Living Woke

Wake up, raise your level of awareness. It’s a real, physical thing you can do. How do we do that? Why do we do that? 

We wake up when we pay attention to what's going on in the present moment. When we wake up, we experience our lives completely, through all of our senses, with all of our beings.

When we’re sleepwalking, we’re still paying attention, but we’re spending it carelessly. We’re not paying attention to the effects of our thoughts and actions. We’re playing along, but we’re not aligned with our purposes and values. We’re only using parts of ourselves and letting the rest go along for the ride.

Attention is all we have. How do we want to spend it?

That is the question. Whether in quotidian concerns or in the development of a grand vision, we spend it. When we spend it on activities, we become better at them. We shape our physical realities by what we pay attention to (and what we don't). We take care of the things we pay attention to and neglect the things we ignore.

I play the viola episodically. Most of the time it sits ignored on the top of the piano. I spend my attention elsewhere. I get better at other things, and my viola-playing hangs out at the barely literate level. If I wanted to play the viola publicly, I'd need to step up my game.

The dreamer imagines success at something, but doesn't spend attention actually doing the thing. The dreaming takes attention, but it's not the kind of attention that actualizes anything. 

I’m not happy with some of the things I’ve spent vast amounts of attention on. My attention went nowhere or it fed an end I didn’t want to realize.

It’s hard to wake up! It takes effort and energy, a willingness to question and shake things up. It risks much, and doesn’t let us hide behind our facades.

Waking up, recognizing the truth of our actions, how they actually affect ourselves and the world around us, is hard work! Paying attention to meta issues both makes us pay more attention to our daily existence and analyze it. Analysis always requires paying attention. Whatever issues we choose to work on get the juice. They grow and progress.

What will I spend my attention on today? What thoughts and endeavors do I most want to realize?

Humility is Endless

I was doing some stretching and mild exercise.  My body told me to get down on the floor and crawl around. As soon as I did it, my body reminded me that it's really good to crawl around on and sit on the floor. Stretches things out, limbers things up, gets the juices flowing, uses muscles in different ways.

I did a lot of that when I had young kids (and I had young kids for a long time). My back loved it. Worked my leg and butt and belly muscles in all sorts of useful ways.

I want a tatami mat room set up like an adult play space. Come to think of it, I want an adult sized jungle gym to go with it. Why aren't there play grounds and play spaces for adults where we can just hang out and do physical things with our bodies?

Be humble. Get low. Maybe it's as much about the postures as the social or spiritual meaning.

turtles all the way down

As a child, I was taught to face adversity head-on, to be brave and cheerful and do the best I can. If I was brave enough, and maintained a positive outlook, and meticulously did what I could, I would be given  enough strength and faith to face whatever life dished out.

My grandmother told me that, matter-of-factly, with a Depression-era story of her mother patching the family's shoes with construction paper.

My grandmother came from a long line of strong, capable women. Her niece eulogized her sister by saying that she did the best she could. She faced up to her life with courage and a smile, gave her daughters a good start in life, and took care of the work before her.

That particular teaching holds the core of my faith. It's what makes it possible to do the best I can and trust God (or whoever's on duty that night) to take care of the rest.

Many times, facing some dark night of the soul, I've scraped the bottom of the barrel for the dregs of my faith. Sometimes, I can't come up with much, but there is always just enough. Just enough to get through the night. Just enough to see me through to the next helping hand, the next oasis, the next spiritual pit stop.

Broken-foot nights can be bleak. Dark thoughts of my uselessness, my restlessness, my intense boredom cross over and tinge other areas of my life with despair. As I try to get my body comfortable, my heart tosses and turns as well.

And yet, the dark nights have gifts, if I wrestle long enough with them.   After I've traveled through the alleys of despair, I discover that I've carried my faith and my courage with me all this way. They're what kept me going at my bleakest moments, what wiped the tears from my eyes and the snot from my nose and told me to get on with it.

Suddenly, a flash of gold in the gloom: the grandmotherly kindness that insisted I learn to be brave and cheerful and do my best.

When you are down to what you can carry in your heart, it's good to know you have something that can carry you through the night.

Spiritual Clutter

My tai chi teacher used to say that we all collect tension in our bodies. She said there was nothing wrong with this, but when we let it accumulate and become stagnant, it impacts our health in various ways.

Going through my life, I encounter all sorts of moral and spiritual puzzles. I play with them for a minute, scratch my head, and stick them up in the attic so I can work on them later.

