Revising and the Art of Living: Thursday's Reflection

For the last couple weeks I have used my writing time to revise one chapter of my in progress memoir, and I am no where done working on it.Who knows when I will feel ready to read that chapter to my writing group and then after getting their feedback, I know I will need to revise some more. 

That's the way it is. Sometimes the process is frustrating, but most of the time it is illuminating. And even rewarding. With each revision, I come closer to what it is I most want to say, and I gain insight into what it is I am to learn from the stories of my life. 

Yesterday during my meditation time I read the following sentence in a chapter on reflection and revision in Albert Flynn DeSilver's  Writing as a Path to Awakening. 

                  If all writing is rewriting, then maybe
                  all living is reliving.

That sentence seemed to blaze on the page for me. The words appeared in neon lights.

I don't think DeSilver only means we keep having the same experiences over and over again, although that certainly happens. We make the same mistakes over and over again. We enter the same unhealthy relationships or insist on maintaining the same unhealthy habits. 

Instead, I think DeSilver means we have a chance to revise ourselves. We can look carefully at how we conduct our lives. We can reflect on what gives us joy, the ways we are called to serve, and how we are asked to live as the person God created us to be. And then we can take steps to structure our lives so it is a reflection of the sacred, of the holy, of the Divine's vision for us. 

Elizabeth Jarret Andrew in her book Living Revision, A Writer's Craft as Spiritual Practice says "Revision is seeing anew," and "Revision requires inner work and thus is a spiritual practice."
This applies to life, as well as to writing a memoir, a novel, or poetry. 

How do we do that? I think the titles/subtitles of some of the chapters in Andrew's book offers guidance:
                  Deep Listening
                  Seeing with Other's Eyes
                  Practicing Presence
                  Reframing
                  Reflecting In and On Your Stories
               
One of the subtitles in the book is "Transformation in Theme and Plot." Yes, your life has plot--all the events of your life--and your life has a theme, too. At least one. Andrew writes about themes as the "plot's inner life. They are the path by which particular experiences illuminate universal truths." The themes in your life are
              the questions that flummox you year and year;
              the facts that plague you, the longings that have
              driven you since childhood. These themes reside 
              in your being... (p. 208)

At what point are you ready to revise what plagues you and to grow beyond or in some case, into the longings that have shadowed you? 
What spiritual practices might help you do that? And who can help you in your personal revision process?

This week I read an earlier chapter to my writing group. I had worked on this chapter for long time, tweaking words and sentences, cutting sections, adding others, moving paragraphs. I had dug deep to find the words, the images, memories and stories from my life to express what I hoped to convey in that chapter. I had read it aloud to myself many, many times, changing something with almost every reading, but when I brought it to the group, I felt quite good about it. 

But as I read the chapter aloud to them, I discovered additional changes I want to make. More revisions. How well the group listened and then asked good questions, clarifying questions. They offered positive comments, too, but it is clear I have more revising to do. 

This is hard work, spiritual work, but I am determined to make this chapter the best it can be. I owe it to myself, but I also owe it to the readers I hope someday will read it. I believe this about my life, as well. I am determined to live my life as fully, as authentically as possible. My desire is to live as my True Self, and to do that is an ongoing process of reflection and revision. 

An Invitation
Where are you in the revision process? I would love to know. 

Surrendering to Silence: Tuesday's Reflection

The snow continues to fall here in Minnesota. Snow and more snow and yet more snow. 

One benefit of changed plans and one cancellation after another is the gift of solitude. Of stillness. Of silence. 

A friend sent me a poem, "A Winter Wonderland Psalm" by Edward Hays, which beautifully expresses the benefits of being snowed in, yet again. Here are some of my favorite lines from this poem:

Be still, my soul, like a winter landscape
      which is wrapped in the white prayer
     shawl
     of silent snow fringed with icy
     threads.
Be still, O my body, like an icy pond
     frozen at attention, at rest yet alert.








and the last stanza:

         Be still so that you can discover slowly, day by day,
                   that God and you are one,
                   to know in that Wonder-of-Wonderlands
                   who you really are.

During my morning meditation time recently I have been reading Writing as a Path to Awakening, A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer and Living an Awakened Life by Albert Flynn DeSilver. Instead of reading one chapter a month I have read a chapter every day. The morning I received the Edward Hays poem I read the May chapter, which focuses on imagination and the art of the image. DeSilver offers several steps for jump-starting your imagination. 

The third step, "Surrendering to Silence" is the one that grabbed my attention and not just for the way it addresses ways a writer can cultivate the imagination, but also because it highlights a basic spiritual principle. 

