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February 3, 2024
The sun is shining!

I wanted to give you a little update because we’re in a new month now and some of you may recall that I started the new year with a very clear intention: to do an experiment on myself in in what I call the power of the mind. The idea is that every day, all the time, I choose to think positively about everything.

For real.

I have read about this and studied it. I have hung out with the idea for a long time. I hear Joe Dispenza and Michael Singer and Caroline Myss and many others talk about this. I started the new year reading Marcus Aurelius, who, two thousand years ago, was writing about this stuff, too.

So it feels like the concept has some staying power. I just have never understood why more people aren’t practicing this, why so many people are angry and sad and anxious and confused when all of these amazing humans have been telling us for a really long time that we have the power to create the conditions of our life, basically by controlling out thoughts. Which, I mean, come on, let’s face it, it’s free! You don’t have to sit through endless hours of counseling or take any drugs or anything other than stop yourself from thinking junk thoughts and start thinking positively.

Your thoughts, so the theory goes, create your material reality.

This should have been the curriculum in school, but, well, school.

For example, if you walk around all the time telling yourself that you suck at managing money, if you tell all your friends and your partner and your kids that you can’t get a grip on money, that you’ve never been good with money then you’re keeping that lousy story alive, you’re feeding it new energy all the time. And, surprise, surprise, you won’t get any better at managing your money. Everything will stay the same because that’s what you believe and that’s what you think and that’s the story you tell all the time.

If you choose instead to tell yourself the story that you are allowed to have money and you can handle having money and you do the work involved: get a ledger and write everything down, all your income and all the outgoing money, and you commit yourself to eliminating your debt or saving enough to, say, spend a month in the Bahamas, then that’s what’s going to happen. Every single day you tell yourself … I am allowed to have money and I can handle it … then you have changed the story and your life will follow.

So I wanted to share some updates after committing myself to this process for one month now.

First, I have never slept better. I was always a pretty good sleeper, but in recent times when I was awake in the wee hours of the morning I would get up and do some work. Then I’d sleep for a while longer. Not ideal. I am astonished by how well I sleep now, with little or no interruption, I sleep eight or nine hours a night.

The choice to have a positive mindset has spilled over to my overall health. I feel lighter and healthier. I eat more greens and stretch more often.

My conscious awareness of the world around me is expanding. What I mean is that I see things in my peripheral vision a lot more often now. I have always had this awareness, of light and other kinds of energy moving nearby, but I’m seeing a lot more now with a lot more frequency. In other words, my energy field is growing and my sense of other energetic experiences in my midst is expanding, too.

The universe is answering my queries with astonishing velocity. This morning I was thinking very clearly about the next stages of my life, where I want to be and what I want to be doing. I wrote to a friend to ask about space in her beautiful building and she responded within minutes with the information that space is opening up there next month.

I have shifted, without thinking about it, from thinking positively about all circumstances to choosing joy at all times. It was a natural and seamless progression. I feel the joy in my chest, welling up and spreading throughout my body. I smile a lot these days. My new thing is imagining every single cell in my body bursting with joy. Needless to say, this promotes good health, too.

What can I say? It’s working. There is an ease to my life, a genuine joy. I look forward to every new day. I am gentler in my relationships and clearer about the people and places I do not want to be around or in.

Life isn’t just on my side, life is inside, outside and all around.

The joy I feel has upped my curiosity quotient. I am amazed by everything: plants and snow and the light and blue sky. There are many synchronicities in my days, and those bring joy, too. It’s a circle of light.

I believe we are meant to live this way.

Like anything in life, this thing takes practice and dedication. It’s like building muscle, you see good results and you want to stick with the program, then something distracts you or maybe you reach a plateau and fall back into your old habits and routines. But you got a glimpse of something better and it feels good. In the case of the power of the mind, better feels kind of infinite. I cannot wait to see what comes next.

xomo

January 21, 2024
Sunday morning

I read a piece in the NY Times this snowy morning about an atheist chaplain and an inmate on death row in Oklahoma. Frankly I had never heard of the idea of a chaplain with no faith at all, so that piqued my curiosity.

Apparently every inmate on death row is, by Federal mandate, allowed to have a spiritual care person with them at the time of their death, so these two men started a conversation that grew into a friendship and the chaplain left his life in Brooklyn to accompany the inmate to his death.

Both of them talk about their upbringing and what they were subject to in the name of religion and how they turned away from that. They talked about their sense of the afterlife (basically nothing) and they talked about people—the condition of being human. It sounds like their conversations were deep and meaningful and that in the end they formed a meaningful friendship, a bond of mutual respect and love. Which is really awesome.

I found myself thinking one thing when I was done reading: no one gets it right.

