Smashing Idols

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Nature, Rest & restore, Silence

A No-Brainer Weekend

Four days at the cabin. Countless wheelbarrows full of gravel spread. In the ground: one maple tree, three azaleas, two rose bushes, two rosemary plants, four juniper shrubs, four asparagus plants, one crepe myrtle, one coreopsis and three speedwell plants. One pair of brand new medium-duty garden gloves from K-Mart, already coming apart at the seams.

I was fully present with my arms as I raked gravel, my right hip as I leaned into the shovel, my back as I dragged plants and soil amendments into and out of the back of a vehicle. I sweat. I felt the sun on my arms and the breeze on my face and clay clinging to my hands.

I sat on the front steps with a tiny lizard. I played live and let live with the dirt daubers who are building a mud hut somewhere around the porch. I stood for five full minutes trying to determine if the snake across the driveway was alive and dangerous or dead and somewhat less threatening before I took another step. I listened to the cows who live a half mile down the road. I napped with my cat.

Most of the time, I live in my head. I am, therefore I think. I think more than I feel. What a glorious thing to get out of my head for four days and into my body, into the earth, into the moment.

I’m not even going to probe that for some deeper meaning. I am content to feel it and be grateful.

Mar

By Peg

Categories: Social Media Fast, The Spiritual Life

Tags: living with purpose, Silence, Spiritual fitness

Social Media Fast: Giving Up Facebook for Lent

The first Ash Wednesday I remember was in 1977. I spent the month leading up to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, living a half block off the St. Charles streetcar line in a 1920s efficiency apartment with a Murphy bed.

I partied a lot, walked the city, made a mask out of a plastic half-gallon milk jug, glue and glitter. I went to neighborhood parades where little kids sat on their dads’ shoulders and shouted, “Throw me something, mister!” Most of the beads were still glass in those days, so if you failed to catch them, they shattered when they hit the ground, a ruined trophy. By the time Fat Tuesday rolled around, I couldn’t wait for the tourists to go back where they belonged. At midnight, when it all ended, the streets and the medians and the sidewalks were strewn with broken beads and beer cans and plastic cups reeking of Hurricanes.

On Wednesday morning, I rode the streetcar into town. Cleaning crews had come through while the rest of us were sleeping it off and left the city as unblemished as if it had been to confession, said its Hail Marys and been rendered holy, or at least forgiven. The people who lived and worked in the Crescent City rode the streetcars in subdued silence, foreheads smudged with ash. I thought it was weird.

By Thursday, the hush that had ushered in the Lenten season was over. Party, repent, life as usual.

When I thought of giving up something for Lent this year, I first thought of sugar, which proved too difficult to pull off last year. One day into Lent, I ate three mediocre boxed cookies and never got back on the wagon.

So the idea was born: I would give up Facebook for Lent. The time I typically spend posting my status and liking somebody else’s status, I will invest in my spiritual practice and hope that something worthwhile is born during my time of fasting from friends-on-demand.

Feb

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

20% Bacall + 80% Channing = 100% Lee

The woman who founded Carolina Romance Writers in (I think) 1985 died in December. She was 80 years old. Her name was Lee.

Actually, that’s not true. Her name was Nellie. But deep down inside herself, she knew she wasn’t a Nellie, had never been a Nellie and would never be a Nellie. So she reinvented herself as Lee.

Picture her this way: Lee was part Lauren Bacall and part Carol Channing. She had a laugh that was bold and brassy, much like her long blond hair. She smoked cigarettes. She had a quirky sense of humor. She wrote romance novels and lived with cats.

I don’t know who Nellie was. I never met her and Lee rarely mentioned her. I didn’t even know she existed the first ten years I knew Lee.

Nellie’s obituary didn’t mention Lee. It didn’t mention Carolina Romance Writers. It didn’t mention the romance novel published in 1992 under yet another name. The obituary didn’t mention how many people became published novelists because of her hard work in establishing a local chapter of one of the most vibrant writers’ organizations in the world. It didn’t mention any of this maybe because Lee was very private. Maybe it didn’t mention any of this because Nellie was ashamed of Lee, or vice versa. Or both.

