All week when people have asked me how I am, I’ve responded, “I feel like I’m in the fertile soil, in the dark, waiting to sprout.” Small things are happening in my life and I’m doing my best to honor the power of change in increments, like I wrote about last week. But it’s tough to be here, in the waiting. It reminds me of a piece by Mark Nepo called “The Courage of the Seed.” He writes:
“All the buried seeds crack open in the dark,
the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.
What a powerful lesson is the beginning of spring.
All around us, everything small and buried surrenders to a process that none of the buried parts can see.
And this innate surrender allows everything edible and fragrant to break ground into a life we call spring.
In nature, we are quietly given countless models of how to give ourselves over to what appears dark and hopeless, but which is ultimately an awakening beyond all imagining.
As a seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way.”
I wouldn’t say I’m a seed that’s cracked all the way. In fact, I’m not even sure I’ve started cracking, but I can say I identify with a seed buried in earth. I don’t know what the heck is happening in my life. I feel muddled, confused. I’m not sure what to do, how to act. I could spend the rest of this blogpost using synonyms for “opaque” and they’d all apply. However, one thing I do know is I’m surrendering to a process I cannot see.
I’m clear there is a process and I have a higher power that’s guiding me, providing for me, taking care of me. I know that just because things are fuzzy doesn’t mean they’re stagnant. My sponsor says something to me a lot because, well, it’s usually appropriate for my life. It’s something to the effect of, “God moves slow but He’s always on time. And when it’s time He moves fast so be ready.” That’s my life in a nutshell. Slow, slow, slow, BAM. Full speed ahead! Go, go, go! It’s easier for me to be in the “go, go, go” phase rather than the “slow, slow, slow” phase but they’re both a part of life. After all, just look at a seed. Or something even closer: a heartbeat.
A heart acts like a pump, suctioning blood and then pushing it out. There is a steady rhythm of movement then pause then movement then pause. My spiritual teacher says, “And this pulsation, that is movement through speed and pause, is an essential factor for each and every animate or inanimate object. Wherever there is existential factor there must be this pulsation. An entity acquires strength and stamina during the pause phase, and emanates vibration during the speed period. There cannot however, be any absolute speed or absolute pause in the created world.”
So this is me, in another pause phase. In another “seed buried in the soil” phase, just waiting to sprout. And I will, eventually.
I dream of a world where we remember the essential nature of life, the heartbeat thrumming through us all that reminds us to pause, then act, then pause. A world where we realize we can’t have all speed or all pause. A world where we take comfort in the fertile soil of our lives knowing at some point we’ll sprout.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
I’m the type of person who wants immediate results, instant gratification, overnight success. (As you can imagine, I am regularly disappointed.) I am once again getting in touch with the concept of little by little. How small steps can amount to big changes. Darren Hardy writes about this in his book The Compound Effect.
The compound effect is the strategy of reaping huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions. A particularly striking example is that of an airplane: If the nose of a plane is pointed just 1% off course when it leaves LA headed for New York, it will end up in Delaware once it gets to the East Coast. For reference, that’s about 188 miles off course.
The thing is, little by little, baby steps, whatever you want to call them, aren’t sexy. They’re not fun. It’s much more exciting to make big, drastic changes than it is to make small, modest ones. We love hearing about people plucked from obscurity – the model who was scouted at the mall, the first-time actor starring in a blockbuster. But the reality is most people toil away for years before they have their big break, if they ever have it at all. Many of us are seduced by YouTube videos that promise you can drop a dress size in a week if you do the person’s workout every day. But it’s not true. That’s too soon unless you’re also starving yourself.
Those little steps add up. Photo by Fernanda Greppe on Unsplash.
The reality is consistency is the key to success. Tony Robbins reminds us, “It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It’s what we do consistently.” The things that have shaped my life in the biggest ways – meditation, yoga, recovery – I’ve not only done consistently, but also gradually. I starting meditating just once a day for 5 minutes and then gradually built up. I went to one recovery meeting once a week. I didn’t dive into a 10-day meditation retreat, nor did I attend six meetings in one day. Some people do both of those things, but for me, that doesn’t work because I get overwhelmed, burnt out, and then I quit.
