The Fragrance that Draws Us In

June 22nd, 2024 | Click to Comment

The largest lavender plant I’ve ever seen is blooming beside my front porch this summer. Most of my mature plants are about ten inches tall. But this year one of them shot out stalks three or four feet long in every direction, like a botanical version of spherical fireworks. Each is tipped by a slender cone of buds opening into tiny purple flowers.

From early morning until twilight the blossoms attract bumblebees. They land heavily, bouncing at the ends of the long stalks like reverse bungee jumpers. The bees tolerate the thrill ride for the sake of lavender pollen and nectar, precious food for a nest located somewhere over the roof and beyond. Today, one of the bees is weighted with two full pollen baskets. They look like little orange balls attached to the bee’s hind legs—nature’s original cargo pants. It’s almost always four bees—for days, even weeks now, four bees at a time bobbing among the lavender stalks. The same four? I wonder.

Bumblebee with a full pollen sack

I enjoy taking my morning coffee onto the porch, breathing the scent of lavender and observing the bees sampling bloom after bloom. In recent days I’ve watched them with a grieving friend on my mind. I wish I could make life into something that holds the sense of the purpose and beauty and peace of this small garden spot. My friend knows suffering, from long years of heartache and loss as mental illness and addiction claimed this child she loved. Even so, the death her child, of anyone’s child, at any age, is too much, whatever the circumstances. The heartbreak this world contains is terrible.

I have so little to offer her, but decide I could cut some of these enormous stalks to make a generous lavender wand, weaving prayers along with the ribbons and stems. As I work, the scent of lavender wafts not only from the flowers, but leaves and stems as well. The lavender-scented air fills my breath and my thoughts; I imagine the pleasure taken by the bees in simply navigating by this perfume.

We’re all following the fragrance that draws us in. We are compelled by what attracts us, and by what we believe we need. The natural instincts of the bees lead them to the life-giving nectar and nourishment of a flower on a swaying stem. The instincts of the human psyche are rarely so simple and pure. What we cling to and what we resist often distort our sense of what we must have. Recognizing the fragrance of what is truly life-giving, and following it to the source, is the work of a lifetime.

What can we learn from the bees? They bury themselves in the blossoms for a moment then move on, their transitory bliss part of a larger pattern. They take their fill and buzz off toward the nest, returning from their explorations with something of value. They never forget that they’re part of a larger colony. They follow the scent of the flowers, and still they remember how to find their way home.

We humans have the freedom to choose what to put in our pollen baskets. If our choices are to be life-giving, we need discernment and sometimes help. Through some mysterious interplay of strength and humility, discipline and grace, we generally learn to delight in what brings life. Through wisdom we come to know our place in the larger pattern of things. Through the leading of the heart we learn to navigate by love. And I trust that even when we leave these gifts unopened, the greater love holding all of us will find a way to carry us home.

Susan Christerson Brown

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Freeing the Form in the Stone

April 21st, 2023 | Click to Comment

Michelangelo described the process of creating his magnificent sculptures as a matter of seeing the form within the marble and then removing everything that didn’t belong. With this lens on the process, Michelangelo didn’t so much create David as reveal him by chiseling away the block in which he was encased.

Michelangelo placed his talent in service to the image he was given. Through his inner vision he engaged with a reality not yet manifest in physical form. He gave it his attention, recognized its value, and worked to bring that vision into the material world. The profound beauty of the sculptures he created gives credence to his way of working.

Our more ordinary creations may not reach the stature of Michelangelo’s David, but being guided by the end product that we envision makes bringing something new into the world—writing, teaching, decorating, cooking, or any other creative endeavor—feels a little more manageable. A guiding vision makes it easier to recognize what does not belong, and to chip it away.

In the King Arthur legends, the sword of kingship is encased in stone, and only the true king can draw it out. In these stories, what lies embedded in the stone is a true identity, revealed not by chipping away the stone but by extracting the sword. That is another way of describing the challenge for each of us—finding the connection to our own true heart and our own true calling so that we can claim and wield the sword of our unique power and agency.

Like Michelangelo’s freeing of the form within the marble, the symbolism of extracting the sword points to a way of freeing the essential beauty of our soul. Our potential, our creativity, our ability to love, often lies hidden within the hard stone that we’ve learned to use for protection. As life unfolds, we find out more about who we really are and learn to let go of the things that get in the way. In the process, we bring our long-obscured form into the light.  

It would be great to have a clear vision of that final form, but that is not clear to me. Nonetheless, I am getting clearer on the patterns that do not serve me, and I’m working on letting them go. In that way, I’m chipping away at what doesn’t belong.

Through it all, I trust that there is some higher wisdom, a knowing that is not fully conscious but which urges us in the direction of wholeness. I try to stay attuned to this lifegiving movement, known by many names: the Higher Self, the Higher Mind, the Divine Wisdom, the Light, the Truth, the Ground of Being, the North Star, Divine Guidance, the Life Force, the Tao, God.

