joy

Taking a Flying Leap

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“You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice he was running on nothing but thin air?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” he says. “I always used to wonder what would have happened if he’d never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think it would have, and I think we’re all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear or insecurity, makes us look down. And we see we’re walking on air, and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to get back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn’t look down, we could make it to the other side…”

–Jonathan Tropper,The Book of Joe

I was sitting at my dining room table, trying to decide what to share in today’s post. My recent reflections have been, indeed, reflections of my state of mind – serious, heavy, full of the weighty feel of winter. I was attempting to think of something to say today that would lighten the mood a bit, but I was coming up empty-handed.

Then, I happened to look up and see the little painting (in the photo above) that my sister, Gwen, gave me for Christmas. When I got home from the holidays in New Mexico, I put the painting in the little niche in my dining room, where it resides with angels and saints, a diminutive ceramic creche, a glass charm against the evil eye. And I promptly stopped noticing it until now.

The woman silhouetted in the painting is leaping – with abandon and joy, it seems — across a chasm. She is looking ahead, at her goal, not down at what is or is not currently beneath her feet. Does she know, I wonder, what lies ahead? I doubt it – it seems clear that this is a leap of faith. Faith that she’ll land safely on the other side. Faith that the choice to leap was the right one. Faith that the time for leaping had arrived. And faith that, whatever awaits on the far side of the chasm, will be worth facing and taking the leap.

Faith is what I’ve been forgetting to cultivate in this dark winter. And in so doing, a joyful spirit is what I’ve imprisoned in anxiety and fear. The overwhelming to-do list I’ve written with my obsessive thinking lacks both faith and joy – I have been thinking of everything as something I have to do (even time with loved ones has been relegated to the status of “onerous chores”) rather than as something I choose to do – or better, as something I am privileged to do.

I am reminded of what Brene Brown says in The Gifts of Imperfection about resilience: “Feelings of hopelessness, fear, blame, pain, discomfort, vulnerability, and disconnection sabotage resilience. The only experience that seems broad and fierce enough to combat a list like that is the belief that we’re all in this together and that something greater than us has the capacity to bring love and compassion into our lives.” (my emphasis)

So here’s to cultivating resilience: to leaping forward without looking down, to releasing a joyful spirit from the gloom of winter, to celebrating connection, and to actively practicing faith.

Becoming One With the Light: The Candle of Joy

Note: I have been writing, in December, on the themes of the Advent wreath. This week’s theme: The Candle of Joy. I out-ran a blizzard last night in order not to miss one day of my holiday time with my family – causing my departure from home early, with many things undone – including my weekly weigh-in and this week’s photo of the Candle of Joy. In a few hours, I will be with my parents and this candle will be burning brightly in my heart. I hope you don’t mind this trade-off!

It should be easy to write about joy. At least, that is what one immediately thinks. After all, we know what brings us joy: family, love, laughter, right livelihood.  And we can certainly write about those things. However, joy, the thing itself, is a bit slippery as writing topics go. At least, as this week has progressed I have found it difficult to write anything true or meaningful about joy. Why is that?

First, it seems that everything I’ve tried to say has been impossible to express without sounding hokey (at best) or insincere (at worst). It is much easier to write believable prose about despair or death or darkness, in part because we often feel the impetus to express these difficult extremes carefully, so that others can understand the exact shade or quality of our emotion. When it comes to joy, we assume everyone experiences it similarly. It is like the Tolstoy quote: “All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Our darkness is unique, our light is universal – or so it can feel when we try to capture it in words.

Second, joy is not the same as mere happiness (not to dis happiness, which is awesome!). Joy is something at once deeper and more profound than happiness, it seems to me. One of my all-time favorite movie scenes captures this beautifully. In “Immortal Beloved“, a deaf Beethoven (played by Gary Oldman) stands on stage during a performance of his “Ode to Joy”. As he watches the orchestra play, hearing the music he wrote only in his imagination, Beethoven thinks back to the night which inspired this particular musical masterpiece. He is a boy who has escaped, for one night, his abusive father. He has run into the woods, and come to a pond. The boy gets into the water and begins to float on his back, staring up at the milkyway, which is reflected in the water around him. The boy, the water, the stars: they merge into one. The boy becomes one more shining point of light within the night sky; one tiny but essential part of the cosmos. And in this moment of union and communion with all of creation – JOY.

