The Fiction of Being

Every life is a work of fiction. That’s what I tell my memoir students. People come to me wanting to tell their life story, the narrative that sums them up, the myth that captures their essence. They expect to find this story hiding inside them like one of Michelangelo’s statues trapped inside the marble, fully formed and waiting to appear.

They’re in for a big surprise, of course. Instead of finding the perfect story, they discover a tower of Babel, a slew of motley characters in search of a coherent author. There is no singular there there, they find, no masterpiece fixed inside of the stone. There are episodes, anecdotes, motifs, impressions, memories, and foregone conclusions melded with imagination. But a fait accompli narrative strong enough to support the sum of their many parts? This is just a fantasy.

We construct our personal myth from the random facts that life presents us, connecting dots to make a shape, devising plots from circumstance, changing characters, fashioning conflicts, adjusting structure, settings, and themes, as our lives unfold over time. Although our stories are fiction, we operate as if they were true. We are Homo narrans, the storytelling ape, the only species that survives by creating a conceptualized self—the character “I”—apart from the flesh-and-blood creature it is. This is how we brave existence on a mysterious planet. To cope with mystery, we create story. Having no idea who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, or what life means, we adapt by giving names to things and pretending the names and stories are real.

This is the root of our ignorance, mistaking ourselves for the story. When we see that this is a false equation, that we are not synonymous with our story, it is a watershed moment in self-realization. Students are often taken aback when this happens. “Who Am I?” they ask themselves, unable to locate their story on paper. This question is their initiation into the life of self-inquiry. In time, they come to see that the gap between story and self, which feels at first like a disaster, is actually an open door, a portal to personal freedom. It’s the crack in everything sung about in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “That’s how the light gets in.” Inhabiting this crack, standing outside our story, affords us a measure of liberation. From this witness perspective, we see that we are many selves living many stories. Although we’d prefer to think of ourselves as having a consistent personality across time and space, this is simply not the case. No one’s the same at work as they are at home, in flagrante delicto or shopping at Macy’s, sitting in church or drinking on Bourbon Street covered with Mardi Gras doubloons. As Dostoevsky pointed out, man is the animal that can adapt to anything. Shifting situations, we adjust our masks and stories, morph, dissemble, compartmentalize, omit, and change like chameleons,gluing our many selves together with this fictive “I.” Self-inquiry in writing or wisdom practice unsticks the glue and frees us of the adhesive pronoun. This unsticking awakens us to the truth. When you tell the truth, your story changes. When your story changes, your life is transformed.

Knowing how little we actually know, we suddenly become a lot more creative. Buddhists call this “beginner’s mind.” Meeting each moment with open awareness rather than through a narrative scrim, we find ourselves snapping to attention. “If your mind is empty,” said Suzuki Roshi, the author of Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, “It is always open for everything. In the beginners mind, there are many possibilities. But in the expert’s there are few.” Creativity comes from not knowing, acknowledging that we are protean, quantum, shape-shifting creatures with many compartments and numerous layers, a chorus of multiple selves. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman asked in Song of Myself. “Very well, then I contradict myself/ I am large, I contain multitudes." Meeting our multitudes is an adventure. The most predictable person turns out to be a matrix of incertitude, a hodgepodge of possibilities pretending to have only one face. We contain this complexity the best we can but the changeableness of our fluid nature is a mystery we must tolerate. Mystery is always changing its story. That’s what makes it a mystery.

Truth focuses our internal witness, connecting us to that part of ourselves that stands outside the flow of time and needs no story to exist. Writing is hardly the only way of stepping outside our story. Catastrophe is also terrific. I discovered this in my twenties when I was diagnosed with a fatal illness. For more than a decade, I sat in this in-between place waiting for my body to wither and die. This period of prolonged affliction stripped me completely of my story. The life I’d known had cracked down the middle, the house I’d lived in, the self I’d believed in, the future I thought was waiting for me, was suddenly condemned. Simone Weil, the mystic philosopher whose life was a study in affliction, compared this state of prolonged dread to that of a condemned man forced to stare for hours at the guillotine that’s going to cut off his head. The upside of this situation is that as the self-story is worn away, the witness grows stronger in proportion. Catastrophe shows us the part of ourselves that cannot be destroyed, the consciousness bigger than circumstances. We’re no longer defeated by samsara. We have the witness to stand beside us.

