s important grows distorted when it becomes “I’m portant.” I’m portant says that that the quality of my life and of those around me is all about me—what I do, what I know, what I contribute. I’m portant is what happens when I lose connection with the source of life and instead believe everything hinges on the effort I make to be safe and worthy and loved.

“Portent” foreshadows what’s to come, and I think of “I’m portant” in that way, as if I’m the one determining what’s to come, as if I were in charge. When I’m trying to be the prime generator of my life, I lose touch with the greater reality. It’s like struggling to touch bottom when I could simply let the water hold me up. Or trading away my place in the magnificence of creation for a small world of my own making.

So I’m practicing creating some space between me and the day’s demands. I’m trying to discern the truly important priorities as opposed to the ego’s clamor of “I’m portant.” Pausing to enjoy the world helps me remember that a vast and powerful life force causes everything to unfold, including my life and work. I have a part to play, but I don’t have the job of making it happen by myself. In fact, when I act as if it’s all up to me—believing that I’m portant—I cut myself off from the flow of life that would carry me forward.

Of course, there’s the reality of everyday life to navigate. Showing up at work, getting kids to school, arriving for appointments on time is part of an orderly, responsible life. We can’t always sit on the porch. But making space within the calendars that drive us is part of a life well-lived.

We are more than our schedules and obligations. Every moment marked by the clock is also a moment that manifests what is timeless. There is a greater reality in which we live and move and have our being. In the moments when we can remember that, there is peace.

Those moments enjoying the lavender budding on new stalks, a wren hopping across the porch, and even the ubiquitous morning glory vines winding up in new places, feel a lot like vacation. I feel connected to a world that encompasses more than the current political climate, one that isn’t pitching me to buy anything.

But old patterns die hard. Part of me wants to focus on the weeds that need pulling. “I’m portant,” is the message when those weeds call to the self that is driven to be useful, to get things done, to make the place look good. Yes, there is a time for weeding. But that work can be held in a wider context, one that honors and appreciates the living, growing world.

I do better when I remember that I’m not so portant after all. My mind is clearer when I’m not trying so hard to think. My heart is more open when I bring awareness and compassion to my own limitations. I move through the world more graciously when I can relax and receive the sensory information all around.

Perhaps instead of portant, I can be present.

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