That, friends, is what I have been unable to express this week. Joy, as opposed to happiness or love or other good-to-great feelings, is experienced in such moments of one-ness with all of creation. There is much written about making deep joy sustainable through spiritual practice. Who am I to claim whether that is possible or not? I only know that I haven’t achieved that level of dharma or mystic union or Godliness in my own life. I have had moments, crystalline in their beauty and etched eternally on my heart, when joy has surprised and humbled me. The promise of Advent is that such joy is available to us all – as a gift. We have only to open our hearts and allow ourselves to receive it.

50 About 50: Caring Less and Caring More

Today is a good day to post two of the 50 About 50 lists I started last week. As you will recall, these posts are leading up to my 50th birthday on Thursday, July 28. Because of the double list, today’s post runs a bit long. I hope you enjoy it anyway. As always, please feel free to respond with comments or your own items for the lists!

10 Things I Find Myself Caring Less About

1. What Others Think

Its a little strange to immediately contradict myself, but I DO care what others think. I will always be interested in how people think, why they’ve reached the conclusions they have. I am happy to reflect on the ways their thinking might illuminate mine. That said, in my younger years I tended to be unduly influenced by others. My own thoughts were like feathers easily blown in a new direction by another’s, more forcefully, declaimed idea. Now, I find I am able to continue in my own direction while remaining open to course corrections based on new information.

2. What Others Think About Me

Finally, I have reached the point in life where I am no longer incapacitated by concerns about what others think about me. Do I care? Yes, sometimes about some things. Mostly, though, I am happy to be the person I am.

3. So-called “Rules”

For most of my life, I have been an inveterate rule-follower. Breaking a rule, even one which might arguably exist only inside my own head,  just felt wrong. Often, even contemplating breaking the rule would induce hyperventilation. Social conventions and mores (such as waiting for an explicit invitation, saying the polite if untrue thing, etc.) still have a certain hold on me. More and more, though, I find that part of living and maturing is learning when to break out – and break a few rules.

4. Weeds, among other “unsightly” things

People say not to compare apples to oranges, because they are two different things.  Well, I was listening to a scientist on NPR one day, who said we needed to change that idiom. At the cellular level, he said, apples and oranges are the same thing! Weeds, flowers, hostas…at the cellular level aren’t they really all the same? I put my energy into the things that matter to me. I don’t waste a lot of energy on the “weeds” in life (or my flower beds) anymore.

5. Cognitive Structure

Things need to make sense, have order, structure, be inherently fair. Or so I once thought. I’m (mostly) through with trying to tidy up all of my beliefs, my thoughts, my emotions into a neat package. The world is wide and full of wondrous things. Its not my brain’s job to rearrange the furniture of the universe. See, accept, wonder, be in awe –  this may be enough responsibility for one human brain.

6. Being in Fashion

Fashions come and go. What looks good on me mostly remains the same.

7. Noise

Dear Mom: on this point, as on so many others, I concede that you were right all along. Sometimes I go whole days without voluntarily creating extra noise (radio, Pandora, television, etc.) in my house. Sometimes, silence is too precious to squander.

8. Television

Like most of America, I enjoyed The Voice when it began airing this spring. But I could miss it if something better – a social event, a good book, a workout, or a quiet summer evening – came along. I refuse to miss more life because “my show” is on television.

9. Body Hair

I don’t understand the current obsession with hairlessness. Yes, I pluck the stray black wires that periodically grow out of my chin. I have my hair stylist wax both my eyebrows and upper lip. But if I forget these things, I don’t run screaming from the mirror yelling words like, “Gross!”  Body hair is just body hair – it IS nature, not an affront to nature.