In spiritual circles, it’s commonly thought that story itself is an affliction, that our goal as truth-seekers ought to be story-less-ness, Zen-like just this-ness, detachment from personal myths, as if we had no shape at all, no history, memories, dreams or dramas. But is this really possible? Should we strive to transcend narrative, reject the storytelling imagination, and not enjoy being Homo narrans? Of course not. Story goes hand in hand with survival. Story matters in the same way that having a body matters; both help us navigate the physical world. Story is our vehicle. Story enables us to pass wisdom forward as well as to connect. “All sorrows can be borne if we put them into a story,” Karen Blixen wrote. Telling stories is a sacred act of communion; we know ourselves, being known by others; we see and hear ourselves through the eyes and ears of people who will listen to us. Connecting through story, we feel whole, knowing we are not alone.

There’s a beautiful story about a Jewish woman who’d gone to a therapist because she was having trouble breathing. As they spoke, the therapist noticed the camp numbers tattooed on the patient’s forearm. The woman coughed a great deal while telling her story. “When did you start having trouble breathing?” the therapist asked. “When my friend died two years ago,” the survivor admitted. “When she was alive,” this lady told the doctor, “we could talk about anything. Although she had not been in the camps, she understood. But now there is no one to tell. And the nightmares haunt me. I can’t sleep alone in the house. I know that if I want to live, I have to find another friend.”

This is how important our stories are. But just as the mind is said to be a terrible master but an excellent servant, story is not meant to be in charge. If we remember who is telling the tale, the story won’t be living us. The witness is our reality check, watching the passing show like a wise man on the banks of a river enjoying the flood of experience. The wise man does not drown. He knows that he is not the river. He’s the witness to the river, telling stories about its passing, the swells of love and waves of heartbreak, the depths of nature’s complexity. Students new to telling their story come to me frantic and drowning sometimes, overwhelmed by how impossible it is to capture life in words. I suggest that they try getting out of the river. I teach them to watch the river, instead, and describe, down to the finest detail, everything they see. If they pay attention to the river, especially themselves, in all their human complexity, they’ll have stories enough to last them several lifetimes. All they have to do is write.

 Every life is a work of fiction. That’s what I tell my memoir students. People come to me wanting to tell their life story, the narrative that sums them up, the myth that captures their essence. They expect to find this story hiding inside them like one of Michelangelo’s statues trapped inside the marble, fully formed and waiting to appear.

They’re in for a big surprise, of course. Instead of finding the perfect story, they discover a tower of Babel, a slew of motley characters in search of a coherent author. There is no singular there there, they find, no masterpiece fixed inside of the stone. There are episodes, anecdotes, motifs, impressions, memories, and foregone conclusions melded with imagination. But a fait accompli narrative strong enough to support the sum of their many parts? This is just a fantasy.

We construct our personal myth from the random facts that life presents us, connecting dots to make a shape, devising plots from circumstance, changing characters, fashioning conflicts, adjusting structure, settings, and themes, as our lives unfold over time. Although our stories are fiction, we operate as if they were true. We are Homo narrans, the storytelling ape, the only species that survives by creating a conceptualized self—the character “I”—apart from the flesh-and-blood creature it is. This is how we brave existence on a mysterious planet. To cope with mystery, we create story. Having no idea who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, or what life means, we adapt by giving names to things and pretending the names and stories are real.

This is the root of our ignorance, mistaking ourselves for the story. When we see that this is a false equation, that we are not synonymous with our story, it is a watershed moment in self-realization. Students are often taken aback when this happens. “Who Am I?” they ask themselves, unable to locate their story on paper. This question is their initiation into the life of self-inquiry. In time, they come to see that the gap between story and self, which feels at first like a disaster, is actually an open door, a portal to personal freedom. It’s the crack in everything sung about in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “That’s how the light gets in.” Inhabiting this crack, standing outside our story, affords us a measure of liberation. From this witness perspective, we see that we are many selves living many stories. Although we’d prefer to think of ourselves as having a consistent personality across time and space, this is simply not the case. No one’s the same at work as they are at home, in flagrante delicto or shopping at Macy’s, sitting in church or drinking on Bourbon Street covered with Mardi Gras doubloons. As Dostoevsky pointed out, man is the animal that can adapt to anything. Shifting situations, we adjust our masks and stories, morph, dissemble, compartmentalize, omit, and change like chameleons,gluing our many selves together with this fictive “I.” Self-inquiry in writing or wisdom practice unsticks the glue and frees us of the adhesive pronoun. This unsticking awakens us to the truth. When you tell the truth, your story changes. When your story changes, your life is transformed.

