Hydrangea at Grace Cathedral

Yesterday, I wrote about Grief, Growth and Beautiful People. I wanted to introduce you to a very important book about grief and moving toward beauty through grieving.

Over the course of the past 24 hours, grief has been on my mind. Beauty has been in my awareness. I’ve wondered about the seeming incongruousness of our world that is easy for a human mind to justify, but so hard for the heart to hold.

The incongruousness of a world we’ve created where some have so much more than they could ever, ever need, and others are dying from lack of clean water, food, or love.

Yes, this is the world we humans have created, the world based on our ideas of how things should be.

It’s okay to have so much since I’ve worked hard for it, I’ve done what it takes to make it, and others haven’t. Why should I care or share?

It’s okay to not have to think of others, because I’ve been born into privilege, and privilege means I don’t have to consider those who aren’t privileged.

It’s okay for me to legislate my beliefs into law because I know better and am right.

I, too, have thought these thoughts and believed these beliefs throughout my life. I was born into privilege and for most of my life, even though I knew on some deep level that those privileges hadn’t been earned and weren’t part of the natural world, I really never looked beneath the covers of that privilege to see what was hiding underneath.

The world itself,

the natural world we humans are so damn lucky to be a part of, has no beliefs written upon its pages. In reality, there may be incongruencies there as well, but if we look very closely and are very honest with ourselves, we can’t even say we understand this world, our place in it or why we’re here…or for that matter, who and what we really are. It’s really all conjecture.

What is clear is that we’re out of balance. It feels as though our structures are out of balance, and our way of life is out of balance.

Yesterday, after a lovely conversation over coffee downtown with fellow coach Heather Mills, I decided to walk home along some of the most beautiful scenic streets of San Francisco. Heather and I had talked about how easy it is to forget we’re a part of this natural world when we’re surrounded by the cold and steel secular structure of our man-made surroundings. Concrete gray surrounded us as we talked, and nowhere immediate in our gaze was there green or blue, or any other bright color of Mother Earth in our gaze. I had shared with Heather about the feelings I encountered when I returned home from India a few years ago. I had been struck by how cold and lifeless it felt here compared to the devotion-laced air I breathed in my travels there, and this recognition had brought with it great sadness.

On my walk home,

I stopped to watch the cable cars, gazed at the Fairmont Hotel and surrounding buildings with beautiful design details, and wandered the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral. As I almost always do when I walk, I was snapping pictures along the way. It’s a form of meditation for me, because as I look through the lens, even the lens of this quirky iPhone, my artist eye has a chance to behold what it sees with a sense of color, balance, composition, intrigue and surprise.

I felt the contradiction between seeing beauty in these concrete creations, while also feeling a sense of estrangement. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what feels so lifeless in them. I looked around at the people I was passing and we all seemed to be so intent on something else other than what was right in front of us – this beautiful sacred creation of life itself that constantly invites us to be amazed. In some ways, what brought me back to the beauty of creation was this quirky artist’s eye…the one that stops to look and feel and compose…and then share images into the interwebs by way of my phone.

In yesterday’s post, I shared this quote:

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” – Elizabeth Kubler Ross

On the final leg of my walk,

I felt a welling up of grief and the tears began to flow. So much beauty. I am swimming in so much beauty, and so much of the time I’m lost in my thoughts and beliefs and fears about the world, my place in it and what might happen. So much of the time I believe what I feel in my surroundings rather than feeling what is deep in my heart.

I thought about how things might be if we lived in a world inhabited by seven billion beautiful people…

Seven billion people who have found their way out of the depths of suffering, struggle, and loss.

Seven billion people filled with appreciation, sensitivity, compassion, gentleness and a deep loving concern.

Seven billion beautiful people.

As Kubler Ross writes, beautiful people don’t just happen. We become beautiful people by feeling, seeing and knowing the depths of suffering and what it means to be human.

Perhaps…

our doorway out of our current predicament is the same doorway into our awakening to the beauty we are, to the beauty of each other, to the beauty inherent in life itself.

Perhaps the fix we’re looking for, that congress is trying to legislate, that our politicians are fumbling to express is really as simple as coming to remember the sacred by feeling the depths of our own suffering that is right here, right now. Maybe, through this doorway of remembering, we might feel our way into a world of enough, of connection, of deep loving concern for all beings.

All the distractions we feed ourselves are done so we don’t have to feel. There is no human being on earth that does not suffer; yet there are many human beings who have learned, very well, how to not feel.

