being at home :: day thirty

the more i live the more i find, that truly being at home starts with coming to peace with and doing the sometimes hard work it takes to be at ease in ones own company.  indeed, “wherever you go, there you are”, and there is no external place that can resolve the tensions that reside in discontent. the truth is, the grass may continue to be greener somewhere else…and i continue to land on the conclusion that my energy is much better spent fertilizing and attending to my own yard, ultimately allowing my life to contribute to the greening of the world.

safety :: day twenty nine

safety is risk

risk of life unlived

risk of avoiding fullness

for comfort?

for known?

for security?

risking stagnancy

risking openness

fear is safety

fear is distrust

there is no life to be found in fear

paying attention :: day twenty eight

 

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”  ~Mary Oliver

time :: day twenty seven

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.”

~Babatunde Olatunji

on the move :: day twenty six

justin and i will celebrate being married for 11 years this summer…and we are now gearing up for our 12th move…indeed from the outside looking in, this may seem a bit pathological…and of course i am sure there are hints of pathology (in everything there is inevitably shadow)…but each move too has been very deliberate or at least framed in a bigger motivation to continue to allow for us to be equipped and able to embody each of our individual dharmas as well our collective dharma as a couple and family.  there is little freedom (or rather a very specific and limited freedom) for example, found it tying ourselves to a home that we can barely afford, for the sake of “having” the “security” of a home, or having the appearance of arriving in some way…

over these 11 years our worldviews (from an outside perspective anyways) have significantly (even radically) shifted and evolved, both individually and thankfully collectively…what i attribute to continuing to hold us together (or at least contributed in large part) has been our intention around  framing our lives together in a vision beyond ourselves that has amazingly stayed quite congruent with the hope we first married each other with.  and even now still recognizing that we are each individually able to serve the world better with each other in our lives…and also that i am a better me with him by my side and he a better he.  not to say that this comes without work, without intention, without allowing ourselves to be sharpened and held to the proverbial fire by one another…

and we continue to commit to each other, again and again…attempting not to take each other for granted and acknowledging that when we are housed in a larger mission for our lives, bigger than ourselves or each other…with a common foundation that serving the world is of paramount importance.  if we can continue to sign on to the importance of this, both for ourselves and the other, our own selfish preferences are softened…not to say we hold back with stating our preferences…we just recognize that they will continue to shift and change and indeed are seemingly insatiable and they are simply not the sole authority on navigating our way in the world….indeed this rooting our way in being better equipped to contribute to the healing and evolution of world has proven to be quite fertile soil for our continued wedding, for which i am deeply grateful.

what would i say :: day twenty five

i was recently given this newspaper clipping by a woman i danced with when we were young girls…i had copy of it at one point and it since had disappeared somewhere along the way…

i was compelled to ask myself what i would say to this young girl, full of life…as if she were my own child…
in light of now having my own children, and the deep desire i now have for them to know their brilliance and the unique gift they are in the world and for the world…

i might whisper in her ear that she has everything she needs, that she is enough, and that she belongs. i might encourage her to have courage, to dare to love, that she will not please everyone and at times she may in fact feel that no one is pleased…that peace in fact is found within, as is contentment. i might also remind her to continue to dance through life and to pay attention when joy rises up and lean into it and live from it.

and what is it that you would say, in this moment to the child that you were?

“adding more beauty to the gem of creation” :: day twenty four

myself and the munchkins just returned from a spontaneous adventure to new yok city…my beautiful sister in brooklyn hung out with them while i was able to be a part of the yoga journal conference for a couple days…i was able to attend a class with my teacher, Yogarupa Rod Stryker, which was absolutely amazing, as continues to be the case in all my encounters with him…and otherwise was helping out at the “three minute egg” booth (an innovative prop that i am a big fan of) for the bulk of the time….(let me know if you are interested:)

and as the opportunity emerged on tuesday and rapidly unfolded to land us (minus justin as he had to work) in the city in the middle of the night on thursday (with all of the details falling into place literally an hour before we left maine) the impulse was strong that i should try to make it happen, even in the face of what may have looked like hurdles and though i held the outcome lightly (i was ok if it didn’t happen) i was faithful to the impulse and was amazed and awed with the way the universe supported the process so graciously…

and what continues to strike me is that as i continue to cultivate space to listen, in meditation and my yoga practice, is how much decisiveness and clarity is being born in me, which is really quite exciting,..because one of my claims to fame among friends and family in the past has been my indecisiveness. it has also become more and more clear too where and why this pattern had taken root in me…out of my subconscious  interest to make sure that everyone was ok with the decision i was (or was not) making to accomodate what i percieved to be their need (or weather or not they were pleased) and how that subconscious pattern bound my ability to be the primary authority on my unfolding experience and truncated my ability to listen…

i am so deeply grateful for the inspired and skillfully designed process that my teacher has developed to support the cultivation of the tapping into ones soul’s mission and purpose in the world through the ”Yoga of Fullfillment training” that justin and i attended in october…(his book “The Four Desires” will be coming out in july which supports and cultivates the process as well!) 

