change

Love vs Power?

In the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:

“…Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience…

…And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality…”

Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
16 August 1967

Politics of Spirit

Saturday night I was at a party at The Chrome Horse Saloon.  I arrived looking forward to spending the evening with friends, then did something a little out of character for me. I introduced myself to a stranger who seemed interesting.  What followed was a lengthy conversation which ranged through some pretty cerebral territory: political ideologies, epistemology, scientific inquiry, and changing the world.  Granted, this wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was both fascinated and energized by the discussion.

In fact, I was energized enough that the following morning I found the excerpt, below, from Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, which was tickling at the back of my brain during part of our discussion at The Chrome Horse.

“We capitalists have a long and crippling history of believing in the power of external realities much more deeply than we believe in the power of the inner life. How many times have you heard or said, “Those are inspiring notions, but the hard reality is…”?  How many times have you worked in systems based on the belief that the only changes that matter are the ones you can measure or count?  How many times have you watched people kill off creativity by treating traditional policies and practices as absolute constraints on what we can do?

…But the great insight of our spiritual traditions is that we — especially those of us who enjoy political freedom and relative affluence — are not victims of that society: we are its co-creators. We live in and through a complex interaction of spirit and matter, of the powers inside of us and the stuff “out there” in the world. External reality does not impinge upon us as an ultimate constraint:  if we who are privileged find ourselves confined, it is only because we have conspired in our own imprisonment…

If our institutions are rigid, it is because our hearts fear change; if they set us in mindless competition with each other, it is because we value victory over all else; if they are heedless of human well-being, it is because something in us is heartless as well…

Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world.  Our complicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility — and a source of profound hope for change.”

“We the privileged have conspired in our own imprisonment.” Pretty powerful stuff.  I know this is true for me, on the level of my daily choices and interactions, especially when I choose out of fear.  But I have also experienced change/transformation at the personal level, and this has been a spiritual process brought to fruition by action.  If, as the women’s movement attested, the personal is political, what we can do in our own sphere can also be achieved on a larger scale.

Therefore, I can’t help but imagine the possibilities open to us at the societal level if we were to bring the transformative power of spirit and consciousness to our political and economic constructs!  What world might we co-create then?  In a week in which we are witnessing the politics of divisiveness and hate at the national level (the shootings in Tucson, the Westboro Baptist Church) and locally (the movement to impeach the remaining members of the Iowa State Supreme Court ) it seems important to remember that we can step outside our comfort zones to create something new in the world.

What that new world might look like would make for a another great conversation at The Chrome Horse Saloon.


Angel Cards

I have a deck of “angel cards” in my office.  Each little card contains one word and a drawing of angels doing something or holding something associated with that word.  The cards sit in a beautiful abalone shell, a gift from my friend Wendy.

Here’s how they are used:  you draw a card and think about what that word is saying to you at the time you select it.  Sometimes, it feels like you’ve drawn a random word that might mean anything.  At other times, it is uncanny how you draw just the necessary word for your current mental or emotional state.  For example, one day I needed to run errands across town with a very limited amount of time between meetings at the office.  I was stopped both going and returning by midday trains, among other time-sucking annoyances.  On the way back, once the lengthy train had finally crossed the road, I was stuck in traffic behind a school bus.  I was feeling harried, impatient.  Road rage was overtaking me just as I spied an alternate route via a side street where I could get out of traffic and go the speed limit.  Unfortunately, the school bus, at the last second, entered the turn lane in front of me.  And it continued on my alternate route, running a leisurely 15 mph.  I couldn’t pass it, and I followed it right into the parking lot at work.

Frustrated, blood pressure elevated to risky levels, I stormed into my office and ranted a high-drama version of my cross-town trip to a coworker, ending with the school bus.  My colleague suggested, kindly, that I take a few deep breaths and draw an angel card.  I took her advice. The word I drew took the wind completely out of my sails — RELEASE.  But the truly unbelievable piece was that the little drawing on the card was of an angel waving goodbye to, you guessed it, a school bus! Direct message sent and received!