Privilege, like oppression, is infused with suffering.

Having too much, like having not enough, is infused with suffering.

Believing we know who we are, like forgetting who we really are, is infused with suffering.

Not feeling our own suffering is infused with suffering.

Perhaps we are on the threshold of this shift, right now, and our doorway in is to feel the depths of the grief that is right here in front of us.

Grief is an intelligent process.

After all, it can lead us from suffering to beauty, to compassion, to “gentleness and a deep loving concern”. It can lead us from separation to connection. It can lead us to all that is sacred within ourselves, and to a remembering of what is at the sacred heart of life in each other, all seven billion of us.

And, I know first hand, that fully grieving leads to joy and peace… a sweet simple joy, a lighthearted love of life.

What would it be like if the world were filled with seven billion people consciously grieving the state of our world, the loss of awareness of the sacred, our sense of separation, our fears of each other…grieving the very real suffering that exists right now?

How would things be if seven billion people felt this sweet simple joy, a lighthearted love of life that comes from remembering the sacred?

People all over the world feel grief every day. They face circumstances I could not even imagine. They see horrors, they know suffering, they live with grief.

Many of us who know abundance and plenty, enjoy freedom others could never imagine, and have our health are also experiencing grief about what is happening on the planet, although we may not be able to put in words what is happening.

In my short travels in India, even though many there I saw lived with so much less than what I have in my life, I also saw joy, a kind of joy I see here less and less.

I have a sense children already are, for as children we are still in touch with what’s real. Most children see through the illusions their parents have about life, but don’t know how to deal with the discrepancy between what they see and what their parents claim is reality.

I know all I can do is to continue to feel, continue to grieve what we’ve done to our world.

How have I contributed? How do I continue to be unconscious? What can I offer that I am not yet offering?

And, can I remember the sacred in the everyday moments of life?

…

What would it be like for all seven billion of us to walk through this doorway into awakening? Perhaps there would be seven billion people who’ve come to realize the inherent beauty that’s always been at the heart of who they really are.

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” – Elizabeth Kubler Ross

broken-open heart

Yes, beautiful people don’t just happen. And, what can open our hearts to the beauty of life, making us beautiful people, are the events that every human being experiences throughout our lives. Living is a vulnerable proposition. It’s what we do with the experiences, how we hold them, if we are open to the gift of them, that awaken the soul to its true richness and beauty.

We all experience suffering.

On a retreat with Adyashanti, he once explained that suffering is our doorway in to awakening. And I would add, to our beauty.

Difficulty in life is real. We all, every human being, experiences what Kubler-Ross writes about.

And, it is these difficulties that are the pathway to a broken-open heart. In my experience, I’ve felt heartbreak many times. And, when I’ve fully felt the loss, when I’ve allowed grief to take me in to the depths of that feeling, riding the line of its experience in my body, that is when my heart breaks open to the beauty inherent in these times of life.

a beautiful offering

I’m writing today to let you know of a beautiful ebook I’ve been blessed and honored to be a contributor to:

Picking Up the Pieces guide

is an offering by Alana Sheeren. An offering from one woman, and her fellow broken-open-hearted friends, that guides you through the many facets of the journey of grief.

Alana started writing at LifeAfterBenjamin.com after her baby boy, Benjamin, was stillborn last year.  She has been in the deep process of grief, sharing some very intimate moments along the way.

This guide is not only beautifully designed and put together, it’s also filled with so much wisdom about grief and the process of grief.

The guide is written by Alana, designed by Shenee Howard, with artwork by Diana Nelson and supplemented with contributions from Christa Gallopoulos, Dyana Valentine, Emily Lewis, Erica Staab, Gail Larsen, Karen Maezen Miller, Roos Stamet-Geurs, Vera Kate Hadley and me.

Grief

Grief takes many forms and appears, many times, when we least expect it.

I wholeheartedly recommend Alana’s guide.

With love to Alana, and to you,

Julie

“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”  Audre Lorde

There is power in truly wanting to see through your own bullshit.

Since I opened the door to wanting to know about silence, privilege and oppression, so much has been shifting and churning. I am already wiser for this exploration. Your comments have touched raw nerves. My own words are doing the same.

Over the past six days, I kept writing and sitting. Nothing clear would come out. I spoke with my writing partner, Jeanne, and clarity seemed to show up for a bit. But the next morning when it came time to write, fog and confusion, again. Something here doesn’t want to be seen. I don’t want to see it; but, I do. I want to be free.

