Tag: love

Finding

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“You’ve always been good at finding things,” my daughter said.

I was bent down, searching our hardwood floor for a magnet the size-and-shape of a bead from a ball chain necklace.

I pondered her statement, knowing in my bones it’s true. Why is that.

She’d been examining this at first cool-seeming gift of “1000 round rare-earth magnets.” Each one a tenth of an inch. She was making this mass into a long string when a tiny ball swung loose and went Ting! against the floor.

“Oh no.”

We were worried about Pippa and Tao, our cats.

I got up and held my hand out for the round mass of tiny powder pink magnets. She handed it to me, knowing from the past what I would do. Holding this now clearly dangerous sphere of 999 swallowable magnets, I carefully pulled one out and put it on the floor where I thought the Ting! had sounded. A trick I discovered long ago. If you can put one of what you’re looking for on the floor, you can better imagine what the lost one looks like and where it might have gone.

Every time I do it, I think, There’s a life lesson here about seeking and finding and the deep looking involved.

I’d vacuumed a few days back, but still—because two cats—tiny pieces of this and that muddled the area where the magnet was last heard. In a surprise twist of luck, when I put the small mauve magnet down, immediately I found the lost magnet a foot or so away.

We were all relieved. We didn’t want to imagine a tiny magnet licked up by one of our cats. A warning sticker took shape in my mind: “Households with crawling babies, toddlers, and pets should not buy these.” Turns out, they are banned in the U.S., but come in through Amazon and other online ways.

Thinking on my daughter’s words. “You’ve always been good at finding things,” I sat down, relieved at finding the tiny magnet, adding, “It reminds me of the time I found Earcell’s rings.”

She nodded and smiled. We reminisced.

It happened one sunny blue-sky day. I was in my early 20’s and driving back to my parents’ house outside Canton, Georgia, in rural Macedonia Community, returning from a job interview with a President of a local bank who wanted an assistant. I was feeling disappointed because the vibe was . . . I wouldn’t get the job. The interview had been bleh.

With the gift of hindsight, I’m thankful I didn’t get it. I don’t think I ever even heard back. It would’ve been helpful to get a timely No. Decent-human reminder: Let your applicants know if you’re not hiring them.

I was dressed up in what passed as high fashion then. Pantyhose, check. Business casual skirt, vest, and blazer, all made by my mother, check check check. White long-sleeved button-up shirt gotten on sale at a mall, check.

Almost home, just a few more straights and bends to drive round, I saw smoke rising less than a mile from home. My stomach jolted with worry, Oh no our house is on fire?

As I neared, with each curve rounded, I realized more definitely it was not our house. My first thought of utter relief, Thank god, was immediately followed by another jolt, Oh no it’s a neighbor’s. I couldn’t tell whose.

When I started down the hill on which our red-brick ranch sat off to one side, I saw it was our next-door neighbor’s home on my left. Instead of their white one-story home, all flames. I’d never seen anything like this. It defined conflagration. Only in elementary school when we lived in rural south Georgia, and I was waked in the night by an eerily bright orange and red light, explosions reverberating, had I seen anything close, as the roaring next-door was our elderly neighbors’ barn burning.

Remembering those long-ago squawkings of peacocks fleeing that barn in the dark, I pulled past the in-broad-daylight blaze and into our driveway, horrified by the disconcertingly vivid flames on my left and worried about our neighbors Hoyt and Earcell.

Were they alright, alive?

In panty hose and skirt, I wasn’t dressed for a fire. But I parked, and heels be damned, I ran over awkwardly. Their house was sat back from the road more than ours, and halfway down their gravel driveway I saw Earcell flat on her back on the grass, a cold cloth on her forehead. Someone pressing it to her repeatedly as she rose up and was gently pressed back down.

Delirious, eyes shut, she repeated, “Oh Lord, Oh Lord, I done heard you never put more on us than we can bear . . . but Oh Lord. . . .”

Women from her family and Hoyt’s who all lived nearby and other neighborhood women stood huddled around her, a ring of protection. The volunteer firemen were scrambling around near the walls of flames. People were everywhere, like a hill of ants someone stuck a stick in.

Finally I spotted Hoyt alone, standing right in front of their home, engulfed totally by fire. He was in his usual blue denim bib coveralls. He could have made those himself. He and Earcell worked decades in the Jones-family-owned cotton mill in Canton, a town incorporated in 1834 on unceded territory stolen from the Cherokee Nation.

The sight of denim still makes me think of Hoyt and Earcell. From hearing Hoyt’s stories during my growing-up years, I learned that making denim is hard, loud, skilled, physical, dangerous, and underpaid work.

Once I took Hoyt to see his old cotton mill when it first became apartments. As we walked through, he told me the real story behind the building, not for the first time, but in situ it was more poignant than ever before. This happened here and that happened there. I remember he dressed up in a suit and tie when we went. It was an outing, and he was proud of his work there. Also I could tell he felt a little like Rip Van Winkle. So did I. His stories did not match at all what we were seeing. Everything was so new and different, and he wouldn’t say it but I felt it: Fancy.

