February is the month we celebrate love. That’s no mistake as it is the coldest time of the year at least in New England Love is probably everyone’s middle name. However it expresses itself in our lives it has companions like anger, loss, disquiet and pain. How could we learn to love in depth without all of it? I don’t know how to give this month’s topic a title that fits. Perhaps it can be what doesn’t but also fits and gives us fits to grow. So “fits” it is.
Phrases posted on Facebook, February 2024
Each day we wake up to a world rocking with war, climate change, discrimination, poverty and despair. I ask how with so little power can I live this awesome reality? I don’t know how. But I know I must not turn way, must hold it in my heart and in some small way do something helpful when I can ,even though it is tiny. I ask that whatever way any of us do this, it will move out as far as it can.
No use ducking pain. It is simply driven underground and becomes worse. In pain I’ve often taken comfort from Katherine Mansfield’s words in her journal: “Everything in life we really accept changes.” Not easy but true.
Continuing from the last post, I believe all of us have accepted pain partially. Life forces us to. Sometimes I think I’ve done it and so can be done with it. But there are always deeper levels that are asking for acceptance . . . not asking to be approved of or to be changed, but asking for inclusion.
All of us can be reactive in small and big ways. The ego likes to be “the one” that is always right. What if we could hold still in those uncomfortable situations instead? It could be one of the bravest thing we do. Holding still gives us time to ask, “What would love do here?” It gives us a chance to act from our hearts instead of from habit.
Right there, when things don’t fit and give us fits, is a mystery not to be solved but to be experienced instead. Often taking care with any so called quick solutions will only block the truth that is trying to emerge and find its rightful place.
It’s good to take a vacation from ourselves and our routines. Making a date with a friend to do something silly is good therapy. Drive the wrong way and find new scenery. I think that is why people travel. They are taken out of themselves for a bit and discover not only something new but how wonderful coming home is.
I want to remember that what I think doesn’t fit also fits. Why make the world smaller when it is totally scary and wonder-filled, too. That is to be God-smacked daily as the Irish put it?
When we embrace our natural being and ask our full embodied self, “What today?, with the intent to really listen and to act on there INFORMation there will be a felt sense of how fitting the intuited answer actually is.
That which always fits is love, and it has uncountable ways to manifest. In a difficult situation I am not alone if I chose love and let it lead me.
To discern what is fitting at whatever moment we happen to need to know a direction requires some silent time, doesn’t it? To have a habit of bering in silence is of great help. Here’s a quote from my book Inviting Silence. “Within each of us there is a silence — a silence as vast as the universe. We are afraid of it …. and we long for it.”
I like finding words within words. Take knowing as an example. “Nowing” is found there, a word not in the dictionary but one I like to believe means being alive and present in the moment. The practice of ‘nowing” will surely lead to knowing and living what matters daily with care.
