Month: January 2023

The South Shore of Utah Lake is another place I go when I seek learning. It is mostly orchard (peach and apple trees) and ranch land (some cattle, horses) with a few sparse homes. A shoreline road follows the curves and bends of the lake. I often see Osprey, Bald Eagle (the only place I’ve seen them in Utah), and many Sea Gulls. Sometimes Deer. I go for the spaciousness and a different kind of quiet to open my heart.

In the spirit of continued blessing, today, here is another that I enjoy from John O’Donohue. I think of it as a blessing of learning, an encouragement of integration. O’Donohue names it as Morning Offering. I’m glad for words and images to guide and to draw attention to magical of the big and the small.

A Morning Offering
John O’Donohue

 I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcomes the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Waves of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

Antelope Island State Park is a new park for me. It is the largest of a few islands within The Great Salt Lake, in the State of Utah where I live. I’ve been exploring lately. Needing and wanting to feel big skies, like the one above that looks north from Buffalo Point. Big skies are what I often go to in times of big change — to help me feel and to help find clarity.

A big change playing out for me now is in my primary work partner. For those reading, you know that Quanita Roberson and I have been up to a lot together over the last seven years. I’m proud and grateful for the work that we have done and for the guiding that we have been able to offer to each other and to those that have come along as participants and clients and fellow learners. I mostly wish to bow to such a good period of life.

This primary partnership will rest now. Changes are happening — some programs continuing in different directions. Some not continuing. Sorting is a part of it all. Programs and feelings that need some time. And then there is newness too. Openings that bring creative energy and some long-awaited desires to the forefront.

I wish well for all of the configurations. And as has become one of my most helpful orientations, well for the configurations of the inner and the outer, and for the configurations of “the now” and of the longer arc. Individually, and in community.

Poetry is what I often turn to for clarity and inspiration. Today, it is a blessing from John O’Donohue from his Book of Blessings. May it be so, all around.

For a New Beginning
John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

I have long appreciated the distinction between “pace” and “speed.”

In her book, The Seven Whispers, Christina Baldwin offers a distinction that most moved me 18 years ago. As I remember it, “Speed,” she says, “is last-minute running through the airport to get to your gate before your flight departs. It’s leaping over rows of chairs and dodging people.”

Christina continues, “Pace is holding a toddler’s hand walking through the neighborhood. It’s more stopping than it is walking. The toddler has you responding to questions about bugs, weeds, pieces of litter, birds.”

Pace is natural. Speed is imposed.

We love speed, don’t we? Revering of speed has been enculturated into most of us. Yet, “It’s not all speed and efficiency.” That’s what my friend Meg Wheatley shared so often in her work with leaders defaulted into a mechanical views and disciplines of life lived. That’s what my son’s little Terrier Dog reminds me when we walk. It’s less of a walk. It’s more of a stop-to-sniff, that turns ten minutes into twenty-five.

And then there is all the stuff of slogans — “the speed of change, and the speed of life.” Again, a lot of imposed stuff intended to motivate as it does.

Now, me, back to pace, I’ve become more interested in the pace of clarity. The kind of clarity that aligns with purpose. The kind of clarity that brings feeling and joy back to the many kinds of life-endeavors we do, solo or in community. I’m interested in the kind of clarity that weaves mystery and multiplicity, that honors many mixes of diversity.

And the thing about clarity’s pace is that it can be slow or fast. It seems to me that pace of clarity can happen in an instant, in a surrender. Like the way that the lake freezes as a whole, edge to edge at just the right moment of winter. Like the way that intuition pops voice to brain and body knowing. Like the way that clouds part, leaving open sky.

It also seems to me that sometimes the pace of clarity is very slow. Like the way that teams build their patience muscles in return meetings together about things that don’t have finish lines. Like the way that complexity requires dwelling with, waiting for something to emerge naturally, rather that being force-fertilized. Like the way that geography evolves to patterns through the slow touch of wind and water.

Clarity is what moves an individual. Clarity is what moves a group of people. Or “enough clarity.” Clarity is an absolute, sometimes. But often it isn’t. It’s only knowing the next step in what will eventually be many steps. Clarity has values in it, that remain true across changing circumstance.

It’s not the shallow of clarity that compels me. It’s not faster, faster, faster so as to exhaustedly move on to the next thing. It’s the depth of clarity that compels me, the remembered joy of that toddler walk that became the surprise highlight and fulfillment of the week.

May there be a clarity that guides and that we remember to revere together.

Audible tells me in it’s year-end report that my most-listened-to book of 2022 was the above, Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse.

I’m not surprised. It’s been both a multiple listen and a physical read. I love the narrative of spiritual coming of age — an important thread for me in my last 45 years of living.

I also love the theme of spiritual awakening, particularly when it is oriented through the self. My overall translation of that is an awakening that values the deeply inner.

Says the character Siddhartha, at one stage of his becoming…

“Yes, he thought, breathing deeply, I will no longer try to escape from Siddhartha. I will no longer devote my thoughts to Atman and the sorrows of the world. I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins. I will not longer study Yoga-Veda, Atharva-Veda, or asceticism, or any other teachings. I will learn from myself, be my own pupil; I will learn from myself the secret of Siddhartha.”

It is an important moment, I believe, when any of us turn to ourselves as the materials to be most intimate with.

I don’t the read the above as rejection of the many outer or communal resources — that is how most of us seem to populate our learnings. I do read it as a keen remembering to take the deeply inner journey, and know it for its richness, and to be held in such journey, and witnessed.

May there be wisdom found for any of us, in these deep journeys of becoming.