Music is my heart language. I think in song lyrics (and can always provide a good song lyric for any situation I find myself in), and music is always running through my head. I’ve had the unfortunate experience, on several occasions, to have a boss stop me in the middle of what they were saying and ask, “Julie, are you really humming (or singing) while I’m talking to you?!” To my horror, I would realize that I was, in fact, humming or singing without realizing it, all the while completely listening to what they were saying. I just can’t help it.
I’m one of those people who can get physical chest pain from an emotional experience elicited by a song or good lyrics. I also think there is really nothing better in the entire world than speeding down a two-lane country road with the windows down while belting out a really good song at the top of your lungs.
I had a couple of conversations this last month with friends about songs that I feel define my life….the ones that undo me every time I hear them. There are five songs in particular that I call my “life songs”…the ones that resonate with me on a heart level. These are the songs I tell my best friends they should make sure and play at my funeral. Not because I’m morbid or anything, but because they speak to who I am and what got my attention in life; they speak to the human experience. And also because I want it to be clear that I don’t want any “I’ll Fly Away” rapture style hymns sung when I kick the bucket.
So, listed in order of my favorites with a little commentary included for each, here are my life songs:
Falling Slowly from the Once movie soundtrack
This song….OMG. Gets me every. single. time. My friend Jemima first introduced it to me about five years ago. The movie was wonderful and sweet, but the song lyrics are just amazing. To me, it’s all about hope, making choices to change direction in life, to stop doing the same things that have always and only resulted in suffering. It’s about being seen and understood by someone who really knows and accepts you, and both of you offering hope to each other. It’s a song about redemption, of having space and time to truly find ourselves and start anew. This will forever be my heart song.
2. Holy Now by Peter Mayer
I still remember where I was the first time I heard this song. My theological scaffolding was crumbling, and I was questioning everything Christian. One day, about five years ago, I was in the sunroom of my house outside Boston, running on the treadmill, and listening to a podcast. The podcast host mentioned this song, so I went and looked it up and listened. I was completely bowled over. I think I must have listened to it ten more times in the next hour that day. This song represents EXACTLY how I feel about life now. Once, I thought that the Earth was destined for the burn barrel and that miracles happened only here and there to other people. Now, because of so many changes that have happened in my life, I am overjoyed at the goodness and grace I experience on a regular basis, even when life is hard. While I adhere less to “rules” for how to live life, I feel like I approach life with a gravitas I didn’t have before. EVERYTHING is holy, everything is sacred. And this makes life worth getting up for every day, even when shit happens.
3. Human, by Christina Perri
This week every single area of my life blew up in my face. I was completely knocked on my ass and forced to remember that I am not invincible and that I have limited capacity. This is the song that reminds me that while I can do alot, I’m still just a human. I have boundaries, I can be hurt by people, I can be overwhelmed. Being human is OK; it’s who I am in this life, and I need to remember that margin and self-care and boundaries that protect my heart are good and necessary things. This is the song that comes to mind when I’ve reached my end and all there is to do is cry and reach out to my people who stand beside me when I have nothing left.
4. Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, sung by Pentatonix
Is this not one of the absolute best songs ever written? It sums up so much of life and what it means to love, and how hard and devastating that can be. “Love is not a victory march; it’s a cold and broken hallelujah.” Agh! Yes! Most love does not come easy. Most love is painful, wrenching, heartbreaking and so often that love is not returned. But we do it anyway because love is good and right even when it doesn’t come easy. We are baffled by life and love and all of those who we try but do not understand, and because of grace, we can say hallelujah anyway, even when we are spurned or facing death or feeling utterly broken.
5. Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol
When it comes down to it, don’t we all just want to know we’re not alone? We don’t need to have all the answers, we don’t have to be perfect, we don’t require alot of stuff. At a heart level, I think most of us just want to know that we are seen and heard and accepted. Will someone be there if we crash and burn? Is there someone who will join us in the mindless things of life just because they want to be with us? Will anyone join us in our misery and just be with us when we aren’t able to actually offer anything in return? This is what I hear every time I listen to this song…the human desire to not be left alone.
I’m on vacation this week in Upstate New York, where I used to live. I come back here every year in the fall…to soak up the autumn colors, post a ridiculous number of photos to Facebook and Instagram, spend time with a best friend, and give myself permission to take a long pause from life, work, parenting, and all the things that wear me down.
The nice part of having these few days to myself is that I can ponder and reflect with few interruptions; there is silence and stillness without responsibility, and it feels like these trips literally save me and make me useful to others and hopeful again for the coming year.
This trip I’ve been thinking about the people that have come in and out of my life – some for days, some for years – and how they’ve helped create who I am now. In my last post, I talked about how I want my life to be influenced and colored by others who are brave and creative. I’m constantly amazed at the people that swoop into my life…people that I never could have seen coming, people that I never fathomed could actually exist in the world, people that brought me gifts with their presence, people that showed up right at the moment I needed them – even when I didn’t know I needed them. This, again, is grace…when you’re given what you need before you knew you needed it.
Another thing about people that I’ve been thinking about, but which I don’t entirely like, is that sometimes, you can outgrow them. Or, maybe you don’t outgrow them, but you grow off in opposite directions, and no matter how much you hash through things with them and try to come back to each other, you can never understand each other again. This growing away from people does not feel like grace, although it probably is in the long run.
Sometimes, the voices that you once trusted implicitly are no longer safe voices to speak into your life – they have become the devil, the accuser. And, it’s not because those people are bad or have ill intentions, but it’s because your paths have veered off in different directions and you lose the resonance that you once had with them. You’re vibrating at different frequencies and when you try to merge together like you used to, the result is clanging dissonance. Maybe the flip of that is also true….your voice becomes the devil for them, as well. You can no longer understand the path they are taking, and so all of your words, suggestions, and encouragements are useless and unhelpful.
Not long ago I met with someone who once knew me very well, someone who I allowed for years to speak into my life because we were on the same path. But this time, I realized how far we had moved from each other. It was like we were complete strangers talking past one another, and there was no point in agreeing to disagree because we were already too far gone.
I told my story of the last five years, in the same way that I tell most people that come into my life these days. To my complete surprise, though, I was wrecked by this person’s response. I came away from the meeting believing for a few minutes that I was a selfish asshole who had really fucked up my life. Why was I working so hard on my writing career? Why was I going to grad school when my children are still little? Why didn’t I just ask my ex-husband for more child support? Maybe I’m just not cut out for marriage or committed relationships in the first place. Did I not realize I’m treating my children like bowling pins in the pursuit of my own self-expression and fulfillment and joy? Was it not apparent that the path I’ve pursued is surely devoid of empathy and compassion towards others?
I believed for a few short moments that what I thought was being brave might actually just be folly rooted in my own self-centeredness. I questioned hard the joy and peace I feel most days now, where once I had little joy and no peace. That meeting was an encounter with my devil, my accuser….a voice that sided with the lingering insecurities hovering around my mind.
I’m so intensely attracted to people I see in the world who are being brave – not necessarily the ones who are doing nutty things that are dangerous – but the people who are ruthlessly pursuing themselves and searching for meaning in life even if means they risk losing everything. When I come across these kinds of people, it’s almost all I can do not to grovel and beg them to let me just be around them once in a while. Their stories help me to be brave, and there’s really nothing good that has come out of my life that has not been painted on or sculpted in places by these people.
