Memories, Pressed Between the Pages of My Mind, 18Jul11

Last Friday my biological niece had her first child after a lengthy (31 hr) labor.  Part of me is surprised she didn't have any pictures of the actual delivery on FB, and yet in many ways she is quite private, so I am glad she didn't.  One of her FB friends contacted me, a woman who we had connected with during a tour-bus trip to greater Paris that was my niece's high school graduation present.  The agreement was that I would take my niece, her best friend since third grade and her mom (my sister) to somewhere-that-required-a-passport as her graduation present.  By the end of the negotiations, the grandma and (now ex) sister-in-law had joined the party and we were a gaggle of six and we were headed to Paris.  

This woman, I'll call her Meg, who was probably a grandma in her own right decided to enjoy, rather than be grumpy about, these two silly teenage girls who were on this highly informational 'blue hair' bus trip around Paris.  Meg got along with the teens famously and so could discretely be the responsible adult who was watching over them, and quite often playing with them, which allowed the girls to get a sense of freedom and still be quite safe in this foreign place where none of us spoke the language.  This is Paris of the late 2002, when things were rather calm, the people were friendly, helpful, and really rather genteel, and kind hearted towards Americans; the worst any of us expected to see was some homeless guy peeing on the sidewalk (which we did, as I recall). 

A hundred memories float up after being reconnected with Meg.  Every one of them was glorious.  The morning coffee, the baguettes, fruit and cheese for breakfast; the food at every meal was beyond magnificent (this was fabulous French cooking after all, Julia Child would have been pleased).  The teens wouldn't touch most of it, as it was too strange for their tastes.  Man, it was good.  The incredible museum with the giant slides outside, that Meg went down more readily than the two teen girls did, enjoying the moment immensely.  Monet's garden, looks just exactly like the paintings, even now. And the crazy castle ... Chambourd? ...  with all the towers 600+ as I recall, reminding me of a manic sandcastle built by kids at the beach.

One of the single women on the trip, I think her name was Diane, wanted to go see a burlesque show in Paris and I thought, why not?  So she and I took a taxi across the city to the Lido to see a show.  The dancers, who were about 7 ft tall and painfully bone skinny, wearing little but feathers and sequins, were incredibly talented and completely matched in their movements.  It was a gorgeous, fabulous show.  I think the tour guides may have told us it was a bit challenging to get a taxi in the evening after the show in that part of the city, but I'm not clear on that detail.  Anyway, we got out of the theater and tried for at least 45 minutes to hail a taxi and none will stop as they are all engaged.   We were well across town, not exactly sure where we are, or where the hotel is exactly but we did have a hotel business card, and neither of us spoke the language.  Finally this man approached us and asked in English if we were looking for a ride.  Diane and I discussed this briefly, then showed him the address where we need to go and asked him how much.  He quoted us a fare of 40 francs and Diane decided to quibble and got him down to 35 francs.  So we got in the back seat of his Beemer and he started driving.  Our tour had been in Paris for about a week by that time and I had been paying attention to the streets and the landmarks.  Suddenly Diane started panicking, that this man was going to sell us to the gypsies.  I calmed her down, the gypsies wouldn't want us ... we were too old for breeding, not strong enough for manual labor, nor rich enough to be useful as hostages, and honestly not beautiful enough in the eyes of the French to be worth selling to the gypsies.  And besides this man was driving past all these familiar landmarks that marked the route to our hotel.   We got there, after what seemed a bit of an extended trip (he did make a few wrong turns on the way) and we paid him his requested fare and gladly exited his car.   What stories, what memories, what a trip.

Its all good.

Keanne's Story, 15Jul11

My friend Keanne and I are part of an 8-woman prayer group, playfully entitled TSW because we know that our prayers do manifest in our lives and that praying with each other gives us each extra oomph in our lives.

