Posts Categorized: Radical Kindness

The Message

in Getting Unstuck, Identity, Noticing, Power of Connection, Radical Kindness, Surrendering, Wordlessness

Message In A Bottle

“I know I said I just wanted a house on the water,” she intoned.

But…How would she put it so that he could hear her?

She tried again. “You know, darling, how much I love our little Cape Cod cozied into the bay.”

But…

Maybe she should just come out with it.

She craved open waters, longed for the growl of surf. Her body needed it like air, like water. She was shriveling in the dreary, forested coziness of it all.

Now she had little memory of the end of her daily two-mile constitutional.

She was on her way to the open beach. She knew that much.

Her headstrong Cadillac simply knew what she needed. It was headed there of its own volition.

Soon she was filling her nostrils and lungs with the salty, sweaty, fishy wind of the ocean as her ears filled with the deeply repetitive rhythm that had brought her here.

One foot followed the other as her eyes embraced the full scope of it all. Nothing but silver movement and driftwood sculpture forever. She had the sense that she could be dissolved in it all and die empty, happy.

Now her feet took her further, stronger, longer, straight out toward Japan, she thought.

That’s it. She’d tell him,

Honey, you know how I’ve always been drawn to Japan? I’d like to move a little closer, dear. Right over there…on the horizon.

She was so drawn to the unknown edge of things that she stubbed her toe on it, just as she felt the moisture seep through her light canvas slip-ons.

It was nothing more than a green lip of something hard. Her fingers scratched through the wet sand, just as the tide reached her ankles.

A pull toward the sea. A yank toward land.

No. It couldn’t be. A bottle.

Seriously? A bottle with a cork?

By now she had it firmly in her hands. She had won the tug of war.

And what a prize!

As she rinsed off the sandy water, another surprise.

Really?

No way.

There seemed to be a message inside.

This was hers. Hers alone. Here was the sign she’d been praying for.

She looked over each shoulder to make sure she truly was alone.

Broke the neck of the bottle on the black basalt rock looming nearby.

As she shook it hard, a yellow paper tumbled into her open hand.

Her hands trembled, full of hope.

The figures were beautiful, exotic zen symbols of some kind.

A long, curved line. Something that looked like a roof of a house, and a figure that looked vaguely human, and female, walking away.

Catcher in the Smoke

in Family Stress, Radical Kindness, Surrendering, Wordlessness

Smokey grace

There’s another woman inside me, I’m discovering. Or, to be more accurate, other women. They tend to take over my dreams, ready to show me what I’m not seeing in my waking life, if I look into their depths. And lately they’ve been showing up in my writing. I’ve decided to share them here because each one seems to come with a gift. And they seem ready to be exposed to light.

And that’s what I invite you to do. Hold them up to light. See what each might bring to your inner self, those parts of you that don’t often get noticed. What other selves are living in your dream life or imagination? The offering is free, and if you feel like sharing your thoughts or reactions, well, that’s good too. 

I wrote this  piece a week ago. Last weekend, four days later, at a meditation retreat, I met a woman who had been evacuated from her home a week before. She lost everything. In retrospect, the similarity is shocking. Who knows where “she” might show up?

She was hot. She was smoky hot. Yes. Smoke was in her eyes. But more. They burned, but there were no tears. The tears hid in a secret recess of her too-large heart. Even though her heart was stitched to her sleeve most days, the tears stayed hidden.

She desperately wanted to cry. The forest fires that raged nearby, the sheer force of the burning, the helplessness as the distant hills were swallowed by the haze. All of it. It brought back each loss of the last years.

They paraded through her mind, one after another, each loss. She ticked them off.  Death. Check. Betrayal. Check. Money. Check.

And yet. No checks by loss of partner, loss of child, loss of faith.

Her faith was in the world that she could not see. It was in the Force that had showed up again and again. It was that Force that had been there every time she had taken a leap into the unknown.

Her faith was in that. Yes.

Mostly, she thought, it was faith in that which always seemed to catch her when she got to the edge of what she had thought she could bear.

Call it The Catcher, like the Catcher in the Rye, she thought.

The Catcher in the Smoke.

