Tag — Soulstories
December Dreamboard: The song my heart sings.
This month’s dreamboard was hard won. First I was in great pain and unable to create. Then I was lost in a chorus of whispers in which no clear voice could be heard. But eventually, when I got still enough long enough, I heard one of the song my heart is singing to me now. The verses are not yet clear, but the chorus is “tribe, tribe, tribe.”
Jen says, I can be honest about what I know now. And what I know now is that is need my soulsisters –or mabye my soulsibilings. I need them around me all the time, sending me messages of hope and speaking affirmation in my ears. I feel sheepish about it — this constant need for feedback and assistance and the exchange of ideas. But it’s okay to do things and get support at the same time, rights? As Jena says, is it functional? Because if it is, then why fight it?
It is functional for me, this communal way of life, the ebb and flow, the give and take. Even in the midst of my love of the solitary, I also need this chorus of voices. So I’m trying to listen to my own internal voice of authority and no matter what the experts say about rugged individualism, I’m recognizing that I need a hand to hold.
This month when Suzie asked The Universe what she had in store for me, she pulled the Nine of Cups not once, but twice. Two wishes for me! For the longest time I couldn’t decide what to wish for. I knew one wish had to be “Body”– for my health, for my pain, for the way I see my physical self. But the other one remained elusive. I got stuck in that loop of endless decision-making to which I am so prone. What if I made the wrong choice? What if I spoke the wrong word into being, then regreted wasting my wish?
I believe, even on my most doubtful days, that nothing is ever wasted. Or at least, I try to believe. (“Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”) So whatever wish I make must be right, right?. And like Jaime says, if you move towards something and you don’t feel like backpeddling as fast as you can, move closer. So this is the word that has settled into my tongue, and I speak it into exisitence. “Tribe.”
Who do you need in your tribe? Truth tellers? Cultivators? Dreamers? Cuddlers? Champions? Warriors? Withmates? All of the above? Do tell…
Sacred Life Sunday: Journey to Mary
Remember, O most loving Virgin Mary
that it is a thing unheard of
that anyone ever had recourse to your
protection, implored your help,
or sought your intercession,
and was left forsaken.
Filled therefore with confidence in your
goodness, I fly to you
O mother, Virgin of Virgins to you I come,
before you I stand, a sorrowful sinner.
Despise me not my poor words
O Mother of God
But graciously hear and grant my prayers.
I am on a journey to Mary. I do not yet understand her; her appeal to so many, or the complexity of her character. At times I feel frustrated that she has become a stand-in for the feminine expression of God, a symbol of the feminine Divine, when she is not in fact a deity. But at other times her creative force seems so strong that I can understand the impulse to mold her into the void that our patriarchal God leaves behind.
In Sienna the shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary is immense. It is revered in the utmost, and nearby at a respectful distance the walls are hung thick with items that denote both thanksgiving and petition: baby booties on satin strings; motorcycle helmets of those who have survived the crash; war medals and memorials. The people pray, “Remember…that is a thing unheard of… that anyone had ever implored you for help…and was left forsaken.” What would it be like to have someone like that? To rest that assured that help was on its way?
In Sweden there are the remains of a most ancient chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. I think it is telling that it has been left to decay, reduced now to a mound of fern covered rock. The powers that be may have decided that this chapel did not need to be protected, did not need to continue to stand. But the placard there will not let me go. It reads simply:
“The people loved Mary because she knew their needs.”
“When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary calls to me….” She is calling, there in the distance. I hear her like a whisper that resides in the curve of my ear. And I wonder as a I wander, what will she say as our journey goes on?
Sacred Life Sunday: Transparency
Pienza greets us with a cheery patch of grass on which to have lunch. The elders are meeting here and the old men gabble, laughing as one when a pinecone drops from the trees, thumping Paul squarely on the head. We eat our typical Tuscan picnic fare, rounding things out with ricciarelli—sweet almond cookies which dust our fingers in confectionary sugar.