Keanne's experience:  Just want to let you all know that the restaurant is coming right along. We have an architect that is working with us to bring the building up to Code.   We are looking at about $50,000 to make all the changes necessary for city building codes. The kitchen doesn't require any modifications.  We need a proper parking lot, the floors refinished, wheelchair ramps improved, landscaping and another bathroom. I met with a professional though the SBA that does business plans. He also will begin to speak to lenders for us.  He says we should have our money in about 3 to 4 weeks.  We are also looking at some grant money as a vegetarian/vegan restaurant.  I have got the QuickBooks thing down pretty well and was able to come up with a Profit and Loss Statement. Wow!  We made a profit in our first 6 months!

Plans are being drawn up this week and next we will be getting our permits for construction. Our space is workable for a 'proper' restaurant. We will close the dinning room during the construction but will be opening a new room where we will be doing healthy grab-and-go food. Vegetarian take-out, plus our cooking demos and we might even do some yoga dinners. We are so excited. We love the support that we are getting from everyone.  We have talked with the landlord not to raise our rent for the next five years and after that only 10% a year for five years. So we plan on being in business for at least the next ten years.

We recently had a man in the restaurant that is a professional photographer; he is willing to do all our pictures for our web sites in exchange for food certificates.  And we just met a woman who is redoing both our web sites so they match and complement each other. She also is working for trade.   Doors continue to open for us. We believe in what we are doing and so does the vegan/vegetarian community. TSW!  You're not kidding. Thanks for being my spiritual support. Knowing we are all here for each other provides such a feeling of confidence and security. I love the TSW Gang!

Jimmy Buffett: "Its my Job to be worried half to death ... that's what people expect in me..." or not. 14Jul11

I'm learning some really interesting things about myself from this book study group on the Trance of Scarcity.   A continuum between stingy and lavish was introduced in chapter three; lavish is represented by wholeheartedness and gratefulness and stingy is represented by constricted, limited and tightly controlled.  I live, like everyone else, somewhere on this continuum; on different days, and on different topics, I slide along the scale between free, easy and open to closed, tight and hurried/worried. 

This was made incredibly clear to me when I went in for a massage.  My masseuse had to cancel because of a family emergency and I was desperate for someone to work on my tight back, so I called some new friends who had opened a wellness clinic in town.  Two of the three co-owners were certified in massage and I got in to see the woman that day.

There's a story I have told myself about tightness in my shoulders and upper back.   It's just the place that I store tension.  The masseuse said, as she was kneading my shoulders hard, "You know, you don't have to store tension in your shoulders."  And then it hit me.  I thought, "Hey, you are right.  I don't."  When I got in to see my regular masseuse the next time, she said, "Whatever you are doing, keep it up.  Your shoulders have never been that loose."

Nothing had changed in my life, except an awareness I had held.  What had kept my shoulders tight, holding tension, was an old story that I had to be hurting in some way in order to warrant having a massage.  You didn't just have them because you enjoyed them, because they felt good.  That was somehow indulgent, and I must have enough puritan in my history that indulgences are not OK.  Good people didn't get massages unless they absolutely needed them, they had to be for 'medical' reasons.

So my new story, that opens me up more toward lushness, and away from stinginess, is that massages are reasonable self care and that I don't need a physical/'medical' reason to need them; that I have no need to store tension in my body because nothing is wrong, or if something needs fixing, I handle it and don't let it build up and store in my body and that I allow myself to be aware of what I want and I take care of myself.  

Pretty darn cool.   

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, 9Jul11

It happens, you know.   David Wilcox has this as one of his primary themes.  Many of the old black spirituals flow from a similar well.  Its the story line of Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and countless other tales.  I woke up yesterday morning feeling trapped and orphaned.  I also know its not true.  I know I belong.  I really do.  Sometimes I belong even more than I want to.


Still sometimes the feeling arises, and sometimes it persists for a while. Yesterday morning I wrote my prayer partner and asked her to pray for me specifically about this.


In less than ten minutes, I had been contacted by a friend "out of the blue"  I had lost touch with months ago and we reconnected.  It was a small thing, and yet not small at all.

