Kindness

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

~Naomi Shihab Nye

Words of wisdom

Spiritual practices can be so simple and yet many people, myself included at times, insist on complicating them. What are we really called to do other than have a grateful heart and show compassion and forgiveness to our fellow humans? Not much. After that, everything else is just details.

I am a collector of wisdom. One of the ways I do it is by collecting quotes. Quotes from great literature, philosophy, history, religion, art and science. Collecting bits of wisdom left to us by amazing enlightened thinkers is one of the most solid spiritual practices I have ever done. Because every time I read someone’s gentle thoughts on love, forgiveness, kindness, compassion or gratitude, I am reminded of my purpose and strengthened in my resolve to realize it.

Connecting with someone through their words is connecting with their mind. And when we connect with the mind of another, we connect with the One Mind.

It’s amazing when you think about it. Time and space dissolve when we truly understand someone’s words (thoughts).

The quote that started me thinking about all of this:

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.” ~Meister Eckhart

That’s why it’s important to express ourselves. No matter how uncomfortable it might feel to make yourself vulnerable, you can never predict who might be helped or inspired by what you have to say.

I hope more people start posting blogs.

Life is really beautiful.

Infinite possibilites

My life lessons usually come to me through mindful, non-judgmental observations of myself and others. When I finally started paying attention I discovered that everyday life holds a gold mine of wisdom for those who seek it.

There is a guy at my job who rubs me the wrong way, so to speak. His energy is overpowering and dark. He is an unhappy man. My heart has compassion for him because although I do not know all of what he deals with, I sense that he is carrying heavy burdens in his heart. Some are really obvious. When you truly listen to people with active awareness you hear what they are really saying and sometimes you hear it in the things that are left unsaid.

I sense that this person is really disappointed with where he is in life. The job is not the type of thing most people would  aspire to. It’s a way to make a living…and that’s really all.

For me it’s a bit more than that. I have this opportunity to talk to the 50 or so people I talk to in a given day and with that opportunity comes the opportunity to treat people respectfully with awareness. The people I have talked to since I started this job have been overwhelmingly affirming and grateful for the help I give them. It’s been nice.

With every relationship we participate in, whether it is a 3-minute phone conversation or a 50-year friendship or marriage, we have the opportunity to bless and lift up our fellow humans. And when we are able to take a step back and look at the big picture, it’s apparent that blessing each other is how we are going to change the world for the better and facilitate the positive shift in consciousness that is currently underway.

Going back to the person from work, he seems to believe he’s fallen short of some ideal and comes across as the guy who settled for mediocrity, never gets the breaks, doesn’t get the girl, etc.

This got me thinking about how we are conditioned by our families in childhood to follow the example that is set for us. To do otherwise is to reject the tribe. It seems to me that in the best case scenario, a child is allowed to grow up and be whomever he/she is without being judged by parents as having betrayed the family.

My family has a dysfunctional pattern. There are silent directives about work, money, love and relationships. In my family, we are all called to be martyrs to the family ideals, ideals that are really messed up. One standard is to stay unhappily married for long, long periods of time, sacrificing health and happiness to the comfort of predictability and keeping up appearances. There are strong messages about what is an acceptable profession and amount of money to make and about [false] humility. What my family defines as humble is not humble at all. It’s amazingly arrogant. In every martyr/victim is a person who feels morally superior in some way. It’s a small reward for carrying such a heavy burden through life.

A couple of days ago a coworker remarked that it must be frustrating [for me] to have all that education and not be able to use it. At the time I agreed, but later I thought about it and wondered why I agreed with that. Yes, society expects me to feel badly that I have a law degree and I am making a modest living doing a job that barely requires a high school level education. I suppose I could feel upset about that if I wanted to. But there is another way of looking at it. For one, I use my education every day. My skills in reasoning and observation serve me well every day. It’s just that this employer is getting a bargain for my time. That’s okay. I’m helping people and making a positive difference in many people’s lives…5 minutes at a time. What more could I hope for?

I am finding my way through life on my terms. I may stumble and have hard times, but I am living this life, making my mistakes and learning from them. I’m paying attention. And I have decided there are certain patterns from childhood that are going to stop with me. I am challenging the things I have believed unconsciously most of my life. It’s uncomfortable and I don’t always like what I see, but the rewards are huge. I am watching myself become a more gentle compassionate person as I understand my role in the universal human drama.

Today I was thinking about how between liberation and true freedom lies a desolate place in the soul where we wander as the Jewish people did before reaching the promised land.

After you tear it down it takes a while to build it again, but the rebuilding begins immediately, which is great.

I’m sort of in that place, wandering, thinking, learning…alone. I almost want to think of the word alone as all one. Because really, that’s what’s going on, the steady realization that there is only one of us here. Every day I feel the connection grow stronger.

Bless all the people at my new job. Bless the people who call my phone. Bless everyone I pass walking to my office. Bless everyone I know. Bless everyone reading these words. Bless us all, everyone.

The world is full of possibilities and choices. We are never without choice, no matter how badly things appear to be going. If you’re still breathing, you still have the power of choice.

That is a glorious thought.

Endings

Yesterday was a day of endings for me.  Not in huge, life altering ways, just in the small ways that happen to most of us most of the time.  I finished dog/house sitting, watched the finale of the Oprah show, and watched the finale of American Idol.  The great thing is, I learned something from all of them.