After my momentary deep dive into depression and certainty that all of my decisions over the last five years were impressively horrible, I ran to a different voice – one who is resonating on my wavelength and has every right to speak into my life because she knows me and understands me, and somehow, I can do nothing wrong in her eyes. [Side note: EVERY SINGLE PERSON deserves a friend like this, where everything you do and say and dress like, plastered or sober, is accepted with love. Grace, I tell you.] I brushed away my tears, pulled myself together, and actively remembered who it is I WANT to be. I don’t want to be a person who plays life safe and lives according to platitudes and rules. I want to be a person who does hard things, and loves people easily and quickly, and shows my boys that sometimes the very best life is not the easy one – but the one with challenges and difficult decisions and a mom that will do anything to find herself, so that they can one day know how to really find themselves.
I want to keep chasing after the brave people and beg them to let me be in their lives, to show me how it’s done, to reveal more of the joy that I haven’t yet seen, to love me despite my fear and faults and failures. I want to keep resonating with the amazing people I already have in my life who show me on a daily basis what it’s like to live wholeheartedly and authentically, even when they are still afraid.
I don’t know…maybe I am selfish. Maybe it is selfish for me to try to squeeze every little bit of joy and glory out of life that I can, even when it looks irresponsible to some people. But I know there are people who resonate with me, who GET IT, who know that there are things you can’t unsee, places you can’t go back to, and ways of being that you can’t unbecome.
I have recently come to the awareness that I have taken handmade pottery for granted my entire adult life. I’ve always been one to go to craft fairs in Vermont and New York and scope out the pretty coffee mugs and egg white/egg yolk separators, and I’ve known a couple of people here and there who made pottery as a hobby. I also remember back in junior high when we would take those clay Christmas trees [you know what I’m talking about, right?], scrape the seams off with scalpels, toss them into kilns, and Voila!, out came ceramic decorations that we felt compelled to pull out every year and plug-in somewhere with plastic lights to sparkle and gather dust until we repacked them away in March.
But I never really stopped and considered the process and hard work of creating enough product to market, sell, and make a living on, all the while trying to maintain a balance of creating good art but doing so in an efficient manner. I have also learned that apparently pottery is not as romantic as portrayed by Demi Moore, in Ghost. I hear the real thing is alot more like chronic back pain, frozen fingers, sweat dripping into the clay, and feeling like you’re sticking your face into the Sun when you’re checking all your baking goods in the kiln. I’m really, really wishing I could get SNL to do a spoof off of that Ghost scene now.
Another interesting and lovely find lately is to discover that there are potter-philosophers out there in the world who write some really amazing stuff. I guess this shouldn’t surprise me; there are plenty of other artists who view the world through their craft. Anyway, I was delighted to stumble upon this phenomenon.
Working as a nurse, I frequently use protocols. They are basically an easy way for us to proceed in patient care without having to obtain doctor’s orders for things that are relatively straight forward and common. So, for example….keeping a foley catheter in a person longer than necessary or without good reason is a surefire way to give them a urinary tract infection. So, there are protocols for nurses to decide if that foley should stay put or if we should pull it. Or, if someone has imbalanced electrolytes, there are protocols to tell us which potassium and magnesium supplements to give, when to order blood redraws, and target values that let us know the protocol is complete. Basically, these protocols are step by step instructions for following a process to achieve a desired end result.
Sometimes I wish life had protocols. Step by step instructions on how to get to where we want to be. Do this and do that until you arrive at your goal. Be this and then that, and it will bring such and such into your life. I used to think life DID operate according to protocols. It was called fundamentalist religion and contract theology. It only took me 30 years of following all those prescribed rules to realize that God doesn’t really play by that game. The Bible isn’t really a handbook for living, as much as people have told me throughout my life that it is. If anything, the Bible is a guide for what NOT to do in life. I think the same is true with alot of other sacred literature.
The universe doesn’t seem to operate by a “you do this and I”ll respond in such and such a way” fashion much of the time. This realization can be really hard when you’re coming out of a protocol-style faith tradition because it feels like you’ve lost ground to stand on and you no longer know the rules of how to play the game…..or if there are any rules at all.
One of these potter blogs that I’ve been reading over the last couple of weeks is written by Carter Gillies; it’s definitely worth your time to look at. He writes the kinds of things I have to reread multiple times to really “get”, and he’ll throw out passages that can bring me to a hard stop. Here’s one that I read yesterday:
“There is much more to the world than the ‘given’, and it is art’s duty to not only explore this but show the magnificent expanse beyond the merely existing and leaden ‘facts’. We don’t just receive the world, we bring it into existence.” -from Sisyphus, November 10, 2018
OMG! So good! This got me to thinking about the idea of being co-creators with God (or universe, or insert whatever word works for you here.). How often do I sit around and demand life to bring me what I want, to avoid doing the heavy lifting, to refuse to see beyond the superficial? I want someone to hand me the rules and teach me how to play the game so I can get to the goal that culture and society tells me is the whole point.
But….what if….we are the ones that are making the rules? What if there is no preordained goal imagined by the universe and we have the creative power to design our own ends? What if the world and what exists before us are our paints and brushes, or our clay and glazes, and our job is to bring more life into existence with them? We belong to the world, but the world also belongs to us and comes into existence through us.
Carter says in all caps: EVERYONE IS AN ARTIST. Wow, what would life be like if we all really believed that?
I definitely think there is a biochemical basis for depression, but I’m convinced that our beliefs play a strong role, especially when it comes to our sense of control. If we believe we have no control over anything, and life is simply done TO us…well, that IS pretty depressing. But, if we believe we have no absolute control over anything but that we DO have the power to reframe our perspectives, exert influence, and use our creativity to express ourselves in new ways and bring into existence things that once weren’t there….what’s depressing about that?
Protocols don’t leave any room for creativity or thinking outside the box. This is one reason it was so freeing to walk away from fundamentalist Christianity. That God was boring, small, petty, and type A. There was little room for anything new and glorious because it was all labeled and judged as good or bad. A protocol-less God/universe is freedom, grace, and space to make alot of mistakes with the knowing that there is always room and time to try anew.
I had a conversation with a new friend the other night about my goals as a floor nurse, and then later, as a forensic nurse. He asked me what was most important to me when I cared for patients Good question on his part, and I knew my answer right away. More than worrying about whether or not my patients walk out of the hospital cured or pain-free, I want them to feel heard and seen. This is an area where protocol doesn’t completely fly. Yeah, it’s great to get all the technical details right in healthcare, but I’ve met plenty of people who technically received amazing care and still recalled their hospital stays as lonely and terrible. On the other hand, I’ve had patients tell me I was the best nurse ever, even after all I did was pass meds and sit and talk with them. Which shows me….most people don’t care about protocol and the details of their medical care nearly as much as they want to be known and validated. And so, I work really hard to ask my patients the good questions, to listen to their life stories, to empathize, and Lord knows I cry alot with them.
So, my friend pointed out…..maybe your style of nursing is also art? I’m bringing into existence something that wasn’t there before….something that couldn’t have existed if I had just stuck to the rules, and gone step by step through the guidelines created by some hospital committee somewhere.
Going back to the idea of everyone being an artist and my previous immature appreciation about the hard work of creating pottery. I think we all want to have the sense that we know what we’re doing, and that what we’re doing matters. Life feels safer that way. But it’s also sterile and boring when we’re told what our lives are supposed to look like. Are mass-produced lives, where we all follow similar paths adhering to the pursuit of the same life goals because someone told us to….really worth living? Is it really all that great to spend our entire lives consuming and never creating?
No, I want a life that I’ve helped create, not one that I’ve just passively accepted. And I want a life that is influenced by other people being brave and putting their creations out into the world. This gives me hope too; that the world will never remain just as I understand it at this very moment, because there are brave people out there who are constantly seeing with new eyes, creating their art whatever it may look like, and offering it without any stipulations for how it may be received or where it will end up. People refusing to live inside boxes and according to checklist protocols are what contribute to the enchantment of all things.
