on being responsible

Life is demanding, hence we love to be led, told what to do, and be absolved of responsibility.  One thing less to worry about seems often like a really good idea. Yet, when you turn over responsibility, you give up control and agency, and the opportunity to formulate your own approach or direction. 

When you order takeout for dinner, you give up control over the ingredients in your food and what nourishes your body for the convenience of not having to cook.  When you go to the doctor and come unprepared to discuss your own research and preferred approach, you give up control over what goes into your body or the logistics of your healing process.  When you do something because “somebody said so” or someone “told you to,” you relinquish the opportunity to create your very own experience, instead living someone else’s reality.  

Of course, nothing is ever black and white.  Without followers we would all need to be leaders and that doesn’t make sense in a universe of polarities.  Some of us just prefer to be followers, and sometimes we decide when to be led and when to lead.  Nevertheless,  it’s good to do research and make an informed decision in order to have an opinion that’s grown on your own turf instead of someone else’s.   Being responsible is empowering, if involved and more demanding.  You have the opportunity to choose many times each day.

it's ok

Friends who come over for a meal and help clean up afterwards are often surprised that we don’t compost.  I’ll buy my favorite whole milk raw milk yogurt in plastic, and sometimes I dilute some smelly toxic bleach stuff to clean the mold spots on the shower grout.

The 80/20 rule applies to me, and doing the best I can instead of being dogmatic and unwavering seems sensible. Composting is currently not convenient, and since we otherwise produce so little garbage, and recycle everything that can possibly be recycled, I won’t feel bad about throwing my produce waste into the trash can.  Plastics from the packaging process leach into peanut butter, so I make sure to buy tahini and nut butters in glass jars.  However, I’ll buy my favorite yogurt in plastic and avoid a lengthy trip to the farm for the single glass jar benefit.  Most of my cleaning gets done with vinegar and a few other inoffensive products.  But sometimes I need to bring in the strong and toxic stuff to get the job done properly. 

To make a long story short, compromising here and there, albeit with awareness, is ok.  No need to be a saint, no need to be dogmatic, no need to be a good girl or boy 100% of the time.  Just doing the best you can and giving yourself a break, with awareness, is ok. 

polarity and the human condition

Judging and evaluating, comparing and taking sides define the human condition.  We exist in a world of opposites.  Remove the concept of darkness, as for example in the Dark Ages, the concept of the Age of Enlightenment is impossible to define.  Take sickness away from our earthly existence and you cannot desire to be healthy since you would never have been sick or had ever experienced sickness in others.  Health would be an incomprehensible, unreal and abstract concept.   A heavy cast iron skillet only conveys its weight to us in comparison to a bag of feathers, not on its own.  

Yet, when we take sides, preferring one over the other, judging one as “good” and the other as “bad,” wanting only what’s “right” and not what’s “wrong,” we only accept half of the picture.  Reality is both, must have both, does not exist otherwise on this earth in the material realm.

Hence equanimity and contentment arise out of accepting that abundance and poverty, hunger and satiatedness, generousness and stinginess must coexist, and only together are One.  One aspect cannot be wished or manipulated away in favor of more of the other.  That’s banging your head against the wall of how the universe functions. Besides, everyone has a different definition of “good” and “bad” and we are now entering sticky philosophical terrain.  The murderer obviously did the only possible thing in that crucial moment, and it was the “right” thing at the time.

Spiritual development begins with the acceptance that what we encounter and experience just “is,” and it is “good” because there is no “bad” or “wrong.”  They both cannot exist without the other, and by necessity are part of the package we signed up for when we came upon this earth.

as abundant as nature

We have been gifted so many plants from friends over the years, by splitting root  (lily of the valley, hosta, hydrangea) or rizome clumps (tiger lilies, irises), separating shoots (lilacs, raspberries) and transplanting runners (strawberries, strawberry begonia), as well as accepting seeds (hollyhocks) and whole seed heads (echinacea).  Many of these plants have grown big enough that we can now share and provide a never ending supply of joy to others.  And we know how quickly animals can multiply, the smaller the faster.  One mouse pair could theoretically produce about 5000 mice in a year.

Nature is just so amazingly abundant that I’m not quite sure how we humans ever came up with this idea of lack and not enough which so permeates our culture (“not enough time,” “not enough money,” “only 2 left,” or “get it while it lasts”).  Perhaps we are so disassociated from nature that we no longer understand its principals. Nature gives so freely, it doesn’t hold on.  It sends its seeds so liberally into the wind by the gazillions.  Abandoned farmland reforests all by itself over the years.  A garden rewilds and overgrows so fast if you don’t constantly pull the weeds and mow the lawn.

