New Year Blessings
Happy New Year to you.
Even though 2017 brought tremendous difficulty in the world at large, overall it was a good year for me. I did some cool things, wrote a bunch, went to New Mexico. It was also challenging and frustrating and full of change. Many things I had hoped would come to my definition of fruition did not.
It is what it is.
In year’s past, I’ve written about and set an intention rather than a resolution. In yoga we call this a sankalpa – a word or small phrase in the present tense that represents where we want to go or what we want to cultivate. The past few years have brought so much upheaval I didn’t bother with anything more intentional than courage. And that has served me well.
I hadn’t planned on designating a new sankulpa for this year either, but as I was lying down for a little rest the world community sprung to my awareness. For the first time my sankalpa is focused outward, not inward. I don’t know what community is asking of me, but I do know enough to let it be, and open to what this energy wants to create through me.
If you’re into the idea of setting an intention all you need to do is take a few moments to breathe, reflect, and listen. You could take a walk, read something sacred to you, and journal. Or not. Just be on the look-out for what shimmers. Finding an intention is more about receptivity than focus.
If you want a little guidance, I suggest Christine Valters Paintner’s free Give Me a Word retreat. You need to sign up for her newsletter. (Which I format and send each week.) I know you’ll enjoy the wisdom she has to offer.
Finally, I’d like to leave you with this upbeat little blessing from one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman.
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful. And don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
With love,
Melinda
Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash
Silence
Today
Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stilllness. One of the doors
into the temple.
~ Mary Oliver
Christmas Eve was strange. Each Sunday after the announcements and before the offering plate goes around the rector invites “anyone to come forward who would like to make a donation to Heifer International marking special times and moments in our lives.” On Christmas Eve I made a donation in celebration of the now official divorce. I felt light. Airy. But as the service drew to a close, loneliness set in. Without Cole around the house felt too quiet. Too empty. My head too loud. Too full.
In the afternoon I met a friend and we walked the trail around Bond Lake. Just that one hour made the silence in my house bearable. I still watched TV for a good portion of the day, but for one hour after returning from the walk I sat in silence with a cup of tea. I didn’t read or write. I just sat, pushing myself to be present to my painful thoughts and occasionally refocusing them on gratitude. I sat, listening for God.
I don’t know that I heard God. Not in any clear or dramatic way. But I made room.
We have entered an interesting congruence between nature, culture, and the liturgical calendar. The shortest days of the year are behind us and light ever so slowly returns to the world as we dig in for the incubation of winter. Our western culture presses us toward goals for the New Year. The liturgical 12 days of Christmas celebrate the post-partum space between birth and the visit of the magi. Between incarnation and gifts given and received.
Now is a potent time for silence. “Silence has two functions,” writes Sister Joan Chittister. “The first effect of exterior silence is to develop a sense of interior peace. The second value of silence is that it provides the stillness that enables the ear of the heart to hear the God who is ‘not in the whirlwind.’”
The cultivation of silence is of primary importance to St. Benedict. And it is of primary importance to me. I rise early in hopes of getting a few moments of silence before Cole announces his exuberant presence to the day. I consciously arrange my schedule when he’s gone to make room for stillness.
But here’s a secret. Even when I’m being quiet, when I’m not speaking a word to anyone, when the TV and music are off, there is still noise. It’s in my head as I obsess over interactions or worry about the future or script conversations with people not in the room. Writing, journaling, doing some of the dishes by hand all help lower the volume on my thoughts so I can listen for God with the ear of my heart.
During these sacred days of Christmas, during the last breath before the New Year, I encourage you to take some time for silence and focused reflection. Pick up your journal or planner or note pad. Reflect with gratitude on where you’ve been and jot down your visions and longings for the future. Listen with the ear of your heart for the desires planted by God. Breathe on them. Imagine them coming to life. Feel them. Taste them. Then let them go. Remain still and enter the temple.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Photo © Melinda Thomas
Getting to Yes
In the summer of 2011 I watched the Adam Sandler movie Grown Ups a dozen or more times. I craved it almost as much as I crave chocolate. Why? Because watching the family dynamics was helping me name a longing I didn’t understand.
Throughout most of my twenties I was convinced I would never have children. I wanted my freedom. I didn’t want to inflict my psychiatric genetics on another being. I was nervous around infants. And anyway, I wasn’t physically healthy enough to bear a child even if I wanted to. But in my early thirties as my health got stronger, things began to change.
I remember waking up one morning and feeling a little pulse, a drum beat, in my womb. I started looking at children in the grocery store with a new awe. Over the following months the drum beat grew stronger, louder.
The biological clock is no joke.
After five years of taking a mood stabilizer my body felt toxic. I was doing well, and with the help of my psychiatrist I was able to get off the medication. During that month I joined two of my dearest friends – both of whom were pregnant with their second child – and their families for a reunion weekend. I cried myself to sleep one night because by then I wanted a child but wasn’t sure I could do it.
There are two kinds of emptiness: the emptiness of loss; and the emptiness of possibility and desire. Mine was the emptiness of possibility.
As the gravity of desire grew stronger, the emptiness in my body and soul grew wider, making room for a new kind of life.
