Well, after 24 hours of antibiotics, my fever is gone and I feel almost back to normal.  I was in bed most of the day yesterday (N tending to the baby), and that helped so much.  I feel like a new woman.

So I’m going to try to put into words some of the rumblings I’ve been feeling inside.  Apologies for any lack of coherence.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve watched two really great documentaries:  The Corporation (about the sicknesses inherent to corporate America and beyond), and You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train (about Howard Zinn and the social causes with which he’s been involved).  I left both so energized.  Like someone had nudged me awake, and I was seeing life anew.

I’ve long self-identified as one concerned with social justice.  Before moving to the Bay, my husband’s line of work (community organizing) and the neighborhood in which we lived were daily reminders of racial/social/educational/economic inequities.  These were ever in my face.

But here we are in a different season.  My husband is in school, and I’m writing.  We’re both caring for our son.  And we live in an area where it costs boatloads of money to live.  (Can anyone say “enormous student debt”?)  The streets are all clean and in good repair.  The grocery stores don’t have guards.  Very few cars were made before the year 2000.  Really, the economic diversity in the area has mainly two categories:  a) students and b) millionaires.

So it’s easy for society’s inequities to fade into distant memory.  It’s easy to feel the gentle sunlight and afternoon breeze (it’s sunny and between 60 and 80 degrees here nearly year-round) and feel as though all is well with the world.  To feel that all is well, and, frankly, a little boring.

But these movies…they woke me up again.  They gave me permission to do something other than focus on my little life in my little household.  They gave different images and role models than much in the media today, all of which inspire engagement with a world where all is not well.  So very not.

So I’ve once again been dreaming of what I can do with who I am and the kinds of things that stir my soul, to lead a more spicy life.  A life of greater engagement with the world’s unwellness. 

But here’s what happens in my dreams.  I get tripped up on the fact that most social causes a person can participate in involve demonizing someone.  An individual.  A group.  A stratum of society.  And all I’ve learned and contemplated of the human psyche, and the social and environmental factors involved in any social ill, makes me unable to comfortably do that.  As far as I can tell, we’re all of us caught up in systems.  Systems that make some of us mean and some of us nice.  Some of us conscientious and some self-absorbed.  Some bitter, some arrogant, some fearful or ashamed.  It’s systems that form our politicians, systems that make rich people rich and poor people poor, systems that cause some from each category to move up or down that ladder.  Who isn’t shaped by their environment?  By their joys and wounds…by the joys and wounds of others?

I can’t comfortably point at any group or individual and say, “You!  The crap is all your fault.  You’re completely to blame.”

Can I join with others to address society’s ills when such others might be saying these very things?

And this leads me to my next thought:  I think I’m too principled.  I think I care too much about being genuine.  Is that possible?  I care too much about never participating in things that I can’t fully, consistently back.  I’m wondering these days whether there isn’t a healthy place for lowering one’s principles.  Lowering them for the sake of doing things in the world.  Working for social change.  Connecting with others.  Participating in religion, even.

What would it look like for me to not fear the wrath of the authenticity police, those boogie men who crouch and watch for me to say or do anything contrary to my convictions?  I’m sure there are some who could really use a dose of that wrath.  But there are those of us on the opposite extreme, who need to stop fearing it.  Whose fear of it, oh so ironically, actually keeps us from doing much at all about all our “authentic convictions.”

I’m not about a guilt-based life, but I am about a spicy one, where I’m not asleep to the spectrum of light and dark in our world…where I’m satisfyingly involved in the spreading of the light, and containment of the dark.  As tempting as it is to let my environment lull me back to sleep, I want to shake that.  I want to be awake and alive in the best sense of that word, and, though getting a little dirty in the process, try to care a little less about being 100% principled all the time.

What do you think?

I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s Pilgrimage, the non-fiction tale of Coelho’s spiritual journey.  Much of the journey is quite literal - a walking path taken across Spain when Coelho was 30.  So far I can hardly put it down.

Monumental current events have a way of worming their way into much that I read, so it isn’t much wonder that Katrina came to mind as I read the following passage:

Everything in our surroundings [along his path in Spain] reflected an uneasy peace, the peace of a world that was still in the process of growing and being created - a world that seemed to know that, in order to grow, it had to continue moving along, always moving along.  Great earthquakes and killer storms might make nature seem cruel, but I could see that these were just the vicissitudes of being on the road.  Nature itself journeyed, seeking illumination. (36)

Do you think this could be true?…a way, maybe, of depersonalizing the devastation that nature inflicts on itself?  Or, rather, personalizing it in a different way than we often do?  Rather than nature being cruel, maybe nature is traveling its own path, doing its best, like many of us are, to balance and counterbalance its own self out.  When too much pressure builds up here, an earthquake or volcano gets released.  When too much moisture or heat builds up there, a huricane spins and dumps the access where it wasn’t before.