10. What Ifs/Fear-Based Scenarios

I’d like to say I’m over these completely, but that would be a lie. However, I no longer frighten myself at night wondering what I would do if a rapist crashed through my window in the wee hours. I don’t tell myself a lot of scary stories that begin with the words, “What if…”, just as I am about to embark on a new activity or adventure. What I’ve discovered is that these thoughts act like a prophylactic, preventing a life pregnant with possibilities. In order to live fully, I’ve needed to cut way back on scaring myself with stories of doom.

10 Things I Find Myself Caring More About

1. Beauty

The experience of beauty opens the heart: to perception, clarity, healing. The human heart craves beauty, though we don’t often credit it as a need. In a poem published in 1911, James Oppenheim wrote of women seeking justice, crying out for bread but also for roses – and it is such an appropriate juxtaposition. The staff of life (bread) and the stuff of life (beauty=roses).

2. Health and Vigor

Things you take for granted in your youth, for $200, Alex!

3. Other People’s Children

My nephews, neices, godchildren and the many other children who feel like my neices and nephews. But also, the young adults I have had the pleasure to know and work with in my career in Student Affairs. When I was a young adult myself, I thought I would be “the fun aunt”, that I would have a lot of good advice to impart to my students. Time has shown that the reverse is true – other people’s children have enriched my life, have taught me so many lessons about life, love, and the importance of not taking the teachable moment too far. Thank you to the parents for sharing their children’s lives with me. And to the OPCs themselves: each of you remains in my heart.

4. Animals (and other species)

I am not a pet person. But I am learning to love and appreciate what animals and other species bring to the world around us, and I am learning to care deeply about their continued existence on our planet.

5. Wisdom

I used to pray for wisdom, as a teen. I always felt so stupid, I thought that if I was gifted with wisdom, I would suddenly feel more confident. What I am discovering as I age is that wisdom isn’t about feeling self-confident. It is about caring enough to self-reflect as a means of continuing to develop and grow into the person I was meant to be.

6. Trying New Things

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Well, that’s only true if the dog doesn’t want to do anything new. And I DO!

7. Honesty/Truth

Its probably not a good thing to admit, in writing, that I am a really good liar. Further, if I am being truly honest, I must admit that I have lied purposefully and often, and not only to myself. But here’s the rub: every time I deny the truth, or “pretty it up” in some way, I deny my own self. This cuts to the heart of why honesty is a virtue and so closely aligned with the concept of integrity. No integrated whole can wantonly deny its own parts. The older I get, the more life experience I accummulate, the more important honesty becomes as a personal value.

8. Compassion/Mercy

I am, and have always been, a really good reader. I can put myself square into a character’s psyche and emotional make-up with little effort. I used to think this was a sign that I excelled at compassion and empathy. Really, that was just fiction. True compassion, true mercy, requires a willingness to enter fully, as myself, into another person’s messy life.  I am just learning the depth of character true compassion requires. I hope, someday, to embody it myself.

9. Unconditional Love

“Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection” said John Powell, in his book titled Unconditional Love. I read the book my freshman year of college, as did many of my friends, and we bandied around the concept quite a lot. I can remember saying to people (wince), “I love you. Unconditionally.”  What a crock! At 19, I hadn’t the vaguest clue what that meant, and no pop-psych book was going to enlighten me. I had to learn what it means the old fashioned way – by torturing myself and others, by saying hurtful things and tearfully rescinding them, by seeing the worst in myself or another and then – joyfully – discovering that I still felt love. This loving unconditionally is no easy thing. I believe it is worth the effort to practice, though, in the hope of someday being really and truly good at it.

10. This Moment

I not only care more about this one, I am in love with this one! I used to live in the past or the future, anywhere but the here and now. When and how that changed is the story I’ve been telling in this blog. One of the best things about my life now is that I am living it right here, in this moment – and I am so grateful for the present.

50 about 50: On Food

If you have been reading this blog, or following me on Facebook, you have to know that I will be turning 50 at the end of this month. While I have made it a point to celebrate and enjoy my birthdays the past few years, I am not typically one to navel-gaze about each passing year (oh, I navel-gaze with the best of them, just not about that, generally speaking!). However, 50 feels different, in many ways. I can’t help thinking it is still too young to be the gateway to old age, but there is no denying that it is likely to be the metaphorical entrance into the second act of my life. In plays, the first act is usually longer than the second, and youth seems endless. Act I is followed by an intermission, kind of a rest period, which might be an apt description for your late 40s. Not quite your youth, but also not quite your elder years. Then: curtains up, Act II.

