No! This post is not about managing financial resources.  It’s about cultivating the qualities that inspire you on your life’s path. 

We live on a hillside, so any travel coming or going requires ascending slopes. The shortest is a half-mile. The longest is more than twice that.  In addition to length, the slopes vary in gradient, a fact that immediately becomes apparent when walking them! 

During the recent heat wave, I set out for an early morning walk. Hot and tired as I labored up one half-mile stretch near the end, a voice asked me, why are you doing this? Fortunately, my mind found enough oxygen to deliver an answer. 

As I have written in posts over the years, we only control two things in life – our attitude and our effort. Rather than dwell on my fatigue and the distance remaining to reach the crest of the hill, a rationale came to mind that bolstered my attitude: your effort is an investment in your future; you are tending your physical health, and you are following your vocation to explore meaning in life’s terrain and share its lessons with others.

The effort in this example involves setting an intention to cultivate physical health, breaking its attainment into manageable pieces, and following through by walking those steps. The attitude includes reminding myself that if I take one step at a time with the expectation that that there are lessons to learn, I can do this.  

As you consider your own path, what goals do you currently have that are worthy of your effort? What intentions might you adopt today? Then ask yourself, what manageable steps can I take each day to move up the hills in my life to achieve those desired outcomes?    

Over the weekend trees blown by the wind fell on electrical lines cutting off power to many members of our community. Thanks to the efforts of those tasked with disentangling heavy limbs from live wires and repairing broken connections, power was restored within a matter of hours.

For the most part those of us living in remote areas are accustomed to such interruptions and have attuned our attitudes and responses accordingly. At the same time, I confess that powerful winds tap the fears in my lizard brain.

Perhaps planted during childhood in Kansas and Oklahoma when tornado warnings would send our family to huddle in our shelter rooms, those fears grew with age during years of monitoring hurricanes coming up the east coast when we lived there. Today, strong gusts continue to bring me the greatest unease.

Yesterday, I discovered that a large birch tree on our land had succumbed to the wind’s force. Fortunately, it fell downhill from the lines into our house. As I assessed the situation it occurred to me that the very forces I feared had brought a gift. Laid out before me was the balance of firewood we would need to feed our stoves in the coming winter. In addition, the timing could not be more propitious, occurring before the full arrival of the seasonal black fly nuisance. As the picture shows, I began bucking it up.

Perhaps this episode can serve as reminder to you as well. What is a gift within the fears you face today? How can it help transform your prospects for the coming days?  Is it helpful to know that you are not alone?

Lessons from the liminal life

The pandemic has thrust us into a free fall, a plummet into loss – of control, resources, relationships, health, and for too many, life itself. We are suspended between what was and what will be. We are in a liminal time.

Liminal passages are periods of “neither/nor” as well as “both/and.” An adolescent, whose behavior embraces both realities, is no longer a child but not yet an adult. When we mourn, we honor the blessings of the intimacies we knew while holding the pain of the loss.

Joseph Campbell and Arnold Van Gennep studied and identified key patterns of the liminal time. Focusing on four of those dynamics may help us take more control over the trajectory of our own upended lives.

Each liminal stage holds for us a jewel, a truth of insight, knowledge or understanding. In order to access that precious awareness, we go through many demanding trials. We are challenged by trolls, those who confront us with the dark sides of our nature, and we are assisted by guides, those who elicit our redeeming lights. Inevitably, the precious jewel is protected by a guardian who must be persuaded or conquered to gain access.

Liminal times beckon us to identify and generate our answers to four questions.

• What for me are the jewels at the heart of this difficult time?
• Who is/are the guardian/s of those precious insights?
• What are the dark-side trolls keeping me from getting there?
• Who are the guides I can turn to for advocacy and support?

This time of great upheaval threatens us individually and collectively. With the time granted us may one of our responses be to seek the growth possible within it, and may we support each other in that pursuit.

In the early days of map making cartographers designated unexplored regions with images of threatening beasts. “Here be dragons.” The image serves us today. How do we face the demons that lie within us?

A first step in confronting our dragons is to see them for what they are. My profession has taught me to pay attention to projection – the unconscious tendency to transfer our personal dynamics on to others whom we then blame (or bless). Becoming aware of our fears begins to defuse them.

A second step is to explore what our demons tell us about ourselves. Why are they there? In one of his letters written to a young poet Rainer Marie Rilke writes:

We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has an abyss, it is ours… And if we would live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what now appears to us as most alien will become our truest, most trustworthy friend.  (July 11th, p. 192) 

Lastly, when we befriend our fears by acknowledging their truth, we often find they hold a jewel. Rilke continues:

Let us not forget the ancient myths … about dragons that at the last moment transform into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage. Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help.

If our demons are powers that call out for our recognition or help, what is one of yours? What is its truth? Who is it calling you to be? What is it calling you to do?