Meditate on This

About this time last year I blogged about my version of the New Year’s resolution. I don’t make promises to myself that I’m not likely to keep. Instead, I choose a phrase or a sentence or two that I’ll meditate on for the upcoming year. That’s right, a whole year.

Sometimes I sit in formal meditation and focus on the Saying of the Year. Other times, I just let it float in the background of my life to see what happens.

My Saying of the Year for 2012 was an Eckhart Tolle quote: “You do not live life; life lives you. Life is the dancer. You are the dance.” Those sentences have shimmied in and out of my conscious thoughts for a solid twelve months now, and they have changed my perspective on the world. That’s what the Saying of the Year is for, and it has never failed to live up to that expectation.

Every year, I’ve waited – patiently or not – for the handful of words that will fulfill this purpose. I have found that I can’t just pick a quote that appeals to me. The Saying has to make itself known, has to come to me. The pearl may be found but it cannot be sought, as they say.

This year, however, is different. The little voice, the one in the back of my head that prods me every now and then to keep me on track, says I need to open myself up a bit. Instead of just asking the universe for my Saying of the Year, I need to ask you, my readers.

Yes, you.

So here’s my request: Please share with me, either in the comments on this blog or on my Facebook page, a quote or saying that has meaning to you, and that you think may work for my Saying of the Year. It can even be a cliché; I’ve had remarkable results meditating on clichés. Feel free to express how the saying has affected your thoughts and what meaning it has for you.

I can’t say how I’ll choose the right one. I may use one of those online random generators to pick a comment, but more likely I’ll go old-school: write them out on paper and have my husband or daughter draw one out of a hat. And I’ll be sure to let you know which one I choose, however I do it. I'll be making the choice late in the day on New Year's Eve, so you have a little time to think about your recommendation.

Please consider this your invitation to pick out a Saying of the Year for yourself as well. You don’t have to practice formal meditation, though I’ve found it to be a helpful addition to my life. Just letting those words float around in your mindspace for an extended period can create wonders.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments, and I wish you all a wondrous, joyful New Year!

It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

Lately several friends have commented (complained, really) to me about situations that keep cropping up in their lives – relationship snafus, issues with co-workers, unpleasantness with relatives. We all experience these sorts of problems from time to time, bits of tangled mess that turn up over and over in similar form.

I call these situations Repeaters.

Teachers create Repeaters on purpose. If you’re trying to teach something to your students, you present it in the way that you expect will reach most of them. But there will be a few who don’t get it the first time, so you present it again, just a little differently. And if there are still one or two who haven’t caught on, you offer it a third time in slightly changed form. That’s good teaching: you keep on offering similar-but-not-exactly-same examples until they all understand.

The universe is a very effective teacher. Call it deity, higher self, cosmos, ultimate consciousness, true nature, whatever…if we don’t get something the first time, that cosmic teacher will present it again. And again. As many times as necessary.

For me, the hard part is recognizing the pattern. I don’t like to think that I’m slower at catching on than anyone else, so I don’t want to see that a tricky or uncomfortable situation is a repeat of one that happened before, maybe several times. I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way.

The second-hardest part for me is admitting that there’s something I don’t ‘get’ yet. I do my best to live mindfully, to think deeply about life, to understand. But then a Repeater rears its ugly head to remind me that I’m not perfect and still have something to learn. Quite a blow to the ego, that is.

Of course, none of us is perfect. We all have things to learn. I know that. You know that. But knowing it doesn’t make it any easier to admit.

After talking with the friends who are facing Repeaters in their lives, I’ve decided to take a little time to examine my own life. The autumn is a contemplative time for me anyway, with the pace of the season slowing down a little and beginning to turn inward. So I’m going to go Repeater-hunting.

I’m going to look closely at uncomfortable or unpleasant situations as they crop up (thankfully, not too often) and determine whether I’ve faced something similar before. If I have, I’ll work to find the lesson, the value, the growth experience at the core of the issue.

I figure, if I’m proactive like this, the really big Repeaters will become less frequent. I find that the ‘examples’ the universe provides me become less subtle and more akin to a two-by-four upside the head, the longer it takes me to get it.

A number of years ago, a friend developed a trinity of deities related to the idea of Repeaters. He called the three Clue, Smack and Swat. If the universe presents you with a Clue and you don’t take heed, you’ll get a Smack, followed by a Swat if you are still unable to absorb the lesson. In fact, he suggested that the various levels of ‘Pay Attention to This’ are applied with a Clue-by-Four.