“I would rather have 30 minutes of something wonderful, than a lifetime of nothing special.” – Julia Roberts, Steel Magnolias
I’ve officially been a nurse for an entire year. It still kind of blows my mind, especially since 3.5 years ago, the prospect of actually going to nursing school seemed so incredibly impossible. At the time, I was living south of Boston and faced long train commutes into the city to reach a school with an accelerated program. Then there was the problem of all the prerequisites I had to take since I’d been out of college for more than seven years. Really? I have to retake Introduction to Chemistry when I was a BIOCHEMISTRY major and actually worked in jobs where I used it? Then, there were all the logistical problems of being a wife and mom to three, with responsibilities and extracurricular activities and dinner to make and a house to clean….and goats to take care of. ‘Nother story there for another time.
So, I did what any sane person would do….I made the situation entirely more difficult by getting a divorce and moving to a different state to start all over. It was a complete jumping off a metaphorical cliff. I had no idea if any of my best-laid plans would fall into place, if I could actually survive independently as an adult after letting go of a career for nine years, and if I could, in fact, make it through more school and start working as a nurse.
Turns out, it all worked. Somehow I still have money in the bank, I am a year into grad school, and people actually want me to work for them, both as a nurse and a writer. My kids still think I’m a badass mom. I have the best friends a girl could ask for. I apparently stuck that landing.
Other landings I have not stuck so well. I’m actually well acquainted with completely effing things up, usually because I get in too big of a hurry, or I don’t trust my gut, or I’m trying too hard to make other people happy rather than do what I need to for myself. But despite a stream of periodic catastrophes trailing behind me, I think that sometimes the absolute best thing we can have happen to us in life is a solid, smackdown faceplant….a colossal screwup if you will.
There are a bunch of variations of the following meme these days on FB that really make me laugh.
As a natural introvert, holing up in my house by myself is one of my more favorite activities. But I’ve learned that it’s also my kryptonite. It’s easier to stay home where it’s safe, where my only interactions are with those who are kind of required to accept my quirks and eccentricities because they’re called “my kids”, and not push myself out into the world to try new things and potentially face having more of my rough edges worn off in some exquisitely painful way.
I’m so much better now at actually making myself show up for things, even whenever everything inside me is screaming “Go home to your couch and Netflix! Don’t face rejection. Don’t have yet another conversation with a complete stranger. Don’t try another thing that you may be horrible at.” It seems that when I ignore this voice and go do things that feel really hard to me anyway, that’s where the magic sauce is.
I remember years ago, one of my friends talking about how she could never be as brave as me. I recall laughing so incredibly hard at that. She had never seen me at my worst, never really knew the depth of anxiety and fear I have fought against since my childhood. She never knew how many times I put on a “mask” and pretend I’ve got everything under control, when secretly I wish a big hole would open up and swallow me.
The tough thing about choosing to do hard, scary stuff in life is that you can never really know for sure which ones are going to result in faceplants. Some change direction mid-course too…..what once looked brilliant suddenly takes a nosedive, or what seemed doomed from the start unexpectedly becomes amazing. While I’m writing this I”m thinking of some of the things I’ve done in life that scared me the most, and how they ended up turning out:
Going on a medical trip to Honduras my freshman year in college with a bunch of people I didn’t know – This one turned out pretty well, and I made some good friends. It also solidified my desire to end up in healthcare.
Joining the college debate team – Yeah, I pretty much sucked at this compared to my decent high school debate showing, but I had alot of fun hitting up Lousiana and Arkansas IHOPs with my debate team.
Spending a summer in West Africa to fulfill my degree requirements: Probably one of the most life-changing and scary things I’ve ever done. Africa gave me malaria but lovingly sent me home with new family and lifelong friends, and an invitation to come back and faceplant again.
Choosing between a PhD program I had just gotten accepted to or move to another state for a guy I met online – Everything seems like a good idea at the time, right? I chose the guy, which ended up becoming a string of faceplants that grew the hell out of me and paradoxically probably ended up being a very good life decision, painful as it has been. Getting three great little kids out of the deal does not constitute as a faceplant, though.
Submitting that first query letter to a magazine – Nothing is scarier than facing rejection about something that you are passionate about, like writing. Many of my first queries were total faceplants, but then, I got an article accepted for a legit magazine with a substantial readership, and then suddenly all my previous writing failures seemed worth it.
Trying to have a kid without pain medication – My body ultimately faceplanted here, but I did learn that I have the capacity to do active labor for 30+ hours without pain medication, twice. That was empowering, even if I still required C-sections.
Turning in a graduate paper on Sayyid Qutb for my Islamic Theology class – this might seem like a dumb thing to be scared about, but I really loved my professor and I really loved the subject….and so did not want to appear completely incompetent. I think I got an A, and I’m still good friends with the professor. I’m probably not great at Islamic theology overall, though.
Getting a divorce and starting ALL over – This has been a continuing series of small wins and small faceplants. By far the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and by far the most worth all of my faceplants.
Starting my first nursing job –This was faceplant on repeat. When you’re learning all that you don’t know, trying to navigate asking intelligent questions while not pissing off doctors for accidentally asking stupid ones, while trying to do good time management and avoid going home two hours after your shift ends, while trying not to look like you’re on the di-la-la yourself from pure exhaustion while handing out Dilaudid to patients….
Dating again post-divorce – I think this goes without saying. Dating after being out of the game for over ten years is no joke. I think I’ve committed plenty of faceplants I’m not even currently aware of. But, I pick myself up, reapply makeup to said faceplanted face, and do it again.
So, why do anything that might potentially result in a faceplant? Because, as Julia Roberts said in one of the greatest movies of all time, it’s better to have short moments of truly amazing and breathtaking, than spending an entire lifetime on this earth without experiencing anything really wonderful or meaningful. And as unfair as it may seem, life sometimes requires us to work for the really good stuff. There’s plenty of grace out there, but vulnerability is often the key to getting the greatest gifts.
I would much rather faceplant and make a fool of myself on a daily basis then die and have to tell whoever it was that made me that I wussed out on life because I was too scared to live it, or let it live me….whichever it is.
All of my epic life faceplants have made me who I am today, and they have revealed more of who I am as my authentic self by sometimes ruthlessly peeling off all my protective layers. Faceplants are proof that you are out there trying, attempting hard things, and growing as a person.
I continue to risk faceplanting because I want my kids to be brave in life and not be afraid to really go for it and give it all they have. If I live too carefully, they might be more likely to approach it timidly as well. I want them to live as fully human as they can, to try all the things that they are passionate about, to refuse to be held back by “what if’s” or “shoulds” or arbitrary rules telling them to play it safe all the time.
Most of all, I want to be able to look back from my deathbed and be able to say, “That was a damn good life.” Actually, I think I’m one of the lucky ones….my 39 years, faceplants and failures and all, has already been a damn good life.
My life has not turned out the way I had expected. Not even close. In fact, I have learned to never say “never” because when I do, I most assuredly will do the thing I swore to never do.
Way back in high school, I swore I would never be a chemistry major; this was related to PTSD I’d sustained in my junior year chemistry class. Lo and behold, I somehow graduated from college with a biochemistry degree.
I told myself in college that I never really wanted to have kids. Now, I have three.
I had planned on going to medical school, moving to some developing country, and NEVER living in the suburbs. I’ve failed miserably at this last one. All I’ve done for the last 15 years is live in the suburbs.
I had never planned on marrying someone just to have an unhappy marriage and finally get divorced. I had never planned on staying in Indiana forever….good grief, I keep ending up back here. I had never planned on waving goodbye to so much of the faith and religious practices of my childhood.
Some days, when I’m really tired, stressed, and overwhelmed, I think: “My life wasn’t supposed to be this way. I didn’t do it right. I made some of the dumbest choices years ago and can I please get a do-over?!”