As I approach my birthday, I am taking-stock, thinking carefully about my life thus far and about the life I hope to live in the coming years. As a result, each Thursday blog post in July will be part of my “50 about 50” list. It won’t be a continuous list, but several lists. I have given thought as to how to organize these lists, how to share the discoveries I have made along the way, the seredipitous moments and the surprises that have contributed to who I am and what I value today. There are only 4 Thursdays in July, so one post will include a bonus list! To get started:

Ten Things I’ve Learned About Food

1.  Your tastes change over the course of a lifetime.

Ok, I’ve never been a picky eater, ask anyone. However, for many years of my life I lived without the joy of avocados. I tried them as a youngster, and did not care for them. By the time I got around to trying them again, they tasted like ambrosia. And that’s just the tip of the asparagus spear – there are many other foods that I have come to enjoy over time that I did not care for earlier in my life. It pays to be open to trying again. And sometimes again.

2.  What we know about foods and their nutritional value and physiological effects changes periodically.

So don’t completely give up anything you enjoy based on a current news report. Moderation in everything, as my former roommate Michelle Fouts was fond of saying.

3.  Food is a social justice issue.

For most of my life, I never thought about this. But even a few statistics can change your view on this if you really take them in. For example, in the U.S. in 2009, households that had higher rates of food insecurity than the national average included households with children (21.3 percent), especially households with children headed by single women (36.6 percent) or single men (27.8 percent), Black non-Hispanic households (24.9 percent) and Hispanic households (26.9 percent). In 2009, 7.8 percent of seniors living alone (884,000 households) were food insecure. (Statistics courtesy of Feeding America) And it goes deeper than the number of people who experience hunger. The social justice issues surrounding food also include issues related to obesity, alarming increases in diabetes, the unequal access to healthy, fresh food experienced by those in economically disadvantaged communities.

4. “Food addiction” as a term is an oxymoron.

We are all addicted to food. Can’t live without it. Figuring out how to live WITH it is the important thing!

5. Oatmeal is my delicious friend.

My folks weren’t oatmeal eaters. The first time I was served oatmeal was at Camp Little Cloud when I was approximately 9. It was a gelatinous pile of what tasted like salty paste. No way! This morning, I had instant oatmeal, maple flavored, with one tablespoon of creamy, all natural peanut butter. The first spoonful elicited an audible sound of delight from deep in my throat. Almost a purr really. In the past four years, I’ve made up for the dearth of oatmeal in my early life by eating it multiple times each week. It never lets me down. When Starbucks started selling oatmeal, and fittingly named theirs “Perfect Oatmeal”, it was a happy day in Jen-land.

5. Food is a sustainability concern.

Locavore. Organic. Community Supported Agriculture. Slow Food Movement. We’ve all heard these words. It is impossible to maintain a laissez-faire stance once one begins to educate oneself about the issues. Read Michael Pollan, watch a couple of the excellent documentary films that have been produced, attend your local farmer’s market. It isn’t even difficult anymore (for those of us lucky enough to have the resources) to become aware of and begin to change our choices in accordance with a more loving stance toward our earth. I have only taken a few tentative steps, but hope to continue further down this path.

6. Not enough poetry has been written about kale.

Or really, about any of the lesser greens, root vegetables, or legumes that middle-America gave up on in favor of Chef Boyardee and Hot Pockets. Discovering these oldies but goodies has totally enriched my diet. They may not be the most beautiful, but they are arguably some of the most soulful foods going.

8. Food can, and in my opinion should, be a total sensual experience.

Mike and I made dinner one night over the Memorial Day weekend. He asked me how I managed, with such delicious leftovers in the house, to avoid bingeing on them until they were gone. I took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh scents of ginger,thyme, hand-grated nutmeg and toasted coconut flakes. I looked at the profusion of bright colors in the salad bowl and on our plates. I thought about the variety of textures in the food we were about to eat. And the answer was easy – when your food satisfies all your senses, it also satifies your hunger at a very deep level. Whenever possible, meals should be sensually fulfilling experiences. There’s no need to overeat or binge when every sense is replete.

