This blog’s title is taken from the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) podcast, Everything Belongs. It comes, as Corey Wayne says in his classic outro, “from the high desert of New Mexico,” and signs off always wishing everyone “peace and every good.”
Behind this amazing podcast, in addition to Corey, are Mike Petro, Paul Swanson, Jenna Kuyper, Izzy Spitz, Megan Hare, Sarah Palmer, Barb Lopez, Brandon Strange. You can find it on your favorite platform: https://cac.org/podcast/everything-belongs-podcast/ More on Everything Belongs in a moment.
Recently I was talking with a friend about life’s changes. She is in a distinct liminal period, and we were discussing how a liminal time (her metaphor) is a bit like being in an airplane. You get twitchy, it’s cramped, you’re never going to land, and there’s a baby who needs a diaper change beside you.
Since, as our Buddhist friends and other wise souls remind us, life is impermanent, my friend’s airplane-journey metaphor is helpful. While we are in the middle of making progress (or even are lucky to be in the middle of breathing), it rarely looks like anything is happening, since change’s inevitability can be surprisingly subtle.
Take for example the very bad haircut I got as a pre-teen. Let me back up. I asked for this pixie haircut. It wasn’t even a bad haircut, if I’m honest. I had entered the shop wanting this haircut badly. Until those first snip-snips to my long dark brown hair. Which didn’t curl then, curls didn’t appear until my late twenties. So these snips dropped long unreattachable straight locks onto the salon floor as tears began dropping from my dark brown eyes and rolling unbidden and unstoppable down my silently reddening cheeks.
The tender-hearted middle-aged hairstylist got out her mirror and showed me how beautiful it looked. She cooed her reassurance. But I immediately began growing it back out as soon as the haircut was over and we walked out into summer’s broiling, pixie-haircut-frizzing humidity.
And all the pink hair set tape in the world couldn’t put humpty dumpty back together again. I spent many angst-ridden hours before the large round wall mirror in the bedroom my twin sisters and I shared, trying to tape my unruly hair into submission and beauty.
My mother was unflaggingly supportive. “It looks beautiful!” She repeated this in a variety of ways throughout the countless, endless in-between days.
Some many months later, one morning my mother looked at me, looked again, and said, “Your hair is beginning to look good again.”
I took immediate teenaged offence. In spite of not having believed her repeated reassurances of “It looks beautiful,” these were a requirement in my mental diet, and as soon as she spoke the truth, meaning, “Your hair is beginning to look like you want it to again, long as before,” I was like, “But you said you liked it short.”
“Well, I did like the pixie cut, but I knew you didn’t.”
What I most remember is that while my hair was growing back out, every day I checked its progress, and taped it pinkly to my head at night in hopes that it would do what I wanted it to, which was, be longer now, an impossibility. It would never seem any longer, when I was checking it on a daily basis.
But one day, it had grown enough where my mother noticed.
This seems like an apt metaphor for those times where we are wanting to grow or change within or heal or want our outer circumstances to be different and are impatient.
It’s also something we all experience, since no one alive ever arrives. We are all on journeys, and as Ram Dass says, walking each other home.
As part of my journey of embracing bringing my gently loved if anxious banjo into conversations, I share here a few of these, with gratitude to the communities who’ve invited me to join in the music-making.
First I am happy to share this episode of Everything Belongs with thanks to Richard Rohr and the CAC, Corey Wayne, Michael Petrow, and Paul Swanson! They are such wonderful conversation partners.
Listen: https://tinyurl.com/050124CAC
Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/S1E9EBCAC
Then, thanks to my dear friend Carl McColman, who had the idea of introducing me to his friends at the Theosophical Society, I am giving a presentation on the Cloud of Unknowing for their YouTube channel @TheosophicalSociety (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_IaSO4lQEU).
Next I want to share this. I was invited into an unspiraling conversation by Contemplative Outreach Atlanta and Chicago in April. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYZoW2XlYp8
One of my most-cherished conversations was with Christine Valters Paintner and Claudia Love Mair for the Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color sponsored by the Abbey of the Arts, here in audio and video: https://abbeyofthearts.com/lift-every-voice/practice-of-the-presence-a-revolutionary-translation-by-carmen-acevedo-butcher/
I am grateful for these communities and more for their kindness.
May we all embrace what is, as the Gospel of Thomas says, and so have more freedom from pink tape in our lives.
Love, Carmen