My hope is that you’ll find serenity in the New Year, the calm within the storm, within yourself.
In this world, we need that calm, centered place!
As I write, I’m looking out at the sky. Moments ago it was pouring down rain. Now there’s a break in the clouds, the light is streaming through, and it’s spectacular!
If we watch and listen, we can find that place again and again.
I don’t believe luck randomly offers people a place in our life.There is a deeper connection involved when a moment, lesson or even message needs to be shared.There is a supreme force of power, love and light that brings us together.We join this energy of infinite possibilities on a journey that brings light and love to the surface.
This morning, after hiking I created an office space outside.The sun had warmed the Earth a perfect temperature.The birds were singing and some of my favorite music was playing.It was one of those moments that reminded me of how perfect life can be.My intent was to catch up on emails and begin my blog.My heart was wide open.
I was thinking about yesterday, an artist confided in me how her art reveals secrets of what is going on in her life.Each peace shares a connection to what her heart is experiencing at the time of creation.In the past decade she experienced a divorce, followed by a diagnosis of a serious health threat.She also had children to raise. It was this powerful need for strength and purpose that brought healing and passion into her art. Finally she is ready to release some of the pieces created in her darkest time.They have served their purpose.The healing is complete.She is now painting over the original art, and sharing a different story for people to connect with.
In 1962, Rachel Carson called it the “silent spring,” the time when pesticides would destroy birds and other wildlife and leave humanity existing in a half-life of stunned silence. Her work was the impetus for the environmental movement and has influenced millions of people worldwide. Yet today, more than 50 years later, pesticides are still very much in use, and we are facing the slow, agonizing fulfillment of her prophecy. In September, the journal Science published the results of a comprehensive study of North American bird populations. The results: Since 1970, there are nearly 3 billion fewer birds singing their spring songs, a staggering 29%gone from the Earth. Bird experts and conservationists are calling it “a full-blown crisis” and “the loss of nature.”*
The day I read these figures, I wept. I could feel my heart breaking. The losses are so huge. Beloved warblers in all their colorful variety: 617 million gone. Two of my all-time favorite birds: Baltimore orioles, 2 in 5 gone; wood thrushes, 6 in 10 gone. It is hard to fathom. Almost unbelievable. The birds that I eagerly anticipated seeing and hearing each spring are vanishing and may one day be gone forever. What would spring be without birds? Without the robin’s cheery song and the redwing blackbird’s flashing colors and ringing call? Dead air, everywhere.
“To live here is to know God, to live here is to understand the power of Nature, to live here is to celebrate life.”—Panache Desai
Like a quartz crystal sparkling in the sun, Florida has many facets. Last year, in late June 2018, my partner Anne and I moved here from Boston. As we drove south along the eastern seaboard, we felt ourselves dropping past identities and memories along the way. By the time we reached Florida, we were living lighter, not anticipating or looking back, but justbeing,living fully in the present moment. It was a heightened state of awareness, and it carried us seamlessly to the edge of new beginnings and unexpected experiences in an entirely different place.
To simplify and summarize, our brain has three primary motivational systems – Avoiding harms, Approaching rewards, and Attaching to “us” – that draw on many neural networks to accomplish their goals.
Lately, I’ve started to realize that a fourth fundamental human motivational system could be emerging as well.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors depended upon their habitats for food and shelter. Today, over 7 billion of us are pressing hard up against the limits of Lifeboat Earth. To survive and to flourish, cultural and perhaps biological evolution are calling us to love the world.
The world is near to hand in the food you eat, the air you breathe, and the weather and climate in which you spend your days. And then in widening circles, the world extends out to include complex webs of life and the physical characteristics of the land, the sea, and the sky.
