Woman as Spirituality

This weekend my daughter and I attended and presented at the 30th annual Women & Spirituality Conference at Minnesota State University in Mankato. It was a beautiful weekend for the drive, and a wonderful way for my oldest daughter Kathleen, and I to spend time together. I continually am awed by what it means to be a mother. The keynote speaker this year was Winona LaDuke, Native American activist and writer, mother, grandmother, amazing woman. I’m still hoping to get her book, Naming the Sacred, soon. I should have stood in line to buy it after her speech, but I was there not just with my daughter, but also with Max, her nine year old, and he’d been sitting very patiently for the entire speech (and opening ceremony); we were all hungry and ready to find lunch.

I continue to think about the things that LaDuke presented, about who gets to decide what belongs to whom? Who does get to name what is sacred? Why do we believe our justice system is even about being just? Why do we have so many incarcerated people in our country? This morning I spent too many minutes (any minutes at all are too many for me) on Facebook. I keep vowing to shut down my page, but then I’m drawn to telling someone “Happy Birthday” or something, and there goes my meditation time, to Facebook browsing, not a good trade-off. But I was there, and found some ‘friend’ dissing the Occupy Wall Street folks, and it made me so frustrated, but I didn’’t answer, didn’t reply, didn’t want to start a Facebook fight. So, one more note to self, stay away from Facebook, except for pics of grand-babies.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the fight is over. It’s not. Ignorance and fear are hard things to fight. I know, I fight them in myself more often than I’d like to admit. A person like LaDuke, however, gives me courage to continue to ask myself the hard questions, to hold out hope, to be appalled that a company can own the rights to seed and food. Really? How did that happen?

safety of the seasons

I am not a cold weather lover. This is the time of year I am usually overcome by dread, wondering how I’ll manage yet another season of cold. The voice on the radio tells me the windchill this morning is 39. After the middle of October, telling us the temperature outside just isn’t dramatic enough, we need to hear the windchill. Brrrrrr.

This year however, I have a plan. Just like Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, I will live through this wintry season, month by month. I will survive another Minnesota winter. Since I’ve lived here all my life, you’d think the season change would move seamlessly for me, but as you might have noticed, nothing in my life moves seamlessly.

So, here it is, already halfway through October. It’s been an amazing October, blue skies and warm breezes mostly. I am still getting by most days not wearing socks. But I’ve gotten my cooler weather clothes ready, you never know when that windchill will plummet. The grocery stores are stocking eggnog, but I won’t indulge until next month.

You see, I can do this. Next month is eggnog latte every day for breakfast, and pumpkin ice cream from Sebastian Joe’s. Dinner out with the family for Thanksgiving. I know it’s not traditional, but I’m beginning to like not having to lug a turkey home and I don’t have to be resentful about doing all the dishes afterwards.

Then it will be December and that month is, well, really magical if you dress warm enough. The trees will be filled with lights and the snow sparkles and dances. The holiday brings with it lunches out and hot toddies in. So, you see I can do this, month by month. I don’t dare go ahead into January, because, well, that is just biting off too much winter for one page. I will get there, resting in the safety of the seasons, content that the seasons still change, that the world still turns and right around the corner, I see spring.

do have be

It does seem that there is a power in the concept of trinity, just ask me, the mother of three daughters. There is definitely some power going on here. Another trio, that I think we need to balance out in life is do have be. I’ve mulled this over, in different ways, before stumbling upon the simplicity of this, this morning. I’ve been wondering a lot about the do and the have, as I’ve been working really hard, ever since I was fifteen, and changed the nine on my birth certificate to an eight, so I could work downtown at fifteen, when the legal age to work was sixteen. Now, with a lot of academic work behind me also, I’m a bit tired of the doing.

I’m also pondering the having, as I wonder about what do I want to have, to own, to carry on with me into the future. As I was growing up, owning your own home was drilled into me as the epitome of having. And having your own home can be amazing, it can be safe, and a place to have fun and a place to put all your other stuff. It can also be a burden, when keeping up that home requires you not to be there, or being there just means dusting off all your stuff, when you could be say, renting something like a kayak and being somewhere on a lake. So, how hard do you work for stuff, how much do you need to hang on to “home” when life seems to be calling you out, somewhere else?

Now, (big sigh here), being. This one is the one that’s challenging me now, the one that seems, well, indulgent. The one that seems such a threat to the other two. Because, if you are being, it doesn’t really matter what you have or what you are doing, or even that big one, “What do you do?” as in, “What do you do for a living” which translates into, “Who are you?” When we allow ourselves to be, we have to let go of all the questions and all the answers that we think define us, and others. But without being, the doing and the having are empty, reverberating questions that only begin to haunt us, the more we rely on doing and having alone.

So, if we can master, and somehow integrate, do have be, maybe, just maybe that is the better way to live. The way to walk our path, without too many regrets, to face the future with both desires and the ability to enjoy what is, to savor the desires that we fill, and to be okay with each moment that just happens. Maybe...

Rules of the Road

I am a rule breaker. This is where I come alive, where the lines are drawn and I dance upon them and then sprightly waltz over them, creating mere dust in the sand where the line once was. I didn’t know this about myself for a long time, and then a long time friend said to me once, in awe, in surprise, “The rules simply aren’t there for you are they? I mean, you just don’t see them.” And at this I had to think, and I realized she was right. I really did not see them, rules meant nothing to me, and her comment made me aware; aware that I was different, that the rules that a lot of other people saw and obeyed quite simply, only made me puzzled, and made me question why people were so enamored of their rules.

And so, this is my disclaimer: I may break some rules, it is what I do.
Oh not that I don’t have any rules in my head, I have a lot of those ‘bad’ rules that parents and adults drum into children’s heads. Children should be seen and not heard, don’t tell the neighbors…. Damnable and damaging secrets and lies that forbid us to talk about our real lives. Don’t tell the whole truth. This rule too, I try to break, if only in my writing, as I try not to be too real in polite company, as it can make people uncomfortable. Teacher and writer Floyd Salas, says, "All considerations of language, of ideas, of symbols and metaphors serve only one function: to convey the soul of a living being to the soul of other living beings and in that process break us out of our isolation and loneliness and put us in touch with the universal spirit."

This boils down what I hope is my function, in life, as a writer, as a therapist—
to convey my living soul to others, to connect with others and to connect with the universal spirit. This sense of connection, of belongingness, is often overlooked as the huge motivator that it is. We all bumble along, hoping for a sense of connection in life, when things are out of whack, some people shop, for stuff, maybe, but maybe for the connection, to be in a mall, to talk to a clerk, to imagine that they are important, buying things from someone who is there, to serve them.

So, how do we create connections that move us forward, that bring us closer, tighter in to this universal spirit? How do we move in sacred steps, so that even when we back away from the spirit, we are still close in? How do we create sacred spaces that invite others in closer to us and closer to the spirit where healing occurs? One of the ways this works for me is through words, reading words on a page, speaking words aloud, finding words and phrases that invite and heal. The hard part for me is to use the academic words, use ways of using words that are required, expected, codified. As if the words that ask questions that can be quantified, are more real, more valid, more scientific. I know better, though, I know that words of wisdom will not be counted, will not be verified by numbers, but by the souls that ring out, by the vibrations that run through the body when the truth hits the heart and the heart sings and says, “I knew this all along, this is truth, this I carry within me. This connects us and this is love.”