Moving/Miscellany

For several months, as I have no doubt mentioned, I have been helping a friend get her house ready to sell, and now moving day is approaching.  Even when the boxes aren't your own, the process is really daunting.  There's a good reason why most people don't like to move and (except for those of us who own very little) try to avoid it.  Having said that, even in the midst of the worst of it, I've been aware of how an outer move facilitates inner movement and growth, and that makes it more bearable!  The cat and dog are hiding under beds and in corners, aware that something is happening and not enthused about what that something might be...I've learned so much about love from these personable animals, and several others that have crossed my path the last few years.  When I am settled, perhaps I, too, will have one of each.

My own next few months are beginning to solidify.  It makes it easier that I have made a promise to myself that year 60 (from now until February of 2017) is the year of "home." Whatever that means or is meant to mean to me in my sixties and beyond, the foundations will be built now.  It's such a happy feeling.  I am ready.

In the meantime, this blog has been my home base for six months, and I love that there is a small, slowly growing following out there, not only of Americans, Canadians, and a few Brits (which isn't surprising), but of some in Europe as well (which is a bit more so.)  Welcome, all of you!  Whatever your path may be, may my experiences occasionally resonate, give you something to think about, something to hope for, or something to be grateful for.  

This afternoon, bright, sunny, frigid, blustery, with blinding light on the snow, is the proverbial calm before the moving storm.  I think I will make some brownies. (The Liz solution to just about everything.) 

Have a good weekend everyone!

How Dare I?

As some pieces have fallen into place this week, as I’ve discovered crumbs of joy on the path, I have found myself doing uncharacteristically silly things – rolling my eyes heavenwards and saying “thanks.”  Doing a little “happy dance” when no one is looking.  Or a little “yes!” fist pump.  I guess I have read one too many Mike Dooley (Tut) “Notes from the Universe”!  But I truly believe that there is an aspect of the divine “up there” just waiting for us to say thank you.  It doesn’t need our thanks to function, but it must love knowing when we’ve found that next clue on the path. 

And yet in experiencing unexpected moments of joy, ease and insight, I have encountered a new dilemma, one which maybe some of you resonate with.  That is guilt.  How – even for one minute – can I feel an emotion of pure joy when friends are literally (physically) fighting for their lives?  When there are millions of people around the world going through various kinds of hell?  During Lent?  In the midst of this bizarre and troubling election year?  After listening to the news?  What gives me the right to be happy, even for a minute?  How dare I?

This wasn’t an issue for decades.  When I worked at Time Magazine as a Letters Correspondent for world and international news, tragedy and war were literally my daily bread.  Since leaving Time (how’s that for good metaphor?!), I’ve been fighting for my own life on a variety of levels.  Energetically, I have been living very similar challenges to so many the world over.  It is even possible that I voluntarily kept myself in a lower place just as a form of solidarity.  I’m not sure I was comfortable with the notion of being happier, healthier, wealthier, or more successful than others, even though this seems to place me utterly at odds with the American dynamic.

So these new, out-of-the-blue moments of joy, of power, of lightness and of intense love are not as easy to embrace as you might think, and this makes me understand why so many of us turn away from them.  Limit them.  Do the little happy dance, and then quietly disappear into the corner.  Hide our light under a bushel.  I feel the world’s pain so acutely, and just don’t understand how to allow myself a sliver of joy when at any given moment it may be so hard for others to access.  I’m still not quite comfortable with the spiritual equivalent of “putting the oxygen mask on your own face before helping others,” or just being an example of joy to others.

I guess for today, the best I can do is try to see life from the perspective of God/Goddess/Universe/Source.  Does this divine energy want the people of earth to be happy or miserable?  While I can’t know for sure, it would seem to be a no-brainer: happy.  Period.  Full Stop.  So just for today, I’ll allow myself this little gift of grace if it comes to me, and even try to extend it out another minute or two, with as little guilt and as much thankfulness as possible.  I’m pretty sure it can’t hurt.

Goosebumps

Almost ninety posts into this blog, I’m beginning to forget exactly what I have said, and when.  So please forgive me if today’s offering goes over any old ground. 

