Goddess Words 63: Gifts

Back in February of last year, I presented one of my other Goddess words, "Gifting". I made the decision this morning not to go back and read that post, so there could well be a little overlap with that essay, or others such as my previous Goddess Word, "Money". But I thought it was best to come to this with as much of an open mind as possible on this very hot June morning.

Gifts. As usual, an enormous word, both a noun and a verb.  I assume that when I added it to the list, what I had in mind was the gifts of the Goddess to us, to all of life. Because all of life is a gift. The fact of being alive is a gift. The fact that we breathe is a gift. The fact that we have access to Mother Earth's natural resources is a gift. The ability of Earth to sustain life is a gift. And although it may not always feel this way, each and every event in our life is a gift, a learning gift, an abundance gift, an opportunity for growth. 

From that standpoint if from no other, I've always found our economic system to be strange. To do anything in life from any other place than "gifting" seems strange to me. I've never understood the exchange of money, but of course that is evident in my. life! I suspect that by some point in the future, gifting will be the norm, but of course it isn't yet.

I don't do the following often enough in my personal journal -- but I'll do it right here as an example of embracing the gifts coming our way in life. Today, I am thankful for many gifts, and I'll list a few of them here. There's been a recent development that may give me more living stability going forward, so I'm very thankful for this. The other day, I was feeling extremely lonely, which is unusual for me. But I just could not think of one person exactly on my wavelength to connect with. I went outside, and realized that the trees surrounding me felt friendly! I could almost feel their blessings and gifts (including shade) coming my way. I am thankful for online access to many wise and beautiful people who are exploring this new age we are entering. I am thankful for the cornucopia of flowers and vegetables blooming right now, and how healthily some of us are in a position to eat on a day-to-day basis. 

Despite what I said above, I am thankful for many beautiful friends, and the people who have entered my life at just the right moment (sometimes to leave again soon after!) I am thankful for a long life of adventures and travel, singing and art. I am thankful for this blog and the regular opportunity to write. I am thankful for the gifts and talents that have enriched my life. I am thankful for animals, the chipmunks on the driveway and the hummingbird at the flowerpot. 

All of these are gifts, the kinds of gifts that may come to us almost every minute of every day. The Goddess doesn't ask us to place money in the hat. She doesn't want to know if we are worthy -- every being is worthy simply by virtue of being alive. And similarly, we can choose to gift others in a host of situations without expecting payment in return, without expecting the recipient to be "worthy". In other words, we can choose to act like the Goddess -- if we wish.

There are many things happening out there which superficially don't seem like "gifts". But they are gifts, teaching moments, learning prompts. If nothing else, we are being reminded of what we don't want, and sometimes that is a gift!

I know many people who are uncomfortable either giving or receiving gifts...at the moment, perhaps seeing our entire life from a gifting perspective might be hard for some of us. Maybe today, focusing on one gift will be enough. The blue sky above me is a gift. It is a beautiful color. Thank you, Goddess.

A different perspective

Today, I know I am circling around some of the ground I've been on recently, but from a different perspective. I remember, literally half-a-lifetime ago (35 years) sitting on a mattress on the floor of my new apartment in Duluth. I could see Lake Superior out the window, and was trying to make sense of an enormous change in my life. I had left New York City, and decided that I couldn't return to England since the men-and-boys' choir tradition still appeared to be in full force. (Unbeknownst to me, at about that very moment, Salisbury Cathedral was in the process of creating the first girls' cathedral choir in England! It is remotely possible that had I known about this and headed to Salisbury to become involved in this venture, everything might have turned out differently. My University of London MMus might have provided an entree...I'll never know!) 

Through a long, circuitous car journey, I had chosen Duluth for an experience of becoming more American, more directly spiritual, and perhaps more grounded. I had already been journaling in a conversational way, perhaps one might say "channelling", drawing on inner wisdom in trying to make decisions. But that particular morning, I must have accessed a huge well of pain and frustration about having significant gifts in a variety of areas -- particularly writing, art and music. I remember bursting into tears and sobbing almost uncontrollably, railing at God about why he hadn't just given me only one of these gifts. I mean, if I had just been one thing, I could easily have focused and not been drawn away by other talents. (My life had already been like a three-way tennis match, art-music-writing-music-art-music-writing...etc.) I had left the one iota of security I had ever experienced, in the corporate world, and here I was out in the wilderness, hoping to use these gifts in some meaningful way, and yet knowing in my heart of hearts that I didn't have the singleness of purpose in any one of these areas to create a career or substantial income. To put it mildly, I was scared to death. And in the subsequent half-a-lifetime, the tennis match has continued. Even now, having focused more exclusively on writing this blog and largely having given up any lingering hopes of fashioning a life devoted to cathedral music or painting, those two talent areas remain live wires, I guess you could say. No matter how often I visualize them flying off into the wake of my boat (!) I find they are still in my heart. They are still at my core.

