Looking at You, Joy!

Looking at you, Joy!

I am looking at the feathery fingers of purple Mexican Sage bush as riotous in their movement as in their beauty, a contrast to the quiet lavender shed they stand next to.  I am not looking at my recently deceased brother’s red tool chest tucked safely inside the shed, but I know it is there. 

Outside the branches are all a jumble like I have been since April 22nd of this year when sweet brother Bob died suddenly at work of a massive heart attack.  Yet, despite this disruptive and yet to be digested loss in my life, I sit this morning filled with wonder at how astonishingly beautiful my life is.  

I am looking at my dad’s rusted vice grip standing as sentry under that lavender shed window alongside an equally rusted metal butterfly that once topped mom’s beloved bird feeder.  And I am not looking at the wooden children’s table and chairs with kitchen sink and stove where I and all 3 of my siblings played for hours in our midwest basement, now stored neatly next to the red tool chest.   In the 1980’s that furniture moved to my parents’ new home where they converted a hen house on the property to a wood shed and upstairs playroom for their  grandchildren.  Oh,  and play those children did.  They colored at the table..   They taught each other and grandma’s stuffed animals,  with colored chalk on bare wood walls.  They managed each other’s unruly behavior.  They let loose their imaginations to wander and tumble much like the Mexican Sage bush I now admire.

I am looking at the shifting of the season, the last gasps of fall in North Texas, a particularly stunning display of red, golden yellow and almost fluorescent orange trees juxtaposed against the season’s low slung blue gray skies.   Solid as my children’s and  nieces’ efforts were back then, Nature clearly wins the coloring prize this year.  

AND I am definitely not looking at December To Do lists.  Gifts to procure, wrap and deliver, food to prepare for gatherings, decorations to place just so and lights to repair or discard and year end paperwork to complete.  These lists were beloved of my father and his son, Bob. Dad said “if you are lucky you die with a to do list”  I come from a people and a place that worships hard work.  And I too relish a sense of accomplishment, but mine is always more relief, than accomplishment.  

Why?

Because I internalized a message that savoring was a luxury not a necessity.  So, when lists are complete, only then can we notice fluorescent orange Chinese Pistachio trees on the corner and how they pop against an unusually perfect blue gray sky.  It is probably apparent the glitch in my dad’s approach;  by the time there is room for savoring there is little energy for it.  My dad favored his German DNA over the French in his genetic inheritance and I have followed suit.  My dear friend Dr. Liz Greenaway said to me in a David Whyte workshop 5 years ago .“Oh I see you, I do the same. Take things that are necessities and call them luxuries.”  When one lives this way it is not uncommon to be visited by the thought (maybe your soul’s whisper?) “  Is this it?  Really, is this all there is?”  

Someone once said, maybe Einstein, that there are 2 ways to live:  as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is!  When the thought “is this all there is?” whispers to me I realize I have lost my literal birthright.  My given name is Nancy Claire Wonders.  My signature written as Nancy C (see) Wonders is both destination and path.  I was born for exactly what I am doing this December morning in Texas.  I am discovering and receiving the wonder in the life I have been given and have made.  In my own backyard, so to speak.  Spaciousness and curiosity are the gateway to wonder.  Spaciousness in the sense of being without the day’s pressing agenda.  But when I allow the tasks, responsibilities, lovely as many are ~ take over the screen of my day, I lose my ability to see wonder, much less Wonders!  Life can become a bleak gray, including the things I freely chose and value … all becomes burden,  and not a gift, under the relentless taskmaster in my mind that does not trust  “being,” only “doing.” 

In September David Whyte offered a webinar by the title Crossing the Unknown Sea, in which he suggested we might reverse the order, the cultural habit of preferring “doing to being”.  That instead of launching into my “doing” list, I could give my best and brightest time (early morning) to deep conversation where I make contact with my deep nature and what will nourish my soul that day, as well as overall.  In this context, the day’s To Do list is grounded by making real contact with my essential self.   Thus giving the “list” depth and meaning.  This essay is the result of such an encounter.   I invite you to join me in this practice of turning your priorities upside down.  Not sacrifice the “doing” for “being” , not at all.  Rather reverse the order.  Begin with “being,” with “savoring,” with receiving guidance from that which is wise and eternal within you.  Then take that experience into the list.  Ground your “doing” in your essential and true nature’s depth.

This practice of beginning my days this way, (Being/reflection first and Doing/production later) shifts my life satisfaction level, when I choose it.  And truth be told, it isn’t always easy to choose this.  There are some things between my ears that continue to shout their bad advice and I continue to listen.  What I can attest to is that when I ignore this deep bias within me to let doing become more important than my being, my day goes far better.  