(In this section, the pronoun “they” is used to maintain maximal ambiguity about the person I’m writing about.)
I took care of a patient in the hospital recently whose life did not turn out the way they had expected. This person lay motionless in bed, hour after hour, their body ravaged by a neurological disease that left them contracted and rigid; the only movement this person was capable of was talking, chewing, swallowing and opening their eyes.
As my shift went on and I spent more time with this patient, they told me of all the plans they had made with their spouse to travel around the world and see all they could in their retirement. Instead, all the funds the couple had saved up was being spent on hospital bills and ambulance rides and home health nurses.
As my patient talked about these things, they cried. Silent, but hugely expressive weeping, with tears I wiped away with a tissue because they couldn’t move their arms to do so on their own. I fed this patient their dinner on this shift; bite after bite of minced up ham, then bite after bite of applesauce, and cottage cheese, and pudding. Forty-five minutes of small spoonfulls they could tolerate without choking.
Through this shift with this one patient, I finally got what Eckhart Tolle means when he talks about extreme presence. I’ve cared for people before who were completely immobilized – people missing half their skulls from being slammed into by cars, people who were breathing the death rattle of their final hours – but this patient was the teacher that helped me really get it.
This was a time when platitudes wouldn’t do. There was no point in saying “Everything’s going to be OK”, because everything, in fact, is not going to be OK. There was no use in saying, “Well, at least you can still do….”.
This patient was trapped in their own body and there was not a damn thing that was going to change it. There would be no magic cure. There would be no hope of a different ending to their life. Life had committed to taking this person by restricting what they physically could do at a frightening pace, all the while leaving their mind completely intact.
It seemed so completely unfair, so completely wrong of the universe to jack with a person like this, to completely rip their dreams away from them. These are the moments when it seems quite right to say, “What the fucking hell, God?! What did this person to deserve a death like this?”
Arguing with reality is futile. This is what Tolle tells us: that fighting against what is, by refusing to accept it...this is what causes our suffering. But I think sometimes people need others to sit with them in their harsh realities to help make it a little more palatable, a little less lonely. Ten years ago, sitting with a patient like this would have made me extremely uncomfortable. What do you do for a person that can’t do anything? What do you do when you can’t fix the problem? What do you do when there are no solutions to try? What do you do when God isn’t offering you decent answers for why this has happened?
There’s a program across the United States called No One Dies Alone, or NODA, for short. This is a program in hospitals where volunteers come and sit vigil with a person who is dying alone, without family or friends at the bedside. I volunteer with NODA at a local downtown hospital, and have sat for hours with the dying. In these cases, there is only one thing to do: not try to “fix” the patients, not try to reach into their unconscious states and convince them not to be afraid of what lies ahead….the only thing necessary, and the only thing possible, is just to BE with them.
Growing up in the church, I’ve heard all sorts of definitions of what it means to forgive. However, most of the examples have been complicated and hard to wrap my head around, especially when it feels like the offending person gets off with a free pass. And, most of the explanations are packaged in a theology that doesn’t sit right with me. But just as hard as trying to understand how to forgive others is learning how to forgive myself for my countless dumbass choices, thoughtless words, selfish actions, and inability to move past so many of my insecurities and neurotic tendencies.
I was walking the dog a few days ago, listening to teachings by Eckhart Tolle on accepting reality. Out of nowhere, I had the realization: this is what REAL forgiveness is – the acceptance of what has happened and what is happening without struggling against it.
To accept what is means to not fight against what has already happened, saying it shouldn’t have happened, or constantly thinking backward to how you would change things if you could just do them over, or playing through memories again and again about the wrongs people did to you or you did to people. When we do that, we enter the world of illusion because the past doesn’t exist anymore. And in fact, what has happened, happened, and there’s nothing we can do to change it. Fighting against that is just a means of bloodying ourselves against a wall needlessly. Wrestling with the past, and trying to wrestle with the future before it happens, are what cause our mental suffering.
I think back about some of the people in my life that hurt me the most, the ones who gave me lots of mental and emotional baggage to drag around for years. For me to constantly dredge up that pain is useless…what’s done is done. Trying to outline all the ways they were wrong or horrible or thoughtless does absolutely nothing to change where I am now, and trying to do so leaves me stuck, unable to be fully present right now.
So, this is what I think real forgiveness is: letting what is, be. Refusing to look back and say “If only…..” or “If so and so hadn’t done such and such”….or “It shouldn’t be this way…”. The fact is, in this present moment, IT IS THIS WAY. When you think about it, this takes away so much of the burdens we carry around ALL the FREAKING TIME. If we accept this present moment as it is, and forgive the past by not arguing with it, we are free to do what we can with the present moment. Either we let it be as it is, or if we feel a change needs to occur, we evaluate our options at that moment and proceed forward after we’ve already accepted what is currently going on.
Forgiveness like this is not a matter of condoning what people do or the difficult circumstances life deals us; instead, it is all about of freedom to live fully right now and not in a dream world of should have’s and could have’s.
There are a couple of Jesus’ teachings that I’m thinking about here, relating to the past and the future. In one place in the Gospels, he tells people to come and follow him. They reply that before they can follow him they have to bury their father. Jesus tells them to let the dead bury the dead. He’s not being cruel here; he’s making the point that what is dead and gone is in the past….it should not keep you from living in the present moment and doing what you are being called to right now.
In another story, Jesus tells his listeners not to worry about tomorrow, because it will bring its own troubles. Today, this moment, has enough going on already.
And again, he tells of the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and how they do not worry and fret over everything, yet they are cared for, moment by moment.
At some point, I think we all need to forgive life for not being what we told it to be. We live these short little lives but believe we understand how reality should operate. We think we know what is best for us, and best for everything around us, and we decide what is good and right for everyone in every situation.
Life smiles, and keeps giving us new moments….now, and now, and now, and now. And really, we have absolutely no control. Forms come, and forms go; everything is passing. Clinging to anything is pointless and only causes us hurt.
It’s exhausting to try to cling to the past, present, and future all at once….I know, because I try on a regular basis. In fact, trying to “figure out” your life and how all the puzzle pieces fit together is an exercise in futility and literally impossible. There’s absolutely no way that we can understand it all and how we can fit into the great cosmic picture. Sometimes we can look back and see traces of how life might be guiding us, but even then, we have to be careful to not cling to where we then conjecture life might be leading us.
All there is is now. To be truly here, right now, we have to let go of our ideas of all that has happened….to forgive it by letting it be and not arguing with how it should have been different, so that we are free to be really alive right now in whatever is currently happening.
When I think about my patient trapped in their body….I think that part of our task is also to help be with people who are in situations so difficult that they might not be able to forgive life on their own. By sitting with them, truly present in whatever circumstances are there, showing them they are not alone in this moment. Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush wrote a wonderful book called Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Death and Dying, where they talked about dying and how to prepare oneself for death. I’ve listened to the audiobook multiple times, but I think the title really says it all. All there really is in this world that we can know for sure, is that we are to walk each other home – not walking each other toward some ethereal heaven that is set in chronological, linear time – but to walk each other into ultimate being and helping each other stay present in every moment of reality, no matter how challenging it is.
When I look at life and forgiveness in this way, they seem so much easier and seem to ask so much less of me than I always tend to think. It’s like Ram Dass famously says, “Be here now,” and then be here now, and then be here now.
One of my kids and I ran to Kroger this evening to grab a couple of things for dinner. It was just one of those quick in and out trips that should have been uneventful. As we were pushing our shopping cart to the back of my SUV to unload the groceries, I looked over to see the guy parked next to me loading up his truck with his own bags. And then, I saw that his open truck door was firmly smashed up against my driver side door. The door that I JUST got fixed when a driver backed her SUV into mine a couple of months ago. The exact same door that I had to take back to the body shop and have them redo the decorative metal strip because they apparently didn’t know to use a level when applying it, and instead of being parallel with the ground, it crept upward at an annoyingly obvious angle.