I don’t know.  A journeying nature is somehow easier for me to respect and relate with, easier for me to swallow than one that’s malevolent or randomly unfair.  It doesn’t diminish the suffering so many bear because of that journey, but it puts the suffering, for me, into a different light.  It also begs we ask the tough questions of why, when nature does its thing, the poor are so often those that suffer most.  That’s a different set of questions than the ones around why nature is so mean.

I’ve also been reading Mary Oliver this week.  Two of her poems have been echoing again and again in my mind as prayers…prayers in response, again, to Katrina.  Prayers for hope that light follows darkness.

The Lily

Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily

which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse

of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there

in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language

some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,

its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden–

or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience

of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon

becomes the golden sun–
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?

At Black River

All day
its dark, slick bronze soaks
in a mossy place,
its teeth,

a multitude
set
for the comedy
that never comes–

its tail
knobbed and shiny,
and with a heavyweight’s punch
packed around the bone.

In beautiful Florida [or the Gulf region…]
he is king
of his own part
of the black river,

and from his nap
he will wake […or she, Katrina]
into the warm darkness
to boom, and thrust forward,

paralyzing
the swift, thin-waisted fish,
or the bird
in its frilled, white gown,

that has dipped down
from the heaven of leaves
one last time
to drink.

Don’t think
I’m not afraid.
There is such an unleashing
of horror.

Then I remember:
death comes before
the rolling away
of the stone.

For the last week my world has had a homebound orbit, circling almost entirely around our newborn son.  I’ve felt such joy and gratitude, such gladness to be right where I am, right who I am, nestled deep into this life that I’m living.  Whispers of the greater world have trickled in, but not until yesterday did I actually take time to read more deeply of the tragedy gripping our nation’s south.

And now I’m floored.  Or rather filled with a profound kind of dissonance.  While I’ve been basking in what feels like the benevolence of our world, thousands have been doing the exact opposite.  The exact opposite.  They’re living in hell.  Right now.  Right freaking now.  How can this be?

One of the hugest challenges of my 20s has been learning to come to terms with suffering, to grow so absolutely exhausted from kicking and screaming in the face of it, from personally flailing around in cesspools of it, and all the questions it raises for me and in me, that I’ve finally fallen limp with my fists newly open.  “I accept you,” I’ve finally learned to say.  “I accept that you’re in our world, that sometimes nights are endless, that pits are bottomless, that no amount of wishing or praying will make you go away.”

But now I’m confronted with an entirely new challenge.  An entirely different beast.  It’s joy.  Joy and peace.  How in the world, given suffering’s Reality, does a person come to terms with such things?  At many points in the last decade I’ve wanted to slap optimistic people.  Or shake them into actually seeing the world for what it is.  Only eyes closed or averted, I’ve thought, could go on registering “good place” when looking at our world.

But that’s not how I’m seeing things at all anymore.  I’ll never ever say this world is only good.  I’ll never look at things like New Orleans and think they’re just a blip on an otherwise glassy sea.  I weep as I learn about what’s happening there.  I weep and mourn and donate and pray.  But I can say, in addition to that, that I am genuinely happy.  And I do think kindness and gentleness exist in our world.  And that sometimes they even wrap us up and fill us up and make us glow in a kind of heaven.

And this is what’s confusing me today, what’s being impossible to get my mind around as I look into my baby’s eyes, guzzling warmly at my breast, and then the eyes of hungry babies half a country away.  God, what a world.

In the Darkness, in the Light, it just keeps on.

"Thomas Merton once said that the spiritual life is essentially to love.  One doesn’t love in order to do what is good or to help or to protect someone.  If we act that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we are seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons.  This has nothing to do with love.  To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God."    ~ Paulo Coelho

To me, this sparkles.  I don’t think I agree with it on every level, or in every circumstance, but I think it’s a really important alternative and challenge to the ways love often gets defined.  Historically, so many of my good deeds have been far more about my own needs to be loved and admired, or at least liked and approved of, than about actually loving people.  Their quality has been just so different from the quality of actions rooted in the communion Coelho speaks of.  Actions that flow from such communion often have the warmth and gladness, for me, of what it feels like to be in love, no matter what age or gender or relation to me the beloved happens to be.