Until a few years ago, my “wires” were totally crossed.  I had spent decades and decades trying to like things and places I really didn’t like, and trying to avoid the things and places I did.  I was blessed to have encountered such wonderful people and learned so many life lessons, in unlikely places.  And yet the “desert” of Montana was the final straw – it was so clearly wrong for me on so many levels that I had no choice but to start the tedious, and sometimes confusing and hard, task of getting the wires (“what I love” and “what I don’t love”) back onto their respective spools.  Like a child in a fairy tale, I slowly learned to follow the crumbs (clues) of “what I love,” and walk in the opposite direction of what I don’t.

There seems to be an interesting thing happening right now; the momentum of the process is picking up.  More and more things that I love and that fascinate me are literally coming to me.  I’m not actively seeking them out, exactly, it’s just that I see them on Facebook or they come in the mail.  Yesterday, a late birthday gift came to me from England, a photo book about English country churches.  At first, I couldn’t even look at it, because the sense of attraction to its images was so strong.  My old impulse is to look (and move) away from what I love.  But yesterday, I forced myself to leaf through it, and I got goosebumps viewing the pictures.  Now, what is this?  It isn’t exactly a religious thing of wishing to worship in these spaces.  And most of the churches pictured are too small to be a venue for my beloved choral evensong services.  Yet there is something about the architecture of these buildings in their landscape that just sends powerful shivers down my spine, as if this book is part of a key to where I am headed (literally and/or figuratively.) 

Then online only hours later, I saw a link to an article in The Atlantic, “Mapping the Acoustics of Ancient Spaces,” and got goosebumps again.  This is about several scholars who have been trying to make sense of how chanting sounded centuries ago in Byzantine churches, and how that resonance interacted with the visual artwork in the sacred spaces.  With my dual art and music degrees (including my master’s in early Christian chant), my whole body was buzzing.  Does this mean that I will be pursuing academic work in this area, or writing, or just travelling?  Is it about Herbert Howells' music and future writing about it, or starting a multidisciplinary creative work? I don’t know yet.  This whole process of remaining magnetic and attractive, not proactive, is new to me, and yet it is working, so I resisted the temptation to send off emails and do a lot of research, at least for the moment.  As these clues get closer and closer together, I feel like a unique contribution to the world is beginning to appear out of the mist.  I cannot even begin to imagine how this contribution will support me financially, but I cannot let even that stop this process.  Concern about money has sent me down the wrong road too many times before.  Instead, my “currency” will be the electric current of joy, the thrill of discovering that passion is still alive in me.  With just a little more receptivity, I’ll know without a shadow of a doubt how to proceed with it. 

 

Things

One of the curious aspects of the Liz path is that I (whose worldly possessions would fit pretty nicely into a small closet) have recently helped several people move from one house to another.  For a few months now, I have helped a friend get her house ready to go on the market, and now we are in the home stretch of actively boxing things up.  It is a huge, huge job.

Fortunately, I have excellent boundaries and simply follow instructions ("Could you box up everything on that shelf, please?") My impulse to own next to nothing is so acute, that it can be a form of torture not to throw things out or take them to the Salvation Army.  I keep having to remind myself that, for most people in first and second world countries, ownership is normal.  Single people or couples owning houses- or apartments-full of possessions, including furniture, is normal. On occasion, even I have done it.  But it just was never sustainable for me.  Trying to maintain stability on my own, without a compelling job, sense of self, or adequate income, just proved impossible.

And somehow I came to believe that I was so alone in the Universe that I would physically need to carry anything I owned.  I look at piles and piles of boxes, at couches and tables and dressers, and I swoon from the physical exhaustion of imagining how heavy it would be to carry.  It's like, earth to Liz, that's why people created moving companies! Big strong men with dollies will move possessions for you.  There is help out there if you are in a position to pay for it, and sometimes even free from friends.  No one on the planet would own anything if they had to physically carry it all themselves, unassisted!

Most of my sixty-something friends are paring, or have pared, way back from where they were a few years ago, when children were still at home, or before divorce or the death of a spouse.  Many of my friends seem to have elderly parents still hanging on for dear life to a lifetime of possessions, which is causing a backlash in my generation.  A few of my friends have even expressed that they are envious of me, or inspired by my freedom from possessions.  I'm honored, but I try to tell them to be a bit careful on this path.  There is a fine line between "paring down to the essential you" and "going too far and eradicating yourself."  We are not our possessions. But our possessions do reflect our beliefs about who we are and our worthiness to take up space on the planet.  If you look in the "mirror" of "things" and there is nothing there that appeals, you may be going through such a huge change that you will want to seek some sympathetic counseling or coaching, as I have sometimes done.  Thankfully, life assistance comes in many, many forms. 

