Not my life, not my problem!

I've been battling a back problem for almost a week and yesterday I pretty much cussed out the higher beings that govern my life.  I slammed doors and muttered as I picked up my doggie and fed her.  At the first slamming, she jumped and slunk off to her crate to wait until the storm passed.  I called to her and told her I wasn't mad at her.  She received my petting and assurances but went back into her crate anyhow.

Later, I was pondering her behavior and I realized suddenly that her moods are governed by mine--that everything about her little life is governed by me, not unlike how my life is governed by the gods.  There's more to it than that though.  I also remembered being a little person in a chaotic household and slinking away when my parents fought, trying desperately to please them and make them happy when things were calmer.

I concluded that Emma Jane came to me as a gift from those same gods that I've been cursing.  She models the profound connection between each of us and our higher power or god, if we prefer.  She turns her life over to me every morning and considers it a joy if I look her way.  How I wish I could do that with god!

So, this morning when I woke up discouraged and lonely, I did turn my life over.  I said, "It's yours, God."  And then I added, "Not my life, not my problem, Dude."  I came downstairs and the day looked different to me.  What did my god, despite my chronic lack of trust, have in store for me?  I wondered that with hope and anticipation, not dread.

Like Emma Jane, I await further developments with patience and good will.  Roxie

Where, Oh Where, Is God?

So, it's hard work to be spiritual, alas.  You'd think it would just be a part of our DNA and we would just incorporate it daily like brushing our teeth.  Not so.  If it is part of our DNA, it's often deeply buried by the time we reach adulthood.

No doubt we are born "trailing clouds of glory" as Wordsworth says, but as we develop, too often religion squelches the curious glory and creativity that are the hallmarks of our spiritual nature.  The Unity Church, among others, calls us "spiritual beings in a physical world."  And so it is.  We are perpetually torn by our dual natures.

How do we become one physi-spiritual being?  I don't know but I think that's the challenge.

Recently, I've embarked on a 12-step journey towards spirituality.  Once skeptical and even scornful of this process, I now see it as my best way to enlightenment.  The third step of the journey invites us to turn our will and our lives over to the "god of our understanding."  I'm stuck at this spot.  Every day, I meditate and pray to have the courage to surrender my will to some higher life force.

At the moment when I'm about to turn it over, I get a frisson of fear and I stop.  I've examined this fear and what comes to life for me is a wounded part of myself.  Authority figures in my life used religion and god as the ultimate punishment.  I find that's true for many people who grew up in strict religious families.  In my case, my mother had god in her pocket.  She would pull him out to support any stricture or punishment that she wanted to hand out.

One of her favorite ploys was to invite me to confide in her.  "Tell me about your date," she would say to my teenage self.  In a burst of hope, I would share.  The words would barely be out of my mouth when she would slam the door on my happiness and declare me to be evil and going to hell.  Then, she would tell me I couldn't ever go out with this or that boy again (the worst offense I can remember was holding hands).

So, at the moment when I'm about to surrender to the will of a higher power of my understanding, I freeze.  Will that god also slam me into worse circumstances than those I create for myself?  My history with the god of my mother's understanding is that he will.  He belongs to her.

I am seeking a god of MY understanding and hoping THAT being has my best interests at heart.  Namaste, Roxie

The Word Made Flesh

I've heard it said that we are "spiritual beings in a physical world."  What does that mean, really?  Where do the spiritual world and the physical world come together?  They come together in me!  In us!

How hard we strive to be good people, to understand the human condition, to help others, to pray.  We cry out for wisdom and sometimes it comes out:  "What the F-- does all this mean?"  Why do we hurt emotionally and physically?  Why do "bad things happen to good people?"  Who's minding the universal store, so to speak?  Somehow we think that by striving and seeking, we can make a difference. 

Well, we can't.  Tennyson was wrong when he wrote about the human condition in the final line of Ulysses, "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."  No amount of trying and of effort is needed. 

The principle is simple:  Love yourself.  It flies in the face of all the spiritual do's and don't's we've learned over time.  How can it be that loving ourselves IS the answer?  That is the answer because each of us is "the word made flesh."  We are the meeting place where the spiritual manifests itself.  Not the church or the holy books.  No one said, "The word is in churches and holy books."  No, the word was made flesh in a person.  In Jesus, in Buddha, in Mohammed.

The word is made flesh today in me. 

So the edict to love myself, just that, begins to make sense.  I start to wonder how to do that.  How can I love myself, how can I be my own best friend?

Some moments of enlightenment have begun to occur.  I was reading and working with my inner teen-ager the other night.  She was crying over the loss of her mother.  I began to ask her about her feelings and, finally, to tell her that it's a different time and place and that, today, she is loved and protected.  All of a sudden, a different voice took over and said:

"I have been trying to tell you all your life that I LOVE YOU.  Not because you're good or bad, not because you try hard or have suffered.  I love you because you're mine.  Yes, you have been brave and survived great hardships.  You know what, the hardships came because you didn't hear me saying I love you.  You are a vessel containing and expressing the God.  I love you with the tenderness of the good mother, with the protectiveness of the good father, with the passion of the good lover, with the loyalty of your best friend. I. LOVE. YOU."