We have no agenda here. No cathedral to visit or museum to haunt. We want only to wander, to follow twisting cobbled streets under the clotheslines hung with shirts and slips, past the window boxes red with geraniums. We think, perhaps we might tour the small palazzo, or buy the local pecorino cheese and eat it warm with honey. Instead, we stumble upon a small chapel. It seems surprisingly spacious beyond the heavy doors; its four walls unornamented save for some crumbling frescoes, the space inside wide and welcoming. The detailed Nativity just inside the doors and the pale broken images of men in brown robes quickly identify this as a Franciscan cappella, my favorite among the old orders. We walk with echoing steps down the long central aisle as we are drawn to the altar at the head of the room. It is utterly unlike any we have seen – a huge slab of unfinished marble lying on its side, for all the world evoking the damaged block from which Michelangelo freed David. Paul and I cannot stop admiring it and of course I, being ever tactile, must lay my hand upon it. The front is rough-hewn with markings I cannot understand, reaching back deep into some hidden past. The back, the side that would face the officiating priest, is covered with images from Old and New Testament tales. Custom says the top must be draped with a cloth in the liturgical colors of the season—although no clearly no standard fare from a mail order catalog would fit this undulating stone. So someone has made one of green and gold, sculpted and scalloped to fit the curve of the gentle polished top of the stone. I am in love. I am deeply in love. Though I wander through the rest of the building—to the beautiful sun-lit Marian chapel with its painted ceiling of blue and gold; past the flat, metal modern sculptures on the walls and the unique candelabra—it is back to the altar I repeatedly come. I pass it round and round, slide my palm over its finished top, sink my fingers into the crevices on its rough sides. It is intended to be a place of adoration, so I adore.
Paul is deeply drawn to the lectern to one side of the altar. It is relatively new, modern in its styling. It reminds us both thinks of our friend Amber, a metalworker and sculptor. We know she would love it. We have forgotten our tripod, and no flash is allowed, so Paul stacks coins on the edge of a pew-back in order to make a sort of camera stand and snaps photos with a slow-closing shutter. The lectern harkens back to Francis’ love of nature and is made in the shape of a tree, its branches entwined and only partially in leaf, so the congregation would be able to see the Bible, the reader, the priest standing behind. I suddenly realize that this is not typical of a Roman Catholic Church. Where is the dramatic raised pulpit elevating the priest above the congregants? Usually it is large and obvious, separating the priest from the people, lifting him up under an ornate dome, rimmed in intricate carvings or fringed in velvet. It is gone. No, not gone—moved—hauled down the length of the transcript to the back of the church and chained to the wall.
I am shocked. I am stunned. Who is the priest here? Who is this innovative renegade? Surely he must be something out of Sue Monk Kidd novel—some romantic character doomed to run afoul of the authorities and into the arms of a clever nun or a pretty congregant with a curious mind. And then I am off and running, writing a sketch in my head of a postmodern misfit in the Catholic milieu. A doomed hero who realizes you have to use art to preach, who knows his people will intuit truth through art. Here is he in my mind’s eye with his open-weave lectern communicating transparency. Here he is, low and close to the community demonstrating equity. Here he is serving the Eucharist from behind an ancient stone, demonstrating a continuous connection stretching from our past to our present and into our future.
Most assuredly, I am in love.
Eden and I sit in front of the stone altar on the dark polished pews. We sing The Breastplate of St. Patrick, the surpassingly good acoustics carrying our voices and making them better than they truly are. We choose the verse Francis would most love:
I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea
Around the old eternal rocks…
The crowds of tourists come in and out of the chapel doors, glancing just a moment at the plain interior before moving on in search of bigger things. Eden and I stay in the echoes. I cannot help but think, “Beware all ye who enter here. You just might find what you are looking for.”
Edge Dwellers: An Update
Dear Friends,
Thank you so much for reading the shitty first drafts for Edge Dwellers (intro: chap one) and for making your commments. I was able to gather up my readership status to day, and to send that info plus your comments and proof-read drafts to the publisher who made the original query. Hopefully things will progress in that official direction. If not, fear not, the writing will continue and you’ll either get it piece meal on the blog or in some self-published form.