The difference between nature and our human behavior is our lack of generosity.  We hold on, tight and tighter.  We stash our money away and get rewarded for it with interest.  During the pandemic we horded toilet paper and meat and created actual shortage.  No wonder then that we live in a culture of stinginess, lack, and miserliness.  Instead of living and modeling abundance, we live and model lack.  Perhaps things would be different if we got rewarded for giving our stuff and money away

To experience abundance, we need to emulate nature’s generosity of giving.  Be like nature.  The more generous you are, the more generous the world around you becomes.

coming to your senses

Just now I walked by a bowl full of ripe peaches and their subtle peachy waft followed me for a few feet into the kitchen.  On the window sill sit two ripening pineapples that exude that characteristic and densely sweet pineappley aroma as I stand at the kitchen sink.  Walking by the roses that are just beginning to flower in the garden is intoxicating, yet so fleeting.  The scent is there one second and gone the next, so subtle, so elusive, so elegant, so delicate.  You can’t catch it, and you can’t make it last forever.  I can only tell  you that my pineapple smells sooooooo pineappley, but I can’t share the aroma with you, and I can’t give you a descriptive since we have no words for scents, only comparatives.  Only if you stand right next to me can we both smell the pineapple.  Yet, even then I can’t be sure you smell the same thing I smell.  A perfume smells different on each person and to each person, and you will smell it differently on your own skin than someone standing next to you will smell it on you.

We take them so much for granted, our senses.  The 6th sense, that of intuition and knowing, may be different, because not everyone believes in it, and it needs to be cultivated to be recognized.  But the other five, those of taste, smell, touch, sound and sight are evident to all of us.  Other than the sense of vision – we can stare at something for hours – the other four senses are so elusive that they force us to be in the present.  One second a scent, or sound, or sensation, or taste, is there, and then it’s already gone.  If we don’t pay attention, we might not even experience it at all.    Some people lost their sense of smell and taste after a bout with Covid, sometimes temporarily, sometimes or a longer period, and it seems to be a very disorienting experience.  It’s as if the universe offered an opportunity to ask ourselves “What do I like better, experiencing tasting and smelling, or not?”  

Our five senses enrich our existence in such manifold ways, they make our life so tremendously more wonderous and pleasurable.  But it takes awareness and “smelling the roses” lest we become so jaded and cynical that we simply brush by an encounter with the delicate scent of lilies of the valley or a gorgeous perfume.  True or not, real estate agents say that the scent of freshly baked apple pie wafting through a house might accelerate the sale.  Our sense of smell alters our perception, making the bearer of the perfume more beautiful or handsome, the apple pie scented home more desirable, or the freshly powdered baby more adorable. Scents awaken our imagination and our memory in magical ways.  Take your ability to smell with a sense of gratitude and awe, stand still for that fleeting second when a scent stirs something in you.  Enjoy it as a gift that enhances and beautifies your day. 

the secret of the universe

From the dawn of time, we have been trying to unlock the secret of the universe in order to find a reason behind why things are the way they are and why we feel the way we feel.  For a long time, those who discovered the secret held on tight to that knowledge which was called “occult” or hidden.  But it was only hidden because we looked in the wrong direction, not because it wasn’t available.  We looked out and played the blame game.  We thought things were “done to us” and felt victimized.  

Turns out we need to look in, not out.  With that comes another revelation.  “The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery (passive observation, AN), but a process of creation (active creation, AN),” writes Neale Donald Walsh.  “Life is not a school but an opportunity to create,” he continues.

Surveying the garden plantings with my husband this morning, I complained about the lemon balm crowding out the beautiful red blooming broom shrub we just planted.  That’s exactly the crux of the problem, complaining.  I criticized what is (a passive observation - too much lemon balm).  The better thing to do is moving towards what I’d like to see (no lemon balm in that spot, removing it, transplanting it, substituting it with something else – an act of creation).

With every moment we have the opportunity to choose how we want to feel, to create what we want to experience and who we want to be.  Life is an activity.  It invites involvement, it invites definition of what you want, it requires action and getting off your butt.

a seed was sown

Looking back through my silver lining pandemic posts from last spring I ponder the take-aways that will seep permanently into our culture.  Some will stick, others may not.  But as a friend said with much insight, “A seed was sown, a spark was lit.”  The possibilities glimpsed will remain in our subconscious, perhaps dormant for a while longer, but not forgotten.  

I might surmise that the more philosophical silver linings, like the need  for patience (silver lining #14), the merits of simplifying your life (silver lining #10), or the benefits of going deep (silver lining #12), will be gone in a jiffy as people rush to get back to “normal.”  At the end of last year, however, we did elect a president who is more in tune with our environmental (silver lining #2) and social challenges.  A deeper awareness of the baked-in racism seems to have taken hold, prompted by more shootings, also of Asian-Americans recently, and a growing awareness that we were previously oblivious to racisms and the plight of minorities.  The advertising, film and entertainment industry all now show such a greater rainbow of people, and I think that shift will stick. 

