I'm glad...

At the end of a year, a writer is faced with the temptation of trying to be unusually brilliant. I would so like to find a way to encapsulate it all, to be inspiring, to articulate this remarkable year's "perfect" epitaph. And yet, what with the proverbial one thing after another, and in the face of almost epic world events, I'm just glad to reach this particular finish line. All I seem to have the energy to do is to present one of my "lists of ten," in no particular order.

1. I am so glad to get to the end of 2016. Yes I am. It has been indescribable, personally, and much more so for the world. It has been catalytic, and it certainly has been revealing. If I thought it were possible, I'd ask the Universe for a year off for all of us to take stock of what's going on, but I don't think it works that way. The best we may get is a quiet weekend. So, 2016, thanks for being a great teacher. Please give all of us the strength to deal with the new factors you birthed!
2. I am so glad to be in a warm house with two sleeping but personable cats.
3. I am so glad that my computer (at least temporarily) came back to life and got me to the end of the year, and maybe beyond.
4. I'm glad I travelled to England this past spring and heard choral evensong in a number of new (to me) settings. I am glad that, while I may be "done" with many things, this specific place and this specific tradition remain alive at my core.
5. I'm glad for my dear readers, and my dear friends.
6. I am glad to be me. Wow. Yes, it's true. I'm glad to be all the wonderful and challenging things that I am. No amount of money would tempt me to be someone else.
7. On the same note, I am glad to be a woman of almost 61. This "sixty" thing has been unexpectedly liberating. You just stop wanting to hide your light under a bushel. You just stop being afraid of being laughed at.
8. I'm still only at the baby step phase, but I am so glad to be exploring the divine feminine, and the real meaning and power of love.
9. I'm glad for my increased understanding of how the law of attraction works.
10. Lastly, I'm glad because I believe all of us have the tools and resources deep in us to grow stronger and wiser in the face of 2017's challenges.

Thanks, all. I love you and wish you the best that can be in the new year! Liz

Ladders

Several threads seem to be converging, with me in a little house with a woodstove and two cats, and snowflakes wafting down.

The first, which I'll just "put out there," is a concept that a friend introduced me to around 25 years ago: that life is like a ladder, and we are all going up, rung by rung. For the most part, the people who are meant to "help" us are the ones on the rung above ours, and the ones who we are meant to help are those on our same rung or the rung or two below us. As well-meaning as it may be, it is counterproductive for us to leave our step and go back ten or twenty rungs and try to be helpful, because we really are not the right person for that job, just as someone way above us isn't going to be very effective helping us. I'm not sure where this friend had read or heard this, but it has at times been a wonderful reminder. Arguably the people we are the most likely to influence in our lives are people somewhere near our same stage of spiritual evolution, and then the wave of assistance will work its way along the ladder.

These dark mid-winter days haven't been entirely serene. I found myself two days ago in sort of a pique of passion about all the things, people, places, situations, and mindsets I am "done" with. In my personal journal, I wrote in big, loose, capital letters, "I AM DONE WITH ___," "I AM DONE WITH ___," for several pages. Some of the things on the list weren't too surprising, but some were. In the end, most of these things just have no spark or resonance for me any more. I'm bored with them, done with them. I've outgrown them. I've learned the life lesson I needed to learn from them in this lifetime, and now it's time to move forward. There has been a bit of disorientation in this. I mean, you can be on such a deliberate spiritual path and yet still be surprised by the heavy boulders that are weighing down your coat pocket, and unsure about how to proceed once they are tossed aside. It's not a judgment of these things, overall. Just a sense of, thanks, but now I'm done. I've graduated.

I happened across this quote online this morning, by inspirational teacher Iyanla Vanzant: "Release and detach from every person, every circumstance, every condition, and every situation that no longer serves a divine purpose in your life. All things have a season, and all seasons must come to an end..."  To shamelessly mix all these metaphors, I guess the message I keep getting is not to fear stepping onto that next rung, and to do it completely. If a season is over, if a series of lessons is over, it doesn't mean life is over. It simply means it is time to move up the ladder toward greater expansion and life. It is OK to move, even if others aren't moving as fast, even if no one understands, even if events in the world seem to be more important than you, or even if you aren't clear exactly what is on that next step.  It is not only "OK" to move forward, it is exactly what we are here to do.  

Another soft-ish landing

As is so often the case, this isn't exactly the post I intended to write today. The one I wrote in my head in the middle of the night was inspired by the fact that yesterday, I thought my computer had completely died. I hadn't used it on Christmas Day, and yesterday morning, I got up early and answered some important emails, checked the weather, etc.  Then I put it into sleep mode, cleaned the woodstove, gathered some new wood, and put birdfeed into the feeder. When I came back, nothing seemed to be working, the screen, the touch pad, control-alt-delete,  escape, even the on-off button. I ended up listening to the fan whir until the battery died, and blessed it and wrote it off as dead. People always talk about Mercury retrograde (which we are in) being hard on electronics, and I figured my well-worn computer had succumbed.