Silence, privilege and oppression.

Three pretty powerful topics, and I’ve lumped them all together. They are intertwined.

Some of you have asked why I’m exploring this topic. Something is pushing me to see what I don’t want to see. I want to know what keeps me silent. I want to know where I am blind. I want to know where I am ignorant. I want to see what I haven’t been willing to see. I want to be free. And, it is foggy. It feels like something painful is coming to light.

I know that what stays hidden, what stays in the dark, hurts us all.

A few nights ago,

after opening this can of who knows what, anger and grief finally came pouring out. I kept yelling, over and over, out loud, very out loud, from someplace deep inside, “I don’t understand men’s silence.” “I don’t understand.” “How can you stay silent about what happens to women, when there are women in your life you love? Your mother, your sister, me?”

I was saying it to him, my partner…and at the same time, I was saying it to all the world’s men.

After so many years wondering what it would be like to simply say what had been kept inside for so long, I experienced it. It wasn’t clumsy at all. It was clear. It was alive. It was powerful. It came from someplace deep within my body.

The anger was a deep and boiling. It’s been cooking for some time. It burned its way through. It burned itself out of me. After it subsided, grief began to spill out. A deep, deep grief about the way things are in the world. So much grief.

But as everything came tumbling out of my body, the rage, the grief and the tears, I also felt something inside me become stronger. It was as if I found a part of myself that I had lost a long time ago. It’s the part that I silenced.

It is still a bit hazy,

but I’m going to try to write it in hopes it will become more clear.

I don’t understand my partner’s silence. He is a good man. I love him. I feel so much anger and so much love. It was a sign that something was up in me, something coming up to be seen through, something that was ready to be set free.

There is an old, worn out relationship between me and men. In opening the door to seeing my complacency and silence, I see even more clearly how these things are fueled by my conditioned loyalty with men, especially the men in my life that hold power. The men in my life who hold power are white men. Educated men. Middle-class men. Men I love.

If you asked them, they might not feel powerful. In fact, I bet they don’t feel powerful. So many men have said they feel powerless in this culture. Yet, in relationship to me, they seem powerful. They seem to hold the power. What’s that about?

As a girl, I learned I held no power. Small body. Big men. No way I could hold my own.

As a girl, I learned my role was to take care of men, and to try to help them feel good about themselves.

As a girl, I learned to be silent about the things they did that didn’t feel right to me, that didn’t feel good.

As a girl, I learned to stay silent: silent = safe.

As a girl, this was survival.

As a woman, it is no longer survival, it is conditioning, habitual conditioning that covers old fears. old betrayals and very real oppression.

The conditioning played itself out until, one day, the urge to know the truth, to be free of the conditioning, became stronger than the urge to stay safe. As Lorde wrote, we can incite our own learning, if we follow the urge for truth.

So what is the relationship between silence, privilege and power?

You may already know this. I didn’t know, until these past few days, how they have played out in my life.

Over the last few days, every time I tried to write about this, I would feel sick to my stomach. Something really uncomfortable was coming up. I could only see fog, and writing didn’t clear it like it usually does.

The morning after so much anger rose up and burned out of me, I went for a walk in the woods across the street from our home. I could hear the birds calling, the water rushing down the stream, and the rustle of the early morning breeze. As I walked deeper into the park, I could feel the earth alive. I could feel her holding me, Mother earth. I felt so much love from everything alive around me. In that holding, more grief tumbled out. The tears literally poured from my eyes.

As the grief subsided, I could feel something shift. It was as if a distancing had happened, a distancing between me and men. Then I saw it clearly.

My silence earns me privilege, and it costs me my power.

Let me say that again. My silence earns me privilege, and it costs me my power. I give away my power to have privilege.

I may feel I have power, but as long as that power is based on a privilege that is hollow at its core, the power is hollow, too.

Any privilege is hollow at its core.

Privilege is not the way Spirit works. It is not the way of soul. It is not the way of the Earth. And it is not the way of the Mother of us all.

Privilege is the way of patriarchy.

It’s an exchange. A pact. A very unconscious pact. Unconscious in me, until now.

This pact between privilege, power and silence upholds this system of domination and control.

Yuck.

As the tears poured from my eyes, I felt grief rise up and leave. I felt a letting go of this pact of silence. I felt my own autonomy grow. I felt a solidness in myself take hold.

I want to be free, a woman liberated from her own silence.