Knowing how little we actually know, we suddenly become a lot more creative. Buddhists call this “beginner’s mind.” Meeting each moment with open awareness rather than through a narrative scrim, we find ourselves snapping to attention. “If your mind is empty,” said Suzuki Roshi, the author of Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, “It is always open for everything. In the beginners mind, there are many possibilities. But in the expert’s there are few.” Creativity comes from not knowing, acknowledging that we are protean, quantum, shape-shifting creatures with many compartments and numerous layers, a chorus of multiple selves. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman asked in Song of Myself. “Very well, then I contradict myself/ I am large, I contain multitudes." Meeting our multitudes is an adventure. The most predictable person turns out to be a matrix of incertitude, a hodgepodge of possibilities pretending to have only one face. We contain this complexity the best we can but the changeableness of our fluid nature is a mystery we must tolerate. Mystery is always changing its story. That’s what makes it a mystery.

Truth focuses our internal witness, connecting us to that part of ourselves that stands outside the flow of time and needs no story to exist. Writing is hardly the only way of stepping outside our story. Catastrophe is also terrific. I discovered this in my twenties when I was diagnosed with a fatal illness. For more than a decade, I sat in this in-between place waiting for my body to wither and die. This period of prolonged affliction stripped me completely of my story. The life I’d known had cracked down the middle, the house I’d lived in, the self I’d believed in, the future I thought was waiting for me, was suddenly condemned. Simone Weil, the mystic philosopher whose life was a study in affliction, compared this state of prolonged dread to that of a condemned man forced to stare for hours at the guillotine that’s going to cut off his head. The upside of this situation is that as the self-story is worn away, the witness grows stronger in proportion. Catastrophe shows us the part of ourselves that cannot be destroyed, the consciousness bigger than circumstances. We’re no longer defeated by samsara. We have the witness to stand beside us.

In spiritual circles, it’s commonly thought that story itself is an affliction, that our goal as truth-seekers ought to be story-less-ness, Zen-like just this-ness, detachment from personal myths, as if we had no shape at all, no history, memories, dreams or dramas. But is this really possible? Should we strive to transcend narrative, reject the storytelling imagination, and not enjoy being Homo narrans? Of course not. Story goes hand in hand with survival. Story matters in the same way that having a body matters; both help us navigate the physical world. Story is our vehicle. Story enables us to pass wisdom forward as well as to connect. “All sorrows can be borne if we put them into a story,” Karen Blixen wrote. Telling stories is a sacred act of communion; we know ourselves, being known by others; we see and hear ourselves through the eyes and ears of people who will listen to us. Connecting through story, we feel whole, knowing we are not alone.

There’s a beautiful story about a Jewish woman who’d gone to a therapist because she was having trouble breathing. As they spoke, the therapist noticed the camp numbers tattooed on the patient’s forearm. The woman coughed a great deal while telling her story. “When did you start having trouble breathing?” the therapist asked. “When my friend died two years ago,” the survivor admitted. “When she was alive,” this lady told the doctor, “we could talk about anything. Although she had not been in the camps, she understood. But now there is no one to tell. And the nightmares haunt me. I can’t sleep alone in the house. I know that if I want to live, I have to find another friend.”

This is how important our stories are. But just as the mind is said to be a terrible master but an excellent servant, story is not meant to be in charge. If we remember who is telling the tale, the story won’t be living us. The witness is our reality check, watching the passing show like a wise man on the banks of a river enjoying the flood of experience. The wise man does not drown. He knows that he is not the river. He’s the witness to the river, telling stories about its passing, the swells of love and waves of heartbreak, the depths of nature’s complexity. Students new to telling their story come to me frantic and drowning sometimes, overwhelmed by how impossible it is to capture life in words. I suggest that they try getting out of the river. I teach them to watch the river, instead, and describe, down to the finest detail, everything they see. If they pay attention to the river, especially themselves, in all their human complexity, they’ll have stories enough to last them several lifetimes. All they have to do is write.

