Tag: grace

Rewriting the Lyrics of Our Lives

Songwriters sometimes rewrite their lyrics to expand or change perspective. Today, we are all called to rewrite how we see ourselves and our lives in the 21st century, to be more truthful, more inclusive, more expansive, more heart-centered. Not only in the U.S. but everywhere in the world. We think we belong to countries, to nationalities, to races, to religions, to belief systems. In truth, we are none of those. We are immigrants on this planet, traveling here from somewhere in the cosmos to sing our human songs. We think we have identities as we move from place to place. Those identities arrive at birth and depart at death. What is left is a soul, traveling light. In a rewrite of the lyrics of our lives, the words will fall way and there will be nothing but that light.

The longer I live, the less I hang onto. Even the language I use to describe my own feelings and thoughts flows through me but doesn’t really stick. It is spirit speaking in the mother tongue of my soul, and I am just a vessel through which it pours. Each of us is. We are souls passing through. We speak and listen, but it is our hearts that discover the deepest wisdom, in silence, in love. Human/soul connection beyond lifetimes.

When those we love pass from this dimension to another, life can take on a limitless, ethereal quality. Memories are both close and distant, bright and dim. Everything merges into one somehow. I miss my parents and friends who have died, but they are also with me. Life on Earth is what we shared, but there is something larger than those lives that holds us together in ways that are outside of language or description. Infinite consciousness.

In recent years, I find myself floating in the intangible: something as fleetingly beautiful as a morning sky or a summer’s sunset. And it is not just one thing. It is everything. I walk but really I am carried. Music carries me. Birdsong carries me. Poetry carries me. Love carries me. I speak but I am speechless. The lyrics of my life rewrite themselves without any effort on my part. They are both vivid and neutral. They shift with the changes in light and sound and being.

In the end, it is grace that carries us. We are part of something we can only sense but not fully articulate. Early in life, we are immersed in the wonders of living. Death is distant. Then it comes closer, perhaps touches us in a sudden unexpected way. It is then that we begin to see a wider view. The lyrics we have written to describe our lives no longer entirely fit. We realize that at the deepest level, all of us, no matter our background, race, or beliefs, share a common destiny and are woven from common threads. The tapestry of life on Earth enfolds us in its wondrous complexity. When we finally see that fully, “lyrics” fall away, and there is nothing left but the grace of being and interbeing.


The Changing, Yet Familiar, Landscape

I was born in Illinois and grew up in a rural area where farms, cornfields, and scattered houses dotted the landscape. My parents built their home on five acres in the countryside, not far from a small town where I subsequently went to school. My daily life was spent mainly outdoors, playing among the trees, fields, orchards, and gardens my dad planted. It was a small paradise, which I still hold in my heart and have gravitated toward in other places and other landscapes over the years.

As an adult, I’ve lived in or near urban areas (mainly Boston and San Francisco). I’ve loved the convenience and ease of living where I could walk everywhere or take public transportation. Neighborhoods with small gardened spaces and trees around the buildings or houses. Corner stores. But it has been the parks and nature sanctuaries where I have spent much of my time. That was the balance for me, a place to live where I could walk as well as visit natural settings. Easy access to buses, trains, and an airport where I could travel to other places in the world. The towns and yards changed over the years, west and east coasts, but each one seemed to fit my life at the time. Even a few years in Florida recently provided an entirely different experience of Nature.

After moving back to the Boston area three years ago, Anne and I began to look for an affordable place to live, in the midst of rising rents. That meant living further away from the city. We eventually found a place we love, but it has meant an adjustment in how we live our daily lives. There are no neighborhoods or corner stores like those we were used to. Instead, an almost rural landscape stretches around the small group of condos where we live: woods, fields, small houses, roads, and occasional shopping plazas. There is a town about a 50-minute walk away with a train to Boston and Cambridge (which I greatly appreciate!). We are grateful for so much here (birds in the trees outside our windows, open skies clearly visible, quiet), but the walkability factor has required us to let go of previous parameters and expectations.