In these times of so much loss and suffering, so much uncertainty and violence we need, more than ever,  to dip into the “wonders” of our daily round.  

“Every morning I awake torn between

 a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. 

This makes it hard to plan the day”

E.B. Whyte is the author of this deep wisdom.  He came to the same conclusion that I have, (thanks to following Whyte’s admonishment), that the only path to sustain a life worth living is to do both, savor and save the world,  and hold the tension of those two opposites.  If you, like me, have a bias to favor the culture’s dictates to worship at the altar of productivity, this I can promise you:  if you flip the script the list will still get done.   I have not become lazy or indolent.  I have become more grateful and more at ease in my  life when I do this more consistently.   I would love it if you joined me in my experiment with  this radical, counter cultural thing of Savoring first, of making real contact with what is timeless within yourself as you greet your day and your life’s demands.   This switch in priorities builds a deep reservoir of nourishment to draw from during the winter seasons of our own lives.  We still experience the losses and setbacks, but we come to see them as we see winter, just a season in the whole of our lives.  And when we can do this, we find that Joy abides with us, even in the darkest seasons of our lives.  And ” for everything under heaven, there is a season.”  

Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

The Wonder and Mystery of the "Negatives" in our Lives.

I penned a version of this essay on Mother’s Day 2021.  I invite us to consider the idea of finding our way into appreciating the gifts hidden in our impossible life situations, those things we cannot change, but deeply wish we could.  To shift our gaze and adjust our narrative about our difficulties and treat them as unfolding mysteries that we do not, cannot yet, comprehend but that we trust that one day, we will be able to make whole the fragments and brokenness of our individual lives.

As an example of that I offer you this piece:

“I have been well mothered in my life, but not from my mom.  Instead true mothering came to me via my dad, my siblings, my friends and even from strangers. My own mother had considerable talents and gifts for cooking, for piety, for sewing and constructing things, and for creating order and structure in our daily routine, which was incredibly important with four young children all two years apart. But in addition to those things, another equally important part of raising children is the ability to mirror and align with the the child. To witness them and see them as distinctly separate from you. To see the unique intelligence and the destiny in the making, unfolding in this other human being.   In this endeavor, curiosity and wonder are the coin of the realm. These were not my mother’s gifts.

But within 48 hours of her death, I realized that everything I love most about myself, arguably my very destiny was determined because she lacked the specific gifts not because she had them. Out of the suffering of not being seen, of being often criticized for my otherness was born a deep desire, honed over many decades, to truly see each human with a particular wonder about who their deep intelligence wants them to become.

I write this missive on Mother’s Day 2021 to remind myself and us all that the “ ideal” lives, parents, jobs, friends, partners, bank accounts, etc (you get the point) that we long for are not what will turn us into the lit angels we came here to be. I write this for everyone reading this who finds themselves in conditions not to their liking. I urge us all to consider stepping outside of that complaint and into the ocean of wonder.

Consider this “wondering” question: “If this/these conditions were created to help me give birth to something unique, a gift to me and others, what might that gift, capacity or action(s) be?” Pick one thing in the external world that affects you, that you struggle with, and apply that question to that thing.

Thank goodness that two decades before my mom died, I was finally able to give up the wish she would be different. I realized I was judging her as “less than” and how hurtful that was to her, and to me. I was doing exactly as she had done. Oh the irony! But it wasn’t until her death that I realized her soul gifted me with my destiny in a roundabout way.   Our human personalities both suffered. Neither of us could attain the depth of friendship we both wished for, but we did retain our deep love for each other.

It has taken me this last decade to apprentice myself to her gifts of order and structure. With my random, creative brain, I can only approximate them, because while they were her nature, they are far afield from mine. But as I do this, I find increased empathy for what a challenge my nature may have been for her and how she steadfastly loved me, even though she didn’t often really like me. Even though our relationship felt and was conditional at times, (“mama doesn’t like you when you are sassy”), even at those times I still knew the love was unwavering. I knew she might rail at me for my mistakes, but I also knew she would never not love me. She struggled to like me. AND I always knew that. Even when I was young I would say to dad, “Mamma doesn’t like me but she loves me”. I don’t recall him ever making a response to that. 