 Every life is a work of fiction. That’s what I tell my memoir students. People come to me wanting to tell their life story, the narrative that sums them up, the myth that captures their essence. They expect to find this story hiding inside them like one of Michelangelo’s statues trapped inside the marble, fully formed and waiting to appear.

They’re in for a big surprise, of course. Instead of finding the perfect story, they discover a tower of Babel, a slew of motley characters in search of a coherent author. There is no singular there there, they find, no masterpiece fixed inside of the stone. There are episodes, anecdotes, motifs, impressions, memories, and foregone conclusions melded with imagination. But a fait accompli narrative strong enough to support the sum of their many parts? This is just a fantasy.

We construct our personal myth from the random facts that life presents us, connecting dots to make a shape, devising plots from circumstance, changing characters, fashioning conflicts, adjusting structure, settings, and themes, as our lives unfold over time. Although our stories are fiction, we operate as if they were true. We are Homo narrans, the storytelling ape, the only species that survives by creating a conceptualized self—the character “I”—apart from the flesh-and-blood creature it is. This is how we brave existence on a mysterious planet. To cope with mystery, we create story. Having no idea who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, or what life means, we adapt by giving names to things and pretending the names and stories are real.

This is the root of our ignorance, mistaking ourselves for the story. When we see that this is a false equation, that we are not synonymous with our story, it is a watershed moment in self-realization. Students are often taken aback when this happens. “Who Am I?” they ask themselves, unable to locate their story on paper. This question is their initiation into the life of self-inquiry. In time, they come to see that the gap between story and self, which feels at first like a disaster, is actually an open door, a portal to personal freedom. It’s the crack in everything sung about in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “That’s how the light gets in.” Inhabiting this crack, standing outside our story, affords us a measure of liberation. From this witness perspective, we see that we are many selves living many stories. Although we’d prefer to think of ourselves as having a consistent personality across time and space, this is simply not the case. No one’s the same at work as they are at home, in flagrante delicto or shopping at Macy’s, sitting in church or drinking on Bourbon Street covered with Mardi Gras doubloons. As Dostoevsky pointed out, man is the animal that can adapt to anything. Shifting situations, we adjust our masks and stories, morph, dissemble, compartmentalize, omit, and change like chameleons,gluing our many selves together with this fictive “I.” Self-inquiry in writing or wisdom practice unsticks the glue and frees us of the adhesive pronoun. This unsticking awakens us to the truth. When you tell the truth, your story changes. When your story changes, your life is transformed.

Knowing how little we actually know, we suddenly become a lot more creative. Buddhists call this “beginner’s mind.” Meeting each moment with open awareness rather than through a narrative scrim, we find ourselves snapping to attention. “If your mind is empty,” said Suzuki Roshi, the author of Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, “It is always open for everything. In the beginners mind, there are many possibilities. But in the expert’s there are few.” Creativity comes from not knowing, acknowledging that we are protean, quantum, shape-shifting creatures with many compartments and numerous layers, a chorus of multiple selves. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman asked in Song of Myself. “Very well, then I contradict myself/ I am large, I contain multitudes." Meeting our multitudes is an adventure. The most predictable person turns out to be a matrix of incertitude, a hodgepodge of possibilities pretending to have only one face. We contain this complexity the best we can but the changeableness of our fluid nature is a mystery we must tolerate. Mystery is always changing its story. That’s what makes it a mystery.

Truth focuses our internal witness, connecting us to that part of ourselves that stands outside the flow of time and needs no story to exist. Writing is hardly the only way of stepping outside our story. Catastrophe is also terrific. I discovered this in my twenties when I was diagnosed with a fatal illness. For more than a decade, I sat in this in-between place waiting for my body to wither and die. This period of prolonged affliction stripped me completely of my story. The life I’d known had cracked down the middle, the house I’d lived in, the self I’d believed in, the future I thought was waiting for me, was suddenly condemned. Simone Weil, the mystic philosopher whose life was a study in affliction, compared this state of prolonged dread to that of a condemned man forced to stare for hours at the guillotine that’s going to cut off his head. The upside of this situation is that as the self-story is worn away, the witness grows stronger in proportion. Catastrophe shows us the part of ourselves that cannot be destroyed, the consciousness bigger than circumstances. We’re no longer defeated by samsara. We have the witness to stand beside us.