Thank you for all of your comments, encouragement, and suggestions. I have finally been able to write a few of you back in the comments on the orginal posts, and have emailed a few of you as well. I’m hoping I can kick the hienous insomnia (evil fiend!) so I can write to you more promptly in the future. Much love to you all.
Yours on the journey,
Rachelle
Chapter One: The Itch
The second of three excerpts from my book proposal, Edge Dwellers: finding your way to a new kind of faith. Intro here: backstory here. It might be too much of the same compared to the intro. What do you think?
The Itch at the Top of your Nose
Tell-tale signs that you have put on a new set of lenses
Sometime in my thirties, just after getting my first gig as an ordained minister in an evangelical church, something about how I was living my religious life started to feel not quite right.
The first itchy little problem was that I was having an increasingly hard time hiding the fact that I disliked Bible study. The truth of the matter was I’d never been one for ‘devotions.’ I was forever setting my good intentions towards daily readings, only to find that my Bible ended up on the shelf covered in dust. In seminary I took as few Bible courses as possible, and although I loved studying Hebrew, I never did develop a heart for that Biblical studies mainstream, exegesis. I dreaded any small group session that involved Bible study, text-based sermons made me nuts, and any staff devotional I had to sign up for was mercifully brief.
By this time I had taken on a preaching roll in the church, and I was good at it. True, my sermons were more stories that scripture, but the words rolled off my tongue and I was getting animated responses from the congregation. But the truth was I was tired of sermons. Suddenly I, the person who could take non-stop notes for three solid hours in a graduate school seminar, could not sit still through a simple Sunday morning message. (And I certainly didn’t remember much of what was said once I was outside the church doors.) I felt as though I had developed some sort of adult-onset ADD. I just could not absorb a twenty minute sermon, much less for the hour-long pulpit sessions which were in vogue at my church.
Then, much to my dismay, the standard versions of prayer started not working so well. The “prayers and praise” format which had carried me most of the way through college was making my skin crawl, and I was practically developing an allergic reaction to meeting with a “prayer partner” or spending an hour praying for people in a small group. The long prayer session that were popular in my charismatic church began to feel like a laundry list of worries and demands, and in our intense healing prayer circles I felt twitchy and discouraged. The church staff I was on was quite large at the time, and we had called in a specialist to come and do some communication training with us. He asked us to pray prior to the meeting, something that had been standard practice for us in the past. But when ten minutes went by with only one or two moments of spoken prayer, the trainer called the prayer session to a close. He was quite disturbed by what he perceived to be our lack of participation, and when the younger pastors in the group tried to explain that we had become more accustomed to silent prayer and meditative listening in recent years, the trainer chastised us for not doing “real prayer” more often.
All of this was a little concerning, but I had one ace in the hole that was preventing me from having a full-blown spiritual crisis: “Worship”. I still adored the worship activities at church. We had great musical worship sets. Man could our church bands play! We had original songs that were seriously hip, adaptations of Fat Boy Slim mixes that rocked the joint, and ballads so plaintive they could bring you to tears.
Not only did we have great music, but the artists were really coming into their stride in our congregation and the place was filled with beauty. Most months there was something fabulous and inspiring in the Sunday morning services: a series of paintings on walls and easels; interactive sculptures for various sermon series; and for Lent and Advent whole services created completely of visuals and music.
I was thrilled. I should have been thrilled. I was trying to be thrilled.
But the truth of the matter was, the worship sets? I’d been working myself into them for quite a while, trying to convince myself that they were ‘working’ for me as a connection to God. In truth, they were feeling a little forced and repetitive. Moreover, after the high of jumping up and down with 200 people wore off, I was left with just me walking out the doors and into the rest of my life. There was little connection between the ecstasy of Sunday morning rock and everyday reality of Monday morning living.
And the art? I adored the art. But it turned out to be a secret agent. The art was my undoing.
