I surrender

Ben on the meditation cushions

Years ago, when I entered a 12-step program, I remember seeing a banner that read, “Let Go and Let God”. It was hanging on the wall behind the speaker, and I had no idea what it meant, but thought, “What a lame philosophy! How could anything get done if we don’t do it ourselves?” It took me a long time to understand this spiritual teaching. Being raised with the concept that God was something separate from me (a distant, critical, large “being” that was waiting to pounce on my every transgression from the good path, or someone who gave gifts and answered prayer if He felt like it) was not only disempowering, but it left me lonely and scared of living and life.

We are no less than temples of the Living God, which means that we can never be separated from the sea of infinite Good. If we need help, we don’t need to grovel and beg to some distant power.  There is no distant power. What many of us have been taught about God; that this force is Someone removed and different from us, was wrong. God; Universal Spirit, the Divine, The Field of Infinite Possibilities, is accessed through our own hearts. What we desire, what we need, is also a part of us. When we “surrender to God”, we are only giving up the idea that we are little, individual, lumps of flesh and blood, trying to figure this life out on our own.

“The day I surrendered myself for God, I transcended all anxiety, because trying to look after oneself is the only anxiety.” Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

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A story-book life….

Jack having a late-evening snack (and Luke watching every bite..hoping for an opportunity to grab a little for himself)

There’s been so much good stuff happening in my life lately, and quite a bit of it I’ve shared here on the blog, but some I’ve held back on. Not because I don’t want to share my life with you. I do. But sometimes, reading about a person’s life (when they are in a period where everything seems to be so wonderful) doesn’t feel that great.

For years, I couldn’t look at the Omega Institute’s catalogue (and all of the pages with smiling faces of the spiritual teachers that would be holding workshops the following summer) without  jealously. Instead of feeling inspired by reading about their accomplishments; books published, appearances on Oprah ect., I felt less than and would think, “what is wrong with me?!” Their lives felt different from mine and if I had to articulate what that difference was, I would have said that I didn’t measure up, that I was somehow not as smart, nice, talented, cleaver, friendly, positive, enlightened, connected, ambitious, young……

Everyone I know goes through periods of feeling like their lives are missing something, be it friends, career, an intimate relationship, money, health…and when we are going through one of these spells, and we look at other people’s lives (that seem to have all of these things and more) sometimes it can make us feel worse; like we are fundamentally flawed…at least this is true for me, and I’ve talked to enough people in my life to even dare say that this might be a part of the human condition.

This is what I started to write about yesterday, but wasn’t ready yet. As I sat outside this morning (at 5 a.m.), this idea came up again, and as I considered whether I’d give it another try today or not, I heard an owl call. Then I heard another call back. This lasted for about a minute and I knew it was a sign to move ahead with today’s post. …about sometimes feeling different, sometimes feeling defective, sometimes feeling alone, sometimes feeling like we’ve missed the boat….

Today’s message is:  You have not! You are an infinitely important part of this world….of the story of this world, that is being written every moment of every day. I am writing a story-book life and you are in it….and you are writing one too, and I’m in yours.

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being“. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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Help is always around…even if we are having trouble feeling it in the moment

Matt and Tom in the front seat (Jack and me in the back)…having a wild day!

Our flight to Philadelphia on Saturday morning was delayed getting out of Burlington, which left us about 20 minutes to make our connection. There were a number of us on the plane flying to Mexico, and so we hoped they’d hold the flight if we were late, but we sprinted and got to the gate just as the final passenger was boarding. Our hearts were pounding, we were out of breath, sweating and happy as we arrived at the gate on-time, behind the last few entering passengers.

The woman ahead of me tried to give her boarding pass to the attendant but she wouldn’t take it, saying that we were too late. “What?!” There are people going down the ramp right now!” my fellow passenger gasped, trying to catch her breath. The airline worker was stone-faced. Then about 15 of us, all who were booked for that flight (which was still sitting at the gate, as they loaded passengers) started asking why we could not get on. The 2 women behind the desk began looking things up on the computer so we waited and waited and when someone asked what they’d found out, one of them looked up said, “I can’t deal with any of you right now. I am finishing up this flight.” The long and the short of it was, that they had filled all of the seats (probably had over-booked the flight) and we were sent to customer relations.