In spiritual circles, it’s commonly thought that story itself is an affliction, that our goal as truth-seekers ought to be story-less-ness, Zen-like just this-ness, detachment from personal myths, as if we had no shape at all, no history, memories, dreams or dramas. But is this really possible? Should we strive to transcend narrative, reject the storytelling imagination, and not enjoy being Homo narrans? Of course not. Story goes hand in hand with survival. Story matters in the same way that having a body matters; both help us navigate the physical world. Story is our vehicle. Story enables us to pass wisdom forward as well as to connect. “All sorrows can be borne if we put them into a story,” Karen Blixen wrote. Telling stories is a sacred act of communion; we know ourselves, being known by others; we see and hear ourselves through the eyes and ears of people who will listen to us. Connecting through story, we feel whole, knowing we are not alone.

There’s a beautiful story about a Jewish woman who’d gone to a therapist because she was having trouble breathing. As they spoke, the therapist noticed the camp numbers tattooed on the patient’s forearm. The woman coughed a great deal while telling her story. “When did you start having trouble breathing?” the therapist asked. “When my friend died two years ago,” the survivor admitted. “When she was alive,” this lady told the doctor, “we could talk about anything. Although she had not been in the camps, she understood. But now there is no one to tell. And the nightmares haunt me. I can’t sleep alone in the house. I know that if I want to live, I have to find another friend.”

This is how important our stories are. But just as the mind is said to be a terrible master but an excellent servant, story is not meant to be in charge. If we remember who is telling the tale, the story won’t be living us. The witness is our reality check, watching the passing show like a wise man on the banks of a river enjoying the flood of experience. The wise man does not drown. He knows that he is not the river. He’s the witness to the river, telling stories about its passing, the swells of love and waves of heartbreak, the depths of nature’s complexity. Students new to telling their story come to me frantic and drowning sometimes, overwhelmed by how impossible it is to capture life in words. I suggest that they try getting out of the river. I teach them to watch the river, instead, and describe, down to the finest detail, everything they see. If they pay attention to the river, especially themselves, in all their human complexity, they’ll have stories enough to last them several lifetimes. All they have to do is write.

              Written by  Mark Matousek    

HALLOWTIDE 2015~ THE GIFT OF SILENCE

Going for a walk in my valley this week, I become aware of the quieting of the voices of the Green World all around me. Golden leaves of chestnut and sycamore are already forming burnished heaps on either side of the lane, and I sense my favourite beech trees ready to shake out their coppery hair and settle down for a long winter's sleep.

Whether known as Samhain, (Ireland) Samhuinn, (Scotland) Nos Calan Gaeaf, (Wales) or All Hallows Eve, (England) this is the time to celebrate the hushed time of the year, for one of the blessings of the Old Woman of Winter, the Cailleach as she is known in Scotland and Ireland, is the gift of silence.

There is a vast solace in silence, in the deep peace of emptiness, the fathomless mystery of the Void, where all things arise and where all return. In a mechanized world in which silence is increasingly rare, and it is almost impossible to find a night sky which does not reflect electric lights, these are gifts to be cherished. The fallow time, the unfilled schedule book, rest, sleep, quietude, less rather than more, are held of little value in our constantly on-the-go modern society. 

Unlike ancient and indigenous cultures, modern society has no comparable ritual practices that allow for the experience of return and renewal by going into the deep silence found within the earth. Yet yearning for this experience is indicated by the number of white westerners who have appropriated the Native American sweat lodge ceremony for their own rituals. This is why entering the Silence is so important in all Mystery work. If you do not regularly quiet your mind in silent meditation, even if only for a few moments, you cannot engage in the all-important deep listening to the wise voice of your soul, your inner guides and teachers, and the Divine Source.

If possible, try to have in your home one room, however small, that you reserve for silence. Choose beautiful, clear colours full of light for the walls and some symbolic or mystical pictures to put in it, and dedicate it to the Divine, in whatever form is meaningful to you. Do not allow others in and do not go in yourself unless you feel able to maintain an inner silence, so that you can hear the underlying voice of the Universe.

As you are preparing your quiet room, try also to prepare it within yourself, in your heart and mind. In this way, no matter where you find yourself, even in the midst of chaos, you will be able to enter your inner room to find peace and light in the silence of your soul.

