Jul
30
When we believe our lives have been wasted…ugly…of no real value…we haven’t been paying attention. In our brokenness lies our highest value, our greatest beauty, our most profound contributions to life. (From the Re-Vision Your Life page on Facebook.)
Sometimes it seems that we spend so much time on self-improvement, on finding the next practice or technique that will be our breakthrough into satisfaction, that we run the risk of losing ourselves in striving. What if we stopped striving? What if, instead, we began to practice acceptance? Acceptance of our lives exactly as they have unfolded. Exactly as they are in this moment. What if we began to look for the gifts our lives have presented us with? What if we discovered that the very best gifts came from the things we had labeled the very worst events in our lives?
If we did that, no matter how imperfectly we did it, for a month…a week…even a day…how would our perception of our lives and our selves begin to change, all for the better?
I know one thing: We can’t change our own lives for the better without creating positive impact on the others around us. Self-acceptance begets compassion, gratitude begets blessings, kindness begets love, love begets joy.
Jul
22
Life from my balcony is all about sky, breeze and the sounds of life. Mostly sky.
Friends visiting the townhome where I used to live often commented on how quiet it was. The most common sounds in my enclosed courtyard were the splashing of my pond, my rocker scraping stone and the occasional mad whir of hummingbird wings. The near-silence was one of the things I liked most about my home on the farthest outskirts of the city.
My favorite thing was that I could see both the sunrise and the sunset from my red rocker.
Now, in my urban third-floor nest, the soundtrack of life from my balcony includes the steady hum of a nearby freeway, the sudden bleet of a siren from the fire station a block away, the iconic sound of the train whistle half a mile beyond the trees, plus people, car doors, birds and more birds, rustling wind. As much as I treasure silence, I now find great satisfaction in the continuous reminder of life being played out within shouting distance of me.
And despite the unceasing sound, I always have a deep sense of serenity on my balcony. I think it’s because of the sky, which from the third floor feels both in my face and somehow even more distant.
Every day, the sky show is different. The moon changes shape and size. Clouds are fat or thin or white or purple. Today the treetops are green and in 60 days — an atom’s heartbeat — they will be flirting with gold and orange. Last night, heat lightning. At this time of the evening, the lights of passing planes begin to show themselves far in the distance, so far they move at a crawl, going nowhere until they vanish. I’m not even a speck from their window as I sit on my balcony, wanting never to give up the night and go inside.
Jul
12
“Words are a heavy thing…they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn’t fly.”
My friend Jim Everitt, who is one of the best reasons I know to be on Facebook, posted this quote from Northern Exposure Sunday morning. It sparked one of those exchanges we all hope for, where people who may not even know each other come together and have fresh insights they would never have had without each other. Following the quote above, the three-way conversation went something like this*:
Wait a minute, Jim. Cool quote. But I write poetry and I like to think words help me fly.
Pay attention, Peg. It doesn’t say “if birds wrote…” It says “if birds talked…”
Oh, yeah.
And when people talk, they aren’t writing. And if they aren’t writing, there’s no poetry. And when there’s no poetry, nobody’s flying.
Very cool.
Birds don’t talk. They don’t overthink it (as I’m doing now) or pontificate. I’m betting they don’t even take credit for the mystery of their flight. They simply spread their wings to embrace something inside them that words could never express. And fly. Their flight is poetry. It is prayer. It is how they express the God within.
Whatever our personal poetry is — whether it comes through music or language or acrylics or teaching or inspiring or bringing laughter into being – maybe we don’t get there by being grounded. We don’t get there by controlling it with our words or our thoughts. We can either talk about our poetry, or we can let it fly. We can assume we’re in control, or we can accept it as grace.
*Conversation edited for the sake of keeping it simple