I’ve known this world in all its splendor and breakage for a lifetime. Or has it been a moment, the blink of some cosmic eye that let’s anyone still enough see the script of history all at once. I only know that when the forces of life and I move too fast, we author violence. When we stop and open, we discover a softness at the center of all things that gives rise to a music of acceptance. Very few things evoke this soft equanimity, which feels like a violin exhausting itself at the center of a symphony when the composer has spent his creative storm and is wondering if there’s anything left to say. Every day, the things we love sprout and emerge, or break and wither, as the vine grows quietly up the wall toward the light. Perhaps this is all we can hope for. The other day, we watched a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis, it’s wings still wet. It had to wait for its wings to dry before it could flutter its way into life. Perhaps loving ourselves and each other and life itself is how we dry and open our wings.
I just finished speaking at the Colours of Ostrava music festival in the Czech Republic, am now headed into the Amazon rain forest, and then in September to Omega in Upstate New York to facilitate an experiential workshop: “Soaring with the Jaguar: Shapeshifting with Plants into a Better World.”
Question: What do these three seemingly different venues share in common?
Answer: They empower us to raise our consciousness, to steer our space station Earth to the future we want.
When I was a Peace Corps volunteer deep in the Amazon in the late 1960s, Ayahuasca saved my life – and forever changed it. Today, shamans, plants, musicians and speakers at many different forums inspire us to change our lives. A large part of the message involves honoring our connections with nature and to being good Earth stewards.
When the question arises, “Why write? Why create?” I’m drawn to ask, “Why breathe? Why climb to a place where you can see the horizon? Why look for things soft and durable to wrap around a wound? Why call into the canyon between us to see if anyone is there?” Because all these efforts help us live.
Repeatedly, we’re called to engage experience as a way to manifest what we carry within us, bringing what is dormant into the world. As the tree that a seed carries breaks ground in time, reflection, dialogue, and writing are seed-like forms by which we release our inwardness into the world. This is why we listen and express. This is why we write, why we create. Because expression is like sunlight that emanates from within. It causes the soul to blossom in time.
Both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo left a trail of unfinished art greater than anyone else in modern history. Still, they are regarded as two of the most talented artists who ever lived. They are extraordinary examples of how the journey of expression is more important than the final product.
William Blake is another inspiring example. Toward the end of his life, Blake endeavored to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, the medieval epic poem that follows Dante’s transformative journey through Hell and Purgatory into Paradise. Blake created 102 watercolors, planning to engrave them all, but he only had time to begin seven.
More than his immense effort to create art, Blake’s innate devotion was to immerse himself deeply in the thickest currents of life. Though he couldn’t finish engraving his illustrations, I imagine that, at some point, the life-force Blake was so devoted to began engraving him. What more can any of us ask for but to be created by the very thing we feel compelled to create? This is where the holy work of effort leads, regardless of its trail.
What does “home” mean to you? A place? A group of people? A memory? Or is it a feeling deep inside that touches your heart and soul? All of these perhaps. Our own life experiences define what home means to each of us. I grew up in Illinois, later lived in California, and then settled in Massachusetts for more than 30 years. Massachusetts is where I met my life partner, Anne, and where we were married. I’ve always loved both coasts, but I didn’t realize how much the Northeast had become home for me until I moved away and then returned for a visit.
So many things change. Leaves fall, friends move away, children leave home. My dad died a year ago, and my mom about ten years before that. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting older (darn, there is no fooling the mirror).
The world changes, too. Evolving technologies alter jobs and lives. Elections happen and different people take charge. New restaurants open while others close.
Experience itself is always changing, right at the front edge of now. So are the neural substrates of this moment’s experience, fleeting coalitions of millions of synapses coming into being even as they disperse, while the molecular structures of individual synapses themselves are dynamically constructing and deconstructing in the blink of an eye.
“I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.” —Mary Oliver
When Mary Oliver died last month, I felt I had lost a kindred spirit from this world. Someone who lived a life of deep connection to, and quiet contemplation of, nature’s never-ending miracles. All my life I have been drawn to quiet contemplative moments more than busy social activities. Even as a child, although I loved playing with my friends at school, something in me craved the experiences I had in my own backyard alone with nature.
