Morning Musing on the Deck

Morning in the Woods

The opposite of love is not rage. The opposite of love is indifference. Love engages all our emotions: Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects that which is loved. We cannot access the depth of loving ourselves or others without our rage. Valarie Kaur (daily quote 5-17-23 in Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service This Nonviolent Life: Daily Inspiration for Your Nonviolent Journey)

Out on the deck! Sun beaming on my face. Cottonwood Creek offering background music with beautiful sounds of flow from the snow melt. Deer nearby. They scattered when I came out. Hummers joyful that the feeder is replenished. Zadie Byrd, content after breakfast, rests as she watches over these woods, ears UP. Stillness this blue-sky morning as the sun rises higher over the peaks.

Thus begins a blessed morning, a blessed day, in this blessed life. How do I express the depth of my gratitude for this, THIS? I wonder, ‘is a simple thank you, felt deeply in the heart, enough?’ For truly this morn, this moment my heart feels it. Appreciation for life, this life, this place, this being that I am radiates in every cell of my body. I am that. I am.

More gratitude for my health as last week’s cold symptoms wane, a lingering cough yet to clear (but moving in that direction!). Gratitude for the health that is this body, this spirit, and its movement to clear and release that which needs to be cleared and released. How we miss this subtle, yet obvious, miracle of LIFE working its magic. 24/7, 365 life is always ‘on’ no matter the calendar or the clock. All Ways! May we go beyond the world’s training of our rational minds so that we can know this, experience this. May I.

I pause to listen to an unfamiliar sound. Animal-like, but not familiar and hard to describe. Not a ‘moo’ or a ‘meow’. Soft, slow, short. Two deer walk up near the Circle of Elders, the sound moves with them. It is them or one of them. I have never heard a deer before. Life’s magic is given voice in this moment.

Before the pause, I was about to write about anger, posing the question ‘how does one feel anger from this place, this gratitude?’ I rarely feel angry and yet I know it has a presence in my life at some layer or level. It sometimes pops out obscuring the love, the care, the curiosity, the true being that I am and want to express in the world, with self, with others, with Zadie Byrd, with all of life. There is little, if anything, to be angry about in my life, about my life, even with its curveballs and setbacks.

As I’ve reflected this week, I’ve come to see that what truly rises my ire is the systems that are unjust, unfair, damaging to people and the planet and have many people trapped in their webs of greed. Perhaps too I am angry with myself for missed opportunities to speak out, do more. Where might I be a greater contribution? What is mine to do? I wonder.

I put the pen down and enjoy for a few more moments of the sun’s warmth, the creek’s song, and the beauty of the woods outback. As I open the computer, the quote above greets me with a new light on anger. The magic of life unfolding!

Cottonwood Creek

Pausing for Self-Care

Radical self-care is quantum and radiates out into the atmosphere like a little fresh air. Anne Lamott

This blog day I’m pivoting to deep self-care, mostly in the form of deep rest, Chinese herbs, and nourishing food so that a visiting cold bug will not linger. I may also watch again a beautiful film that I a colleague recently shared: Human. I hope you’ll watch – click here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uog4eCZTUX4&t=33s

I was moved by the visual beauty, the music, and experienced a number of emotions as the stories unfolded. My soul felt nourished and awakened to some deeper understanding of humanity, our humanness, and the range of our life experiences.

I was moved to learn more about the film maker and the making of the film in 2015. In doing so I found this moving quote from the artist:

I am a human being among seven billion others. For 40 years, I have photographed our planet and human diversity and I feel that Humankind has not moved forward. We cannot live together yet.

It is in their faces, in their gazes, in their words that I now see a strong way to plunge into the depth of the human soul. Each human interaction makes you move forward. Each life story is unique. By plunging into the experience of the Other, I felt the urge to understand.

And in the end, what is a human being today?

What is the meaning of human life?

Are our differences so great?

Don’t we share more values ​​than we think?