I tell this story to illustrate why I pay particular attention to these angel cards.  It isn’t that there is magic in them.  But, as with many things that allow us to touch our less conscious mind (journal writing is another example) we sometimes surprise ourselves by going to the thing we most need to hear or think about at that moment.  And if Providence is also moving to assist – via our guardian angels – then that is a gift worthy of attention.

Over the past several weeks, I have drawn two words out of the abalone shell repeatedly: BIRTH, EXPECTANCY. First, I can assure you these words are not to be taken literally. Even so, they are powerful words.  I’ve learned to listen when powerful words come my way with such insistence.

What is trying to come into being in my life? I don’t know, but I am excited and just a little trepidatious.  Change, that wonderful, terrible “C” word, fills me with anticipation and fear.  I think I am learning to not only accept change, but to embrace it.  The fear is born of the knowledge that change always requires something from us — if only the internal readiness to go where we will end up anyway.  Friday, after several weeks of pondering BIRTH, I drew a card and discovered that two were stuck together — TRANSFORMATION and TRUST.  Alrighty then. I will try to trust myself, my guardian angels, and Providence.  Something big is on the horizon, though I can’t quite make it out yet.

Ch-ch-changes!

Welcome to the newly up-dated Jenion!

With the coming of autumn, I realized that the look and feel of Jenion was based on the self I was when I created the site last November:  a little wintry, a little dark…OK, a LOT dark!  Readers who have been with me since its inception have followed me as I’ve blogged my way through some significant life changes.  And while the Hunger Challenge and weight loss goals I began with have moved out of the foreground a bit, they still inform the experiences I am writing about — namely, how someone in the middle of life’s journey can “change her mind and change the world” (even if it is primarily her interior world that has shifted!)

So the look of the blog has altered, to reflect a brighter, more upbeat sensibility.  I hope it reflects my inner peace and happiness, too.  There is a subscription button for those of you who have lamented that I stopped sending email reminders when the hunger challenge ended.  I have also tagged entries, picking out themes and/or key words.  Click on one of these (in the lower right sidebar) and it will take you to blog posts which discuss that theme.  The recipes tab is more prominent, and I have added a couple of new recipes which I hope you like (including one for a spicy sausage and veggie soup I created myself)!

As I worked on updating the site, and going back to tag previous entries (which, by the way, is time-consuming and not finished!), it occurred to me that I ought to give some kind of status report on my journey.  Originally, I thought this would take the form of updating you all on happenings in several categories.  But as I gave it more thought, I realized I wanted to share two things in particular:  one a personal insight, the other a goal – both derived from the experiences of this past ten months.

First, after a lifetime of living most of my days in either the past or the future, I have learned to live in the present moment.  It is both energizing and freeing to live right here, right now.  You begin to feel your life vibrate at a higher frequency, and each moment takes on a special and important quality.  Living in the future, thinking things will be better at some distant point (someday when I’ve lost weight, or won the lottery, or done xyz) feels like squandering a precious gift.  I no longer see time as an endless resource — I value it, and want to make it count because my time here on earth is finite.  I cannot wait for someday.  Someday has to be today.

Second, my goal is simply to continue this journey.  No rest for the weary!  More important than the specific tasks and small goals I pledge myself to, is the quest to continue growing and developing into the person I am meant to be.  Certainly, I am not there yet.  There are external pieces of my life I have clung to out of fear or lacking self-confidence to let go and move on.  There are also those parts of my internal self that I have refused to set free out of fear — fear of failure or fear of success. It hardly matters which fear prevents your gifts from seeing the light of day.

Thank you for joining me at Jenion for all or part of the past ten months.  I look forward to sharing the next phases of my journey with you — and hope that you will use the comments section to share both your own path and insights.  For those who don’t feel comfortable making public comments, please see the “about” tab to learn how to contact me via email.

The Story

The following is a true story.

“The girl in the teal shirt, with the long blonde hair, is studying hard. And when she takes a break to gaze out the window she is working hard, even then, to not meet anyone’s eyes or connect in any way. The only other customer is a dark, small man whose attention is completely on his computer screen, though there are books and notepaper piled on the table all around him.

The woman in the corner puts down her book and stares at nothing for a minute before picking up her coffee cup and, pausing with it halfway to her lips, peering at its contents as if reading her future inside. She takes a small sip and returns the cup to its saucer.  There are tears floating in her eyes. They do not overflow.

