Always Learning

I've been blessed to have learners in my workshops who are twice my age. For those who don't know my age, that means some people in their 90s have attended my workshops. When those students are present, I feel a little intimidated (what can I teach someone with so much more life experience?) and inspired (however long I live, I want to keep learning, too). When I feel secure and grounded, I know I have something to teach them precisely because we don't share life experiences. I also know even more deeply that I want to keep learning until the day I die. There is so much to know and no possible way to know it all- a daunting and beautiful notion.

Lately I've been repeating the phrase "Never failure, always learning" (from adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy) a lot. A conversation didn't go how I'd hoped: never failure, always learning. A class or service promotion didn't take off the way I wanted: never failure, always learning. That thing I had to do that took waaaaaaay longer than expected: never failure, always learning. The lessons rarely happen in a library like in the picture above, but rather as we experiment with living life. Always learning...if we choose to engage with the lessons.

Last week I very excitedly signed up for an International Intensive Training (IIT) in Nonviolent/Compassionate Communication in Palestine. Within hours of signing up, I had a gut feeling that I shouldn't have signed up, despite the enthusiasm I'd felt while filling out the application. Curious, I sat with the feeling for a few days. It didn't go away. In fact, the more I thought about not going, the more relieved I felt. I am not going to attend the training.

What I came to is this: I believe I have a role in that IIT, but my role isn't to be there, but to support the work happening there. I invested some money in it when I signed up, and I'll give more. I also invite you to support the work by donating here and choosing "2020 IIT in the Middle East" where you are asked if you have a special purpose for your donation.

I could have seen my sign-up and retraction of my sign-up as a failure to follow through. Instead I see it as learning to trust myself more, a reminder that most decisions we make are reversible, and that it's ok to make those reversals. I feel pleased that my not attending may facilitate someone else's ability to attend. Never failure, always learning.

A few days ago I had a private Compassionate Communication session with someone seeking clarity before a difficult conversation. She left the session with the clarity she'd sought, as well as tools for the conversation. Later she told me the conversation had gone really well! Always learning.

Last week I offered my first Heart Talk monthly offering. The group was small, the sharing was rich. At the end, during our check-out, I shared that one need met for me during the session was adventure (an answer that surprised me at the time). The reality is I never know how people will respond to the concepts I'm sharing, the stories that people share as we put the concepts to use, or the vulnerability it takes to share of oneself. Adventure. Always learning, never failure.

Learning is an adventure; sometimes we take it on with willingness, sometimes with resistance. My hope for myself, and for you, is that we can approach our learning with willingness and openness, that we can approach missteps with compassion, that we can get comfortable with discomfort, that we can embrace the idea of:

Never failure.

Always learning.

Swimming in the Holy

Not long ago I returned from my church’s Thanksgiving service. Gathered was a group of people I dearly love. Some of the people I know well, or others I see only on Sundays. Whichever is true, I consider them my family.

At the service I had the pleasure of singing Carrie Newcomer’s “Holy as the Day is Spent,” a song that recognizes the sanctity of many seemingly ordinary moments.

How often do we regard these moments only as ordinary and forget that in them also live opportunities for gratitude, for holiness, for recognition of abundance?

About 3 years ago, I started writing daily gratitude lists on Facebook. The lists are short and sweet; they are my attempt to recognize that even on hard days, even when devastation feels like the status quo in the world, there are so many things, people, moments to be grateful for. In the three years since I started my list, several friends have started posting their own lists and others tell me that they appreciate mine.

My lists are short and sweet. My gratitude is long and deep.

So today on this Thanksgiving Day, even as I acknowledge its complicated and violent history, I dive into giving thanks, swimming deeper than I go in my little lists, knowing that I can’t possibly cover all I’d like to.

Today I am thankful that I woke up.

In a warm bed.

I am grateful for my 19-year-old calico cat named Frida who walked across my chest and then sat on me, meowing until I pet her and then got up to feed her. I am thankful that she snuggles with me as I write my morning pages every day. I am grateful she has lived to be 19 and I am grateful for her orange tabby sister Telula who died at the age of 18, a few days after Thanksgiving last year. I’m also grateful for Clyde, another orange tabby who used to live with me and now lives with my parents.

I am grateful that my 46-year-old body continues to move with relative ease and is healthy most of the time.

I am thankful that I have clothing and that it’s even clothing I enjoy wearing. Some of it I’ve bought new, some at the Goodwill, some I’ve been gifted, and some I’ve acquired through clothing swaps, fun occasions to give and receive clothing that may have interesting stories already attached to them.