Or maybe it was just because Lee liked the idea of slipping out quietly, having the last bold, brassy laugh.

Jan

By Peg

3 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Old Journal Posts

Resolved: To remain pock-marked

My New Year’s Eve practice, for the past 6 years or so, has been to spend time in contemplation — to journal, to meditate, to express gratitude and to set intentions for the year just arriving. Last night, as part of that time, I reviewed old journal entries from past New Year’s Eves. This excerpt is from last year. It seemed filled with that childish contradiction of wanting to be one of God’s favorite kids and knowing that even the wanting is as much the desire of my ego as it is the desire of my spirit.

Whenever I say the “your will, not mine” thing, the thought comes to me that I’m trying, in this ham-handed way that children have, to manipulate you into blessing me. “Oh, look, God, I want to be spiritual but I’m so humble I’m just glad for you to use me however you want.” I know how transparent children appear when they’re trying to play adults. Is that how I seem to you, God?

Heal me of all my human B.S., God. Lift me out of all this frailty of spirit.

But when you do it, show me your face. Or let me feel your touch. Don’t do it in some way that allows me to self-aggrandize. Just do it in a way that I feel it in my heart. Get my pride and ego out of the way and shine in me even if the light is shaded from anyone else’s view. Oh, here’s a thought, God — and let me say as straight from this self-centered child’s heart as I can — if you can place that light in me and use it even though it continues to be a source of ego contamination for me, do it. Just do it. I’ll remain pock-marked with my spiritual arrogance, if it serves your purpose.

That’s the human dilemma, isn’t it? Don’t we all want to make a mark, be of some significance in your grand scheme, yet it drives us nuts not to be able to see and comprehend the grand scheme we’re part of. Because if we can’t see it a) how can we be sure it’s really grand, and b) maybe no one else can see it either, and c) maybe we really are just a worthless scrap in the wind. Don’t we all, then, just want to be Jesus Christ? A favored child? And if we can’t, we don’t want to play. Because anything less makes us just another rock or clod of dirt or speck in the eye of the universe. Being a cell in the body of God isn’t good enough because, after all, what difference does one cell make? Who will remember the coming and going of one cell?

Journal entry ends there. I would close it out by saying that we are, of course, a favored child. Each of us. But like most children, in our human frailty, we want to have it proven to us. It takes a very special child to simply know how much he or she is loved and treasured and vital to the corner of the world into which he or she has been born.

Dec

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

Believing in Santa

Santa and Peggy, a few years ago

Patsy Kelley is a Facebook friend, despite the fact that she is the one who, when we were eight years old, announced to me with great authority that Santa Claus did not exist. I was furious with her for confirming what I already knew but had refused to admit, even in the secret places in my heart. Of course there was no Santa.

B ut I wanted so much to keep believing.

I still do.

That’s why, of course, I tear up at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol (the George C. Scott version is my favorite) and Miracle on 34th Street. I’m even a sucker for scenes like the one from a movie I’ve never seen, Elf, when a lone young woman inspires a crowd of strangers in New York City to begin singing together. As people join in, one by one, to sing “He’s making a list and checking it twice…” during the YouTube clip, I want to be with them, bundled against the cold, warming up to the idea that, yes, there is magic in this season, if we could just raise our voices together and sing into our presence something greater than ourselves — something with more power, more love, more goodness, more hope.

Nov

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

The spiritual practice of getting high enough

Today, the sky is gray, the color of dull pewter. Not exactly rainy, but a soft mist most of the day brought leaves to their knees and darkened the pavement. A chill in the air confirmed that, once again, winter will have its say. An ugly day as a harbinger of more ugly days to come.

And yet.

At lunch, I sat at my window and watched as the wind tumbled leaves ass over teakettle. Brittle and brown. Plie and en pointe and glissade, like a troupe of weightless wrens, some scudding across my balcony or hovering, undecided, over the table top. In the background, a Mozart piano sonata on the radio.