9. Cooking for (or with) and feeding loved ones is one of life’s greatest joys.

Unless you have to do it every day. In which case it is a drudgery. I discovered the joy part back in the late 80s when I first learned to bake bread. My two roommates, the Michelles, would come home and immediately devour the first loaf while I enjoyed their delight. It continues to be one of my favorite ways to express my love for others. The drudgery part, I’ve heard from nearly every mother/wife I know.

10. I like food. Food’s my favorite.

Enough said.

The Big Lonely

Avoidance and denial, my old friends. Back in the day, we hung together pretty tightly – in fact, we were what you might have called inseparable. I fed them all the emotions I preferred not to feel, and they shielded me from facing the harsher realities of my life. We made quite a team, living together inside the 352 pound flesh shell we built – soft, warm, protective.

Looking back, I know we weren’t exactly happy. But most days we felt like we could face whatever came our way. Or deflect it without much emotional impact. My friends would say, “I’m lonely,” or “I just wish I could meet someone”, and we would respond, “Why dwell on it? You can’t change it, and it only makes you unhappy.”

Man, have times changed. I kicked Avoidance out somewhere around 280 pounds, and Denial, while more tenacious, left shortly thereafter. For the most part, I haven’t missed them. My life has, in virtually every way, been so much lighter (brighter, less weighty, happier) without them. Oh, they visit briefly, from time to time, but its much easier to say goodbye each time. We just don’t have that much in common anymore. Breaking up was hard to do, but I don’t miss them as my BFFs.

Well, except in one way. These days, I’m feeling my feelings. Something that I never really had to do before if I chose not to – Avoidance and Denial (and the protective layer of 138 pounds I don’t carry now) took care of that for me. I’ve alluded to this in previous blog posts, mostly as one item in a list, or as something that I was acknowledging but didn’t want to get into. But here’s the honest truth: I have never felt this lonely.

How strange to say that at this point in my life. After all, I am – truly – happier than I have ever been. I have better, more fulfilling, relationships than I ever expected. My family and friends are with me, daily, enriching every experience and showering me with love and blessings. From the midst of this embarrassment of riches, I feel like an ungrateful or spoiled child to admit that I am still lonely. And yet, there it is.

Many times, I have refrained from talking about this, because I don’t want to appear pathetic, or upset my friends, or worst of all become a broken record on this point. Talking about my loneliness makes those who love me uncomfortable, because they can’t fix it. Instead, they try to cheer me up with stories about those who found a soulmate when they least expected, or by sharing their belief that one is waiting just around the bend for me, or by urging me to turn my eyes and heart to God.

Let me tell you this, so I can get it off my chest once and for all: I will be 50 years old this summer. I have never been part of a couple (not in the sense of two people who live together and make decisions together). Certainly I have given and received love, but never at the level of true intimacy which requires full participation and commitment from both people. And I have wanted this. Even when Avoidance and Denial helped me to hold the longing in check, and hide the depth of my loneliness from others (and, to a certain extent, from myself). So there is a reservoir of emotion which grew wide and deep all those years I had it dammed up. Without my old BFFs, I am swimming in it.  And for crying out loud, don’t bring up God right now, because the anger I’m not directing at myself is being quite forcefully directed at him. Right or wrong, that’s how I feel.

And there you have it. Once you stop denying that you have feelings, and start feeling your emotions, you feel them all. You don’t get to pick and choose. And the truth is, its really ok, even experiencing “The Big Lonely”, or deep anger. In one song, Lady Antebellum sings, “I guess I’d rather hurt than feel nothing at all.” I would amend that to “I guess I’d rather feel it all than feel nothing.”  And feeling my own anger or loneliness is a small price to pay for also feeling the joy that I sometimes experience with those I love – or for the contentment that mostly suffuses my days.

Joy and Contentment – way better BFFs than Avoidance and Denial, at any price.

