The First Commandment

The first commandment is:

Love Life with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

I know what this looks like, and what it feels like. I know how it feels to love life, and to be around people who love life.

It doesn’t have anything to do with their belief systems, or their occupations, or their circumstances, or their activities. It is a saying-yes, open-hearted embrace of everything that’s here. It’s a habit of paying attention to the needs of the moment, of taking the time to care.

There may be many directions on how to live a good life, many different interpretations of what that means. But they shouldn’t even be looked at first.

The first commandment comes from Life itself, not from anyone else’s instructions. So I have resolved to not ask any other source about it first. I might ask second, to hone and clarify my loving of Life. But first I will pay attention to Life, and to keeping the first commandment.

The Hand of Love II

It’s very important to me to feel the dimension in which Love holds everything. Holds it in precise harmony of time and space, moves it in ways which would seem impossible in fewer dimensions - so that everything moves freely and nothing collides. I know that the lines I have always drawn on things - my estimations of where things have been and where they are going, and why, and what should be done about it - are in fewer dimensions than the things exist in. Thus my estimations have always been wrong. They’ve seemed compelling and true, but they’ve led to conclusions short of the ones Love would make. They’ve led me to accept the inevitability of discord, the necessity of clashes over time, resources, and attention. I find great relief in letting Love do the defining.

Love makes room for everything, everyone. Love has time to hear every story. Love knows how to release every thought from the worry that says there is no way out of this one. Love gives us each our custom-made reassurance that we are what we’re supposed to be, and we can always have what we need.

In the dawning of the morning
Rays of light stream like combs through the trees
Freeing each branch from its background
Lifting sight
Inspiring the chorus of the birds

In the dawning of the morning
The fingers of Love reach every dreaming thought
Warming each molecule
Enlivening joy
Tuning the chorus of the Word

Musical Waves

Eric and I were sitting at Matthew’s Beach and I said to him, listen to the waves lapping on the beach and against the wall - try to hear what music you can from them. Then I listened myself, and I found that they sounded musical, instead of random, as I laid their sounds on a rhythm that depicted the grid of waves out on the water. It was a 12-8 rhythm - or a pair of six-beat measures.

I’d tried before to hear music in the waves, and was brought up short because the waves didn’t break rhythmically - the pause between the breakings would always be unpredictable. My attempts to find melody would lurch and fall back like the waves, and slap against each other. Now with a rhythmic background underlying them, the waves brought interesting highlights of melody and rhythm - often coming in on the two- or three-count of the beat. And different waves could finish their pattern while others joined in, overlapping - I could imagine setting up an orchestration on Eric’s music composition software, where different instruments would follow the tune of different waves, and others would hold the grid pattern that I could see spreading out across the water.

I noticed again the next time that the fast cycle of threes - two or four three-beat pulses - was a pervasive part of the wave’s rhythm. I wondered if it was just me imposing that on them, so I tried to think of them in 4-4 time. They would accept a four pulse, but within each pulse there was still a three-pulse. I wondered if it was related to waves being made from circles, and circles being associated with the number six.

Riding home, the music stayed with me, and I thought about rhythm as the matrix upon which melody is laid out - matrix being the net upon which ideas can be hung, what stretches out the possible, upon which what is can then develop. I thought about how the word matrix comes from the word that means mother. But mostly I listened to the music, the memory of the wave music mixed with the bicycle’s rhythms.

Today when I rode to Matthew’s beach and sat up on the lifeguard’s seat, I heard the waves singing to me. I didn’t need to construct the music or think about its underlying rhythm - they just sang, and I listened and watched the dance of blues and almost-whites and dark green, the interlacing of transparency and sheen, on the water.

Riding home, accompanied by the music, I thought about resonance - how it feels to vibrate with the music - having it awaken places inside of me and define their chambers, feeling alerted from my core up through the place behind the roof of my mouth, feeling harmonized, aligned. And I thought about Love as the matrix - the rhythmic background that arranges everything in its proper place and time, so it can sing.

Cast Party

As I was riding my bike yesterday, I noticed a change in feeling towards people I encountered, especially people who might be around my age. I noticed that I feel towards them as I might feel towards fellow members of the cast after a show was over, when we were relaxing in some festive room, celebrating. Whatever role we each had had to play, we had taken off our costumes now, and were simply together, in the commonality of our collective effort and abiding humanity.

So I no longer cared if this was a high powered executive, or a humble worker, or someone with a successful family, or someone who felt all alone in the world. Whatever things had gone on in each of our lives, I sensed that we had had high points and falls, deep loves and deep lessons, things we cared a lot about and things we had let slip. Probably none of us felt totally content with our performances, but now we were beginning to glimpse that it didn’t matter anyway. We could celebrate life, accept each other in the room of those who had finished playing the game.

Not to say we weren’t still living, not to say the intensity and beauty of our lives were passed, or that we were coasting rapidly towards a finish. It’s not life, but the game, that’s over - the game of trying to measure up, to be good enough, to have a plausible story that we could tell. We now knew that no one was worse, and no one was better, that it was good to help each other, and to strive for honesty in all things. That we didn’t need a story as much as a willingness to listen, and we didn’t need things or accomplishments to define who we were.

As I said, all of this was just a feeling in my mind as I rode by and looked at the other people on the trail. But I found it made me feel easier among them, just as I’ve felt easier, lately, in other venues. And I thought, I can invite anyone into this room of celebration. They don’t even have to be old enough. If they are young, or their career is, maybe there’s something that I, or someone else in the room, can give them to help them on their way. And if they need to be celebrated, they will have come to the right place.

Serenity Dog

Sometimes when I see signs from too far away to quite read them, interesting suggestions come to mind. The other day as I walking home from the bus stop I saw a sign on someone’s gate and it said (as my mind suggested to me) “Serenity Dog.” It was only two steps before I could tell that it actually said “Security Dog,” but in those moments I got an image that I liked enough to keep thinking about it as I walked home.

A serenity dog would make sure that everyone who set foot on the property was at peace. It would guard the state of peace with a kingly authority, an unassailable dignity. People who walked in would find their anxieties melting away, and people who lived there would find their lives unfolding in a delightful, unhurried order.

