Tag: open heart

From the Heart

In her recent DNC speech, Michelle Obama urged listeners not to complain but rather to “do something!” Yes, and to that I would add “Be in your heart as you do.” Because being is as important as doing in this world, maybe more so. How you go about “doing” infuses your life energy into what you do. If you complain or criticize, you may negate all that you do. If you are optimistic and hopeful, you amplify your doing with positive energy and inspire everyone around you. The power of open-hearted human connection.

Another word for life energy is soul, who you are at your core. Your soul doesn’t have opinions; it is pure peace, pure love. That energy can break through walls. As Amanda Gorman wrote in her poem “This Sacred Scene”: “While we all love freedom, it is love that frees us all….empathy emancipates.” The loving compassion in your words and actions frees the love in the hearts of those you encounter on your life’s path. One seemingly small expression of love can have a huge effect. For example, Tim Walz’s teenage son Gus, who tearfully said “ I love you, Dad! That’s my dad!” from the audience as Walz accepted the Vice Presidential nomination at the DNC. Gus’s image on video opened hearts around the globe when it went viral on social media.

But you don’t have to be famous or in the public eye to touch the lives of friends and strangers alike in your life. Telling those close to you that you love them is the most precious gift you could give them, which they can then pass on. One smile and kind words to a bus driver or cashier can make their day and ripple through person after person as they share their uplifted spirits with others. Does that sound like a Disney film—too good to be real? Well, try living in that awareness for one day and see how it affects not only others’ feelings but your own. The proverb about the movement of a butterfly’s wings in China affecting weather in North America is not as far-fetched as you may think!

Whatever you feel called to do in your life—volunteering at a Food Bank or animal shelter; activism for human rights or environmental awareness; voting; recycling; donating food or funds; creating art, music, writing; helping a neighbor or family member—is a pathway to active being as well. True soul-to-soul connections. When you consciously live from the heart, you are creating waves of loving-kindness and generosity of spirit wherever you go. You are being and doing simultaneously, and your full human potential is shining out into the world—from your heart.

Sweet Peas and Dancing Trees

When you move from one place to another, the way in which you view your surroundings day to day changes. Depending on how far you move and how different one location is from another, your perceptional shift can be imperceptible or radical. But it always happens. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I used to move frequently for just this reason: it was like throwing everything up in the air and starting all over again. Whether across town or coast to coast, the world was a different place. Traveling has the same effect. All my senses come alive in new ways. I am consciously interrupting habit, and I love it.

My partner and I recently moved to a condo on the opposite side of Boston from where we had lived for years in various apartments. This was after a move to Florida for two years. It is wonderful to be back in Massachusetts, and this current move has introduced us to an entirely unfamiliar town, quite different from where we used to live. It took a number of months for me to open fully to the change. I really missed where we lived for so many years (which was very close to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, my favorite nature sanctuary). Now, however, gradually, the sense of newness is reawakening my full awareness in unexpected ways.

For instance, last week on my daily walk I discovered bright pink and white sweet peas growing wild in the area next to the woods across from our condo. It was such a delight because it reminded me of my childhood in the Illinois countryside, where sweet peas blanketed the fences with their beautiful blooms. I never knew they could grow wild in the fields like I am seeing here. These were covered with bees and butterflies, and I stood watching them for quite a while in deep appreciation.

This past spring the cherry, crab apple, and red bud trees blooming here were also a surprise, as were the dozens of song sparrows and house finches singing all day from March on. Joined by cardinals, robins, Carolina wrens, gold finches, red-winged blackbirds, and catbirds, they have been a particularly powerful welcoming for me, as I was uncertain how many birds would be nearby. But the woods that surround the condo buildings are a natural habitat for them. Flocks of spring migrants have flown in, as well as birds that remain here all year. The entire area is alive with avian life.

