Category: inspiration

Depth and Breadth

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“The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has pearls too.” – Vincent Van Gogh

In my house when we have a fun announcement, we blow the imaginary trumpet in our hands and sing “Doot-doot-da-do!” So please, humor me and imagine a “doot-doot-da-do!”

Because I’m really excited to announce a new shared blog space that Vicki Atkinson (from the Victoria Ponders blog) and I have created with a team of incredibly talented group of contributors and thinkers. It’s called The Heart of the Matter – https://sharingtheheartofthematter.com. It’s intended to be a blog that digs into the depth of how we find what matters to us and keep our eyes focused on that horizon as we are swimming through our days.

This topic of what matters I something I believe to be different for every person and different every day but with a lot of common elements of experience, learning and love. Which is why it’s important for us all to be collaborating on this topic and space so that as we figure it out, we are contributing to the journeys of others. It’s found in what DOESN’T matter as what does. The other things we plan on diving into are:

  • What is fueling us to figure out what’s important
  • Celebrating who is helping us discover our own keys
  • How we get stuck thinking it’s one thing long after that one thing has ceased to be vital.
  • Linking to resources that help uncover what’s real
  • Heartening each other to have the faith and confidence to pursue what matters
  • Healing what is broken so that we can uncover what’s essential

This shared blog space is for surfacing our stories that help us discern what matters so that others are inspired and it pulls us all along.

So please follow us there – but more than that join us there. As we figure out how to make this a collaborative and supportive space of contents, comments and topics, I hope to see all my dear blog friends in a rich space of discussion around the Heart of the Matter. My first post in that space is The Small Decisions that Matter.

Which doesn’t mean that I won’t be also blogging here on Surprised by Joy. As I see it, my personal blog covers the breadth of life in all its glory and surprises while The Heart of the Matter digs into the depth of authenticity, inspiration, values and love found in what really matters.

Quietude

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“External silence can be the doorway to inner silence.” – Ram Dass

On a recent lazy holiday morning when it was still dark at wake up time, my kids and I were snuggled in my bed watching a lightning storm out the windows. Lightning is fairly uncommon in our area so Miss O was chattering away about it in her typical 7-year-old patter until three-year-old Mr. D said, “Ssshhh, I can’t see.”

As someone who relishes and recharges from quiet, I really appreciated that sentiment.

The past few days my kids and I have been staying at an AirBnB on the Washington coast. There is no city noise here – no car doors slamming or car alarms going off, no hazy road noise, not the occasional siren and no one talking on the sidewalk. It’s just the roar of the ocean. It’s like a complete vacation for my ears from the noises I’m not aware of hearing until I get away to this entirely different soundscape.

In an On Being podcast, Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, called quiet a “think tank of the soul.” In her introduction of him, Krista Tippett mentions that he’s gone out to record dawn breaking across six continents. She goes on to say, “He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound but an absence of noise.”

I was so taken by the work of Gordon Hempton that I’ve written about his work before in a post titled Silence. One of the points he made that really stuck with me is that our ears are always on. That’s why alarm clocks work – because even though our brains are sleeping, our ears never do.

Gordon Hempton told Krista Tippett how he became dedicated to being a listener:

“I grew up thinking that I was a listener. Except on my way to graduate school one time I simply pulled over — making the long drive from Seattle, Washington, to Madison, Wisconsin — pulled over in a field to get some rest. And a thunderstorm rolled over me. And while I lay there, and the thunder echoed through the valley, and I could hear the crickets, I just simply took it all in. And it’s then I realized that I had a whole wrong impression of what it meant to actually listen. I thought that listening meant focusing my attention on what was important even before I had heard it, and screening out everything that was unimportant, even before I had heard it. In other words, I had been paying a lot of attention to people, but I really hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to what is all around me. And it was on that day that I really discovered what it means to be alive as another animal in a natural place.”

Gorgon Hempton on the On Being podcast

To the wonderful perspective provided by Gordon Hempton, I would add that it’s only when I sit in silence that I can hear my inner voice. It’s wonderful break when I get away from the city noise and find outer quiet but I still have to work at cultivating my inner quiet. When I manage that, usually by sitting in meditation, even for just a few minutes (or seconds sometimes), I’m rewarded with a renewal of spirit and ability to listen to myself.

So I echo Mr. D’s sentiment in all it’s different meanings, “Ssshhh, I can’t see.”