…

This is part two in a series of posts on silence, privilege and oppression. You can read part one, here. I don’t know how many more there will be. Thank you for walking beside me through this exploration. I would love to know your reactions, comments and experiences with these very tender places.

Blessings, Julie

I bow down in complete awe to the immense depth and breadth of what is possible to experience as a human being.

…

To know the full range of being human is to know the capacity for great joy and great sorrow. To feel so alive that nothing is pushed away. Nothing is deemed too difficult to feel, too shallow to experience, too risky to allow out into the world.

Yesterday, I was feeling playful and light. Totally free. Smiling from my belly.

This morning, I woke up a little groggy. Had some tea. Sat down to email, twitter and facebook. I found a tweet from Yoko Ono, followed the thread and wound my way to this video that Yoko created to celebrate what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday.

I watched the footage from the seventies, and listened intently to the brilliance of John’s genius. I listened to his wisdom, how he was willing to do things no one else dared. How he spoke of Ghandi and Martin Luther King embodying non-violence as a way to peace, and how he spoke of them being shot for it. I thought of how amazing it is that John was sharing his vision for love and peace, and he, too, was shot for it.

And then I began to cry. A deep cry, a cry of grief. A feeling of grief so deep that it found its way back to love. I cried for the beauty of John Lennon’s vision. I cried for his vision that still has not come to pass thirty years after his death. I discovered unexpected grief. Perhaps mine. Perhaps the collective. It doesn’t really matter. I cried.

…

Grief is the doorway to love, and to life. It is by way of grief, we begin to know death.

Grief teaches us about what we’ve killed within ourselves, and therefore it teaches us what we’ve killed in others, and in the world itself. What we’ve pushed down into the dark because we couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t allow ourselves to feel the immensity of its pain.

Bindu Wiles writes, “If you run from the sorrow, you live a half life.”

Some of us avoid pain and sorrow. Some of us avoid play and joy. Some of us avoid anger and rage. Some of us avoid vulnerability and softness.Whatever we avoid is in the other half of life that we aren’t living.

I ask myself, “What’s in that other half that I am not living?”

I have found the more I am willing to be with the grief that is always present when we’re living a half life, the more it teaches me what it is I’ve been avoiding.

Grief is a loving companion. It takes our hand and walks with us. It wakes us up to the power and vulnerability inherent in a heart that is willing to open to the mystery of life.

…

Love and grief are deeply intertwined.

When my late husband died, I feared being obliterated by the grief. I discovered I couldn’t feel the grief fully until I allowed myself to feel the love I had for him fully.

When my mother died and I sat with her body, and sat with the grief that was raging through me, I was mysteriously given the opportunity to experience a profound love for her I had never  known.

How can I be a whole human being, if I’m living a half life?

Isn’t it our humanity that’s needed right now, our very real and vulnerable humanness? Isn’t it an embodied spirit that’s needed, a playful, joyful humanity that doesn’t shy away from another’s suffering?

I know many people who don’t travel to ‘difficult places’ because they fear seeing the suffering that is very real. I, too, feared traveling to India because I didn’t know if I could handle seeing the poverty. That fear was keeping me from a whole life. That fear was keeping me in the half life Bindu speaks of. What I discovered was a delightful playfulness in the children that were begging on the Ghats of Varanasi. Yes, they experience a great amount of difficulty. And, in seeing the difficulty up close, I realized that everything I think they are experiencing is only what I imagine in my mind. When I am not willing to be with something in another, it is my own fear of being with that in myself. It stems from living a half life.

…

When I am stuck in the land of ‘there is no mystery’, I think I know what this world needs to heal. I think I know how to save it, or even that it needs to be saved. Maybe it’s humans that need to be saved, and I don’t mean saved as in born again. I mean saved as in waking up to what we believe we have killed within ourselves. Maybe it’s as simple as waking up to what I believe I have killed within me, waking up to the love that is waiting in the half of my heart I don’t dare open, the half of my heart I don’t dare share.

I do know that we humans have imposed ourselves on this world for far too long. We’ve become great at dominating and not so good at coming into rhythm with Life. Sometimes doing is too much. Sometimes it is good to stop and listen, to feel, to open and receive that which might cause us to remember humility and awe for life itself, for the sheer wonder and delight that we are breathing at all, that something is breathing us.

