I offer you peace.          
I offer you love.          
I offer you friendship.          
I see your beauty.          
I hear your need.          
I feel your feelings.          
My wisdom flows from the Highest Source.          
I salute that Source in you.          
Let us work together for unity and love.         

–Mahatma Gandhi, Prayer for Peace         

Answers to questions like: What changed in your life? What was your process, exactly? What steps did you take? How did you get from there to here?

Around the beginning of the end of our relationship, my ex used to say, accusingly: You’re changing. I’m not, I would protest. I really didn’t feel it, didn’t know what he meant, not on a conscious level. Later still, he told me once, with tears in his voice: You’re going somewhere and you’re not taking me with you. Now, several years after we split up, he begs me to let him in on my secret: Please tell me, I want to go there too.

I try, I honestly do, to share what I can of my process, even though he interrupts me time and again with little resistances: I don’t believe in god, I don’t this, I don’t that. You don’t have to believe anything, I’ll say to him. You just have to open yourself up to you. Change is an inside job. It's not a veneer that can be applied on the outside, as if by some contract house painter you hire.

This is the thing, these internal processes sometimes defy being spoken about in human physical languages. And perhaps there’s a reason for that. I might say something like: it started with the two most important people in my life dying unexpectedly when they (and I) were in their late twenties to mid thirties. But then again, those were only triggers, weren’t they? And in a manner of speaking, I summed up everything that matters in my 6-word memoir. But as to specifics of the path I took (or that took me)? The process is an internal one, and therefore a unique and individual one for each seeker. If I could tell you exactly what I did, what happened, how I got out of that into this, etc, you might think, oh, if I do that I’ll get there too. No. You have your own path, your own way, the trick is not to follow what someone else has done, it’s to follow what your heart is urging you to do. Go within, that's where the answer lies.

Whoever Brought Me Here

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

—Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)

Besides everything, you mean?

I have the hardest time asking for help.

I find it a lot easier to be on the giving end of help than on the receiving end. I expect it’s because I don’t like to show my vulnerable side. And I’ve always prided myself on being able to do for myself, to figure things out, to learn by doing. What I miss out on there is the human element, the connectivity, the give and take of everyday living.

1) How did you celebrate the New Year?
A couple of friends from out of town and I got together for afternoon tea (high tea), without too much of a plan about what we were going to do after. For hours we talked, ate, drank tea, reminisced, drank tea, ate some more, laughed a lot. Much, much later, in fact, long after the waiter had dropped off the check (hint, hint), and well after people had started showing up for the 6 o’clock dinner setting, and probably even after some folks had finished their dinners and left, we decided to check out the Imax for the final gigantic-screen showing of Polar Express. A dry New Year’s Eve, huh, you might be thinking. But no, it was not dry at all. Besides the tea, well, there was the rain that arrived right around the time we pulled into the parking lot of the theatre. We were glad enough for the rain, we all agreed we’d seen enough of snow for one winter.

2) What new thing(s) do you want to do this year?
I want to start a new business, a (on/offline) workshop that utilizes journal- or journal-style writing/creating as a tool for healing old wounds, old stories, to create a space for individuals to uncover or rediscover the unique voice that is theirs in the world.

3) What is one (or two!) of your goals for 2009?
I hope to travel more, to clear off all debts, to bring my writing to a new level, to make myself more felt in the world.

4) What do you wish for the world?
I used to long for peace in the world, but now I wish for clarity. I would like people everywhere to step back from their stories about themselves and about the world, about how they got to where they are, about who did what to whom. I wish for them the gods’ eye view that is available when we remember to look past the obvious, past the ego, past the pain.

5) What do you hope to nourish in your own life?
Acceptance of what is. Patience with process. Continuity. The ability to live so authentically and with such grace that each now moment glides seamlessly into the next.

Nostalgia, along with a feeling of something ending, but what’s left to end?

And a sense of floating in the mystery of not knowing.

winter serenity

Snow. I grew up on the prairies and snow is a given there in winter, not like in Victoria, where I now live. This year we got lucky. Looks like we might even have snow on the big day. That would be only the second or third time since I moved here 15 years ago.

Christmas lights. Lovely in the holiday season, but In Victoria some home owners leave their lights up (and on) well into January and even February. I like it because winters tend to be a bit dull and rainy here, and the lights add considerable cheer to an evening’s walk or drive.

Celebration. Connecting with friends and family, even if only by phone.

Memories of Christmases and winters past. Toboganning and skiing. Extended family get togethers. Christmas carols and concerts. Here's a carol from my childhood I've found myself singing quite a lot in these days of snow softly falling.