When the Pendulum Swings

When I was younger, in high school and college, I was very deeply involved in religious activities. Several times a year, I went on weekend retreats, which were invariably peak experiences. People who hardly knew one another would open the contents of their hearts, bond quickly and intensely, and share a high well beyond any experienced in normal, daily life. Returning to normalcy post-retreat was always difficult. People returned to their daily selves, and the shared experience grew less powerful as a touchpoint with one another. As the retreat ended, you told yourself things had changed, that you had changed. But the truth was, your old self and habits nearly always reasserted themselves.

I remember Pastor Ross addressing this: faith isn’t a feeling, he said. When the feeling of the retreat passes, you discover that faith is a verb. Something you actively do, not something you passively feel.

It has now been many years since I’ve been on that kind of retreat, or experienced exactly that kind of high. However, for just over a year now, I have been on a journey which has led to similar feelings: happiness, joy, a sense of purpose, renewed (or just new) relationships. My life has had a quality of incipience, every day on the cusp of a new experience or revelation. It has been amazing. I have gushed about it. I have sworn that everything is different now, things have changed, I have changed.

And all of that is true. However, no peak experience, no emotional high lasts forever. And when that feeling goes away, when the pendulum begins to swing on the downward arc, what does one do? More to the point, what should I do?

Option #1: Chase the High

A friend recently invited me to join her at a movie premiere in New York. The movie, directed by Robert Redford, stars several actors I enjoy. I loved that she asked, but for a variety of reasons needed to decline the offer. Several people told me I was crazy; in fact, one person said she wished she had my life because she would live it better than me. Well, that’s possible, I suppose. However, I am still me. I will still make decisions, for good or ill, based on my own values and gut feelings. I will never be the type of person who drops everything else in my life to jump at unusual experiences just to be able to say, “See what I did?!” So, chasing the high isn’t really an option suited to my temperament.

Option #2: Wallow.

As the pendulum drops from its apex, its easy to allow your emotional self to plummet into sadness and depression. Truthfully, there have been many times when this proved to be my modus operandi. In the current case, the things that have changed the most in my life are internal. The outward trappings have remained essentially the same. And now I am faced with the same life choices and decisions that have always awaited my attention: What should I be doing with my life? I have learned to be honest with myself, which felt really good at first, but which can be a bit depressing. For example, I pretended for decades that I didn’t have feelings like other people. Now, I’ve admitted to myself that I do and some of them are angry or disappointed or sad. Part of me wants to roll around in those denied emotions for a while, just feeling them. Luckily, my emotional health is more robust than it once was, and I can’t see the point in wallowing. So, Option #2 is a no go.

Option #3: Remember that to BE has always been a verb.

I’ve (briefly) studied two foreign languages in my life, and while I don’t remember much of either, I do remember that to be was the first verb we learned to conjugate in both of them.  So this option suggests that, regardless of what I am feeling, I can keep breathing, keep moving forward. I can keep living in the present, living as this new self I’ve worked so hard to become. And I can have faith – an active choice, not just a momentary feeling – in my ability to continue creating a meaningful life.

In summary: Option 1: too hard; Option 2: too soft.  Option 3…just right! Now that I’ve chosen an attitude, I just have to figure out the right action plan to go with it. And that will be both the hard and the rewarding part. I don’t know what will come next. But I do know that the pendulum will eventually hit its nadir and begin another upward climb!

Word Girl Meets Visual World – Finale

A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990

For my final attempt to fulfill the “Winter Silence” challenge, I decided to return to a medium and technique with which I was already familiar – bead applique.  Now, if you have difficulty imagining me sitting, quietly, for hours on end wielding a needle and thread, you’re probably not alone.  But you’ve probably never seen me around beads.  “Winter Silence” took many hours, and in the week leading up to Art Day I beaded until my fingers bled (from sticking myself with the beading needle when I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open).

Winter Silence: Third and final piece

While the photos don’t fully capture the final piece (which is framed, making it difficult for a novice like me to photograph), I loved the final product.  Why?  First, because it conveyed the theme without words.  Second, because it does so without being directly representational.  Third, because I envisioned this scene in my mind and the end result is not too different from the original conception.