It hurts to live with that, and I really suffered when I was younger. When a child believes a parent doesn’t like how they are made, they are in a terrific bind. They need and are attached to the parent and they can’t do a lot about how they are wired. Although they might try. I tried. And in the trying I/we contort ourselves. And in the dissonance of that contortion, I/we have the chance to grow because of that very constriction.  This is really the point I am making.  The “negative” of my mother’s inability to truly like how I was wired hurt me, but the story doesn’t stop there…it also created Me!  

Back to mom and me.   How human of my mom, right?  Don’t we, don’t you struggle to like someone so different from you when you have to do daily life with them, at work, or in your family? I sure do. I don’t understand why the world seems intent on delivering this experience to all of us… intent on giving us someone or something completely immovable to our desires and needs.   The 20th century poet Maria Rainer Rilke who also struggled with a sense of exile from dominant society his entire life wrote:

 “Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings”.

“Winning does not tempt this woman. This is how I grow, by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.”  Beings such as my mother, whom I could not bend to my will. But also, by conditions that I cannot change but must navigate. Personal health challenges. racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, all the other ways we separate ourselves and disconnect from each other. They still break my heart as much as when I was little. As they should.  These are the result of a civilization that fosters disconnection rather than connection. Many, if not all of us feel a sense of exile. Maybe from some part of ourselves that we have othered, and therefore banished, or from others, or maybe because we don’t seem to fit the dominant ideal.

 But…another wondering question comes to mind: “How could it be true, that the very conditions or people that we feel imprisoned by or exiled from in our lives, are actually inadvertently helping us give birth to some new capacity that can navigate this reality and evolve us, into an ever more human and humane version of ourselves?”   And what happens when we focus on this new growth within ourselves, instead of our complaints about our current circumstances? 

 I am not suggesting we deny our suffering.  Nor am I suggesting that these negative conditions are made tolerable by what we can wrest from their grip.  They are not.  I would much prefer a lifelong connection and affection going both ways between my mom and me.  Denying the level of impact of our suffering leads to negative psychological and biological costs. BUT I am suggesting we give ourselves something forward moving, (our becoming and our own growth) to focus on instead.   Because really what else can we do that is life giving, in the face of our losses and suffering?

In the words of Rilke,  “…until some distant day, without hardly noticing it, we will live ourselves into an answer.” An understanding or insight will find us, much as mine did 48 hours after mom’s death. Maybe it was a gift from her? I like to think so.  BUT it was also a gift from myself.  Those years of growing and becoming a woman who could love well even in the face of disappointment and disconnection set the table for that insight to find me so that finally both of our hearts were at rest.

Art by: Hilma AF Klint

There is always more to the story than meets the eye ~

The Winter Woods  by Parker  Palmer

The winter woods beside a solemn
river are twice seen—
once as they pierce the brittle air,
once as they dance in grace beneath the stream.

In air these trees stand rough and raw,
branch angular in stark design—
in water shimmer constantly,
disconnect as in a dream,
shadowy but more alive
than what stands stiff and cold before our eyes.

Our eyes at peace are solemn streams
and twice the world itself is seen—
once as it is outside our heads,
hard frozen now and winter-dead,
once as it undulates and shines
beneath the silent waters of our minds.

When rivers churn or cloud with ice
the world is not seen twice—
yet still is there beneath
the blinded surface of the stream,
livelier and lovelier than we can comprehend
and waiting, always waiting, to be seen.

As our nation more deeply entrenches itself in a patterned reaction to the other side, my heart,  maybe yours too has grown heavy and weary of  this.  Just as in a midwest January it is hard to hope for spring.  Will spring ever come?   Will we as a nation, ever mend?  Or at least get to a place where our leaders think beyond  the next election to the common  good.

As I was  reading Palmer’s  new book: ON THE BRINK OF EVERYTHING: GRACE, GRAVITY AND GETTING  OLD, his poem Winter  Woods appeared and my heart  took wing.   It is the first thing that has comforted me since the impeachment trial began.  It  reminded me of something important I had forgotten.  “There is always more to the story than meets the eye”.

I have felt so deeply sad at the distance between us as fellow citizens of this country.  To my eye, it grows ever darker.  Maybe some of you too, are  experiencing the depth of winter in your own experience.  I just loved his reminder that the stark frozen cold of my pastoral Wisconsin landscape was not the entire story.   There is something below the surface.  And  so to the frozen cold between Dems and GOP is only half the story.  There is yet movement, we can only glimpse or guess at but ephemeral as it is, it is also real.  Spring will come.

When rivers churn or cloud with ice
the world is not seen twice—

The news and constant railing at the other side, is Palmer’s river churning,  we cannot see then (and now) what is below the surface.   But the poet tells us
yet still is there beneath
the blinded surface of the stream,
livelier and lovelier than we can comprehend
and waiting, always waiting, to be seen.