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Daring Practice of Compassion

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“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” – Dalai Lama

Yesterday Miss O was with me when I dropped Mr. D at his daycare for the last time in 2022. There was another little person having a hard time with drop-off. She didn’t want to cross the threshold to go in and her dad needed to step away.

As we walked out of the building, we could hear the little girl’s cries. Miss O said, “I hate hearing little ones cry.” We talked all the way to the car about what the little girl could be feeling and why.

When we got home, I pulled out Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown and looked up compassion. Brené’s working definition of compassion is, “Compassion is the daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering.”

I read this to Miss O along with some supporting paragraphs about how compassion is scary because of it reminds us that we all have pain and struggle. It isn’t feeling better than or fixing it, it’s being with another in their experience.

Brené includes a passage from The Places That Scare You by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön:

“When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us… In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience – our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.”

The Places That Scare You by Pema Chödrön

It is this feeling of fear that resonated with me. Before I had kids, I got to know the homeless people in my neighborhood that sell the Real Change newspaper, a Seattle newspaper that exists to give low-income and homeless people a job opportunity. Walking around the neighborhood with my dog, I got to know their names and some of their stories. At Christmas I would prepare Christmas cards with $20 in them and walk my dog around until I found them.

Then I had kids and stopped. Now I realized that it wasn’t just because my budget was more squeezed but because it became so much more uncomfortable for me to consider their situation. Somehow the high hopes I have for my little ones never to suffer made me so much more ill-at-ease with the journey of these people who have some pretty hard life stories.

Brené, Pema and Miss O all touch on the difficulty that comes with compassion. It hurts to see people cry and struggle and the action that is often the most helpful is just to be with others as they move through it.

Miss O summarized, “It’s being with them to show them its normal to feel that way.” And now that I know that compassion is supposed to be scary, it helps normalize my reluctance to feel it at times. It helps put me back into the holiday spirit of giving to my homeless friends.

***As a sidenote, my friend and colleague Todd Fulginiti has released a single of a holiday single, Snowfall performed by The Fulginiti Family Band. All proceeds/donations for anyone that wants to download it go to an organization that helps the homeless in Lancaster, PA. For more info see: Todd Fulginiti Music

(featured photo is my dog Biscuit taking the paper from one of our favorite Real Change sellers)

Sliding Into the Holidays

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“You must not abandon the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds…What you cannot turn to good, you must at least make as little bad as you can.” – Thomas More

There’s a scene from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark where a stone wall is dropping to seal off the chamber and Indiana has to slide through the crack at the bottom to get out in the nick of time.

This is how I’m feeling about the holidays – I’m sliding into our Christmas plans feet first, barely making it. And it doesn’t help that Seattle got a couple of inches of snow yesterday so that nothing is happening reliably as we collectively panic through our weather conditions.

As a result, I’ve come up with some strategies for coping that I’ve written about in my Wise & Shine post: The Vortex of the Metaphorical and Messy Storm

Light, Water & Soil

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“People grow when they are loved well. If you want to help others heal, love them without an agenda.” – Mike McHargue

When I picked Miss O up from school the other day she handed me her mystery science project. It was a little plant in a shot size plastic cup. The experiment was for each table of two kids to divide up – one would leave their plant in the light and the other would put their plant in a dark cupboard for a week. They made predictions about what would happen.

Miss O’s plant was a little radish seedling that had been in the dark cupboard for a week so I was surprised to see that it had three little shoots popping through the meager soil. Miss O’s conclusion about why her plant survived the dark cupboard was that it could survive there but not thrive.

As she handed it to me, Miss O said to be really careful. She was super proud that it had survived. And I promptly bumped my hand and spilled it all over the seat. I scooped the little dirt back in, apologizing and trying to restore calm.

Then I handed it back to Miss O in the back seat and she spilled it. Holy cow – if this plant survived, it was going to be a miracle, not science! But I scooped it up once more and when we got home, put a little fresh dirt in, watered it and put it in the windowsill.

All the while I was thinking about the conditions for growth. I hazard to guess that we’ve all been in the dark cupboard for a week. I think I was in there for a couple of years as I went through my divorce and before I found meditation.

But when we make it through, what do we need to really thrive? For me, it’s meditation, sleep, time in nature, playing with my kids, and conversations with deep and thoughtful friends (online or in real life).

I often poison my soil by eating too much sugar and spending too much time in front of a computer but when I balance it out, I can feel my roots growing deeper.