…having this purpose and mission to root into has also facilitated my increased clarity…as my hearts desire, in all of my decisions, is framed in this bigger desire to honor God. and by grounding into my dharma, as Yogarupa rod stryker so beautifully articulates as being: the ”desire to be who we are meant to be and in our own way, either known or unknown, to somehow add more luster to the gem of creation…as that is our job…to think about adding more beauty to the gem of creation”. and as i continue to walk forward, decisive about and motivated by my dharma, my experience and choices framed in this bigger mission, it takes a certain kind of pressure off…and i am finding more and more too the amazing reality found in the wisdom of theologian frederick buechner and the likes, who observe that “vocation (a concept born out of christian understanding that god has created each person with gifts and talents oriented toward specific purposes and a way of life) is where our greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need”….a win win:)

might as well jump :: day twenty three

no looking back :: day twenty two

there have certainly been times during this venture of being a mama that i have thought, what the hell was i thinking? what was/is any parent, who consciously choses to be a parent thinking…it is by no means a paths for light weights.

and i also know that i am not the same woman that i was before bearing these two beautiful beings into the world, the amazing beings that i have the honor of calling my children, two of my greatest teachers…and the curriculum can be one that challenges everything in me, asking me to rise to a different occasion over and over again and it is also one that can gently open and soften me and that has allowed for my growth in ways that i never imagined…

i recognize that they are not mine, that though i have done and will continue to do the best i can do with what i’ve got in any given moment to attempt to best guide them through it, they are each on their own sacred paths, as am i and i am deeply grateful that they chose me, in all my imperfection to walk along side of them for awhile…

photo: thanks to margo ducharme

stuff and the age of conscious reason :: day twenty one

it is such a wild, wonderful, at times heartbreaking, and joyful process…to witness these little beings developing, maturing, and making their way in the world….one that is constantly shifting, offering opportunities for my own continued maturation…it is said that at around age 7 there are rapid changes happening in brain anatomy, physiology, and chemistry which facilitate a growing clarity about what is real…biology is moving one’s understand of the world from an egocentric place to broadening a sense of ones place in a larger world.
in addition to the leap in reasonableness, children have an increased ability to focus and concentrate and are capable of classifying and ordering, and have a more realistic sense of cause-and-effect. doing well in the real world becomes vital to their self-esteem, fears are no longer of monsters, but of real people, and most of all of not being liked, being different, and risking loneliness.  it indeed is a lot to navigate.   

and with this 7 year old boy we have in our midst we have recently been having such conversations that reflect this emerging reality…trying my best in the midst of the heartbreak that his struggle stirs up for me to support the process of peeling back the layers of where it is all coming from.  to put this in a frame of reference…we intentionally have chosen to live very simply, no tv (though the kids do watch movies on our computer) no video systems (other than the itouch that Jeremiah saved up for and bought with his own money), and have been very deliberate about navigating our consumer culture, 

though we have done our best to frame it intentionally for our kids along the way and j has even gotten excited about living in ways that are different and allow for more creativity (we have really worked a lot with that one:) in his eyes at this juncture, his perception is that his life just isn’t as fun as “everyone” elses (minus the video game systems and trips to Florida ect ect)…

and yes there are more layers indeed…though we recognize our children are deeply a part of our soul’s calling and that parenting is a radical and world changing act…we are both also tapped into a larger sense of calling that doesn’t allow for our children to be the center of our universe…we have not put our own development and movement toward this larger soul’s calling on hold “for the sake of our children” in fact we are rooted in just the opposite assumption…that even though not having the world revolve around them may not be as fun, may invoke plenty of parental guilt at times, and certainly does not allow for a certain keeping up with the joneses…we acknowlege that the world needs something more from each of us…it demands that we think outside of the four walls of our own household…the world needs creative, radical thinker that are not going to be developed without being seen as different, even weird…at times not “fitting in”.  We need more children arriving home to a box of markers rather than to an electronic box that stupefies and perpetuated some of the most unbecoming aspects of our culture…they do have amazing capacity to entertain themselves, allowing for their imaginations to have space, even silence, free from over stimulation to explore…

there are so many layers to this conversation that certainly cannot be fully represented here, but for now i offer this skimming of the surface…i do not intend to negate many of the beautiful movements in our culture and the radical parenting that is also a very real…but the fact is that we and our children are up against a lot.