Year of Self Compassion #42 #receiving

This week I was asked a number of times if I enjoyed my party and the answer was a resounding yes. One of the things I have had to learn this year is to receive. I have been so unable to do so much so often, reception is what has been left. Bereft and broken, alone and fumbling around I have had to put down my arrogance and fear and be waited on more than once. Vulnerability and humiliation paired up to remind me I am human.  While I invite others to be together, to find the good in one another, to celebrate and extend generosity – I haven’t been so good at doing that for myself. Hence this year of Self-Compassion.  I still have my L plates on, but as a wise woman said to me this week – L plates is a good place to start.  And starting I am, and learning I am, and practicing I am.

Learning to receive is a practice all of its own.  I think the key is the practice …. like any discipline. I was looking up the history of the word receive and it is declining in its use over of the past two hundred years or so. It has Middle English and Anglo-Norman origins from back and take. I think there is a clue in here for me to think about receiving as giving back. In receiving you are giving back, by acknowledging the gift and honouring the giver. It seems to hold a promise and potential too. By receiving you are moving a relationship forward, taking another step in trust towards deeper intimacy.

Another clue to the power of receiving, is the opposite, the betrayal of a gift being rejected. Having spent yourself and given with joy, to have that thrown back at you is a hurt that creates a hole which is often hard to be re-filled.  You are greeting the good in the other when you receive as they give witness to the good in you.

It is not always easy to receive and so I am growing my reception muscles and my birthday has helped me in that fitness quest. Inviting other to give to me so I can receive is quite a big step. To receive random acts of kindness is a whole other level and to be impacted by a stranger or an invisible human seems to always connect me to the cosmic energy of the goodness in the Universe. Universal love is made visible in those random acts.

And then there is the receiving of what is around us everyday – the big blue sky, the pleasure of a cup of tea, the blossom on the trees, the little ants going about their business underfoot, the magpies calling me to the day and the majesty of the grey box tree offering spiritual direction from broken branches, peeling bark and a precarious nest being held halfway to the sky protected from the elements and predators.

Receiving is an art and craft. I find myself bowing to the giver so often, to recognise what they have done in their lives to make the gift and the cost that has been. The act of receiving is only possible because someone else has eeked out time for me, found and prioritised resources, knowing me well enough to match their giving to what my needs are.  This is call and response. And I know the giver receives as well, I know this better because I am good at giving, and learning to receive is what is opening up  … and I like it!  And may you too be blessed with good friends as John O’Donohue writes in this blessing from The Space Between Us and find your visible and invisible soul friends in many you meet on the road.

Blessing for Friendship

May you be blessed with good friends,

And learn to be a good friend to yourself,

Journeying to that place in your soul where 

There is love, warmth, and feeling.

May this change you.

 

May it transfigure what is negative, distant,

Or cold within your heart. 

 

May you be brought into real passion, kindness,

And belonging.

 

May you treasure your friends,

May you be good to them, be there for them

And receive all the challenges, truth, and light you need.

 

May you never be isolated but know the embrace 

Of your anam cara. 

Photo credit: Catherine Lawson 

 

 

Year of self compassion #23 #friendship

Having friends who have been in your life for years, decades even, are gifts that give over and over again. They can see the scars as wisdom, hold the memories as prayer and recognise the frailties as kinsutori (more beautiful because first broken and then repaired with golden thread).  Friendship often just needs a light touch, a glance, a stroke on the back of a hand, even the removal of a recalcitrant thread on a garment will define the depth of a friendship.  The time spent sitting in a back yard chatting, drinking another glass of shiraz or perhaps filling up the tea pot one more time, extends the friendship and takes you to a deeper well.  In this well are the truths, the surprises, the questions longing to take shape and reveal themselves as those golden threads to weave and heal the brokenness.

Such a privilege to be a friend and a salve to be-friended. I am deeply grateful and bow down to the friend in you that I hope will find the friend in me, even when there is little for me to give.  There is a social contract of conditional love that seems to seep into many friendships and family relationships and it is often only when one has literally nothing to give that conditions fade and the gift is given without any notation on the ledger.  Perhaps this is where compassion makes a home, at the threshold between conditional and unconditional love and as we stand under the lintel, the invitation from compassion helps us lean in to accept the invitation that may take us to a new level in the relationship in friendship and a new level to our selves.