Not one faith tradition, no religion. They’re are all human constructs built on the biases of their founders and they’re all wrong in one way or another, usually in about a thousand ways. Most particularly in their belief that they’re right.

And no human gets it right, either. Because we are all just best-guessing and everything we think is true or right has to move through the many filters of our lives: childhood, school, church, sports, friends, parents. We might be born Knowing, but that sacred truth is washed out of us pretty quickly by all the screwed-up people we interact with in our lives.

We all spend our lives constructing a set of beliefs based on our own unique experience of being in this world. Why we feel we have to press those up against anyone else is a mystery to me. My beliefs don’t become right when I prove that yours are wrong. Which, as we know, is impossible to do, so why even bother? No one ever really changes anyone else’s mind after a certain age.

Tragedy is one of the few things that will make us re-think life. Adversity, challenge, trauma, the loss of someone or something dear to us. Pain seems to soften us enough so that we stop thinking that everything we know and believe is true.

That’s the beauty of suffering. It is a beautiful, beautiful opportunity when dark days come because when you make it through there is a good chance you will be a better person, more compassionate, more curious, less correct.

Life is not nearly as much about being right as it about being in it. Being engaged, learning, doing, asking, trying, failing. Laughing at yourself as you go, because you don’t really know what the heck is going on, but you want to be in it, you want to be a solid participant in your life, engaged with the people in your tribe, helpful to those who need help. You want to show up.

You do not want to live your life with the hundred yard stare of a person waiting for the bus. You want to be in it, in the muck, engaged, willing to be wrong and to look foolish. You want life to do its work on you so that when it’s time for you to leave here you will go having really lived. Who cares what your theory or your beliefs are? They’re yours and no one else needs to know, unless they ask.

Wrestling with the Big Questions is a terrific idea, just don’t think for a minute that you’ll know the answers or that you have the answers. Life is a gigantic question mark from one end to the other and your job is to seek, search, ponder, wonder, wrestle. Stay open, always, until your last breath. It’s all an enormous magical, mystical, ever-changing crazy gorgeous mystery.

January 9, 2024
Peru, Vermont, snowing

It’s taken me a while to get to the keyboard to write because I’ve made a commitment in this new year and I’ve been pretty focused on that.

I decided to commit, 100%, to what I call the Power of the Mind. It’s a full-on experiment in what can happen if I choose a positive mindset all day, every day.

No kidding, right? It’s a job, for sure.

As part of this research project on myself I am also committed to removing all samskaras as well.

All of them.

Those are basically scars from your past. All the garbage your parents subjected you to, all the crap schools and churches made you do, any stuff from old partnerships. All the junk we hold on to and often grab and pull out for another juicy look at what went wrong. Which is most certainly counter-intuitive to living a good life, but we do it anyway!

I also made a promise to myself and the spirit realm for a fully committed partnership. What that means for me, a medium, is that I will make myself available for communication when someone here needs help talking with someone who has died.

It would be silly to do all of this, to fully commit to these things, if I didn’t have goals, that part is easy. The main goal is freedom. The freedom to live in this world in a joyful condition and all that comes with that.

This might sound crazy, it might sound unrealistic and it also might sound … not new.

On New Year’s Eve I watched the lovely film The Holdovers and there is a scene where the curmudgeonly boarding school teacher gives copies of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations as Christmas gifts. It turns out that that’s an excellent place to begin if you’re interested in this idea, that your mind, your thoughts create your reality. Aurelius was writing about it two thousand years ago.

It’s been repurposed by many writers since then. It’s been called The Secret, the Law of Attraction. Michael Singer has written several good books on the Untethered Life.

One of my favorites is a little-known book called Eden is Now, channeled by a woman named Maya Cointreau. She lived not far from me here in Vermont, though I never met her. She died a few years ago, in her 30’s I think. Eden is Now is fun and funny and playful and clear: Before anything can exist on the physical plane, it must first take shape and form in the astral, etheric planes. Having the idea is like planting a seed. It creates a blueprint for the form to manifest.

The secret really is no secret. If you believe that bad things are going to happen, if you spend your days thinking negative thoughts then eventually bad things will happen, which will reinforce your belief that bad things are going to happen to you and before long you are living in an unending cycle of bad things.

So what have you got to lose? Why not do a little experiment? I mean, what is it you think this life is for, anyway? Most certainly not for the acquisition of things. Most of them end up in a landfill or the thrift shop.

We did not come here to be angry, spiteful, resentful people. We came here to manifest the full potential of humanhood.

You can try even the smallest experiment: the minute you start thinking about something that’s bugging you, smile instead. Every time. It sounds and feels cheesy, but watch how your mindset shifts, how your body relaxes. Do it often enough and people will start talking about you in terms of your smile. It will catch on. Your smile alone has the power to improve the conditions of your own life, your physical and mental health, and the world around you.