My husband is reading a book called Chimpanzee Politics, in which a scientist documents 6 years of observing power dynamics and pecking orders among colonies of chimpanzees.  Fascinating stuff.  Apparently the author notes that those who study chimps long enough often face destabilizing questions.  Chimps are so much like humans that they force you to wonder just how fair it is to classify them as animals and us as, well, not animals - different, civilized.  When questions like this are asked, worldviews and self-definitions get wobbly.

We were talking about this this morning, wondering whether it might be true that no matter what you study, if you study it long enough, and with enough openness to the broader implications of your discoveries, you will inevitably face a crisis.  Or many of them.  Sure, crises come to varying degrees, and with varying amounts of pain and disruption.  But the thought is that they come.  They happen.  My crises came initially with impassioned study of religion.  But scientists face them, too.  Physicists.  Mathematicians.  Psychologists.  Anthropologists.  Even Joe Bloe, diving deeper into self-knowledge.  Study anything deeply enough, and with that openness to broader implications, and WHAMMO!  Worlds collide.

The thought strikes me oddly today.  Makes me feel funny.  Like all of us go about our lives, creating through that complex mix of genes and experiences a sense for who we are, how the world works, how the parts fit together, why things are the way they are and do what they do.  We create extensive webs of things to take for granted.  But in the process we’re all of us, far more than likely, really, really wrong about a lot of it.  Maybe most of it.  But we don’t know it.  And in fact we need to not know it in order to feel…normal.  Stable.  Like we’re not walking around in some science fiction novel where appearances are or aren’t what they appear to be.  Talk to anyone in crisis and you’ll get a sense for how wobbly and fluid their world has become.

Despite all the crises I’ve faced in recent years, or maybe because of them, I think I don’t mind admitting that I’m glad my web of things to take for granted is getting put back together, and I don’t even care that despite my best efforts, big chunks of it are inevitably going to be wrong.  I need it.  I need a web.  I need something to hold me up in this crazy world of relative space and time.

For months, now, I’ve been meaning to buy a copy of Rachel Remen’s book My Grandfather’s Blessings.  I saw her speak sometime last winter, left absolutely dazed by how loved and inspired and happy she made me feel, and have had a number of dreams since then telling me to BUY HER BOOK.  Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to do it.  Is it not the hugest irony that I accidentally put half of our old address and half of our new one on the order for it?  By some miracle it showed up on my porch today.

Anyhow, one of the first stories she tells is of her grandfather telling her, as a very young child, the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the Holy.  I read it out loud to N and couldn’t get through half of it without crying.  Here’s the two paragraphs I love the most:

I was very puzzled by this story.  How could it be that one might confuse an angel with an enemy?  But Grandfather said this was the sort of thing that happened all the time.  "Even so," he told me, "it is not the most important part of the story.  The most important part of the story is that everything has its blessing."

Looking back on it, I have wondered if my grandfather, old and close to the time of his death, had not left me with this story as a compass.  It is a puzzling story, a story about the nature of blessings and the nature of enemies.  How tempting to let the enemy go and flee.  To put the struggle behind you as quickly as possible and get on with your life.  Life might be easier then but far less genuine.  Perhaps the wisdom lies in engaging the life you have been given as fully and courageously as possible and not letting go until you find the unknown blessing that is in everything.

I’ve been reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning this week.  Profound book.  The first half is the author’s story of survival in Nazi concentration camps.  The second is a more explicit description of an approach to psychotherapy (logotherapy) the author developed because of his death-camp experiences (he was a psychiatrist before and after the war).

I’ve spent a lot of energy in my life searching for meaning, so not surprisingly, I’m enjoying the book.  And particularly since it’s so indelibly shaped by suffering.  I’m deeply moved and heartened by those who have walked through hell and found (or been given) a way to actually come out on the other side…those whose wisdom and grace and inner quietness reflect that journey.  Frankl is truly a gift.

One of the observations he makes about the human quest for meaning (a quest he thinks all of us are on) is that there is no “meaning of life” that’s universally true.  He says, “To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion:  ‘Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?’  There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent.  The same holds for human existence.”

To find the meaning of life, he says, think of the question the other way around:  what if instead of asking the question of life (or books/philosophers/friends/nature/religion/etc., in other words, things outside yourself), you take it as a question that life is asking you.  What is the meaning of your life?