We will grow  weary of  our walls.   This is not  sustainable. Until the conversation changes, it is important that each of us find and become Sanctuary to each other.  Not for agreement with your point  of view  whatever it is but rather seek in each other the sanctuary of  our common humanity.  Let’s commit to remind each other that  “meanwhile”  there are things of great beauty happening daily, there are acts of kindness given and received every where around the globe.  We are not just our partisanship.   We are not  just divided and walled off.  There  are  things we can agree to do together, even if our leaders cannot.  We can start by focusing on the fact that the other side doesn’t like being apart from us  any more than we like being apart from them.  That’s a beginning.  The rivers will run again, if  we don’t let our hearts freeze up.

Dialoguing with a Poem

Dear Readers, I am an apprentice to David Whyte’s Invitas: A Path to Conversational Leadership.  I have followed his work for nearly  25 years now.  I have learned to be in dialogue with any and everything , so too, with poems.  In fact listening to David recite and riff on a poem puts one in a dialogue with their own sweet soul as well as  their heart and mind.This morning I decided to do the dialogue on the page (blog)  in  honor of Valentine’s day and the celebration of love.  Hearing this poem almost 25 years ago with Leslie Lanes, ushered in my first experience of an ecstatic moment.  A moment where everything belonged, including me.  Just as it was.  Just as I was.   If that is not Love I am not sure what Love is.  To be able  "to gather all our flaws in celebration” is to truly unconditionally love all of ourselves, to love how we were made.  To love how the world is made.  In honor of Valentine's Day, I offer you this:The link for the poem without commentary can be found here.  I suggest you read it first and then come back to the blog and read my dialogue with it.  As you read it, note your own inner conversation.  There is no single way to dialogue with a poem.  There are as many ways as there are people.https://www.davidwhyte.com/where-many-rivers-meet/

The Faces at Braga   by David Whyte

Commentary by Nancy C. WondersIn monastery darkness by the light of one flashlightthe old shrine room waits in silence. While above the doorwe see the terrible figure,fierce eyes demanding. “Will you step through?”  Will I step through the glories of youth and a well-functioning body and quick intelligence into this new territory?  The territory that holds decline, disease and disappearance?  Will I?  Good God this is hard.  My mind knows I cannot choose anything else.  I do not want my face to be the face of an old woman chasing a time that is decades gone.  If that is what is behind door #1, it is not for me.  It is humiliating.  It is shame.  I had so much of that in my youth at the mouths of my mother and the nuns.  No, I cannot go that way. I cannot return to those youthful days when I barely appreciated the beauty of my form, the brilliance of my quick mind nor the grace of a body I did not have to pay attention to because it ran just fine!  That is gone.  But door #2?  What waits there? And the old monk leads us,bent back nudging blackness,prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lampsand bow, eyes blinking in thepungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation,a hundred faces carved above,eye lines wrinkled in the hand-held light.  That’s true!  So many more wrinkled faces than mine.  So many more who went before me could I see them as … Such love in solid wood!Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence,they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.  Engulfed by the pastthey have been neglected, but throughsmoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growingthrough the dust of eroded slopes,their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.  So I too must turn my face toward the mountain of age, even with my youthful spirit, my body is asking other things of me now.  It demands me love it, touch it, stretch it, move it.Carved in devotiontheir eyes have softened through age …oh please let me soften…please do not let me harden…and their mouths curve through delight of the carver’s hand. Delight?  There could be delight in this paring back?  This essentialism.   BUT my life mantra has been DO NOT MAKE ME CHOOSE and it would seem this aging stuff is all about choosing.  AND I have a lousy picker (chooser).  It does not want to choose. It wants everything and mostly all at once.  Sheesh…how can I possibly walk this road?  I truly know virtually nothing about this way of being. If only our own faceswould allow the invisible carver’s handto bring the deep grain of love to the surface.  Shoot, I knew it, what is going to have to go is my ability to skim along, to flit from flower to flower.  instead I am going to have to pay deep attention to what I want above all else moment by moment.  To choose and abide within my current limits.I do not have time to read the NY Times or the Atlantic Magazine from cover to cover.   I can no longer follow all my lovely random curiosities.  Well actually I can, but I must accept that this means something else will need to be sacrificed.  It takes me more time to do what I did on almost everything.  "If only my own face would allow the carver’s hand (aging) to bring the deep grain of love to the surface."If only we knewas the carver knew, how the flawsin the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, my flaw:  my mind that does not live within limits…how?we would smile tooand not need faces immobilizedby fear and the weight of things undone.  It is true, I worry about this more and more, “what am I forgetting?” The constant backlog of work or home responsibilities not tended to yet? When we fight with our failing.  This was the first of David’s poems that I fell hard for.  I had a transcendent moment and it began on this line.  I (and others I might add) have fought with how I am made as long as I can remember.  And…we ignore the entrance to the shrine itselfand wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fightour eyes our hooded with griefand our mouths are dry with pain.  So much unnecessary suffering from this all my life…even still.  But there is slowly emerging a small voice that talks back a bit to that fierce figure…there is not yet an Archbishop Desmond TuTu (Made for Goodness) residing within me that is FOR me on a consistent basis, but there is something that says:  "Don't talk to my friend Nancy that way, it doesn't help her."  And that is everything. If only we could give ourselvesto the blows of the carvers hands, I wonder, what is it I refuse to give myself over too?   What if it is a kind of faith/trust in these very things I am struggling with?the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers feeding the seawhere voices meet, praising the featuresof the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away my face of productivity, of “earning,” of “the need to be deserving,” of competence…maybe if I could finally trust that as I am made, I am enough for my life…I could indeed grow youngeruntil we, growing younger toward deathevery day, would gather all our flaws in celebration  to merge with them perfectly,impossibly, wedded to our essence,full of silence from the carver’s hands. May it be so." src="blob://www.nancywonders.com/1b966a48-e3cd-4ff8-8fd1-890eda11c993" alt="image001.png" class="Apple-web-attachment Singleton" style="opacity: 1;">