This morning, I decided to plug in the charger and just see...after 45 minutes, I turned on the "on" button, and lo and behold, here we are. It is working. It's a Christmas miracle, literally, because I had walked through a whole process of letting go, talking myself into envisioning a newer computer, accepting a better reality that better suits my needs, and I never despaired or freaked out. This may only be a reprieve, and overall it is time for a brand new (not six or seven year old) machine, but somehow facing the reality calmly led to a soft-ish landing. And as you know, I am the Queen of those.

I had so many other things on my mind, but I think I won't press my luck today. I'll just express my gratitude that there's a little life in the old girl yet. My computer and I have something in common.

Lessons and Carols

I don't remember a time when the service of Nine Lessons and Carols (as sung at King's College, Cambridge) was not a part of my life. The men and boys' choir at my home church of St. George's, Schenectady sang it, as did the pick-up choir at tiny St. John's Church in Essex, NY in the 1970's when I came home from college. For a long time, I owned an old Argo record of the service from King's, and then starting in the late 1980's, public radio began to broadcast it live on Christmas Eve morning (mid-afternoon in England), and this tradition continues. ("Check your local station for listings.")

My yearly Christmas Eve "settings" might constitute a book in itself, if I could only remember them all: thirty floors up in an office on New York's Sixth Avenue, answering letters; at a cash register at a toy store or stationer; on an airplane; racing around in a car doing last minute Christmas shopping with the service on the radio; two years ago, listening to the broadcast from Gloucestershire, England, as the sun was setting over still-green hills out the window. In 2010, I joined the choir of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine just in time to sing multiple Christmas services, and what a thrill that was. But by far the most memorable Lessons and Carols experience happened back when I lived in Duluth, Minnesota in the early 1990's. For several years in a row, this was my Christmas Eve morning routine: Duluth was (as mentioned several blogs ago) absolutely frigid in late December, and the extreme cold made for an extraordinary, roiling, steaming lake, a sight to behold. I would drive my little red car up the north shore towards Two Harbors, and park in a little pull-off just in time for the service to start. Keeping the car engine and heat on, I sat, mesmerized by the lake's unique "show," listening to every second of the service, from the treble solo that opens "Once In Royal David's City" to the final Bach postlude, In Dulci Jubilo. I basically know the service, and most of its readings, anthems and carols by heart, so I spoke and sang along with tears absolutely pouring down my cheeks. At that point, I had "deep-sixed" English church music, believing girls and women would never have any real opportunities to sing it. I think I found my way to Duluth precisely because it was a world away from the music I loved entirely too much. But every Christmas Eve, I allowed myself this one broadcast and one good cry over my life's strange incongruities. As the service came to an end, I dried my eyes, put my car into drive, and headed back to Duluth where I had a standing invitation to a Scandinavian feast complete with lutefisk, lefse, mashed potatoes, sugar cookies, and white foods of every description. I'm so grateful to the friends who have regularly included me so wholeheartedly in their celebrations, and for the exposure to other traditions and tastes.

Tomorrow, for that ninety minutes, I'll be with a friend who also wants to listen to the broadcast, and we'll cook and bake while singing along to carols. (I hope this aligns with the spirit of the thing!) I've learned a lot of lessons in my six decades of Lessons and Carols, not the least of which is that time and space aren't quite what we think they are. An actual physical presence isn't absolutely necessary for loving participation in this kind of tradition. But having said that, I've also made a decision. Christmas Eve afternoon 2017, I will be in Cambridge, England, lining up to attend the service in person. Because it is time, isn't it? It is time.

May all of you have a beautiful weekend, whatever tradition you are observing, whatever music you are singing, whatever warmth you are choosing to chase the cold and dark away. Blessings, all.

Solstice

When you own as little as I do, packing for a two-week stay away is basically the equivalent of moving entirely. There's an hour or two of total chaos as you try to re-organize things into bags, and decide on what few things will stay behind. Then, presto, out the door to a friendly ride and off you go. The last 24 hours have consisted of getting trained in the art of the latest pet-sitting job and staying out of the way of the friends heading, themselves, off on a trip.

And now, at 2 PM on the solstice, total silence except for the sound of wood crackling in the wood stove and the Christmas music I'm going to play periodically the next few days. There is no TV where I am, so for the most part I'll be able to shut out the worst of the world's demands, and hold an energy of calm. How very, very thankful I am for this moment. I know how few people have the privilege of regularly experiencing such peace.

For today, I am not going to try to visualize or manifest or make anything happen. For today, silence and stillness. For today through the weekend, the year's darkest days, may we all have a "stille nacht," and a few sparkling stars for good measure.