Sure, grand gestures are fun and exciting, but it’s the little actions every day that make a lasting impact. For today I’m reminding myself there is value in the small things. In doing things one day at a time, little by little. I’m again reminded here of vast canyons that are created by water wearing down rock little by little, day by day. Little by little adds up to something beautiful and grand, and right now is the time for me to practice that, knowing eventually I’ll see the results I’m looking for.
I dream of a world where we focus on small choices just as much, if not more, than the big ones. A world where we keep in mind the compound effect and remember constant and steady actions can add up to something amazing. A world where we honor the power of little by little.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
The other day I heard a quote that stopped me in my tracks. It’s from Mother Teresa who said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” Wow. That quote right? It makes sense to me because when I think about the process of judging, it’s standing apart, removed from. We see that literally in the courtroom as well. Where does the judge sit? Not with the defendant or the prosecutor, and not even level with those parties. At least, that’s what I gather from portrayals on movies and TV.
To judge someone or something, you cannot be with them and love requires presence. Sure, you can love someone and live far away from them, but in that case, presence is not physical, it’s emotional. This goes for our relationship with ourselves as well.
All week I’ve been judging myself for how I feel, wishing I felt differently. Why aren’t I a bubbling ray of sunshine? How come I’m not dancing around my apartment with joy? The New York Times recently published an article that said we’re all languishing. The author Adam Grant says, “Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.” He also said mental health is a spectrum with depression on one end and flourishing on the other. Languishing falls along that spectrum.
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
I agree with Grant, but also I don’t think he’s quite right. Sure, we’re languishing, but really I think he’s describing burnout. According to HelpGuide.org, “Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands.” Um, hi, what would you call life during a pandemic? Usually when people talk about burnout, they associate it with work, but y’all, I think it’s entirely possible to be burnt out by life itself. When going to the grocery store is stressful, when you’re worried about being physically close to friends, when everything you do feels risky, it makes sense to me that would lead to burnout.
The judgment comes in for me because one, I wish I wasn’t burnt out, and two, I’m close to being fully vaccinated so why aren’t I more focused on the joy of that? My temptation is to argue with myself, but that’s not loving. What I need right now is the presence of myself. For me to say to me, “I know you’re burnt out baby. That’s OK. It makes sense. You don’t have to feel any other way than you do right now.” I took a big breath as I expressed that so I know it created relief.
What all of us want is love – love from ourselves and love from others. I can’t do much about how other people view me, but I can do something about how I view myself. And if I want to improve my relationship with myself, that means approaching my moods, my body, my whatever with love and compassion. It means allowing and accepting where I am, how I feel, as if I were talking to a dear friend.
I dream of a world where we realize judgment separates us while love unites us. A world where we remember love requires presence and that means allowing and accepting what is. A world where we work toward treating ourselves with love and without judgment, no matter how we’re feeling.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
Lately I keep thinking about my Grandma Libele. Maybe because her birthday is right around this time. Or maybe for other reasons. Who knows? However, because the universe works this way, something interesting happened to me related to her and my grandpa. A friend of a friend sent me two stones from Lithuania, the country of my grandma’s (and grandpa’s) birth. My grandma would not have said she’s Lithuanian because back in her day (and I mean literally right around the year of her birth), Lithuania was under the rule of Russia and shortly thereafter her town in particular was a part of Poland. My grandma would frequently say she was from Poland when asked, but first and foremost she called herself Jewish.
She led with “Jewish” and not “Polish” because she felt so betrayed by her country. I mean, I get it. During World War II she was put into a ghetto apartment with nine other people, including children. She dug her way out of that ground-floor apartment and used the sewer system to escape outside. Her childhood home was burnt to the ground with all the family’s valuables stolen. When she asked former neighbors to shelter her, they refused. Eventually she found a farmer she could bribe with money in her family’s safe deposit box. When the money ran out, so did the sheltering.