She takes a deep breath and refocuses her attention, turning her head so one ear is cocked toward the staff behind the counter, who are alternately joking and bickering.  Outside the window, her eyes follow two women and a child in identical orange shirts, then shift to a thirty-something couple attempting to settle a large German shepherd into the back of their car.

This is what the woman in the corner is thinking:  She is thinking about one summer back when she was in college, and they had a small apartment downtown. There was amazing art on the walls, which belonged to the professor who owned the place.  She remembers the white walls, wood floors and the paintings.  She remembers the long summer of wasting time, of endless talking and smoking, of quick walks down the block to the bar or the Maid-Rite.  She remembers feeling the life ahead of her will be anything but ordinary.

She knows it is useless to wish for the past to come back, to wish for a different chance, to have been a different person. That doesn’t stop her from wishing it. Doesn’t stop her from wishing she had chosen differently. It occurs to her that she can choose differently for herself now, that beginning with this moment she can try for something other.  But then she thinks of the work piled on her desk. She thinks of the bills that must be paid. She thinks of her timid nature, her indecisiveness, and she can’t believe in her own ability to change.  She thinks, “I am like that German shepherd, acting like I have a choice when, in actuality, I am always going to sit in the back seat.”

And she knows she can never say these things. She knows that anyone hearing these thoughts would argue or, worse, console her.  Instead, she picks up the pen and opens the notebook in front of her.”

April 22, 2007. I wrote this story in my journal as I sat in Starbucks on a Saturday or Sunday morning telling it to myself.  I thought of it yesterday, when I happened to stumble onto a Tony Robbins video clip.  Now, I’ve never really paid attention to Tony Robbins, motivational speaker extraordinaire, so I was surprised to find myself listening carefully.  Paraphrasing what he said, “Suffering doesn’t come from life events.  Events happen. Suffering comes from the meaning we attach to them.  The story we attach to the event is the secret.”

In the story I used to tell about myself, I was a sad observer of life. I’d never merit the front seat.  My “glory days” were behind me in an apartment in downtown Dubuque, Iowa circa 1983.  I never really liked that story, but I thought it was the only one I had.  After all, you cannot go back and change the past.

But I can change the story.  The woman, sitting in the corner of the coffeeshop can, after picking up her pen, can write:

Snap out of it! Its a beautiful day. No need to brood over gloomy thoughts of the past when you have today.  Today, anything is possible. The more you believe that, the more you know in your heart it is true, the more the impossible will take shape in your life.  Who you have been has led to who you are. And who you are is someone who will put down this pen and walk out into the sunshine.”

We can always change the story. I know, because my story has changed substantially. You should try it.  I can promise you this — it is way more fun to be the author of your story than just another character in it!  To quote another great motivational performance (the band Sugarland): “…find out what it means to be the girl who changed her mind and changed the world…”

Collected Works

Potlucks.  I cannot say how many times in my life I’ve inwardly groaned at the thought of attending one.  And not only because I’m too lazy to make a covered dish to bring, though I am.  The thought of eating a mish-mash of food I generally wouldn’t serve at home, and making small talk with a bunch of people crammed in a room somewhere…well, you can tell from my description that I haven’t been much of a fan of the whole potluck experience.

That may be changing.

Today, my little house was filled to overflowing with people who arrived in a swarm (like a plague of benevolent locusts?!), set out food and condiments, made themselves at home and generally settled in for a good, old-fashioned eatfest.  Except that the food included delicious salads, fruit, low-fat key-lime pie, and fresh corn dip (alongside the traditional brownies, better than sex cake, pulled pork sandwiches, and chips).

Ok, so I was actually hosting a potluck (to celebrate my own birthday, nonetheless).  But as I looked around, at friends and colleagues talking and laughing, all jammed in the living room to be together rather than spread out in the small seating areas I had arranged throughout the main floor rooms, I had a moment of clarity.  Potlucks celebrate community, and the community seated in my living room is one we have been creating for a long time.