I suppose one might get all uptight at that thought, feeling pressure to give a respectable answer.  I can imagine conjuring up the image of a stern, white-haired god, calling us to account. 

But what if the question doesn’t have to be asked with judgment or sternness at all?  What if the question is more playful, more artful than that?  What if it’s asking that you notice what’s growing in the garden that is you.  What seeds have been planted there?  What’s tended or left wild?  What might be time to prune?  Maybe these are the meaning of life.  For you.  Right now.  And possibly into the future.  Whether what’s growing there is plump with fruit or quiet in a winter dormancy, it’s there.

I cannot know all my life will grow or mean, but by the end of it, I’d love to look back and see a pattern of awakening.  A pattern of learning to love self and others well.  A pattern of rich engagement with people and emotions.  I want to see reverberations of a woman becoming more comfortable in her own skin – ripples into other lives, where because of that process going on in me, others feel it happening in themselves, too.  I want to tend the garden of a healer, a namer, a noticer and celebrator of beautiful things.  Things that call courage and hope into being.  I want to walk gently with fellow souls.  These are what I want to conspire with in that swirl of plants and sun and rain and seasons that is me.  That is me in this world.  Today.

If all of this is the meaning of life, of my life, I think my existential angst might be pacified.  If this is the meaning of life, life makes me smile, and want to throw my arms around it all.

So I’ve mentioned before that I’m taking a class on Buddhist ritual.  Every week a different practitioner comes and demonstrates and/or lectures on a different ritual from the Buddhist tradition.  We’ve studied mantras, sand mandalas, poetry, meditation, pilgrimage – even something called goma fire ceremony (quite something to observe!).  Every week I leave struck by the worlds the presenters inhabit – worlds filled with symbols that I know little about, practices mostly foreign to me, convictions about what is real and true, what can and can’t be known, what’s best and worst to pursue or desire.

I’m struck by the fact that we’re all living on the same planet, and yet in so many ways inhabit different ones. (I could write piles on what it seems like everyone has in common, but I’ll leave such thoughts for other posts.  I want to look at the differentness angle here.)  And it’s living in our worlds that keeps those worlds alive, keeps them real.  To explain…

So often in my study of world religions, I’ve heard or read of devotees’ frustrations with “outsiders” observing and studying religions at arm’s length.  “To understand our world, our community, our God, you must participate.  You must become a disciple.  Then see what of us you think, or feel, or know.”  Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Sufis – even a woman I know whose life is immersed in Japanese tea ceremony:  all have suggested that practice comes first.  Distanced analysis simply can’t get to the heart of each tribe, each religion.

But here’s the thing that trips me up:  inhabiting a world and surrounding oneself with people who live in it is itself reality-producing.  True, some realities are more believable than others, more readily or thoroughly convincing, but by and large, surround yourself with a world of people saying the sky is red, and even the best of us will sooner or later believe it.  A host of social psychological studies confirms this.  We’re tremendously shaped by those around us – their assumptions, their values, their thoughts, their claims.  For good reason practitioners of religion gather regularly with those who see reality the way they do.  "World" maintenance depends (in large part) on it.

This is frustrating me this week, though.  I’m frustrated by how thoroughly we humans can believe things that are only one way of “seeing” (one way of understanding what’s real, true, trustworthy, etc.).  I’m standing at the overlap, or rather juxtaposition maybe (?), of so many worlds that each have recognizable wisdom, depth, history, resonance…but each claims to be The Story, The World, The way of knowing what’s real.  I don’t have enough lifetimes in the next fifty years to become a disciple of each, and even if I did, I don’t think I could suspend my knowledge-of-the-truths-in-other-worlds long enough to be able to do so successfully.

I’m reminded of the process of awakening that children often go through when they discover that the ways things are done in their nuclear families aren’t the ways things are done in every family.  What in the world are the Johnsons doing, they may ask, eating ketchup on their eggs?!  Shock can mellow into realization that there’s more than one way to eat eggs, and eventually can even become appreciation of alternatives to one’s own.

So here’s the rub:  What do I do with my knowledge that there are all kinds of Johnsons out there, practicing all kinds of ways of knowing, maintaining all sorts of realities, believing any number of disparate things about God and Truth and the meaning of the cosmos?

Postmodern angst indeed. 