When I am in fix-it mode, I think my powers as a human being are far greater than the intelligence of the creative mystery that breathes us, that smiles us, that can heal us. The old way of doing things was to impose our ideas of what was wrong with the situation so that we could fix it, and in turn feel better about not feeling that place in ourselves that was being mirrored out there. I know this way well. I’ve wanted to fix the things that I see are broken. I’ve wanted to fix the things that cause ME pain.

As I write this, I see how I (over and over again) react to what causes me pain by attempting to impose what I believe to be a better way to be. It’s painful to see it, and I’m not all that proud of it. And, what I also know from experience, is that when I choose to feel the pain I am fleeing by my attempts to ‘fix it’, what emerges is love, a love so bright and clean and full because it came out of the cauldron of grief. And in this love, is a different way, a new way that is about coming together, collaboration, creativity, sharing, living simply, honoring, respecting. This love isn’t about not doing, but rather it is about moving from a deeper, wiser place.

I know deep in my bones that grieving, and the healing and love it brings, is a natural, intelligent process. And, it takes being open to that process, which is a deep mystery. Whether we want to know it or not, we are bathed in that mystery. We are that mystery.

That mystery is trying to get our attention. It is whispering to us, giving voice to a different way to be. I know I hear that voice from within, a voice that scares the crap out of me, because it asks that I surrender to it. I would be lying to you if I told you it no longer scared me. Yet, I’ve come to a place where the voice that wants to ‘fix it all’ scares me more. I see where trying to fix it all has gotten us. I see where trying to fix it all has gotten me.

This quiet, yet insistent voice within doesn’t bargain with me. There is no bargaining with it. It only shares one step at a time. It asks us to trust in something greater than ourselves. It asks us to trust in love.

I bow down in complete awe to the immense depth and breadth of what is possible to experience as a human being. I bow down to love.

…

Love, by John Lennon

Love is real, real is love
Love is feeling, feeling love
Love is wanting to be loved

Love is touch, touch is love
Love is reaching, reaching love
Love is asking to be loved

Love is you
You and me
Love is knowing
we can be

Love is free, free is love
Love is living, living love
Love is needed to be loved

Loss can be an opening, a portal to profound transformation.

We all lose in our lives. We all experience loss. When we bring a depth of awareness to the experience of the loss, and the hole the loss leaves, the portal can open wide, embracing us like a mother embraces her child.

Like you, I’ve experienced profound loss in my life. More than once.

Loss, Love and Life

I’ve also worked closely, and intimately, with women who lost their husbands in 9/11. Many of the remarkable moments I experienced with these women came as I facilitated a course on dating and new relationship.

Over the course of 18 months, in numerous groups around the New York City area, we explored the deep desire to love again after profound loss and grief.

Portals opened wide for these women. They had already done some powerful grief work before coming to this particular course that I had developed. Using my own experiences of grief, exploration of self, and beginning to date anew from the death of my late-husband in the design, the course laid out a journey of opening the heart to the deep emotions that had been buried.

After all, if we are to open our hearts to love again, whatever is in our hearts, whatever has been buried in an effort to not feel, will come tumbling out. When we have a safe, nurturing community in which to feel and express these things, transformation can happen – the transformation of our grief into powerful presence, and transformation of who we thought we were into who we come to know ourselves to truly be.

And, when we realize we are still alive, that it’s okay to live again, to really live with joy and passion, we begin to honor the life being offered to us in each moment.

Feeling Grief and Love Together

Loss, love and life are intertwined. In grieving the death of my late-husband, I found transformation happened when I felt both the grief and the love together. Grieving with the love I felt for him, the love I knew he felt for me, and the love I could feel this portal was holding me in, was deep and rich and powerful.

Grief is an entirely intelligent process, if we are willing to open to its embrace. Grief brings us right up against all the things we shield ourselves from feeling.

And, there is deep love in grief. I experienced it as an invitation to come to truly know the limitations of being a human being, living a human life. I came to realize the deep peace in surrendering to life on life’s terms, not on mine. I came to see that life isn’t conspiring against me; rather, life is unfolding to its own rhythm, not ‘mine’.

In the shattering of the illusion of control, what arises is a willingness to dance to this rhythm wherever it takes you. In this rhythm, there is divine love.

Beautiful Strength

In the course with the women who had lost their husbands in 9/11, a beautiful strength began to make itself known from within them. Through our time together, a natural delight in the idea of embracing life again began to emerge. The women organically began to follow their own heart’s desires to love. In some, the desire was to date, in others it wasn’t. What did appear, though, was a desire to truly live again, knowing that it is okay to be the survivor. One can move forward from something as profoundly devastating as 9/11, as the survivor, and learn to truly have gratitude for the experience of being alive.