       Spend time in silence every day, lest you remain caught
       in the chronic chatter of the world, with all its 
       opinion-slinging and mechanical celebrations of the 
       mundane...At a certain point, it is essential to just stop
       and let it all go...Letting go should be a daily practice...
       If you give yourself to silent meditation every day, you
       will never be at a loss for peace and calm, for deep
       connection; ...Yes, of course, you will still experience
       sadness, doubt, fear, and anxiety, but over time you
       will become friendly with these visitors; you won't
       get snagged by them, and the spaciousness within 
       you will grow to accommodate the totality of being
       human... (pp. 80-81)

How is this related to the poem by Hays? What does surrendering to silence have to do with winter? 

If you feel challenged by undesired hibernation time, perhaps you can imagine yourself invited to wrap up in a white prayer shawl and to enter into silent time. Perhaps the silence of the snow falling and the expanse of the unbroken white is an invitation to release, to nurture your inner quiet. 

I was recently reminded of the term "Spiritual Positioning System," (SPS). Like a GPS, when our SPS is functioning well we have a better understanding of where we are, and I think that includes knowing who we are and our true nature, the person we were created to be. When we adopt silence as a spiritual practice, we are more likely to hear answers, responses, even the bidding of the Divine. And then we are more prepared for the next season of our life. 

An Invitation
How is your SPS functioning these days? I would love to know. 

Change of Scene: Thursday's Reflection

I love working in my garret, and, in fact, I spend much of each day in the garret, writing at my desk, reading in my Girlfriend Chair, or meeting with spiritual direction clients. 

Sometimes, however, I stall. My work feels stale, and what I need is a change of scene. Sometimes it is good to pick myself up and relocate to where I can feel the energy of other people's interactions and connections. Get thee to a coffee shop, I tell myself. 

I did that recently. How grateful I am that I can respond so easily to the need for a change of scene. That may not always be the case.

Mary Pipher in her new book Women Rowing North, Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing As We Age, notes that at seventy, the average person spends about seven hours a day alone. That doesn't include sleeping. 

For some, those hours are ones of deep loneliness, but others are more content and are enriched by the solitude. Most of us will experience a mixture of both loneliness and solitude, and the difference, Pipher says, is our attitude. No surprise there. Pipher encourages us, even if you are an extrovert, perhaps especially if you are an extrovert, to develop a host of activities to enjoy when we are alone. 

                  The more we do this, the more likely we are
                  to enjoy our lives as we age. When we use our
                  skills for self-nourishment and to foster deeper
                  connections with the people who remain in our
                  lives, loneliness transforms into solitude. (p.95)

As a child, my family moved many times, and I experienced many lonely times. We moved during the summer and unless there was someone on our new block who was my age, I didn't have a chance to develop new friendships till school started in the fall. I know now I am an introvert by nature, but that doesn't mean I wasn't lonely. Mainly, I turned to reading and riding my bike.  

As an adult when we moved, I had more options to make friends and to create a new life, but doing so was easier said than done, and  I was often lonely. Gradually, however, I discovered the opportunities I had in the lonely times--to read and study more, to pray more and to integrate a variety of spiritual practices into my life. Being alone allowed me some freedom -- to choose how I most wanted to spend my time. To listen to my inner voice and how Spirit was calling me. In the process I discovered the gifts of solitude.  

I hibernate well. I am content in my sanctuary, and that is a good thing in this winter of snow and more snow and more snow, but sometimes it is good to leave the garret. 

An Invitation
How do you manage loneliness? What have you done to transform loneliness into solitude? 

Simple Treats: Tuesday's Reflection

This past week my husband painted the inside of one set of kitchen cupboards and installed sliding baskets from The Container Store, making access so much easier for pots and pans and ETC. 

I was delighted, and we laughed about how it doesn't take much to make us happy. 

In their day baubles and bouquets of roses and weekends away were wonderful, but these days I am just as pleased with simpler pleasures, including ones I give myself. 

Here are some recent treats:

* Using new markers for my bullet journal and coloring books.

* Inviting friends for a casual supper and planning a menu.

* Receiving an email from the library saying a book I requested is waiting for me. Most recently, it was Heavy, An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon and earlier this year Laurentian Divide by Sarah Stonich and Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver.

* Organizing my dresser, using Marie Kondo's "tidying" methods.

*Watching a fat squirrel burrowing through the snow to get seeds from the bird feeder.

*Enjoying the scent of the lavender-rosemary candle as I read in the snug.

* Listening to "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" on NPR.

*Seeing granddaughter Maren swish a basketball through the hoop at her most recent game.

* Looking ahead to the coming week and events planned with both grandkids. 

*Walking at the Mall of America before stores open --no worries of ice or snow. 

*Seeing chatty emails from friends in my inbox.

* Going out for brunch after church and reading The New York Times. 