In that moment I was swept up into the joy and peace of the universe.  Enlightenment.

This morning, everything seems in slow motion.  I am IN my body.  I feel the oneness of spirit and flesh in this slightly overweight, arthritic, aging body.  That's the best way I can describe my moments of enlightenment.  Time disappears.  Everything slows down to this moment.  Turning on the bedside light is an act of tenderness.  Enlightenment.  Roxie

And He Will Raise Me Up

Sometimes, our higher power or greater good comes through in unexpected ways.  We can choose to recognize those moments of grace or we can sleep walk through our days.  It's hard to see those unexpected and often tiny "ways" as miracles, but what if they are?

I've had such moments in the last few days and I've noticed them.  I was in Maine with family for the holidays.  I slept well every night.  Miracle.  It wasn't always easy.  Sometimes, I had to ask for divine intervention to keep all the inner demons in check. 

What does it mean to ask for divine intervention?  As I read somewhere, it's unlikely that the Big Dude or greater good is going to help your football team win, for example.  But it might help you or me have a gentler attitude when we watch that game.  Here's how I think of my higher being.  It's a "he" today.  He raises me up.  I rise to meet him.  Together, we become my higher power or greatest good.  That entity sees and accomplishes miracles.

That entity faces its less-than-helpful behaviors and tries something different.  Driving home from my brother's home in Maine, it was dark and there were predictions of a terrible storm the next day.  It occurred to me that I might get snowbound in my hotel where there was no restaurant.  Procrastination is one of my personal challenges.  My  higher self took charge.  It drove me into a convenience store where I filled my gas tank, bought bottles of water, granola bars, and yogurt.

The next day I was snowbound.  I was prepared and unafraid.  My higher power had seen to it that I had food and water.  Yesterday, the snow stopped and I went out to my car.  Snowplows had piled snow up all around it.  I took a deep breath and borrowed a shovel.  I shoveled for an hour.  When I was finished, my heart was pounding and I was shaking.  I wanted to go back in my room and not face the five hour drive home.  Truly a higher being took charge again.  Step-by-step, I carried my luggage through the snow to the car. 

Where are the miracles?  Two months ago, I would have worried all night about whether I should drive home and so I wouldn't have slept.  I wouldn't have filled the tank or gotten supplies.  I would have churned with guilt because I didn't go out to my brother's that day.  I would have blamed myself for everything and railed at the gods as well.

Instead, it was all in sync.  I was serene and living only this moment's challenges.  I did what needed to be done to be safe.  And, I was happy and grateful.  On the way home, I sang:  "And he will raise me up on eagle's wings."  That's how I felt.  How is that not a miracle?  Roxie

Trailing Clouds of Glory

Last night, I dreamed that one of the first people to love me unconditionally died.  I woke up with a sense of urgency.  I wanted to contact this beautiful, evolved, spiritual man to thank him.  Upon further reflection, I realized that there have been several of these "spirit guides," if you will, who have come into my life.  I'm certain they come into all of our lives in various ways.

We start our journey as spiritual beings in a physical world slightly before we are born.  The poet, Wordsworth, suggested that as children we are still "trailing clouds of glory," bearing some memory of another, spiritual origin.  My childhood, as did so many childhoods, left me ravaged by loneliness, lack of love, and terror.  My child's understanding was that parents were supposed to love their children.  I believed for most of my life that my parents did love me; I deduced that what I received from them was love.  I lived my life with the understanding that "love" was defined by loneliness and terror.

In my home, there were occasional bright spots that I now think of as sent by a higher good.  There was my next door neighbor, a little girl named Terri, with whom I spent every free hour. She gave me the gift of imagination as we played out innumerable myths and fairy tales of our invention in the nearby woods. There was my grandmother who lived with us briefly. She taught me not to take my mother too seriously and that I was an angel.  There was Aunt Helen.  She taught me to ward off the threats of my brothers by ignoring them. There was Aunt Agnes, whom we affectionately called "Anya," who taught me that I was beautiful and had gifts and talents to give the world.  She taught me to appreciate the beauty of nature and she loved me unconditionally.  Finally, there was my dad, a workaholic for sure, who loved me as best he could and, over time, confirmed my perception that my mother did not love me.  "It's not you," he used to say.  "It's her.  She can't love."  This did help although it also sealed the coffin of my growing understanding that, for some reason, the gods had bequeathed a paranoid depressed mother upon me who played out her fantasies and delusions on my little psyche from the moment I was born until she died.