I plan to work hard at identifying the Clues so I don’t have to deal with the dreaded Smacks and Swats. I want to ‘get it’ as soon as possible to the cosmic teacher doesn’t load me up with too much homework. Not to mention the headaches, both literal and figurative, caused by the Clue-by-Four.

Have you experienced Repeaters in your life? Did it take you a while to recognize them? Will you come Repeater-hunting with me this year? I now declare the season officially open.

It's the People, Stupid!

It's the people, stupid!

That's what I said to myself the other day as I fought the urge to bang my head on my desk. Again.

For several years now I've had ongoing conversations with friends and family about the different kinds of government and economic systems and how well they do or don't work.

People toss around words like capitalism, democracy, republic, socialism and communism without really knowing what they mean or how those types of governments work. So I started doing some research.

I learned about the true democracies of ancient Greece and modern New England townships. I learned about the republic systems of ancient Rome and the United States. I discovered the philosophies (yes, they are philosophies or ideologies which can be put into action in human communities) of feudalism, capitalism, pure monarchy, constitutional monarchy, Marxism, socialism, anarchism, communism and fascism. I looked at the way people have run their societies from the dawn of history to the present.

As I sifted through all this information, one thing struck me over and over again: Each one of these systems is designed to make society run smoothly (though not necessarily fairly) provided everyone follows the rules. A handful of these systems are even designed to make society fair in one way or another. But none of them have ever worked out that way in the long run. Why?

It's the people, stupid.

Or the stupid people, depending on how you look at it.

In other words, people aren't all generous, fair, kind, compassionate and caring. Some, perhaps many, are greedy and selfish, and will stoop to any depths to get what they want out of whatever system they happen to live in. The problem is, all the systems proposed and enacted over the centuries assume that everyone will play fair. That's a hopelessly naive assumption.

Every system, every institution ever invented by humankind has been abused by that unpleasant, self-absorbed portion of us humans. No exceptions.

Over the past few months I have frequently been forced to listen to people arguing politics, with the hot topic this election year being the economy. Over and over I have heard some people shouting about the need for more government regulation of private business, and others screaming that regulation is strangling business and destroying it. Each time, after my ears stop ringing I recall that, at the time of the BP Freshwater Horizon oil well disaster, BP had on file with the government over 800 violations of federal regulations - violations the appropriate government agency was simply ignoring due to bribes and the other exciting, under-the-table activities of inspectors and higher-ups.

So really, the issue isn't regulations at all. The issue isn't the government or the economic system. The issue is the people.

Shoot, if people were all honest, kind, generous and all those other qualities our kindergarten teachers tried so desperately to instill in us, it wouldn't matter what kind of system we had, or even whether we had a system at all. But people aren't all like that, and we all suffer for their shortcomings.

It's these shortcomings that the great spiritual and philosophical leaders have tried to address over the centuries, with varying results. But the fact remains, there will always be people whose unbalanced self-interests tempt them to break the rules and get what they want regardless of the cost to others.

So let's stop whining about how we should change the system or chuck it altogether in favor of something else. Let's admit that we're the problem, that it's ourselves we need to fix. Like the twelve-step folks say, admitting the problem is the first step to overcoming it.

Hi, I'm Laura and I'm a human.

Teacher and Student: You're Doing It Wrong

Over the years I’ve been a teacher and I’ve been a student. Whether it’s elementary or high school, college or certification classes, sometimes we have to put ourselves in that unbalanced situation to get what we need before we can move on. But that’s not always the best way.

I made my way through the public and private school system, college and graduate school as a student. During graduate school I also became a teacher, so I was sandwiched between my grad school professors above me and my freshman college students below me. I believed that the teacher/student relationship, in which one set of people (the students) is considered somehow lower than the other (teachers) was good and right. Obviously, if a teacher knows something you don’t, they’re better than you, right?

Don’t worry, I got over it.

The person who helped me get over it, in a messy and unpleasant way, was my first pagan priestess. She desperately wanted to be my teacher. That should have been a clue right there, but I was too young to know better. She wanted to be in that higher position over me, for me to be beneath her as a student. Since she had so much more skill and experience than I did, I bought into that idea and agreed to the teacher/student relationship on those terms.