I told my husband about this thought, and he said it was sort of like a few places in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, like the home of Tom Bombadil or the place of Beorn, or even the elves’ kingdom, where the travelers would feel, at least for a time, that their troubles were left on the outside, and they were safe within.

It is a quality that every home should have, and a being that could ensure it would be much more valuable than a security dog. Come to think of it, serenity could be ensured by a dog about as well as security could.

Which reminds me of something that happened today. My daughter is traveling in a foreign country, and early this morning went, with two other girls - her cousin and friend - to a very remote area, renowned for its beauty and biological diversity. Last night I started to get a niggling concern about their plans, in terms of three girls traveling on their own to a place where there would be little, if any, cell phone contact, etc. Though I told myself that for certain my worry was unfounded, I still felt the need to pray. It occurred to me that safety could not be based on location, and that if I had the fear that any place or any person could be unsafe, this needed my prayers.

So I thought about the fact that there was no place that, by virtue of being where it was, could guarantee anyone feeling safe. If I had demons in my mind, even a place as benign as my suburban back yard could be terrifying. From this I concluded that the one place of safety is Mind - that Mind proclaims safety in every place. Then, since Mind is the center at every place, safety in every place is as certain as it is here, and I can be free of fear for myself and for my daughter at the same time.

I kept thinking about this to strengthen my conviction of the safety of my daughter and of every one of God’s ideas. I considered that the power of good is always unfolding, and there is no contrary power that can stand up against it. I considered that God wouldn’t make any of Her ideas vulnerable, but would supply each one with everything needed to be safe.

We eventually got an email from my daughter saying that all is perfect. But I continue to hold to my new insight about the safety of everyone, provided by Mind, Love, the maker of all of us. So maybe I don’t need a serenity dog. Maybe instead I will contemplate the non-location-based imperative for serenity everywhere (and security, too, for that matter), based on the fact that Mind, Love, is the center in every place.

Quiet thought

I’m learning to spend less time in the paper-surface layer of thought, where all the words are, and the reasons and justifications, the weavings of stories as to why people do this and that, and what they should do, and my opinion about things going on, and why I am right, and what this has to do with Universal Truth. I’m learning that there’s little to communicate to others from this layer - little that can help them, little that will lift us to communion with each other or the universe. Humor can be good from here, but that’s about it. Nothing serious.

Underneath that layer is the place of slow moving liquid, like magma, where bolts of bright light emerge from the heat of hope and desire for goodness. When that warmth can come up through my thoughts, it gives me genuine sustenance. It changes things, forming channels of conviction and strength, creating new structures, a place for the development of new soil which supports tender green growth.

If this warmth expresses itself in words, the words have weight and the power to solidly support. If these words bubble with mirth, the humor is sweet and unifying. If the words seek to comfort, the comfort is felt. And the words are for the here and now of their expressing - they can’t be cut and pasted into other uses and retain their power. If I want to be effective, if I want to be myself, I must let myself go back down to the magma layer, to be reheated and, once again, moved.

My friend Laurie and I connected on that level. We called it twii (initially from That Which Is Important, but later relying on the bright explosion of sound in the word twii itself). It was our practice to still ourselves and take the time, and allow the twii to emerge. We would look for the glow of the deep warmth in each other, and through its recognition, bring it out. We found that later, this work - the making of this connection - demanded of us deeper integrity in the way we thought about everything, and in the way we saw everyone.

More and more I’m finding that this is the only place to know anything, and that all petty and tragic discords are solved on this level. When I was first doing this work with Laurie, I wrote: not by will, but by willingness; not by figuring out, but by faith; not by expertise, but by grace. I’m still learning what this means. Right now I’m thinking: willingness takes me down to the magma, faith lets me dwell there, grace brings it up where it can heal the present moment. The word’s aren’t important. These ones work for me, right now. The meaning is in the deep layer underneath the words, where the inexorable light and heat of what we really are stills all cacophony and smoothes thought into shining peace.

In the last two days I felt the Christ leading me.
I.
I started off on my bike ride, feeling a little unsettled at the aborted get together I was now not going to have with my friend. My erstwhile friend, I thought. She had reserved the right to cancel if she got too busy, but she hadn’t called me, and I hadn’t been able to reach her. So I decided to just take a bike ride, and was happy about that, because it was a good day for it. I came back just after I’d started because I’d forgotten my cell phone, and decided to check my email one more time. There was the message from her, saying, sorry, I just can’t. Maybe things will slow down next quarter. I hope all is well. Take care.

As I rode off, I contemplated my response. Delete. Just delete - no response. I tried to reestablish connection, but it’s simply not a priority for her. Let it go. And I thought of responding: Whatever. Just that. Then she would know I was hurt, which would be incomprehensible to her, and stupid of me. Bridge burning. Then I collected myself, I reminded myself that I’m willing to be led by the Christ, willing to let go of my own interpretation and see things in whatever way made sense. And the word came to me - I am in charge of your life. I am the source of all that you need. I arrange all relationships, and you don’t have to worry about it.

As I thought further, it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t the right time for that get together. Not because of dates or schedules, but because my thought wasn’t right for it. The day before I had walked with another friend, who had asked me about this relationship. I had accounted some of the things that I had learned from it, some of the way I had let myself be hurt by it, and the time it had taken me to get over it. I realized that, though I may have had a clear thought when I tried to arrange the get together, I was now at a different place, a kind of a tentative, vulnerable but guarded state, hoping for acceptance.

So I let my thought be lifted. I let myself feel the enveloping care of Spirit, wrapping me up, giving me power and light. I let myself feel the gentle infusing of the Christ, like soft, sweet rain, aligning all relationships. Showing that love is the only thing that ever makes sense, and that in love, there’s no tally about whose turn it is to give, or what an outside observer would see as just. In every case, there’s one opportunity for me, and that’s to bring forth whatever Love creates in this moment. Sometimes it will seem miraculous; sometimes it will just seem like the right touch. Always it will make me feel impossibly blessed, awed and grateful, alive in a way I hadn’t thought could be.