During my second year on staff one of the artists, Stephen Wood, made an enormous sculptural installation for Advent. It was Mother Mary, her figure formed of bent bamboo and draped in gauzy cloth. Her arms were arched up and outward like a dancer and her belly glowed with an internal light. Each Sunday, while the worship band played, while people clapped and sang and raised their hands, while the senior pastor gave us good and wise words in a sermon–I sat at the feet of Mary. There was a little half-wall that curved around one side of the sculpture, and if I leaned against it I could sit behind Mary’s draping sleeve. Crouched there, something solid at my back and something beautiful at my side, I could be present to the congregation I was serving, but at the same time feel protected from a system of faith practices I no longer understood. I could soak in the reality of what I really needed, while still being tethered to what was familiar but no longer functional.
It was in this small Marian way station that I finally acknowledged that everything I’d grown up with as a Christian had stopped working – probably hadn’t been working for a long time. I’d been talking myself into so many things: convincing myself that prayer was a discipline; that the Bible had to be helpful somehow; that God needed me to express my devotion to him through lots and lots of emotive songs; and that I needed to be lectured at for at least 30 minutes a week or I’d backslide my way into hell. But as I gave each of those things up, then after a bit of a delay realized that I’d given them up, a stunning reality came rushing in. It didn’t really matter. I still loved Jesus. I still lived as morally or immorally as I had before. I still felt randomly connected or disconnected from God on any given day or any given hour.
In spite of the art, liturgy, and ritual, church still wasn’t helping me. It wasn’t transformative. I didn’t help me be a more Jesus-like person. Rather than letting me be a minister and servant to the world around me, the tasks of running the Sunday morning show just kept me trapped in the church. I began to see the church as a castle, holding me inside with the Ruler, but isolated from the rest of the population outside. The amount of time it demanded of me, and the amount of energy I spent feeling badly that I wasn’t doing Bible study, prayer, or worship left me unable to be present to the people outside the walls of the church – unable to be part of the broad range of God’s kingdom.
There, sitting behind Mary, something had happened. My nose had started to itch. When I reached up to scratch it, there at the top right between my eyes, I found that I had a pair of new glasses fairly permanently affixed to my face. I started to think of it as wearing a pair of very funky cat’s eyes glasses – orange maybe—a style linked to the past, but hip enough for the future. Everything looked different now, through those funky lenses.
Perhaps this is happening to you. Perhaps after a life time of devotion you are waking up on Sunday mornings and feeling sick at heart. Perhaps you are starting to feel angry that what you say you believe and the way your life in “the world” really works are not in alignment. I’m here to tell you: Don’t be Afraid.
What you are experiencing is not a dark night of the soul. It’s not a crisis of faith or a season of doubt. What you are experiencing is a shift away from one kind of Christian faith practice to another. In technical terms you are moving away from traditional Christianity – probably evangelical Christianity, but possibly some form of mainstream Christianity—and into what is referred to as “postmodern” or “emergent Christianity.” Now, we aren’t going to get into what all those things mean yet. That’s for the next chapter. For now let’s look at a list of symptoms.
Symptoms
• Former religious practices (sermons, prayer, Bible study, small groups, worship sets) are no longer meaningful to you.
• You are beginning to suspect that Christianity may not have cornered the market on Truth.
• Your intellectual life and your spiritual life no longer seem to be able to play nice together.
• You are increasingly interested in spending time outside the four walls of the church.
• Many non-Christians seem suspiciously Christ-like to you.
• If you are a woman, you may have begun longing for a God that looks like you.
• You have started asking questions that worry your family, friends, and pastor.
• You have begun to suspect that you might have to give up your faith in order live with integrity.
Don’t worry my friend. This discomfort you are feeling, this disconnect, is just a portal you step through into being what Brian McLaren calls A New Kind of Christian. You’ve just put on a new pair of glasses, and that’s a good thing. They are going to help you see things more clearly, and with that clearer vision you are going to be able to craft a new version of your faith that is going to work for you. It’s going to be a true reflection of what you believe and how you intuitively want to live. It’s going to bring integrity back into your life, and allow you to honor what you truly value about God, Jesus, and the Christian life. A new kind of faith is growing– is emerging out of your soul. You are forming a new kind of spirituality:
• A spirituality which finds its inspiration in ancient teachers and newly published writers.