I learned the hard way that relationships that are unbalanced in power become unbalanced in other ways as well. It probably didn’t help that she was a bit unbalanced mentally to start with, but there you are.

From early childhood we are encouraged to buy into the idea of authority, of someone being in power over us. Students must bow to teachers. Lay people must bow to clergy. Patients must bow to doctors. Employees must bow to supervisors. And, until very recently, women must bow to husbands and fathers.

So it’s only natural, I suppose, that we should expect most of our relationships in life to have a dominance hierarchy rather than a partnership.

The thing is, I don’t think dominance hierarchy is natural at all. (Don’t talk to me about baboons and their dominance hierarchies; we’re not baboons.) I found it to be especially detrimental to my spiritual growth, both in the Christian churches I attended (voluntarily or not) in my early life and in that teacher/student relationship with my first priestess. First there was my long-reinforced but unfortunate desire to please my teachers at the expense of finding my own truth. Then there was the teachers’ desire to be looked up to as gurus, if not demigods, by all their students. Yick.

Soon after I ended the relationship with my first priestess, I was lucky to meet some people who were starting a pagan group based on the idea that we were all on equal footing. Sure, some of us were already trained in some tradition or other. And others were only just beginning. But we set out together, walking the path side by side with no one above anyone else. The rest of the local pagan community was dismayed by how well our organization worked, because our equality threatened their authoritarian setups.

Unfortunately, the later infusion of some people who were bent on being in authority led to the eventual breakup of the group. But while we were able to maintain that equality, we all learned and grew by leaps and bounds. It was, literally, all good.

Over the years I’ve come to realize the only way I can truly learn and grow is to walk in partnership with others. I suspect this is true for many, if not most, people. The authoritarian, hierarchical setup that usually accompanies the teacher/student relationship is a hindrance to real forward progress for either the teacher or the student. Sure, you the student can memorize large amounts of information. Yes, you can perform to the pleasure and ego-inflation of your teacher. But I’m not sure you’re really advancing on the path if you do those things. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re not. And the self-absorbed teacher sure isn’t. We just find it difficult to look outside that box, much less actually step beyond its confines, because it’s such an ingrained part of society.

A few years ago I gave in to the requests of several friends and instituted a pagan discussion group. I had expected lively conversations in which everyone participated on an even footing. What I got, instead, was a group of people most of whom sat open-mouthed, waiting for my pronouncements about various topics, waiting to be spoon-fed information they could use, with no effort on their part.

When I cancelled that discussion group, the whining of the poor students who suddenly had to think for themselves and do some real work again echoed for days.

Since then I’ve been careful not to institute anything resembling the conventional teacher/student setup in my life. I’ve come to believe our society’s emphasis on authoritarian relationships simply doesn’t allow for a healthy outcome in that regard. It’s hard enough to maintain a real partnership in a marriage given all the dominance baggage that institution carries; dominance hierarchy is still alive and well in the teacher/student world.

Sidebar: If you haven’t read it already, you should pick up a copy of Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade. It’s the seminal work on partnership versus dominance relationships.

In recent years I’ve had a few friends who were really jonesing to be my teachers. I have quietly ignored them. Here’s a clue: If you’re looking around at the people you know, deciding who among them you should recruit as your next student, you’re not teacher material. If you're desperate to gather people around you and run a group, you need to do some serious personal work first.

The converse is true as well. If you’re flipping through your mental contacts list, trying to find someone to be your teacher and give you the secrets to life, the universe and everything, you need to get your butt in gear and start walking your own path on your own two feet.

My best teachers have been the ones who walked the path by my side. We taught each other. We learned from each other. Sometimes, we leaned on each other. But we never got caught up in the who’s-above-whom game. Ultimately, we’re all both students and teachers. The sooner we accept that fact, the sooner we can move forward and grow.

On Grief and Healing

I’ve put off writing this blog post because I suspect it will make some people angry and make others feel threatened because it challenges the way they have defined themselves over the years. But I feel compelled to share it with you now, so here goes.

Everyone suffers loss at some point. Sooner or later, someone you love dies. That is a painful, unavoidable fact of life. What I find every bit as painful as the loss itself is watching the people I love - the ones who are still living - refuse to heal from such a loss.