This past weekend, thanks to some material I listened to online, it finally, finally hit me. These gifts are not (and never were) separate entities. They have been ways of accessing the beauty, harmony, love, and wisdom of the Goddess...separate "paths", perhaps, but one destination that arguably I "reached" early in life and was trying to express. The "gift" isn't being a writer or painter or singer or organist, it is having the capacity to access a high level of spiritual beauty. The gift is having the capacity to easily align with the Aquarian values that are now emerging in our world. (Since I am an Aquarian, I guess it makes sense, right?) Truly, I don't think that I fully understood this until this very moment. 

I don't know quite what to do with this different perspective except to let it settle in and take hold. It helps me understand why this lifetime has been what it has been, but what that will mean for my life moving forward in any practical sense, I don't know. I'll just have to let the insights keep surfacing.

Too much

Nothing is coming as a huge surprise to me right now, even the fact that just about every single external aspect of life seems to be "too much". I mean, after the deep dive inwards a week ago, and then a somewhat quieter, more still, receptive week this week, it seems like absolutely every bit of the world's chatter is too loud, whether it is in the news or in the artistic, musical, or spiritual online venues that I usually find more appealing, more aligned with who I am. Perhaps this is par for the course for a mystic, the moment where everybody else's model falls away, and you are left simply with you. Not politics, not religion, not outer structures, not even potential future structures or models. Just exactly who you are personally, right now, right this minute. All else is entirely too much information. 

I am, however, thankful for a recent guided visualization that helped me to access an image of me at a table writing (longhand!), surrounded by a circle of loving human beings who can't wait to read what I have to say!!! I do long for a slightly less solitary writing experience, and yet I wish to keep writing, in fact, to write more than I do now. I have never run out of things to say! It is the one area of my life where I don't experience "too much"! So how and when I will find a way of being in that sort of community, perhaps only the Goddess knows. The image made me happy. It made me glow with joy. So that is a good thing.

A hot day on the horizon. Stay cool, folks, if you can!

A Big Aha

I had a big "aha" this morning, not surprising given that I dug so deep last week, and then Sunday was a powerful full moon with its clarity and light. This was to be a week of letting realizations simply come to me, and come they have!

This morning, I was listening to the Albinoni Adagio in G minor on the radio. I was swamped by the longing I have felt for years and years to be utterly immersed in that kind of beauty, whether it be classical music, brilliant historical architecture, cathedrals, choral evensong services, major art museums, formal gardens...you name it. The aspects of our world which deep in my heart of hearts I find most beautiful, at times far more than natural vistas. I've mentioned before that there has always been a part of me living in London (or Paris, or Montreal...) within eyesight and hearing of exquisite examples of human creativity. But this has not been my real life, as you know. Whether I "chose" my experiences or they chose me, they were often 180 degrees opposite what I had hoped for. And this morning, I found myself for the first time absolutely furious with the Goddess. If I have been aligned with Her all along, why would She keep me so far from my preferences? (Yes, I know how much this sounds like a traditional lament to God!)

And then it hit me. As beautiful as these traditional (European) art forms are, it is unlikely that many of them were created to honor the Goddess. I cannot know this for sure, but certainly they were all formed within a certain context and set of beliefs that we are rapidly leaving now. Without fully understanding why at the time, I gravitated toward the experiences outside the milieu that would have completely enthralled and engaged me. The life I originally wanted would probably have left me in less harmony with self and the divine feminine. My main intention for this lifetime was undoubtedly alignment with the Goddess, and my actual experiences guaranteed that I would be in Her inner spiritual "place" by the time all our current shifts started. (I did some neat, more extensive, writing in my personal journal about this, which I may share soon. My backlog of things needing to be shared is beginning to get entirely too large. But I can only go so far today.)

I've had a good cry. My logical brain finally makes more sense of this whole journey, but, as ever, it may take some more time for my heart to catch up.  