• A spirituality which spins out of fresh translations of the Bible.
• A spirituality which will be messier and more open-ended, but ultimately more genuine to you and truer to the deepest parts of your soul.
Joseph Campbell, the godfather of comparative religion, tells us a story in his videography The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In these interviews he talks about the epic hero’s journey which is captured in the myths and traditions of every culture and every faith. According to Campbell, we are all on a hero’s journey—intentionally or because of life’s unexpected circumstances. He tells us that each of us will come to what appears to be a great impasse. For Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz it is the field of poisoned poppies near her journey’s end. For Luke Sykwalker it is the great literal and metaphorical divide between him and his unknown father, Darth Vadar. For Indiana Jones it is literally a deep chasm between himself and the Holy Grail. Campbell says “On your journey, you will come to a great chasm. Jump.”
Are you ready? Give your cat’s eyes glasses a rub and make sure they’re nice and clean. Can you see the chasm? Go ahead. Jump.
Introduction: Sea Change
A page from the little book I made for my November dreamboard, and a chapter from the book I am drafting this month, tentatively titled something like Edge Dwellers: finding your way to a new kind of faith.
Introduction: Sea Change
There’s was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy
They say he traveled very far, very far
Over land and sea
And then one day, one fateful day he came my way
And though we talked of many things, fools and kings,
This he said to me:
The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved in return.
Nature Boy
Nat King Cole
Once there was a girl. This girl was a good little girl. She was a Christian girl. It’s true that she was a bit of a mutt, having been raised in a Lutheran church and sent to a private school run by the Pentecostals. The latter were rumored to be found swinging from the rafters. In proper religious circles this was just shy of snakes handling, but still, she made the cut. She had, after all, prayed the prayer and studied the catechism, filled her memory verse chart with shiny silver stars, and taken first communion. She got up at 6am to be a teenage prayer warrior and responded to altar calls in the school gym (for what reason she was never quite sure.) She even sang in the choir.
After a while this girl grew up. She went to more private Christian schools and got letters after her name. She met people who thought that the Holy Spirit was still afoot, and she learned about healing and prophecy and things that, frankly, acted a lot like magic and miracle. She met a wizened old man who everyone called a guru, but who called himself “Eugene.” When the girl talked to Eugene, his faced curved upwards into swoops because he smiled at the questions that only made other people look worried. He told the girl lots of stories, this Eugene, and some of them the girl seemed to remember like a mist in her memory. She thought she might have heard them once a long time ago. Only the stories were more interesting when Eugene told them. (When Eugene told them it was they were full of trolls and fairies, she was sure of it. There! Behind the sackcloth and ashes!). The felt she might be a part of these stories, and that maybe that everybody got to play, that things weren’t quite as scary as they were meant to be–or maybe they were more so–but the ending was even better than she had first understood, so the scariness of being in the story was worth it.
Sustaining a Marriage, Embracing Whimsy, and other Life Lessons
The birthday questions project rolls on…!
Leonie asks: What do you most want to celebrate about yourself?
Since childhood I’ve carried this self definition of being ‘the fearful one.’ I’m actively working on shedding that right now. My approach to the challenge? Embrace whimsy.
On a Christmas episode the TV show Bones a tactiturn character–I think she’s a district attorney– cooks up this crazy bargain with the two main characters. It’s a really goofy request and they are confused. She just looks at them and deadpans, >“I have a puckish side which cannot be denied.” That’s my new mantra.
P.s. That particular epsiode has one of my all time favorite TV lines. Booth says to Bones: “Thieves and murderers get Christmas too Bones. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what it’s all about.”
Denise asks: Where do you see yourself at 65? Where will you be, physically and spiritually?
I’m so frail right now physically that this is a very scary question. I hope I’ll be healthy. I hope the chronic pain won’t overly shorten my life span. I hope I’ll be mobile and traveling and taking my grandkids camping.
Spiritually, I would love to be a little like Phyllis Tickle. That woman is amazing: wise, articulate, authoratative, gentle, confident – she’s inspiring a whole new generation while her adorable husband sleeps in the front row. I love it!
