Tag: love

Seeing the Whole Mountain

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“If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.” – Mark Nepo

It’s probably not shocking to admit that the most beloved people in my lives, a.k.a my kids, can sometimes irritate me. The other day, my 6-year-old daughter walked by me as I was sitting at the table and used the back of my shirt as a napkin for her buttery popcorn hands. And the little one loves to get his hands on my dental floss – and pull and pull and pull until there’s a long trail behind him sufficient to find Hansel and Gretel.

But all it takes is one look at them earnestly trying to learn something, or one comment from someone else about how precious they are and my eyes leak as my heart overfills.

One of the best pieces of advice about love that I’ve heard about love is when feeling the grind of it, to back up and see the whole mountain. Maybe my love of mountains makes this resonate especially with me but it brings to mind some of the toughest spots I’ve faced in climbing.

One of my least favorites is called Cathedral Gap on Mt. Rainier. It’s right next to Cadaver Gap, which because it’s aptly named, is NOT the route we take. But Cathedral Gap, despite its lovely name is grueling. It’s right after you’ve left Camp Muir at 10,200 feet and the first time that rope teams and crampons are required. Often the route is quite pebbly in spots and the mud and muck get jammed between the points of the crampons designed to help grip in snow and ice. When that happens then with each step you have to bang your foot against your ice axe to clear the debris.

The combination of being roped up, coordinating the pace with those on the team all the while climbing, banging your foot with your axe and breathing undoes me. It isn’t that climbing the rest of the mountain is easy but that particular part of the route (approximately located where the yellow arrow is on the picture below) I find to be grating.

And yet, when I see Mt. Rainier as I do every sunny day in Seattle, it gives me such a thrill. Just a glimpse of The Mountain, as my dad called it, and I’m filled with a tingle of the timeless beauty, daunting majesty and feeling of home it gives me. I feel this overwhelming sense of hope that we can all know beauty and dignity and stand tall against the test of time.

And it’s the same with my kids. There is a particular expression they both have that show when they are feeling confident about something they’ve learned. One glimpse of their little faces and I’ve come home – to my love and my life.

Going All-In

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“To lose balance, sometimes, for love, is part of living a balanced life.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

I dated a guy when I was in my mid-20’s that told me early on in the relationship, like before we’d even been on a dozen dates, that he would never take me to or pick me up from the airport. That way, he reasoned, it would never look like he loved me less when he stopped picking me up.

Around the same time I had a work colleague who was celebrating his one-year wedding anniversary. He said that the key was to go really small so that he wouldn’t set a precedent that couldn’t be maintained.

What I’ve found interesting is that with taking care of babies, there is no choice but to go all-in. You start out taking care of their every need and then with time have to negotiate new roles, responsibilities and boundaries.

I recently implemented the practice that once I sat down to dinner, I wouldn’t get up until I was done eating. If the kids are excused and they need help getting a toy, I tell them that I’ll get it when I’m finished. If they want something to eat or drink that was included in dinner, I give them choices they can get themselves or that are reachable. If they want me to watch them, I remind them to do it where I can see from the table.

This practice was incredibly hard work for me for about three weeks. I had to resist the temptation to just get up and do it. Or, if they spilled something, I had to let go of muttering under my breath because doing it would be easier than cleaning up when they do it. Setting the boundary meant creating the consistency in me as much as the expectation in them.

But it is the work of maturity – in our relationship as well as ourselves. It made me think about that boyfriend from my 20’s.  It’s no surprise that I broke up with him. Among many things, his practicality limited his openness. There’s a fine line between defining boundaries and not wanting people to breech our walls.

And my colleague – unfortunately the marriage ended in divorce. Life has taught me that hedging our bets almost always limits the full range of feeling. It’s hard to walk the service back, draw better boundaries as relationships mature. But parenthood has taught me that sometimes it’s necessary to start by going all in.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Learning From Experience

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“Turn your wounds into wisdom.” – Oprah Winfrey

Ten years ago (I know because I found the picture), I was walking my dog on a busy neighborhood street and he found a stuffed animal. A cute little tiger with a soft white belly and my dog proudly picked it up and carried it all the way home until he could stow it away on one of his dog blankets.

While I didn’t think much of it at the time, I now realize with great horror that it likely was some child’s precious stuffy that got tossed out of a car in a moment of great emotion. I’ll never actually know if the family went to look for it but by allowing my dog to carry it home, we certainly made it unfindable.