The Next Day, the Next Week

As I guess most of you know, I've spent the last week or more delving even more deliberately "down and in" than usual. It was a response to feeling extraordinarily antsy, and yet not knowing where (externally) to go or what to do. So I made the decision to symbolically take the bus to stations within, and it has been a rich, intense journey. Yesterday was a rare and powerful full blue moon, and it was a rare and powerful day, as it turned out. The "station" I accessed was really, really hard, and for the moment, I don't quite know what to do with the realizations that came up, so -- as with some other material surfacing -- I am letting it percolate. (The consolation being that I am more consciously letting it percolate than in the past!)

Allowing a quiet "next day/next week" to be part of the process is an important model for the larger re-balancing the world needs right now. We are all so used to feeling the need to keep going and going and going with whatever we are involved with (even spirituality!), and yet Nature, with its seasons, its waxings and wanings, its ebbs and flows, its births and deaths, is a great, healthy, model. This week, I'm not planning to dig one inch deeper. I am feeling quite drained and exhausted, and -- appropriately! -- as if I've just been on an arduous trek! So the plan is to stay in more of a receptive mode, and catch up on sleep, and try to go with the proverbial flow. I know about the best laid plans (etc.etc.) but ideally I need time to weave some of this stuff into the fabric of my life and consciousness. 

In the Northeast, several more days of blessed coolness before summer sneaks back in...

 

Night Life

Today's post has nothing to do with the deep dive inwards that I have been doing this week, except to the degree that it is a result of a certain amount of looking back. 

These days, I am generally asleep by 9 or 9:30 PM. I will only go out in the evening to something that is a "hell yes" (usually a musical event). I was wondering if this is me becoming an old fuddy-duddy. But the fact is that, essentially, I've always been "early to bed, early to rise" in a boring kind of way, by most people's standards. Whether it was at Smith, or when I lived in DC, or my decade in New York City, my idea of a night out on the town was to take part in a choir rehearsal, or take an art or yoga class, or eat dinner out with a friend or go to an early movie. I mean, I never, ever, went to bars, or discos, or night clubs, or swank restaurants. I attended a rather formal dance at The Plaza once, but it was with relatives, not a date. The year I studied in England, I'd go with friends to a pub once or twice a week and have a cider or a glass of wine, but my memory is that last call was 10 or 10:30 pm. In places like Duluth and Helena, night life was usually me reading or watching TV for an hour after supper and going to sleep. 

Now, even today, if the opportunity presented itself to dress up and go out to dinner at an awesome restaurant and have a really top-notch gin and tonic, I would -- and I would do anything in my power to stay awake past nine! But that hasn't been my life most of the time, and clearly if that kind of entertainment had been a priority for me, I would have lived a very different life.

Last night, I chose not to attend something that wasn't quite in my wheelhouse, so I stayed at the house and read an old Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael mystery. Yup. England, monasticism, medieval life, and the option of throwing a bookmark onto any page and take it up again tomorrow. When you are a contemplative nun at heart, that is "night life". That is your "wheelhouse". In the old days, I subtly judged myself for being so dull. What is lovely now is my ability to fully accept and love myself exactly as I am...

Today's "Station"

Over the course of seven decades, it has been, of course, impossible not to engage with the news of the world. The first major letter I ever wrote, at seven or eight years old, was to President Johnson, begging him to stop the nuclear arms race. In school and at the bachelor's and master's level, I studied many aspects of history (most of which involved wars and violence at least to some extent), and of course at Time, my daily focus as a letters correspondent was the news of the world. I've been privileged to be mostly an observer of these kinds of events, and to have the luxury of considering them from an intellectual, spiritual, ethical, even feminist standpoint. More recently, as my heart has opened up, it has become easier to feel the subtler violence I have experienced, and what it would be like to be at the receiving end of it more directly. I have felt grief that I think I had previously buried.

I hadn't planned necessarily to write again until next week, but something new happened to me yesterday as I was listening to a news report on the radio. I reached a new inner bus station. I strained to actively imagine being the perpetrator of violence, whether in war or any other setting. I was trying to "feel" what it would be like to be a person forcing people out of their homes, or using a weapon, or attacking other people, animals, or the earth in any way, and I simply could not get there. If anything, attempting to experience the emotions that cause such violence took me further from understanding it. We are all told that this is the human condition, that all of us could act this way under certain circumstances, and perhaps some day I will be proven wrong. But I am a human being, and as far as I can tell, this is not "my condition". And more importantly, I do not believe it is the condition of (or a given in) the Age of Aquarius paradigm we are entering. Violence does not match this new energy in any way. It may seem fanciful to say, but I truly believe that in the near future, people who are about to act violently will find that their arms literally collapse, their weapons de-materialize. They may shout in frustration, but nothing will come out of their mouths.