Human to Human

Sister Julia Walsh is one of the writers / bloggers that I enjoy a lot. I met her during work with the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration over the last few years. She is vibrant in her thoughtfulness, curiosity, and willingness to lean in to the complexity that is worship and vowed life.

In her recent post on “Technology Habits and Connections that Matter Most,” she references this term, “IT,” intentional technology. I appreciate how she reflects on the choice of how to best use social media, and more importantly, clarify relationship with social media.

It’s not as simple as “technology is bad” is it. That overlooks essential mediums that are helping people everywhere to organize everything from chats over coffee to revolutions. It overlooks a convenience of apps than enable mass amounts of portable information and practices to be available at fingertips.

I’ve been experimenting with my own relationship to social media. Really I’ve been doing this over the last 10 years in particular, just like most other humans. In the last year, I’ve created deliberate times of unplugging. Sometimes a morning. Sometimes three days. No email. No texts. No computer. No TV. In the best of those times, it is no clocks also (just an alarm set to mark the end of that period).

It is not reasonable, nor desirable for me to think of always being unplugged this way. Let’s face it, it’s pretty sweet to do more with a smart phone in five minutes standing in a grocery line than what would have taken, ten years ago, two hours at the office. The flight is booked. The banking transfer complete. I have the top news headlines. And I’ve touched in with five friends on Facebook. But I, like Sister Julia, also want those choices to be intentional. Deliberate. And I don’t want to miss the moment in front of me. Sometimes, its not my isolated todo list that matters in the grocery store, but rather, the person standing next to me. It’s also pretty sweet to to experience in those five minutes a “hello.” A “how are you?” A “that looks tasty, is it?” A laugh. A connection. A “have a good day.”

Therein lies the crux of it, in this human to human world. “Things” and technologies and distractions and, and, and. These will always be available. It is our intention and reclaiming of choice in relationship to any of those that matter.

That’s tasty don’t you think?

“Divine Feminine” and “Divine Masculine” are terms that I hear often, even attributed to me, yet must admit that I don’t fully understand. I hear them invoked in the world, particularly the feminine. Particularly by women. As an energy. As a spirit. As a marker to identify an evolutionary shift in culture. As a way of being that interrupts the pattern of organizing solely around the masculine.

Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine feel important. I want to feel them as invitations. And though easy to connect and associate them with gender, I don’t want to make them so small.

I’ve just come from four days of a healing intensive in which the divine feminine was invoked many times. Beautifully, I would say, and in a group of 35 that was 70% women. It was spoken as an invitation to come into different ways of seeing and being in the world and with one another. It does have a softness, yet is not to be confused with gooeyness. There is utterly clear and sharp purpose in the divine feminine.

It was my Grandmother on my father’s side that first introduced me in the late 1980s to Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade. It was then that I first became more aware of the dominance of a cultural story that amplifies the masculine — no, wait, eclipses the feminine — and I believe appropriately, was challenging the roots of that story. To challenge such a deeply engrained story is to point to the invisible. Invisible habits. Invisible routine. Invisible embedded beliefs that create structures and leadership forms. That separates. That divides. A good friend jokingly referenced this to me years ago when he said that men only think in two ways — fuck it or kill it. Ouch. There is a truth in that.

This last weekend, there was much pointing to that invisible. There was much that happened through the realms of story, love, kindness, embodiment. Activation. All of this was good and will stay with me for a long time.

I noticed after this event that I wanted to speak particularly to the men, to the invitation toward not just the divine feminine, but also to the divine masculine. The culture making called for is not an abandonment of all things masculine. Sometimes it can feel this way. Or be comically referenced this way. As confusing as it may be, the planet’s evolution calls for men also to step into clarity. Away from fears (or through them). Away from blame (or through it). Away from shame (or through it). Men too, need to step up to be with and in the culture making that is happening.

I imagine that we as humans will find our way. I hope that is so. To an evolved culture that doesn’t unintentionally replace masculinity with an imposed femininity. I feel the call for men — now I am speaking of gender — to remember the best of who we are, even the forgotten parts, yet that reside I believe in our DNA. It may reach back thousands of years, but we men also know a divine wholeness together. It is inspirational to be with women that have reanimated this part of themselves individually and together. I believe this is changing and evolving the planet.

Our job as men is not simply to watch. Even if we don’t fully understand (ah, there a pattern — if we don’t understand, ignore it, or shame it, dismiss it…). Ours also is to participate.

The American Southwest is beautiful country. I am in some of that now, having driven yesterday from Albuquerque to Gallup. It is unique. In someways stark and barren. Bushy Junipers somehow finding way to scatter and grow in dusty, red earth. But these are big sky areas too. Long, reaching, cloudless blue punctuated by red mesas. The contrast is deeply alluring, pulling my eyes to to wander, to expand. When seen close up, those mesas feel very alive to me. Like grandmothers and grandfathers matriarching and patriarching generations of family. I feel words in me, emotions pulled in me when I am nearby. Longings.

I continue a stretch of working and travel. This week with good life friends and companions, Chris Corrigan, Caitlin Frost, and Teresa Posakony. My time to write in times like these mostly shifts to words spoken aloud with one another and with the group of people that participate in our workshops. This week, tomorrow through Thursday, about 40 from Navajo Nation that work in health promotion. There will be longings there too.

John O’Donahue has become a favorite poet for me. I can almost select randomly from his writings and find something deeply satisfying. The poem below, a blessing, For Longing, is one that I have been been both feeling and sharing these past weeks. May it inspire. It does for me.

For Longing by John O’Donohue

Blessed be the longing that brought you here

And quickens your soul with wonder.

May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire

That disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease

To discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

May the forms of your belonging–in love, creativity, and friendship–

Be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.

May the one you long for long for you.

May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.

May your mind inhabit your life with the sureness with which
your body inhabits the world.

May your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.

May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.

May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.

 

 

Over the last year, I’ve done a lot of thinking about “home.” Home as place. Home as geography. Home as being with friends. Home as memory. Home as comfortable in one’s skin. Ah, there it is. Comfort. Maybe what carries across all of these aspects of home is a feeling of comfort, of belonging. 

I’m in one of those stretches of the calendar where the home that is geography is quite welcomed. Six of seven weeks are on the road, away from the home that is Utah. This includes all good things — a board meeting for a non-profit, four Art of Hosting events (reaching 200 people), and a healing retreat. I am “home” now, today being the third of four days in such manner. To be with my kids. To eat Sunday dinner. To walk my dog a few times. To take a long, hot bath. To catch up to email and tasks that have had to wait while I’ve been hosting. To prepare for the events that are coming. To stack up essential phone meetings that can’t wait another two weeks. It is full. I am full.

Perhaps “home” is a marker for the deep longings that so many of us feel. In a way, with my kids, all I’ve ever wanted is to be a good dad. I love them. I love watching them grow into their adult lives. Hearing what they are studying. Hearing what they are questioning. I love playing games with my youngest, now nine. Laughing. Teasing. Being dad is a home for me. I know that I am uniquely fed by being with my kids, even in the ambient togetherness that is doing separate things under the same roof. I believe they are fed by being together, even in the simple touchstone that is a Sunday dinner with overcooked chicken.

Our longings feed us. Our “coded for together” feeds us. These are impressions that ground me while I’m here, in the home that is family. And they are impressions that I will carry with me into the next two weeks, where others, from other homes, will turn to each other with longings, and likely, surprise belongings.