I felt the urge to ask all these questions, to speak about Humankind. A crazy, utopian bet. With my team, we started our quest with great humility and restraint. For two years we travelled across 50 countries, shot more than 2000 interviews... we travelled to meet with Others. There were those who talked and especially those who never talked before. Those who told their life stories for the first time.

By placing at the heart of the movie the evils of Humankind: poverty, war, migration, homophobia, I made choices. Committed, political ​​choices. People told me all sorts of things: from their difficulty to grow, to love, to happiness. It is all this wealth of human expression, which is the heart of 'HUMAN', and which resonates with the images of the beauty of the world.

This movie brings the voice of all men and women who told me their life story. It is has become their messenger. I made the movie I dreamt of, my greatest wish is the everyone takes hold of it in their own way, organize screenings and become Ambassadors for Living Together. Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Indeed, may we each live as an ‘ambassador for living together’ …

It IS Up to US!

Heart of the Labyrinth

You have three votes every day. Nick Chambers, Valley Roots Food Hub

Our choices are the guiding force for how life unfolds.

I think of Nick’s quote often. In my mind, we have vastly more than three. EVERY choice we make is a vote for something. In the fast pace of today’s world and the multitude of choices we face, I wonder whether we’ve lost connection with how important our ‘votes’ are. Perhaps more importantly, I wonder if we are willing to take seriously the power of our choices and make them wisely on behalf of ALL life.

As I settled in to write early this morning and the direction became clear, Muse, knowing my passion for the topic, gently suggested that I take care not to rant. I take heed of Muse’ message, especially in this intense time where the planetary energies are magnifying much of what is occurring in our world. I aim not to contribute to the chaotic energy, but rather to look deeply at what is being revealed with care and compassion on my own journey to live in alignment with all life. What do we need to reckon with? What do I?

In a world of distractions and complexities, it seems that collectively we’ve lost the awareness that our power to choose IS our personal power. And that our choices matter in the greater context of community, planet, and life.

Our choices are the guiding force for how life unfolds. Take a breath. Let that sink in for a moment. Our choices ARE the guiding force for how life unfolds. It IS up to us!

Paradoxically we crave freedom of choice while at the same time looking outside of ourselves to burdensome, self-interested systems (governments, institutions, corporations) to ‘solve the world’s problems’ and even our own. Even more (and with good reason) we have lost faith in those systems.

Though wobbly, old systems persist, and they continue to be the ones that receive the attention of mainstream media and dominant search engines. Alternative choices are often labelled as ‘dangerous’, ‘risky’, ‘misinformation’ and the like.

Just this week as I was researching alternatives to traditional veterinary medicine, I was warned about the dangers of a therapy that I’m quite certain extended the life of my dear canine Luke several years ago. While I’m sure that, like all interventions, this therapy has had negative consequences for some, my instinct now as it was then is to ‘vote’ for its use.

In one sense my vote is a vote to buck the system. To support an independent practitioner whose experience, knowledge, and heart I trust. In this case I’m blessed that our ‘traditional vet’ is supportive. I do the same with my own health, doing my best to vote for healthy, local, organic foods and work with independent practitioners whose values align with mine. And with other choices like where to bank (locally as much as possible), to invest (finding initiatives aligned with my values – locally where possible), to shop (local and directly with companies whose products I value – though, yes, I haven’t ditched Amazon – yet).

I’m reminded that my job is to be clear in purpose and intention. To act from a place of self-trust. And then to ‘let the chips fall where they may’. This is my aim in all the choices I make, the votes I cast daily. I understand that these votes matter, just as my vote does in every election. Not only does the choice itself matter, but my intention and spirit in which my ‘vote’ is cast…Muse says that’s a thread to weave another day.

In what area of life do your choices create angst? With new awareness what pivots are possible to align your choices with what you value?

Morning Light and Shadow in the Labyrinth

Pivot to Sanity

Ziggurat and Spring Storm on the Horizon - 4-25-23

Till the cloud weeps, how should the garden

     smile?

The weeping of the cloud and the burning of

     the sun

are the pillars of this world: twist these two

     strands together.