But you’re too mad to try it, right? You hate your ex-wife so much you’re not willing to try joy instead of anger. You are so mad that your dad was such a jerk when you were a kid, you want to hold on to that feeling. You want to be mad, damnit! That boyfriend who left you ten years ago, you really want to keep hating him.

But maybe this is the year to stop all that. The anger and bitterness that you swallow on a daily basis eventually becomes disease. You don’t catch cancer, it’s not a cold bug floating through the air, you create the conditions for it in your mind and body. A body can’t handle endless frustration or disappointment or anger that seethes beneath the surface all the time. Eventually it sends up the red flag of illness in hopes you’ll change your ways.

So in this new year I am watching myself, catching myself, choosing joy all the time and observing, with curiosity, what happens. I’m looking around me for information about where my life is headed, what I should be doing. I pay attention to what people are saying, what books are showing up, who calls, what opportunities are presenting.

I turn 60 next year so it feels like the right time to commit to this experiment. I still have most of my faculties in tact. All the body parts are still working. My kids are launched and out there doing cool things. I’ve spent the last ten years in pretty intense spiritual exploration. I’ve studied the words of the living and the dead and the same things keep coming up: we have a lot of power to generate the life we want; we rarely put it to use.

I can tell you this much, after just nine days, I don’t have to catch myself as much. I find I am sleeping better and waking up feeling grateful and curious and joyful. It feels like there are unseen forces on my side. I find I’m not hungry the way I used to be in the winter, putting food in my mouth out of boredom and frustration and anger. I hate the cold! I’m having another waffle!

It’s kind of like … I’m an observer in my life. I’m watching myself in this experiment. I’m not trying to push my agenda, I’m watching things unfold. It’s cool.

And it can’t be half-assed, it has to be full commitment. I’m not letting myself off the hook on this one. Even when I have to do something I don’t really want to do, I change the story: this is fun, this is enjoyable, there is something in here that is going to be interesting.

I’ve also learned how and when to say no. This is not an experiment in saying yes to everything, there’s curating involved. But it is, indeed, a daily, full-on commitment to choosing joy, gratitude and a positive mindset.

I am certain that I have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

I trust that the Universe is far greater, richer and deeper than I have considered.

I believe that the Creator and I are in a mutually beneficial partnership.

I understand that I am here with purpose and that my life is my responsibility.

I choose truth and presence. And joy.

December 22, 2023
Merry Christmas

There are six teenage girls upstairs sleeping. By tonight my parents, son and nephew will be here. The toilet in the upstairs hall bathroom is leaking water and gas; the handle on the refrigerator door broke off and the car battery died, all in the past few days. Oh and a couple of the thermostats needed battery replacement.

Minor, right?

I thought I might take my Christmas Eve sermon out for a test drive here this morning. Just for yucks. Just to see if it sinks or floats.

The thing is, as a pastor Christmas and Easter are days to love and loathe. The church becomes overrun with folks who won’t be there a week later. Everything feels more amped-up on those days and we’re a casual church, unaccustomed to fancy dress or punctuality, really. Our gatherings are kind of organic and a little disorganized. The music is great and sometimes when I have a mic I’m inspired. Sometimes I find the fire and everyone feels it.

Christmas brings a weird set of emotions. It’s awesome to have so many people in church. It’s not awesome to feel like we’re putting on a little pageant for the benefit of the guests.

The Taurus in my fumes and says The rest of us are here the other fifty-one weeks of the year, trying to figure it out, working to build community. Then I remember that, as the tale goes, the pregnant couple couldn’t find a place to have their baby that night. The wayfaring strangers needed a warm room and some love. So I have to work on my holiday hospitality.

What do you say to a room full of people who might only be there one night of the year? How does a pastor capitalize on all those eggnog-soaked hearts? Because I know that a lot of them have a mindset about God. I know a lot of them have decided they don’t need any of it, it’s just a bunch of bunk, or that they get their spiritual kinks worked out in yoga class.

Which, that’s fine. I wouldn’t call myself religious, in truth. I don’t really care about organized religion. I don’t care if churches wither and die. I don’t. I care that churches figure out how to get with the program, pay attention to what’s happening in the world right now, lose all the musty and meaningless rules and habits and meet people on the weird road that many of us are walking right now here in this world. I want to see pastors ditch the silly costuming and condescending pastorly voices. I want to see more women running things. I want to see the actual tenants of Christianity — gentleness, humility, forgiveness, truth, service to the underserved — mirrored in the behaviors of leaders and congregants. Until that day, if a churches are dying, I say good riddance. Make some space for the new, better, more dynamic thing to arrive.