The trees themselves are my latest source of inspiration and wonder. As the weather and winds change, the tall, intensely green oak, maple, beech, birch, and other trees reflect the shifts in air movement in quite dramatic ways. They dance! From our third-floor windows, I watch them quite literally dance with the wind, swaying synchronously like an Alvin Ailey or Martha Graham dance troupe. The music of the spheres seems to move them, and I feel a part of the greater movement of the universe as I watch their collective branch and leaf motion so perfectly in unison against the sky and clouds. Each time I gaze at them is a fresh look at life itself.

Every day now, my heart expands in gratitude for these gifts of Nature that surround me—and for the ability to see and hear them. As my habitual ways of perceiving fall away, the world opens up around me, and I remember that this can happen anywhere at any time. Moving does shake things up, but I can also keep my sensual acuity sharp by living each moment with wide-open awareness. Even walking in the same area in different seasons is a continually new experience. As I look out my window each morning at the ever-changing details of the natural world before me, I feel such joy—and my soul dances with the trees.

Heroes Among Us

When people think of heroes, they often picture those who risk their lives to save lives, such as first-responders. Indeed, these individuals are definitely courageous heroes. Yet, there are others in our communities who are also heroic and touch our lives in many different ways. For instance: teachers, who with dedication and purpose hold the door open to our education and growth as human beings. From teachers, we learn to think, to explore ideas, and to expand our minds to include all kinds of views of the world. One of the greatest gifts that teachers can give is support for being ourselves.

My grandmother, uncle, and aunt were teachers. My wife has been a teacher all her adult life, first teaching history to potential high school dropouts (using Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States), then graphic design to college students and adults, and eventually web design to people of all ages. One of her fondest memories is of a student who told her how kind she was and how much she had helped him learn. Often kindness and compassion are what we remember most about our teachers.

My fourth-grade teacher was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She treated her nine-year-old students with gentleness, humor, and respect for each of us as individuals. My favorite part of the day was a reading hour in which we could read the many varied books she had collected at the back of the room (or any we had brought ourselves). She honored our independent directions and choices in learning and in life. Not all teachers are encouraged to do this, however, especially now.

Today, many local and state laws are dictating what can and can’t be taught, as well as what books are available in libraries. The history of slavery, systemic racism, gender identity, and climate change are prohibited from mention in increasing numbers of educational institutions. The lists of “banned” books grow nationwide (classics such as The Diary of Anne Frank and The Color Purple). Belief systems constrict how we are “taught” and what we read. Teachers are currently facing a particularly heroic path in this country. And they persevere, in spite of the challenges.

I feel such gratitude for the teachers in my life, past and present, wherever I may encounter them. For not all teachers are in classrooms or education venues. In daily life, I learn from friends, as well as strangers, who speak and live their truth in the world. Wisdom can be passed on in so many ways: a shared poem or song; a calming insight; an expansive, inclusive idea. I learn from activists who speak out for freedom and justice (Bernice Johnson Reagon, Howard Zinn), as well as from spiritual teachers whose lives are centered in loving-kindness and peace (Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzberg). To live love by being love is deeply heroic and inspiring.

Sometimes people become heroes in the simple act of being themselves and in doing so teach others how essential freedom of expression is. The transgender community especially embodies this kind of heroism. When we listen openly to those who have been silenced or outcast, we learn to become more compassionate human beings. The courageous voices of everyday heroes who speak and act from their hearts and souls inspire us to do the same. Together we all step into living heroic lives committed to kindness, freedom, peace, and unconditional love.

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

I’ve been visiting it regularly for more than 40 years: Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1831 as the nation’s first garden cemetery, it remains a place of natural beauty and peace for those mourning loved ones as well as those who come to walk quietly and appreciate the diverse landscape. Old oaks and maples, flowering trees and bushes, butterfly garden and wildflower meadow, ponds, dells, and hills all combine to create a vibrant habitat and nature sanctuary. To me, in every season, it truly is the most beautiful place on Earth: the deep greens of summer, the red/gold/orange leaves of fall, the sparkling snows of winter—but especially the rainbow colors in springtime.