The reality of denim manufacturing seemed the activity furthest from that building already gentrified and turned into real-estate speak as “an adaptive re-use development” offering luxury apartments, Trivia Nights, Bourbon Tastings, NFL Football on the Green, Elf on the Shelf Story Time, and Christmas Movie on the Green.

What happens when we forget our history? I remember asking myself.

Standing beside Hoyt that day, all I could think was how Hoyt and Earcell’s hard work that had gone into the purchase of their home was now totally up in flames. It was obvious the firemen were merely keeping the fire from spreading to the chicken houses out back and the barn in the side yard and the neighboring homes, like ours.

The day that Hoyt and Earcell’s house burned slap to the ground, as people would later say, and I found Hoyt standing alone right in front of the flames, his thumbs hitched in his denim bib, I was struck by how he did not look away. I saw him seeing utter destruction and not running. That in itself was a lesson in courage, in acceptance of what is.

When I walked over to stand beside him, I looked at him. He looked at me. He looked back at the orange glow reflecting on us even in the daylight. I put my arm around his waist. He put his arm around my waist. We squeezed tight. Then, arms dropped, returning to just standing beside each other, my arms crossed, his hands back in his denim bib, both of us were silent a beat.

Then Hoyt said, “Well, Carmen, it looks like I’ll be sleeping in the barn with the cows tonight.”

That is a clear snapshot of how Hoyt was always my oasis of sanity in the middle of a violent childhood. I could walk over and sit on his porch, and just be. We would talk about nothing and everything. He was so smart. I was also impressed that at quite a distance he could cleanly hit his brass spittoon with a carefully chewed, caramel-colored glob.

Hoyt had had to leave school to work on his family’s farm, so he didn’t finish elementary school. From Hoyt I saw again how education is not accessible to all. I had already learned that from my straight-A-student mom who graduated high school with honors but couldn’t afford to go further. What an absolute, cruel mess the U.S. system of educational inequities continues to be.

Once the fire was out and the smoke rising from next door, our rural neighborhood in northwest Georgia rallied around Hoyt and Earcell. People took off from work for days, weeks. Someone found a trailer and hauled it in for temporary housing. Some of us went over with Pine-Sol and such and helped clean it. Then the new house building began. People donated their time. Others donated materials.

Before the smell of new lumber and the sound of hammering, one day, when the ashes had at least stopped smoldering, but before they were cleared away, I went over to see how Hoyt and Earcell were. They were standing in what once had been their front yard, and Earcell was deeply upset, I learned then, because she had lost all her rings.

As we talked, we were just standing there looking at the piles of gray, white, and black charcoal and ashes. No porch to sit on. No walls left. No framing. No doors. Nothing upright except a crumbling chimney. No markings of any kind. Just an inhospitable moonscape of ash. Ashes to cold ashes, dust to dust.

Curious, and concerned, because Earcell was so upset, her loss and grief as ripe and tangible as the deep purple blackberries on the vine then, I asked her what at first seemed like an incongruous question. Where were your rings when the boiler exploded? Fortunately, neither Hoyt or Earcell had been home at the time.

She blinked at the hope in my question and cocked her head as if to make sure she’d heard me right. But she immediately told me they’d been on her bedside table in a box. Hearing that and reconfirming where that room was, I said my goodbyes, and in a bit walked on home, planning.

I was wearing cut-off shorts, the kind made from tan pants, with strings hanging down from where you cut them to make shorts. These were not my best shorts. I kept them on and changed into a ratty t-shirt. I also changed into my oldest tennis shoes, the ones with holes in the toes. Grabbing a pair of old work gloves from the basement, I went right back over.

Everyone was surprised when I came back with my father’s little army shovel. It folded, and was lightweight and easy to use. We talked a bit more about location, and I walked out into the ash landscape and began digging slowly. I felt in my soul I would find Earcell’s beloved rings, even as I knew it was statistically impossible.

As I began shoveling carefully, I heard a silence open up behind me, a noiseless gasp from Hoyt and Earcell and from a couple of their relatives who lived nearby, all gathered around. I vaguely realized the sight I must have presented to them. I was the odd oldest child of the neighbors next door. Who kept going to school. The not-married late-20-something UGA graduate student.

As I became more and more covered in soot, shoveling, bending now and again to pick up pieces of their destroyed home, and inspecting these indiscriminate gray-black-and-white ashes, a kind of disbelief settled in behind me. It was palpable. Those gathered around talked about other things among themselves, very politely.

As I dug without success at first, I pictured them thinking my true colors had finally come through. She was always a strange kid. Always reading. But that was my imagination, because what I mainly felt was their solidarity and family love, despite their incredulity.