Then I knew the right response to the email: OK. Maybe we’ll reconnect at some point when the time is right. love, Wendy. No need for me to outline how that connection would be established, or if it would. Just to let it be, with everything else, under the sweet alignment of that which gives us all everything we need.

II.
My daughter was running late. She had been up late the night before, making preparations for the student literary evening at her school - practicing her piece, making cookies. Now she was trying to get it all together. I was taking up some of the slack, making her sandwich, making a snack for her to eat after school while they prepared. My son came down a little early and flopped in the chair. It was my daughter’s day to put the rabbit out, and I thought it would be really helpful if he would do it for her that once. He wouldn’t.

I reminded myself what I was learning, that there are always two sides to human opinions but neither of them can provide what the people yearn for. So I didn’t press my son about the rabbit, and I encouraged my daughter not to do so either. But I didn’t quite reach the place of understanding - I found myself feeling a bit annoyed with my son, and even speaking to him a little shortly when he asked me to do a last thing for him in the moments when I was trying to get everyone out the door. After they left I remembered.

The only thing anyone ever wants is love. They may learn that the way to reap the greatest feeling of love is to do kind things for others. But there are some times when we all just want to be loved. If my son wasn’t feeling compelled to be kind to his sister, the remedy was for him to feel more loved. There wasn’t any need for me to go down the path about whether I was neglecting his training not to try to make him be kind. It’s impossible to make someone be kind, anyway. The only thing he could learn from was my example, and shrill demands that he be nicer were at the least hypocritical. I saw how, once again, the Christ comes down between all human opinions and stances, neutralizing them, diffusing them, and giving that which everyone really wants but no one, without that touch of unjudging love, knows how to get.

III.
I was praying about the Middle East, Israel and Palestine particularly. There is so much screaming about who is wrong and what the other side needs to do so that things can move forward. I may have my strong human opinions about it, but human opinions are useless. The Christ is the only thing that can solve the problem. The Christ, defined as “the true idea voicing good, . . . speaking to the human consciousness,”* is an impulse to individual thought which takes the quantum leap beyond all the human prerequisites for peace (things the other party needs to change) and shows each person, right where they are, how to love. The result may be an act of miraculous courage or wisdom. It may be a very simple step. It may come from one person, or another. It may be a quiet uprising that sees a way through that no-one ever thought of. It won’t be because one person is better than another, and the ones who make the difference won’t hold themselves up as virtuous. No one will be asked to pay for the good that comes. It will simply be what makes sense. When human opinions are set aside and the Christ is allowed to speak, the result is peace.

*Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 332.

Lesson on Love

There’s a man I visit in jail each Monday. I go and read the Christian Science Bible Lesson* to him. We usually have very little small talk, and he doesn’t tend to have anything he wants to discuss with me. I just come in and read the lesson, and he listens.

This Monday when I read the lesson, feeling how it might feel to him, it seemed, to me, the most tender message I could possibly deliver. It is a lesson that makes it very clear that we can be forgiven, and spells out how it happens, and how comprehensive a forgiveness it can be.

It’s not a thing I’ve thought about that often, not having committed a heinous crime - the tremendous hope that comes with the prospect of forgiveness, the tremendous lifting and redemption it can bring. But I thought of it this time as something that made all the difference - to me, to everyone I know and love, and to everyone I don’t yet know. Imagine being forgiven! - the slate wiped clean from all the things that niggle as regrets - times I’ve said something stupid, times I’ve failed to understand someone else, acts of arrogance. Also from all suspicions of being unworthy - clumsy, weird, ungainly, ungraceful, uncool, unlovable. Being totally forgiven would mean that any of the things I’ve ever done or been that I have regretted, and also any things I was unaware of but which other people held against me - would have no more weight - no ability to pull me down, no ability to determine anything about who I am and how I will act. Being forgiven means being able to define myself anew, as the beloved of God.

I then thought about what it means to be able to forgive others the same way. It means to let go of anything I’ve held against them - all my annoyance, impatience, indignation, all my feeling that I need to find some way to change them, any hindrance to my simply loving them purely. What a freedom for me! No obligation to judge or hold back my affection to “encourage” better behavior. No need to decide how I’m going to feel about them. The fact that they are forgiven lets me merely love them - so easy! - and see what God has given me to see in the moment of our interaction.

When I was reading the lesson in the jail, the man I was visiting would often be looking down, so I couldn’t see his face. But sometimes he would look up, and sometimes I saw moisture in his eyes. Whether that was from deep feeling or sleepiness, I can’t say. But I had the deep feeling, and still do. I feel deeply loved from the reading of this lesson, miraculously forgiven, and greatly uplifted from the forgiveness of others.

*to read this week’s lesson on the subject of Love, visit a Christian Science Reading Room or see the ebiblelesson at spirituality.com.

Waves

I saw a squirrel running through the back yard a few weeks back. I noticed that it moved in a wave - its tail undulated with the same movement its body made while leaping from front feet to back feet, curling and springing. It was as if it were moving through an invisible standing wave that extended forward and back from its track.

I started thinking about other things that move in waves - herds of animals I’ve seen in videos, snakes (though their wave is sideways), wondering what law of grace it is that makes them move that way, and wondering if humans, with our cross-lateral gait, also move in waves.

Some time later I was swing dancing. I had the opportunity to dance with many different partners, and several of them were quite good dancers. It pleased me that I was able to hang with them, that my skill as a follow was such that I was able to move as one with them, though (in most cases) we had never danced together before. It occurred to me later that it was a kind of a wave function - being enough in tune with the music and the particular way my partner had of holding me and moving, that it was natural to follow in the instant grace with which a wave moves.

Today I saw, on another blog, a video of Stacy Westfall riding her horse with no bridle or saddle. The blog writer, Sandi Justad, http://newcloth.blogspot.com/ talked about how it illustrated oneness of horse and rider, and how this could reflect our oneness with God. I agree with her, and I also saw the action of waves.