I left class last night feeling like every religion, on its own, is a rich dessert.  Amazing.  Beautiful.  Delectable if taken in the right time or amount or temperature or context.  But I feel like I’ve been eating a whole meal of the stuff.  It’s making me sick.

I want something simple now.  Something less elegant.  Less sophisticated.  Something that’s vegetables or protein or grains right from the stalk. No butter or sauce, please.  No sugar.  And please, no chefs fighting over the right way to make it, or the proper method for enticing rough audiences to try.  Or over what will happen if they don’t.

I want to stare at the moon on balmy spring nights.  I want to smell earth smells.  I want to send out my gratitude for life and love and hope and resurrection without getting tripped up on who it is I’m sending it to.  I want to feel my anger and fear and indignation at a world where so many suffer.  Where I suffer.  And I want to learn to embody all the things I admire.  Like honesty and integrity.  Like gentleness and strength.  Like respectfulness and awareness that we’re all interconnected – gloriously and perilously so.  Confidence and humility in knowing how much light and darkness are inside of me.  And you.  The ability to hold a lot in tension and still have joy.  Levity.

I want a simple, earthy faith, and to feel unthreatened by the voices who say that’s not enough.  People who fear or prophesy, because of the worlds they inhabit, that people like me are going to hell.  Or straying far from God.

God help us all.  This world of sweets and dear sweet-eaters is just too much for me right now.

One of the things that stopped making sense to me sometime during seminary was the idea that humans are born innately bad and deserve eternal punishment for this (a foundational concept taught in many Christian circles).  Why would we deserve punishment for something over which we have no control? I came to ask.  Felt like torturing people forever for eye color or hair texture or the shape of our little toes.  These, too, are innate from birth.

But the more I live and think and read and get to know people, the more the first part of that equation doesn’t work for me either.  Even the most hideous human acts seem rooted not in innate badness, but a complex web of factors, including, yes, our genetic make-ups, but going far beyond that to damaging life experiences and powers beyond any individual, like those of families, neighborhoods, cities, and political and religious environments.  Heck, I’ve even been learning about lead poisoning recently, and all the havoc it unknowingly plays in lives across our country, concentrated (where else?) in slum dwellings where occupants have little choice about whether their walls get repainted or pipes get replaced.

I’m coming to wonder whether, when it all shakes down, we have any choice at all.  You heard me rightly:  any choice at all.  I live daily like I do have choice, and it feels quite often like I do.  But when I think longer about any single choice that I make, the choice can’t be extracted from that huge web I just talked about – any hundreds or millions of things that all moved in and around and through me to bring me to today, to this choice, to this ultimate decision about, oh, what cereal to buy at the grocery store.  Or whether to forgive the mean telemarketer lady on the phone.

The more I get to know the back-story to any person’s life, the less able I feel to place blame on any shoulders for the bad things people do.  On the contrary, my compassion for wrong-doers grows, and, in many cases, I grieve for all the things they endured to bring them to whatever badness they’re presently about.  Part of my own healing in recent years, for that matter, has involved unlearning to feel personally at fault, and therefore guilty, for responding to certain kinds of people with fear or judgment or hostility, for not being able to follow through on certain things I know would be good for me…for being far from perfect.  Most of these very things are defense mechanisms that my dear little psyche dreamed up long ago to try to protect me.  They are not evidence of badness at all – not rebellion against Good and True and Right.  Salvation I’ve needed, yes, but not from innate badness.

And this gets to the heart of what I’ve really wanted to talk about today:  God.  I want to ponder God, and whether or not the divine has a rough side.

A friend responded recently to the story I posted last month with a version of this question:  Isn’t it possible that the judgment and wrath of the preacher in this story (Harris) and the love and compassion of the blind woman (Mama) are both faces of God?  Are you wishing for and imagining and dreaming only of a lop-sided God – a God that lacks the wholeness that is softness and spikes, darkness and light, judgment and mercy…Harris and Mama?

Maybe I am.  I’m uncomfortable with a God that looks too human, too full of all the limitations that come along with human territory.  I’m suspicious that such a God isn’t God at all, but a projection of our own selves, made far bigger and more powerful, but nevertheless imbued with our own consciousness and emotions and responses to the things we don’t like.  Anne Lamott wrote once, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”  And I think she’s got it right.  A God that’s going to zap all my oppressors seems appealing, in one sense, but also one who isn’t taking into consideration, in the zapping, all the things that make oppressors what they are…that make me who I am.  Again, that web I talked about earlier.