Since the searing heat of the sun and the

    moisture of the clouds

keep the world fresh and sweet,

keep the sun of your intelligence burning bright

and your eye glistening with tears. Rumi - Intelligence and Tears

As I moved toward dreamtime last night, I opened a book of Rumi wisdom. The verse above is where my eyes landed. My heart followed. I felt the paradox that rises often with opposites: bitter and sweet, joy and sorrow. Each holding truth, sanity, yet not all the truth, nor all the sanity.

 Earlier in the evening I watched a Charles Eisenstein talk titled The Next Five Years. As I listened, I felt a deep resonance as he wove together a myriad of thoughts and possibilities about the years ahead. While much of what he sees is not rosy, I found it calming in a strange way. Accuracy. Recognition. Truth.

 In leaning into the darkness of possibilities that seem inevitable, I discovered the sanity that lives beyond denial. I was reminded that the future is in our hands, in the choices we make day to day, in the stories we embrace each time we choose, whether that choice is conscious or not. What does this choice say about me? What am I supporting when I take this action or when I react in certain, less than stellar, ways? How do I sustain and maintain my awareness and my sanity? What new stories do I/will I embrace to call forth a new world?

 Rumi’s wisdom speaks to me of the sanity necessary for navigating the crumbling complexities of our current world and for co-creating a new world. I’m not pointing to the ‘sanity’ of our legal system that judges whether someone is ‘competent’ or to sanity in our culture’s terms where we’ve come to dehumanize and render those who are different as ‘crazy’ (or worse).

 Rather I’m pointing to the sanity that is wholeness.

 In wholeness is our capacity to experience the depths of sorrow and despair, acknowledging the truth, the pain, the errors at the roots of this despair AND to embrace the pure joy of beauty, of Nature, of the miracles that are Life. Indeed, the beauty in that very sorrow and despair.

 In wholeness is our capacity to see the nuggets of truth in all points of view, as well as to recognize and navigate in the paradoxes that life and truth offer.

 In wholeness we find our knowing that we are One. One with our planet. One with Nature. One with one another, each and every One.

 In wholeness is our capacity to co-create new stories, new agreements, new systems and structures, new ways of allowing what Life knows to guide us when we don’t yet clearly see the path ahead or even the next step to take.

 In wholeness is the recognition that everything we create is based on story: family, community, country, systems, health, money, politics, art, business, home, EveryThing.

 In wholeness is our recognition that our old stories of separation no longer serve because they are not the truth of who we are.

 In wholeness is letting go of our old stories so that the new may rise.

 In wholeness is sanity, embracing the story of your heart even (perhaps especially) when that story runs counter to the cultural stories that you may find yourself still swimming in.

What a Difference a Day Makes! 4-26-23

This New Moon Day - Attend to Intention

Mountain Morning Beauty This New Moon Day

Setting an intention is like drawing an arrow from the quiver of your heart. Bruce Black

Be mindful of intention. Intention is the seed that creates our future. Jack Kornfield

Our intention creates our reality. Wayne Dyer

I woke up this morning with a clear message this ‘blog day’: Attend to setting clear intentions for yourself on this powerful new moon/solar eclipse day! I was clear as well that this is the message to be shared in this week’s Pivot. Muse nods in agreement bowing to the power in you, in us all.

Ancient traditions recognized the new moon as a time of new beginnings, a tradition and practice that continues to this day. For many years I have recognized each new moon as a time for reaffirming intentions previously declared and for creating new ones, examining how I want to be in the world, my desires for self and others, how I want the world to be and my role in bringing forth that reality.

And so this day I invite you not to ‘take time’, ‘make time’, ‘spend time’ (old phrases long past their useful prime) but to give yourself the gift of attending to becoming clear about what you intend IN your life, FOR your life, for the environment that you inhabit (home, hearth, community), for our world, for humanity, for our planetary home.

Take stock not just of your desires and goals but of how you intend to BE in the world at this potent time of change.