My experiences on horseback are few, and for the most part, unsatisfying. I remember my tendency to bounce as soon as the horse started to move any faster than a walk. I’ve found it mystifying how people could stay seated firmly in the saddle. Here, this woman, without even a saddle, was able to move as if she and the horse were one. And I could see the ripple of movement, from the horse’s gait up through her body. that embodied the grace of moving in waves. I felt an echo of love from the time I heard of how the Native Americans rode their horses, not with domination but with mutual understanding and joy. I felt that this young woman was claiming back for us something that we should never have lost.

When I find grace in my interactions with people, it’s when I’ve tuned into the same wavelength with them, so that the smiles and movements flow together as one. I think I get on the same wavelength by loving them - by approaching them with an accepting openness and no particular desire to push an agenda of my own. The wave pattern of their internal atomic clock - well, of their rock-solid identity that reverberates with the harmony of the universe - harmonizes with mine. I find that we really are one. Our love is one, our primal motivating impulse is one, regardless of all the trappings of societal labels or personal lifestyle choices. We are of God. Our being moves in the wave that God impels. Our grace together is not of two separate beings trying to coordinate externally, but it is the harmonic humming of the one tone of being, sending out its infinite waves.

Splash of Spirit

When I visit my parents each summer, my sister and I take a daily morning bike ride. We have a twenty mile loop that includes beach side, meadows, and woods, with some edges of towns at the corners. When it has rained the night before, there are puddles on the road and the trail - sometimes covering the whole road surface. My sister generally plows right through them, lifting her feet high off the peddles. I tend to go around them if I can, and if I can’t, I go through gingerly, hoping to avoid the wet, sandy track of splashed water up my back.

My sister rides all year round. Once, she told me, she had ridden right after a heavy rain, and pretty much the whole trail was a big puddle. The sky had cleared, and the puddles were vividly reflective. She said she had almost a feeling of vertigo, seeing the reflection of the trees and sky deep below her. She said, maybe we’ll get a ride like that while you’re here.

A few days later, we had a ride that had some puddles. I approached them in my usual way. Another feature of our rides is conversation - we call ourselves the biking philosophers, solving the world’s problems each morning at six, except on Fridays, when we take out the trash first. So the conversation was going along on that day - I was trying to explain some metaphysical point to her, and getting the feeling that I shouldn’t have tried. My words were just creating a sense of separation, and I didn’t feel I had any way of expressing it that could pull it together. Then we came to a puddle.

It was a bright puddle, full of sunshine and yellow-green from sun-drenched trees, with blue and white from the sky. It was on Jennifer’s side of the trail, and she rode right through it with great delight. She exclaimed at how the vivid picture was splashed into an abstraction of colors as her tires plowed through.

I was ready to just let that be the end of my efforts to explain my point. But Jennifer urged me to continue, so I said,

When you just rode through that puddle, it was this marvelous connection with another world - with the depth of the sky beneath you and the play of the colors. And when you went through it you felt a thrill, because of the sensation and your connection to it. That was an experience of being alive. Now I went through a puddle a little while back, and I didn’t see the reflection at all, because I was thinking of the sand that would go up my back, and trying not to get my feet too wet. Whereas, for you, the puddle was a great experience. But you couldn’t really prescribe your experience in terms of riding through mud puddles - “for your well-being, ride through at least five mud puddles a day.” It somehow wouldn’t get a handle on what you were trying to recommend. But you did have an alive experience riding through the mud puddle. It just can’t be prescribed in material terms. That’s what I mean by saying life is entirely spiritual. You can’t get a handle on what’s important, substantial, valuable, by pursuing material experience. Because it can’t capture the quality that makes you love it.

That made sense to Jennifer. The actual presence of the alive moment worked in a way that none of my philosophical words could do. The splash of Spirit came and united us in understanding - bright yellows and greens and blues exploded into clarity - the abstract colors forming a concrete connection.

My neighbor as myself

I had a dream early Monday morning in which I felt deep emotions - strong love for the characters in the dream, a sense of the importance of the things in their lives going in the right way for them.

On the bus Monday, a woman didn’t want to move her backpack off the chair next to her to give me a seat. She asked me to ask another person, who was also taking up two seats, to move. While I was hesitating, the young woman across the aisle offered me her seat. I hesitated there, too, unwilling to have her stand in my stead, but she indicated a vacant seat farther back which I hadn’t seen, and moved to it.

Sitting in the seat she left, I felt a little discomfited by the exchange - happy enough to have a seat but uncomfortable that someone else had moved for me; wondering if the young man in the seat next to me was her partner and I was causing them to be separated, wondering about the woman with the backpack. I had noticed the helmet on her pack when I still thought she was going to move it, as I expected, for me to sit down, so I surmised she had her bike on the bus. I then noticed that there was also a fold-up bike inside the bus, taking the space of three seats that fold up for a wheel chair to be accommodated. I wondered if it was hers (it turned out to be). I had been more comfortable asking her to move her backpack than asking the other person - a rather flamboyant person of dubious sex who was deeply involved with something with a large antenna - to stop lounging diagonally over two seats.

Then I had a thought: what if all the people I see on the bus are characters in my own dream? Because the emotions from my morning dream were still lingering, this was not a dismissive thought. It had two accompanying parts - one, an opening of my ability to feel love for them; and two, a sense that they were all part of me, all with messages to teach me, all opportunities, tests, as it were, of my ability to love. I considered that perhaps the woman with the backpack was feeling strong in a newfound ability to stand up for herself, to take enough space for herself. I didn’t really think specifically about anyone else on the bus, but as I got off the bus, I found myself thinking of her as someone who had just taught me a great lesson.

I’ve been trying this out, when I think of it, in the days since. My husband will say something to me, and I’ll think, here is a character in my dream. He is mine to love. He is here as an opportunity for me to test my love. And then I’ll respond. My responses then tend to be kinder, because I’m not thinking he should be a certain way. And there’s no place, in thinking of other people, for things like envy, because everything I see is part of my world, and no one else’s.

I’m not saying that I’m the only one that exists. I’m just saying that I’m the only one that exists in my dream. Every other individual is also a perfect reflection of God. But I don’t have the ability to see them that way from within my dream. How I see them in my dream is up to me. And the more I consider my interactions with them as opportunities to love, the more closely, in my dream, I’ll see them as they really are.

Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” I’ve been considering, in the last few years, that this can imply that my neighbor is myself. This odd fiction of thinking of everyone I see as a character in my dream, a part of me, can be a working exercise of loving my neighbor as myself. I didn’t think this up and then work on having it happen. It started to happen, and so I started to think about it.

The hand of Love

In the middle of the night
the mother comes and strokes the child’s hair
running her fingers through
gently smoothing the strands

In the middle of the night
the currents of dreams softly realign thought
disentangling the questions
deftly smoothing the strands

Soft as water
strong as currents
lifting the mermaid hair up from the rocks
smoothing it and holding it in disentangled ripples
The hand of Love lifts all tangled things
smoothes them
sets them right and holds them in shimmering order.

I’ve had this image for a while of the hand of Love - how it solves all conflicts without having to engage in them, how it sidesteps the question of who or what is wrong, and lets each of us know that what we always wanted to believe, is true. We are loved, we are held in our perfect purpose, none of the things we feared can hurt us. We were not wrong, but we were not right either - not in the way that puts us on one side or another of a conflict. There is nothing we need to prove. Love is unfolding our being, and holds us with the same certainty that the current holds the mermaid hair.

I’ve felt this hand of Love lifting and settling my thoughts, taking away my sense of conflict with others - any feeling of needing to confront a problem, to be wrong or right or to view others that way. I feel it lifting our country, our world, rendering irrelevant the perennial considerations of blame, giving us a new sense about how all needs can be met together, instead of some being chosen over others. When Love guides me, I know what to say in my family, so I don’t create tangles, but allow Love to smooth us all and hold us up together.

Sea Change

I meant to look up what the phrase meant, before I packed up my computer. But I was out of time, so I came anyway, with this feeling of sea change washing over me, surprising me continually, like waves lapping at the shore of my thought.

So surprising to feel so different. So strange to consider that perhaps I can’t describe the difference in words that are any different from ones I’ve used before. Sea change to me means that the whole sand scape of my world has been wiped casually clean, as by a wave. It means the closing of the water over the surface quickly becomes smooth, as if there were never an exposed sandbar. The waves calmly say, I didn’t see anything - yet everything has changed.

Sea change - a new weather that comes in over the sea and brings a new atmosphere, a new set of smells, a new texture in the air.

I was reading articles in the Penn Alumni magazine - featuring people who went to my school, who are now doing impressive things -a man who has used his savvy to start up multi-million dollar enterprises, a woman who has carved out a career as a novelist and promoter of her books. I found myself delighting in the logic of their approaches, and when I was done, I noticed that something had shifted in my thought. When I was in college, I shunned business - the word, the people studying it. Though it was slightly under the surface of consciousness, I think the two components of my thought were belief that business is associated with selling out, with selling one’s soul and one’s friends; and fear that I could never understand it or be successful at it. Mostly the notion of business made me want to sleep.

Now I realized that my thought, over all these years, had closed out as undesirable a vast field in which people might interact with each other with intelligence and effectiveness, might bring ideas to fruition, might stretch their capabilities, express their identities, give to the world. It seemed unsurprising to me then, that I hadn’t gone forward with any of my ideas for accomplishing good in the world. Not that I hadn’t tried a few times, not that I hadn’t wondered why I didn’t seem to have what I needed to actually pull it off. I had had, buried beneath the surface, something that worked against myself with every effort I made.

Now it feels like that’s gone. It doesn’t mean, as my husband may wish it did, that I will forthwith go out and start a money-making business venture. But it seems it’s important for my business of being in the practice.

I started thinking about this in September - studied business plans and wrote one for myself - translating all of the concepts, as I understood them, to spiritual terms. I wrote a plan for increasing the market share Truth had in my thought and in my view of the world. I guess what has happened here is a palpable gain in market share for Truth. Suddenly I can see God’s hand in all the field of business, and have a basis for affirming that God can guide business to be universally beneficial, principled, sound. It feels like a better basis of prayer to see God guiding business than to imagine business as an evil thing that should go away. Also I felt my thought opening up towards all the people who have embraced the pursuit of business - and because that is such a lot of people, it feels like an opening towards people in general.

There is another part to this as well. It is that I don’t succeed in life by defining it - people, pursuits, ways of thinking, etc - as being comprised of some good and some bad, with my task being to choose out what’s good, at least for me. Instead, I succeed in life by knowing that all is good, that God is in control of everything, and that by standing up for this truth, I bring it into my experience.

I got home and looked up sea change. It turns out, I had the feeling of it right, though the reference, from Shakespeare, is to bones changing to corals over time, under the sea. But it still has that transformational feeling - everything is here but everything is different. I asked for this, and I am happy to see it come, time and again, as many times as needed, till I come home to myself.

Traveling Lighter

I was talking with the mother of the friend with whom my daughter did her search and rescue training. She said, I'm so happy that Kelsi accomplished this, because it means I know she can go anywhere. She knows how to make shelter, and she knows how to find her way. It has been an important part of the whole process of letting go and having her move out on her own.

I think it's true. The two things I need to know how to do are find my way and make shelter. I can think of that these days as I practice traveling lighter.

I'm traveling lighter by leaving behind a couple of big things that used to define me to myself. One of them is idealism. Growing up, I felt being idealistic was heady and lofty - it gave me a feeling of deep purpose. I couldn't imagine not wanting to be that way - it gave me something to think about, and a way of feeling good about myself, at least some of the time. I think people told me at times that being idealistic maybe wasn't such a great idea, but I didn't understand them. Now I'm looking at it differently.

As I parse out what it is to be idealistic, I define it as having a picture of the way things should be, and then trying to live out my life as close to that picture as possible. The problem with it is the assumption that any picture I could have in my head would do any kind of justice to the wonderful, convoluted, earth-smelling intricacy that is life. Holding a picture like that as my first reality would lead me to miss most of the crucial and alive things that make up each moment, the surprise bumps and the secret hollows, and all the things that ask to be noticed and responded to in the moment they present themselves to me. It was highly presumptuous for me to think I could predict any of that before the moment, and it prevented me from having the humble and supple readiness to meet life as it came.

