Courage to Enjoy

June 7, 2016 //

Rain returns today, dropping a gray curtain on the colors of spring. The drumbeat of the daily news fans the flames of our fears. Friends and family face challenges to health and well-being.

Sometimes we forget what accompanies the shadows of the world: the rain brings water to nourish the land; love waits patiently for our permission to shine forth; a deeper well of meaning waits only for us to lower our pail.

Words of Fra Giovanni in a letter to a friend written in the 16^th century come to mind. May they help each of us today find courage to seize the moment, whatever its shadows, and find the peace that passes conventional understanding.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven!

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see – and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look! …

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty – beneath its covering – that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.

Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.

And so, at this time, I greet you. Not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and the prayer that for you now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.

Categories Inspiration, Personal Growth, Spirituality

Walking With Us

May 19, 2016 //

A passage I recently read prompted this post. It expresses gratitude for friendship and the many ways that people walk with us through life.

Friends accompany us along differing paths and in differing depths. They have shared times that have been significant to us – difficult, perplexing, reflective, joyful and just plain fun. In that sense they represent chapters in our living history. They bring out the best in us and give us permission to be our “real” selves, even when it isn’t our best. They bear witness to who we are and what we are about.

I explored this theme in The Company of Friends, a post from this blog a year ago. Daphne Rose Kingma’s passage below brought it all back. Blessed are we who can acknowledge the gifts of our friends’ companionship.

Thank you for the circumstances that brought us together and have bound us into the sacred bundle of life. Thank you also for the gifts of our friendship: for knowledge that comforts, for words that encourage, for insight that blesses, for all the experiences shared, for the sweet bliss of deeply knowing each other in so many ways; for history and a hope of the future, for conversation and laughter, for silence, for bearing each other’s witness truly, for holding each other safe in our hearts with great love and tenderness.

Today is a good time to pause and give thanks for the friends in your world – maybe even contact them to tell them how much they mean to you.

Categories Relationships

Passion and Purpose

May 12, 2016 //

I took this morning’s first sip of coffee on the porch overlooking the distant hills. Day light crept across the trees below casting shadows on the far side of emerging leaves. Birds sang their songs of a new day’s connection, and thoughts of a friend came to mind.

Once more he undergoes chemo, this time for a new cancer unrelated to the first. His is a warrior spirit. His life is filled with passion and directed by purpose. It is this energy that will see him through yet again.

A reading from A Grateful Heart introduced me to another warrior whose attitude toward her cancer over thirty years ago provides a life lesson for us all, regardless of our history or the circumstances we face today.

In the lines below Dawna Markova’s message is both elusively simple and intensely profound. Our task in life is twofold: to find our passion, what we care most deeply about, and to live our purpose, that which gives meaning to our being here. Our daily choices both shape and convey the ways we fulfill the task.

I will not die an unlived life. / I will not live in fear

of falling or catching fire.

I choose to inhabit my days, / to allow my living to open me,

To make me less afraid, / more accessible, / to loosen my heart

until It becomes a wing, / a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance;

To live so that which came to me as seed

Goes to the next as blossom

And that which came to me as blossom,

Goes on as fruit.

Categories Coaching, Personal Growth

What Brings You Alive?

May 5, 2016 //

As darkness descended outside last night, the conversation of our men’s gathering deepened in the room. A stillness wrapped itself around the words of those who spoke, hallowing the circle of our sharing.

Reflecting afterward on how we show up with ourselves and each other, one of the men forwarded the link to Krista Tippett’s interview with poet David Whyte from her series On Being. I listened to it this morning. It is a gift to share.

Of the many jewels in the podcast I have selected the poem below for this post. It serves as a reminder to myself and to many with whom I have worked that the darkness in our lives holds the promise of horizons we cannot see and challenges us not to settle for less than we are here to manifest.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired / the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone / no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark / where the night has eyes / to recognize its own.

There you can be sure / you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb / tonight.

The night will give you a horizon / further than you can see.

You must learn one thing. / The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds / except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn

anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.

Categories Inspiration, Men's Issues, Personal Growth

The Good Old Days

April 28, 2016 //

I have returned home from a week in Colorado filled with friends, clients and family. The blessing of these relationships brought to mind a line from Carly Simon’s song – these are the good old days.

How easy it is to spend time looking back to what our life used to be or anticipating what might lie ahead. Given my age, I confess to a certain amount of dread for what the coming years will bring.

This focus has been fueled in part by Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal which I have read in preparation for an upcoming discussion with friends from high school days. Written by a doctor, it is a frank account of the aging process and death and ways we and our culture deal with both.

In Still Here, a book by Ram Dass completed after he experienced a debilitating stroke, I found a gentle reminder that has bolstered my spirits and resolve to be here now.

As the Tibetan teaching instructs, we learn not to “invite” the future into our thoughts before its time, or to cause ourselves unnecessary discomfort, for just as the past traps us in memories, the future traps us in anticipation.

In the popular idiom of days gone Carly Simon’s classic sums it up well.

We can never know about the days to come

But we think about them anyway

And I wonder if I’m really with you now

Or just chasin’ after some finer day

Anticipation, anticipation is makin’ me late, is keepin’ me waitin’…

And tomorrow we might not be together

I’m no prophet and I don’t know nature’s ways

So I’ll try and see into your eyes right now

And stay right here

‘cause these are the good old days.

Categories Growing Older, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spirituality

Our Special Dance

March 31, 2016 //

This morning two thoughts met in my mind and began to dance. They extend their hands to you in hopes you will join them in composing your day, especially if you are one who is searching for your life’s purpose.