From street level, I’m sure it felt damp and chilly and mildly unpleasant. But from the third floor — maybe for anyone who was able to get high enough above the everyday dreariness of it – there was magic not only in the moment but in the way an otherwise bleak day transformed into art and blessed my spirit. A scene from a black-and-white film. A passage from Jane Austin. Lyrics by Ira Gershwin, set to Mozart.

Oct

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

Sweet and sour grapes

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1950s and ’60s.

When I tell people that, most know the subtext. My hometown was infamous as a place where the Civil Rights movement was a hateful, ugly thing. In news around the world, people saw our law enforcement officers mow down peaceful protestors with water from fire hoses. They saw police dogs set loose on people who wanted nothing more than respect and a fair chance. They heard about the deaths of young Black girls — girls who were just my age — who died when cowards bombed a church on a beautiful September Sunday morning.

I left Alabama in 1973 and never moved back.

Friday afternoon, I experienced something healing. A group of white people gathered on land where their church was built and prayed for the land to be healed. The land was once part of a cotton plantation. For generations after the slaves who worked those cotton fields had been freed, their descendents barely eeked out a living by working as sharecroppers on the same land. Much like the ground I walked when I was a child, this ground had been cursed by oppression and injustice.

Joining this group of people who look like me was the pastor of another church, a nearby church that was founded by newly-freed slaves the day after Emancipation Day. He prayed with us and read from Jeremiah 31:29-30: ”In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The bitterness of sour grapes, eaten by men like my father, need no longer be tasted by their children.

If land can be consecrated and cleansed of evil, lives can, as well. Generations of lives, even. Maybe it’s happening now. Sometimes the bitter taste lingers; sometimes the sweet taste of promise bleeds through.

Sep

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

A garden where mysteries bloom

There are some people I just wouldn’t have expected to be Christian. One of them is Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey bridged the Beat Generation and the hippies, two cultural movements that took many in my generation far from the faith of our parents.

Kesey appears to have been the kind of Christian I like — the kind who knew he didn’t have all the answers.

In a recent issue of The Missouri Review, I read a thoughtful article on Ken Kesey by M.C. Armstrong. The article quoted from a 1994 Paris Review interview in which Kesey talked about his Christian faith. Kesey said: “I’m for mystery, not interpretive answers. The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answers, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”

That reminded me of a newspaper column written several years ago by Jody Seymour, pastor of Davidson (NC) United Methodist Church, in which he said the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. His words said to me that having doubt and having faith weren’t mutually exclusive. Armed with that, I came to understand that all I can really know with certainty is that I don’t have a clue.

A teacher of meditation from the 1970s whose name escapes me called it “don’t know mind.” He said it is the place where we are empty of preconceived notions and have therefore become teachable.

If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking.

Of course, even being too attached to the idea of mystery dances me closer to the edge of thinking I have the answers. All I can do if I want to always be seeking is to keep planting a garden where those mysteries can bloom.

Sep

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

Global communication, pre-internet

Long before the Internet – before telephones or telegraph or radio – global communication took place.

I recently watched ”Cosmos,” a 30-some-year-old series on the mysteries of the natural world. One of the episodes visited the world of whales. I learned that decades — centuries — ago, whales were able to communicate at distances up to 15,000 kilometers via deep channels in the ocean. I had to look up kilometer because I had the measles the week my class learned measurements and measurements have been a mystery to me ever since. My dictionary says a kilometer is .621 mile. So 15,000 kilometers is…well, my calculator is across the room, but I think 15,000 kilometers can be rounded off to “a long way.”

In other words, whales could manage the equivalent of global texting when humans still needed paper, ink and weeks on a boat. Over the last couple of decades, humankind has finally developed expensive technology that can do what whales are capable of naturally.

By the 1970s when “Cosmos” came out, damage to our oceans had reduced the deep channels by which whales communicated; at that time, those the whales’ long-distance capability had been whittled down to a few hundred kilometers.

I wonder if whales can communicate with each other at all today.

If they’d been graced with earth’s most marvelous brainpower, would whales or lions or elephants or camels risk destroying their world? Are we really as smart as we think?