Amazingly, Miss O’s little plant is doing great in the windowsill. If it keeps growing this way, it’s going to need a different container but I suppose we humans do that too as we navigate the different phases of life.

Our Hobbies, Our Metaphors

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“In every walk with nature, one receives far more than one seeks.” – John Muir

The other day I did a really fun podcast recording with Todd Fulginiti, a musician and former teacher who is also a writer for Wise & Shine. We had a great time talking about trying – what enables and encourages us to try new things, who and what inspires us, what our limits are.

It occurred to me as I listened to this conversation that our hobbies fuel so much of how we see and face the world. For Todd, he gave examples as a musician. And for me as a climber/hiker, so much of my experience in the mountains still helps me face life. So I wrote about it for my Wise & Shine post this week: Climbing Out Of My Gunk

And here’s the link to the podcast in case anyone is interested: On Trying New Things

Keep Small Things Small

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“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison

The other day Mr D was upset and Miss O shared the wisdom, “Keep small things small.” I was taken by the phrase and asked her to tell me more after we got past our speed bump.

“It’s something Ms. Park says,” she elaborated providing the example that her second grade teacher, Ms. Park, said it the other day when there was a fly in the classroom. All the kids in the first row were trying to “attack it,” in Miss O’s words and Ms. Park wanted them to settle down. “Keep small things small.”

I thought of the parking problem I had the other day when I was turning around to take the space and someone slid right in. I was on the verge of making it a bigger story about how tough life is when someone made me laugh and I let it go.

It also reminded me of when Mr. D punched his sister in the gut the other day as they were wrestling. She said it hurt and he said he was sorry and they moved on. If they continue to be able to do that, it seems less likely that they’ll create a pattern of feeling disrespected and hurt that has plagued my siblings’ relationship in adulthood.

Keeping small things small speaks to me of airing wounds before they fester, identifying patterns before they become bad habits, stopping the internal dialogue before it goes on a self-critical rampage. It helps nail me to the present before I pile on added layers of time and repetition until whatever it is that is bugging me becomes unrecognizable. It means don’t hurt myself trying to attack a fly, whatever the metaphorical fly may be.

So here’s a new note to self courtesy of classroom 219 and all our brilliant and dedicated teachers: “Keep small things small.”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Leading In My Microcosm

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“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” – Dalai Lama

I got angry at my kids yesterday morning. It was a mixture of things – things were tense on a work project so I was already primed and then Miss O’s first words on a Monday morning were “Why does Mr. D get to?” But it was a completely whopper of one – “Why does Mr. D get to sleep in his own bed?”

Umm, it’s as if all the efforts I’ve made to get her to sleep in her own room instead of mine were completely forgotten. The lighting, the sheets, the help cleaning her room, the cozy warm blankets. And I’ve done this multiple times, over and over and still she wanders into my bed in the night or chooses to start there.

So the injustice of the question pricked me and I got angry. I didn’t yell but I said it was a completely unfair question that not only had we had talked about before but also was her choice, walked out of the room and slammed a few cupboards as I was making lunches.

Anger is not an emotion I’m comfortable with. I grew up with an older sister that was consistently angry and my mom can flash pretty hot although she doesn’t do it very often. It’s not that I swallow my anger – it’s that I don’t feel it very often. I feel frustrated, disappointed, discouraged much more often than I feel mad. Or at least so I think.

But it was what happened next that surprised me. My kids didn’t fuss at all at getting ready for school on a Monday morning. They did everything they were supposed to when they were supposed to do it more or less without whining, crying or protesting. They banded together, helped each other, and cooperated beautifully.

In that respect, my anger made things work way better for me. And it made me wonder if it’s such an effective tool, why would I not choose to use it more often? Other than the fact that I’m not a very good actor and couldn’t pull it off.

That’s a theoretical question of course. My experience growing up taught me how corrosive anger is. If I used anger as a tool, I might get what I want on the surface but I wouldn’t have many real relationships – not ones where people were vulnerable and shared. Not relationships where we could dare to explore together. And it would undercut the honest expression of growth and humanity.

It reminds me of the “power over” model. Researcher and author Brené Brown differentiates power over as power that leverages fear as opposed to power to, power with and power within which are collaborative and growth models for power.

In respect to my kids, I might be able to control them better for a time if I tried to pull off a power over model but it feels like it would be a step backwards in all the learning we’ve done to try to acknowledge our emotions and still do what needs to be done. Moreover, it feels like it would prime them to go out into the world thinking that fear is an effective strategy in dealing with others. And my teeny, tiny microcosm, that feels like I’d be adding to the aggression of the world instead of the compassion of the world.