One of my favorite passages about God isn’t found in the Bible. I don’t know much about the Bible. I love old mythologies, but I’m always suspect about who ‘wrote’ them, who had access to printing, who was allowed to tell the stories … usually privileged white men, so … there’s that. Those texts are certainly to be referenced, but with the caveat that they were recorded at a certain moment in time—there was a context that no longer exists.

My favorite bit about God comes from The Count of Monte Cristo. There are two men in the scene, serving time in a really horrible prison in … France, I think, in the early 1800’s. One is a holy man, Abbe Faria, and the other is Edmond Dante who has been framed and wrongfully imprisoned. Just before his death Faria gives Dante the key to a buried treasure. Dante says that he’s going to use the fortune to get revenge on the man who put him in prison.

Do not commit the crime for which you now serve the sentence, Abbe Faria tells him, leave revenge in the hands of God.

I don’t believe in God, Dante says.

It doesn’t matter, Faria replies, God believes in you.

It doesn’t matter if you shun faith or God or think it’s all a joke, a fairy tale. It doesn’t matter if you look at the Grand Canyon or the Rockies or a butterfly in flight or a peony unfurling or a newborn baby and don’t see God. I don’t know how that’s possible, but ultimately that’s your business.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in God because God already believes in you. And the day you open your mind to that tiny seed of possibility is the day an entire world of wonder is born to you.

My standard response is, what have you got to lose?

We’ve all heard the story of the couple going to his hometown to register for the census, very pregnant, unable to find a place to stay, baby born in a barn, placed in a manger, adoring livestock hovering nearby.

I’ve given birth three times now, in a hospital, with lots of drugs. I know what that looks like, the screaming, the agony, telling the med students at the University hospital to get the f out of the room. I know the exhaustion, the insanity that comes with realizing that your body has produced another human, that was inside you for nine months and is now gone. A team of skilled doctors, midwives and nurses got me through those ordeals and if there had been a cow and a donkey in the room when it was all over I probably would have asked for a pistol.

It’s a cute story, and I do believe that God wanted us to know that God is in love with us and so maybe did present in human form in that baby. But honestly, I think God presents in human form in all of us, all the time. Jesus had some awesome skills (that sounded a lot like magic tricks), but I don’t fixate on that stuff much. I like the humility of his life, the kindness, the tending to the sick, lame and impoverished. I think I’d like anyone who could wave a wand and make a castle materialize, with staff, white stallions and an ever-flowing chocolate fountain, but chooses not to. That’s interesting to me. I always like the person who quietly gives his or her resources away, fixing broken things in the world without drawing any attention to themself.

We’ve heard the Christmas story so many times now that it kind of loses its zing, right? So what to say to a roomful of skeptics who are eager to get home to the figgy pudding?

When I was young and forced to go to church I hated it. It didn’t make any sense to me, the stories were weird and scary. It was an oppressive line we were fed: a powerful white guy in the sky keeping track of my transgressions. I liked the Santa version of that much better. At least he brought gifts. The payoff for good behavior in that narrative was much more appealing.

What would have made a difference? I think if I could have found myself in any of the stories, if any of it had felt … more real, applicable in my little life. I mean that’s what we’re all ultimately looking for, right, a story out there in the world that feels like home.

It took time, I needed to reject, seek, live. Then I saw it: I saw myself in the tired pregnant woman. I saw myself in the wanderers looking for shelter and finding none. I saw myself in their poverty, in their distaste for oppressive governmental decrees. I saw and see myself all the time in the shepards looking up at the night sky in wonder.

I saw and see myself all the time in their curiosity, in their choice to try to see what God was wanting to show them.

And seeing myself in those ancient narratives makes me realize that I belong here. Or, as Abbe Faria said, that I matter.

As strange as it seems, I think this is what we are all seeking all the time: a sense of belonging; the confidence that my life matters.

Manger, sheep, barn, inn, frankincense, the details don’t really matters all that much. But you matter, and I matter and that’s really important information.

And you don’t even have to believe it, you don’t have to buy into the idea of a Creator, a benevolent loving energy, if you don’t want to, that’s fine, your loss I might add. Because the God you doubt does not doubt you. And never will.

11.21
Lake Tahoe

Why does everything have to do so much heavy lifting in this life?

Why do mugs have to be philosophical and t-shirts whimsical? Why does a cup of coffee have to carry the same flavor profile of a pint of Baskin Robbins? Coffee is a flavor.

Why do teachers have to be parents and counselors and anti-warfare tactical specialists? Why must a dog be a therapist? Why do we need a laundry detergent with the scent of a wildflower field after a spring rain? Potato chips that taste like fries with ketchup …?

