Category: General Learning

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On Grief

Thanks Roq Gareau for sharing this with me. There are few that I know that tend as well as Roq to such earthy, bloody, real soul stuff.

The video is Francis Weller (14 minutes). It’s filled with great insights.

  • “When you compress grief, you also compress joy.”
  • “Grief has always been a communal process. There is nothing broken and nothing to fix.”
  • “Cannot trust a man who cannot grieve.” (Malidoma Some)
  • “All war is unmetabolized grief.”

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Wild, Yet Domesticated

I love this daisy patch from my front yard. Full. Vibrant. There’s some flowers that are brand new. Some that are dying. The mix is beautiful to me. Simple reminders of life that would be fun to wax on with — but mostly today I’m just drawn to the beauty of this patch that greets me as I enter and leave my home, and that I can see through my window from my desk where I most often work.

My first association with these daisies is “wild.” These flowers grow like crazy every year. I trim them to the ground in the fall, and usually once in the summer. They reseed like nobody’s business. I also thin them a bit each spring. Ain’t no risk of no daisies next year.

And then, “domestication” comes to mind. These daisies grow in a designated flower and vegetable patch. They don’t grow beyond that into the yard.

Something is important to me in the dynamic that is domestication and wildness. For all of us. I’m drawn to enough wildness, surprise, and creativity. These are forces of life. Essential expressions of life. Without them, we have only two dimensions. And then, domestication is about negotiating norms to levels of cooperation and commitment in support of the whole.

Hmm….

Daisies.

 

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For The Interim Time

“On The Way” is a newsletter publication of The Central Pacific Conference of the United Church of Christ. I love the title. It shows commitment to movement and process. I’m working (and friending) with some really good people in that conference to support a cultural evolution and leadership centered in participation. I get to cohost their annual meeting again this fall.
This month’s “On The Way” included the poem by John O’Donohue, the Irish poet and priest who died in 2008. I love this encouragement to “dwell in the between spaces, refining the heart for the dawn of the new.” There’s a kind of spiritual maturity in that that continues to beckon for patience in the deep.
Enjoy.
For the Interim Time
John O’Donohue
 
When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,
 
No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.
 
In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems TO believe the relief of dark.
 
You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.
 
The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.
 
“The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is too young to be born.”
 
You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.
 
Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.
 
As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.
 
What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.
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Life Wants To Be In Partnership — II

From book-writing this week, a second teaser from the Epilogue.

d

In many indigenous traditions it is recognized that the dream an individual has may actually be a dream for the larger community and tribe. Sharing that dream might help others wake to what they need to learn or what we need to learn together.

Likewise, I’ve come to believe that when something holds our individual attention, it may not just be for us, but might be for the group. Or it might stir something beneath the surface of another individual in the group.

I have come to realize that often, when one person grows and expands their level of awareness from one state to another, it makes it possible for others to grow and expand also.

Remember the first person to run a sub 4-minute mile, the Englishman, Roger Bannister, in 1954. I’m told that after he broke this barrier for the first time, it was broken many times by others in a relatively short period of time. One person paves the way.

The way-paving for many of us is our awareness. It always has been, even for the greatest of doers among us. Way-paving comes from first, being in relationship, even partnership, with Life, this wholeness of the world. Second, from recognizing that what has our attention is a doorway in to more clear and essential understanding and purpose. Third, from recognizing and acknowledging how our inner worlds create outer realities. This step alone resets so many of the patterns of blame that show up in contemporary and complex tensions. And fourth, claiming our projections resets a vitality and honesty with Life. We are both in the world and of the world. 

Life wants to be in partnership with us. 

It does so by offering us experiences, people, and symbols 

that catch and hold our attention. 

In these offerings, Life gives us invitation 

to notice more of how our inner condition is projecting our outer reality, 

which in fact, renders us, 

co-creators with Life.

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