So I've left my idealism behind - left it behind in favor of faith in the goodness of life as it presents itself in this moment; left it so I can expect to be surprised, and expect to find, in the present-moment-giving of life, everything I need to navigate the moment with grace.

The other thing I'm working on traveling without these days is criticism. It's actually a related thing: criticism is about thinking that I have a picture of how things should be done or how people should be, and then measuring them according to my picture and complaining about the things that don't match. Now I remind myself that God is the Mind of other people, and I am not. Primal goodness tells them how to be, compellingly. I can't, both because I can't know what's right for them from the inside, and because I'm not the voice inside them which speaks from their center and moves them with poise and balance. But God is that voice, and God is here. My job is to be humble enough to notice what God is doing, in me and in everyone.

The two things I need to know how to do are to find my way and to make shelter. I find my way by noticing what's here and how the law of goodness is manifest here and now. I make shelter by welcoming everyone I see into the warmth of being loved.

Digging Ditches, and other spiritual experiences

I’ve taken great pleasure, in the last few weeks, in doing hard physical labor - using a digging bar and a post hole digger to make a deep hole in the ground. The four-foot wide hole goes down three and a half feet, and the narrow post-hole dug one extends an additional four feet down. The last six feet of the excavation is through hardpan - a compacted mixture of clay and sand and rock which needs to be speared with the heavy digging stick to break apart. After the hole got too deep to allow for effective swinging with a shovel, I climbed in and used my hands to fill a bucket, which I would stand up to dump outside the hole. When going deeper down with the post-hole digger, I would pull the dirt up and dump it into the bucket in the bottom of the deep hole. When the bucket was full, I would dump it.

There’s a tangible substance to the satisfaction of the work. Part of it is made of doing something harder than what I am used to doing. Part of it is in the perseverance, and the success of actually making it happen. I feel a steady and warm light, about the size and weight of a fist, a coalescing of the reward of the work, solid inside of me. It makes me feel nourished, strong, and substantial.

I’ve started collecting things that make me feel that way. There is love,similarly solid and powerfully centering, when given freely and with no tally about how it is received. And there is honesty. Last December my friend Laurie, who was visiting from Bali, lost her wallet in a Seven Eleven parking lot. She didn’t even know she’d lost it till the man who found it contacted her. The wallet had everything in it - all her documentation for travel, all her money, her credit cards, the PIN of her debit card . . . And the man was willing to wait there until she could come for it.

I thought about what it would have felt like to be that man. I could feel how what he found in that parking lot was the precious opportunity to exercise his honesty - to reach out and make a big difference to someone. I imagine that that opportunity must have left him with a greater reward than anything that was in the wallet. I could identify with the glow - entirely independent of the gratitude he might receive from Laurie; the internal reward of acting according to his best nature.

I got to exercise my honesty a month after that. The kids behind the counter at the computer store were ready to let me go without paying for the optical drive they had just installed. I asked them twice - they said that was all, I was free to take my mac and go. (And in a way I would have liked to; I wasn’t happy about my mac burning out so soon after the warranty ended - first the hard drive then the optical drive) But I said, Are you sure? You’d better check that - I expected to pay for an optical drive. Then I waited about twenty minutes while one of them went in to talk to a supervisor. And when he came out, he charged me $236 for the optical drive - more than the price I’d been quoted, or the one that appeared on the printed receipt (which their records seemed to show I had already paid). He didn’t thank me for my honesty or for saving him from his mistake. So I didn’t get any external reward for being honest. But as I walked away with my mac, I acknowledged to myself that it was worth the price to feel the surging, centering, comforting glow of an act of honesty. A gift that had been given to me through the circumstance of their inexperience. I felt grateful to them then, and felt compassion for them and whatever mix of thoughts they had that made up their world view and life experience.

There are other things that give me that feeling. The heart-soaring response to a majestic vista, the delight of an “aha” moment, the satisfaction of creating a work of art, the warmth of being in community with others. I’m using these collected experiences to redefine my sense of substance. What if my substance is that solid, glowing feeling? What if the whole point of life is to bring out that substance? What would it mean for me to understand that I don’t need to seek out activities, or manipulate events, to experience that substance? Could I have it all the time?

At our spiritual formation group last Monday, the scripture that was shared referred to drawing water from the springs of salvation. What came to me as I listened was that the springs of salvation are made of the same substance that I’ve been collecting in my experience. I draw water from the springs of salvation when I acknowledge that this is the substance of being. I can have it right now - it’s not dependent on having any material conditions met. And if this is true for me, it’s true for everyone.

Humility

“Take a happy pill, Heather,” said my daughter’s violin teacher. “You’re just going to have to do the work it takes to learn this – you might as well be happy about it. Settle down and do it with humility and attention.” – Something like that.

I was struck by the wisdom of his words, and the fact that humility is, indeed, a crucial component for learning anything. It gives me the willingness to go ahead and work at something even if it’s hard, instead of making excuses for why I don’t know it already. I look back these days on huge swaths of my life in which I didn’t make the effort to learn something that I wanted to and could have. I see that arrogance was a large cause of my inactivity. I felt I should already know something, given my great education and/or experience, so I didn’t want to put myself in the group of those who didn’t know in order to actually learn it. This has been true at different times about my writing, my music, illustration, web design, and probably other things I could have been good at.

Thinking deeper, wondering how I could have not seen this arrogance at all, I realize that it was tied in with my sense of self-worth. My self-worth rested on my concept of myself as a smart, well-educated person. The way I had it set up, to be a person who still needed to learn all those things was in conflict with what made me worthy of existence. I apparently was willing to accept huge blindnesses in order to preserve the illusion (delusion?) that I knew as much as I needed to know to be the person I thought I needed to be.

Going deeper still, I see that I could have, and still can, place my sense of self-worth on something more elemental than an image of myself as a certain kind of person. I can place it on my source, and my place in the universe - on my identity as a child of God. This view of myself maintains my worthiness no matter what, and allows me to admit to ignorance, and to missteps, and to my need to learn and grow.