Aug

By Peg

Categories: Re-Vision Your Life, Uncategorized

Tags: Love

Myths, fairy tales and big fat lies

When I reached adolescent angst, I adopted two songs as my life anthems. One was “I Am a Rock” by Simon and Garfunkel. The other is a song called “I’ll Sing in the Sunshine” by Gale Garnett. Part of the lyrics from the Gale Garnett song: “I will never love you, the cost of love’s too dear. Though I’ll never love you, I’ll stay with you one year.” Art and Paul, of course, sang: “A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.”

I latched onto those songs as if they held life’s great truths. They fit what life had taught me to that point, hardened those misinterpretations into a world view I would carry for decades.

Most of us develop myths about ourselves, our families, our talents, our dreams. And those myths become the creaky foundation on which we build our lives. Like most myths, some of them are rooted in a great truth. Others are nothing more than fairy tales — in other words, they’re big fat lies that we’ve given the weight of truth.

The big fat lies that shaped my life:

I’m the strong one. I can get anywhere on sheer will power.
I’m alone on my island. No one gets on. No one gets off.
If we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t matter or it doesn’t exist. Take your pick.

These are false beliefs about myself and my way of walking through life. By believing them, I gave these myths the power to determine many of the choices and directions that became my story. Decades passed before I began to learn that I didn’t have to keep living the same story.

Now that I see them for what they are, I could fight those myths and fairy tales. But time is too precious to waste it fighting anyone or anything. So when I sense these old beliefs directing my choices and my moods, I name them what they are: big fat lies. Like most lies, they shrink from the light of the truth and go back where they came from.

What are the myths on which your life is built? Can you re-vision them into a life-enhancing truth you can live with?

Jul

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

What if we stopped striving?

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

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

Sky fetish, part 1

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

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

Birds writing their poetry

“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

Jun

By Peg

5 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Move Over, George Bailey

Elisabeth and her Dad

I’ve always had this love affair with my stepdaughter’s beauty. Over the years I’ve taken many hundreds of photos of her; her amazing spirit calls to me, shining through her eyes and her smile. Now photographs from her wedding are going up on Facebook. Sometimes I just sit and stare at this radiantly beautiful bride with her adoring and adorable husband at her side.

Watching her at the wedding, I experienced the pang of loss that I’m sure many parents experience. As much as I love the poised and confident woman she has become, sometimes I miss the little girl who’ll never again need to sit in my lap or hold my hand.

But some of what I felt was a bittersweet awareness that by the time I was her age, I had already left behind a lot of wreckage. I had already made mistakes I couldn’t take back, mistakes that clouded my life and the lives of others. At her age, I still wasn’t fully aware that life wasn’t just happening to me, that I was creating my life with my choices. The sweetness came in recognizing that all my mistakes and missteps have been woven into the wisdom and promise that mark her life. Nothing I did was wasted because my hard-won lessons have contributed, in some small way, to making her life into something finer and brighter than my own life.

As I approach the age of my own mother when she died, I feel my mortality and already mourn the ways parts of my life have played out and cannot be changed. But looking at the beautiful young bride who is my daughter I also know that it is, indeed, a wonderful life.

Jun

By Peg

3 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Walking in circles

Walked a labyrinth this afternoon, a beautifully crafted labyrinth made of stone nestled into a quiet courtyard. Labyrinths have appealed to me for years, although in practice I often walk away feeling I must be missing the full complement of spiritual genes.

While I’m sure everyone else is approaching nirvana, here’s what walking a labyrinth feels like to me:

Getting in a rhythm is hard. I tend to speed up. Then remind myself to slow down. But at least I’m consistent; from start to finish, I’m speeding up, slowing down, never satisfied with how I’m performing.
I forget my purpose. It’s a spiritual experience, not a competition to see how spiritual I can be.
My head won’t stay where my feet are. I glance around again and again to see how far I’ve come and how far I have left to go.
I’m never as close to the center as I think I am. A couple of twists and turns can take me right back to the outer edge again.
Stepping out of the labyrinth has great appeal. Who’ll know? Who’ll care? Why am I doing this anyway? Is this really better use of a Sunday afternoon than going to the movies?
When I reach the center, I think I’ve “arrived.” Then I remember the center is only a rest stop and the next right thing is simply to take one more step.

