"Always we hope someone else has the answer, some other place will be better...
Art by: Camilla West
“Always we hope
someone else has the answer, some other place will be better,
some other time, it will turn out
… This is it.”
Pema Chodran
“Always we hope
someone else has the answer, some other place will be better,
some other time, it will turn out
… This is it.” Pema Chodran
Abiding truth. This. It recalls T.S. Eliot’s “Hope would be hope for the wrong thing” as he too, calls us to the Waiting.
the Being Here.
just
just Here.
Waiting.
It requires the body in full presence. Anxiety hates waiting. Monkey mind, that chatterbox and ally to the gods of productivity, recoils in the face of Waiting. Of Being just Here.
Waiting.
Here.
just the Waiting.
What might arise in that void of activity?
Monkey mind is pretty sure nothing good will come of this “Waiting” this just “being Here.”
And now we find ourselves deep in the season of Waiting: Advent. In the Christian tradition, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are designed to be a spiritual preparation. Even more than physical preparation. The gift giving of this season of the return of Light to the world is an outward manifestation of generosity, particularly the generosity of God.
Black Friday. Cyber Monday. That’s trickier. These are built on scarcity. “Only this day. You must act and buy or you ‘lose’ the bargain.” That thinking and energy is the opposite of generosity. It is scarcity.
But I digress. Back to Waiting. To just being.
The Pema Chodron poem I opened with indicates a surrender in this “Waiting.” Surrender takes humility and openness. Maybe I am not the best judge of what is best for me in the whole of my life? What is desired now could become a poison to my soul then.
Yet, how does this willful, German-stubborn woman (me) surrender to what is? How do I wait in that? Instead of jumping to what could be?
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
T.S. Eliot
It is hard indeed not to wish for what we believe we want. For most of us it is a heavy lift to open to, be curious about, and actually embrace the reality we have in this moment rather than the one we “think” we should have or the one that we “believe” will make us happy.
I can think of so many times in my life I was mistaken about what would make me happy. Or what would be best. And even in the times I was right, how much joy did I sacrifice, how much real life did I miss when I chose to give my attention to my preferences for a different and yet to be reality? To what “Could be.” Didn’t this wanting “some other place” or “some other time” increase dissatisfaction with current reality? And of course it did.
My first baby steps into “the Waiting” and into “Embracing what is” was a daily practice of gratitude, specifically, journaling my gratitudes and sharing them.
The poets call us to surrender to the present moment and…to trust it. To trust reality! If I trust that I am enough for my life and for what is yet to be, then I can “be here now.” Just HERE. Trusting the present moment, my current reality, requires trusting myself. Trusting I am “able” to meet this moment, whether it is to my liking or not.
What helps me do this is to remind myself that preferences, “I want this and not that,” and, “It should be this way and not that way,” belong to the mental constructions of our Ego’s. They are not real. And therefore, they are not necessary. They are simply an idea, my preference. This is why spiritual and religious traditions ask us to surrender to “God’s” will over our own. They, too, know that our will comes from a place within that seeks security over vitality. This part of us seeks safety over experience. The entropy of the known and seemingly predictable over the aliveness of growth and newness.
We humans have the amazing ability to imagine. To imagine new worlds. To imagine and then enact behaviors to reach these possible futures. “What Could be,” and “What is yet to be” is indeed miraculous. This faculty is what makes us different from animals. We can take a step back, reflect on ourselves and our lives (New Year’s resolutions) and imagine new futures for ourselves. I love our human capacity for “Could be.” I have made a living for over two decades helping people imagine themselves into new ways of behaving and responding, into new futures, into new ways of understanding and relating to themselves and others.
I am all for “could be.” AND I want to invite myself and you to fully be grateful for what is, embracing the yucky parts of “Here” before we start to imagine a different “Could be.” Embrace the reality we have. Poet David Whyte suggests in his articulation of conversational leadership/Invitas that we “Come to ground. That we meet the reality we have, not the one we wish we had.” I think the reality we have has its own secret treasures.
Why do this? For the sake of being able to chart our course forward from a place of the soul’s revelation. Our soul desires are our true desires. They are often very different than the preferences of our Ego’s. They are the ineffable and the abiding. They reside in that still place within us that Eliot would have us wait in. They are “the dancing.” Within their sweet embrace we do not hope for the wrong thing. There we do not love the wrong thing. There, “the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
And there lies the originality that was born in each of us.
May this holy season, this winter of Waiting bring each of you the peace that surpasses all understanding.