* Pulling into our garage and then walking into a warm and cozy house as the snow continues to fall.

*Teaching T'ai Chi to a group at church and feeling the energy as we open and receive from heaven.

Don't I have a luxurious life? 

I suspect you do as well. 

Sometimes we just need a reminder, especially on these cold and sometimes treacherous winter days, or on days when we feel overwhelmed by changes or challenges in our lives. 

I recently read Mary Pipher's new book Women Rowing North, Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing as We Age (loved it!), and she ends the book this way:

           Dear sisters, I hope that we can experience bliss.
           I want us to sense how big life is--how intense,
           joyful, painful, complicated, and beautiful our lives
           can be. Let us embrace everything. This can be our
           rescue as we navigate this last stretch of the river
           with its treacherous currents, quicksand, deep clear
           waters, and silver sunsets. 

Begin by naming your simple pleasures. 

An Invitation

What simple pleasures are you noticing right now? I would love to know. 

Happy Valentine's Day: Thursday's Relfection

                   At its core, life is not about things, it is about
                   relationships. It is the hands we go on holding
                   in our hearts at the end that define the kind of
                   life we have led.
                                            Joan Chittister
                                            The Gift of Years


Today is a good day to send love to all the hearts you hold in your heart. And to receive love, too. 

An Invitation
Here are some heart-filled questions to consider from Wise Aging, Living with Joy, Resilience, and Spirit by Rabbi Rachel Cowan and Dr. Linda That.
* Who has loved you in a way that encourages you to be your best, most authentic self? As you think about your current relationships, are there people you genuinely love and whose love for you feels transparent and trustworthy?
* Who invites you to grow and helps you reach self-understanding?
* For whom are you that sort of friend or relative? What is it about you that allows you to fulfill that role?

I would love to know. 

Happy Valentine's Day!

A Poem for One's 70's: Tuesday's Reflection

In preparation for revision of a chapter in my memoir, I re-read a couple journals written in 1997, the year we moved to Sweetwater Farm in Ohio. 











I found a clipping of a poem by Anne Hazlewood-Brady called "One Week in My Seventies" taped to a blank page in the journal. She describes one activity for each day of the week, including cancelling the news and laughing at her cat. The following lines resonate with me now and perhaps did then, too. 

                   


                    
                    On Friday I tidy the house
                  because neatness clarifies life.
                    On Saturday I bake a dessert
              to sweeten the sorrows I cannot solve.
                    On Sunday I know for sure
                             all life is prayer
                    and everyone is immortal 
                            to someone.

I googled the poet, and she was 72 when she wrote this and died in 2012 at the age of 87. I wonder if she wrote a poem about a week in her 80's. I was 49 years old when I read the poem and saved it in my journal --more than two decades away from being 70. Now I am only a few months away from being 71.

The journal where I found this poem documents a busy and emotional time in our lives. Earlier in the year we made a rather surprising move from our home in a Cleveland suburb where we had lived for not quite three years to a century farm in the country. Our soul place. That fall our daughter and son-in-love moved to Tanzania to teach for a year, my father had a heart attack requiring triple bypass surgery, and our son started his freshman year in college at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design--all within the same month. 

Living at Sweetwater Farm provided the calm and serenity I needed in order to respond with some degree of equanimity during those days when feelings were right on the surface. I imagine myself cleaning the house, in order to restore order in each room and in my heart. I imagine myself mixing flour, sugar, and eggs to blend sadness with hope and promise. And I imagine myself giving thanks for all the love and grace in my life. 

I must have had some idea when I was 49 that "all life is prayer," but now that I am in my 70's those words are more real for me. They may be the only words that are truly necessary. The only instruction and reminder needed to live each day wholly. 

So today I write about a day in my 70's. 

                  Today I open my laptop
                and vow to live with an open heart.
                   Today I simmer chicken soup
                to nourish the spirit, as well as the soul.
                    Today I know for sure
                God's presence is everywhere,
                     within and all around. 

An Invitation
What wisdom from earlier years continues to live in you today? I would love to know.  
                     
                


           

                        
  
               

Deciding to Stay Home: Thursday's Reflection

Thanks to last week's extreme cold and this week's ice and now snow, events on my calendar have melted away. In some cases I have suggested re-scheduling and in other cases my spiritual direction clients have moved their appointments to a day one hopes will be less problematic on the roads and sidewalks. 

As you know, if you have read this blog over time, I never have a problem with "found" time. I may miss not doing something or seeing someone, but I have no problem with the open, unfilled space. After all, there is always another book to read.

I think I have always felt that way, but now that I am 70, I have a freedom I didn't have when I was younger. 

I no longer need to get to work where I was bound to worry all day about how I would manage the drive home in the snow that was accumulating through out the day while I was at my desk writing media releases and planning events. 