We have shared road trips, disasters (both natural and of human creation), births, traumas, bike rides, weddings and karaoke nights.  We have shared the range of human emotions, we have offered words of comfort and support.  We have made each other laugh when feelings of anger, sadness, or hopelessness threatened to overwhelm.  Not each person in the room has been part of every one of these events, but that’s how communities work: they share the load — whether that is the work of preparing food or the effort of finding a smile on a tough day.

Not to worry, I didn’t spend all my time lost in introspection — mostly I enjoyed the event and the moment I was in.  But later in the evening, in Iowa City, Wendy and I wandered into a shop which sells a line of greeting cards that really appealed to me.  One spoke to me in a particular way about the day’s events.  It says, “Some people call them decades — I prefer to call them my ‘collected works’.” (Curly Girl Design/Leigh Standly)  And it struck me that being a part of my community of friends, being one of the weavers of this large web of relationships, is a part of my “collected works” I’m both proud of and immensely humbled by.  And I will take every opportunity to celebrate this — even if it means becoming a fan of the traditional potluck.

JOY

…Though I try

to hide it I burn with joy like a bonfire

on a mountain, and tomorrow

and the next day make me shudder

equally with hope and fear.

— “Arriving” by Marge Piercy

When I was in high school, I joined an ecumenical youth group which had a tremendous impact on my life, my beliefs, and my worldview.  At one point, we adopted a practice of signing notes, cards, etc. with the acronym J.O.Y. — which, in youth group parlance stood for the phrase “Jesus, Others, You”.  If we committed ourselves to J.O.Y. (in that order) we would experience joy in our lives.

In describing my own path, I have no desire to offend anyone else’s beliefs.  Putting God and others ahead of self may be both appropriate and right.  However, when I regularly attempted this I rarely experienced joy.  In fact, until recently joy had pretty much fallen off my radar as something I hoped to experience — it was just too far off the grid of normal, daily life.

So here is what I believe now.  Human beings are meant to experience joy.  My mother was wrong (sorry, Mom!) when she told us “life isn’t about being happy”.  I don’t mean we should expect to feel giddy every moment of every day.  There will be trials, tribulations, burnt toast and stubbed toes.  Cancer and poverty aren’t going away any time soon.  But we were created to feel that deep down satisfaction that comes from being truly happy.  In order to get there, you may sometimes have to put your priorities in a different order:  oyj or yoj or jyo — or even include completely different letters in your personal joy acronym.

One day, not too long ago, I was having a really cruddy time of it.  Nothing was going right, I had experienced a big disappointment, it was raining.  For most of my life, a day like that would occasion a feeling of “why do I always have it so bad?”.   But this time it was different:  I was having a cruddy day.  But I was happy.  How could that be?

In looking at that experience, what I discovered is that one thing had changed — I had shifted my priorities in order to develop a “right relationship” with myself.  I can remember talking with a friend about how all the self-focus felt incredibly self-ish to me.  She told me that, by working on my own issues and healing past wounds, I was bringing something good to the world, not just to myself.  I wasn’t sure at the time, but now I can see she was right.

Which brings me to the poem excerpt at the beginning of this entry.  Sometimes, we try to hide the joy we feel because it can be uncomfortable to stand out so starkly from our surroundings.  Sometimes, we are afraid that it makes us a target for others who wish to stamp out our fire, and there are certainly people out there who might try.  But it is also true that  it adds to the measure of our days to interact with people who exude joy. We are energized and inspired by them.  And maybe, when it is you (or me) burning like a bonfire of joy, we will be lighting the way for someone else.  This is the hope part of the equation.

On being a “goalie”

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

We ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

means you have no

Inner Resources.’  I conclude now I have no

inner resources because I am heavy bored…

–“Dream Song 14”, John Berryman

Life, friends, used to feel a lot like this poem.  In fact, that was one of the reasons the poem resonated with me – I knew, in my heart even if I refused to admit it aloud, that my boredom and inactivity resulted from my own lack of inner resources.  There wasn’t a lot of “flashing and yearning” going on in my life.  There WAS a lot of ho-humming and “Victory Garden” watching. Yawn.