So while friends are going smaller, I am bucking the trend and trying to go bigger.  For me this will never be about consumerism per se.  And I could never have a "home" that reflected values too far from my core.  It's still not clear whether I will live in a studio apartment or a manor house.  But whatever the space, it will be filled with antiques, select fine art, music, and books, lots of books.  Books on English history, English music (history, anthems, carols, etc.), spirituality and religion, art and philosophy.  I've had to do a considerable amount of "homework" to remember who I am.  Now that I have, I'm ready for a home.  Helping other people move has helped me begin to understand the value of "things" -- and to understand that everyone needs help moving forward!

Three days

I don’t think it’s on account of turning 60, per se.  I think it’s on account of having been blessed since fall to have been in a home where I could catch up with an almost unreal level of inner and outer changes.  In any event, in the three days since my birthday, it seems like an awful lot has “happened,” inwardly.

The first is that the other morning I woke up and started to cry.  For someone who barely cried the first half of her life at all, I’ve certainly done a lot of it the last year or two.  And yet this was interesting.  It was not crying because of something wrong, or out of fear or grief.  It’s like I had reached a moment perhaps six months to a year from now where I am safe and sound in the home and place of my choosing, surrounded by love and the music I love, and I could let go and cry.  It has been a traumatic journey, really, no matter how I try to understate it.  I recognize that on a deep level I chose it for my soul’s growth.  But even ignoring many of the factors that I’ve mentioned before, the fact is that being a woman alone in this world is no picnic, no matter what the specifics of your life may be.  And most of these sixty years, not only did I not believe that “the Universe was on my side” – I think I actively believed that Life was thwarting me at every turn.  I had internalized the energy of a human battering ram, fighting tooth and nail just to live to see another day. 

And in the blink of an eye, I have moved beyond that.  There is no material proof of that, of course, but it’s an inner shift.  I can feel it.  “The strife is o’er.”  Perhaps it’s just battle fatigue.  I can’t “fight” any more, be it for love, attention, validation or even bare bones survival.  I feel like I have simply stopped the frantic rowing, and am letting the stream take my boat where it was meant to go in the first place.

Yet this shift unleashed a soup of memories wanting attention.  “Remember how traumatic this was?” “Remember how hard that was?” “Remember how you almost didn’t make it on this occasion?”  Remember, remember, remember… For the better part of a day I was sucked into my hardest memories.  In a strange way, these memories and events have been my most loyal companions on the path.  They are afraid of being released and rejected, and I understand that.  I bless them.  But my head and my heart also understand that it’s time to unlock those chains and move forward.  My intellect is gently taking me in hand and saying, “Why are you revisiting this when it feels so bad?  Why are you revisiting this when it makes your heart hurt?”  

Indeed.  It’s so simple. As humans, we’ve been trained to focus on the negative.  It is not an easy process to start to focus on love, joy, passion, the future and what you love.  Trauma is so addicting.  It has taken me five or six years to break the addiction.  But it’s happened.  I finally realize that when it feels bad, it is bad for me, so I must focus on something else.  I can’t even perseverate on the election campaign crisis, the climate crisis, the refugee crisis, or the world’s traumas in any form right now.  Even one second of attention to all these things, one second of “righteous indignation,” brings my inner battering ram back to life, and all it does is batter me in the end.  As I head into Act II, all I seem to know is that I must focus exclusively on the highest level of love and trust I am capable of, and hope that the ripple effects of this will go out toward the rest of the world.

The last realization came last night as I looked in the mirror.  I did that thing that they say you should do, really look yourself in the eye.  I’ve always found that to be excruciatingly hard, and have always looked away.  And yet, this time I was able to do it.  Yes, my mind’s eye could certainly “see” what the world may see right now, but for the first time that I can remember, those opinions literally melted away and all I saw was this confident, beautiful being, ready for the next stretch of river.  I smiled at “her” and was proud of her.  I loved her.  Yes, I love her, present tense.  And I believe that the Divine loves her too and will work on her behalf.  From this point forward, that is the only opinion that matters.  