Careful ..... 7Jul11

About a month ago when I was looking at my finances, I said out loud to no one in particular "It sure would be useful to have an extra couple hundred bucks a month."  I thought nothing more of it.  The next night I was coming in through the gate of our little gated community and the security guard, who also served as part-time postmaster, asked me if I wanted his community post office job.  We have a small private post office that serves only our community, separate from the USPS.   (We go up to the local Post Office to pick up the bundled mail and packages.)  He said, "it pays a couple hundred bucks a month." Every time I hear my words coming back to me out of someone else's mouth, it tends to catch my attention. 

He was leaving town and thought the position might interest me.  After we talked a bit about it, and he told me the catch ... that I would have the whole thing six days a week for the month when the alternate postmaster took vacation this summer.  I agreed to take it on.  By the end of my first week, I had gotten the task(s) down to the absolute minimum number of hours per day (which makes it less profitable, since it is a paid-by-the-hour job).  Ah, well... 

Mysteriously, that month of vacation coverage morphed into seven weeks (this past week was week 2), and even though I recognize it as a service within and for our community, I have also realized that I'm not interested in continuing this job past this September/October when they can find someone else to pick it up.   

Be very careful what you ask for.

Here Comes the Sun - 5Jul11

I've been part of a group working through Victoria Castle's Trance of Scarcity as facilitators, preparing for book study groups that our church will hold this fall for congregants.  One tiny aspect of tonight's material talked about our old 'stories', where they come from, how we used them to boundary our world and how we unintentionally still use them to create our current reality. 

One of the women spoke about how she used the old story of "Not Good Enough" to motivate her to always try harder which ultimately created in her an incredibly strong work ethic and allowed her to succeed in her chosen field of study/business.  The variant that bubbled up for me tonight was a story called "If I'm Really Smart, No One Will Love Me."  It manifested in my high school years as a perpetual B+.  No matter what I did, how hard I worked, I seldom pulled down an A, but I was fabulous with those 92% and 93% B+s.  So here's the conflicted battleground between "Not Good Enough" and "Smart, But Not Too Smart" which has warred inside my being for years and years.   Zounds.

Marianne Williamson's quote, which has always bothered me and I never knew why:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

What I've come to realize, what I've come to own these past couple years is that I am cheating myself and my world if I am not as bright a light as I can be.  And as I learn to shine even brighter, I know that it doesn't diminish anyone else's light, but instead gives them permission to shine too.

Preach On, Sister.  Preach On!

Let It Be, Let It Be...

I'm a doer by nature.  So the notion of just being still, and letting things happen on their own is not completely 'natural' to me.  Yesterday I had the marvelous gift of being able to just sit on the shaded patio of a friend's beautiful house and just stare off into the distance at the mountains, the desert, and the building cumulus clouds of what would later become last night's yummy rains.  To not have to do anything, be anything, have anything, other than that moment of now was totally delicious.  It wasn't silence -- there were kids splashing and laughing in the pool, a bit of ukelele music on the I-Thing and conversation going on at a nearby table.  For a long moment, it was like all my gears disengaged and I was coasting without any effort.  I was sitting peaceably and contented, not thinking about anything, just being.  Nice.


That moment reminded me of the bliss of a morning meditation -- the internal stillness, the spaciousness, the allowing, the ease and the penultimate trust that all is well with the world and nothing at all was needed from me.


All is well.

Flip Wilson Had It Right - 2Jul2011

Remember him? "What you see is what you get."  Or in plain language, how we each see our world is what comes to us, what we continue to create.  If we perceive the world as a generally friendly cooperative place, we tend to each feel generally befriended and cooperated with.  There may be instances when this doesn't happen - that 'bad stuff' happens instead - but these other times tend to be more easily dismissed as aberrations rather than the norm.  What I choose to see is a world that works, where people cooperate and everyone wins.

One of my dear friends, I'll call her Helen, had planned an enjoyable weekend with her friend who I will call Larry.  Larry hurt his foot while working on his second home and the doctors were doubtful that Larry could travel because of several potential medical complications.  She was really sad about this and we prayed about it, knowing and believing and trusting that his foot wasn't as bad as the doctors thought it was and that he could come home.  He arrived home yesterday and gets to stay for a full six weeks so that his foot can rest.  I don't expect to see much of my friend for the next six weeks, but I know she's happy.  

And I'm good with that.