Before bed, my 6-year-old daughter and I take turns reading. She practices her reading skills and then I read a few pages of something longer we are working on. We just finished J.K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig in which a child loses his most precious friend, a stuffy that his step-sister throws out the window in a moment of rage. The child then takes a precarious Christmas Eve trip to the Land of the Lost to try to retrieve it. In J.K. Rowling’s incredibly imaginative tale, there are several places the things we lose go – Mislaid (think eyeglasses), Disposable (e.g. batteries), Bother-Its-Gone (that poem you penned on the back of a napkin), The Wastes of the Unlamented (the tchotchke you never wanted to buy in the first place), The City of the Missed (where we meet someone’s Principles) and The Island of the Beloved (where Santa lives).

In the story, she includes not only things that we lose like a diamond earring but also the intangibles – the bad habits, the tendency to bully, our pretenses, ambition, power and hope. It is so incredibly insightful that it is one of those books that was a pleasure for me to read as much as my daughter to listen to.

Which brings me back to the stuffy I let my dog take home. Often it’s only through experience that we can relate to someone else’s pain. This is the case now that I realize that stuffy was likely a well-loved object of a kid’s affection. Fortunately, my kids have not (yet) thrown a stuffy out the car window, but I have spent many fretful moments in a full sweat looking for the item that we just HAVE TO HAVE before going to sleep.

Suffering, as much as we might not like it, helps us to know each other.

Meet Tenderness with Tenderness

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“My hands never feel empty because you hold them with care and love.” – unknown

Yesterday, my two-and-a-half year old son and I were sitting in the car goofing around while parked outside Starbucks before I dropped him at school. It was an early Monday morning after a really fun weekend as a family together and he said a couple of times that he didn’t want to go to school. Then he said, “I miss you, Mama.” And I started to protest that I was right there and talk him out of it. But before I could put the words together he followed up, “I miss you Mama atta school.”

My heart was gulping like a fish out of water and tears sprang to my eyes. Before I left the moment to justify that I can’t be do everything or to troubleshoot how we could spend more time together, my thoughts snagged on an idea from poet and author Mark Nepo that tenderness is best met with tenderness.

Frequently, this reflex to solve, rescue and fix removes us from the tenderness at hand. For often, intimacy arises not from any attempt to take the pain away, but from a living through together; not from a work out, but from a being with. Trust and closeness deepen from holding and being held, both emotionally and physically.

The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo

So I gave him a big hug and said, “I miss you too, Buddy.” Then we went on our way.

I found out from his teacher that when the kids at school miss their families, she gets out a picture of their people for them so they can look at it. It’s the daycare version of the pictures I keep on my desk that give me a little zing whenever they catch my eye.

I felt my son’s statement all through the day as I went about my business. When it sparked a feeling of guilt or responsibility I kept practicing the return to the beauty of having a relationship worth missing.

Friendship Brownies

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“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was talking to my friend, Doug, the other day. He is planning a climb of Mt. Adams with his son this summer. It’s a 12,280 foot mountain in Washington State – tall enough to be a challenge but not technical enough to need a lot of equipment and training. The last time we summitted this mountain was with his daughter about 10 years ago when she was 14 years old.

Doug wanted to know if I remembered what packs we carried between our camp at about 9,000 feet and the summit. He is a meticulous packer and doesn’t carry anything more on his back than necessary.

These questions reminded me of a time we were planning a climb on Mt. Rainier that would take place over Doug’s birthday. His wife asked me if I would carry some brownies up to celebrate Doug’s birthday. It was only after I happily agreed that she told me that Doug said he wouldn’t carry them because he didn’t want that unnecessary weight in his pack.

It is probably because of all this carrying of loads that makes one of my favorite meditations is one where I imagine I sit down, empty everything out of my pack, look carefully at each thing I’m carrying. When I’m done sorting through the worries, the presumptions, and fears as well as the love, the purpose, the nostalgia, the energy stored for digging deep, the vulnerability, I mentally load the pack again with only what I need. I always carry a lighter load after that meditation.

But in thinking about those brownies, I realize that friendship means we are willing to carry things for other people that they won’t carry for themselves.

We hold in our packs a version of our friends at their brightest and most creative that can be shown to them when they are in a slump. We carry memories of the times we laughed, did silly things, failed and succeeded. We store all the depth of the ways we have walked side by side on the path as well as the times we waited at an intersection while they took a detour and vice versa.