An eventful three days.

 

Sixty

When I started this blog last August, I was fifty-nine and a half.  The moment has come...today I am sixty!  It is surreal. I don't know what I see in the mirror, but it's definitely not sixty.  But then I look at video footage of the fashions, cars, houses, and institutions of America in the mid-1950's when I was born, and I realize, yup, this isn't surreal, it's for real!  I was born in another world, another era. 

There are so many things to say, but it's the weekend, so I just want to express appreciation.  I appreciate being alive.  I appreciate being healthy.  I appreciate having such a clear sense, now, of who I am.  I appreciate clarity, finally "getting" a lot of things.  I appreciate uncrossing crossed wires.  I appreciate future possibilities for fun, creativity, leadership, self-expression, love, abundance and joy.  I appreciate knowing that my unique niche for those things will never look like anyone else's.  I appreciate my friends.  I appreciate dogs and cats.  I appreciate living in a world full of surprises.  I appreciate the perfection of everything that has ever happened to me, "good" and "bad."  I appreciate all my spiritual teachers, in so many different guises.  I appreciate being part of a loving stream of life.  I appreciate that at any second, I have the power to choose to be happier.  I appreciate beauty.  I appreciate miracles and wonder.  I appreciate synchronicity and serendipity.  I appreciate how far I have come.  I appreciate that I have graduated from Act I, and am heading into Act II.  I appreciate this rebirth.  I appreciate that I am a new person from even a year or two ago.  I appreciate the possibilities.  I appreciate that there are no "shoulds."  I appreciate that I finally understand that "The Universe is on my side."  Most of all, I appreciate that in the 1950's, there is no way on earth that I could have envisioned the path I would follow, the challenges I would face, the world we live in now, or the woman I would eventually become.  And, of course, that means that the next sixty years (who knows? It's possible!) has the potential to be even more extraordinary, occasionally more surreal, and even more serendipitous.  I wouldn't want it any other way.
 

Courage, Leadership, Independence, Wisdom

A few months ago, when I was working my way through the Firestarter book by Danielle LaPorte, one of the best exercises was one that I gather is classic life coaching material – choose your top heroes or heroines.  And then, you note what qualities draw you to these people, and this is a clue to your own values and strengths.

It didn’t take me long to make a list of eight, and then to narrow it down.  My top four were – Queen Elizabeth I, Malala, Joan of Arc and Hildegard of Bingen.  And, yup, they all basically share the same qualities of courage, leadership, independence, and spiritual wisdom and/or intelligence.  I neglected to add my own grandmother, Winnifred Wilton, who was one of the first two women lawyers in Manitoba, Canada.  She and another young woman had to break through Manitoba’s “glass ceiling” at the time, a law on the books that said that only “persons” could be lawyers under Manitoba law, and women were not considered persons.  Read that again: women were not considered persons. This is just about exactly 100 years ago.  Because of the conventions of the time, Winnifred had to give up any hope of a career once she married and children were on the way.  But she shared all four qualities and I am proud to be her granddaughter, and to have her as one of my heroines.

Last night, I watched the video, “He Named Me Malala.”  Media coverage of Malala’s life didn’t do justice to her experiences; the movie bowled me over. This young woman is absolutely extraordinary.  Her courage was and continues to be off the charts.  When I think of the level of courage it has taken me to click “publish” on this modest blog, I cringe in embarrassment, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what I want to say!  The different literal and psychological dangers/challenges faced by women who speak out, in different countries and situations, and of different generations, are hard to compare.  But Malala, who is still only a teenager, has far more to teach me than I believe I could ever in a million years teach her, and as the only contemporary heroine on my list, I hope that perhaps I will have the opportunity to meet her in person. 

Leadership

St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue has just chosen a new director of music (organist/choirmaster.) I don't know Daniel Hyde, but I had a brief correspondence with him several years ago in connection with my Herbert Howells research, and he has the quintessential background to take up this prestigious post.  He looks like a great choice, and I wish him every success.  There’s been another fascinating announcement in the music world, that Mirza Grazinyte-Tyla will be the new conductor of the City of Birmingham (UK) Symphony Orchestra.  This young Lithuanian woman (thirty years old!) has the most expressive, musical, joyful, exciting presence on the podium – you must look her up online.  I almost swooned with pride, and that disorienting feeling that even I experience (child of the fifties that I am) seeing a woman conducting in a top venue.