In the Celtic tradition it is cara, that is the friend, and anam cara, the soul friend – that person a guide to your self with whom you are at home and through their presence also brings you home. A friend “… opens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you” (John O’Donohue – Anam Cara). In this friendship we show up with one another with complete integrity, vulnerability and with a knowing that hearts will meet and hearts that will break.

I am grateful for the times I have been a friend to others and the friend I might be into the future. The well is deep and making a space to receive and be blessed by the waters of that well is a daily practice and one I am learning to activate. So to all my friends I say thank you for hanging out and hanging in with me … time and time again for your love conditional and unconditional and for inviting me to threshold moments in your lives and mine.

For my friends

Witness my walking,

and falling on the earth.

Enter my dark and dank places.

Lighten my load with flowers and hugs.

Bring surprising questions, to open my heart.

Throw me distractions, to tease my brain.

Celebrate my resting and hibernation.

Invite and include me.

Cover me in colour.

Find me in frames of stories past and new beginnings.

Surround and hold me, even when I don’t notice.

Hold the torch into nooks and crannies of my vault of fears.

May many anam cara show up for you,

just as you do for me,

at thresholds of becomings.

 

Photo by Melvina Mak on Unsplash

 

Promises to tomorrow #39 #befriending self

I am getting lessons on how to be my own best friend by noticing what my friends are gifting me and accepting those gifts with the love and gratitude of a receiver. The love transaction in friendship is transformative.

My friends are creating a nest for me at this time, little pieces of straws and sticks broken and re-arranged for me to fit, shiny foil reflecting light to ward off evil, catching feathers to enable a soft landing for me to rest in, keeping enough space to hold the structure together with a light touch. My friends are familial, close by, far away. They are in real time and virtual. They are known and unknown to me. Being blessed with friends and knowing the sinews and muscles of friendship that have been exercised and strengthened over time tells me who I belong to and who belongs to me. There is recognition in love, even love unrequited is recognised. My inability to return right now perhaps is a falsehood, for it is in the receiving of the unconditional that the gift is given. My practice now is to receive.

A Friendship Blessing

May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessing, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara.

John O’Donohue: Anam Cara

My anam cara – my soul friend – is making his way to soon be turning towards the light. It is a journey that refuses to be hurried and stubbornly almost defiantly won’t turn down the paths even though the signposts are calling. This is marathon vigil. Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta was made to alert readiness for battle and so there is some of me that thinks the final message while in the process of being sent, is not yet delivered. My anam cara still teaching me about friendship, forgiveness, integration, identity in the few hours of wakefulness he has each day. You might also think of anam cara as friend to your soul – and in doing that – you too could be your own anam cara. This is the love and friendship you have where there is no pretence and all the illusions have faded and fallen away.

My promise to tomorrow is to make more time to nurture the friendship with myself. How might I bring the knowledge and experience of anam cara to the mirror? There are magical healing powers in forgiving others and yourself and surely that is what takes friendship to a new stage each time, more transformational than transactional.

Anne Lamont says: In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Generosity is an ethic of abundance and is the fuel for friendship. So thank you to all those who are being generous with me and patient and kind and inviting me to be a better friend to myself.

anam cara

Promises to tomorrow #16 Die Wise

There is a lot of cosmic energy in the air this time of year with the change of season and various religious rituals. And in my own life I have had my fair share of hatched and matched and dispatched connections around me. It is so often that new life is paralleled with deaths.

The news of one of these deaths of along-time friend came in a phone call. It was a life short-changed. Her death marked by a note in the informal and bleak, cold space of a facebook page, where the smallest group of readers weren’t all across the last details of her life. She set the page up years ago to post a few photos and it had not served her in any way as a community platform. Scratching through archival emails I was able to find some addresses and my forensic skills failed me in being able to find a sister that I knew was out there somewhere. An empty hole, dug to put a body, but not one to put in. A mutual friend and I went to our memories to put into that hole the laughter, quirky, difficult, cantankerous, generous, inspired, learned sojourner and friend she had been to us. On the street, the day after I heard the news, I saw shocks of white hair on every corner, little reminders of the sacred monkey she was in our lives.

I am preparing for the next Salon we are making and it is on the future of death. Unlike the wisdom cultures we are not so easily able to find ways of keeping the generations past with us into the future. We bequeath precious material objects, legally passing from one generation to another those items we want to live on.