Our unhappy little pod of 15 made our way to the customer service desk and were told that we would be put on stand-by for the 7pm flight (it was currently 10 a.m) which was full also, or we would be guaranteed a seat on the 7:30 a.m. flight the next morning. My visions of sitting on the beach, smelling that wonderful sea air, under the full, Cinco de Mayo moon, seemed to be fading and were rapidly being absorbed by the dismal thought of spending the night in a Philadelphia airport hotel under cloudy, diesel-fuel-smelling skies.

Some people were accepting the stand-by tickets, others were trying to get any  flight out of Philadelphia, and I was becoming more discouraged as several hours ticked by. At one point I plopped down in  a seat outside the customer service area, and closed my eyes. I could feel a cauldron of negative emotion swirling around my gut. I kept trying to imagine arriving that evening and seeing Matt (my son who was flying in from L.A.,  and would be waiting for us) but I didn’t really feel any better…my efforts felt insignificant and puny.

Suddenly my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number but answered it anyway. The voice on the other end said, “Hello Mary? This is Brother Michael. I used to work with Sister Margaret…” Sister Margaret (a Catholic nun) was my beloved spiritual advisor who had died several years ago. I wrote about her on this blog once.  She was well-known for saying goodbye with the words, “Have a wild day!” Brother Michael (a monk) had never called me in all of the years that I had known him. He had a very mundane question about, of all things, the skin balm that I make, but I knew that this call had nothing to do with that.

Sister Margaret’s name brought a peace to me that felt like a hug. I hung up the phone and my son Tom (who had been very patiently working with the customer service people for the past 2 hrs) handed me a piece of paper with an 800 number, and asked me to call it and tell them what happened. I called and immediately got the sweetest guy named Jeremy* who put us on the 3:30 flight to Charlotte NC with a connector to Mexico. I told him that the customer relations people had already tried this flight and it was over-booked. He said, “Well, I’ve just put you on it. You’ll get in at 8:15 tonight.”And he was right.

“You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation. Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be spoken of – yet I am speaking of it now. I am speaking of it now not to give you something to believe in, but to show you how you can know it for yourself.” Eckhart Tolle

*When I got home, I looked up the meaning of the name Jeremy….it means, “God will raise up.”

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we are all in this together

Great picture sent to me by a friend last night

So, we have our plane reservations made and are now working on a place to stay. I’ve sent out a bunch of emails to bungalow/beach house owners, asking prices and in some cases, seeing if they would be willing to come down in price to meet our budget. I have never done this before. I’ve always believed that negotiating prices (on anything) was not the “right” thing to do. It occurred to me the other day that I could try to do it differently.

Instead of not even considering a place that is over our budget, I could simply ask them. As I did this, I noticed a fear that asking for a lower price would make the transaction somehow adversarial. When I told Jack how I was feeling, he laughed and said, “They can say yes or no, or even email back with an in-between price, but your emails were really polite. No one is going to get offended Mary.”

It struck me, as I closed my computer last night, and put the search to bed also, that maybe my email will be just what someone was hoping for too…that what we want, also wants us.

“There is only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment, when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of Paradise.” Marianne Williamson

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Connection

A little help from our friends

I was just about to walk out the door on Saturday morning, for an overnight trip to Burlington, and decided to blow dry the ends of my hair (so it would flip up). This sounds pretty mundane…I mean, who cares if I took a few extra minutes to fiddle with my hair? But it wasn’t a usual thing for me.  I was ready to leave the house; overnight bag packed, car warmed up and running, and suddenly I thought that I needed just a bit of curl? I cannot tell you how unusual this is. I am a pretty focused person when I’m going somewhere. If I say I’m going to leave the house at 10:00 a.m., 99% of the time I follow through.

But the feeling was strong, so I decided to do it. As I picked up the blow dryer, I saw a little mouse clinging to the cord (who then, suddenly jumped to the back of the sink!). Jack was still home so I yelled for him to bring the “mouse catcher” (he knew that I meant the cheese-keeper) and within a minute we had her/him under the glass and ready to be set free outside. I guess that many people would think that this was just a random coincidence: me suddenly needing to style, and a little mouse hanging onto a blow dryer cord for dear life (If I had gone away for 24 hrs, it is a pretty safe bet that the little guy would not have made it out alive with our 6 cats all inside for the day too)…but I know better. I know that beneath the level of our reasoning conscious mind, beneath the “pros and cons” way of thinking, the figuring out, the compartmentalization of life, and everything in it, that we are all here in a vast, mysterious, loving sea of connection; each tiny, seemingly insignificant piece, moving and affecting all others.

This song “Friends” from Elton John just came to mind when I was writing so the link to it is below. Have a wonder-filled day friends!

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