During the last week of 2018, I traveled from sunny, warm Los Angeles, California to wintery Owego, New York. As the doors of the airport slid open, a blast of frigid air hit me square in the face. My eyes immediately begin to water uncontrollably.
I loved it.
Everything around me was frozen, gray and bare. The sky was gray, the ground was gray, the trees were gray.
I grabbed a coffee in town and fell into an easy conversation with an Owego resident. She is a born and raised Owego boomerang who has lived there for over thirty years. She shared with me how this winter has been one of the toughest for her in a long time because the sun hadn't come out in over three months. I told her I lived in Los Angeles, where the sun shined practically year round. She paused, contemplating her response and then replied, "Yeah, I think I'll take this rough patch we're having here instead."
Does God have a face? Absolutely. But not just one—an infinite number. As many faces as there are humans, animals, birds, and insects on Earth. As many faces as there are trees, flowers, bushes, rocks, and sand particles. As many faces as there are mountains, deserts, plains, oceans, rivers, and glaciers. Cells, molecules, and atoms. And then there’s the entire universe with every planet, star, asteroid, and constellation a different face of God. You can’t count the facial manifestations of God in the cosmos because God is infinity itself.
I just got my December issue of O magazine featuring Oprah’s favorite things….that got me thinking about MY favorite things…the things I use nearly every day.
While many of Oprah’s are quite pricey, mine are mostly in the $20-$30 range and they are what I consider “small luxuries.” These items bring me joy, beauty, comfort, and ease. Get some for yourself (and they make great stocking stuffers!)
More than 30 years ago, a new friend invited me to her apartment for a visit. As we sat in her cozy living room, she served me tea in a delicate china cup that was placed on a beautiful mahogany tray that held a tiny silver teaspoon, a small plate of petit fours, a shiny silver vase holding one perfectly shaped pink rose, and a white lace trimmed cloth napkin. I felt like I was having high tea with royalty!
I told her she shouldn’t have gone to all the trouble as I would have been just as happy with a mug of tea and a paper napkin. She smiled sweetly and said to me, “Darling, this is how I serve myself tea every day.” This elegant woman then explained to me that life is short and that we must insist on having as much beauty as possible in our lives, in every way possible.
A song written and recorded in 1944 that was popular with my parents’ generation had the refrain: “Accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative.” Those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II often developed one of two responses to life: fear or hope, or perhaps a mix of both. You can see hope in songs like this one. And I definitely saw it in my mother when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Without fail, she always looked for the positive in any situation, person, or event. If someone behaved in an unpleasant manner, my mother’s response was inevitably, “She means well.” And then she would find something nice to say about the person.
When I was a child, I used to lie on the living room rug and gaze up at the ceiling, imagining it as the floor. I pictured how it would be to live in an upside down house and walk from room to room stepping over the doorway arches. My partner Anne used to do the same thing when she was little, even though she grew up in an entirely different part of the U.S. Is this something that all kids do, or just a coincidence? I found myself wondering if it is a genetic code within us for novelty and reinvention, which somehow gets lost as we grow older. How do we keep our vision of the world fresh in an adult world that teaches us that physical reality is solid, unchanging, and that facts and predictability are the basis for living a safe and orderly life?
At an early age, children often aren’t interested in order and rigid perceptual rules, unless they have had it already instilled in them via parental fears. What if, at heart, we aren’t either? What if our souls really want imagination, improvisation, and exploration? The element of surprise. After all, we came to this extraordinarily diverse and beautiful planet to live our human lives fully and completely. Who wants to live it in a box of repetitive, expected events and experiences? I’ve always intuitively felt this way. That’s why I’ve moved and traveled so much in my life, from coast to coast and continent to continent. Every time I went somewhere else, I saw the world with fresh eyes. I loved it. I still do.