Today I am grateful that I have access to food, any kind of food I want, really. I am grateful for the times I have money to buy local, organic, and sustainably produced foods. I am grateful for the farmers committed to providing nourishment for others. I am grateful for so many interesting tastes I have experienced and the cooks who have prepared them. I appreciate the technology, old and simple or new and more complex, that makes food preservation possible.

I am grateful that I can turn on the tap and clean water comes out. I can regulate its temperature for drinking , bathing, washing hands, washing clothes. I can flush my toilet. I can water my indoor plants and my garden. I am grateful for rain that eliminates the necessity to water my garden.

I am grateful to have a car and that I had the means to buy a hybrid, so I don’t use as much gas as I would with other cars. I am also grateful for times when I can carpool with others, both for the savings in gas and the joy of traveling companions. I am grateful for times I can walk to where I want to go. I am grateful for public transportation, though I rarely use it.

I am grateful for heating and air-conditioning, particularly when it’s bitterly cold or swelteringly hot outside.

I am grateful for the cardinals, robins, doves, hummingbirds, butterflies, bees, squirrels, raccoons, opposums, and even a groundhog (and other creatures) who I see in my yard often or rarely. I am grateful for the diversity of plants, animals, and other parts of Creation that I have access to, even in my small yard. I am thankful for the creative way Life has evolved and that I get to experience even a small part of it at my home and a larger part when I am away from my home.

I am grateful for books, audiobooks, podcasts, libraries, radio programs, and other ways I learn new information and am inspired by creative expression through words.

I am also inspired by drawings, paintings, collage, glasswork, mosaics, ceramics, sculptures, music, dance, and other ways humans touch our souls when they expose their own.

I am grateful for scientists, who explore the world with a particular curiosity and openness, and for intuitives and mystics whose curiosity and openness lead to Connection. I particularly love when these two ways of seeing come together and affirm from their different perspectives what IS.

I am thankful for the rhythms of days, moon cycles, and seasons, that teach us, if we choose to learn, to honor every stage of being from birth to growth to slowing down to death.

This is today’s incomplete list. Reading over it, I am aware that some of the things I’m grateful for are related to the privilege I carry in the world and some are related to simply being alive. Like Thanksgiving, my interaction and place in the world comes with complications. I’ve written about such things before and will again. Today I choose simply to acknowledge that and focus on gratitude.

Today I choose not to name the particular people I am grateful for. There are so many people, SO MANY PEOPLE I am grateful for. Some I’ve exchanged words with. Others I will express gratitude for on other days in other ways. Perhaps I’ll acknowledge them in a blog post some time.

For now I thank you for reading this post.

I hope you find as much abundance in your life as I find in mine.

You Are the Light of the World

You are the light of the world.

I see you looking around, eyes wide and quizzical, eyebrows raised, finger pointing at chest.

“Who…me?”

Yes.

You.

You are the light of the world.

“No, no. No, not me. Let me just tell you all the bad things I’ve done. Let me tell you all the ways I’ve f***ed up, the people I’ve hurt, the times I’ve been hypocritical, downright mean and nasty, the times I yelled at my kids, my partner, my parents, my friends, my co-workers, my neighbor, the customer service guy, the cashier, myself. The times I’ve lied and cheated, and the times I’ve rested in my own comfort while others suffered.”

You are the light of the world.

“I’m sorry, but the more you say that the louder the NOOOOOOOO becomes. This is getting a little ridiculous. I thought you knew me. I now know you don’t.”

You are the light of the world.

“Please stop.”

You are perfect. Perfectly imperfect. Broken and whole. Light and shadow.

“Those are opposites.”

Sometimes the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth.

“Uuuuuuuuuuuh.”

*

*

*

*

You are the light of the world.

*

You are light.

*

You hold darkness, but you are not darkness.

“I…am…not…darkness.”

You hold pain, but you are not pain.

“I am…not…pain.”

You hold grief and doubt and fear and anger, but you are not grief or doubt or fear or anger.

“I am not grief or doubt or fear or anger.”

You are the light of the word.

“I am the… I can’t. How can I be the light of the world when I feel so ordinary?”

You are ordinary.

And you are the light of the world.

Extraordinarily ordinary.

Ordinarily extraordinary.

Your light shines just like the light of every other being.

It shines with its own particular luminescence.

Your light shines in its own particular way.

You are doing your own particular work.

“Well, that feels true. I don’t always like my work, though.”

You don’t have to.

Even though you have hard days and

even though you cover your light or someone else tries to obscure it,

You are the light of the world.

“Hmmmmm….”

*

You are the light of the world.

Will you try,

just try,

to believe it,

and see what happens?