Category: General Learning

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I’m pretty much an early morning person. I like to wake around 6:00. I like to get the day started. To feel like I’m accomplishing things. It’s my upbringing. My Mom was this way when I was young. My Grandparents were this way too.

Today was not one of those days. I woke from a dream that had me a bit sad. My body felt stiff and sore from the spring yard work that I’d done on the weekend. My dog woke me three times in the night to go outside — perhaps a bit going on in his stomach. I ate too much food on the weekend, which I enjoyed in the moment, but felt lousy about after. I hadn’t exercised on the stationary bike (because I was doing yard work instead). And it was the first Monday of daylight savings time. The light in the morning was just off.

I accept that there are days like this, when it is a wee bit harder to get going. It is part of life, right. There are times to just dwell in what does not feel like it is going so well.

Today was not a day to dwell in that. Far too much to do and with some immediate accountabilities in the day. So now what?

I found myself looking for the little things. I can’t figure our the whole picture of things, or, my energy just isn’t there. So, it’s best to follow my friend Charles’ advice, to just make good decisions for the next 15 minutes in front of me. Write in my journal. Good. Meditate. Good. Take in the back yard stream for a moment. Good. Blog. Good. Set up an appointment with my tax accountant. Good. Send my weekly email to my son on his faith community service. Good.

Little things.

In many ways I think of myself as a big picture person, able to hold a lot of complexity and contradictions. Maybe today will turn into that. But the start, sometimes, is just one little thing after another, to get through the morning and into all of those good things cued up for today.

Yesterday a colleague and I were in conversation about a workshop series we are offering. We revisited a question that we first started with months ago. “What do you want people to get out of this? What do you hope they leave with?” One of our responses was that they, and all of us, would feel awakened.

Awakening lies beneath specific skills. It’s not separate from, but often gives them wholly new context. Awakening is not the tasked recipe part that is often inherent in some good learning. Rather, it points to an ongoing imagination of possibility. Awakening is not the blindness to options that all of us are from time to time. It is instead, a reclaimed ability to refresh ourselves in seeing choices. The awakening is what creates partners and co-creators rather than dependents.

A friend recently shared this John O’Donohue poem with me, the Irish poet and priest, that further inspires awakening.

Once you start to awaken,
no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns.
Now you realise how precious your time here is.

You are no longer willing to squander your essence
on undertakings that do not nourish your true self;
your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language.

You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety
and the confirmation of your outer identity.

Now you are impatient for growth,
willing to put yourself in the way of change.

You want your work to become an expression of your gift.
You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers
to where the danger of transformation dwells.

Getting even a grain or two of this awakening is massive. I hope that it is so, for all of us.

 

In Utah, the blossoming crocus is a sure sign that Spring is arriving. The crocus is the first to flower. They will be followed by daffodils in a couple of weeks, and tulips a couple of weeks after that.

You can see in the above that these crocus in my garden are coming forth among some old dried grass, a few old leaves from other plants, and a few weeds too. The crocus come when the snow is mostly gone, yet when the lawns haven’t yet turned any kind of green. When the fruit trees are just starting to think about budding, but remain mostly cocooned.

There is no tending of this crocus. They are so delicate, yet they just come forward. And I know that they won’t last long. I find the window here is about three weeks. But in that three weeks they signal a somatic shift for me. They make me smile. They cue my spring outdoor todo list that includes raking out the old growth, thinning the daisies, and trimming back the willow tree. They appetize me into the coming satisfaction of dirt under my fingernails and sore muscles that will need a soak after a day of yard tending.

Arrival is a ripe topic that I often find myself thinking about. With these crocus, I would want to explore the seasonal arrival that is us as people. It’s an invitation to notice birth, difference, or evolution.

But for today, I’m content with the smile that I feel, the joy that I feel, in seeing these delicate flowers arrive to accompany these days.

 

I admit, I’m really interested in the American political process these days. I know, it sounds a bit like a shameful confession, which I suppose says something.

Like many, I try to stay informed, listening to the candidates for Republican and Democratic party nomination. I try to listen to the issues and the platforms. It’s not easy, I find. It takes a lot of patience. You have to get through a lot of posturing and attack talking points to hope for a small chip of a gem of authenticity. I would say this is true with those who analyze the process — including professional media and arm chair analysts over coffee.

What is easy is to jump into the social and psychological insights of the process itself. The fact that this nomination and election process takes close to two years remains absurd to me. I’m Canadian eh — what’s wrong with five weeks, or even three months as it was in the recent federal election that brought Justin Trudeau to the office of prime minister.

But never mind that. I believe the process is set up to bring out the worst in the candidates, no matter who you may favor. Not intended that way, but just results in it that way. It’s one that privileges winning over truth-telling. And it has such history that this stooping is largely unavoidable. Good and rather talented human beings must fight with one another. The more bombastic the better. The more outrageous the better. The more shocking the better. The more clever in witty quips and putdowns the better. It reminds me of the fights I would get in with my sister, when we were both under the age of eight — “She started it! No, he did! Mommmmmmm!”

Why is this tolerated and even supported in the American system? It’s a bit crazy. Most people know this. But underneath lays some shadowy realities that are not limited to Americans. I wonder — yes, I’m guessing — if there is such an addiction in the American collective psyche to being entertained and shocked. It creates great opportunity for outrage which, let’s face it, if you are living in an overall numbed state, feels inherently good to react to. It’s the hunger for feeling alive, even emotionally and neuro-chemically that feels so good.

Crazy right? Sure. Or maybe not. It’s a reality that is not limited to Americans.

Robert Langan is a psychoanalist and longtime Buddhist practitioner. I recently read one of his articles, “A Buddhist Psychoanalyst Puts Our Divided Country On The Couch.” He offers a story worth reading to address some of this dynamic in American politics.

Here’s a couple of teasers from his article that stood out to me:

• “We fear things becoming worse and hope to make them better. There’s the rub. Our country is in the midst of a polarized conflict between hope and fear, with each side’s hope becoming the other sides’ fear.”
• “Demonization of the other only fuels the conflict. The more certain one’s sense of righteous rectitude (the side of the angels), the more adamant is one’s determination never to shake hands with the devil.”
• “The acceptance of not fully knowing does not stymie action. It credits others’ ways of knowing complimentary indicators of what we humans should be doing with ourselves, our communal best guess.”

One of the things I believe is that we as a human species (yes, it’s a very broad reference) have a fundamental inability and fear to accept an inherent unknowable of human existence. The American political process, like most political processes, imposes and privileges knowing on top of inherently unknowable dynamics. Until we (you, me, us…) become more comfortable with that — which I suppose could be never — this “ah, screw it; entertain me” disposition will continue to govern the collective psyche and the processes that grow from it.