Nov
26
By Peg
Categories: The Spiritual Life
Tags: Adrian Monk, Cookies, living in the moment, living with purpose, Sacred ground
Nov
26
Living in the moment with ginger cookies
I work with my brain. As Adrian Monk says, it’s a gift and a curse. It makes the perceived world in my mind seem fascinating, while the real world comes at me diluted, a gray blur.
Yesterday, I baked three batches of Christmas cookies. It’s a ritual I love. Creaming butter and sugar in the mixer, watching it become pale and smooth. Adding egg and vanilla extract, maybe orange zest, inhaling the aroma of something coming to life in a deep metal bowl. Then the blend of flour and spices that make each batch unique — ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, maybe finely chopped hazelnuts to change both the flavor and the feel on my tongue.
First up yesterday: ginger cookies. After the mixing, I sat at the table scooping out heaping teaspoons of chilled molasses-dark dough, rolling it into perfect balls, dipping each one in sugar and lining them up on shiny cookie sheets. As I did, I had one of those moments that my brain usually keeps me too preoccupied to notice: a moment of being perfectly present with what was before me. I was hyper aware of my hands, slightly sticky with dough and gritty with sugar, the evocative theme from To Kill a Mockingbird playing on WDAV, late-morning sunshine soft on the walls and table-top.
Everything was perfect and I was there for it.
The first few times that kind of hyper awareness happened to me, the experience was so intense I was actually terrified. I wasn’t sure I could stand life lived so vividly. Because most of the time, my brain is filtering the world, pushing my senses out of the way so I can think. About what I just said to somebody, what somebody said back to me, what time I have to be somewhere, how long it’s going to take me to revise the last thing I wrote.
None of that’s bad. I’m grateful my gifts lean in a direction that allows me to work with my mind. love being a writer.
But living through my brain instead of my senses can dim the colors and the smells and the textures and the sounds of life. Too much of the time, I live life through a glass, darkly, forgetting that as valuable as my mind is, the world waits for me to engage, even when it’s so intense that it is terrifying.
Nov
24
Being grateful for what I have is easy. Pecan pie and Miss Bailey and sunshine out the windows and my favorite shoes that are not only comfortable but look good, too.
What can be hard is being grateful for what I don’t have. Not the stuff I don’t have like sickness and hunger and homelessness – it’s pretty to be grateful that I’m missing those things.
What’s hard is being grateful for what I don’t have when I think it’s something I should have, something I think I need to make life perfect, something I expected would come my way.
I spoke with a friend yesterday who had surgery about a month ago. She worried, before surgery, about how she would cope. She wouldn’t be able to go up and down the stairs to her bedroom. She wouldn’t be able to get her own breakfast or dress herself. And this was all going to happen over Thanksgiving, which would mean she wouldn’t be with her daughters in other states or her granddaughter or her brother.
What she has had, in the midst of this ocean of need, is the humility to accept the help of dozens of friends, the kind of friends who are willing to help you when you’re helpless. What she has had is an awareness of how much she is loved and what really matters and that each person who has helped her has been the hands of God, providing everything she needs in life. What she has been given is a hard circumstance that became not something to endure, but a time of spiritual growth.
So on this day of giving thanks, and every single day if I am paying attention to the way God works, I will be grateful for what I don’t have and think I want. Because I can be sure that there are more gifts in my lack than I will ever find in my abundance.
Nov
1
As seen on Facebook
Wow.
I saw this posted on Facebook. Its original source was a fan page that posts a lot of stick-it-to-the-liberals funny stuff. So I presume from its source — and from the 1000-plus responses — that this is intended to be a humorous put-down of Democrats.
I’m not going to get into the politics of this because at this moment in time I have very little respect for politicians of any stripe and next to no confidence in the folks we’ve elected to run our country, whether they’re red or blue.
What I want to talk about is a world in which we ridicule the idea of saying, “Share your candy.”
I know, I know. I understand the political ideology behind this. But, hey, there are so many ways to make liberals look foolish that I am astounded conservatives would pounce on this particular idea. They might just as well ridicule the notion, “Feed the hungry. Clothe the poor.”
My inclination was to add, “Love your neighbor. Bhahahah!” But I think the point is made.