Susan asks: My question: as you describe it, one decade of your marriage has seen babies, post-partum depression, migraines, major spiritual shifts and now an international move – how have you seen each other shift and accommodate all this? What has sustained your relationship?
And don’t forget a stillbirth. We’ve kind of been through the ringer, huh?
Okay, I’m gonna embrace my puckish side here and come clean with something: I really do not pay that much attention to my marriage. Paul is a very devoted husband and in the words of Jen Lemen “He worships you like a goddess.” This, my friends, goes a long way.
Paul often says that my roll in his life is to keep him “from living a boring life.” I’m very good at that, and thankfully that feeds him. We naturally talk quite a bit. We are both pretty intentional about the kind of life we want to build together and how we are going about doing that. We evaluate things sometimes: are we traveling enough? where do we want to be in the next 5 years? etc. But it’s always is a sort of haphazard way. We do not have marriage summits. We do not go on retreat.
We’re content with parallel play (Paul on his keyboard, me on mine, showing each other stuff on youtube from time to time.) But we are not the kind of couple that’s going to go to a marriage retreats or take a couples workshop. We don’t describe each other as ‘being in love with my very best friend ever kissykissyfacelalala.” In fact, we are sometimes tempted to throw things at people who do self-describe like that. (We aren’t really all that nice. People get confused and think we are, but I don’t think we are. We are kind of John Stewart-y.)
The hard times—the death of our first son, my illness, Eden being so highly sensitive, faith crises, —these are kind of romantic to us and really bring out the best in us. I think we bond more over these challenges than over the rainbows and butterflies.
Paul’s one request is that I be more attentive about what happens to him on my radar when new passions come into my life. The first flush of new obsessions—newborns, writing, housemates, church planting, artistic projects, teenage adoptees—these tend to knock him off my plate. I’ve become more aware of that over the years and try to adjust my focus on him a little when I feel the energy of a new passion coming on.
Paul has a good sense of humor. We both have our own separate adult selves/lives. We respect each other’s life visions – that’s sustains us a lot.
Amy asks: In the last 9 years, what experience has been the most frightening? The most enlightening? The most exciting?
Most frightening: being in the ER with violent migraines.
Most Enlightening: stepping outside the walls of the church
Most Exciting: living communally in the Densmore House with our family of choice (our nuclear family plus Sharon, Rebecca, and Souren)
Dawn-the-punk asks: Why is the sky blue?
I’m not sure but whoever writes the best 100 word or less fairy tale about this will get one of my altered postcards. Email me the tales: moi at magpie-girl dot com.
More Q’s with their A’s still to come….
Yes, I am a priestess. (And four other things you just had to know about.)
Thank you, reader dears, for all the lovely birthday questions. I’m having such fun answering them. Here’s the first installment. Feel free to ask, and ask, and ask away. And don’t forget to offer your two bits on things that make you go “Hmmmm.” Cheers!
Florencia asks: are you a priestess or have I been reading too distractedly?
I’ve been trying on the term ‘priestess’ for the last few years. I think it looks good on me!
In official terms, I do have a degree in theology; and I have been ordained. (Although I’ve allowed that to lapse since moving to Europe.) I served as an ordained minister at a church and as the abbess at a neo-monastic community. I don’t have an official title now, but I enjoy offering people spiritual direction on line, and I write regularly about spirituality. I like the term ‘priestess’ because priests, ideally, usher people into a place of transcendence and beauty—which is something I try to do with my writing and my practices. I chose to use the feminine version of the word ‘priest’ because it helps me embrace my quest for uncovering the feminine face of God –the Feminine Divine—which I believe has been buried by the patriarchal models which are predominate in religious institutions.
Josh asks: Compare ten years ago to now, what would you say are the major beliefs that have changed and how has that change changed you?
At 30 I was a happy little evangelical minister gleeful to be accepted into the big-boys club of church ministry. I was very concerned with making sure people were developing an ‘orthodox’ faith, and the myth of personal holiness (i.e. being good) was very important to me. Art was hovering patiently at my door, waiting for me to be ready for our date, and ideas about a new kind of leadership were knocking around my head, but all of that was in embryonic form.