Can’t soap just clean, mugs just hold a drink? Can’t we let coffee be coffee and dogs be dogs, romping around sniffing things and bothering cats? I mean, come on … how great is a potato chip? Made with a real potato, crispy fried just right with a little salt? Perfection.

Did we get bored with plain? Have our tech-saturated brains gotten so used to being over-stimulated that we need all these weird layers of action around us? Where is this all headed?

I was very curious about that back-to-the-land moment during the pandemic when everyone was baking pies and growing beets. Everyone was talking about how nice it felt, to do so little, to do plain old things like finish a puzzle, take a nap, eat with family members.

Of course that was short-lived and we’re back to life in the fast lane, which, as the Eagles (band, not football team) sang, will surely make you lose your mind.

I wonder if this is why everyone is so tired all the time. Which, strangely, seems to be happening at a time when no one is able to sleep, too.

I mean I’m not an advocate for the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle. That idea has been monetized to hell and back. To note: the woman on Instagram who is the CEO of Ballerina Farm. She makes Martha Stewart look like a varsity slacker, romping around her Utah playhouse with something like eight kids (I’ve lost track), decorating for the holidays, cooking everything from scratch, and competing for Mrs. America in her spare time. She often wears a frilly apron, and she stops to do ballet moves when the kids are … I have no idea where the kids go, though not to school, naturally.

Of course she puts sausage and stuffing in a pumpkin for breakfast. But wait … first she makes the bread, then she makes the stuffing, then she cuts open the pumpkin and bakes it all…? Isn’t everyone rolling on the ground, screaming and crying with starvation at this point? Gosh, I remember very vividly the meltdowns I endured in the time it took to open a fruit roll-up when my kids were little.

Real farm life is hard. I know because I’ve lived near and been friends with actual farmers during the thirty years I’ve been in Vermont. I don’t recommend it at all, unless your husband is the heir to the Jet Blue fortune, as is the case of the Juilliard grad, Mrs. Perpetually Pregnant Giant Faker Farmer Ballerina.

The problem with this stuff, this pretend simple life persona is that she makes it look and seem like anyone can do all that she’s doing and have fun and always adore their partner and kids. Which they can’t. Unless there is a staff running around behind all the scenes that are cleverly crafted for public consumption.

That’s how that works.

I’m assuming that you, like me, do not have a staff. Not today, anyway.

Why do we think we have to do and be so much? Ballerina Farm is pure comedy, but unfortunately most people don’t see it that way. A lot of people think it’s real and awesome, like caramel marshmallow flavored coffee and a mug with a profound message that will undoubtedly jump-start you into the most amazing day of your whole life!

A mug is just a mug and coffee is a bean grown in a tropical climate, usually by underpaid farmers. Made pretentious only in its movement through the great money machine that convinces you you need (deserve!) the fanciest most delicious coffee drink in the world!

I most definitely do not want us all to turn from our lives toward a pretend Instagram-fab ‘simple’ lifestyle. But I do wonder if we might be healthier, better sleepers, less stressed, more content, if we could just accept some basic realities: a chair lets you sit, it doesn’t need to give you a massage or help you get up. If you can’t get out of your chair by yourself, something’s off and you should work on that. You don’t really need your t-shirt to tell the world how you feel. You just need something to cover your nakedness. Your bra does not need to lift and separate; your boobs, by design, fall down.

You’re picking up what I’m putting down, right?

But there’s this, too, and you know it will always circle back around to death with me.

If you can live your life seeing through all the nonsense, letting a mug do its job holding your plain, perfect coffee. If you can allow your dog to just lay quietly beside you while you do the hard work on your emotional life, if you can accept that you are ok the way you are and see the beauty in a rock and the stars, then when it’s all over you will be content letting your loved ones put you in a wicker basket or a shroud and lower you into the ground. You will have lived a satisfying life, not expecting your clothing to reshape you or your moisturizer to de-age you; you understand that everything holds an elegant simplicity and finding that is one of life’s great joys. And you will be able to transition away from here gently and peacefully, dust to dust to stardust to infinity.

Amen. xomo

11.9
Rain + Snow

Further notes on self awareness

I’m not entirely sure when this became about the weather, but it does seem to be the most obvious thing each time I sit down to write.

My daughter, Coco, sent me this photo yesterday.

She (left) and her friend, Clare, are on the ferry from Portland to Peaks Island in Maine.

I am a little obsessed because she looks so much like me when I was young. I absolutely love the face she’s making, in contrast to Clare’s smile. Coco has lots of great faces and this is one of my favorites.