Then at just the right moment, we unpack the brownies we’ve carried so far and celebrate our friends. There are some things worth the extra weight and friendship is one of them.

(featured image from Pexels)

Swimming In the Deep

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“The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.” – Parker J. Palmer

This weekend my friend Eric told me a story about a course that he took in college. He went to one of the Claremont Colleges in the mid-1980’s and this sounds like something that might have only been possible in that place and time.

The course was called Mind, Culture and Sports and it was held at the professor’s house, usually with drinks served and the professor encouraged everyone to take it pass/fail. The course content varied greatly – one week it might be a study of how hard it was to hit a baseball and the next week it was about meditation.

One weekend their field trip for this class was to spend a night at a Buddhist monastery. With great interest I asked how that went and Eric replied that he was terrible at mediation. Apparently the monk kept coming by to (gently) correct his posture. But, Eric brightened considerably when he reported that he was great at “sweep the path,” the chore he was assigned at the monastery.

It made me reflect on what we get out of our experiences. I’d have probably missed the whole point of a meditation retreat when I was 19 years old as well. But in contrast, can I name what I get out of meditation now?

If I didn’t meditate, I’d spend the day operating from my to-do list and getting a great deal done but swimming on the surface of the lake where the conditions of the weather affect the choppiness of the water a great deal.

By meditating, it feels like I spend at least a few minutes submerged in the deep. It’s where the quiet allows me both to read about and hear the bigger forces at work – the thread of the Divine in my life, find the echo of Love and Beauty in what I’m doing and touch the feeling of Peace that pervades regardless of the surface conditions.

I was also in college and about 19 years old, the same age as Eric when he took his college course, when someone who was trying to recruit students for the Church of Scientology stopped me on University Avenue and asked me “What about your life do you not want anyone to know?” At age 19, I was still blissfully naïve, untroubled and pretty uncomplicated. Perplexed by the question, I replied, “Nothing?”

Now, 33 years later, I’d answer a lot more assuredly “Nothing. Because after all those years I spent thrashing about on the surface, I’m finally submerged in the deep.”

(featured photo by Pexels)

It’s Love Calling

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“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu

To some degree I always write about what I don’t understand in hopes that the words on the page will put some order to the giant gaping hole of the mysteries that I can’t comprehend.

But today I’m writing about a bigger mystery than usual. The best I can hope for with these words is just to describe the size and shape of something that I can’t fully grasp.

The other day my phone rang. I’m notorious for not answering my phone especially when, as was the case here, it’s just a number and not attached to anyone in my contact list. So I didn’t answer, there was no voice mail. It rang again, there was no voice mail. It rang again an hour later from the same number. I knew in my bones after the second call who it was so the third time I picked it up.

It was my friend Bill and he just said, “Wynne” in this deep voice that sounds like it could be the voice of God. And I replied, “I knew it was you calling.”

This friend only calls me about once every five years. When he calls, it’s always from a new number so it never comes up as a name. And yet, somehow I always know it’s him.

In the five years since he last called, I had another baby, my son. And he’s moved twice to different countries. Now he lives halfway around the world in Eastern Europe.  

I ask him about his parents who I’ve never met. He tells me through tears that he lost both of them 7 months apart a couple years back. He asks me about work and I tell him I’m doing the same thing — it doesn’t feed my soul but it feeds my kids. So I tell him that I’m writing.

In worldly terms, we don’t know each other that well.  We’ve maybe spent a dozen days together over 25 years. But we have this deep connection that was instantly apparent when we met.

It’s something I can only describe in metaphors. The connection is like plugging into a bolt of lightening when you only need a 200 amp current. The results are apt to blow a circuit and also are a little dangerous. It’s a mistake we made when we were younger and tried dating only to find it chaotic and unworkable. He’s a road sign, not a destination.

When he calls it’s always at a point when I’ve gotten so busy playing the roles I have in life that I’ve forgotten that there is a core, central “me” that is lovable.

The calls remind me to come alive in a way that is more than what I do. They speak to me of great love even though its quite clear that we will never be in each other’s lives on a daily basis. It’s more that we share the same core so when he calls it sparks some primal memory in me to remember to take care of that precious center of my life. The sacred space in me that touches the sacred space in others.

The connection we share is inexplicable in practical terms. There should be no way that we can speak so deeply to each other and be a reminder of anything. The only thing that rings true is that it’s a spiritual connection that affirms that God is Love and Love is God.