Isn’t it funny that having my self-worth be placed on a much greater thing would allow me to be more humble? Isn’t it interesting that arrogance is a mark of a deep need to find the elemental source of self-worth that isn’t dependent on a cardboard cut-out self-image?

I got an award two weeks ago. It was for showing up. It was because two years ago I stumbled across an organization that struck me as so good that I needed to give something of myself to it. It’s a self-organizing advocacy and support group for homeless women. I remember thinking about the fact that I didn’t have anything in particular to offer them, but that I could be, perhaps, a body – answering the phone or doing whatever humble labor might help them. It turned out that they set me up to work with a writing group, which spluttered along weakly under my unconfident leadership, such that I felt lucky they were allowing me to be there. This evolved, for a time, into my helping with the production of a bi-weekly newsletter. I felt mostly like a weak catalyst prompting them to keep putting in the energy it took to do it.

Eventually my comfort and confidence evolved, and the writing group started to get stronger. This coincided with my clarity that my best role was to do the very least – to impose no expertise, offer very little advice, and basically encourage them to listen to themselves. So I continued to feel that my role was a very humble one. That’s why I was astonished, at the 13th annual Homeless Women’s Forum, to be this year’s recipient of their “Woman of Light” award, for a woman who, while not homeless, does much to help their cause.

It was an amazing feeling to get the reward. There was the kind of embarrassed astonishment, and the awed sense of the great work the organizers and attendees were doing, and the gratitude for being allowed to work with them.

Later, I found myself thinking about the paradox of humility. Jesus talked about how we have to humble ourselves to be exalted. But being humble doesn’t turn out to be a wretched state, and being arrogant feels anxious, not confident. The strongest basis for humility is having an unassailable understanding of true worth. And humility is the grounding that allows things to be accomplished.

Grace

A friend and I started getting together about a year ago for coffee or lunch, to talk about matters of Spirit and of the heart. When the food arrived, the first time, I lifted up my fork as usual to begin to eat. But before the food reached my mouth, he said, “grace.”

It wasn’t like he was admonishing me, telling me we should say grace first. The word itself, the way he said it, was grace. It made me stop the automatic movement of restaurant habits, made all my trajectories disengage, spin like gears on a coasting bicycle. I felt myself lifted – my thought floating into a much larger place. Grace. He continued, “It’s right here. It’s all that ever matters.” From that point I was ready for all our interactions to be grace-filled – to exude what matters.

At several Thanksgivings over the past years, I’ve felt the momentum of all the food steamroll over the thanks. We were a group of friends together, each family bringing something, doing the last preparations together in our kitchen. When it was ready, there seemed to be the need to eat it while it was hot. But later I missed the taking time – or whatever it takes – to disengage from the trajectory of motion and float, still, in grace. Last two Thanksgivings I had us spend a moment before eating to express thanks. It almost worked. I still needed to find a way to invoke that sudden peace that came with Peter’s “grace.”

So this Thanksgiving, before all the food was set out, I had everyone gather in a circle. I told them that I wanted to do a grace, and that others could have the opportunity to share their expressions. Then, when we were all holding hands, I said, “Grace. It’s right here. It’s all that really matters. It’s the joy that’s in everything that’s joyful, the thing that makes anything you’re doing feel worthwhile.” In that moment, for me, the grace came present. It stayed as other people shared thanks, and one friend shared a movement exercise. It continued throughout the time of food and conversation and movement and music, till the end of the evening.

Parenting Lessons

I’m getting a lot of mileage this fall from a confession of ignorance. A friend said she felt it illustrated true wisdom. Other friends also have given it a proper, respectful space to be listened to. It has made a big difference for me in raising my kids.

The confession is: I don’t know anything about how to help a boy become a man.

It has made me stop trying to pretend I know, or thinking I have any understanding of the best decisions of guidance and discipline for my son. It has allowed me to give up the burden of it and consider that everything he needs, to be who he is, is already in him. It is the nature of his being, as he is created, that provides him now with what he always has been, and develops it day by day. The qualities of manhood, which are so attractive to me even though I fathom them faintly, are already part of who he is. The strength of character, compassion, integrity, and ability to do are not my job to construct in him. Phew! They are part of who he already is as the reflection of God.

As I’ve relaxed in this, I’ve seen, day by day, that it is true about my son. It makes me happy to know him. It makes him happier to be around me. I’m no longer worrying about whether he’ll develop the qualities I think he’ll need. Even if I knew what they were, I wouldn’t be able to make them appear. But I can trust with the same trust I have towards the goodness of the universe that his Creator does know everything he needs (for he is, after all, his Creator’s idea) and gives it to him.

In the last few days I’ve reflected that this is also true for my daughter. Though I may have felt more comfortable about guiding someone into womanhood than manhood, I really don’t know anything about this either. Even what it is to be a woman is something I may be only just now discovering. It is lovely to feel that I and she can both be led, each from within, in the development of our own womanhood.

Jesus said, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?” – implying that none of us could. Depending on interpretation, that could mean: since you can see that you can’t, by setting up a self-help program for yourself or by worrying, make yourself a foot taller, don’t try to set up such a program, or worry, about any part of yourself. God is taking care of all aspects of you. And it can mean, since you can’t, either through worrying or a self-help program, do anything to improve your self-esteem, give up the effort and rejoice in the royal place that you are granted in being the child of God.

I’m learning that this applies to parenting, too. I can’t add a cubit to their stature, I can’t make them be a woman and a man. But I can relax and enjoy the expression of Life that Life, Love, gives to us in our relations with each other day by day.

“Mortal existence is a dream . . .”

Wednesday was rainy. I was walking down the hill on Yesler, from up above Broadway where I had parked. I was carrying about ten Bibles in a plastic bag, and a similar number of Science and Healths in my backpack, along with my books – going to the jail to deliver literature and visit people. I had already gotten pretty wet picking up the books – unlocking the padlock at the gate, walking up to the Reading Room, walking back, closing the gate, replacing the padlock, stepping gingerly through the half-inch deep sheet of water pitted by raindrops. And I had driven in low visibility on a freeway thick with cars, my windshield wipers thrashing. The rain now was a little lighter but still getting me wet.