It got me thinking about conducting, and the form of leadership it represents.  About fifty years ago, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said (as perhaps I’ve mentioned before) that I wanted to be the first woman conductor of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge.  So far, there hasn’t been a woman conductor (yet!)  Something I haven’t explored enough is the impulse that this represented – to lead.  I mean, here I was, aged ten, and something in me had the confidence to believe I could direct one of the world’s finest choirs.  I had the confidence to believe that when I spoke, the choir would listen, and when I gave a downbeat, they would sing.  That confidence soon dissipated, but didn’t die entirely.  There is a leader in me.  Until now, when I have tried to “rally the troops” in a few select situations, I have been unsuccessful.  The troops, as it were, have not always wanted to be rallied, at least by me.  I have too often forgotten to remind myself that this just means these are not the people I am meant to lead. It does not mean I am not a leader!

So there is something in this leadership equation that brings together a person with a certain set of talents with the people that need – and want! -- a leader with that skill set.  And while orchestral conductors may find some success with church choirs and vice versa, the fact is that a leader’s best success will come in the field of their true passion.  A leading heart surgeon would not necessarily make a great CEO, a great CEO would not necessarily make a great college professor, etc.  Many of my friends insist they would never want to lead, so it has surprised me that I do.  Yet I could never fake enthusiasm for random leadership positions in organizations that really didn’t mean anything to me. Of course, that also made me a poor employee.

These few months of “intermission” have forced me to really identify what now “means anything to me.”  I was more than half a century ahead of my time in a field that wasn’t ready for me. That is just how it was, and probably is exactly the journey I signed up for in this lifetime.  And in the intervening years, my path has been surprisingly hard, not what I ever wanted or expected.  While I have managed the last few years to go back and pick up some of the lost threads, the fact is, I not only could not return to the late sixties and start seriously training to become “the first woman conductor” at King’s, I would not want to. Too many other experiences, places and people have formed me into a different whole.

At the moment, the only passion I can clearly identify is my passion for having survived this journey, and my desire to communicate all its lessons, which I have started doing in this blog.  But I envision a more active leadership role growing out of this, above and beyond being Liz Lavish, writing checks!  I am not quite sure who wants the leadership of a pioneering woman English church musician, artist, mystic, anglophile and writer who has been broken over and over and over again by life yet has not given up.  I am not quite sure who needs the insights of a cutting edge “out there” spiritual thinker who is the product of high church Anglicanism.  I am not quite sure who wants the leadership of a wise, super well-educated woman who never married or had children, and has been homeless and spectacularly nonfunctional in “normal American life.”  These paradoxes are what I bring to leadership.  I am not quite sure who my choir is.  But in about three weeks my wonderful current living situation is ending, and I will be stepping out into the world again with my baton in hand, ready to conduct.  And can you believe it? I walk out in the assurance that there will be a “choir” gathering in the choir stalls!

My Mom

My mom passed away fifteen years ago yesterday.  I guess it is a testament to the passage of time that the anniversary came and went without my remembering it.

Mom was a woman of her time, so powerful and yet the structures were not in place for a woman to express that power.  In about 1950, she had a job at ABC radio, and when the "powers-that-be" heard her distinctive and commanding voice, they wanted her "on-air."  But when she announced this to her mother, her mother said, "No Way."  In the 1960's she was active in the Junior League and our church, and she wanted to be on the church's governing body. But the rector, towering over her also said, in effect, "No Way."  (At the time, all clergy, major choirs, vestry, acolytes, etc. were male.)  She helped to found a women's group that met, initially, to play bridge, but then morphed quickly into a discussion of challenging issues of the day: politics, the nuclear threat (this was the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis), education and religion.  Talk of recipes and diapers was not allowed.  In someone's suburban living room, these women were powerful.

Mom eventually would play significant leadership roles in several churches and community groups, but by the time that she might have been able to really take this to a new level, her health was starting to fail from a lifelong smoking habit.  It's so interesting, in the last few weeks of her life, Mom made two pronouncements that surprised me.  The first was when she said, "I'm sure you know, Elizabeth, that I have never approved of women having careers." My jaw dropped. I understood in a split second why this discomfort had been under my own surface for so long. We had an amazing conversation, in which she admitted that she had begun to change her perspective based on the caring professionalism of the two hospice nurses that had been working with her for about two years.  Quite literally, it took competent women coming into her home and shining like medical stars for her to see the possibilities.