Create intentions that will anchor you as the winds of change blow stronger. Intentions that will support you to BE the change you want to see in the world. Intentions grounded in love that will buffer you from the fear that some will try to perpetuate. Intentions from the ‘quiver of your heart’.

May the winds of change be guided with love as they cleanse and clear and open us to the new.

Light and Shadow in the Valley

A Step Toward Unity

Just for fun … What do YOU see?

Perhaps if we stopped setting ourselves enormous anxiety-producing quantitative goals and instead focused on building fewer but deeper relationships, across difference, we’d actually shift more hearts and minds. Charlie Wood (daily quote for 11 April from Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service)

For several months my community has been engaged (‘embroiled’ says Muse) in a debate over whether to incorporate as a town. It’s not a new question and has been looked at from time to time since the 1990’s. I’ve been reviewing that history and the various reports created to grasp the issue more deeply personally. I’m talking with folks on both ‘sides’.

I know from my experience in government early in my career and from serving on the board of the local water and sanitation district several years ago just how challenging governance is. I can imagine in the current climate of political discourse that it’s more difficult today. Indeed, many decline to serve because of this environment.

Self-governance which involves active participation from all community members presents even greater challenges.

When I read the above quote yesterday, familiar on one hand, a question that I’ve set aside for a while popped up and let me know that it wouldn’t go away: Where are you willing to engage with others across differences? Indeed, where am I willing to reach out to discover common ground rather than to simply seek information? What is possible when I hold this question with sincere curiosity?

On a day that finds me unexpectedly needing to be on the road, I take the question with me for my drive through the beautiful Colorado landscape and I invite you to muse with me: What’s possible in our world if we each take a step or two in this direction? What if our enormous quantitative goals shifted to building peace through qualitative relationships right in our own back (and front) yards?

Happy musing! I suspect there’s more to explore …

Treasuring Contradiction and Paradox

Springtime Snow - A Contradiction???

We need to rediscover contradiction as a creative force within the soul. … …to have greater patience with our sense of inner contradiction in order to allow its different dimensions to come into conversation within us. There is a secret light and vital energy in contradiction. John O’Donohue (Contradictions as treasures in Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World)

What do you notice about contradiction and paradox? Contradictions in the world? Contradictions between you and that world? Contradictions within? Do you/how do you value these contradictions? Could they be gifts, although perhaps in disguise?

Snow has fallen several times since the calendar announced the arrival of Spring. I wonder if ‘Springtime snow’ is a contradiction and what it may be telling us.

A somewhat startling contradiction in the world caught my attention this week: a letter signed by over 1000 folks involved in the development of artificial intelligence demanding a pause in AI development to identify and address AI’s risks to humanity. At the same time and in seeming contradiction to their demand, signers and companies with which they are associated apparently continue their profit-driven, competitive push to develop AI technology (at least I’ve seen no announcements or stories reporting such a pause).

I’ve long been curious about paradox, and I’ve probably mentioned being dubbed with the nickname ‘pet paradox’ by friends in college. Back then I’m sure I engaged in paradoxical behavior, though only a few witnesses remain who could verify. It was also during this time that I recall declaring that ‘living with and navigating paradox’ would be an increasingly important skill in living with the increasing complexities of life in the future.

Believing that to be quite true today, I was immediately drawn in as I began reading O’Donohue’s essay. His words resonate deep inside in a way that they couldn’t have back in my college days (heck, he didn’t even write them until 30 years ago, two plus decades after my college years). Today I sense that he is pointing to a skill that we need to rekindle in these days of contradiction, controversy, complexity.

For surely as we are more willing and better able to allow and nurture contradictions within, our capacity to be more coherent, more aligned with our values will expand and the skill that we bring to listening, to considering, and to collaboration with others will deepen.

Indeed, as we nurture contradiction, allowing in with care and acknowledgement negative and/or opposing ideas, thoughts, experiences, memories, our choices and our values are likely to become clearer.

In my own life I grapple with contradictions that rise between my desire for comfort and ease and my deep care for Mother Earth and her well-being; for my culturally supported need for financial security as the world defines it and that same care for the Earth and for my fellow human beings.