The point here is so obvious I’m afraid I risk sounding flippant, or as if I’m trying to make forced, not-so-cute correlations between life and labyrinth. I’m not. I’m always simply struck that the intricacy and beauty of the labyrinth’s pattern feels, when I’m in the middle of it, so much like the ordinary chaos of being human.

Jun

By Peg

Categories: Re-Vision Your Life, Uncategorized

Tags: Family, Love

Sometimes I feel like a fatherless child

Happy Father’s Day.

The bullet points of my personal life can look pretty dismal. Relationship breakage and all that. I’m not going to point fingers — at this stage of my life, all the fingers point back at me. But I do want to say that it’s only in the last half-dozen of my 57-and-counting-really-fast years that I’ve begun to catch a glimpse of the gaping hole left by a father who wasn’t and never will be the man I admire most in the world.

He wasn’t a bad man. Just a seriously broken man. The problem is, to a girl who is 5 or 7 or 10 or 14, “seriously broken” can look a lot like “bad” when trying to look up to the man called father. I’m grateful now to understand his brokenness and to have sympathy and sorrow for him.

But I still wish I could look back and see signs that he was the leader of our family. That he was a kind man. An admirable man. A man of integrity or courage or strength. I wish I could look back and see that I’d learned what to expect of and believe about men from someone else. I wish I could look back with gratitude for a different kind of role model. Instead, I spent a good bit of my childhood hating myself for believing I was so much like him. I dragged those beliefs with me for a long time and let them drive a lot of my behavior.

So for all of you men who are making a real effort to lead and love and leave a legacy for sons or daughters, nieces or nephews, your best friends’ kids, even the young people you mentor at work, thank you for everything you do. You don’t have to do it perfectly. Just do it from a place of love and integrity. Happy Father’s Day.

Jun

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Prayer

Confessions of a Prayer Drop-Out

Let me say it outright: I don’t have a prayer discipline any more.

For years, I did. Prayer was as much a part of my daily routine as brushing my teeth after breakfast. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I got bored. Maybe I outgrew what I was doing. Maybe I figured out I was getting cavities anyway, so what was the point?

Realizing I wasn’t praying scared me. So I did what any good recovering intellectual does when something troubling happens: I read up on it. I learned about a lot of cool ways that people experience prayer. I also learned that as a struggling pray-er I was in pretty good company. Priests and monks and saints have written about dry spells when prayer wouldn’t come. Most of them came to believe, from the other side of their dry spells, that this was a growth spurt in their relationship with God. I read that, over time, our relationship with God may change and the ways we communicate in that relationship may change, as well.

One day I heard something that changed not just my intellectual understanding of what was going on, but changed the way I actually experienced that period of distance from God. Someone said, “My life is a prayer.”

That meant, to me, that everything I did could be prayer, if I chose to see it that way. When I heard that, it gave me permission to let go of what I thought prayer ought to be so it could become a unique expression of a real relationship with God. For the first time, I really “got” the idea of praying without ceasing.

Prayer may be the silence that is pure contentment or the dark days when all I feel is the absence of God. Prayer may be a yearning so deep it can’t be expressed in words. It may express itself through service. It may be a song I can’t not sing or a poem that flows through me from nowhere. Maybe if I give up trying to control my prayer time, it leaves space for God to pray through me and express Divine desire for us and our world. Maybe prayer can become less about what I’m saying to God and more about what God is saying to me.

May

By Peg

5 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Prayer

What’s the deal with prayer?

Is God the Great Santa Claus in the Sky, receiving our wish lists all year long? Or is prayer about asking what God wants — the old thy-will-be-done thing?