The first thought comes from yesterday’s meditation in Joan Borysenko’s Pocketful of Miracles. It reminds us to pay attention to the “still, small voice within.” It is that voice which holds the clues to our unique calling in the universe. Our task is to pay attention to it and dance with it.

Patience is related to authentic spiritual courage. It is the deep faith that the universe is unfolding as it should, even when things are not happening according to our own plans or timetables. All we can do is act in integrity, in accordance with our priorities and the guidance of the still, small voice within. After that, we must surrender all attachment to the results.

The companion theme comes from M. J. Ryan’s anthology, A Grateful Heart. As the father of four children who dance to the music of their own callings, the image has particular resonance.

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost, the world will not have it.” So said dancer Martha Graham…we pray that each of us find our unique life force and express it as fully as we possibly can.

May each of us tune in to the still, small voice within and embrace the gifts of our special dance in the world.

Categories Coaching, Personal Growth, Spirituality

Gateways to Transformation

March 24, 2016 //

This past week I was in touch with friends who faced an unexpected turn in their life’s path. One of them, a survivor of a previous severe cancer, confronts a newly discovered and different form of the disease. The second friend battled a blaze that could have dealt his small family business a damaging blow.

My heart goes out to each of them. Having lived through a couple of life altering challenges of my own, I am aware of the depths of darkness that can accompany the initial news. I have also known the light of new life that is possible from their lessons.

With synchronous pull this week I was drawn into David Whyte’s entry on Disappointment in his book Consolations. While many of us think of disappointments as frustrating interruptions in the day’s trajectory, his use of the word focuses on our life threatening and life opening distresses.

Our attitude toward our circumstances and our effort are the only dynamics we control, and the choices we make facing our travails define who we are. May these words from David Whyte bolster each of us in confronting our disappointments.

Disappointment is inescapable but necessary…a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience.

Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, in the end, more rewarding.

Categories Personal Growth, Spirituality

Appalachian Returning

March 10, 2016 //

The temperature reached 60 yesterday cutting short the maple sugaring season. The snow retreats before the ascending sun. The earth reappears. It’s early yet – no doubt there will be more “weather” this month – but the days pronounce spring’s imminent arrival.

The return of spring renews the promise that below the surface of an apparently frozen landscape life’s energy continues to create its abundance. There is the assurance that we will surface from our winters of disappointment or arrested expectation. We are meant to be where we are – on track to resume our growth into the fullness of who we are becoming.

For me spring’s arrival is accompanied by the music of Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring and the Shaker hymn on which it is based. Stretching from Maine to Georgia the Appalachians have provided the backbone for my life’s journey. On its shoulders Peggy and I have worked and played and launched our family. Its hills have schooled us in the lessons of self-sufficiency, community and interdependence. Now in our later years we return home to its gentle slopes and their essential truths.

For your meditation today I suggest you listen to Copeland’s composition reflecting on the return of spring in your own life and the message of the Shaker hymn.

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free.

‘Tis the gift to come round where we ought to be.

And when we find ourselves in the place just right

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.

To turn, turn, will be our delight

Till by turning, turning, we come round right.

Categories Growing Older, Overview, Personal Growth, Spirituality

An Extra Day

March 3, 2016 //

Have you ever wished you had more time to finish all that is on your plate? What if you had an extra day? Would you spend it any differently? I doubt most of us would. Case in point: this year is leap year. According to the rules we have created, every four years we grant ourselves one more day. So, did you use this past Monday any differently? Or did you pretty much follow your routine for the first work day of the week?

Whatever the amount of time granted us in life, we control our attitude and our effort toward it. Suppose you allocate 15 minutes per day differently. Depending on your goal you may devote that time to rest, a relationship, meditation, prayer, exercise or working on that project you are postponing.

Here’s the calculation: assuming you allocate 8 hours for sleep and hygiene, you have 16 waking hours each day. 15 minutes X 365 days = 5,475 minutes; divided by 60 minutes = 91+ hours; divided by 16 waking hours = 5+ days. That’s five times more than leap year!

Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that it all begins with focusing on the present moment.

To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.

Peace is all around us – in the world and in nature – and within us – in our bodies and our spirits. Once we learn to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed. It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.

What practice will you begin or resume today?

Categories Performance, Personal Growth, Spirituality

Awakening the Energies of Love

February 25, 2016 //

How do we awaken to love? No doubt our answers begin with our life experiences and our age. We may feel it first in flames of infatuation. We may live it daily in the burn of our passions and committed relationships. We may give it in the glowing coals of our compassion.

In her book Awakening the Energies of Love Anne Hillman explores a more profound theme launched by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s quote.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.

Our ancestors’ taming of fire symbolizes our species’ differentiation from all others.

Propelled by a yearning that ran counter to their bodies’ counsel and to the time-tested wisdom of their clan, they took an enormous risk. Instead of running away from fire, they engaged it…

Eons later we find ourselves in another defining era. Our technology links us as a global tribe, while our fear and greed threaten our very existence. Led to listen to our better angels and our expanding consciousness, Anne challenges us to engage our capacities for transformation, the energies of love.

We too stand at an evolutionary juncture…a longing to be somehow more than we are… Our longing – our yearning – is part and parcel of the song of the soul, and it has always beckoned us toward a future that is not ours alone. We may choose to follow it by ourselves, but that we follow it matters to generations; for just as the embers of the first fire ignited the power of language, those of the second will ignite the power in our hearts.

I highly commend Anne’s book.