“Every day when I awake I am torn between saving the world and savoring it…”

As we stand at the gateway, a summer stretching out in front of us, this quote is particularly meaningful to me.   Full quote:  "Everyday when I awake, I am torn between saving the world and savoring it.  It makes it hard to plan the day."And that reminds me of another poem by David Whyte What to Remember When Waking where the poet states 

"...What you can plan

is too small

for you to live.

What you can live

wholeheartedly 

will make plans

enough

for the vitality 

hidden in your sleep. ..."

Is there a kind of planning that is more like a conversation with a person?  Where no one leads, you aren't leading and life isn't leading but you are co-creating the dance together?  I believe there is.  Conversational planning may be the secret to 21st century well-being, whether planning your family's summer or your organization's vision and mission for the next 3 to 5 years.Recently, I lost a most dear soul friend.    It reminded me of the futility of a plan that does not include the following:

1. Interruptions
2. The random...things taking a surprise turn (positive and negative).
3. Trust in oneself and life.

The last one is particularly important I think, because I cause myself unnecessary suffering when I get out ahead of "now" and tell myself a story about a possible future that is not here.  But when I am able trust the unknown (unplanned interruptions and the random), what C.G.Jung called God, only then can I stay present and fully available to this moment instead of my story about this moment.  How do I trust the unknown and random?  By trusting that I can meet whatever life is bringing.  I Part of what makes this a bit easier is staying in this moment where I can't truly see if what is happening is actually good or bad, in the long run.  What I can know in this moment is only that I like it or I don't.  I want it or do not.  But I can't actually know how I will feel about it 20 years from now.  You see until our last breath, we are all always in the middle of a long play.  So this "detour" or "setback" might actually be a kind of divine intervention giving me the chance to pause and relook at what I am  doing or where I am heading.  If you don't believe in Divine intervention, no worries, you can still take a pause and ask yourself the question, "How is this potentially a gift to me?"  In other words, use it as Divine intervention giving you the chance to pause and regroup.  Even if it is not!In that pause, you can ask yourself questions, like:

• "Am I all in?"
•  "Do we have anything nagging us that we keep turning away from?"
•  "How is this actually a good thing?  Even though I still don't like it.  

By the way trusting the unknown or trusting Life, doesn't mean I don't get to feel, sad, mad and/or scared.  But if along side those feelings, I can squeeze in a little curiosity and wonder via exploratory questions (like those above), the whole thing opens up again and I can move forward with more confidence and commitment.  Not in outcome.  No one gets to have that.  Confidence and commitment in myself and my direction, come what may.So back to 21st century conversational planning.  What exactly does that mean?  It means planning expecting a partner (Life/the Unknown Future) that will ultimately help you create more than you could have without her.  Planning for interruptions, detours and reversals.  Keeping the end in sight, but holding the "how" and the "when" loosely.  And trust yourself, especially that vitality hidden in your sleep and your dreams.