August 31--It's Inside Us

Freedom is from within.  --Frank Lloyd Wright

    We've made it through August, focused on freedom. Mr. Wright's statement sums it up. Consider these:

1. What do you want to be free from?
2. What do you want to be free to do/be/have?
3. How can you pull forth the freedom within to accomplish #1 and #2?

    As we move into September, we take on the theme of "purpose." I have a "mixed bag" of feelings toward the idea of purpose, so it ought to be an interesting month. 

    More to come...

            Leta

"The cage was never locked!"

August 30--Discipline is Not a Dirty Word

In the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves. 
--Bernard Baruch

Never pass up a belly rub.  --Barney Clark

    I want to be more like my dog, Barney Clark. I do have the napping game down quite well. It is his complete acceptance of good without reservation that I'm after. If I offer a belly rub, he rolls belly-up, paws stretching, his "go for it" position. He would lie peacefully and let me rub his belly forever if I had the time. He's not trying to figure out if he "deserves" it. He's not feeling bad because he "should" be doing something else. Belly rub, bring it on and don't stop. Enjoying this moment.

    Back to discipline. I would say that I'm a fairly disciplined person. It shows up most consistently in my exercise schedule. I have a very flexible work schedule, so discipline helps me keep some order to my days. My best example of discipline is my list of daily self-care items. Being the nerd that I am, I have the list in spreadsheet form, easily accessed from my cell phone. As I do each item, I check it off for the day, and I keep a week's worth at a time. These are simple items that matter to me in terms of daily self-care, such as spiritual practice (including this writing) and taking my vitamins. I don't beat up on myself if I don't do one or more of the tasks on any given day. I just note at the end of the week, before I erase it all and start over, where I might want to put in a bit more effort. It's truly the "little things" we do each day (discipline) that makes for a happy, healthy life. 

        Leta

Barney in belly rub heaven

August 29--Solitude

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.  --Virginia Woolf

Musicians must make music, artists must paint, writers must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves.  --Abraham Maslow

    The second quote above was in one of my morning readings. With my main art being writing, I take daily solitude time to pay attention as Ms. Woolf states.  Even away from home I make time for this morning writing ritual. It is a must in order for me to stay in a peaceful state. 

    I've been binge-watching a Netflix show titled "Manifest." I rarely do this, but it's great activity when it's so damn hot outside that I don't want to even open the door. I've had a lot of solitude lately, and it has been a "mixed bag." I see my tendencies toward boredom, procrastination, and numbing out. I learned at an early age to numb out, and it is very nearby and easy-to-get-to place for me. It feels fine in the moment, but does not leave me with any sense of accomplishment. Solitude feels good to me when I am paying attention, engaging in life and appreciating the relationships I enjoy with my loved ones. Solitude gives me the opportunity to recognize how blessed I am. 

        Leta

Alan Seeger Natural Area, PA
The best solitude on Earth 😉😉

August 28--Change? Hell, yes!

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.  --Cecil Beaton

    "We've always done it this way." I worked at a church for several years, and while I loved the job, churches are notorious for living by that mantra. It was often maddening. Don't rock the boat, maintain the status quo. 

    That cannot be done. We either evolve or regress. Change, evolution, is terrifying to some--we've seen that clearly in recent years. I get it. Life is uncertain. But it is the daring, different and impractical that will bring about the desperately-needed consciousness shift on planet Earth. Those fighting to return to the "good old days" are not helpful. 

    One of the sayings Ana Forrest hammered into us during yoga teacher training was "evolve or die." I'm good with "evolve." 

        Leta

August 27--Do You Like You?

I have made my world, and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside. 
--Louise Nevelson

    The introvert's rallying cry! I've worked long and hard to reach the point of being comfortable in my own skin. I like being alone with me. I crave it even. I can set aside all the awfulness of the outside world, at least for a time. The world I grew up in was not an emotionally safe place, so I learned to spend a lot of time alone in order to protect myself. 

    Just think--if we would all create an inner world of peace, harmony and joy, what a spectacular "outside world" we would have. It starts with you and me, each individual soul. 

    As part of the world I have made, I am very fond of the practice of hand-writing and snail-mailing letters and notes to friends. Below I offer a meditation by Henri Nouwen about the subject. Enjoy!

        Leta

The Beauty of Letter Writing

As I was writing letters today, I realized that writing letters is a much more intimate way of communicating than making phone calls. It may sound strange, but I often feel closer to friends I write than to friends I speak with by phone.