WILD NIGHT FOR ME~~ AWAKE~~ AND ASLEEP

Haven't been so..... under attack.... FOR YEARS. And I hate to put it that way, as I'm not really paranoid about this.... but it was not a mere mood, it was very real, and followed me into my dreams. Came from nowhere in particular as well. 

Temptation is strong..... not to ruminate on past sins & failings, which I could and sometimes do, nor feel any stirring to return to "old ways", it wasn't like that. It was much more of a look at here and eternity and feel left out somehow and that the Lord cannot be trusted and there really is no other reality so we are, in a word, screwed.  That God is not trustworthy, not loving, playing his own game with us, his creatures. 

The urge was strong just to give up. Give up the faith, do whatever, take up other spiritual systems.... makes no real difference in the end. And no sense of God in all this, nothing at all to hang on to.

Strange? I suspect this has happened others, or similar.... especially those with prophetic giftings, who usually fall prey to all kinds of desolations. But for me, I'm ordinary. Whether I like it or not, I'm completely ordinary. I may have wanted a place, a particular place, of some sort, in the Great Plan of God, but I'm just one of the many. 

It was not depression coming in, I am more than familiar with that one. This was more, and it's hard to describe, and even as I look over what I'm writing here, it sounds whiney, and not anything significant. But somehow I suspect that for me, it was.

FINALLY, as I was waking up, still in this particular struggle, or whatever it was, I was given reminders.... not direct comfort to me and beautiful words just for me..... which perhaps I would have liked, but reminders, of others, having gone before, thinking & feeling some of the same, and also not feeling the presence of God with them. Some pictures of people I know.... and many I don't know, though the ages (it seemed) and some we all know something about, like Mother Theresa, who had her call, a big call, waited for it to be confirmed within the channels of the Church, which it was..... and went on her way to India...... and then, evidently, for the entire rest of her life, never felt God's Presence to her again. She just lived by faith, period. Not putting myself in her league, but considering that this sort of thing happens to folks in her league, guess it can certainly happen to the rest of us.

One thing which was very interesting was seeing folks from the church I grew up in, Salem Covenant Church in Worcester.. I have appreciated it before, gave me a good foundation for sure in the Bible and all.... haven't much thought of it for years now. Ordinary people really, bunch of Swedes, many a tad ornery or cheap or whatever, but they were committed to something beyond themselves. For sure. 

Anyway, just felt like sharing.

WEIRD DREAMS LAST NIGHT~~~

My husband doesn't quite remember his, even as he was trying to once awake, it slipped away. He knows about dreaming very rarely, so I was eager to hear..... but nothing came back. 

My dream on the other hand, I do remember, for the most part:

We (husband and I) went to a large building, unclear if it was a government building, museum, historical house or building--- seems we went to tour the place, so it was open to the public. There were groups being brought around, many stairs, very dignified and beautiful, lots of oak and some stained glass and books in a library (not like a public library, maybe a law library? Official in some way). Huge windows looked out over a veranda and a large property, with some gardens, like formal gardens, all the way to some river in the distance. It was beautiful, really.

Suddenly there was singing, unclear just where it started from or by whom, but it was first among the guests, those in the tour groups. First one and then another and then everyone on all the floors, and the tour guides, and it was some kind of extended hymn, I almost recognized it but did not. Just knew it was a glorious and beautiful hymn of some rather formal type. 

Suddenly some kind of force--- wind perhaps--- brought me out to the grounds, to the gardens. which as I said were extensive and beautiful. And THEN some things began to happen to ME..... my entire body and then my mind, conciousness, even ability to SEE or UNDERSTAND what was happening.... were completely changed. Totally. I became very small, very very small. And THEN I was put underground. I could FEEL the soft warm earth, could SMELL it somehow. I felt like a seed being planted, not like a person being dead and buried. And then it was DARK. And I was content.

Next morning I went on Facebook and saw THIS, posted by a priest friend, who had led a Healing Conference at the local church a couple years before:

WOW! What a confirmation! And what a gift! 

TRANSITION ALMOST COMPLETE

This Easter Season has been HUGE for me. Usually they are, but this has been even more so. Nothing that much happened externally, and the only church-related servic e we attended was on Easter morning. We had observed Lent and gone to Confession in preparation, but that is all.