I’ve been reading Carl Jung’s autobiography this month, and he reflects a lot on God.  He’s convinced that just as there is darkness and light in all of us, there is darkness and light in God.  And I’m drawn to this wholeness – drawn in a way that makes me think twice and thrice and more about my friend’s recent question.  If all of life is a mixture of yin and yang, is never only one thing or the other completely, why would God be an exception?  Why would God be only love, only light, only softness and compassion?  Is God so “other” from us, as many religious groups and writings claim (despite the fact that the God imagined by many of them doesn’t seem so other to me)?

My dabbling in quantum physics and a handful of clairvoyant experiences make the world and everything in it seem deeply interconnected, interwoven.  “One,” if such a word can communicate.  The breathtaking magic and mystery of it all makes God seem…I don’t know…equated, somehow, with all of it.  All of it together.  All of the oneness and conscious/unconsciousness that is everything.  In moments where I’m in touch with this perspective, it seems silly to think of God as outside of it all, watching on, acting and reacting to a separate universe of his or her creation.  If anything, God and the physical universe feel indistinguishable, and “physical” an arbitrary designation to assign to anything.

If God is something like the All (how in the world do I talk about this???  I feel at a loss for language here), then of course God is not all softness and light.  God is thunderstorms and avalanches and raging wildfires.  God is attacking lions and tantruming two-year-olds and oppressive dictators.  And yes, God is peacemakers, too.  And prophets.  And sages.  Community organizers.  Disaster relief agencies.  Babies, suckling at our breasts.

God is Jesus on a cross, living and dying in such a way that our darkness is exposed, our intolerance of those who challenge our systems, our religions, our gods.  God is death and loss and unutterable grief. 

And resurrection, too.  New hope, new life.

A God like this is bigger and more pervasive than any God I’ve ever otherwise dreamed of.  I’m not sure I like it entirely.  But right now, nothing else rings quite as true.

What do you all think?

I think somewhere inside each of us lives a tender, sparkling soul – a kind of Christ child pulsing to grow into all the Wisdom and Power and Love and Purpose that are actually its nature to become.  But like the infant Jesus, it can’t get there right off.  Its path is an unfolding one, beginning with much dependency, much need of gentle food, deep rest, attentiveness, nurture.  A vulnerable god, in need of our protection.

I don’t think a soul can ever fully die, but I do think it can get lost inside of us.  It can be ignored or beaten down or scolded for its strangeness or inefficiency so long it learns to be silent when it most needs to speak.  For years my soul felt too afraid to tell me things it urgently wanted to say. I’m sure some fear remains.

But in those golden moments of freedom, as I learn to listen, to wait, to honor, to encourage it toward Becoming – watch out!  I feel a source of Wisdom and Love and Power that makes me shake.  Or smile.  Or laugh.  Or sit silently reverent.  From its cracks seep hope and confidence and humility and courage.  Its roots drink Purpose, and in its presence I feel more deeply happy with who I uniquely am and with all the ways I’m just like everyone else.  My darkness and light become less adversaries than companions, each respecting the necessary role the other plays.  My fears become less hurdles, less roadblocks to thriving, and more like folks to whom I tip my hat as I move along my way.

Last night I had the most wonderful dream.  As a child I had a parakeet named Buddy, with whom I spent a lot of time.  Often he’d sit on my books or the tip of my pencil as I did homework, or sing from the ceiling fan in my room.  In the tenth grade I guiltily sold him at a yard sale, bearing the burden of abandoning, for convenience’s sake, my trusting companion.

Since then Buddy has become a persisting figure in my dreams, popping up particularly when I’m not taking care of myself…when I’m consciously or unconsciously ignoring my soul.  He represents my soul.

In many dreams I’ve forgotten to feed him.  I haven’t given him water.  His feathers are bent and unpreened.  His cage is filth.  In one, his eyes were even plucked out.

But last night – last night I dreamt I came to where his cage has always been, and the cage was gone.  Buddy sat serenely on a free-standing perch, the essence of youth and beauty.  His feathers were soft and more colorful than they’ve ever been, the look in his eyes all life and health.  I went immediately to him, exclaiming how beautiful he was, and how delighted I was to see him.  I woke up smiling.

My prayer to all of our souls:  may we love and honor you into becoming what you pulse to become.  May all your wounds and silencings be transformed into beauty, flight and song, and the resulting chorus become a contagious balm to a world in which there is much darkness, and the need for thriving souls is great.