Creating adult-adult relationships with your children
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;">
Thankful for Wonder and Wonders
As you know I am a Wonders. Daughter of Robert John Wonders, Mary Skotze Wonders, niece of Helen Wonders Chandler, Marion Wonders Wollum, Louise Wonders McKinnon, Lucy Wonders Doney, Virginia Wonders Rahoi, Joseph Wonders, and Harry Wonders. And Granddaughter of Claire Lemieux Wonders to whom I owe my middle name and my beloved Harry Wonders. He was only in my life for my first six years but I simply adored him and I am not sure I will ever know why. Why does a six year old love one human to the moon and back and not others? I do not know but I do know it isn't because her smart brain took a tally, or came to value assessment or built a spread sheet to point her in the right direction.She simply loved who she loved for reasons unknown to her. And that is what I want to write about today:The reasons unknown. Why do we love this one and not that one? Why do we get triggered by this one and not that one? But this isn't just about humans. Look through out your day. You have clear preferences for all kinds of things, from your favorite kind of pasta, to your preferred coffee house, (today mine is Champion on Nassau Ave in Greenpoint (Brooklyn), a block from my daughter's apartment), your route to the grocery store, etc. What is your favorite time of day? Mine: sunrise or sunset. My favorite day of the week is Saturday, and I am not even Jewish. My favorite season Autumn edges out spring, summer and winter by which also delights. But when fall arrives, I am done. I am at home. Leaves turning, the transition between the uber fullness of summer and the quiet barren landscape of winter, the transformation of green leaves into the bare branches of the season is the one I savor most. And luckily, living in Dallas TX, our autumn cycle is a slow circuitous path to the shortest of days.Do you ever wonder why you prefer one thing and not another, one man over all others, one woman? A season? A book? A movie? Anything? What is the preference making vehicle we all come factory loaded with?I wonder this a lot. And not just for myself, but for all of us. I think our preferences, desires, longing, affiliations and affections are glimpses of our individual souls, if you believe in such. If you don't then they are a peek into our essential self. It is the nest of our distinctness, like a cuckoo clock popping out on the hour, we too reveal ourselves to ourselves and to each other through our affections.Isn't that the loveliest of thoughts? Don't know who you are? Wonder who you came here to be? Just look to your affections and in due time all will be revealed.Yes, our preferences could also arise from longstanding, unconscious habits but even so, they were born out of either random chance or our particular resonance (the cuckoo popping out) to that particular thing. And if our habits began out of a random choice, a preference, an affinity for that choice set in early and thus it became a habit.Why is that? I think because our soul wants to be revealed, first and foremost to us, so we can follow it's code. But also it wants to be let out to dance in the world. I believe we each come with an "inner chooser" with dislikes and likes. Affections and repulsions. Longings and aversions.And why does this matter? Because the inner chooser, (I will name her, Joy) is also our inner compass who can help us find our way home. And by home I mean, to becoming our essential self, the person we came here to be, or who God made us to be.And why does that matter? Because that my dear friends, is the miracle of life. It is the wonder of life.So as we enter the season of wonder and awe that is initiated in Thanksgiving and ends in the positive resolve of a fresh new year, my favorite essayist comes to mind: Anne Lamott. I wish for us all a moment where "We start to get a hint of the power and sweetness and absurdity of life and to see it not as all fragile and harsh but as real, the really real. We get buoyancy and, God knows, sometimes even effervescence. Perspective doesn't reduce the gravitas, it increases reverence."Let's all raise our glasses and toast to wonder, reverence and effervescence.
May I not become trapped ...
"May I not become trapped, caught or entangled in false inner networks of negativity, resentment or destruction toward myself. May I treat myself as the nest of God...." John O'DonohueMay I treat myself as the nest of God! What would that look like? The first thing that pops to my mind is the humility it would require. The ultimate "don't know" mindset. When I get really quiet and look at the Pride of Barbados flowers just outside my window, there arises in me an awareness of my being the nest of God. Just for a moment. Just a glimpse. I don't really know how to describe this. I have a hard time staying with it. It is wondrous and frightening too. My monkey mind slips into the experience by whispering something like "...danger, danger...move away, back slowly out of this room ... it isn't meant for you. You will get hurt." Or it says "Who has time for this?" Or "You can do this later, you better do X,Y or Z now"But who will I become if I am not a nest of God? And in these times, these difficult and fearsome times, when the news features children separated from parents at the hands of the US Government; I realize how much work there is for me to make of myself a nest of the divine. I must look into and be with my fears and my immense grief. How can I be a sturdy warm protection from the energies of hate, fear and shame that swirl around us all? For I do not want to cradle the Divine with the fear I often find in my heart these days. What is to be done with it? Surely this is what the Holy Spirit of my Catholic girlhood was for, to help me create a heart that is beyond the geography of fear and worry. Just that thought brings a measure of piece. I will seek to grow a heart that is a nest for God, a heart so open, so wonder-filled, so safe and warm that the Divine could indeed nest here. Is just the wanting this enough?"When the Guest is being looked for, it is the longing that does all the work." KabirI will nurture my imagination for that is what humans can do AND I will double down on my longing for a heart that is beyond fear and all constriction. A heart that could be the nest of God.