Imagine show and tell on the second Art Day…each person unveiling their attempt(s) to create something within specific parameters, using a specific set of objects.  Each person brought completely different projects to the table. Stephanie’s son commented that hers looked less like “Winter Silence” than like “Winter Slaps You in the Face”, but I loved seeing them all individually, and their diversity as a set.

We have now had five Art Days.  Each day, each project, has been different.  Each of us is developing a small collection of challenge pieces.  One Art Day was devoted entirely to stained glass projects, Paula’s forte.  The most recent saw us all arrive with so many supplies that they took multiple trips from car to house to get everything into the work room.  We still laugh a lot, and talk, but there is a lot more actual work getting done, too.

So, why have I taken three posts to share the story of Art Day and my recent efforts to explore a more visual form of expression?  On one level, it is a way of honoring the experience and the wonderful women with whom I have shared it.  On another level, though, I want to share an experience I am growing from.  Like many people, I suspect, I am reluctant to try new things unless there is a certain level of success guaranteed. I avoid situations in which I feel or look foolish.  Which, for most of us, is what happens when we try something we’ve never really done before.

Art Day has helped me keep at it, learn how to play without undue emphasis on the end result, to compare and contrast my work with someone else’s without a need for ranking the results. I am learning to communicate in actual images rather than verbal imagery. And the sheer fun and concentrated effort required to create is truly a joyful discovery.  Art, and as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a joyful life “is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.”  In other words, living life is an art: our time, energy, activity and emotion are the media we have to work with. And in order to live fully, we have to stop waiting for only those things we can do perfectly from the start.  Risking being an amateur or a failure or a fool…that’s how we work our way through to the joy.

Serendipity

 the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also : an instance of this

Serendipity is one of my favorite words, and has been since long before the movie starring John Cusack was filmed.  Since the ’70s, in fact, when  I learned it at a meeting of my ecumenical youth group in high school (thanks to Dave, Randy, Bill and Chuck, the college guys who led the group).

There have been many instances of serendipity in my life and I am always happy to share stories of these moments and experiences because their impact has, invariably, been important.  The hunger challenge, completed on Easter Sunday, was one such experience.  The impacts on my life have been documented in this blog, and I won’t bore you with a lengthy recap.  But hang on to that idea of serendipity for a moment, while I make a slight detour.

Yesterday, I met with the staff of Horizons and Meals on Wheels in order to deliver the donation collected from the hunger challenge sponsors.  If you check out the Horizons website http://www.horizonsfamily.org/news_details.asp?News_Id=105 you’ll see an article and photo documenting the event.  I was THRILLED to be delivering $1,756.00 to Meals on Wheels.  Many people have asked what my original goal was for the donation, and I honestly answered that I hoped for $800 and thought if we hit $1000 that would be pretty cool.  The only thing missing from the true pleasure of handing over the funds yesterday was that I was alone when making the delivery — I would have loved for the sponsors to be there, representing the unified effort it took to reach and exceed our goals!

As I left Horizons, I was a little emotional.  The entire hunger challenge experience was so much more life-changing for me than I could have envisioned when I had the original idea to do it.  Easter was a bittersweet day: I wasn’t sure I was ready for that leg of my life journey to come to a close.  But in recent weeks, as the checks came in and so many friends (old and new) celebrated the journey with me, my perspsective began to shift.

And here’s the serendipitous part:  I had a lot of expectations for the 18-week challenge, but personal happiness wasn’t one of them.  I don’t mean that I didn’t expect to feel good at the completion of the challenge.  I mean, I didn’t expect to feel deeply happy and at peace in my heart.  I didn’t realize that I was opening the door to a truce with my past, yet this truce and the healing it has brought have substantially changed my outlook.

As I continue my personal journey, I am more ready than ever to make progress toward becoming the person I want to be, and creating the life I want to live.  And I am able to be deeply grateful for the ongoing effects of the challenge, rather than sad that it has come to a close.  Who knows what the future holds?  I feel certain, though, that further experiences of serendipity lie ahead!