In doing so, suddenly, one morning I was reminded of my own childhood home. We lived in the country, a rural area not that different (except for the cornfields!) from where we live now. School buses took me in town to school. My parents drove to local markets, etc. Trees surrounded our house. Have I come full circle, returning to a distantly familiar landscape, one I have to accustom myself to but that from that perspective becomes newly interesting?

Life is full of surprises and replays and new beginnings that remind us of past experiences. Everything is both old and brand new in our lives. There is nothing on Earth that has not been lived before in some form or another, and yet at the same time every experience feels like a new discovery. We have lived many lives, within this one and among those in the expansive past of the planet. Often that sense of deja vu touches our hearts deeply and opens us to possibility and a fresh outlook on daily life.

That is where I am now. I am living changes, centered in a new present. Simultaneously, I am being reminded of the rich and diverse past I have already lived. In the distance, a train whistle evokes both past and present-moment awareness. Landscapes shift throughout our lifetimes, and within that motion is the purpose of every life: soul expansion and recognition of our commonality in all experiences and all lifetimes. In that, we realize that every moment, every landscape, is a gift of grace.

Joy, Grief, and Miracles

My entire life I have carried within me, in equal parts, exquisite joy at being alive and profound grief at one day having to leave this world for the vast unknown of eternity. That unknown, and the sorrow surrounding it, frightened me terribly as a small child. At night, I would cry about this seemingly insoluble dilemma of life and death and the infinite universe. As I explored a spiritual path in my adult life, I came to see that this life/death dichotomy arose as part of being embodied spirit in physical human form. My soul saw no polarized separation; only my mind did.

There have always been times in my daily life when I saw the world as my soul did: expansive, wondrous, flowing, filled with miracles. When I am walking quietly in Nature, surrounded by birds and trees and flowers. When I am with friends and family, feeling the love that connects us. The trajectory of my life has been to balance out the joy and grief, to come to peace with all the varied and sometimes contradictory experiences of living as a human being on Earth. Perhaps this is what we are all doing in our own way.

Immersed in presence in the natural world, I feel that balance. Trees, birds, clouds, flowers, seasons. I am outside of time, beyond the mind’s observations. I connect to all parts of life with each breath. Breathing like a tree, like a flower, like a bird. Therein is calm, a surrender to something greater that is comforting not frightening. Here, infinity is who I am. It flows within me and surrounds me as well. In Nature, I recognize that life holds infinity in everything. Somehow grief falls away in those moments, and I only know the peace that is at the center of my soul.

The key perhaps is to see the entire world as one with Nature, to recognize that Mother Earth and Spirit are a single seamless creation with no beginning and no end. And within that eternal, never-ending Presence is something beyond the mind’s ability to understand. Only in completely letting go of the need to solve the puzzle of existence and accepting the wonders before us each day do we experience peace. And a balance that brings together joy and grief in the human heart and makes them whole.

This is where I am now, sitting silently on the edge of eternity and knowing it as who I am, who we all are. William Blake could hold “eternity in an hour,” infinity in the palm of his hand. He saw a “World in a Grain of Sand, and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” To me, this is the greatest and most exquisitely beautiful wisdom I’ve ever encountered. Within it is the amazing grace we all hope to find in our lifetimes, no further away than our own miraculous hands or the flowers at our feet.

What Is Destiny?

The idea of destiny scares many people. They fear losing individual control over their lives, the “free will” they’ve always been told they have (in the Western world anyway): “If I can’t change the course of my life, am I a victim of circumstance? Am I a prisoner of fate?” Thoughts such as these can trap us in polarity and a single-minded view of the world. Words are like frames really; if you change the frame, the meaning changes.

What if we called destiny something else? Use a verb frame instead of a noun. How about: Destiny is flowing with the river of the universe. It is dancing with the divine music of the spheres. Living from the soul in pure loving awareness. Or all of the above. Instead of a closed door, destiny could be an open field, the one your soul and God designed together for you to play in in this lifetime. Destiny could just be another name for you and God as One.