Such grappling challenges me to examine my beliefs about the nature of life, of Universal law, the true source of security, and such. Gradually, step-by-step, my understanding grows, and I pivot, discovering pathways that honor care and hold the potential, dare I say the probability, of the comfort, ease, security that I desire. In some strange way, my willingness to grapple in the muck of contradiction, leads me to plateaus of peace.

Muse says that about now you may be asking ‘what the heck does this have to do with AI and pausing AI development?’. Or with any other seemingly unstoppable train that truly needs to be examined (I’m sure we can all name a few!)?

Most always, pivots require a pause. Even the sun pauses for a few days as it makes its Solstice pivots. In our pauses, individually and collectively, rests the time, the energy, direction, and the possibility for inviting contradictions to rise and be acknowledged. In the pause is the opportunity to see contradictions with greater light, clarity, and wholeness. And, perhaps, to look beyond the drivers of competition, winning, and profit. In the pause is the opportunity to treasure contradictions and then to choose differently.

Morning View Through the Trees

New Doors, New Worlds

Angel’s Wing …

Between every two pine trees is a doorway to a new world. John Muir

So many pines. So many possible new worlds. What worlds will we create? I wonder …

Winter’s grip is easing after a week of snow, sub-freezing, record-breaking low temperatures. I too still feel winter’s interior pull. Not yet ready to ‘spring’ into action, I hold on to the quiet solitude that is a favorite winter experience.

As I move more firewood in for the hearth, I imagine just below the surface of the soil dormant plants and grasses beginning to stir and to think of sending green shoots into the visible world. Soon they will pop here as they have already done in less harsh environs.

These plant beings like the bears that will soon stir out of hibernation will enter a world that may look like the one they left behind months ago when they retreated to their underworld. Likewise, the woods out back where I sauntered earlier this morning seem as they were before winter’s cold grip.

But the world they are waking to has changed. They too have changed. Change, visible and not, is a constant. Speaking of this nature of change, a wise sage once told me, “you cannot walk through a doorway without creating change.” Sometimes we forget how subtle change can seem and how every change ripples out through all the world.

Today I sense a different quality to change than that of a year or so ago. I sense change is deeper, wider, faster than most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. It’s easy fall into the trap of thinking that change is happening to us. Muse nods in agreement, adding that more humans are waking to how and what our choices contribute to change, to the shape and character of the world.

While many are waking to and embracing new doorways, new possibilities for creating a world beyond the world of separation where we live into the truth that there is no ‘other’, some cling to the so-called security and comfort that separation, differentiation, and win/loose competition.

Yet the doors between the pines in the woods invite us to listen to Nature’s ways of living in harmony. Indeed all of Nature invites us to listen, to discover her ways, her truths. The rivers invite us to explore flow. The oceans ebb and flow with the moon. The stone beings hold deep memory for us to tap into, and the plant beings offer nourishment and an opportunity to more align with Mother Earth’s seasons.

Muse gently pulls me back to choices, to the thoughts and actions about where our attention goes and to the importance of aligning those choices with doors to the world we want to create, the world we want to engage in. What do we care about? What are we committed to? Are those the focus of my attention? My actions? My choices?

Rigor in our thinking and aligning what we speak and the actions we take with our beliefs requires attention, commitment, and care. These are the keys to open the doors to new worlds, co-creating with Creation and cooperating with one another each step of the way. This is being the change we want to see in the world.

Resting In the Doorways

Deep Stirring

Between Snow Storms — Colorado Blue Sky Beauty

The Earth itself speaks in myth. There is an aliveness in it. It speaks across species, a form of ecological communication that invites us into the unknown forest. Emergence Magazine Valemon the Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene (click here for a treat!)

Much is stirring deep within this blustery third day of Spring, the 500th week of ‘dates with Creation’ (aka Muse), of sitting to write and share. A cursory search for the significance of the number 500, brought a spectrum of possibilities, none of which resonated deeply, so I left that path for what seems more fertile ground.