Of course, as it would turn out, the paint on my driver’s side door was damaged. Chipped, not just a paint smudge that could be wiped off. I was LIVID. Livid at the man for knowing I was watching him and actively ignoring me. Livid that the man knew his door was hitting mine and refused to do anything about it. Livid that he decided not to take responsibility and at least apologize to me. And livid, because what the heck?! Why does life give you these freaking exasperating experiences when your week is already stressful enough? It’s like God knows you are teetering on the edge of losing your mind and he thinks it would be helpful to offer you the last little shove necessary to finish the job…
I know, you are reading this and thinking, wow Julie, you need some serious therapy. It’s just a little paint chip. And yes, it is just a little cosmetic flaw on a 10-year-old SUV. In the grand scheme of things, it is a piddling little problem. Except…..I was already angry. Like…really, really angry.
In fact, for the last couple of months, I have been furious. Deep, dark, seething anger that has risen up out of nowhere….or so I thought.
Now, don’t get all upset on me…I’m not homicidal or anything, and I’m not about to go ballistic on anyone. The point is this: I’ve realized I had some intense pent up anger that built up over a decade, and I now finally have the space to deal with it. At least, that’s what the universe seems to be telling me.
Anger is a tough emotion to deal with. Growing up a good Christian girl, I was always taught that anger isn’t OK….you’ve got to eradicate it before you go to bed at night, and geez….who can really do that? It’s not exactly possible to have all your frustrations and wrongs addressed during daylight hours. As far as I understood for years, the only justifiable long0term anger is righteous indignation, like when you’re angry about injustices that occur in the world. I’ve noticed, however, that people usually have limited patience when individuals feel angry about injustices or wrongs personally done to them, and they aren’t able to get over their anger quickly enough. We tend to be uncomfortable allowing others to grieve or be angry for very long. We want them to fix it or get over it.
I have a super wise therapist friend who once taught me that anger is a secondary emotion. It really is a front for four or five other primary emotions: fear, embarrassment and shame, guilt, frustration, etc. One of my kids was having real struggles with anger a few years ago and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Once my friend explained this concept to me, it was much easier to ask my son the right questions, dig deeper, and find out the underlying cause of his anger. And she was right. He was usually embarrassed about something when he became angry, or afraid of looking incompetent.
I’ve been doing some digging now into my own anger. I don’t like it honestly. The raw, human part of me wants to feel and flesh out my anger because anger makes you feel validated, and justified. But anger burns you away from the inside. Frankly, it is also exhausting.
It became clear that I carried years of pent up anger from my 12-year marriage. Like, ALOT of anger. For the first couple of years after I got divorced, I was trucking along just fine, and then BAM!, a volcano of all kinds of vile emotions started pouring out from the recesses of my mind. As you recall, I grew up a good Christian girl and I still have enough of that in me that it makes me control my outward behavior and I can present myself appropriately to the world. 🙂 But my best friends know my struggle – they know how I want to yell and rage and stomp and throw things, and that I’ve used the word HATE on multiple occasions, and all the shame that comes with that because good Christian girls aren’t supposed to hate anyone.
But this is real life, y’all. Which is why it needs to be written about. Because we all have situations like this. And we all get angry.
So why all the anger now? I think that this is part of the healing and grieving that comes from going through hard things in life. God knows the dark parts locked away inside of us that need to be dealt with, even if our conscious minds don’t. And God clearly knows that I have some stuffed up emotions and a big pain body locked away within. And until I deal with them, they insidiously poison me and control other areas of my life, limiting me from being the best me.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t know I was angry for all those years, because I had developed coping mechanisms to survive. We all do this at times in life. If we are faced with difficult situations that we don’t think we can escape, we construct stories or ways of dealing with things to avoid the despair and frustrations that we don’t think can be resolved. I know I felt this way. For most of my life I thought divorce was wrong in pretty much every circumstance. I knew I wasn’t happy, but I also knew if I was going to be married for the next forty years I had to figure out a way to make things work so I wouldn’t be absolutely miserable.
And so I justified, rationalized, created stories, overlooked wrongs, etc etc, etc, to try and cope with a life situation that I absolutely didn’t want. I couldn’t be angry at the time because that certainly doesn’t help create an easy forty-year path.
But now, I am no longer in what felt like a seemingly hopeless situation, so all of that suppressed anger has come up. And believe me, you can build up alot of anger over 12 years.
Pema Chodron, a Buddhist monk who you should absolutely acquaint yourself with if you haven’t already, wrote a book on anger called Don’t Bite the Hook. Actually, I think its an audio recording of a talk she gave once. ( I have it on audible). In this book, she talks about learning to see anger as a teacher, not as an enemy. She offers that if we learn to work with anger and be open to it, it can teach us to be more compassionate and wise instead of just escalating on autopilot into aggression and violence.
There is a concept she discusses called shenpa. Literally, it means “attachment”, but the idea behind it is the same as the theme of her book title: “getting hooked.” A review of her book in Tricycle magazine describes it well. Something happens to you that you don’t like, and a shift happens deep inside you, and you’re suddenly hooked. Or, as Eckhart Tolle describes it, the pain body, that was lying dormant within, suddenly wakes up and begins to arise, taking over your thoughts and emotions. A couple of possible examples to illustrate: My ex-husband says something that irritates me and suddenly I tighten up inside and feel snarky. A colleague drops the ball and I have to do extra work, but instead of just letting it go and doing what needs to be done, I latch on to the “unfairness” of the situation and seethe until my ego is soothed. Or, I come out of Kroger and find that a stranger wasn’t diligent with his own property and allowed mine to be damaged. And, instead of giving grace for it, I clench my teeth and latch on to the angry emotions arising. This is shenpa.
I’ve been thinking about Chodron’s idea of working with anger alot lately. Other Buddhist teachers discuss similar ideas, like inviting difficult emotions in like they are good friends, not fighting against them. Apparently, when this practice is done regularly, those emotions begin to dissolve and don’t seem to be quite the toxic invaders they once were.
There are many emotions that are easier to sit with than anger. Give me some sadness, grief, joy… But anger is harder because you either want to feed it with delicious fantasies of getting revenge on the person or thing that wronged you, or it makes you want to retell your stories to everyone who will listen and revel in their assurances that you were treated terribly and you poor thing and how dare someone do that to you and…..you get the idea. Shenpa, as the Tricycle writer wrote, is very much an itch that yearns to be scratched.
If there’s one thing I know about life, it is that is it is very patient and generous in helping one learn lessons. God will keep bringing the same lesson around again and again in different forms for you to learn until you finally learn it. It is really, really aggravating.
However, since I’ve learned this, I’ve also gotten smarter and recognized that if I want to decrease my suffering, I might as well learn the lesson early on. God has no problem waiting me out. But, I’ve also learned that you can’t be sneaky with God. My first tendency is to pretend I’m not angry about anything and act all kum ba yah with the world. God sees right through that and will promptly allow something to happen that proves to me that my anger is still ripe and ready for picking.
My second tendency is to run straight to therapy and try to fix my anger asap: a little EMDR, a little talk therapy, maybe even a little primal screaming. Yeah, nope. While therapy is brilliant, it is not a quick fix. We have to do the hard work, and the hard work insists on sitting with things, creating space, and just allowing things to be for a while.
So, I’m totally writing this post from an unenlightened state. But I’m giving myself a billion points for at least being aware enough and willing to admit that I’m really angry about alot of stuff that has happened over the last 15 years. But I’m also giving myself another billion points for knowing that my anger really isn’t all about my ex-husband, or the Kroger parking lot guy, or any other person or event. My anger is really rooted in all the stories I believe about life and myself. It is rooted in underlying emotions of shame and feelings of incompetence and fear.