Even Jesus seems to have been ambivalent about the whole prayer thing. He’s been quoted as saying that whatever we ask for in his name is pretty much a sure thing. Yet, one night when he was sweating blood over what the future held for him, he asked for a reprieve that he didn’t get. Of course, right before he said “amen,” he gave God an out.

So are we supposed to ask? Or are we supposed to submit? If even Jesus waffled, who the heck are we to think we have the answer?

May

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

Walking in Soggy Shoes

Looked out the window recently during one of the sudden, summer-like downpours we’ve had. I love my third-story perch and the perspective it gives me — a wide-angle view of the world sprawling before me instead of that narrow, coming-at-me sensation I can get from life when I’m out there in it.

Walking toward the corner grocery store were two people, a man and a woman, single-file, each with an umbrella, both drenched despite the umbrellas. I’ve been in their soggy shoes before. But it’s getting harder to be surprised by life.

The storm that rolled in late this afternoon did not surprise me. Before bed last night, I checked the hour-by-hour weather for my zip code for the next 18 hours. Sometimes I check my zip code and somebody else’s, too. Then I can plan my life accordingly. I can wear shoes that have seen better days, cancel a lunch date if I don’t want to be on the freeway in a gully-washer, move the plants on my balcony closer to the rail so they can drink in as much rain as possible.

I suppose that’s better than getting caught. But it gives me the false illusion that I can control how life comes at me. I start to believe that even if I can’t control whether it rains, I can be prepared. I can minimize the inconvenience and plan my way into predictability. And that’s a comforting notion that can coax the spontaneity out of me.

To fully, joyfully live this life, can I at least try to welcome whatever it brings without feeling the need for an hour-by-hour prediction? How would it change my experience of life if I could sometimes walk home in soggy shoes?

May

By Peg

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Nature

All Talk, No Action

Stepped out on my balcony last night, plate in one hand, glass of iced mint tea in the other. Not yet late, but overcast, so it was neither too hot nor too sunny for comfortable dining out.

As I pulled out a chair, the bistro table lit up at the very instant I sensed a flash over my shoulder. Before I had time to name it lightning, thunder exploded like rifle shot, so loud and so close I expected to whirl around and see a limb cracking and falling from one of the giant trees beyond my third-floor balcony.

Nothing to see. But I knew a declaration of war when I heard one. I covered my willow rocker, took down my red umbrella, brought in the folding chair, retreated to my dining table. The sky remained calm, the wind never picked up. In the end, I could have stayed outside, dined to the music of birds and the hum of traffic from the nearby expressway, let the day fade out. But when nature roars, I’m not bold enough to call the bluff of a natural world that continues to prove it is cruel and capricious.

Tonight, without the all-talk-and-no-action fireworks, it has begun to rain here at the intersection of afternoon and evening. A gentle rain, no wind, even. I’m going to sit out on the balcony and wait to find out if nature — unfeeling as ever — waters my tiny garden or if I’ll be up doing it myself tomorrow morning.

May

By Peg

3 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Love, Spiritual heroes, Unconditional love

A Tribe of Women

Do I know the greatest women in the world, or what?

I know at least one woman whose sparkling laughter could save the world, if we could get enough people to listen. I know another woman who can make me laugh until I’m reduced to tears and in danger of wetting my pants. Yet another possesses a wild, wooley spirit that makes everyone around her smile.

I know poets who take my breath away — and bring out all the petty jealousy I wish I could deny.

I know artists who have adorned my home with sacred roots and magical birds and brazen magenta magnolia pods.

I know women who make God sit up and take notice when they pray and women with the gift of powerful silence. Women whose music makes me ache and weep and throw wide my arms to let it all in. Women who are wise and women who are like children in the joy they feel and the joy they create. Women who write and teach and garden and give and polish up the world’s beauty on a daily basis.

All of them are God’s unique way of loving me by providing everything I need for joy, wisdom and unconditional love.

I spent the first 40 years of my life holding myself back from the friendship of women. I didn’t know how to be part of their tribe. I didn’t even know I wanted to be part of the family of women. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the women I was working so hard to keep out knew every secret I had ever thought was hidden from me, and were willing to share it.

May

By Peg