When I write I think deeply about my friends, I pray for them, I tell them my emotions and feelings. I reflect on our relationship, and I dwell with them in a very personal way. Over the past few months I have come to enjoy letter writing more and more. In the beginning it seemed like a heavy burden, but now it is a relaxing time of the day. It feels like interrupting work for a conversation with a friend.

The beauty of letter writing is that it deepens friendships and makes them more real. I have also discovered that letter writing makes me pray more concretely for my friends. Early in the morning I spend a little time praying for each person to whom I have written and promised my prayers.

Today I feel surrounded by the friends I am writing to and praying for. Our love for each other is very concrete and life giving. Thank God for letters, for those who send them, and for those who receive them.

August 26--Forget About It!

Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.  --Kahlil Gibran

    First reading of this quote made me chuckle. I am certain that I have forgotten a LOT, so I ought to be feeling really free. The more I ponder this, the more I note that there are some things that are easy to forget, and others, not so much. And it is the stuff that is more challenging to forget that we really ought to be letting go. 

    Considering my behavior toward others, making amends has enabled considerable forgetting and freedom. Relative to others' behavior toward me, especially early-life family-of-origin stuff, I can't claim that I have forgotten. The best I've been able to accomplish is to remove the emotional charge in remembering. That in itself is a form of freedom. Yes, it happened, but I have the tools and support to handle it and the long-term repercussions. 

    Inner peace is priceless,

        Leta

August 25--A New Story

Elegance is refusal.  --Coco Chanel

    I'm not "feeling it" this morning, so I'm refusing to write. 😉😉 I will, however, share a blog from Patricia Pearce about refusing to continue our old (not working) story and inviting us to create an elegant new story:

Co-Authoring a New Story

I’m a sucker for a good novel. I love being transported into another world, into the lives, hearts and minds of characters who, like me, are finding their way in the world.

Recently, when I finished reading a very long and dense novel, I realized that when I enter into the narrative world of an author I am giving myself over to them in trust. I am reading the product of their imagination. It feels like a sacred act, a solemn trust.

As a reader I am picky. I want the author to take me somewhere meaningful, somewhere transcendent. I don’t want to spend my time reading a story that leaves me on the same vibrational plane that I experience in consensual reality. I want to enter into a narrative world that transports me into the New. This is why I have no time for dystopias. They are unimaginative. They merely play out a catastrophic trajectory to an epic dead end.

The Fiction We Live In

Why does any of this matter? Because fiction isn’t limited to the books we read or the movies we watch. We are living in a fiction everyday—the fiction in our own minds as well as the fiction in the collective mind. You could say that this whole world is a novel, but unlike the books we store on our shelves, we are both the characters and the authors of this novel we call the world.

And we have a choice, each of us. We can either continue spinning the same narrative thread of the past, remaining loyal to the premises of its plot, or we can be bold enough to invite a surprising narrative twist that opens up a whole new horizon for ourselves and for planet Earth.

And we all know it’s high time for a surprising narrative twist to take place on planet Earth.

Willingness Opens the Way

How do we invite that? All it really requires of us is that we be willing to relinquish our loyalty to the narrative that has been passed down to us, defect from its ground rules and its demands for enemies, divisions, struggle, winners and losers, fear.

Notice that I said it requires us only to be willing. That’s an important point, because one of the core themes of the current story humans have been authoring is based on the belief that we have to make things happen, and that even this planetary transformation and this global awakening is on us to carry out.

But it isn’t, and the first narrative twist happens when we accept that there are spiritual Beings who are in this with us, cheering us on, eager to partner with us to help bring forth what wants to happen in our lives and on this planet.

Since the spirit realm respects our free will, it will not intervene if we want to try to go it alone. This means we can decimate the ecosystems on the planet to the point of collapse if that is what we choose. And the shocking truth is that even if we do, Love would not reject us.

A New Story

So I encourage you to be picky about the stories you indulge, beginning with the stories in your own mind, because a New Story is ready to emerge on this planet. It isn’t based on the fallacy of separateness and division and judgment, but expresses the Reality of Love and the truth of our inter-existence.

This New Story is a partnership between the spirit realm and we embodied ones who are willing to release our allegiance to the narrative world of the past and become co-authors of what is to come.

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    Let's be elegantly imaginative!

        Leta