Welcome anger, come in and sit for a while. Teach me about the deepest places in myself. Tell me about my fears and insecurities. Help me to become more compassionate and wise. And may I enjoy a deeper sense of connectedness with every other person who has also struggled with their own shenpa and anger.
*I use a masculine pronoun for God in this post simply out of convenience.
A couple good friends and I closed down a Starbucks the other night, catching up after not being together for several months. These are two of my people – the ones I can get REALLY real with, ask the deep questions with, and speculate about the point of ALL of IT.
One theme that each of us has struggled with at different points in the last few years is having our expectations for the way life works completely thrown back in our faces. We thought that if we only worked hard enough, played by the rules, were nice to everyone, and sacrificed ourselves….then, the kinks of life would unravel, we would suddenly find our true purpose and financial security, we would be treated well by all, and would live out the rest of our lives in relative ease and happiness.
Along the way, my friends and I have each discovered that life doesn’t play by the rules, at least not the rules that we were raised to believe. Rather, the best-laid plans can fall apart before our eyes. The people we struggled to understand and love often turned their backs on us or remained just out of our grasp. Many goals we worked so hard to reach were finally achieved, but with a bittersweet taste left in our mouths as other troubles rose up to join the ones we thought we’d left behind. And when the quiet moments come, we wonder when the other shoe will drop. Was all of our striving for naught in the end? Is life only, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, a mere chasing after the wind?
We have each fought hard to cling to life, to let it dance us, to doggedly pursue hope time and again. But as one of us asked the others, if working hard and doing all the right things doesn’t get one anywhere, what else is there?
I once heard Anne Lamott say somewhere that God loves rock bottom. Part of me hates this. Like, what….God needs us to get suicidal before he can work with us? We need to be beaten down again and again as “punishment” for all of our good intentions and hard work? And why is life so timely? You barely start to crawl up from one clubbing only to be throat punched by some other trouble.
I guess if God loves rock bottom, he’s either absolutely hateful, or there is something good that can come from it.
But if I’m honest, the more God bloodies me, the more resilient I’m becoming. It’s getting harder to knock me back down, and takes bigger blows to get me there. This kind of battling makes one see what is really worth getting upset over, and it reveals my ego’s own pettiness in the past for getting so riled up over the dumbest of things. Every once in a while I get a little brave and Captain Dan-ish, screaming: ” Is that all you’ve got? You really think that’s gonna bring me down?”, with a belligerent yet still timidly respectful middle finger held out in my mind.
Remember that praise and worship song from a couple decades back, Refiner’s Fire? I used to like the song, but now I laugh when I hear it because of how superficial it is. It’s a lovely melody always sweetly sung about how we are simply delighted to be refined in God’s fire to become holy and pure. I can’t help but wonder if the writer of that song had ever suffered. Suffering is not sung about in major chords to an audience of swaying and softly sobbing onlookers. Real rock bottom with God feels like a shit-hole, like you’ve been abandoned and there’s no hope for much of anything. When God burns away parts of you that you thought were necessary for your identity and security….that freaking hurts like hell….especially in the dark nights when you’re not sure if he will rescue you when he’s had his way with you. I think appropriate music for what God often takes us through is much more along the lines of minor chords and death metal, followed up by some mourning bagpipes once he has successfully broken us to pieces.
Having expectations has never really helped me out much in life, though I still seem to latch on to them. Very few things or people have actually turned out the way I’d expected or hoped. In fact, the more expectations I have, the more disappointed I end up being all the way around. But we cling to our stories, don’t we, as though we had such great control over much of anything in the first place?
As I get older, expectations around fairness seem to be absolute folly even though I haven’t been able to rid myself of them. Life isn’t fair, never claimed to be fair…yet we always put that demand on it. Where did we get that from? Even the God of the Gospels wasn’t fair in how he treated people. Maybe he was just, but he wasn’t fair.
It’s like that line from the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe….Aslan isn’t safe, but he’s good. God isn’t safe, but he’s good.Life isn’t safe, but it’s good.
How do we know that life is good, that the Divine big picture is working in our favor and not against us?
Though I hate to admit it, I’m coming to realize that rock bottom part is the only thing that can truly show us the inherent goodness of all things. But it’s really hard, because if we fight against rock bottom, we are so blinded by our suffering that we can’t see anything but ourselves and what we “think” we’re losing. But if we breathe through rock bottom, and let the suffering shake us hard and then pass through, we can find that something pure, something real, remained. Our real selves. The divinely infused core that is connected to all things, is loved completely, and is well.
Even if it seems silly, I believe that from rock bottom springs forth deep magic. It is the same resurrection magic that transformed the suffering of Jesus into hope and transcendence. Didn’t Jesus say all along that to truly live, to truly understand what is real and lasting, we must die to ourselves? (Or, in Julie’s commentary, we must die to who we think we are – our identities, our stories about ourselves and others, our illusions about the permanence of what is around us).
So, maybe God really does love rock bottom…not because he wants to see us in pain, but because he knows it is the one place where we can finally be freed of facades, and all the games we play, and all the belief systems we construct, and all of our expectations for how life should work. Maybe, as Don Miguel Ruiz says, we are born into this life and fall into a dream…and maybe we need a hard shake (or many hard, gut-wrenching, strip-us-bare shakes) to wake us up again.
I am addicted to podcasts. In my opinion, the podcast is the best media form that has sprung up in recent years. Not only are they an avenue for disseminating quality information on various subjects, they are also an easy mechanism for even the most amateurish to generate conversation and introduce the world to people and ideas that we simply need to know about.
A few years ago, I did a graduate program at Johns Hopkins in science writing. We briefly covered podcasts, and I remember one of the professors commenting that podcasts would not be a long term, viable option for generating enthusiasm and communication about science. I scoffed at that statement then and still do. If anything, podcasts are a way to draw people into topics and ideas that maybe they’d never otherwise take a listen to.
So, without further adieu, the following list contains my favorite and go-to podcasts. Some I’ve listened to for years, others I visit only occasionally, and a couple are either new or ones that I recently stumbled upon and find fabulous. I encourage you to give these a listen, and pass on any podcasts that I need to add to my listening queue.
The Robcast – What can I say? I love Rob Bell and his podcast for SO many reasons. He started this podcast kind of as a lark based on someone’s suggestion and records in the “Back House” in his back yard. He covers basically everything that delights and intrigues him, from theology to music to people he finds fascinating. Some days he interviews people, other days he waxes poetic on whatever he is currently chewing on, and recently, he’s done a three-part running commentary series on all the books he’s written. Bell’s ideas were a theological game changer for me starting about six years ago, and he’s just a crazy fun person to listen to. I am also beyond excited to see him live on his Introduction to Joy tour next month.
Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me – If you listen to NPR, you should have heard about this radio show/podcast. If not, go immediately listen to an episode. WWDTM is a news trivia show featuring some of the best comedians like Paula Poundstone, Mo Rocha, and others. The show producers manage to find some of the most fantastical and ridiculous news stories to ask the panelists about. Some famous person is interviewed and then pulled into the trivia game as well. This is my favorite lawn mowing and road trip podcast because it keeps me hysterically laughing for a full hour at a time. One day I will be so lucky as to make it the Chase Bank Auditorium in Chicago for a live taping.
