“Under a sky the color of pea soup she is looking at her work growing away there actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans as things grow in the real world, slowly enough. If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food, if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars, if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees, then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock. Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs. Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.”
by Marge Piercy, From Circles on the Water, Selected Poems of Marge Piercy
Parker Palmer urges us to fall deeply and madly in love with our lives, and offers some significant wisdom on how to best live them.
Here’s a small taste:
“…be passionate, fall madly in love with life. Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”
In his TED talk, “The Psychology of Your Future Self,” Dan Gilbert observed, “At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we’re going to become…”
The choices that we make today often have far more reaching effects than we realize. This video reminded me of how important it is to keep this in mind as I make choices today.
One easy way that you can tell which books in my library have touched or taught me the most would be to notice which are the most marked up. I came across a book just the other day that is filled with yellow highlights, it’s Dawna Markova’s, “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life.” Beautiful and wise. Reminding us of what’s sacred, asking us what it would look like to live our lives “fully, sensually alive, and passionately, on purpose.” Encouraging us to live days that are “a sweet and slow ceremony” and nudging us as winter approaches to let go of “what no longer is alive, to get bare enough to find the bones of what is important” to us.
“I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit. ”
I’d like to warmly and humbly share a gift with you today in honor of Father’s day. For the rest of this month you can listen to the audiobook, “Discovering Meaning,” for free! “Discovering Meaning: Living and Loving the Good Life” is the second of four audiobooks in the “BirthQuake: Journey to Wholeness” series.
“The Birthquake: Journey to Wholeness series is one of those rare finds written by a psychotherapist that not only enlightens, inspires, and comforts – it befriends and embraces the listener. It’s the culmination of the author’s many years of research, clinical experience and perhaps most importantly, her own life lessons. The BirthQuake series is an invaluable tool for anyone who has ever struggled or stands anxiously at a crossroad.”
The sky is grey today. My boots crunch and my body tenses when I first step out into this frigid January morning. I move slowly, huddled against the cold, still baring the gravity of grief and the weariness of long nights with too few exits and too many echoes.
Getting out of bed took little effort yesterday, my mind was alert, my movements fluid, and the sun was shining. I breathed a sigh of relief, finally able to recognize the promise of a morning without my mother in it. I didn’t have to force myself to leave my house, and I jogged and jumped and danced during my water aerobics class. My body felt light and graceful. It was going to be a good day.
Someone began to sing, “these boots are made for walking” and I cheerfully joined her in song, hands on my hips and legs lifting high. And then my eyes met those of a woman who is older than my mother and the pain slammed into my chest without warning. I was breathless as a memory consumed all of my oxygen. My young and sexy mother is singing that song while I prance around her in my imaginary boots. We are pointing at each other, warning that “one of these days these boots are going to walk all over you.” In that moment, all was perfect. The depression had not found her, she was cancer free – healthy, happy, and ALIVE. I was safe.
My eyes filled with tears and to my horror, it occurred to me that I could start crying in a public pool surrounded by perfectly nice and normal women. I took a deep breath, clenched my jaw, called upon my well practiced will, and pulled myself together.
Rumi wrote that our lives are like guest houses. If my life truly is like a guest house, then grief, an unwelcome guest, has settled in for the time being. I cannot move out, and there will be no eviction. And so, If I’m to avoid structural and collateral damage, then I’ll need to make accommodations. Grief, I will make a place at my table for you, but I will not feed you. Instead, I will infuse my cooking with love and gratitude and nurture my family with them. And I will stop wasting energy trying to lock you out, instead, I’ll open all of my windows and invite beauty in.
My walk is complete. I return to the home that I now share with grief, close the door, absorb the heat, and resolve to not long for spring, but to listen to winter…
The Winter of Listening
“No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.
All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.
What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.
What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,
what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.
What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.
All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.
All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.
All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.
And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.
So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.”
As a therapist who walks beside others who struggle with depression, and as a woman who has endured its devastating blows myself, I’m all too aware of what overcoming it demands of us. We are required to hold on even as our grasp weakens, overwhelmed by dread and hopelessness. The pull of life insists that we get up and face the day when all we really want to do is cover up our heads and refuse to come out. And we are called during our long dark nights to recognize that those voices (all too often the loudest and the most convincing) that repeatedly remind us of all the ways that we have been wounded and taunts us with our failures, disappointments, and of the vast array of dangers that surround us, can not and must not be trusted. And when almost every fiber of our being seems to be shutting down, we are challenged to acknowledge that the gaping wound inside of us is also an opening – one that is capable of ushering in as much possibility as it does pain.
Dancer and wisdom keeper, Gabrielle Roth, who died from lung cancer this past October, just one month before my mother lost her own battle with lung cancer, wrote that in many shamanic cultures when someone sought a medicine person because he or she was disheartened or depressed, it was common for the sufferer to be asked one of the following four questions:
“When did you stop dancing?