Spring! The word carries within it the feeling and the movement of the season. My heart literally springs with joy when I walk through Mt. Auburn’s gates and see the new yellow-green leaves on the trees and the daffodils and narcissus springing into bloom. These are special days of excitement and joy for me, too, because of the annual spring bird migration: a vast diversity of birds flying marathon miles from Central and South America to North America. Many of them I see only once a year as they stop on their flights north to nest and raise their young. Each sighting is a cause for celebration. Yay—you made it, sweet little being!

At the end of April this year, I made my first spring trip across town to Mt. Auburn, and as I walked along Indian Ridge to Auburn Lake (also known as Spectacle Pond), tears filled my eyes at the beauty of the azaleas bursting with red and white blossoms and the magnolias covered with huge pink blooms. And then the birdsong! Warblers, tanagers, thrushes, catbirds, and the whistling notes of the orioles, all of them virtuosos of song. No human symphony orchestra could be more varied and beautiful. Every year I feel this way. Every year I know I have walked into paradise on Earth, a gift of a lifetime.

Machu Picchu and the Napali Coast are spectacularly stunning, as are the Southwest’s red-rock deserts and the Caribbean’s turquoise seas. So many wonders in the world, all extraordinary—and yet, it is a small, quiet nature cemetery in Massachusetts that moves me most, heart and soul. I feel Spirit everywhere there. My parents are with me, as is every friend I’ve ever shared a walk there with. And every migrating bird I’ve seen in every year since the 1980s, each special and unrepeatable.

The memories are countless, all of them interwoven with the course of my life—and continuing into the future. One of the reasons that Anne and I moved back to Massachusetts after two years in Florida was for those longtime memories of people and places here. Including our wedding at Auburn Lake with friends and family present exactly ten years ago this June! The saying goes that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” True, but for me it’s in the heart of the beholder. There is no beautiful place on Earth that touches my heart more than Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Breathe Your Life

Mystics have written that each breath holds birth and death in it. Perhaps each lifetime is one long inhalation and exhalation, as Spirit fills us and then gradually, finally, empties back into the Source from which it arose. We are spirits passing through, part of a mystery that only our souls know the extent of. Our human lives courageously carry us into the unknown of life on Earth, and as we travel, soul awareness slowly seeps into our consciousness. If we are fortunate, we grow wiser with each year we live.

Those who have passed through a serious illness, such as cancer, and come out the other side, often carry within them kernels of insight that may help them understand a bit of life’s mysteries. At the very least, it expands their view of their own lives and life itself. (I think of writers Mark Nepo and Suleika Jaouad.) They have looked into infinity and seen themselves. Everything is different after that.

During the months I was treated for breast cancer, I had moments of seeing the universe as a giant tapestry with moving parts that are perfectly interconnected. The pieces engage in a dance of beingness in which we all are included. There are no mistakes; everything unfolds according to a greater purpose that our souls know and our human selves catch glimpses of in our lifetimes. What I experienced carried me through treatment to survival. I could see at the deepest level that facing cancer was all part of my soul’s plan for this lifetime. I felt peace within my heart in that awareness.

A “peace that passes understanding,” as the saying goes. I experienced peace beyond any rational attempts to understand it. This is the peace that lives in each breath and is the essence of every one of our lifetimes. To live through both challenges and celebrations and accept them as integral parts of your life. The breath holds this wisdom within it. Each time you or I inhale, all of life moves into and through us. Each time we exhale, we fill the world with Source energy. The human form is a container for Spirit. When you consciously breathe your life, Spirit flowers in all you say and do.

Not everyone faces a health challenge that opens the door to eternity, but each of us, in the course of a lifetime, eventually looks beyond the mundane into the infinite. It is why we are here. To stand firmly on this Earth, this beloved blue planet full of varied experiences, and see the entire universe before us. It may happen at any time, for any reason. Or it may happen as you move through a “review” at the end of your life. Ultimately, you are Spirit embodied, and all the wisdom of the ages lives within you. Take a deep breath, open your heart, and see the invisible flow of your life and all lives, perfectly, peacefully, orchestrated in each moment.