The dog sitting showed me how wonderful it is to be home and how it’s not the amount of stuff that makes a home comfortable, it’s the energy that we bring to our homes that make them welcoming and inviting places to be.

The people I house sit for have a lot of stuff.  Their drive to accumulate stuff feels like fear to me.  Fear of not having enough things I guess.  And guess is all I can do.

This all came to the forefront when I arrived last week at their house to find a note, much like the notes they always leave with contact information and instructions.  This time however, the note contained an admonishment about using coasters, highlighted in yellow.  Further, there was a sticky note folded into a small tent shape on the actual table where the coaster incident had taken place that said COASTERS!, just like that, all caps with an exclamation point.

My mind went through a gamut of thoughts and feelings about this.  Including: incredulity, offense, defense, anger and judgment.  I suppose it could be argued that I am still judging by making note of these things.  However, I do have a point and plan to get to it any time now.  But this next bit is not it.

In the four years I have been taking care of their dog and house, I have never left a mess of any kind.  When they return from a trip their house is as clean or cleaner than when they left.  I’ve never broken anything and despite their invitation to help myself to anything in the fridge, I always replace anything I eat or drink.  I guess I’m saying that I am a pretty good house sitter.  I house sat for one of my law professors for a couple of years and also for the former career counselor from my law school.  These are all people who live in nice houses with nice things in them and I have always taken very good care of their stuff.

Okay, now on to my point.  Obviously I was bothered by the way the coaster incident was handled and how it felt like I was given no benefit of the doubt as to my apparent carelessness.  That’s okay.  I can be more careful in the future.  The point of this part of my post is that it is glorious to be home.  I live in a condo.  It’s old, it creaks, and I don’t have very much stuff.  And the stuff I have is not worth very much money.  But my home is every bit as comfortable, if not more so, than their house filled with things so important that they are worth getting angry at someone whose conscientious nature should be apparent after four years of not making mistakes.  My home is comfortable and welcoming, not because of the things in it, but because of the love that is in it and the people who inhabit it.

While I was house sitting, I couldn’t take a bath.  Their water heater is not capable of producing enough hot water to fill their relatively shallow tub.  This morning I soaked in a hot bubble bath in my lovely not-so-shallow tub with a seemingly endless supply of hot water.  It was glorious and I was so grateful for it.

I may not have very much in the way of material possessions, but I have everything I need and most importantly, I have enough.

“To know you have enough is to be rich.” ~Tao Te Ching

When I got home I decided to watch the final Oprah show because Oprah has been a light on my path for such a long time and I wanted to see that chapter of my life–the chapter that had the Oprah show for inspiration–close gently and with gratitude.

In her typical no-nonsense fashion, Oprah taught me a couple of things in her farewell.  One is actually something I am well aware of: All people, without exception, want to be validated.  They want to know that they are seen and heard and above all, that they matter.  I once heard a preacher say that we all have a desire to be known.  I think Oprah goes further and recognizes that we all want to be known and we all want to be loved, just as we are.  The world we live in is a harsh one at times, but every once in a while we meet someone who sees us truly and finds beautiful what they see.  This is the most healing thing on earth in my opinion.  It is wonderful to know that God loves us just as we are, but the truth in my opinion is that God is manifest in each and every one of us, so to know the unconditional love of God, we have to give it to each other…and ourselves.

This brings me to the final lesson I got from the Oprah show: There is a difference between believing that you deserve happiness and believing that you are worthy of it.  This one hit me like a ton of bricks.  I have been wondering, a lot recently, why I so often find myself almost successful.  I know I deserve success.  Heaven knows I have worked hard enough.  But somehow things that seem beyond my control keep popping up just in time to make most of my life struggle with very little reward. A good deal of my struggle is trying to convince myself that I am enough–good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, educated enough, kind enough, compassionate enough–in short, worthy.  And I never have truly gotten to that place where I have been able to ease up on myself and know that, as Oprah said yesterday, I am worthy because I was born.

All I can do with this revelation is be willing to accept myself and to know that I am enough, just as I am.  There is no magic formula that I can apply to work toward this knowledge, I just have to keep telling myself it is so and do it with a willing and open heart.

I am…and that is sufficient.

The final lesson I learned last night was from American Idol of all things.  This is the first season I have watched and last night the contestant that I did not want to win, won.  I checked Twitter at the end of the east coast broadcast and knew the winner before watching it here on the west coast.  All I could think was ugh, I don’t want him to win, I want Lauren to win.  American Idol did something really right last night in my opinion.  They made the entire finale a celebration of all the contestants, not just the winner.  The part that was about who won was a mere couple of minutes of the entire two-hour show.  The lesson was: They all won and they all deserved to win.  Anyone who is working toward their passion, following their bliss, is a winner.  The specific example I love most is James Durbin, the 22-year-old who a year ago was a struggling young dad who could barely afford diapers for his baby.  Last night he was on stage with Judas Priest.  It was a privilege to watch this kid’s dream come true.

Yesterday was the culmination of a rough week for me.  Expensive car repairs with more to come, wounded pride over a freaking coaster of all things, and the ever present question I carry in my heart: How can I, one person with so little, make a positive impact in this world?   The answer to that last one, I hope, is the words you are reading now.

I feel good; I am here, now; and I am willing.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen

~St. Francis of Assisi