When did you stop singing?
When did you stop being enchanted by stories?
When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?”
As I sat yesterday in the gloaming, mellowed by the sweet territory of silence, I asked myself those questions. And as I waited for answers, memories of my mother floated in and out of my consciousness. As a child she created entire universes within the magic and mystery of her own imagination, enchanted her husband as a young woman by belting out country songs about cheating hearts and lovin eyes, and captivated her eldest daughter with tales of an abused and abandoned little girl and her faithful dog, buddy. My mother taught me so much with her stories, and it was both the bitter and the sweet of her own life that offered up multiple lessons regarding how to live, what’s important, what needs to be let go of, and what’s essential to remember.
And at this moment I am remembering one of my favorite stories of my mother as a child. She was five years old and it was her first day of kindergarten. My grandmother was helping her get ready for school and she was both excited and terribly anxious. As her mother combed her fine brown hair, she peppered her with the following questions.
“Can I come home if I miss you too much?” she asked.
“No. You need to stay until the school day is over,” her mom replied.
“Can you come and visit me?” she bargained.
“No. School is for children, not for mothers,” answered her mother.
“Can I sing in school?” my 5 year old mother asked hopefully.
“No Brenda. You have to be quiet and listen to your teacher.”
“Can I play?” she asked tremulously.
“Only at recess. You go to school to learn,” my grandmother explained.
“Well, can I dance?”
“No Brenda. You have to sit in your seat,” her mother responded firmly.
“Well,” the tiny child sighed, holding her skinny little arms over her head as she started to twirl round and around, “then, I’d better dance now.”
And I see her in my minds eye still, almost fifty years from the time that I first heard this story, and feel my soul reaching out to the child that I came to cherish almost as dearly as I loved the mother that she would grow up to be, and I am smiling and I am weeping now as I imagine her yet again, swirling around the kitchen, pig tails flying, dancing.
Both Gabrielle Roth and Brenda Byram are with us no longer but their legacy lives on – dance. Dance even as your heart breaks, dance even as your body bends from the terrible gravity of grief, dance even though your stomach aches and your heart trembles. Dance. Dance while you can….
Within the past year I’ve reduced my carbon footprint and my work hours while increasing the number of hours I volunteer and engage in mindfulness meditation. I take a water aerobics class and have resumed my journal practice. Still, I consume too much fat and sugar, worry too much, and don’t eat enough fruits and vegtables or exercise enough. Sufficient self care is time consuming and requires a level of commitment and motivation that I don’t always muster.
And so yesterday I decided to conduct an experiment. I signed up for the 10 day free trial with Gaiam TV. I like the idea of having hundreds of videos on exercise, yoga, and meditation at my finger tips and documentaries, films, and interviews that promote emotional, spiritual, and psychological growth and well-being just a click away. Yesterday (day one of my 10 day trial) I took a tai chi class in the comfort of my living room and watched a thought provoking documentary on life and death. Today, I did twenty minutes worth of dancercize before heading off to visit a friend. For the next 8 mornings I’m planning on doing yoga, qigong, aerobics, pilates and strenght training. I’m also looking forward to relaxing at the end of the day with films on compassion, personal development, health and wellness, spirituality, and more. As always, looking for more ways to follow the door mouse’s advice (remember the old song, “go ask Alice?”) to “feed your head.”
Truyện Ma Có Thật
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Ma là một khái niệm trừu tượng, một phần phi vật chất của một người đã chết (hay hiếm hơn là một động vật đã chết).
Theo quan niệm của một số tôn giáo và nền văn hóa, con người gồm thể xác (mang tính vật chất) và linh hồn (mang tính phi vật chất). Khi thể xác chết, linh hồn xuất khỏi thể xác. Nếu linh hồn đó không có cơ hội đầu thai hoặc nơi trú ngụ chung với các linh hồn khác mà tương tác với cõi thực có con người sẽ gọi là “ma”, “hồn ma”, “quỷ”; nhưng nếu các phần phi vật chất đó tương tác với cõi thực của con người theo tình cảm, theo trách nhiệm được giao của các tôn giáo thì lại gọi là “hồn”, “linh hồn”, “thánh”, “thần”, “thiên sứ” .
Và khi Doc Truyen Ma và Nghe Truyen Ma của TruyenMaCoThat.Net các bạn nhớ là nó chỉ mang tính chất giải trí thôi nhé các bạn đừng nên tín quá nhiều cũng như cố gắng tìm mọi cách để nhìn thấy ma nhé thật không tốt chút nào ??? . Chúc các bạn có những phút giây giải trí thật sử thoải mái cùng với TruyenMaCoThat.Net
Truyen Ma Co That
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Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life 