This gratitude comes from embracing the totality of experience; not just the ‘good’ things life offers, but embracing the gift of life itself.

One thing loss has taught me is that each day I am here is truly a divine gift. Each year the life odometer turns over, and in that turning I can honestly say I am grateful to be getting older. Getting older means I am still here, alive, living in this mystery. and receiving the wisdom that comes from living into these rich years.

Toward the end of the eighteen months that this course was offered, one woman renamed our course, “From alone to alive”.

Back in May, the lovely Nicola Warwick invited me to be a part of a beautiful project. She was putting together an ebook offering titled, “Loss Love Life”. This was to be a compilation of writings about the power of loss, transition and change with contributions from Thursday’s Child, Patti Digh, Margaret Fuller, Danielle LaPorte, Michael Nobbs, Carolyn Rubenstein, Andrea Schroeder, Kate Swoboda, Julie Jordan Scott, Dyana Valentine, Eydie Watts Nicola Warwick, and me.

I was honored to submit my offering to this work. This ebook is now available for download. It is truly a remarkable collection of open-hearted writing about these three powerful things, Loss, Love and Life. If you feel called, visit Nicola’s site and download this work. I think you’ll find reading what is shared here to be transformative in itself.

And, you?

I’d love to know what you’ve experienced with loss and the powerful tumult that follows. If you feel willing, share here, with us, any insights, experiences, or understandings you’ve had.

Image: courtesy of Tapperboy on Flickr; Creative Commons 2.0

belle endormie, by colodio

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” ~Arundhati Roy

::

I was introduced to this amazing woman when I read her first and only novel, The God of Small Things, in 1997.  In this book, Roy writes about the many varied faces of love…and there are many. Her words are beautiful. They are real. They are alive.

When I first read this quote, so many things jumped out at me. I had to read it over and over, letting what she was really imparting, that transmission between the words, fill me with its wisdom.

What I love about her words is the raw truth she shares. In a world that is filled with so many ways to turn away from reality, including the one I’ve flirted with for so long, that of being a spiritual seeker, she calls me back to reality. Reality in all its rapturous beauty, vulgar disparity, unspeakable violence. Reality where I am utterly insignificant – simply one of billions of people existing on this planet right now, and just one of a gazillion forms of life on mother earth.

In most places, we’re encouraged to see our specialness, to pump ourselves up with our own importance, breeding a kind of hierarchical sense to one’s existence. To never forget my own insignificance reduces that sense of importance and specialness. Somewhere in this insignificance is true humility…

What comes to me from this quote is her pure love for this life. And her inviting us to open our eyes, our hearts to the fullness of human experience. Opening to life fully, all of it. To embrace the paradox of joy in the saddest places, opening to beauty in the most raw, painful moments of life.

::

My seeking began at a young age. I grew up in a family without religious dogma. We did go to church, occasionally. At the same time, Mom and Dad had their own belief systems about God. How could you not, growing up in this western culture? The wonderful thing they did pass on was a thirst to know, a longing to know the real God. I remember the longing in my heart, as a young girl, filling me with ache. A longing that kept at me, and kept at me, and kept at me….

Throughout my early adult years, I was busy raising a family, working, building our own home, doing things people do in everyday life. Normal, mundane things. Sometimes the longing would peek through in these simple moments of the day. My heart would ache, tears would well up, a sense of emptiness would make itself known. Immediately, my mind would jump in, wondering what was missing. Thoughts would jump in, convincing me that there was something I had to find ‘out there’, something I would have to do one day, something somewhere that would satisfy this longing. My mind always looked to the future as the storehouse of what my heart was longing for. My heart simply felt emptiness, some deep sadness, aching, hungering, longing…

::

When my late husband died suddenly, at 4 in the morning, my heart was torn open. His heart gave out, mine tore open. It was a place of no mind. Just sheer raw pain. Enough pain to put me in shock. I wandered in this desert for a long time. I wished I could be more there, more present, more mother, more together; but, I wasn’t.

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I searched for a way to live with this ragged, jagged heart, ’cause it wasn’t going away. If I tried to talk myself out of this place, my heart would have no part of it. It knew. It knows. The heart knows the wisdom of grief, the intelligence of the process of moving through it all, the joy that is waiting on the other side, the broken-open heartedness that is waiting if one is willing to keep inviting it in.