I am very curious about the ways mothers and daughters interact, share DNA and traits. How much of me is there? How amazing and funny to be given a mirror in a kid, to watch evolve and bloom.

My daughter has a very nice life, the kind of life I dreamed of when I was young. I feel good about that, that one generation into this my offspring have access to many opportunities I didn’t.

I am proud of the many ways she’s strong and independent. She’s far away from me now, but I love watching her life unveil. She is working, meeting new people, living healthy, having fun.

She’s taking a cooking class in Rome next week!

Watching her sometimes puts me in a time machine and I don’t hate that.

I think there are two main features that distinguish my life with her from my life with my mother, when I was growing up: money and conversation.

There is much more of both now.

It’s easy to see how a paucity of one or both affects a person.

I got out my school records the other day. They’re funny and weird, the things upon which we were graded and judged so random and dumb. On one of the forms from a standardized test I took my junior year in high school I indicated that I intended to earn a PhD in forestry. The following year I noted that I was going to study food science.

I ended up getting a BA in English literature.

Funny.

The things I loved: the woods, food, reading. I still do but I don’t think I needed a degree in any of them, which is why I so admire that Coco is taking her time in figuring out if college is the right choice or not, looking in that direction with a critical eye.

I was a teacher: kindergarten, second grade, fourth grade, English, photography. Apparently I taught religious education in high school.

Then I was an AmeriCorps volunteer for a while. I think I couldn’t find a job after I got an M.Ed. Then I was a newspaper writer, photographer and editor.

Then I had a little shop and I was a photographer.

Then I became a hospital chaplain. Then a pastor. Then a hospice chaplain.

It took me almost 35 years to find my way to thing it feels like I’m supposed to do. Recently a woman read my natal chart and said, “It’s right here: you have a contractual obligation to death.”

I feel like we should have our chart read before we leave the hospital when we’re born. Or maybe at least make it an option. Can you imagine all the time we would save?

My other doppelgänger, my sister, is coming down from her perch in Alaska in a few days. I’ll be studying her, too. I have always thought she looks and sounds like me, but she’s super smart. I was too lazy to be that. I didn’t get that genetic material, either.

But daughters … I mean …

“We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they’ve come.” Ruth Handler

Of course we do. Why wouldn’t we?

Cheers, stay warm. xomo

11.2
Who Am I?
A little study in self understanding

If you are alone and naked in a room, separated from everything and everyone by whom you define yourself, who are you?

Tree falls in a forest kind of thing.

When you take away mom, sister, daughter, friend, partner, job description, activities description etc. etc., what’s left?

Imagine your end of life. Your work days long behind you, your time raising kids, spoiling grandkids well over, everyone’s stable and mostly OK. Your partner no longer here. You’ve done all the traveling you hoped to do, you even took a few risks. You’re in the bed now, quiet most days, preparing yourself to leave this world. Who are you now?

Is it even possible to define one’s self separately from all those roles?

One of the things I like to do is map my life. From time to time I go back and think about … all the islands I’ve visited or all the sports I’ve played, all the states I’ve been to. I map relationships that have held meaning, classes I’ve taken. It’s a really fun exercise and I’m often pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve done and seen so far.

Recently I started thinking hard about what I want to do with my remaining days. All the kids are gone now and we’re here in this very quiet corner of Vermont figuring out our next moves.

For a long time I thought I wanted to expand my role as a spiritual teacher and guide in this world. I always said I wanted a larger audience. So I took a pause and tried to figure out what I really mean by that.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a teacher. In part that had to do with my limited exposure to the world. My imagination wasn’t rich enough and no one had planted any seeds of think big! or you can do anything! in me, so I kind of defaulted to the stereotypical vocation for a woman: teacher. I love kids! was probably what I was thinking.

Looking back now I think I see it differently. When I was a kid I set up a little make-shift classroom in our basement. Not because I wanted to teach math or science, because I wanted an audience. I really think that what I wanted was to stand in front of people who would listen to me.

And I think … I’m a little afraid that that might have been the driving force, the wind beneath my wings (try not to vomit), that compelled me toward the things I’ve done.

I did become a teacher. I liked teaching; I didn’t love it. I liked it. But I can see now how acting or the idea of being an actor was kind of always standing close by, I just never really peered over at it long enough to see what it wanted.

In fifth grade we spent the entire year making a film about the history of our town. We wrote, created costumes, filmed, edited and spliced. Back then we had to cut film and literally splice it back together to edit! At the end of the year we had a full length historical documentary. That same year I saw Grease on Broadway. I’m not a fan of musicals, but I loved the story and there was something very, very magical about seeing it on stage.

Around that same time the movie The Way We Were was being filmed in a town nearby and my parents took us to see what was happening.