I guess it's because of things that are happening internally. I have written before about the sense of being in some kind of transition, and finding it disconcerting, confusing, maybe scary. One gets used to things how they are, one gets used to seeing themselves a certain way. Transition goes from one state of being to another, in such a way that nothing will be the same again. Using Labor & Delivery as a metaphor, first we're not a mother, then we are-- even if we lose the child then or at any time after, first we have X children, now we have X+1, and so on and so forth.

For me, I have seen myself in a vocation, of a "Sermon on the Mount" variety, for many years, and am both good and bad with that, comfortable & uncomfortable. I especially noticed something late last week, when I was participating in an End-of-Life Planning Meeting with a family in conflict over these issues, among themselves, and with their nursing home resident, who is his own person. No details needed about the meeting, but I had some kind of silvery thing happen and became very nostalgic, like looking at an old movie.

The process of "leaving" that vocation is well in process now. No real outward changes to report. I am still going to work, have no indication that I can "retire" (my husband will not even rationally discuss me retiring before I turn at least 68), and have pretty much resigned from or otherwise let everything else go, as concerns lay ministry. HOWEVER.

The time is HERE, and the Lord Himself is to be my Focus, and my Ministry.

I can't see how this will go, how it might look. My husband requires an enormous amount of attention, and I have four adult children plus two grandchildren to think about. I'm not the best wife (two divorces thus far prove that) and there have been all kinds of issues with the kids, so I guess it's fair to say that I get, at best, "mixed reviews" as a mother/stepmother. I've got a very good work reputation (not bragging, it appears to be fact) but have never made much in the way of salary and have no idea if whatever service I could render was of temporary, permanent, or eternal benefit. I've also been valued as part of various lay ministries, and some protests were made about me leaving some of these now, till I could explain, however poorly and briefly, that I am aware of a "change in season" from the Holy Spirit, and then was blessed to have had that confirmed by leadership (past few days).

About all I know is that the Lord Himself, who has appeared to me a few times requesting that I comfort Him (as I've told you) is going to start showing me HOW to do so. And this will be for the rest of my life, now and perhaps into Eternity.

I hope this makes sense. I will report on my progress or lack thereof as we proceed. BTW: I have no idea where sewing/quilting fits into this change. Maybe it's to "distract" me as I leave work, make it easier to do so, by being another kind of work, with a different purpose. The lack of clarity as to purpose of sewing/quilting for me parallels my lack of clarity with change in focus in general.

Gracie~~~

                

Her decline continued, she didn't appear uncomfortable till last evening. At that time she appeared quite weak and lethargic and had a bout of diarrhea--- that is all. When we got up this morning she was lying on the living room floor, and when I touched her she cried. We got her comfy on the couch, and wrapped her in a fleece blanket to keep her warm. No more sounds, though she enjoyed being gently patted. And within an hour, she died. 

So my Gracie, after fourteen years, is gone. Best cat I EVER had. Sweet, simple, and I believe she fulfilled the purposes God had for her--- to be my companion all these years, resident pet therapist at the Haven of Grace -Jude, the Executive Director, gave her to me one year for my birthday- she shared my quarters and evenings and weekends she spent time with the ladies- then companion to my mother in her latest years- and been our fur baby the last few. 

I am so sad. Jack is very good, handled everything, and is a comfort.

GRACIE FLANAGAN 2002-2015

SIMPLIFY. ORGANIZE. MANAGE RESOURCES WISELY.

It's been a "one thing leads to another" sort of thing the past couple of years. I have worked in health and human services my entire career, and been involved in lay ministry, so had never heard of organizing, not as a profession. One of my work colleague's wife was a professional organizer with her own company, so I heard of that... then while in the process of checking on job postings (on behalf of my husband who was forced into early retirement four years ago), I saw her post an apprenticeship. Timing was not right for me then and I didn't know enough about the field, started to read about it, look into it, and linked to sites on simplifying, organizing, managing resources wisely, creativity, and productively. And found that interesting as well. 

In my field "productivity" can be a threatening thing, a pressure to keep interactions with clients to a specified minimum length of time, treatments are defined in minutes, but some definitions of productivity are quite different. It appears to be about maximizing our personal and organizational time, talent, and treasure... to keep things simple and manage our resources wisely. My life is all about that, as my husband and I deal with our mid-life transitions. And that, in a nutshell, is my current interest in professional organizing and productivity!