I still don’t think we achieved an environmental healing crisis (silver lining #9), but the push for cleaner energy sources like electric cars, solar and wind power, is now unstoppable and hurtling forward with remarkable speed.

On the other hand, the pandemic has not become the Great Equalizer.  The rich became richer, and industrialized nations hogged vaccines.  Did we get the message that the true heroes are those who keep our life glued together (silver lining #7) and not some internet influencer? That a better social safety net, higher minimum wage, more comprehensive health insurance, and education benefit us all?  What have the superrich got to lose?  A few millions or billions?  How much do you really need to live a comfortable life?  What about the shift from I to We (silver lining #13)?  Philanthropy is not the answer, a more equitable distribution of resources is.

Have people gained greater trust in their bodies and its innate healing abilities instead of relying exclusively on the miracle vaccine (silver lining #11)?  We know from a year of Covid research that the Coronavirus thrives in an acidic body environment (too much sugar, starch, meat), hence a healthy diet (silver lining #4), with alkalizing greens and lots of fruits and vegetables in general is the way to go, not only to prevent you from catching Covid-19 but all civilization diseases, from diabetes and heart disease, to inflammation and cancer, to obesity.

We have experienced the limits of online study, work, entertainment and socializing, as novel and practical as it all seemed in the early days.  And while it prevented life from coming to a standstill, we have discovered the troubling shortcomings, from students who are behind in their school curriculum, and depressed from lack of interaction with their peers, to the emotional impact of literally losing touch with people (silver lining #6).

What we have learned is that as a civilization we can move mountains if we combine forces in a mutual goal and vision (silver lining #1).  That is powerful.

ode to the mother

For several thousand years we have lived in yang cultures, more warrior than nurturer, more taking than giving, which shows in how we have treated Mother Earth. She has been used and abused and is tired.  We have taken from her more than we have given back.   

Becoming a mother is the ultimate act of creation, making a new human being out of love and thin air, at least sort of.  A mother gives of her body and soul to create, grow, birth, nurture and nourish a new human being in an act of procreative self-sacrifice that requires putting other before self.  In an instinctual effort to protect a young and fragile life, mothering brings forth ultimate, even fierce, unconditional love. As mothers we pour into these little beings everything we have – milk from our own body, food, love, advice, protection, healing energy, soothing lullabies, and words of encouragement.

It’s time for us, whether man or woman, mother or not, to remember that we have all experienced being mothered and nurtured, what that feels like, and how healing that is.  Dear fellow women and mothers, we must now show the way of the nurturing yin to rebalance our lopsided relationship with the earth, our ultimate Mother who gives us everything that brings forth our existence.  I see you becoming stronger, rising to the occasion, and bringing your creative nurturing spirit to heal our Mother Earth.  

Happy Mother’s Day!

crystalizing thought

An idea is one thing, to carry that idea out is another.  All physical things begin with a thought, but that thought must be solidified through purpose and intent so that the energy of the idea can crystalize and eventually manifest in the physical.

Sometimes the clothes that need ironing sit around in a pile for days, until I finally pull the ironing board out in the morning and unfold it in a prominent spot to signal intent that the task must get done before the end of the day.  Intent is the energy impulse that moves manifestation along.  Procrastination is an idea without intent behind it.   Something needs to appear in the physical to move the creation process from thought form to solidification.  A previous post talked about the power of list writing for things you need to do or purchase.  A list is such a manifestation vehicle because you put down on paper what you wish to manifest. 

Architectural plans are the transition stage between idea and actual building.  A book proposal is the transition between the thought of writing a book and finally holding the actual book in hand.  Your grocery shopping list is the transition between the need to fill your fridge and going to the supermarket.  

If you have had a desire that hasn’t come to fruition yet think about what kind of next step you can take on the way from consciousness to solidification to make that wish come true.

moon and tides did it

Technology alone was unable to dislodge her. “The crews working to dig out the ship were largely dependent on forces beyond their control: the moon and the tides,” the New York Times wrote about the all-out effort to free the Ever Given, one of the world’s largest container ships that was stuck sideways in the sandy banks of the Suez Canal for almost a week,  holding up hundreds of other cargo ships with billions of dollars worth of goods and livestock from pursuing their journeys through the canal to their destinations to keep global markets humming.

The message is a crucial one, one we seem to need to hear over and over and over again.  Whether we’re talking about climate change, growing food, protecting ourselves from viruses, or lifestyle improvements in general, technology applied in a vacuum has often far reaching negative side effects which we seem unable to predict.  Only in cooperation and harmony with nature can science and technology achieve true heights, as the crews freeing the Ever Given realized.  

We must finally integrate science, technology and nature into a holistic, sacred and mutually inclusive whole to evolve into a better incarnation of ourselves and assure the survival of our species.