Sometimes a sudden "aha" sends me scampering to the attic to dust off the puzzle and solve it. Sometimes, one sobering little piece comes to hand and I fit it in place before sticking the still-unsolved puzzle back on its shelf. Sometimes I grind at the puzzle in odd moments before eventually coming up with a solution.

I speak lightly of these puzzles, but whatever illumination they contain comes in dark clothing made of anxiety, fear, shame, anger, disappointment and guilt.

My life has been busier and more stressful these past few years, and the unsolved puzzles have spilled out of the attic and into my daily walkways. I can't get through the day without stumbling over them, and I can't sleep without telling them a bedtime story first.

I've fallen out-of-touch with the flow of Love in the world.

So it's time to tie a rag over my head and climb into the attic to see what's going on.

Facing the Darkness

Another Christmas has passed.

When I was a child, my mother was a consummate Christmas magician. Her decorations sparkled with promise. Her holiday table groaned with delicious treats. The pretty packages under the tree contained carefully chosen signs of her love. I wanted to taste this magic so badly that I once burnt my tongue on one of the colored lights on the tree.

I grew up, the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw things differently. The Christmas tableau now seemed like an exercise in excess: too much food, too much drink, too much stress, too many presents filled with too many things that people didn't need. No one in the family was a practicing Christian.

What was it all for?

My mother's explanation that Christmas was about family failed to satisfy me.

I was reading a lot of Pagan thought at the time, including James Frazer's amazing work The Golden Bough. One of the things that amazed/amused me most about Frazer's work was that he devoted his enormous tome to the universality of the sacrificed god of vegetation without once mentioning how the Christian myth is an instantiation of the same blood sacrifice. I guess Frazer's work was scandalous enough in 1890 without thumbing his nose at the establishment religion.

The subtext was very clear to me in the 1980s. The Jesus myth was another instance enacting a blood sacrifice of the god of vegetation in order to bring the Sun back from its winter darkness and restore the fecundity of the Earth. We animals shivering in cold as the days grow darker need to believe that Spring will come again. We need to believe in the return of the Light and Warmth to keep us from despair in our darkest days.

So. The Christian myth was relevant to me after all. Change the spelling of Son to Sun, shift the celebration from Christmas to Solstice, and we're good to go. The tree and the lights and the presents and the music and the treats can all stay.

This would have worked except for the inexorable insistence of the rest of my world (including my extended family) to keep the Christmas celebration on the 24th and 25th. Adding in a Solstice celebration just increased the stress.

I next read the book Unplug the Christmas Machine in an attempt to tame the Stressmas holidaze. This helped me prioritize the aspects of the winter holidays that mattered the most to me and my loved ones, and to strike a balance between Christmas minimalism and Christmas excess.

Then I became a Quaker. To my somewhat uneasy truce with the Christmas holiday, I now added the Quaker opinion that Christmas oughtn't to be celebrated at all. I had a lot of sympathy with this viewpoint, but it wasn't going to fly. I received no leading during worship to eschew the celebration of Christmas. I was left to work it out for myself.

My mostly minimalist approach worked pretty well except for a few things. Members of my immediate family, still tended to have meltdowns around the holidays. I struggled with a deep depression between Christmas and New Year's most years. This annual battle with the darkness discouraged and exhausted me.

Over the past several years, I've spent more time thinking about what religion is for. Why do humans all over the world engage in religious practices? What deep human needs does religion fill?

It's hard to be a warm-blooded animal in a big, cold, sharp, hard, and indifferent universe. We need a Light to shine within and around us, leading us through the dark nights of our souls. We need to believe that things will be alright, that we will make it, that we can do it.

The celebration of Christmas, right after the darkest time, is a way of laughing in the face of the forces of darkness and cold and stillness. It's a way of asserting our animal warmth and movement and noise, our ability to light a candle against the darkness. It's an annual act of courage.

My mother has always been full of that kind of courage. She makes merry in the face of despair, and has often stalked her own depression with laughter and love and gatherings of loved ones.

I have a greater peace with Christmas this year. I look around at all the people frenetically trying to make merry. I see the courageous souls behind their eyes, struggling against the darkness. Every hackneyed Christmas card inscription can be a prayer held in the heart, a counter to all the messages of anger, greed, and despair.

I will not give in to the darkness. I will stand in the path of darkness, sing Christmas carols, quaff ridiculous holiday drinks, decorate trees, light candles, boil sugar syrup into magical concoctions, and fill my family's stockings with hope and wishes for a good future.