Whatever we call it, I believe that this loving and life-affirming presence does see the essential form that’s possible for each of us. It offers us guidance and direction for chiseling away what does not serve, and setting free what is encased in stone.

Susan Christerson Brown

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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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Hope

January 7th, 2017 | Click to Comment

One of the things we need most as we move into this new year is Hope. Not an expectation of wishes coming true, or anticipation of ease, but the indwelling of life energy that refuses to check out in the face of adversity.

A friend recently shared Jan Richardson’s new meditations on hope for this year’s “Women’s Christmas” retreat. (Women’s Christmas is an Irish tradition of Epiphany as a day for women to take a break from family and domestic obligations, gathering to relax and celebrate together.)  Richardson’s insightful observations are a testament to the journey through grief and faith she has walked for the past few years.

True hope beckons us to do more than wish or want or wait for someone to take action. It asks us to be the one who acts. It calls us to discern what lives beneath our wishes, to discover the longings beneath our longings, to dig down to the place where our deepest yearning and God’s deepest yearning are the same. When we find that, when we uncover those deepest desires, hope invites and impels us to participate in bringing about those things for which we most keenly long.  – Jan Richardson

Our deep and true longings are placed within as a gift. They are a spark of the divine that urges toward what will bring us into health and wholeness. It is painful when what we love or value is taken away, yet the longing for what we know is good continues to call us into life. This energy that pulls us forward is cause for Hope.

Hope has work for us to do. It asks us to resist going numb when the world within us or beyond us is falling apart. In the height of despair, in the deepest darkness, hope calls us to open our hearts, our eyes, our hands, that we might engage the world when it breaks our hearts. Hope goes with us, step by step, offering to us the manna it holds. – Jan Richardson

Trust is a close relative of Hope. When we don’t know how to make things better, when the way forward is dark, being able to trust that we’ll be given what we need allows us to keep going. It helps to remember times in the past when our needs have been met and we have been led forward. We can recall events from our individual lives or from our collective life together.

Hope is not always comforting or comfortable. Hope asks us to open ourselves to what we do not know, to pray for illumination in this life, to imagine what is beyond our imagining, to bear what seems unbearable. It calls us to keep breathing when the world falls apart around us or within us, to turn toward one another when we might prefer to turn away. Hope draws our eyes and hearts toward a more whole future but propels us also into the present, into this day, where God waits for us to work toward a more whole world now.  – Jan Richardson

Hope is a kind of strength, though not a strength that we have to cultivate alone. As we share our disappointments and longings, honoring the authentic yearning of our hearts, we hold space for the new life that wants to come through us and be born into the world. The energy of that life force will not be denied. When we experience its flow we cannot help but dwell in hope.

 

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Beyond Personal Growth: Trusting the Mystery of Transformation

April 1st, 2010 | 9 Comments

It took a long time to make much progress through John O’Donohue’s Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. I mean that in the best of ways. The Gaelic term, anam ċara is literally “soul friend,” and if books can be friends, this is such a one. Most pages hold something rich enough to send me off thinking about it for a while. I’ve kept returning through about two-thirds of it now, and today this is the passage on my mind:

Spirituality is the art of transfiguration. We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any pre-determined shape. We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program or plan for our lives. Rather, we need to practice a new art of attention to the inner rhythm of our days and lives. This attention brings a new awareness of our own human and divine presence.

A willingness to grow is a good thing, but the programs and plans available to encourage our development are overwhelming. Bookstore shelves teem with personal growth books, religious and secular, as if we can’t stop flagellating ourselves with agendas for self-improvement. And yes, I’m familiar with these store displays because I’m irresistibly drawn to them. It’s hard to pass up some bit of wisdom that will make me more capable, more fulfilled, more deserving. When an article promises to share Five Steps to Happiness, I can’t help but read it.

I want to grow, but I’d prefer to do it without all the messy uncertainty and annoying unpredictability of not knowing the way. I would love to learn what to do and just do it. But O’Donohue spells out what’s lacking in such a prescribed approach:

It is far more creative to work with the idea of mindfulness rather than the idea of will. Too often people try to change their lives using the will as a kind of hammer to beat their life into proper shape. The intellect identifies the goal of the program, and the will accordingly forces the life into that shape. This way of approaching the sacredness of one’s own presence is externalist and violent. It brings you falsely outside yourself, and you can spend years lost in the wilderness of your own mechanical, spiritual programs. You can perish in a famine of your own making.

Creating, growing, transforming—these are all mysterious processes. They happen underground, in the depths, in the dark. Paying attention while a process unfolds that we can neither control nor rush is a counter-cultural way of life. It can be hard to learn and harder to trust.

But if we lose faith and limit ourselves to the kind of processes we can control, we banish ourselves to the wilderness O’Donohue describes. Will power is hard work, and doesn’t make for a very joyful life. Maybe it’s trust power I need to work on.

What kind of power keeps you moving forward?

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