In high school, there were more such guides in the form of enlightened teachers and friends.  My best friend and lifetime ally, Joan, entered my life in a deeper way and we overtly explored new avenues of spirit life.  Two teachers, Dominican nuns, really showed me new paths.  Sister Michaelene, the math teacher, gave me two amazing elixirs.  She told her classes that evolution and creation were not mutually exclusive and she explained both scientifically and spiritually how they could easily co-exist.  That tool enlightens my journey to this day.  She also demonstrated to me my teaching gift.  I was failing Algebra II and she called me in and said, "Don't tell me you can't learn this stuff.  I know you better than that.  Here's the thing.  I have to have surgery and I'll be gone for three weeks.  You're going to teach the class.  We're going into negative numbers; go home and catch up and be ready to take my place on Monday."  This was a miraculous intervention.  What teacher does this?  I taught my peers Algebra II for three weeks, everyday.  I became a teacher because of her.

The other nun, Sister Amadeus, gave me the gift of creativity.  She was my senior English teacher, a young, passionate, rule-breaker, who forced us to write poetry.  I remember a poem I wrote for her called "Toast."  She showed me how it was a really good poem and made me see that I had the gift.

And then, in college, I met the man I dreamed about last night.  He was a priest of great influence and prestige in the Detroit arch-diocese.  I had a major crusth on him like every other girl I knew. There was only one difference.  He blew up my fantasy crush by actually falling in love with me.  For several months, I walked on air.  No one had ever loved me, ME, so completely before.  He would leave the priesthood, he said.  We would marry.  I dreamed of dark-haired babies with big eyes.  And then, I lost my nerve.  The memories of my mother's curses, her belief that I was evil, that I should not have been born rose up and I found myself, quite simply, suddenly and terribly unable to sleep at all and then ill.  I began losing weight and eventually I told this amazing man that I would die if I continued the relationship.  He knew it was true although neither of us really understood why.  I left him. His wisdom and love never left me.  He launched me on the next phase of my spiritual quest.

There are moments when we see our life in all its dimensions--its good and evil, its strenth and weakness, its love and hate.  This is such a moment.  A moment when I know I can hold within me the human condition and still be aware of my spiritual nature.  I came into the world trailing those "clouds of glory," as do we all.  Now and then, we catch another glimpse of them in later life.  They leave us warmed and shaken.  With thanks to my friend, Father Tom H.  Roxie

Enough!

Probably we're all having different feelings about the murder of 20 elementary school children and six adults today.  I'm a bit numb and maybe I need to be restarted.  I'm furious and despairing, sad, and despairing, despairing.  It's too much!  I know that the US has had fewer massacres than other countries.  I know that we are privileged to live in a relatively peaceful country.  And I know it's not good enough.

In recovery, they would say that life has become unmanageable and we need to surrender to a higher power.  I agree that life has become unmanageable but I'm thinking the higher powers that be, the Big Dude, whoever, are doing a terrible job!!!!  What bottom does the human race have to hit before we get rid of guns and begin teaching peace in our schools and our families?

You can say it's not guns and blah, blah, blah.  It IS guns.  It is guns everytime in the U.S.  I cannot bear another minute in which we foster a culture that kills the weak and the marginalized.  It has to stop. 

I'm thinking of the song, "Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me."  It comes back to the tiny drop in the bucket that is each of us and making peace with ourselves and with each person who comes our way.  This is my pledge:

I'm going to hug the next 26 people I interact with. 

Roxie

Happiness vs the Other Shoe Dropping

Sometimes, happiness sneaks up on you.  And don't kid yourself, happiness is a spiritual quality.  Happiness is being aware of yourself doing well in the midst of circumstances beyond your control.  It's essentially noticing.  As the hero says in Joe and the Volcano: "99% of people are asleep and the other 1% are amazed!"

I've used that quote before in my blogs but it always bears repeating.  If we're on a spiritual journey, we want to be in that one percent, right?  We want to be awake and amazed.  That's happiness and beyond.

So, how do we become awake.  The first answer is yada-yada always meditation.  I'm not going to say that today.  I think the first answer is conscious choice for your own well being.  So often, we are on auto-pilot, zinging along and remembering our selves only when life catches us up short.  For me, that usually means that something painful happens.  Why is that?  Well, I tend to doubt the good things coming my way, to wait for the other shoe to drop.  Probably, I won't find myself in happiness while my eyes are on pending disasters.

All of this was brought home to me last week when I made a difficult, conscious choice not to act on an impulse.  I literally had to slam my computer shut and go to bed in order to make the right and good choice in that moment.  I did it.  The next day, I found myself really happy.  I talked with my son unexpectedly and with a lightness of being that surprised me.  I noticed my happiness at Thanksgiving dinner.  I caught myself trying to prolong it, trying to engage and participate.  I realized that, for once, I wanted to be where I was instead of rushing off to my hotel room.  The people around me seemed like blessings.  Instead of draining me, they were filling me up.

I believe it was the conscious choice of the night before that paved the way for me to be awake and amazed at dinner that day.  I confess that I have since been cringing occasionally as I slip back into waiting for the old shoe to come crashing down.  But, I'm aware that it doesn't have to and even IF it does, I don't have to be crushed by it.  I wouldn't say I'm exactly happy today but the groundwork is prepped, the bread is rising, and I'm waiting, not for the shoe to drop, but for happiness.  Wait, is that it?  Ahhhhh.  Roxie