My grandparents could have walked in this field, given the location. Photo by Geda Žyvatkauskaitė on Unsplash
I could keep going and get into more detail but I won’t because this post is not a Holocaust story. Instead, I’m merely sketching the details to say I understand why my grandparents felt betrayed and bitter about everything that happened to them and identified as Jews rather than by their nationality. However, their feelings didn’t die with them. Whenever I meet someone from Lithuania, or see pictures from that country, I feel an ache in my chest. There are unresolved feelings about Lithuania and knowing that, I asked a friend of a friend for a natural artifact.
This weekend I held a Lithuanian stone in each hand and promptly burst into tears. I think I’m the first person in my family to touch anything from Lithuania since 1945. My grandparents never went back to their country of origin and to my knowledge neither has anyone else in my family. I cried so much as I felt the grief and pain associated with leaving there. But I also felt the sweetness, the happiness that comes along with any person’s life. It’s not as if things were all bad in Lithuania – my grandparents had lives before the Holocaust. They laughed, they danced, they sang, they loved. Lithuania has not only traumatic memories for my family, but happy ones too. As I continued to hold the stones, I felt into that and eventually segued into peace.
What’s cool about this picture is not only am I in it along with my mom, grandma, and brother, but my little sister is in utero!
Lithuania is just a country and the people responsible for my grandparents’ trauma are dead now. And by holding these stones, feeling those feelings, that finally gets to be true. Lithuania doesn’t have the charge it used to. You may be thinking to yourself, “This is such a strange post. Why is she even talking about this?” I mention all of it because trauma doesn’t end with the people directly involved. It carries over, it runs through family lines. Thich Nhat Hanh says in A Lifetime of Peace, “If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.”
I am the continuation of my grandparents; you are the continuation of yours. What legacy exists in each of us that we can let go of? That we can heal? I’m sharing a little bit of my story with the hope it will inspire you to dig into your own. You just might find doing so will bring you peace.
I dream of a world where we realize we carry with us things that originated with our ancestors. A world where we honor those who came before us while also letting go of what no longer serves us. A world where we recognize our ancestors, despite being dead, have living legacies and that means those legacies are dynamic – they can change.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
This week I keep thinking about a post I wrote in November 2015. I’m sharing it again now. Enjoy.
The other day I had a conversation with my friend and neighbor about how I’m constantly seeking love from the “other.” And what I’m still learning is how to give love to myself and be OK with my own company. A lot of it comes down to being my own inner loving parent. She reminded me while it’s true it’s important to love ourselves, it’s also important to remember we are the beloved. That we are the divine in physical form and we are already loved and cherished more than we can imagine.
Wow. Take that in for a minute. We are already loved. We are already cherished. We don’t have to do anything to earn love and affection; it’s already here.
We are all little lovebugs. Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash
My spiritual teacher says the same thing, but he adds in a twist and mentions the notion of subject and object. He says when we are meditating, we are thinking of God. In that instance, we think of ourselves as the subject because we are the ones doing, we are the ones meditating. However, in actuality, God is meditating on us and we are the object. I think I’ve heard that a bajillion times and I just. don’t. get. it. Maybe it’s because I never learned grammar in elementary and middle school, but I don’t connect with the subject and object analogy.
I started thinking about this more, puzzling over how to feel into the notion I am the beloved, the beloved is me. I started thinking about the people I love unconditionally, the people I would do anything for, and don’t require anything in return because loving them is enough. One such person is my niece (not by blood), nicknamed Buddha. This is a girl I fell in love with at first sight. I’ve sung her to sleep, I’ve wiped her butt happily while she was potty training, I’ve kissed her, held her, and loved her even while she threw her worst temper tantrums.
It occurred to me God loves me, and us, the way I love my niece. All the love I feel for Buddha, that’s exactly how God feels about me, plus more. I am loved, cherished, and adored beyond measure. Just now I looked up from my computer to the sky outside and saw a heart in the clouds as if to remind me, “Yes, Rebekah, love is everywhere and you are loved that much.”
Pause for a moment and feel into that. Think of some entity, whether it’s a person or a pet, who you love unconditionally. Now imagine all the love you feel for them directed at yourself. Feel the depth and breadth of love for you, for us. It’s already here.
I dream of a world where we feel how loved we are. A world where even at our most alone, we don’t feel lonely because we sense the love of something greater than ourselves. A world where we remember that love and take time to soak it in. A world where we realize we are already loved.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.