A bequest literally means “about speech”, and so what do our bequests have to say about us after we are gone or when we are alive and making the decision about what we want to say to others when we are gone. Stephen Jenkinson, affectionately known as the Grief Walker, says we (of the non wisdom traditions) want to leave things and letters to the living behind because we are frightened of being forgotten and that is the biggest fear most people have when they are dying (once the fear of pain is longer realised). Jenkinson believes, having listened and been with thousands of dying people, this fear is because we have forgotten those who have gone before and not paid enough attention when it happened to others, and now when our turn comes this is the instinct that kicks in. He doesn’t let the dying off the hook and implores mothers to keep mothering, children to keep being children, partners to keep being married, all in the act of dying. The work of this time, and indeed of our whole lifetime, is to learn what it means to be human and to bring that wisdom to life, to die wise. Our bequest is to have our lives speak into the space made by knowing we will die.

We all know we are going to die, yet most of us don’t live that way, cherishing and nourishing every moment. My friend did – she squeezed every moment of life out of every day – truly living life to the full and that is her bequest to me. And only those of us who knew her, got a taste of that indefatigable spirit hungry for life and thirsty for adventure. She traipsed through laws and codes deciphering and searching for justice, turning stones over that refused to be turned and leveraging them out of crevices, often causing her more pain than was really required. She knew from an early age her body would be ravaged and let her down and her mind would probably too and to find her in that state the last time I saw her was devastating. I saw her in a public hospital, the very place she had brought her skills and advocacy too when we first worked alongside of one another. She believed in the public purse, public good and public service. She rioted for equity and access. She demanded a fair go for all and put herself in places where she could contribute to making that happen for others. Fiercely private she died with barely a soul knowing and no public mark or bequests to show for her life. Memories will live on with the small family she shared DNA and for those of us who are scattered, like her ashes in favourite places, we will catch the memories in the wind and help them find a home in our hearts.

Living a life to bequest, to die wise is a big promise to tomorrow, inspired by those who have died recently and the dying I share my living with every day.

 

Served by Soup

Carrot soup was on the menu – a touch of spice and sweetness, vegan and diary free as well. All care was taken to make the choice of carrot soup for the guests that arrived in time for lunch on a winters day with Venus in transit from Melbourne to Adelaide.  Our host had listened, remembered and delivered more warmth than was in the bowls.  She chose very well, witnessed by the “yes please, I would like some more.”

I first met this soup maker in her choice of a coffee shop, then in a foreign land, that had all the familiarity of shared histories; and now in the comfort of her own home.  Another step on this forever pilgrimage, taking another sip from the soup bowl together.

The next day the soup I had was bestowed upon me by a couple sharing their day off with me by the seaside.  It was an honouring of times gone by and a gradual unfolding of what might be ahead with friendship re-kindled.  Chicken (and vegetable) soup for the soul, heralded a conversation alive with the radical spirit and critique we were able to reactivate in a single sip.

Another day in the week and I was graced with another soup. This time there was the echo of a full winter garden.  The soup was crafted with love, first knitted together in my womb more than thirty years ago. Shared with the originators of the creation; communion.

In the confines of a workplace, a final bowl of soup for the week was heated up in the microwave after being poured from a pre-packaged supermarket purchased container.  It had none of the love of the other bowls sipped with deep affection earlier in the week.  I was however comforted by thinking that it was a moment of east meeting west – the soup was laksa and the packaging meant I could enjoy it easily without a trip to Malaysia.  Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the humble tea bag being a wonderful expression of east meeting west – where the plentiful tea leaves of Asia and held together in single serves for us Europeans to enjoy at our leisure. So with that memory, I breathed in eastern cuisine infused by western packaging and smiled as I breathed out and took my first spoonful.

I have been served by soup this week.

I love that all the ingredients rest together to make a whole that has to be contained in a bowl. I love how soup comes in a bowl and always prefer to drink soup from a bowl rather than a mug. The bowl is my favourite receptacle for eating from.  I love the shape of bowls and how my hands can cup the bowl.  I love the openness of bowls.  Like an open womb I drink from the bowl and take all that I need to sustain me for the next step of the journey.

I have discovered Hildegard that there is an Angel of Light soup on the market that includes the herbs you advised for soup.  I am sure you would have had many a bowl of soup shared with friends, family, travellers and co-workers in the vineyard, barnyard and fields.

When I sit down for the soup of life I want to always be able to say; “Yes please, I do want some more”, regardless of what is being served up and in what shape packaging it comes in.  In my heart, I do know that the great soup maker always makes it with love even when I see it packaged in plastic, blinded by the east/west co-creation it may well be.

Soup has served me well this week.

Soup