When the darkness triumphs, as it does sometimes, I will have the courage to laugh at it. I will acknowledge the annual Christmas meltdowns, the forays into depression and despair, the deep sadness that can well up in the darkest part of the year. There is a place at the table for the darkness. Perhaps it would like a cup of cocoa?

facing in and out

Prayers to be going on with:

Make me a strong vessel for Thy work.

Let me be a Light to everyone I meet.

is it supposed to be hard?

At  midweek worship, we often read the words of weighty Friends. The words are usually weighty, too, and often the writers make it sound like this business of being a Quaker is hard. Much of what they write is wisdom, and yet the words Does it really have to be that hard? often flit across my mind.

There is much in life that IS hard. There's plenty of suffering to go around, and we all have our struggles, our roadblocks, and our limitations.

Living in the Spirit, though, how can that be hard? The Spirit giveth life and truth and guidance and all good things. It is the Spirit to which I turn when I don't know what to do, and the Spirit that speaks Truth into my soul, and the Spirit that gives me more wisdom than I possess. It is the Spirit that buoys me up when I am afraid, and that strengthens me to face what I must.

Sure, I fall short all the time. I do things that would have been better undone and fail to do things that were required.

On the whole, though, I think I do a pretty good job.

I am not often a Friend who will rise and talk about what a miserable worm I am, lost in sin and darkness. (Are there still Friends who do that?) More often, my mistakes amuse me. Oh, Heather, you are so incorrigibly human! What an odd duck you are! How often do you keep needing to fall into that hole before you learn better?

I did my best to avoid accolades when I passed on that clerkly mantle. I do want to know, honestly, how people think that I served so that I can grow. The words that were spoken when accolades could no longer be avoided, however, surprised me.

My former co-Clerk talked at length about my courage in truly naming whatever we were facing.

Now, I do not consider myself particularly brave. I tend to think of the trait that my former co-Clerk described as clarity (when I am feeling good about it) or my charming habit of going for the jugular (when I am aware how uncomfortable my plain speaking makes others).

I have my father to thank for the practice of facing facts squarely. All his life, he did just that. He did his best to make an accurate assessment of every situation he faced. While my mother gave vent to her feelings, he would say, Now Dee, this is the situation. And what we must do is....

He taught me that an accurate assessment of problems carries with it the design of the solution. My life problems, no less than my programming and calculus problems, could be solved by careful attention to what I know about the situation and what I can derive from it.

My former co-Clerk called that wisdom. In my dad, it often looked like wisdom, but I think he would have said it was simple common sense. It was an economical approach to problem-solving, one that avoided a lot of wasted effort.

She also seemed to think that I was foolishly optimistic about how well those solutions would work. She didn't use the word foolishly, but I could tell. My optimism, in the face of all the ways that things can go wrong, is foolish. I believe that, if we move forward with honesty and love and tenderness and compassion, that we will get to the place that is right for us.

So if I have courage or wisdom, it is by not minding too much if I appear foolish. I don't have to worry about how things will turn out, or about whether I know enough to do this, I simply need to take the next step that is before my foot.

And that is not hard at all.

i have been released

i feel the light come shining
from the west down to the east
any day now
any way now
i shall be released

— Bob Dylan

I found it difficult to continue this blog while I was serving as co-Clerk of my monthly Meeting. So much of my focus during worship and in life was concerned with holding the Meeting that it didn't feel proper to share it.

I learned much serving as Clerk. For me, there was no better way to learn to let go and let God. To trust that small voice within to guide me. To trust my Meeting to act as motive and curb and brake as I learned what we needed to do, together. To trust that I could share my bit of Light, spoken plainly, and that others would bring their bits of Light to bear and that we would get through this. Together.

During that time, the Friends with whom I served as co-Clerk often felt like the other half of me. We worked together so harmoniously that I frequently joked that we were not two co-Clerks, but one Clerk that just happened to occupy two bodies.

There came a time when the work of Clerk felt not like a challenge, but like my own skin. Where I felt myself slipping from Serving as Clerk to Being the Clerk. When that happened, I knew it was time to let someone else sit in that seat for a while.

That decision felt clean and clear. I was able to finish my term joyfully and at full strength, and to pass the baton to a Friend who will serve excellently.

I am enjoying the release of that responsibility and authority.

And I feel freer to share my faith and practice than I did.