On the search I encountered Peter, Paul, & Mary’s hit song 500 miles. But rather than the sad feeling that this journey of The Zone and The Pivot has taken me away from home, I sense it brings me ‘home’, wherever and whatever home may be. Thank you for being on the journey.

As I write, a strong wind blows and large blobs of melting snow slide off of the roof. Plop! More snow is forecast. The few signs of Spring rising from the soil are hidden for now, snow and wet earth nurturing them for the warmth and their growth to come.

Deep stirring. Seeds ready to burst and sprout. In time, their time. Nature’s time.

My deep stirring feels like a call from and for new futures rising, and it is sprinkled with rich curiosity about the old, ancient times when our ancestors were in deep reverence for and clear communication with Earth, with ALL her beings, and with the cosmos.

I don’t recall my German and Irish ancestors telling me the traditional stories of their peoples, their roots, the myths that live on through such handing down through the generations. Despite the lack of early kindling of this interest, today I find myself curious about such stories in this time when ‘something’ is definitely ‘on the move’ in me, in my immediate environs (aka ‘the woods out back’), and beyond in most every aspect of life all around the globe … and beyond.

I wonder what mythology is alive today that can inform this new future. Perhaps that is why I find the myths emerging from astrologers today so fascinating and why I’m fascinated with the stories from indigenous Earth Keepers. Perhaps that is why I found this offering from Emergence Magazine insightful and inspiring. I hope you’ll make yourself a special cup of tea and enjoy the gift.

The unknown forest is inviting us in. Will we embrace the invitation to enter and forge the new futures yearning to be birthed? Futures that we too long for deep within. Or will we cling to that which is crumbling and no longer serves? Will I?

Before the Equinox Storm

Imagining a New Reality

Winter Vistas …

You represent and unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice. … The imagination is committed to the justice of wholeness. … Imagination is the most reverent mirror of the inner world. John O’ Donohue (The Body is Your Only Home in Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World

Once again, I’m challenged to settle in and focus attention, to put pen to paper, words to paragraphs on the page. O’Donohue’s words draw me deep within as they invite me to bring voice to the world I alone represent.

Winter’s gifts of soul time and precious solitude are giving way to a spectrum of activity that ranges from the mundane of tax preparation and heater repair to the magical, mystical realms of imagination. Winter’s embrace nurtures the later, holding seeded ideas until their time to sprout. The world I give voice to seems scattered, unformed like a bonus seed packet of ‘surprises’.

As the first shoots of green are breaking through the soil, I’m in awe of their response to some inner voice that knows and guides: Now! This is the time. These plant beings are tuned into the greater energy force field of our planet home. They listen. They know. They ebb and flow, go dormant then grow in tune with rhythms lost to most of us in our culture as we attend to the outer world more than the inner.

It is these greater rhythms that I am drawn to tune into more deeply in this phase of life. Observing them sparks something inside, a seed gone dormant long ago perhaps, and expands my capacity to imagine and contribute to a world far different from what we label ‘reality’ today.

This week I found myself returning to the childlike nature I remember as a toddler growing up in the country and breaking the bounds of home to head to the pasture and commune with the cows. Oh how I wish I could remember cow wisdom. The family canine, Sweetheart, a Lassie-like Collie, came along and would nudge me homeward before our escape became a worry to parents whose ‘reality’ was vastly different than mine.

I walked these woods with what of that nature I could muster and I ‘heard’ and ‘saw’ the land in new ways that don’t yet have words. A felt sense of deeper connection, more confidence in my capacity to sense the land’s needs as well as its sacredness.

The labyrinth is guiding some gentle adjustments and inspiring creations to strengthen the energetic flow and the contribution of this land to the greater whole – community, continent, Gaia, and beyond.

I feel as if I’m writing a dream. The ‘adult’ me wondering ‘will this make sense?’. The childlike me inviting you to come play on the playground of creating our world anew.

Listening to and holding sacred this vortex of energy in the woods out back