A stronghold is a fortress. It is sometimes called a keep. Where do we involuntarily and unconsciouly hole up to try to be in control and be safe? Such “keeps” are secret and often hard to open and release. They tend to be deep inside us. Holding is so varied, but when it softens we learn to hold but not to bind. We support others but do not direct them. We hold up our commitments but not our old habits. Whatever footholds we have, we let go of in time in order to move on. Holding tight and holding on is temporary even if it seems endless to us sometimes.
Holding and being held is very human There is much to learn. When we remember that we are in the Great Holding that always grants us free will, we have a blueprint of how to hold and how to let go.
Phrases posted on Facebook, August 2015
As a writer I have learned to wait and listen . . . a kind of expectant, cross-your-fingers-hope-to-die kind of thing until a word or a thought or some small bit of inspiration of whatever ilk shows up. Now many days with zero results as to August’s topic I found myself holding my breath. Aaaah! Inspiration. My topic: HOLDING. Hope I can find some nuggets digging around that theme.
Mystic, where I live, becomes more of a tourist town in the summer. We know that because of the many out of state license plates, and also because the tourists always seem to be holding hands strolling past the shop windows. Holding each other’s hands through thick and thin is not a tourist thing! You’ll agree I am sure.
Soon we will be inundated by politicians “holding forth” to gain favorable positions while also delivering phrases of an unkind nature about other candidates. In much smaller, personal ways we may also “hold forth” in order to be seen to be right. I, for one, suspect myself when I do it with vehemence. There’s some thing forced in the “forth”. Where’s the delete command?
When we hold something in, it can suffocate us or it can mature us. If a truth needs to be expressed we must dare to express it and not hold it in. If a truth or a fertile idea needs to grow inside us we must dare to hold it in until it matures. Mostly we know deep inside what needs to happen, and we can’t skip the job of discernment.
How many ways there are to consider the phrase, “holding up”. Picture Atlas holding up the world, or all those who maintain worlds for others. Picture an old fashioned Western hold up. Picture people or things that slow things up. Picture demonstrators holding up their placards. And aren’t there countless ways we each hold up!
Rubber bands, clothes pins, paper clips and bungee cords are all means to hold things together. I want to think of them as ordinary icons to appreciate, for don’t we need to hold things together? We can go it alone a little way, but together we can go much further, longer and more meaningfully. Today I’ll wear a paper clip on my shirt collar as a remembering practice of being held together by all that is good.
Sometimes we hold ourselves up at gunpoint. We are at the mercy of a robbing self-judgment. In the ancient prayer of Orens our arms are up also, palms open to receive. There we are asking for tender mercy. We need to give it and receive it.
We hold fast to principles, to moral values, to committed relationships, to “something”, even if it is holding fast to not holding fast. When we are clear about what we hold fast to and are also consciously committed to it (a two-step process), we are authentic. No small matter!
Some children and adults hold back. They have tremendous creativity and inner resources, and yet they hold back. There can be many reasons for this. And we, from the outside, will mostly not know why. But we can, as the Quakers quietly put it, see “that of God” in them, and let our gaze be one of encouragement and acceptance.
How extraordinary it is to have hands that can grasp, use tools, bring things to us and also push them away! How would we live a day if we blessed our hands in the morning and were conscious of their use all day? Wouldn’t anything “hand held” be informed by that awareness, and in even small ways partake of blessing.
“Hold it!” Stop! Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is not here. This is the only day that it is possible to live. Hold it with both hands.
How we “hold” things determines the quality of our experience. “Hold your peace” is an admonition to chill. To hold in prayer is a curious one, for there we not only keep somone in our hearts, but we also release them to their highest good.
As none of us can know what is ultiately best for another we have this to offer–holding them in prayer, supporting them with our hearts, and releasing them into love.
The other side of holding those we love in prayer is sensing how we are held by those who love us. It is an invisible net that spans distance and time. And more importantly, whether we are aware of it or not, we are also in the endless outpouring of goodness from the Source that sustains us. To trust that is the corner stone of faith.
There isn’t a person, I believe, who doesn’t have something that has “ahold” of them: a habit, an obligation, an addiction, an orientation, a mission. We are patterned by conditioning or by resisting our conditioning. To know and befriend what has ahold of us is to begin a path of freedom.
What do we rely on? What upholds us? If we think our own efforts do, we are wrong. They count, of course, but in essence we are upheld by the life force which is in everyone and everything. To align with that eternal flow brings goodness to us in ways (sometimes through difficulty) that we could not have imagined.
I have held up a month with the subject of “holding” and want to end on this next to last day of August with the conviction that to “behold” love and possibility in whatever circumstances we find ourseslves will allow us to be in world and yet not of it––a double dip–a freedom to discover.