I bet you know someone who suffered from the death of a loved one, perhaps many years ago, but who lives as if that person died just yesterday. They are tormented by fresh grief every morning when they wake. They just can’t heal. Perhaps they even appear to work at keeping that grief alive, focusing on it regularly to keep it fresh, prodding at it the way we poke our tongue at a rotting tooth just to make sure it still hurts.

Before you start steaming and wondering who the hell I am to say such things, let me share one thing with you. My daughter Anna died in my arms in June 1997, three months before her sixth birthday. I know grief.

I know grief so great it feels like you can’t breathe, then you realize you have no choice but to go on breathing, which is even worse. I know grief so great you wish you could die, but know you can’t. I know the special kind of grief called survivor guilt, which says that if anyone should have died, it should have been me, not her. We’re not supposed to outlive our children.

I have a clue.

And I’m not saying anyone, ever, should just get over it. But healing needs to happen. It may take years, but it can happen. It should happen.

It can happen only if you don’t keep tearing at the wound, ripping the scab off, refusing to let it heal.

And it’s not disrespectful to their memory to heal. I promise.

I remember counting the days…days until the end of the year Anna died. Days until the first anniversary of her death, her next birthday, Christmas. I remember learning to function again, finding normal in life one tiny piece at a time when it felt like nothing would ever be normal again.

About five years after she died, her birthday came and I didn’t need to cry. A few years after that, her birthday passed and I didn’t realize it until the next day. Then the anniversary of her death passed and I missed it.

I was healing.

I will admit, I glanced around furtively to see if anyone would criticize me for daring to move on. There is intense pressure in our culture to define ourselves by our wounds. We name ourselves by them: adult child of an alcoholic; incest victim; angel mother. It’s a powerful force that requires us to look always to the past, never to the future.

That force disturbed me; it’s a sick society that makes someone out to be a bad person for daring to heal.

But I decided to do what was best for me, for my mental and physical health, regardless of what anyone else thought. I decided to heal, to move on. Because only when you move past the grief can you truly appreciate the time you had with that person. Only then can your heart open enough that you know, deeply, what a blessing they were in your life. Until then, all you can feel is the pain because that’s what your heart is filled with. Believe me, I know.

I turned to mythology, the archetypal symbols of life writ large on the human psyche, to help me find my way along a path no one wanted me to take. I chose one archetype in particular and took it to heart.

The image of the dying-and-reborn god is a powerful one that can help us move through hard times. Whether you look to Jesus, Odin, Dionysus, Adonis or Osiris, the promise of resurrection remains. We are all wounded nigh unto death yet, if we allow ourselves to do so, we can live again. The sun rises in the morning, the barley sprouts anew, we breathe in again after we exhale. Every moment is a rebirth if you let it be so.

I cannot imagine my sweet Anna saying to me, “Yes, Mommy, you should always mourn me and never recover. Always be sad. Build your life around your grief and let it define you so it eats away at you until you die.” She would never wish that. What I can hear her saying, very clearly, is this:

“We will always love each other. Let that be enough.”

Are they real?

Are they real?

That’s the question I’ve been asked over the years by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. It refers to the deities I revere and love. (I don’t worship anything in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense, but that’s another post.) The question is, are All-Father and Great Mother, Freyr and Freya, Stag Lord and Oak Lady real?

It’s a good question, one I’m not sure I can answer. I believe they’re real the same way a Christian believes God is real, the same way a Hindu believes Ganesh is real, the same way a quantum physicist believes quarks are real. None of us has actual proof of any of these things; they’ve never been directly observed, measured or photographed. Yet we have faith that they exist and that they affect the world in various ways.

Over the years I’ve considered the possibility that some of my deities might be psychological side effects of the abuse I endured as a child. I first became aware of All-Father and Great Mother when I was two or three years old, during one of the many long days in which my mother locked me in a windowless laundry room from the time my father left for work in the morning until minutes before he got home in the evening. And yes, All-Father and Great Mother are the names I knew them by, even then.

Of course I wanted loving parents who didn’t do terrible things to me and then lie to everyone about what they had done. So maybe All-Father and Great Mother are projections of my own subconscious in grand Jungian fashion, a way for me to comfort myself. I have to admit that as a possibility.

As a young adult I encountered Freyr and Freya, first in fiction (Diana Paxson’s Brisingamen is a great read, if somewhat dated now) and then in ritual with pagan friends. Their energy was familiar yet challenging; I fell madly in love with them the first time they were invoked and continued to work with them from that point on. Was I induced to believe in a fantasy thanks to the powerful psychological elements of a well-constructed ritual? It’s possible.