Newsworthy with Norsworthy – This podcast is hosted by Luke Norsworthy, a Church of Christ pastor in Austin Texas, who I happened to go to college with. I didn’t know him well at all, and honestly thought at the time that he was a never-serious, white boy with dreads, youth pastor type. Well, he has impressed me well with this podcast. He’s pulling in great people for interviews, covering a lot of Christian and theological perspectives. Richard Beck, Shane Claiborne, Rob Bell, Richard Rohr, on and on and on. And while Luke can be goofy and joke around on his show, he is definitely a deep thinker, and I humbly stand corrected about my first impressions of him.
Sounds True-Insights at the Edge – This is one of the podcasts I’ve listened to for the longest. I don’t even remember how I found it, but Tami Simon’s ability to bring in diverse spiritual teachers from all walks of life has really worked to stretch my mind. Some of the spiritual teachings that have most helped me were from people featured on this podcast. Pema Chodron, Don Miguel Ruiz, Caroline Myss, and so many others were first introduced to me here. Some of the interviews on this show can get pretty deep, and every so often I’ll listen to an episode where I just don’t buy the teaching at all. But I very much credit Tami Simon with presenting us with so many spiritual paths to investigate and learn from.
On Being with Krista Tippett – This podcast is another that is actually a radio show. Krista is a journalist who pulled away from her conservative Christian roots to find a broader, more encompassing spirituality. She interviews theologians, artists, poets, journalists, social justice activists – all in the search of wisdom, meaning, and evidence of our greater interconnectedness. If you want a podcast where spirituality, culture, and art intersect, this is a good place to visit.
The Rich Roll Podcast-Rich Roll is an ultramarathoner and triathlete with an amazing story. He was an alcoholic and unhappy lawyer who let the athleticism of high school and college go, finding himself overweight and out of shape. After an epiphany struggling to walk up a flight of stairs one day, along with the encouragement of his wife, Rich turned his life around. He became a vegan and began pursuing some amazing athletic feats, which he talks about in his book, Finding Ultra. (I recommend reading or listening to this book….it’s really good).Now on his long-form podcast (think 1.5 to 2 hours per episode), he dives deep into conversation with others about fitness, nutrition, spirituality, leadership, self-development, sustainability, and so many other topics. If you want to be inspired to get off your couch and start making some serious life changes, check this podcast out.
Good Life Project – This podcast has something for everyone. Jonathan Fields interviews basically anyone worth listening to these days. I mean, SERIOUSLY. Brené Brown to Liz Gilbert to Seth Godin to Scot Harrison to Michael Pollan to Courtney Carver to Matthieu Ricard, and a BUNCH of other people that I still need to become aware of. It’s a show that mixes inspirational stories with motivation to get out and the things that bring meaning and purpose in life. Ya just can’t go wrong with this one.
You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes–I first learned about Pete Holmes through Rob Bell. The two of them are great friends. A couple of years back I was lucky enough to see them on tour together in Boston, and my small claim to fame is that I sat in like the third row of the audience. Pete is a comedian, and a quirky one at that – BUT, he has a deep side, too. He left the conservative religion of his youth but is reconstructing his spirituality now along the same spiritual teacher lines that I am – he name drops Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Richard Rohr, etc, all the time. And yes, I’m jealous because he’s like the billionth podcaster I know who has gotten to meet and talk to Richard Rohr. I think I’m going to start a podcast simply so I can try to bribe an hour of Rohr’s time. Pete interviews a range of people, from theologians to comedians. His style and sense of humor might not sync with everyone, but he’s worth giving a solid listen to.
Awaken with JP Sears Show– I loved JP from the very first silly YouTube video of his that I saw. He makes fun of everything from eating vegan to using essential oils to “Prancer-cizing”, all to make very good points. He points out bad logic or our inflexible ways of thinking through a ridiculous persona. But, also like Pete Holmes, he has a serious side that he likes to express in very non-serious ways. Last year he started an Awaken with JP online community, consisting of weekly videos and a Facebook group. I was a part of the group for a while (but left only because I needed to divert the membership fee to some other life crisis) and it was really good! In fact, if you’re gonna join an online group to pursue spiritual awakening in the real world, I totally recommend it. I recently stumbled upon his podcast and have found it to be just another delightful outlet of his personality and what he has to offer the world. Definitely check him out!
Dance Floor Podcast– I go to a Mennonite church in Indianapolis, and this summer we suddenly had a new guy leading worship. As it turned out, his name was Clint Reed and he and I discovered we used to attend the same church for years but had never met. He and a friend of his, someone I also had mutual friends with but had never met, Larry Mitchell, started up this podcast. This is a local goodie that opens up the conversation about our doubts, finding connection and meaning, and seeing what God might be up to. May I especially recommend the episode where my friend, Bob Brown, talks about smashing the patriarchy.
The Minimalists–The pursuit of minimalism has dramatically changed my life. And no one can pursue minimalism these days without hearing about Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. They’ve written books, they go on tour, they have a documentary on Netflix, they have a podcast. On their show they discuss all different aspects of minimalism, from philosophy to tangible tips to help reduce our consumerism. The best part: they aren’t the minimalism police. They’re real people who live in the real world who just want to show others that it isn’t “stuff” that makes us happy.
Main Street Vegan–Anyone who eats plants should listen to this podcast. Victoria Moran literally covers EVERYTHING about plant-based eating and vegan living. She talks to medical experts, plant-based athletes, theologians, chefs, clothing designers, animal rights activists, etc….basically every possible nuance of the vegan world. If you’re plant-based already, or curious about it, give this how a listen.
Another Name For Everything– In honor of my birthday this year, Richard Rohr started a podcast. Just kidding, I tell myself that to pretend like he even knows that I exist. I hope there really is a heaven just so I can finally meet him, since it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen in this life. Richard Rohr is probably one of the greatest single influences on my life, and he has no clue. If you haven’t read his books, like Falling Upward, Everything Belongs, etc., you really, really need to. I’ve been listening to his latest book, The Universal Christ, on Audible and think it might be his pinnacle work. However, if you don’t delve into his books, introduce yourself to him through his podcast, which is a 12-part conversation about the book.
A few other podcasts that I’ve enjoyed immensely in the past and still dip into:
The Enneagram Journey and The Road Back to You (great podcasts on the Enneagram, and Suzanne has the best soft-spoken Southern accent – I’d probably listen to anything she said just based on her voice.
The Fundamentalists with Peter Rollins and Elliot Morgan – Rollins is another great theologian (with a fantastic Irish accent) that I learned of thanks to Rob Bell
*I was inspired by the reflections of others at church today. This is my response to our collective conversation.
When I was young, I truly believed there was something wrong with me. Something wasn’t right about me being here in the world. I recall, as a child, having moments where a feeling would pass over me – a tangible sense that I don’t belong here, that I’m not fully legitimate. This feeling would come out of nowhere and usually last no more than a couple of minutes, but it was powerful and had a deep influence on how I viewed myself for a very long time.
A child isn’t usually well equipped to understand these kinds of phenomena, and I certainly wasn’t an exception. I don’t think I ever mentioned these transcendent moments of gloom to my parents. I would simply try to shiver the feeling off like a chill up my spine and move on. Eventually, and thankfully, these feelings stopped coming over me – probably about when I was in junior high. However, beliefs about inadequacy and not fitting in were firmly entrenched in my psyche.
In one of my last posts, I wrote about how it feels to lose one’s sense of home. You know that Bon Jovi song that was popular a few years back “Who says you can’t go home?”? The thing is, sometimes you really can’t go home back to a physical place, or even a group of people. Your family may move on from the house you grew up in. Maybe you’ve changed so much since leaving home that when you come back, there are only faint glimmers of recognition towards you in the eyes of those you once knew so well. Even those things that were part of “home” that once belonged to you might no longer be yours.
I’ve experienced this sense of “losing home” for years now, a little at a time, and then with increasing rapidity. After moving around the country frequently over the last 13 years, I struggled to find a solid, physical home. Who are my people? Where is my tribe? Is there a piece of land I can anchor myself to? Who am I without external labels of what constitutes home?