Throughout all of my school years I was known as a good writer. I was the editor of our high school newspaper, but I loved making people laugh with funny social commentary more than reporting any actual news. I loved seeing peoples’ reactions.

In college I went to London and fell in love with Shakespeare—every time we read a play we went to see it in the theater. Second semester of my senior year I took an acting class and loved it so much that I was mad that I was already on my way out the door when I finally found something I adored doing.

My first teaching job was in Bedford, New York and Jill Clayburgh’s daughter was in our class. I was mesmerized by her elegance and grace. Her daughter, Lily Rabe, is an actress now.

While I was there a film crew came to make Fatal Attraction and a couple of years later, when I was teaching at Emma Willard School in Troy, New York a film crew came to make Scent of a Woman.

What are the odds?

Later in life I met, on a short flight, an actor who invited me into his acting life. Last year I officiated at his wedding and there were lots and lots of actors there.

And now I’m a preacher, which is basically a teacher with a microphone and a fresh audience every week. I mean, let’s face it: as a pastor you get a stage; you put on a little play every single week. It’s nice to think of it as a profession to which one is called, but the truth is that a lot of us actually do have ambitions.

It’s obviously too late to switch gears and storm Hollywood at 58 with my little dream of landing a starring role in a really funny series, but I am a little surprised by the realization that there was this thing always nearby in my life that I never really paid much attention to. There was acting, all along, kind of beckoning me and I didn’t go.

Did I miss my calling, as they say, or did I just take the idea and morph it into other things because it didn’t feel real enough or possible or was it that I just didn’t even know where to start with a dream like that?

Was I supposed to have been something different?

When I say I’d like a larger audience, is this some voice lodged deep inside that has been trying to be heard all these years? If I had a larger audience, what on earth would I want to tell them?

I’ve always said there’s a very thin line between being a pastor and being a stand-up comedian. Is that the thing?

Is the answer to the question, who am I? simply … a never-ending work in progress?

Daughter, mother, partner, grandmother …

Student, teacher, preacher …

Does our childhood hold more answers to the question than we know? Did I become what I was supposed to become or was I so distracted or lacking in courage that I ignored all the signs?

I have a sneaky suspicion that it’s actually far more simple than we think.

I have a gnawing sense that we’re here to manufacture joy. And we can do it in lots of different ways with lots of different costumes and scenery, but that’s what we’re supposed to do. Generate joy, liberate joy from beneath the weight of grief and disappointment, marinate in joy, live it.

I think that’s probably it.

Who am I? I’m just a brief shooting speck of light, moving from one end of this to the other. I hope when it’s over you will have thought the rays I sent your way helped, even just a tiny bit. Whether you were in my classroom, one of the kids I shuffled around with my kids, an old lady I visited in a nursing home, someone whose hand I held while you were dying. Maybe you sit in a pew in the church where I work or you work in a restaurant I go to a lot. Maybe you’re a stranger out there, reading what I write. Maybe you were hitchhiking once and I gave you a ride. Maybe I saw that you didn’t have enough money in line at the grocery store and I paid for you because I just happened to have a little extra that day. Maybe we were pals in high school or college. Maybe you were my teacher and you helped me figure something out. Whoever you are, I hope you and I meet (again) one day on the astral plane and and have a good laugh seeing how we overthought everything while we were here. After all, as my buddy Will wrote, All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

xomo

11.1
It’s Snowing

I’ve sort of been sneakily writing here in this quiet little corner, feeling, once again, like the territory where I last set out (Substack) is now overloaded with noise. Kind of like when a town just gets too big for its britches and starts to lose some of the quirky charm it had when only a few hearty souls were hanging around there.

Which, I know, it’s absurd because what you want as a writer or for any kind of performative thing in this world is an audience, right? But I guess maybe I’ve often more happy treating my writing space like it’s a diary. I want to write, I have to write, but I’m often conflicted about whether or not I actually want anyone to read what I write.

I think I amuse myself more with my writing than I could ever amuse anyone else.

But I wanted to mention two things today.

First, it’s the first snowfall of the year here in Vermont, which is so pretty, but for the first time in my life, depressing.

Historically I jumped for joy when the first snowflakes fell from the sky. This year, with kids all gone, here in this quiet house, sure it’s pretty, but there is no one to go outside and eat snow with, no one to think we can sled on this thin layer. All of the skiers live somewhere else now.

The snow is just driving home the reality that my kids are grown and gone. But yes, fine, it’s pretty.

In the past few weeks I’ve met two young men of the highest integrity and caliber of craft. One is a knife maker and blacksmith and I’ll talk about him later. The other is an upholsterer named Eric. He works out of Shoreham Upholstery in Shoreham, Vermont and even though his real love is car upholstery work, he agreed to take on a teeny project for me.