Then, just a couple years ago yet another pair of deities made themselves known in my life. I was hip-deep in genealogy, digging into my family history and being drawn ever more strongly toward northern Britain. During the day I filled in the blanks in my Family Tree Maker software; at night I dreamed of Castlerigg stone circle and the people who lived there five thousand years ago. Especially, I dreamed of a woman whose ashes were buried in the ground in front of one of the stones. And I dreamed of her gods, the gods of the grandmother of all my grandmothers, the gods of my blood, my bone, my DNA. The Stag Lord and the Oak Lady provided the meat and mast on which my ancestors survived. At least, that’s how they thought of it. It has come to be how I think of it, too.

So am I imagining all this? Am I living in a fantasy world in which deities that don’t really exist appear to hang out around me and affect my life? Are they real, by any definition of the word? Does it even matter whether or not they are?

Ultimately, no, it doesn’t matter. And the reason it doesn’t matter has nothing to do with the strength of my faith or any other religious-type blather. It has to do with one simple, powerful truth: They make my life better.

Now, most of us (at least, those who aren’t nutcase fundamentalists) tend to think that it doesn’t matter exactly what a person believes as long as their beliefs make them a better person. I think my deities do that, but I know they have done something even more important: They enabled me to survive.

They saw me through years of abuse from which I emerged relatively functional; that’s a miracle right there. They gave me the strength to endure nearly six years as the mother of a profoundly disabled child, and fight for her needs and rights every moment along the way. They helped me survive the unfathomable grief of her death and put me on track to finding meaning in life again without her.

They’re with me when I wake up in the morning and when I go to bed at night. They soften my dreams, sharpen my ambitions and remind me to pay attention to what’s really important.

Whether they are figments of an overactive imagination, protective archetypal constructs generated by a damaged psyche or truly ancient energies and entities, they get the job done.

Are they real? The ultimate answer is, it doesn't matter.

What I Learned Down on the Farm

Most of my friends know how girly I am (swirly skirts, jewelry, makeup, perfume) but they also know I like to be hip-deep in the garden and am perfectly capable of repairing a fence or building a cold frame. I’m definitely not allergic to dirt or hard work. This combination confuses people, sometimes.

Over the holidays I did a lot of reflection about how I came to be the person I am now, and I realized something: Though I officially grew up in darkest suburbia with my parents and sister, I learned my life values from my grandparents in the time I spent on their farm.

How much time was that? If it wasn’t a school day, I was there. As a family we spent weekends and school holidays at the farm. My mother sent me out there for long stretches during the summer as well. (She once even tried to give me away to my grandmother, after my sister was born and Mom decided she liked the new child better. Grandmother declined; that’s the only time in my life I ever heard her raise her voice to anyone.)

A small family farm is hard work with little room for frills or foolishness, though there was usually time for play (I was a kid, after all). I spent my days wearing blue jeans and covered in dirt, hay and manure. From my grandparents, especially my grandmother, I learned most of the values that have carried me through life. Those values helped me get through all sorts of things that, at the time, I didn’t believe I could survive.

This blog post is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, Noreen Crews, one of the wisest people I’ve ever known. She passed away a few years back but her common-sense approach to life, and her unconditional love, still live on in me.

In all the time I spent with her, all the dumb things I did, she never framed any experience I had with, “And the moral is…” In fact, she rarely talked about lessons learned at all. She simply lived her values every day and encouraged me to do the same.

I’ve collected up a few of the things I learned on the farm, to share with you. Perhaps you might find them useful, too.

-You have sense. Use it.

-Everyone has limitations; some are just more obvious than others. Don’t let your limitations define you and never use them as an excuse, only as an explanation.

-The difference between people and trash is not what you have but how well you take care of it.

-Don’t stand there waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Figure out what needs doing and do it.

-Assume you’re capable of doing (or learning to do) whatever needs doing until proven otherwise.

-If you choose to have children, do not behave as if they are a nuisance, a bother or something to escape from. You chose to have them. You are an adult. Act like it.

-If you say you’ll do something, do it. Your word is your bond.

-Dream all you want but take care of the real-world stuff first.

I wouldn’t be here today - literally - if it weren’t for the values Grandmother taught me. The best tribute I can give her is to share those values with my own daughter, and be thankful for the time I spent on the farm.