Others have told me that they consider home to be wherever their partner or spouse is, or where their kids are – physical locale doesn’t matter. This has never been helpful for me – you can be married and still feel more lonely than at any time ever in your life. Your kids can be snuggling up to you and telling you how much they love you, and still, you can feel lost and uncertain of where you belong.
During this Lenten season, my church has been looking at the story of the prodigal son, from the Bible. For most of my life, sermons I’ve heard about this parable have focused on the depravity and pure selfishness of the son who spurned his father and left home. The older son was always offered a mild rebuke for being callous towards his penitent sibling. However, as we took several weeks to take a longer look at this story, more and more grace rose to the surface as we threw the traditional interpretation of this story on its head.
As one of my pastors said so wisely today, sometimes you have to leave home to appreciate home. She recalled how, as a new college graduate, she was so eager to jump off into her own life and away from her family. It took being away for months to begin to truly appreciate where and what she came from.
These days, I don’t judge the prodigal son much at all. The fact is, we all do stupid, thoughtless things when we are young. We are driven by our egos and we can become enchanted with the systems of the world. We are compelled to strive after those people and things that promise us happiness and meaning. This is just what we do as humans; we just vary a bit on how extreme we go. In fact, I might argue that the prodigal son was living out an essential component of authentic spirituality – he had to come to the end of himself before he could find who he truly was and what truly mattered. Call me crazy or a heretic, but I’m convinced that sometimes the greatest grace we receive is God allowing us to become completely wrecked at some point in our lives.
*************************************************************************************I think that more important than establishing a physical home, or finding where we fit among a group of people, we have to find “home” in ourselves. As the mystics have said, “I” and “me” is all there really is. Everything outside of me is ultimately my stories about the world and about people, based on my own beliefs and projections. But, “I” am the only one who will always be there for me, even when everyone else and everything else is gone. As such, it seems to me that if that’s the case, I should probably dig deep and find out who I really am. We’re going to be spending alot of time together.
*************************************************************************************The great journey of this life is to seek after one’s authentic, real self – to move past illusions of what are around us and appear to be real, down to the purest ultimate reality.’Most of my own life has been spent trying to be what I thought others wanted of me, and then failing miserably anyway. I didn’t explore the deepest realms of myself because the spirituality of my youth taught me not to trust myself, not to trust my instincts and gut reactions. When you think about it, not being able to trust yourself is a dreadful way to live. Everyone, I mean everyone, in the world, will offer their opinions and judgments on what you should do with yourself, how you should act, who you should be. But how do you know which of those people to trust to make your decisions? How do you discover the right path outside of yourself if you can’t trust your own reasoning? It’s all a very circular mess.
Coming home to yourself is a recognition, a learning, that you’re OK and you have all you need within you. When we are finally able to accept ourselves, love every part of ourselves – even the weirdness and quirks and cellulite and crow’s feet and all of our epic mistakes -this is actually the greatest freedom we could ever attain. Coming home to yourself also brings the life-changing realization that the Source of Ultimate Reality, God, or whatever you want to call her, is within you – not somewhere “out there”.
I have never been the prodigal in the popular sense of the word. In fact, I resonate the most with the son who stayed behind with his father. But like the older son, I didn’t stay out of altruistic loyalty but out of fear of stepping too far away, crossing the wrong boundary, and losing God’s love and good pleasure. But I think the sons were alike in that both of them were seeking external affirmation for their lives. One, the older son, was bound to an honor/shame code of what it means to be family, and the second was lured away by all the illusionary glitters of life that he thought would make him happy. Both needed to come home to themselves, to discover what made them tick apart from anyone else’s opinions, and to find the steady love of their father no matter their actions.
As I am, step by step, coming home to myself, this is what I’m finding: my oldest, biggest fears are gradually falling away. The questions and concerns that created those fears no longer seem so pressing or relevant. I’m discovering that every time I make a decision based on what is truly “me” and not based on someone else’s opinion of what I should do, there is continual grace for the outcome.
The best thing of all is that I enjoy being with myself now. I used to be embarrassed by my very nerdy tendencies, my lack of interest in things that intrigues so many of my peers, and qualities in me that set me in stark contrast to much of my family. Now, having given myself permission to be me, I have settled into a delicious relief – no more exhausting struggles to be someone that I’m not.
Yesterday in church a friend of mine shared something that her son said as a two-year-old, years ago, when his father was putting him to bed one night. “Daddy, you be you, and I’ll be me.” I LOVE this. Yes! This is what it’s all about.
You be you, and I’ll be me, and God will be all in all and there is grace for everyone and every moment. Stop being afraid of all the “what-ifs” – just come home.
A random assortment of things that I’ve picked up over 38 39 years, from people, books, and my own experience. These are my rules to live by.
You can’t choose who you love; you either do or you don’t, and you are free to love whomever even if they don’t love you back. And you can be OK with being loved back or not being loved back.
It is never too late to stop, turn around, and go in the other direction.
Where you live doesn’t matter, and where you live doesn’t bring happiness. You can be just as happy in a little house in nowheresville as you can be in a big house in a happening place.
How other people treat you has little to do with you. They are dealing with their stories about you. Likewise, when you have a problem with someone else, it is really a problem within yourself. You are projecting your own baggage onto other people.
Eat less. Eat unadulterated food as much as possible. Plants. You’ll just feel better.
Try to never make decisions rooted in fear, guilt, or shame. Choose what you want in your heart and stand by your decision.
God isn’t angry. He/she was never angry.
You don’t have any problems right now. Your “problems” are either in the future or the past, and those are just illusions.
Do whatever necessary to protect your sleep rhythms. It heals you.
Don’t forgive people to make them feel better. Do it simply to liberate yourself.
Cut yourself some slack when parenting. The things that scarred you are not the same things that will scar your children. Stop trying to extrapolate how every one of your mistakes will ruin your kids’ lives.
Two glasses of wine in one sitting is enough.
Sometimes radical self-care looks like complete irresponsibility in the eyes of others. Just carry on. You know what you need.
Pay attention to your dreams; they can tell you alot about yourself, and sometimes offer glimpses into the future.
Let your children be your teachers: they reflect back to you who you are.
Welcome whoever life brings your way, but intentionally choose who you do relationship with.
Give away most of your stuff. Only keep what brings you joy.
Don’t wait for the perfect temperature; go outside and play anyway.
You can do more than you think you can; it’s all really just a mind game.
Your parents did the best they could with what they knew at the time. Generally.
Family is not always biological. They are sometimes found in the most unexpected people.
Find what you’re really passionate about and pursue it with abandon.
It is possible to find at least one commonality with every single person you meet.
Jesus was totally right when he said to find yourself you must first lose yourself.
Working in the hospital can freak you out. Healthy people get sick. Get the flu shot.
Cheese and corn syrup are in literally everything. Read the labels.
Sometimes you need to plan diligently, deliberately. And sometimes you need to be bat-shit crazy impulsive.
Community is important, whatever that looks like for you.
Sometimes the scariest option is the absolute best option.
Just buy the hammock.
Don’t avoid doing what you really want to do just because no one is there to do it with you.
Live your questions; don’t demand answers for everything.
Surround yourself with people of all ages. Babies and the very old usually have the most sense.
Don’t hit. Ever. It won’t bring the results you want.
Don’t punish yourself for making a bad mistake by living with that mistake forever.
People will exploit you only as far as you will tolerate their behavior.
There is enough.
Everything belongs.
Sit with a dying person, and really SEE them. It might be the most meaningful thing you ever do, and it might be the only time they’ve ever really been seen for who they are and not what they do.
Scientuality 