I have a chair I love, not because I use it a lot, but because it has such lovely bones. I love the curve of the exposed back. I like the size of it, it fits my body just right, like I was Goldilocks searching for the right place to sit when I found it at a furniture place in Burlington.

I also love Pendleton fabrics. I’m a little obsessed, if truth be told. I wanted to marry my favorite fabric with my favorite chair.

I asked Eric if he would work on my little chair, covered in white fabric that had gotten dingy over the years. He did, even though I chose tricky-to-work-with fabric.

Every time I called he answered the phone. Every question I had he answered patiently. He spent way more time than I’m sure he wanted to on this little project.

He wasn’t sure about the placement of the fabric, given the unusual design. I gave him carte blanche, trusting he has a good eye. He was worried about that, afraid I might not like it and ask him to start over. I assured him I wouldn’t.

He was kind, tolerant, patient. And open about costs. It was, in short, an old-fashioned customer experience of true quality and human interaction.

Since I brought the chair home I’ve been admiring it in different places and in different light. It just makes me happy. I haven’t even really sat in it! I believe our objects should make us feel that way. So often we fill our living areas with a bunch of stuff just so the space isn’t empty. I love loving the things I live with.

I’m so grateful to have worked with Eric, to have been on the receiving end of such genuine kindness and goodness and quality.
xomo

10.31
Halloween

If spirits can be anywhere anytime, why are they always taking the stairs?

I have such mixed feelings about Halloween. I have never cared about dressing up or partying on Halloween. It was GREAT as a kid, the tsunami of candy, but I wasn’t creative enough or resourced enough to do costuming well. We usually had those horrible drug store numbers—a polyester costume that included a mask with a thin rubber band holding it on your head. Or the classic sheet with holes ghost. I actually still think that’s the pinnacle of costuming, only now if I wore it I’d call myself the Hole-y Ghost.

As an adult I have always been suspicious of people who love wearing a costume and drinking or partying for Halloween. It’s creepy.

Candy, however, never gets old.

But what about the spirits at this time of year? Are we closer to the so-called other side around Halloween? It’s a great question.

In certain traditions All Souls Day and All Saints Day are celebrated this week. My favorite saint was Juniper, a pal of St. Francis’s, because he was a kind of jester to Jesus, supposedly, and apparently took nice things from rich people and gave them to the poor. Totally my kind of guy.

But the spirits, do they find it easier to connect with us for some reason at this time of year?

Yes, perhaps, but most likely only because we put more of our collective energy toward the idea. Those who have died are always available to us, but most of the time our skepticism or grief or busyness gets in the way.

I’m thinking of teaching a little class on spiritual connectivity in December, though I know that’s a really crowded time of year. But I love stick season, when the earth is quiet and the air is crisp and the moon really shines bright. I adore the winter solstice. But again, there is no need to associate communicating with those who have left the body with any particular time of year. For me it’s part of my everyday life, I’ve integrated it in a way that’s just part of my existence and it’s fun and funny and helpful and not all that different than being in relationship with all the souls still in bodies.

Here is the added benefit of living this way: I can say with whole-hearted honesty that if today is my day to die, I’m ready to go. And in the world we’re living in today, this feeling brings peace.

I hope you eat a ton of candy today. xomo

10.30
Recent Trip

Hi Friends.

I was in Maine the other day and in our rental there was a huge full-length mirror and I was passing it in the morning and for the first time in a really long time I stopped and looked at myself and felt good about what I saw.

It feels self-indulgent and irrelevant and stupid in the world we’re in right now, but it’s also way too easy to start to feel invisible as a woman in this world, late in her fifth decade. It’s hard to maintain a sense of worth or even a belief that I’m just right just the way I am. For the first time in too long I saw myself and I was happy with what it looked like. Wrinkles, gray hair, crooked toes, the same clothes as yesterday … it felt really nice to feel really ok with what this is.

By the end of the day not one bit of it mattered because while we were all getting ready to head to bed we heard about the shootings in Lewiston, just up the road, and our hearts started to hurt even though it already felt like our hearts couldn’t take any more hurt, with wars raging in the world and more hurricane devastation and deaths in our family, it felt like there was no more room for the sorrow of loss.

But I think our love and even just knowing we would wake up and make coffee and eggs together really helped.

And even though it felt dumb and vain to even bother with my image in a mirror, when I passed it on my way to bed I remembered that seeing myself look healthy and sturdy is precisely what I need right now to keep trying to be a force for good and love in the world. I know that being centered, grounded here on earth and well is a really good starting place for conjuring the energy and grace it takes to try to make a difference.

I send you my blessings, wherever you are. xomo