I realized the profound beauty in this process of grief and in this place of broken-open heartedness. Others I shared this beauty with couldn’t understand my use of that word. Beauty in grief? Beauty in death? Beauty in such profound pain? Yet, the profound aliveness I finally felt after 38 years of closed-heartedness was breathtakingly beautiful, because of just that…the profound aliveness that poured out of my broken-open heart.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not romanticizing death. I’m not minimizing the pain my children went through, my husband’s mother went through, our family went through, or I went through. Minimizing pain does not bring beauty. Feeling pain does. Indulging in pain, does not bring beauty. Experiencing pain does.

It would have been so easy to die while I was alive. A part of me wanted to. Simply to numb it and get on with life. Many people encouraged that. But something, and it certainly wasn’t my mind, wouldn’t let me…my heart knew the pain was my doorway in, the doorway in to that which I had been longing for.

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Nothing in life is a straight linear line. Instead, it seems to move in spirals, in every increasing circles of wisdom and understanding. As the longing grew, I became a seeker. A seeker of that which would satisfy this longing. A seeker of that which would end the pain. A seeker of that which would fill the hole. I was pursuing this ‘beauty to its lair’.

All along I thought “I” was seeking, that I had the power to find this source of beauty. All along I thought my seeking was going to bring home the bounty of beauty, as if I could really find this beauty in its lair and capture it for my own pleasure.

The seeking was trying to ‘do’ the longing in the only way my very humanness could. The seeking was necessary, but it was never in charge. The seeker can’t find the lair. But the pursuit brings forth beauty. It’s the nature of the paradox of our existence. Both divine and human. Both heart and mind. Both being and doing. The paradox of seeking is that in the seeking we find that which could never be captured, and we find that seeking is really keeping us from that which we seek.

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All along what I was seeking was right here within me, surrounding me, hidden in the one place I never thought to look. What I was longing for has been here all the time.

Sometimes it takes going on a hunt for it, pursuing it to land’s end, to know it has been right here all along. Here in the midst of the turmoil. This is the goddess. This is discovering light in all our broken places.

Beauty’s lair is all around us, yet we’ll only catch glimpses until we open to the grace that is always here, the grace that invites us to open our hearts to our own insignificance.

We are swimming in our own insignificance. Just look out your eyes at the wonder life is. We are a tiny insignificant part of this life, yet the paradox is when we realize our insignificance we realize that our being here is immensely significant.

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The only thing that causes us to lose this dream Roy speaks of is the belief we are separate. The illusion of separation is what allows us to turn away, to get used to the unspeakable happenings of our time, to believe we are more significant than another being, or even the earth itself.

The only dream worth having is the dream that is no dream. It is the awakening to what is right in front of us, behind us, all around us…the infinite that has no edges, top, bottom…the infinite that is missing nothing, that holds everything.

In this great infinite that is reality, what I am is insignificant, and completely significant. What I have to offer cannot be offered by any other. And in the totality of it all, I am but a drop in the ocean.

My humanness, that insignificance, is the great gift, because there I find humility and awe. To embrace it all, even those things I desperately want to turn away from, is to be in right relationship with life. Joy can be found in those sad places. Suffering can be our doorway in, in to a place of lightness of being, and broken-open-heartedness.

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As Roy says, “Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe.”

This is the world of the goddess, the world we awaken to when we come out of our slumber enough to realize that all along we’ve been sleeping in beauty’s lair.

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And, you?

I’d love to know what you’ve discovered in beauty’s lair.

image by Colodio, licensed under CC 2.0

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my Mother’s death.  It’s so hard to believe it’s been one year. I remember I couldn’t write for a while after she died. It was as if things needed to settle inside me. No, settle isn’t quite right. Things needed to move around, push their way out, burrow deep inside, get all mixed around, catywampus-sideways…everything just had to be left alone to be inside me. One thing I have become all-too-familiar with is the need for grief to be welcomed and befriended. It is an intelligent process, grief. I have experienced that when you open to it, don’t rush it, don’t fight it, even befriend it by giving in to it and entering the darkness of it with trust, it will move you, it will shake you, it will bring you somewhere out the other side of the darkness, somewhere new that you never expected.

Mom’s death was a lesson in letting go on so many levels. Letting go of my longing for her to be cured of her cancer, letting go of her being open to talking about her death, letting go of being able to say good-bye in the way I wanted to, letting go of wanting to be by her side at the moment she passed, letting go of all the things I thought I still needed from her as my mother. One big-time letting go.