To me winter also speaks of dormancy and gestation, a turning inward, a time to reflect on what is past and clear space for what is to come.

It’s four questions, actually. Byron Katie’s four:

1. Is it true?                          

2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without the thought?

Really, these questions have a way of getting right to the heart of conflict – inner conflict, which is where it all starts. All the coulda, woulda, and shoulda’s up in smoke. Poof!

Hmm, I have run from anger most of my life. I have feared it in others, I have feared and fought against it in myself. But here’s the thing: Anger points me to places where little conflagrations of war still exist, in myself. Maybe in others too, but that’s really not my business.

Anger shows me that what I thought I had put behind me, I haven’t.

Anger shows me that what I thought I had accepted, I haven’t.

Anger shows me where I haven't taken responsibility for me.

Anger shows me how I really feel about what’s happening.

Anger shows me my deepest, most hidden fears.

So I say this:

Hurray for anger, because it shows me where I’m really at (as opposed to where I think I’m at, wish I were at, think I should be at, etc).

Hurray for anger, because it gives me a point of comparison so that I can map my progress on that blessed day when a particular trigger that used to ignite me every time, rouses only minimal reaction in me, or maybe none at all.

I think I’ll let my prayer plant answer for me.

Maranta leuconeura

—It’s not what you’d expect.

She looked over at the prayer plant, leaves coming to attention atop stiffening stems. The prayer plant’s members always assumed this stance at a certain time of evening. She glanced at her computer clock. Roughly 9 pm. Summer, winter, fall, spring. It didn’t matter that the hours of daylight differed widely between the seasons, that right now, a week away from winter solstice, the sun set at 4:20. Waning daylight was obviously not their clue, they did not take their call to prayer from visual signs. Must be something internal, circadian rhythms, she supposed, wasn’t that what was supposed to govern such things? In any case, she had given up trying to figure out how the plant knew it was time to pray. Perhaps it existed in a timeless state, like one that she herself aspired to. Or aspired to aspiring to.

It was always the stalks in the centre of the ceramic pot that started the process, leading the outlying stalks gently prayerward. Some of the outliers took their time, some never really quite attained to the prayer posture. She thought she herself would likely be an outlier if she were a member of a plant that prayed. After all, didn’t all groups have their leaders, their avid followers, and their stragglers? Strugglers?

Earlier, she had just sat down to write, wondering what would appear on the page, worrying that no words might appear at all, when out of the corner of her eye she had seen movement, the tallest stalk, smack in the middle, had jerked suddenly upright. Call to prayer! Boy, that was one dude that lived in the now. That’s when she thought she had heard those words: It’s not what you think.

—It’s not what you’d expect, the tall one corrected her now. —Those were my exact words.

—What isn’t what I’d expect? she asked, round-eyed.

—This prayer thing. It’s not what you’d expect. It’s not as if some god-presence is calling me, telling me it’s time to pray. My whole life is about prayer. Bowing, reaching leaves out to the light, stretching upright at night, it’s all prayer. Drinking (assuming you remember to water me) is praying. Not drinking, too. Breathing is praying. New shoots and leaves unfurling is praying. So is old ones shrivelling up and falling to the earth.

—Prayer is such a misleading word, really. You humans go to church, you kneel or stand up, fold your hands in a certain way, bow your heads or lift them up, raise your eyes or close them, sit cross-legged on a mat watching your breath, all depending on how you were taught or what you think you need to do to be heard by some mystic or mythical deity. It’s not like that. Praying is eating, it’s moving, growing, drinking, eliminating, having an orgasm. Prayer is not something (a particular activity) you do so much as it is everything you do, and more, it’s something you are.

Not much I can add to that, except perhaps: Amen. But if you're looking for a more traditional sort of prayer, here’s one I like a lot, words and music:

Remembering to feel blessed that it chose to grace us with its presence for a time, even if later it chooses to leave.

Love's a butterfly

Remembering that it is both the strongest force in the world, and the most fragile. Its healing powers are well mooted, but they are seductive. It is hard not to want to hold onto something that makes us feel so right and good, that is so beautiful. And yet to hold onto love too tightly is to kill it, perhaps to break our hearts in the process.

I’m talking about love at the human level, of course. At the deeper level of soul, aren’t we all one, a harmony composed of similar and yet diverse parts? To be in harmony is to be in love. To be love. In a world where we are all one in love, is heartbreak even possible? I expect not. If I feel brokenhearted at your leaving, isn’t it because I think love is somehow separate from who I am, something outside of me? The object of my affection may leave my immediate vicinity, but love cannot leave that which is love.

Which leads me to the greatest challenge of all:

Remembering that I AM LOVE.