The walk down Yesler is always a bit breathtaking. There is the sweeping vista down and across the Sound, and to the left across the valley. To the right is the roar of freeway cars being channeled down various parallel and diverging rampings of concrete. Then you come down, across the homeless encampments, into the land of the skyscrapers.

So I was walking along, hunched and squinting, when I suddenly got an arresting thought. I imagined that this was all a dream, and I had awakened. I still found the dream interesting, so I was describing it to myself, trying to remember everything. I told myself, we had these things called cars that could move us along special channels that we had made for them. And we had these things called bodies that we moved around in, too. We considered the bodies more attached to us than the cars, but we moved them with similar instrumentation – with both we would listen to their feedback and supply them with what they were said to need.

A funny thing happened to me at that moment. The rain, which had been an annoyance, suddenly became an interesting detail of my dream. I felt the drops on my face as cool and soft, refreshing; something to notice. I wanted to remember everything – I felt a love for it. I also started to think about what I knew now that I was awake – that good is here, now. I could feel that goodness, that feels-like-flying lightness inside.

After I was done at the jail, walking now up the very steep hills but with a lighter load, I again put myself into mind of noticing what was in the dream. I thought, in the dream, we all had different things we were supposed to be doing. Some of them were considered more desirable than others. There were people that we really loved, and things we really cared about. But we didn’t necessarily notice that love is present all the time.

As I maneuvered my car onto the freeway, I felt a surge of satisfaction at having accomplished all my tasks successfully. And I thought, in the dream, we thought we could have goodness based on certain conditions. We set up the conditions, or felt that others had, and then we tried to meet them. If we succeeded, we got to feel goodness. Otherwise, we didn’t.

There are two places in Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy says, “Mortal existence is a dream”. I’ve accepted that on an intellectual and analogical level, but hadn’t come so close before to feeling what it might mean. The question, so if it’s a dream, what difference does that make? is an important one. I could say, it’s just a dream so it doesn’t matter what happens. But that feels like a cop out, and also something my heart would never quite believe. I could say, it’s just a dream, so if we get good at lucid dreaming, we can make whatever we want happen. But that misses the point – it is an attempt to live in the dream instead of wake up. I could say it’s like the premise in The Matrix – that while this may be a dream, it may be preferable to stay asleep than to give up everything I know as true.

My experience on Wednesday pointed to a different answer. I had the feeling of being awake to the truth that good is here now, and that nothing else is absolutely true. The particulars of the dream give me many opportunities to love, and the love is real, something I’m actually doing in my waking state. I start to see that elements of the dream are only real to the extent that they are opportunities for me to love. The phenomenon of cars and highways is dream, but the desire to move freely and to harness power is real. I have the opportunity to love the dance of harmony, and the swift movement, and the ingenuity of invention. The phenomenon of bodies is dream, but locus and volition, presence and interaction with the environment, feeling and caring, are real. I have the opportunity to love the long strides and wide vistas of high hills, and tender touch, and being with people.

There are so many issues in the dream that cry for healing. The ground beneath the highways cries to breathe; the air cries to be clean; people cry to know their worth and purpose. All the currents of human systems, many swept along by blind grabbing for a misunderstood need, cry to be set right so they don’t keep on impoverishing people and wreaking environmental havoc. What delivers healing to the dream is doses of awakeness, moments of vision which guide actions toward the natural good that all creation desires.

Casting out the beam

Jesus taught, “first cast the beam out of your own eye so you can see clearly to cast the mote out of your brother’s eye.”

I’ve come to see that this is more than just a figure of speech telling me to pay attention to my own problems before criticizing others. It turns out it isn’t literally impossible for me to have a beam in my eye, and it is with great enthusiasm that I report that I have found out what the beam is, so now I can cast it out.

A beam is a structural member that holds up the floor and the roof of a building. The relevant structure here is my paradigm – my construct of the system of laws that govern my world. Everything I see is dependent on this construct – every deduction I make regarding cause and effect, every conclusion I make regarding what happened and why. And if a part of my construct is faulty, it will distort my vision, hampering my ability to see what’s what. It will be a “beam in my eye.”

So I found out what the beam in my eye is. It’s the notion that it’s possible for one person to be better than another, or for me to be a better or worse person based on my choices. I cast out the beam by realizing that this isn’t true.

There is nothing I can do to make myself a better person. There’s nothing I can do to make myself a worse person. There’s no way for me to be better than anyone else, or worse than anyone else. How does that make me feel? What does it mean?

It means there’s no need for me to ever criticize myself. There’s no need for me to make resolutions to be better. There’s no need for me to look to others to see if they’re doing better or worse than I am. There’s no need to feel anxious because maybe I haven’t done enough, or I haven’t done it well enough.

It is a big structural plank. Lots of things rest on it. Lots of things threaten to fall if I remove it. How can I get myself to be good if my behavior doesn’t matter? What motivation will I have to achieve anything? If I give up that plank, what makes me be good?

God makes me be good, just because God makes me that way. My being good is in gratitude, in joy, in delight – it is what I want. It’s not in trying to measure up, to be worthy, to earn God’s approval. God approves of me because God made me that way.

This was Job’s lesson: he thought God would be good to him if he was good. He needed to learn that God is good anyway, and that he was good because God made him that way; there was no way he could be otherwise. After he learned this lesson, he was healed.

The beam I get to cast out functions like a teeter-totter – giving the sense that one person can be up and another one down. In fact, no matter what we do, we are all of the same quality. We are each here in our nakedness, with all of our mistakes and failures, and all of our beauty, and all of our desire to be redeemed. We are all here with our love, and our loneliness, and our desire to be loved, and our desire to be holy. We are each the child of God.

One theological view says, “God loves you even though you are unlovable. This shows you how great God is.” Another says, “God loves you when you are good. Do well to be worthy of God’s love.” Both of those are just shadows of the truth, that God makes us lovable and good, and loves us that way.

If I can cast this beam out of my eye – this false paradigm that leads to comparison, then I will be able to see clearly to cast the mote out of my brother’s eye, for I will see him with compassion, and with oneness, and with love.


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