Then, perhaps emboldened by this discussion, maybe a week later, she admitted to me that at one point she had contemplated becoming an Episcopal priest!  At the time, she was the head of the vestry and lay reader at a small church, and it sounds like, once again, her commanding voice and presence had drawn some attention in church circles.  Yet she "only" had an associate's degree, and the amount of expensive education that would have been necessary coupled with this underlying belief about women's roles prevented her from pursuing the idea.  I asked her where she would have pictured herself, and she said she would have liked to be the canon of a major cathedral!  This was the very early 1980's, and I believe it must have taken another decade for women to reach those positions.  Only now do I appreciate the courage of that sliver of a dream, and its parallel with mine!

Mom and I weren't always close, oddly enough; we were so different in most superficial respects.  And sometimes she drove me crazy, apologizing every time she said something important (as I have done until recently) and saying "we need to do X" when in fact she wanted me to do it!  But I treasure that last eighteen months or so of her life, particularly when we would meet over the "Today" show and discuss the news. In those months before her death, I finally began to understand the depth of her intelligence and the parallels in our lives. It's an appreciation that only continues to grow, even if my memory for dates does not!  Thank you, Mom!  

Liz Lavish

When you have been living a spare, unsettled, and overly self-effacing life, there are certain words that are a bit of a reproach to you.  The one that perhaps comes to mind first, and which I have been trying recently just to play around with, is “lavish.”  Some synonyms are “sumptuous,” “rich,” “extravagant,” and “luxurious.”  As a verb, “to lavish upon” means to be exceedingly generous with. These are qualities that I have to say I have yet to fully experience, although I certainly have been at the receiving end of some amazing smaller blessings.  It’s the idea of “living large” and being in a state of permanent abundance that has in the past elicited negative, bitter, frustrated feelings in me.  I know that there are people out there who live a lavish lifestyle, but my brain hasn’t been able to even wrap itself around anything above and beyond “barely getting by,” which, law of attraction being what it is, explains why “lavish” has seemed so out of reach, so irritating, and so incapable of inspiring me forward.

However, a character I have loved in both the book “A Room with a View” and the film version is Eleanor Lavish, played in the latter by the incomparable Judi Dench.  Ms. Lavish is a turn-of-the-20th century lady novelist, and appears to be quite extraverted and unconventional, although in reality she is about as straitlaced and Edwardian as the rest of the characters. 

Eleanor does inspire in one respect, though.  What if, in fact, “lavish” was my proverbial “middle name”?  Liz Lavish!  What would Liz Lavish do differently with her life?  There is something liberating in just thinking about it.  I mused on this a few weeks ago before buying that lottery ticket (!) but it doesn’t hurt to revisit the topic with this new playful persona!

First of all, I would own a house.  A large, beautifully appointed house with many guest rooms. There, I’ve said it. I would own more clothes and shoes than I absolutely need, I would buy antiques, and shop for food, clothes and gifts with little to no regard for price.  I would attend choral evensong several times a week, at different cathedrals and chapels, and drink champagne more than once a year.

But what surprised me on this quest to align with my inner Liz Lavish was how quickly I started to want to give away money. This week, there was a news article about how many English cathedrals have started to put off essential upkeep – I had a vision of Liz Lavish sitting down at her desk and writing large checks to all of them, and to organ restoration funds and choirs, particularly girls’ choir programs.  I would give substantial gifts to all the educational institutions I have ever attended.  I would give large thank-you gifts to the people and institutions that have helped me most over the last few years.  I would donate to funds that help underprivileged girls go to college and find lives that they are passionate about.  And I would start a trust to assist deeply spiritual people who need meditative retreat time, which either I would provide or help them find.