I no longer have to pick up kids from school and get them to the game or activity that for some ridiculous reason has not been cancelled.

I no longer have to attend a meeting or another event if I don't want to. The group will survive that one time without my presence and input. 

I can choose to stay home. Without regret. Without agonizing about disappointing someone or myself. I can relax knowing my father is safe in his senior living apartment and because our grandkids live close by, we can easily accommodate their needs and changed schedules. I have fewer layers of responsibility and expectations now and, in fact, live a privileged life. I can adjust easily and even graciously. 

Now I realize these at home days caused by treacherous weather conditions may be easier for an introvert, especially a writer who often craves stretches of time to write and reflect and read. I have always been a self-directed person and usually can move smoothly from one vision of the day to another, but I also think these days are gifts. I can cultivate inner contentment. I can find satisfaction in the simplicity of staying home. 

And so I do. 

An Invitation
What have you learned about yourself when schedules change? I would love to know. 

Black History Month--Book Recommendation: Tuesday's Reflection

One of my reading commitments this year is to read more books about the experience of being Black in the United States, especially nonfiction. This commitment is the result of going on a Civil Rights Tour in Mississippi and Alabama this past fall. (See posts on November 13, 15 and 20, 2018 plus January 15, 2019)

The tour gave me the impetus to finally read a book that has been on my list almost since it was first published in 2011, but once I started reading it, I almost couldn't put it down. I found more and more excuses to ignore my daily To Do lists and read for longer and more frequent stretches of time. 

I highly recommend The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. 

Yes, it is long (over 500 pages), but it is incredibly well-written, brilliantly researched, and profoundly moving. 

From 1915 to 1970 almost six-million Black citizens migrated from the South for northern and western cities, changing the face of America. Wilkerson interviewed over a thousand people in order to give life to this exodus, along with highlighting key data and records to uncover this dramatic history. Throughout the book she weaves the stories of three specific people: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney from Mississippi who migrated to first Milwaukee and then Chicago in 1937; George Swanson Starling from Florida who migrated to New York in the 40's; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a black physician who served in the military and migrated from Louisiana to California in the 50's. As readers, we are privileged to follow their stories up to their deaths, and I found it genuinely hard to let go of them as the book ended.

These are real people whose stories illustrate the unspeakable treatment and hardships they experienced that drove them to migrate in hopes of a better life. Life in the North was not easy however, and Wilkerson does not portray northern cities as being free of prejudice. No way! 

My parents were born in 1923. I was born in 1948. I graduated from college in 1970. This migration was an active economic and cultural force during those years, and I knew basically nothing about it. 

I live in a part of the country where many Scandinavians immigrated in the middle to late 1800's through the early 20th century, and often I hear descendants of those immigrants proudly tell stories of how hard their great-grandparents worked to establish themselves in this country--the hardships they endured, along perhaps with prejudice they experienced. Sometimes those conversations are offered in an empathic way towards current immigrants from other countries. But sometimes I get another impression. "If my ancestors could do it, why can't they?"  

Well, this book goes a long way to shed light on the difference. For one thing, Black Americans don't look like Swedish farmers and Norwegian shopkeepers. How obvious, when you think about it, and although there were not official Jim Crow laws in the North, Black Americans often were treated as if there were. 

Unlike all the other groups of people who have left their native countries to come to the United States to find a better life, Africans had no choice. They were kidnapped and forced totally against their will to become slaves. No, the Black Americans who migrated from the South to the North in the 20th century had not been slaves themselves. They had not been on the slave ships, but I keep thinking about the family history they had inherited. And the trauma. And the effects of that trauma, which, I think, our nation continues to experience today and, in fact, perpetuates. 

The book challenges a number of stereotypes we white people almost take for granted. Wilkerson, after studying the census and other records, enlightens us:
         * Migrants were better educated than those left behind 
            in the South
         * Compared to northern Blacks already there, the
            migrants were more likely to be married and remain
            married, more likely to raise their children in two-
            parent households and more likely to be employed. 
         * The migrants were less likely to be on welfare than their      
            Northern counterparts. 

February is Black History month--a perfect time to open to what we didn't know we didn't know.  

I close with the last paragraph from Wilkerson's book.

             Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have
             been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is 
             not a question of whether the migrants brought good
             or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled
             to their destinations, but a question of how they 
             summoned the courage to leave in the first place or
             how they found the will to press beyond the forces
             against them and the faith in a country that had
             rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did
             not dream the American Dream, they willed it into 
             being by a definition of their own choosing. They did
             not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the 
             Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that
             they had always been deep within their hearts. 

An Invitation
What meaning does Black History Month have for you and how will you commemorate it? I would love to know.