In short, it feels like that the power over/anger/fear model is being a crappy leader. Especially when using Brené Brown’s definition of a leader as “anyone who holds him or herself accountable for finding potential in people or processes.” 

So, on the Monday morning in question, I choose to instead apologize for my anger and we went off to school and work with hugs all around. I sense that I’m choosing a style of parenting that takes more energy for now but in the end benefits our relationships with each other and the world. And that seems worth the effort.

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Coming Radiance

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I’m not sure how many of you also followed Martha Hendricks of the White Hair Grace blog so forgive me for introducing someone you might already know. But for anyone who wasn’t, Martha was an 80-year-old blogger with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and sharing the stories of getting old gracefully. She had a lot of roles in her life. In her words, she was “professional classical singer; a Norwegian rosemaler; a pastor. And now a writer. “

I say “was” because she passed away this past August. But not before penning an incredible post that is as much about living as it is dying. So I’m reblogging this beautiful writing from an lovely woman:

whitehairgrace's avatarwhite hair grace

Dear friends, I am Martha’s eldest son posting these final words that mom felt she needed to share. She wrote this post August 12th, but didn’t publish it. My mom passed away peacefully, surrounded by her family this past Sunday, August 21st. She so loved writing this blog and sharing her life with all of you. Thank you all for the joy you gave her. She is with her beloved Dwight once again.

“Learning to be still, to be really still, and let life happen – that stillness becomes radiance.”

Morgan Freeman

My dear readers and followers – Hello again! Surprise!

When I wrote my last blog in May and closed out my White Hair Grace page, I thought that my work of seeking out the miracles of grace had reached a kind of natural conclusion. Of course, the best of intentions meet up with life’s larger plans, and here…

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The Magic Kingdom

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“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” – W. B. Yeats

I watch a lot of Disney movies these days and I’ve noticed there is always a pause before the magic kicks in and works. Like in Beauty and the Beast, Belle comes back to the castle and the Beast is fighting off Gaston and is gravely injured. Belle goes to him on the terrace and says, “I love you” just as the last petal falls from the flower that held the magic of the curse that turned him into a beast.

Everyone thinks its too late and Belle is crying over his crumpled form…until the magic lifts him up and transforms him into back into a prince.

As I notice the pattern, it makes me think about magic in our lives – and that the pause is of indeterminate length and certainly of a length that we can’t predict. For example, establishing a gratitude practice. My kids and I made gratitude boxes, little boxes to slip the things we are grateful for on a daily basis. But starting that practice and feeling the magical onset of a good mood of the soul isn’t instantaneous.

And the same goes with blogging. It’s not like we write our first blog, and then instantly we’ve perfected our style, know what we want to write about and are surrounded by supportive blogging buddies. It takes time to find our sweet spot and build our WordPress community.

Ditto for passion and love. And everything else where we step forward and then life meets us.

So I know what you’re thinking – none of these examples involves any the special juju as depicted in a Disney movie. There are simply hard work and time.

But I think there is magic involved. It’s magical that we find our way to the things that work for us. And beautiful that we get enough to keep us at it. That we open just long enough for someone else to be open and see us. The magic is in that it can happen in the time between when I open and you close.

It’s magical that when we risk, we open ourselves up to opportunity. When we make ourselves vulnerable enough to be seen, that someone else comes along to hold us is rare and then we tell the stories to inspire others to do the same and we get those tingles all over again.

In The Princess and the Frog, the prince gets turned into a frog by a voodoo man. Then he kisses Tiana because he thinks she is a princess, but she isn’t and they both end up as frogs. [SPOILER ALERT – I’m going to tell the ending here.] After a Disney movie length adventure of making friends and finding out what is truly meaningful, they fall in love, give up their human dreams and get married. Once they do, Tiana becomes a princess because she married a prince, albeit in frog form. The prince kisses her and they both turn back to human.

They stop struggling to be what they thought they wanted and just love each other as they are – only to get it back again. The magic of life.

The secret is in the waiting through the moments where all seems lost, holding the faith for as long as it takes for the magic to work which will likely be longer than the pause in a Disney movie. The magic is in believing it will still happen even as we wait. And then, when it does happen, seeing it as one whole story and telling it to others so they too will last through the wait.

(featured photo from Pexels)