The most fun idea of all was this; I would give the “party to end all parties.”  This party would be lavish in every sense of the word, with catered food and drink, gorgeous flowers, games and outside play, and perhaps a fun theme.  But even though I might dress in a blue linen dress with white pearls like my grandmother and great-aunts used to do (I am determined to start doing that!), it wouldn’t be one of those “kiss-kiss” snooty parties.  No, I would invite dozens of people who mean the world to me, and I’d greet them at the door with a warm, grateful bear hug.  Church musicians would rub shoulders with former residents of the YWCA, folk singers with mountain climbers, aristocrats with new agers and artists, and scholars with sailors.  Any of my friends who are non-mobile or unwell, I would transport to the party in comfort, and help them find a way to take part.  I would run around, introducing everyone to everyone, in the calm sense that all of them would find common ground.  It would be the best party anyone had ever been to!   

Liz Lavish.  Hmmm….oh dear, I think she is the real me!  After all, it’s all an inner game, isn’t it, and at this point I will try every trick in the book to move forward!  Without worrying too much about TUT’s “cursed hows,” I’m going to continue to practice her energy on a daily basis.  And if I have nothing else but lavish love and lavish writing to give away at first, hey, at least that’s a start!  Maybe you have an alter-ego under the surface too?  To find him or her, just listen for that word that irritates the heck out of you!

 

 

 

 

Wonder

Sometimes a few days go by which conform to a certain theme, and this past weekend was a weekend of “wonder” in several forms.

I watched a video from the library called “Bronte Country,” about the Yorkshire landscape of the Bronte family (in particular, the three literary sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne.)  I had not realized how bleak and tragic their 19^th century lives were, with the very early deaths of their mother and two sisters, and the alcoholism and dissipation of their brother, in a town with an extremely high incidence of illness and death because of poor sanitation.  The fact that these three young women from one benighted family survived beyond their teen years to begin with, much less published still-acclaimed literary masterpieces, fills me with astonishment and wonder.  It reminded me of the Gloucestershire newspapers from the early 20^th century that I read on microfilm while doing research into composer Herbert Howells.  Small town English life 100 years ago was still, by our 21^st century standards, a minefield of uncertainty.  Every newspaper was chock-a-block full of accounts of freak accidents; from passengers falling off trains, to farmers being gored by bulls, to women being trampled to death by runaway horses on the High Street, to major mining accidents.  I remember that as I sat at the archaic microfilm reader, I wondered how it is that much-loved West Country composers like Howells, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, Ivor Gurney and others could have grown up with any sense of a larger purpose in this inherently uncertain environment.

Then late last week, I happened upon the latest episode of NPR’s “On Being” with Krista Tippett.  Her interview with Dr. B.J. Miller, director of Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, was a wonderful, rich meditation on life and death.  Miller himself experienced a serious accident in college, leaving him without legs and one arm. His situation gives him a unique perspective on and understanding of dying hospice patients, and his early architectural studies inform his work as well.  Once again, I wondered at human courage, and how so-called tragedy molds unique gifts to the world.

My last dance with “wonder” over the weekend came in the form of a free audio lecture by astrologer and “visionary activist” Caroline Casey, sent to me by The Shift Network.  What an astonishing person!  Listening to her is like being hit by a spiritual tornado.  She’s so brilliant, her mind moves a mile a minute, her use of language is so precise and yet creative, and the lens for her teaching (Coyote/Trickster) is so intriguing.  But she said the most “wonderful” thing: that “Wonder Invites Revelation.”  She suggested couching our life’s predicaments in “I wonder” statements, inviting a divine response, a gentle opening to insight and possibilities.  Some general examples I came up with are:

·         I wonder how my body will heal me today

·         I wonder where my true home is

·         I wonder what’s next

·         I wonder where I’ll find my optimum source of income

·         I wonder what the gift is in this situation

·         I wonder how my spouse and I can get on the same page about ____

·         I wonder how to heal from grief or pain

Globally, perhaps some questions might include:

·         I wonder when humans will stop fighting each other

·         I wonder how we can treat Mother Earth more gently

·         I wonder where humanity will be a century from now

We are all buffeted by some ferocious winds in our lives, which may threaten to topple us over completely.  Sometimes lives of great meaning and beauty are blown over sooner than makes sense.  And yet the wonder is that so many of us are still standing at any given moment, molded by adversity or “contrast,” heroically being ourselves as our fragile planet hurtles through space.  Not everyone has aligned yet more with love than with fear, but still … billions of courageous people, billions of singular stories.  What could be more wonder-ful than that?