No No

One of the main premises of law of attraction thinking, articulated in numerous Abraham Hicks talks and in the writings of other New Thought writers and metaphysicians, is that there is no "no" in the divine mind. I've written about this before, but it has been on my mind again, both in terms of my own life and the scenario unfolding before us.

The concept is this: this is an attraction-based universe, where people and situations of like energies bond with each other. Attention itself is a form of attraction, and if I say "no" to something, I'm having to look at it long enough to say "no." If I say, "heck, no," my attention level to the thing I don't like rises, and if I become apoplectic about the thing I dislike -- if I begin to hate it and rise up to fight it -- from the standpoint of law of attraction, I am in fact saying "yes" to it. By giving something constant, emotional, negative attention, I am in fact helping to create it as a reality as much as if I were saying "yes."

I am the poster child for No No, as most of you know (!) By age six, all I wanted to do in the world was to sing English cathedral music, and by ten, I wanted to live in England and be the first woman conductor of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge. Yet at 60, I am still living in the U.S., having never had job satisfaction, livable income, or permanent connection to this tradition except what I hear on records or online. I have experienced a few glorious moments of alignment, but nothing remotely permanent. I can see how the early "no" ("girls cannot sing this music") translated into a domino effect of outer and inner "no's." I tried over the years to say "yes" instead to a variety of American life options and to shift gears to other interests, yet after a short time, my inner "no" would come out. I'd say, "No, this isn't right for me," and move on to another place or situation that wasn't inherently right for me either, eventually saying "no" before moving on yet again. Not only did I lose sight of myself in a sea of "no's," everyone around me lost faith in me. I've had so-called friends joke about how they thought I was dead, and in a sense, I have been, because I've been exiled from my life passion, my personal conduit to Divine Love. 

How does this relate to this extraordinary international moment? As I observe the pushback to this unfortunate path we are on, I am struck by the fact that it is essentially (and understandably) a great big "no," a great big "heck, no." My heart sinks, because I know what that means. Unwittingly, the "no's" are saying "yes" to this path, yes to these horrifying trends. We think we are doing the right thing by saying "no," but we are co-creating the very thing we fear. We are co-creating our own exile from the values we love, our own "death."

There is nothing harder in the world than to detach from your "no" long enough to vividly and lovingly envision your "yes." It goes literally against all of human history, which has been one dramatic fight "against" after another. But I'm setting a goal for myself these next two weeks, when I will live quietly, pet-sitting for friends in the country. I plan to focus almost entirely on my lifelong dream. I plan to envision it and feel its beautiful energy daily for hours at a stretch. At 60 I won't become that exact choir director or achieve success in the traditional way, and that is OK. But there is still some way to live my dream that only a consistent "yes" can create. "Yes" is the only path to life. In terms of the national and international scenario, I will try my hardest to envision what I know most of us want: enlightened leadership, a world where everyone is validated, accepted and supported, and where everyone honors and cares for our earth home. I invite my small but hardy band of "Liz Path" readers to spend these two weeks saying "yes" to what they really want, not "no" to what they don't want. And let's see what this New Year brings!

I'll check in in a few days to let you know how it's going.

Brr...

Yesterday, I stood for about ten minutes waiting for the bus to a job. (Sharing the bus shelter with me was a shattered television, all broken glass and sharp metal.) It was eight AM, and about minus 5 degrees F, with a wind chill of at least minus 15. After years of living in Duluth, Minnesota, I should have been used to it, but I guess I'm no longer as hardy as I used to be. All I could think of was, if the news reports about the incoming cabinet are even partially true, and the combined wealth of only 17 individuals exceeds that of a huge proportion of the rest of the U.S. population, I guess it is safe to assume that public transportation is unlikely to be a high priority in upcoming years. Have any of these people even taken a bus or a subway in the last twenty years or so? Have they got any clue?

This weekend, I am holding the members of the electoral college in the light. It's not necessarily that I think there will be a major surprise (although that would be darned interesting! My hunch is that an avalanche has been triggered that will just have to go its course.) However, I hope that all of these folks will listen to their gut feelings and have the courage to align with the best truth they can find within them. Yesterday I heard someone say, "We were meant for these times," and that is true of all of us in our unique roles.

Speaking of Duluth, two astonishing photographs of my former home showed up online yesterday. One was of "sea smoke" (formed by frigid air hitting a relatively warm Lake Superior) parting in the shape of a heart to reveal the sunrise. The other was of a fifteen-or-twenty-foot ice-filled wave rolling down the center of the lake. Those waves used to literally crash into the beach outside my window, creating ever-changing mountains of ice. One of the things I loved about my experience out there was coming to understand the overwhelming power of nature. It's reassuring to remember that the human power games we are watching just don't hold a candle to it.

Brr...