Person: Maybe it’s that you’ll get behind.
Me: I don’t feel competitive. Do you think that’s it?
Wise Person: Maybe it’s more about fear of survival and always being busy.
Me: I want to make sure I’ll do what needs to be done. Its more than that though; maybe it’s a fear of ...
I had a gym teacher in Ohio, Miss Jane Mahaffey, who knew more than anyone else I can imagine about having a healthy body. She is one of my wise teachers, a friend who knows about gentleness and taking action. I can see her with her head tilted toward me so I can hear her better. Fire is also one of my teachers. It helps me find my correct emotional involvement. Today in your journal you’ll be exploring what your wise teachers have to teach you.
“Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of growth within us any more than without us, there have been many circumstances of sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.”
—George Eliot
Exercises
1. Use the technique of gazing into the waters and streaming to write down what you feel about patient people in your life. How could you honor the patient person in yourself? How is patience useful as you better develop your spiritual nature?
2. Pictures hold clues for what the culture wants for us and what we want for ourselves. Take several magazines and find pictures that encourage patience or discourage patience. Use streaming and see what you find out about the culture, yourself, and perhaps what you want for your future.
3. Set up a dialogue about patience between two of your teachers. Write it out and see what you can learn from it.
Day 6: Grace
I remember when I first heard the choir at the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco sing “Amazing Grace.” What struck me was the word wretch. If someone so lowly as a wretch could be saved, maybe the wretch in me could be helped, too. I didn’t need to be good or feel good, I just had to notice “how precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed.” There was something magical for me in this church, listening to the music as I sat in the pink-cushioned pews, many of the men knitting. The song continued, “tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”
“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”
—Simone Weil
One Sunday evening Dorothy Allison offered the sermon at MCC. She spoke about her experiences writing Bastard Out of Carolina. She recalled her “poor white trash” origins and the grace with which the women of her family raised their children the best they could without much money, education, or class status. I could feel that the connection between the generations of women in her family helped heal her spirit.
I also noted how the minister, Jim Mitowski, encourages creative people to talk from the pulpit honoring what they had learned about their spirit through their creativity. To me, it showed that Jim is full of grace. He bows to the source of spirit. He is pleased at what greatness is brought to God’s sight. He can stand aside. He doesn’t need to be the voice through which God speaks. When I’m there, grace enters my body and sings with me.
Grace is my favorite word in the English language. To me, it denotes a flowing feeling of living deeply in my body. It tells me that my inside is connected to the outer world and I am traveling lightly on this planet.
With your growing awareness of connection to your spiritual self, you will notice that you are in grace from time to time and it may surprise you. It will please you, too. It feels like all is right with the world and you have stepped inside that peaceful feeling. Think of grace as a robe with which you cover yourself. It is grace’s robe that flows out behind you in the breeze, a breeze that connects you to the wind and the wind to the sea and the currents and air pressure. You are connected to everything around you by wearing that robe. Grace gives us ease to find our way back to loving the world.
“I see the wise woman. She carries a blanket of compassion. She wears a robe of wisdom. Around her throat flutters a veil of shifting shapes.”
—Susun Weed
Exercises
1. Try asking the printed page where grace is. Look in a book of poetry for phrases to explore. Jot down those phrases to which you respond: all creatures sleep, kiss the rose of your skin, birth and craving quieted for a while. Then write what grace has to do with these random phrases.
2. Image yourself visualizing grace around someone difficult in your life. How would that help you to deal with this person? Write down a prayer for her. Write down a prayer for yourself.
3. Try to recall when you have been more generous than would be expected from your past experiences. Perhaps you did a kindness for someone who isn’t always kind to you. Perhaps you were kind when you were not feeling joyful yourself. Write and explore that feeling of grace.
Day 7: Rewarding Yourself—Gift in Public Places
We’ve covered a lot of ground in just one week. You may feel changes bubbling up within yourself. Sometimes just deciding to keep a journal causes a shift. Giving daily time to yourself is a great gift. Maybe you’ve noticed that you can sit quietly and feel a little more content. For your reward this week, take your journal to a sculpture in town and write what this sculpture has to do with your awareness of your connection to a spiritual force. (This sculpture could be a statue, a coin, a gravestone, the relief on a water or sewer cover.) How does the subject of the sculpture, what it’s made of, and where it’s placed reflect your spiritual development? If the sculpture in the park is an angel with a cracked base, what does the cracked base mean to you? Or, if it’s a cast squirrel on someone’s front lawn, how does the busyness of the squirrel reflect your spiritual development? What does your wise voice say? What can you learn from your writing today?
“To create ones own world in any of the arts takes courage.”
—Georgia O’Keeffe
WEEK 2: THE HEART THAT EMBRACES
As we begin to explore the spirit, we naturally begin to look for ways to accept ourselves and others. Writing can be a wonderful aid in this process. Even just to write your name with awareness on the page is to write your name on the world. The awareness of connection that we began to develop in last week’s writings begins to follow us in all our mundane tasks and all we see. We begin to notice the mud at our feet or the egret’s nest high in the trees. Our hearts open and part of this opening has to do with love recklessly and wonderfully unzipping toward us.
“Birds sing after the storm, why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?”
—Rose Kennedy
As we become aware of connections, we begin to notice that the world gives us all of itself to accept: the mowed lawns, satin sheets, shortbread cookies, a smooth bowl to hold your tears, the rattled bone