We humans want to believe we can single-handedly control our daily lives, avoiding pain and hanging onto happiness. We fear getting lost in suffering. Yet no one can live a human life without experiencing the full spectrum of emotions, from sadness to joy. The secret is that we don’t have to suffer as we feel these things. If we open our minds and our hearts to a fully expanded soul view of the universe, then perhaps we can better see that we are one small, but essential, part of an intricately interwoven tapestry of light, color, and sound, which was created long ago (in human terms) and is continuing to unfold.

What if destiny is actually the supernovas, galaxies, and stardust from which we were born exploding across the cosmos to manifest as Planet Earth and you in this moment of human time and space? What if destiny is the spark of life itself within you? It is born, expands into shining beingness, and then gradually fades back into the universal matter from which it arose. All of it extraordinarily beautiful and magical and over which we have no control. You can only observe the unfolding in awe and wonder. This is human destiny. Within that is celebration not grief if seen through the lens of divine Presence. You are a miracle within a miracle.

Peace of mind and inner calm arise when we allow acceptance of life the way it is to fill our conscious awareness. This is not really alien to our human selves because deep within us is the core of living spirit (soul) which is peace itself. It is this Spirit that flows through the galaxies and through us and connects everything in oneness. We and the stars are destined to shine together. Accept every moment of your life, and light will radiate from you, and the idea of control will dissolve completely. Then you will know destiny as the gift of love and grace that it is.

Divine Infusions

I have straddled the worlds of western medicine and holistic health most of my life. As a child, I saw an Illinois allergist for many years who helped me with desensitization shots for my chronic multiple allergies. When I was 18, doctors in Venice, Italy, saved my life when my appendix burst on a trip with a student group. As an adult, I began to gravitate to alternative remedies like herbs, as well as acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, massage, and meditation. I became an organic vegetarian. I continued to see my very supportive primary care physician for yearly checkups and prescriptions for migraines, but I was aware of the shifts in prevailing consciousness (and funding) that influence what is available at any given time. Every decision I made arose from my own intuition about which path served me best.

My recent diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer catapulted me into an unexpected journey that actually allowed me to learn so much more about western medicine, particularly as it relates to treating breast cancer. I found myself in the hands of three knowledgeable and compassionate doctors who worked as a team to customize my care and were able to explain it clearly and understandably to me. I absolutely knew I was on the right path. Once again, all my decisions are grounded in my own inner guidance, and I have felt profoundly guided from the beginning. Never more so than last week, when I received my first chemotherapy infusion, the treatment I had feared the most.

All I can say is that it was a divinely orchestrated day, every bit of it. The staff at the chemo Infusion Center were wonderful, human angels every one of them. Thorough and careful about all they did. I sat peacefully in my own little room with heated blankets, looking out at trees and sunshine during my treatment. I had been saying for a week or so that I was going to receive a sacred elixir from medical alchemists, and I truly felt that. The words came to me from deep inside, my own spiritual perspective on what was happening. Throughout history, alchemists in many countries, some well-known scientists, have worked with energy and matter to find ways to cure diseases or transmute matter. Modern medicine and science probably do not see a connection between that work and theirs, but within my own experience, I felt myself once again bridging worlds, even dimensions.

As the nursing staff explained what the chemotherapy does and answered my questions, I felt my spiritual vision expand and deepen. What moved it along even further was an iPod that I had brought along, filled with Panache Desai’s meditations. I was drawn to one program in particular: “Align, Attune, Ascend,” which I had loved but hadn’t listened to for years. When I looked at the listings, I found that the word infusion was included in several titles, and Panache referred to all of the meditations as “vibrational infusions.” The synchronicity was unmistakable!

The first one I chose to listen to during my treatment was “Body Ascension Infusion,” and it was perfect. The words themselves were powerfully infused with energy and light (Panache spoke of releasing the density in the cells and allowing homeostasis and balance to occur), and the Solfeggio frequencies music that accompanied the meditations amplified everything. I felt myself carried along on the combined energy of the chemotherapy infusion and the vibrational infusion, both divine. I was receiving a sacred elixir of medical and spiritual alchemy. My words, my experience. “It’s all in how you frame it,” a friend once said to me. I returned home to rest quietly, and gratefully. Every moment of the day pure grace.