And now it’s one year later. I find I am still letting go. I am letting go of our culture’s taboo on discussing death and sharing grief. I am letting go of the expectations that we are only supposed to grieve for a set period of time and then if we don’t move on we’re ‘not normal’. I’m letting go of the culture’s obsession with the objectification of a woman’s body, as if it existed solely for sexual gratification. And, I am letting go of the societal voices that ‘honor’ mothers on the surface, and treat mothers with disdain and women with second-class status.

As I wrote in a post last year, as my mother died, I felt a deep painful tearing in my body, right at the core. It felt as though my connection with my mother (the most primal connection I had) was being severed as she prepared to die. The pain seared in my core, down deep at the base of my body. It was as if I could feel her leaving by way of the pain in my own body.

Then, after she died, I sat with her body for a long time. I felt awe in the presence of her body, the body that nourished me and delivered me into this world. I felt gratitude for all she did in her life to provide for me, to keep me safe, to usher me into adulthood. I felt compassion for her foibles and humanness, a humanness that I had once expected to be perfection. Yet, there in the moments following her death, I was captivated by the ephemeral nature of this imperfect humanness for I knew, with her life force no longer there, her body was already beginning its way to non-existence.

Over this past year, I have come to know a strong connection between my mother and my own body. This connection lies at the heart of being human. We are fed by our mother, both inside her and once we are born. Her body is the vessel that holds us as we grow from being a few cells to a baby big enough to make our way into the world. She sustains us. During this time in the womb, she is all that we know.

This connection is primal. It is a connection to more than just mother. It’s a connection to the Universal Mother and to the Earth. This Earth is the vessel that sustains us as we move throughout our life. She provides for us. She nourishes us. While life can be harsh, without the Earth, we would not be.

We lose our connection because we are conditioned to believe we must let go of mother to be strong, independent individuals in our western culture. We also learn to blame mother for most everything that wasn’t right in our childhood. Mothers take the brunt of blame. Mothers are taken for granted. Mothers learn to internalize this blame.

It’s not about believing that mothers can do no wrong. Rather, despite the ways in which you don’t see eye-to-eye with mom, and regardless of whatever story you tell about your mother, can you find and feel your heart’s deepest gratitude to your mother for carrying you and birthing you? Because, that Mother, the mother that nourished and sustained you, is the same Mother that sustains all of life. The substance that fuels a mother’s capacity to nourish a baby into existence is the same substance that fuels all of existence.

What conscious grieving of my mother’s death has taught me is the profound, yet basic connection between awe and gratitude for my mother and the gift of life she gave me. It has strengthened my connection to my own body and to the Earth, and to all of life. And, it has brought me to the wisdom that comes from knowing this same substance is within me as a woman.

This substance allows for a beautiful and mysterious connection between women. We don’t have to be mothers to know this connection. It just is. This substance connects us with the Earth, with nature, and with the sacredness of life itself.

I don’t know what sharing this with you will bring, I only know that now knowing this has awakened reverence and awe for my mother, my daughters, my sisters, my nieces, and all women; my grandchildren and all children; my father, my partner Jeff, my sons-in-law, my nephews, and all men; and all of life. That’s been the gift for me that lies in knowing the fullness of my mother’s humanness, as well as the sacred nature of her female creativity.

Just a few days ago, last Thursday evening, I was lucky, lucky, lucky…I got to experience Mary Oliver in person in San Rafael. It was my good friend Megan’s birthday and she invited me along with her.

Mary Oliver is an incredible poet, and having the opportunity to hear her read her own words was one of those amazing moments in life. She is simple yet profound in her ability to articulate the experience of being present to the beauty of life. I found her most engaging as she shared poems about her important relationships: the one with her late beloved partner of 40 years, and the other with her dog, Percy. She is a master of speaking from her heart, in writing and in person.

I am currently re-reading one of Mary’s latest books, Thirst. It is a beautiful collection written after the death of her partner, and opens to two new directions in her work: grief and her discovery of faith. This book looks at sorrow as an opening to the awakening of faith. It reflects my own experience of the profound way that grief can move a person into the depths of the heart, which can bring about an opening into a new, very personal, relationship with life. Pick it up and be prepared to be amazed.

Amy Lenzo, of the Beauty Dialogues, was there, too. We were hoping to meet each other in person, but it wasn’t to be. The place was packed, every seat sold in advance. You can read Amy’s account of the evening in her post in the Beauty Dialogues.