It was at this same time that I began writing my first novel. The story filled my imagination and renewed my spiritual energy. One of the first scenes I wrote, which takes place in the later third of the novel, was the birth of Imogen—the ten-year old, fairy like child who attached herself to me everywhere I went. I felt her sitting on my shoulder and carrying an energy I could not name.
And that’s when my prayer started. God, if there is a being who wants to be born through me, let them come.
With this one prayer I moved from “no” to “yes.” Without knowing it I echoed Mary’s prayer in Luke, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.*”
We don’t know Mary’s backstory. We don’t know the interior worlds Mary traveled to bring her to the place where she chose to say, “yes.” Perhaps I will write a story about that one day.
When I finally said “yes,” when my body and soul were ready. When my husband said “yes,” I got pregnant in like a day. I was so sick for the first three months I actually lost weight. And then came Christmas 2012.
At 14 weeks I was feeling better. We had a steak dinner Christmas Eve. On Christmas day, the feast of the Incarnation, I came down with a terrible headache. The kind I get when a huge energy shift is about to happen. The next day I went to my doctor’s appointment where I was to hear my child’s heartbeat for the first time.
Only there was no heartbeat. My baby had died. The one I said “yes” to left me.
I woke briefly at the end of the surgery and saw the nurse holding the tiny, bloody fetus. She prayed with me and then I went back into the oblivion. I came out of anesthesia sobbing. I heard someone in the recovery room ask what was wrong. “Miscarriage,” said an unknown voice.
The following months were filled with the emptiness of loss.
And yet within that loss a great creativity surged through my meager body. I completed the first draft of the novel. By July I was pregnant again. Nine months later, Cole entered my life.
Mary could not have known that her “yes” would lead to every parent’s nightmare. But such is the way of things. Such is the mystery. Her “yes” led to joy and horrible grief. My “yes” has led to joy and grief. Because that is what is means to have a body.
Photo by Dan Kiefer on Unsplash
*Luke 1:38 NSRV
Patience, Young Padawan
“Patience you must have, my young Padawan,” says Yoda to Luke Skywalker.
When I say this to Cole he doesn’t understand the Star Wars reference. Or patience for that matter. I’m not convinced I understand patience either.
Patience is “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.” I do a decent job with the aspect of acceptance. In some relatively innocuous circumstances, such as waiting at a red light, I sometimes do a good job of remaining calm and serene. I don’t do such a good job when I’m waiting for Cole to go from point A to point B, or brush his teeth, or get dressed. My need for control and timely action is challenged, and I often lose my internal, and sometimes external, cool.
When I have the big stressors of life placed in their proper compartments, not ignored, but set off to the side so I can function during the day, I have a measure of serenity. An almost laughable peace and trust that, to quote St. Julian of Norwich, “All will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing shall be well.” I live in total trust that things will unfold and I’ll be ok.
When the compartments tip over and spill their insides all over my heart, I get upset. Like my son, I throw temper tantrums in the form of anxiety and fear. Why are you taking so long, God? Do you have any idea what time it is? Haven’t I waited long enough?
Two things about patience strike me as odd. First, that we tend to link patience with waiting even though “waiting” is not in the definition, only implied. Second, that patience comes from the Latin patientia which means “suffering.”
How did a word for suffering evolve into a word that teaches us how to tolerate suffering?
Last week I went to a mid-day, contemplative Eucharist. I arrived awash in my own inner suffering regarding all the perceived delays in my life. Less than twenty-four hours prior I was complaining to a friend about God’s apparent slowness. “Haven’t I waited long enough? Something has to break open here.” And then we read this from 2 Peter:
The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. . . . Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish, and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.
Ok, God, I hear you.
A handful of priests of late have said, “We are an Advent people.” (They also say we are an Easter People, but that’s a related topic for another time.) We are a people in constant waiting and preparation. The purpose of Advent is to teach us how to wait with patience and hopeful expectation while living each moment as it is.
The purpose of our yoga practice is to teach us to be present and to prepare us inside and out to meet the trials and triumphs of this life as the people we wish to be. I wish to be responsive rather than reactive. Kind rather than aloof. Hopeful instead of cynical. Patient instead of exasperated.
One of the hallmarks of St. Benedict’s Rule is his admonition against grumbling. Throughout the Rule Benedict makes exceptions that allow for the diversity of human limitations. If you are ill and truly can’t subsist on just vegetables, take a little meat. (The monks ate mostly cooked vegetables. There’s no room for food shaming in the Rule.) Rather than setting a rigid clock schedule, let us adjust our daily activities to the light of the season. Give a person what she needs to feel healthy and strong so her mind and spirit can stay focused on God. Or rather, so that her mind can stay focused on the good promise of God.
When I’m grumbling I’m definitely focused on God. Just not on God’s good promise. I’m focused on my perception of absence. Of slowness. Of “Why this again?” And, “Haven’t we been through this already?”
Thankfully, like Yoda with Luke, God has more patience with me than I have with God. I, like all of us who choose this path, am an Advent person, a Padawan learner in the ways of changing mental and spiritual focus so that I may be found at peace while waiting in hope for goodness as life unfolds.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
The HouseHolder's Path 