And then, slowly, things began to change.  We’re talking slow as in “at a glacial pace” (thanks, Meryl Streep).  One significant part of that change has been the discovery that I operate best, achieve more, when I set goals.  Now, to those of you who have been devotees of Stephen Covey or who knew your life’s ambitions at age 10, this is a no brainer.  For me, it was a revelation.  (Remember what I’ve said in the past about being a late bloomer?  Turns out, I am not that quick on the up-take, either!)

My college English Department faculty lampooned the seniors each year, and in performing her version of me, Sr. Pat Nolan slouched into the skit, hands in pockets, and said, “I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll be a writer…Maybe I’ll become an editor…whatever….something’s bound to turn up.”  Not a flattering portrait, albeit accurate.  For much of my life, I just seemed constitutionally incapable of committing to a course of action and then taking the steps necessary to see it through.

Now, I know I have accomplished a number of things over the years: graduate school while working full-time; a demanding and time-consuming job; making a difference in the lives of students. I am proud of these achievements.  But many of my proudest accomplishments, while the result of hard work, began as things I just sort of fell into (grad school is a perfect example, and I’ll tell that story another time if you want to know!)  The discovery that goals help me to focus my time and see things through has been a key factor in my current state of happiness.  A second eye-opener:  goals can be small!  Yes, its true — audacious goals are great, but so are the smaller lets-finally-clean-the-craft-room-type goals.  I no longer underestimate the satisfaction of meeting a goal within the time-frame allotted for it.

On Sunday morning, I was up bright and early and on my way to Palo, Iowa for the annual Pigman Triathlon.  Competing in a triathlon has never been a goal of mine, however, it was for three important people in my life and all three were competing on Sunday.  The day dawned bright, beautiful, and without the normal summer humidity.  And while cheering on my friends, I also had the opportunity to see 800 others fulfilling their triathlon goals — 800 people of every age, shape, size, and fitness level.  It was inspiring and motivational.  I did not leave with the goal to compete in a triathlon.  But I did leave with the sense that it is time to set a goal to stretch myself.  So this week, I’m enjoying my newly clean craft room, gathering my inner resources for an exciting life ahead: its definitely time for a little flash and yearn!

Jump On Life Today!

Several years ago, after attending another boring but educational lecture, I had an idea.  What if we sponsored a breakfast speakers series that would be inspirational in nature — people could come for breakfast and leave ready to try new things, step outside their comfort zones.  I even had a name for the series, JOLT (Jump on Life Today).  I shared the idea with some colleagues, to lukewarm response.  So, I dropped the idea.

Flash forward to earlier this academic year, when I brought out the JOLT idea and shared it with my friend Tricia, our campus counseling center director, and Layne, an amazing young professional in my department.  They met, without me I might add, and decided that it was time this idea became a reality.  The three of us collaborated, brainstormed, and began the series in February.  Yesterday, we held our third JOLT event and it was amazing!

Our speaker, Dr. Deann Fitzgerald (check out her website http://www.docfitzgerald.com) blew us away.  Dr. Fitzgerald and her team have changed lives in a big way both here in Cedar Rapids, and in Kenya (their latest project will bring clean water to 32,000 people).  She talked about failures (“they’re all outcomes…you just like some outcomes better than others”) and she talked about inspiration and passion being things that you have to go looking for…they don’t just appear.  They come when you take a step forward — in any direction — and decide to take another step.  She also says this is the way each person can change the world:  one step at a time.

After Dr. Fitzgerald finished speaking, she gave her email address and encouraged everyone to write if they had questions, ideas, or wanted to create change in the world.  I listened to people saying they want to go on medical mission trips, that they were moved and inspired to act by being in Dr. Fitzgerald’s presence…and that is when it hit me that JOLT was serving as a vehicle for inspiration — just what I imagined it could be when I first had the idea.

One thing that stands out for me today as I have spent some time reflecting on this experience is that I let naysayers prevent me from jumping on life, from taking a step forward in a direction I was inspired to go.  Thank God for Tricia and Layne, who talked back to the negative voices (those of my colleagues, and those in my head which suggested that others knew better than I).  They gave me a true gift when they joined hands with me to take that first step.  I am thinking it is about time for me to trust my own inspiration and creative energy.  Next time, I take the step forward on my own.