In the end, I said to him. “Thank you for calling until I picked up.” And he replied, “I will always call you until you pick up.”

I’ll close with the final text he sent me after the call. I had written to him, “I suspect possible in our comprehension is a small sample of what is truly possible in the Universe. And you are evidence of that gift.”

And he replied, “That I am the evidence that is closely related to the everything that you must give daily, is the best of compliments. You, Wynne, creator, inventor, leader and human are truly one of the most beautiful humans I know! Thank you for finding me.”

I bet that we won’t communicate again for another 5 years. And that will be enough. Because maybe what we remind each other of isn’t anything about the specifics in life, it’s the big picture Life where love reigns and we are all known in our core.

Humor: Dec 26

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I’ve gone back to my dad’s humor notecards again this week so I can post the kids love advice that is teased in the featured photo. Enjoy!

Tips on Love
(All questions answered by kids age 5-10)

WHAT IS THE PROPER AGE TO GET MARRIED?

Once I’m done with kindergarten, I’m going to find me a wife. (Tom, 5)

WHAT DO MOST PEOPLE DO ON A DATE?

On the first date, they just tell each other lies, and that usually gets them interested enough to go for a second date. (Mike, 10)

WHEN IS IT OKAY TO KISS SOMEONE?

You should never kiss a girl unless you have enough bucks to buy her a big ring and her own VCR, ‘cause she’ll want to have videos of the wedding. (Jim, 10)

Never kiss in front of other people. It’s a big embarrassing thing if anybody sees you. But if nobody sees you, I might be willing to try it with a handsome boy, but just for a few hours. (Kally, 9)

It’s never okay to kiss a boy. They always slobber all over you… that’s why I stopped doing it. (Jean, 10)

CONCERNING WHY LOVE HAPPENS BETWEEN TWO PARTICULAR PEOPLE

No one is sure why it happens but I heard it has something to do with how you smell. That’s why perfume and deodorant are so popular. (Jan, 9)

I think you’re supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the rest of it isn’t supposed to be so painful. (Harlen, 8)

ON WHAT FALLING IN LOVE IS LIKE

Like an avalanche where you have to run for your life. (Roger, 9)

If falling in love is anything like learning how to spell, I don’t want to do it. It takes too long. (Leo, 7)

Christmas Wish

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“The most effective medicine here on this Earth is unconditional love.” – unknown

I woke up this morning thinking of two types of people working on Christmas Eve. Healthcare workers and pastors. The former must be so discouraged to see the Omicron fears and anticipate the number of people who might overflow their beds.

And the latter must be so disappointed to see the Omicron fears, knowing that it’ll keep people away from services and reduce the number of people in their pews on Christmas Eve.

Growing up in a pastor’s house, Christmas Eve was a big deal. It was a chance to celebrate with the congregation and whoever else came along the hope, peace and magic of a story. It was a chance to hear silence because regardless of anyone’s particular beliefs, it is a day we close our stores and change our schedules.

It makes me wish on this day where our bodies might not be able to go where we want to be, that at least our hearts can be in the right place. May the spirit of Christmas with its hope, peace and generosity fill us wherever we are!

The Gifts of Imperfection

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“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.” – Buddha

The other day at work, I jumped in to help my colleagues with a project to create order from a bunch of data. In the course of an afternoon, we had so many emails, spreadsheets and versions flying around that my inbox was overflowing. Finally at one point I stated to a colleague that I didn’t have the version he was talking about. He forwarded an email sent to me 2 hours earlier that had the version.

I was mortified. I hate that particular kind of mistake that could have been prevented by a more detailed search of what I already had. It triggered the most unkind voice in my head.

I’d really like to do this all perfectly but fortunately I’ve had many years to come to terms with the fact that I’m far from perfect and never will be. Also on the plus side, I’ve learned a technique from my meditation teacher to create some space when I bump up against this.

It’s simply to talk to myself as if it were a friend that had made the mistake. It’s pretty easy to realize that I wouldn’t chastise a friend who had done the same. I’d say things like:

“Oh, I’ve done that before. It’s frustrating.”

“At least you didn’t send it to the customer with the wrong data. You stayed curious and kept asking questions.”

“Missing one spreadsheet in twenty? Not a bad ratio!”

Several times I’ve heard the Biblical instruction “Love your neighbor as yourself” turned around to be “Love yourself as your neighbor.” There is a lot of wisdom in not only cultivating kindness to others but also ourselves.

(featured photo from Pexels)