Since then I have completely let go of evangelical doctrine. I don’t believe Christianity is the only way to God. I don’t believe in hell. I still love the transformational theology – that is, I think we can all continue to become more in-the-image-of-God by transforming more deeply into our truest selves—but moral ‘rightness’ and acquiescence to some religious standard (i.e. personal holiness) is no longer a tantamount for me.
How has this shift changed me? My primary language is no longer one of debate and critique, but one of dialogue and curiosity. I’m considerably less uptight and worried. Fear does not dominate my life as it once did. I can see truth in a lot more places now. I’m now live in a place of generosity and abundance, and not in a metaphysical land of judgement and lack. I have a less secure sense of place, and I sometimes miss the way having a clearly delineated religion provides security. But overall, my life has more beauty, ease, and compassion than it once did.
Elaine asks: If you could live one day of your life as another being (animal, vegetable or mineral but it must be non-human), what would you be and why?
I’d probably be a tree. I’m really into the spirit of trees. There was a fig tree near my house in Seattle that I called Mother Fig. I used to stop sometime on my pre-dawn walks and put my hand on her trunk and say encouraging things to her. (She was very overgrown and neglected. Poor baby.) Here in CPH there is a tree in the Univeristy Havn that might be magical. When the Winter sunset strikes it it glows like someone has uplit it with sophisticated stage lighting. Right now its leaves are so beautiful. Trees represent wisdom to me…wisdom and resilience.
Elaine again: If you could meet an inspirational leader from the past or present, who would that be and what one question would you ask him or her?
I can’t really think of anyone from the past right now. I’d like a pow wow with some of my current personal leaders though. Jen Lee could coach me on how to get a journal project and a collection of audio essays ready for distribution. I’m really admiring her work lately. And Sharon Benton could keep advising me how to not squander my so called (cushy) life. Oh, and Leonie could teach me how to be less of an Eyeore and more of a goddess. That would be good!
Four more Q’s with their A’s coming up tomorrow….
It’s My Birthday! Ask me a Question!
me at two. then i asked endless questions. now it’s your turn. ask me a question, i’ll tell you no lies.
Today is my birthday. I am 39 years old. One more year until the nice, round four-oh.
Thirty was a happy day for me. I was elated at 30. I threw myself an enormous party in which every one had to participate in a talent show. Ian read Beattle’s songs as droll British performance-art poetry. Karl wrote a comic ditty about me and sang while he played the piano. Neil put art up on an easle. Kami made her famous beef-stew-in-pumpkin. (And swore never to make it again after it sloshed all over the back of the pimp-mobile, which later spontaneously combusted on the front drive.)
I was emerging out of my post-partum depression, back into my pre-baby clothes, and happily on staff at a church that I loved. The decade looked promising.
The past few years have been harder than that blithe birthday would have lead me to believe. I’ve been sick most of this decade (chronic migraines); a huge idealogical shift has lead me away from the church and onto a more ancient-future faith that refuses to behave and is always giving me fits; and the home I thought I would grow old in is now occupied by renters while I learn how to live life abroad. It hasn’t been a terrible decade — far from it! But is has been more challenging, and more surprising that I ever could have imagined.
It makes me wonder what the next few years will be. Will my 40′s be as dramatically life altering as my 30′s? Will there be more children adopted by affection, and communities built and dismantled as the Universe dictates? Will there be books and columns, or will blogging remain my means of witness? Will I feel wiser in ten year’s time, or merely have more questions?
And speaking of questions, there is nothing I like better than being interviewed. I think this is charming, and I love what Leonie did here. If I could be interviewed full-time for a living I would be a very happy camper. So on this my birthday, I give you my lovely readers free reign. Ask me a question, any question, and I will tell you no lies. Because really, it’s my birthday, and I think today it’s okay for it to be all about me.
Thanks for celebrating with me!
With love from a very mild narcissist,
Rachelle
Sacred Life Sunday: Stillness & Solitude
Walking the paths in the Monastery d’Olive in Tuscany. More here.
