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.

Creating adult-adult relationships with your children

I received a very late b'day card ... Reasons I'm happy you were born, it read.  The sender is one of my children.  The 10 reasons written made me weep. I often receive other cards from my other child, post cards from travel destinations, thank you notes, etc. Both of these remarkable human beings treat me as a person separate and not simply their mother. They are 29 and 33 years old.I remember thinking when they were 17 and 21 that they might be two of the most interesting and fine humans I would ever meet (of course I am biased but it was also what I truly believed about them). I also thought I did not want to be stuck forever in the role of only "their mother" and never seen as a human who had passions beyond her children.  Full disclaimer:  that is exactly how I treated my parents, as if they existed only in the role of my mom and my dad. And I didn't want that relationship with my own children. I suspect my parents wanted more with me too.  I wish I had known or paid attention.  Where was my curiosity about the two remarkable humans who loved and raised me?  It was missing.But unlike my parents, I am more demanding. I knew I wanted adult-adult relationships with my children. So when they turned 21 and 17, I began a journey to make sure that was a possibility for us. That journey was treating them like they could teach me things. Of course, I still had things to teach or share with them, but I found I was profoundly interested in the world they inhabited (in spite of my fears about it) and more importantly I was interested in them and how they were navigating said world.Fast Forward: I have ended up creating a bit of a niche in coaching Millennials mid and high level executives.  I really do love them!  AND since they (millennials in general, my children in particular) were little I always had a hunch they knew things...were plugged into something different and I wanted in on that stuff.  Today, I would say this is probably always true. I used to think it was just true about that generation. I was wrong. I find it equally true about the one coming behind them. Those kiddos in Florida from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, I would love to talk to them. I am fascinated by a young woman, Emma Gonzales, still in high school, who held an entire audience on a large stage in Washington DC for 6+ minutes in silence while she simply witnessed her own suffering and that of her peers. Who are these people? I don't know but I want to...  and I hope you do too.  What if each generation that is born, along with it's particular challenges also comes with particular gifts, well suited to help society navigate a particular part of the evolutionary journey toward wholeness?But even if this is not true, what if the secret to experiencing a sense of belonging with anyone and everyone ...is recognizing that this person/generation in front of you has an experience you don't know or maybe you can't even understand BUT you might be able to  share. You could witness his or her story.  You can tell them you "see" them. They are real. Their experience is real.And that my friends is the difference.Those of you who know me, know that I don't miss a chance to "teach" to educate. BUT I also don't miss a chance to ask a "real question". My question, is born of my own genuine curiosity. All I have to remember is to not ask it aggressively so it reads as "justify yourself" but instead reads as real curiosity. So it reads as "wonder." My name is my reminder to Wonder … To Wonder what someone else knows, thinks, feels that I can't imagine.And therein lies the difference between a life of tedium and decline and a life filled with wonder and awe. 

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.