That’s what it was. Just when she had given up on believing anything, just when she thought she would always suffer in a drought of the soul, her heart ticked a little extra beat. It took a leap.

What it felt like was surrender.

She thanked the smoke for the tears that slowly wandered down her cheeks.  And for the veil that cloaked her as she allowed herself to be taken by the depth of her grief, trusting the Catcher to hold her sorrow as she dissolved into it.

There’s another word for the Catcher, she thought. I think I’ll call it Grace.

The Silence Beneath the Chatter

in Noticing, Radical Kindness, Surrendering, Wordlessness

Silence 390331 1280

I just completed my fourth day of an at-home retreat. It was supposed to be silent. I truly intended it to be silent. After all, my home is in a forest-like setting near a park in a quiet neighborhood, with towering trees bearing silent testimony from every window. My ever-understanding husband took off for our cabin in the woods so I could have silence and the Internet for a couple days at a time. (I was participating in an online retreat that featured silence except for six or seven hours of inquiry a day with Byron Katie, a teacher of mine).

Back to the Sea

in Family Stress, Noticing, Radical Kindness, Surrendering, Wordlessness

Back to the Sea

Mother, carry me,
Child I will always be,
Mother, carry me
Back to the sea

My sister and daughter and I wind our voices together in a song new yet ancient, returning from the Oregon coast. It would be the last trip I would take with my sister. My daughter, at eleven, was a skinny sprite who invited her aunt again and again to come back with her sand castles and stick-writing and cartwheels.

An Impatient Patient Surrenders

in Body or Aging, Getting Unstuck, Identity, Noticing, Power of Connection, Radical Kindness, Surrendering

White Flag

It’s a month now since I found myself climbing on the surgery gurney for a knee installation on my left leg. My right leg, ever the competitive First Child, was there first, six months ago. With the help of family, friends, and a whole infield of life coaches, I convinced myself it made sense to complete the job on the other side. The logic was watertight: I’d profit from my first experience and skate through it the second time.

What if the Food Thing Is Simple?

in Body or Aging, Confusion to Clarity, Noticing, Radical Kindness, Surrendering

Egg

“It’s just that food…diet…food choices…are so complicated.” This was my stated conviction last week as I began a three-day Eating Peace inquiry retreat with dear friend Grace Bell.

My confusion about nutrition and diet has increased over the years, and that’s saying something given my birthright as a woman and my family issues with overeating . Ever seeking a fix for various bodily challenges (such as carrying twenty extra pounds, mostly on my hips and thighs), I have tried these “deep fixes” in the last ten years alone:

Now . . . A Pause from Self-Improvement

in Getting Unstuck, Noticing, Radical Kindness, Surrendering, Wordlessness

Deer

Who is this one who’s convinced she must improve me?

She tramped through the oxalis on a wet January evening, wondering at the recirculating advice device that seemed to be her brain.

A “retreat of solitude.” That’s the way she had described her coming week in the half- collapsed cabin, hunkering up to a leaky wood stove.

“Alone with my own thoughts” she had said. “Away from the breakneck speed of screens, terrorists, presidential candidates. (Really? Him? Again? She thought. That’s reason enough to hide in the woods for two years, not just a week.)

Starting Close In

in Confusion to Clarity, Getting Unstuck, Radical Kindness, Surrendering

Footprint

To learn a poem by heart is to feel it in my body. To learn a poem by heart is to live with it in my pocket. I’ve long been a fan of Kim Rosen’s book Saved by a Poem. For a time I forgot how it feels to stay close to my own marrow with a poem as my guide.

But sometime a couple of months ago, Irene, one of my beloved yoga teachers, read a David Whyte poem I’d never heard before. (Wonder of wonders!)

When Liminal Time Meets Technology

in Confusion to Clarity, Noticing, Radical Kindness, Remembering, Surrendering, Wordlessness

Computer and candles

It’s Epiphany morning. Here’s what I wrote at earliest light, following my purest intentions and my personal tradition of defining Epiphany as a time-out-of-time. Just before a tiny techno glitch grabbed me and shook me by the heels:

I love this liminal time. The time between dark and light. I resist electricity and grope my way by candlelight before meditating each morning.