It was a fool’s errand. Yet I had a weird hope. A near certain feeling I could find Earcell’s rings. Yet I also felt they appreciated my looking, regardless. I kept digging. An hour went by. Then more. I didn’t keep time. I kept shoveling, picking up and sorting, looking at different-yet-the-same gray-black-and-white ashes. Being careful not to reinterrogate the same ones.

“Well, we appreciate you done looked,” Carmen. I heard over my shoulder. Yet no one left.

I kept digging. Time was shovels of gray-black-and-white ashes.

After some time, how much I’m not sure, I came upon some ash-covered and gleaming gold circles. The box they were in was gone.

Earcell was not usually a very demonstrative woman, but I got a hug that has lasted a lifetime that day.

That could itself be the end of a very good story.

And also I ask myself: What in my life made me think I could find Earcell’s rings?

I can think of three reasons.

#1, Hoyt and Earcell were like family to me. That was only beginning to dawn on me then.

Until then, I lived in their love almost unknowingly. That’s how real love works, isn’t it. It’s so much what we all need that often we cannot see it at the time, for how it is our requisite oxygen. Hoyt and Earcell treated me like family always. Even invited me to their Watkins family reunion.

And they had been struck a mortal blow. If I could find the rings, that could restore to them some of their Before.

And it did. When I handed Earcell in my blackened glove her shining-through-the-ash gold rings, I’d never seen her so happy, to tears, wet and running down her sun-and-age-wrinkled cheeks. Dead many years now, Hoyt and Earcell are still family to me. They are my wise ancestors. I still hear how they laughed at how dirty I’d gotten. Face, legs, arms, neck, clothes all gray.

We had to bend over with our hands on our hips to get those laughs out. Somewhere inside my self, I’m still happily covered in acrid soot, pleased to find Earcell’s most prized possessions. I’m thankful my ancestors include these two cotton mill workers, crop farmers, and chicken farmers. Thank you, Hoyt. Thank you, Earcell. Again.

#2, Books made me think I could find Earcell’s rings. Books saved me. Books helped me breathe and dare dare. In books I escaped the largely inescapable war zone of my childhood. Take Pippi Longstocking. The irrepressible, fairly parent-less, and imaginative 9-year-old Pippi Longstocking was my childhood friend, even role model. She lived alone except for her horse and monkey, Mr. Nilsson, and spent her days finding treasures wherever she went.

Once Pippi told her less-adventurous neighbors, the children Tommy and Annika: “I am a Thing-Finder, and when you’re a Thing-Finder you don’t have a minute to spare.”

They asked her what a Thing-Finder is. Pippi responded: “Somebody who hunts for things, naturally. What else could it be? The whole world is full of things, and somebody has to look for them. And that’s just what a Thing-Finder does.”

“What kind of things?” Annika asked.

“Oh, all kinds. Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, dead rats, candy snapcrackers, little tiny screws, and things like that.”

Pippi helped me go through life with that same attitude of expectant finding. In this way she is one of my ancestors, too, via her creator Astrid Lingren, another one of my good ancestors, who gifted us all with Pippi’s so alive words and radically resilient selfhood.

Pippi’s attitude became my life’s foundation in many ways, especially her advice to Annika and Tommy: “We shall see what we shall see. One always finds something. But we’ve got to get going.”

We’ve got to get going.

I got going. As a child, I always looked into gray dust bunnies under Coke machines or down into their change dispensers for quarters, dimes, nickels, or unicorn 50-cent pieces. Treasures. Pippi Longstocking’s attitude was—You never know what you’ll find. She kindled within me my own grit and helped me give expression to that feeling of You never know what good thing you will find.

I grew to see treasures in the ordinary and also within me.

Pippi’s words still echo in me: “We shall see what we shall see. One always finds something. But we’ve got to get going.”

“We shall see what we shall see.” She encourages me to see life as it is. Just as Hoyt did. Does. Pippi’s perennially wise words also still remind me to find ways to look and see What is.

And “get going.” There’s no time to waste.

To me “get going” also means “get resting.” What I find in resting is indescribable.

#3, My father was always losing things and blaming it on those closest to him. Anyone but himself.

I wrote this piece over a month ago and kept coming back to it, asking myself, Do I include 3.? After much reflection, I decided, Yes. By the Yes of an egret’s feather.

As I started doing research in graduate school at UGA, I began to grasp a hard truth. One of the reasons I’ve been and I am a persevering researcher is that my life used to literally depend on finding where my father put his tape dispenser. Or any other of countless household items.

A good psychiatrist told me once that PTSD is defined as feeling your life is threatened or experiencing your life threatened or having your life threatened. She said, “There’s no doubt that that was your repeated experience.” Then I looked it up in the DSM, where I read, “Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, . . .”

During regularly recurring episodes of losing things, he’d become more enraged and closer to lashing out as he tore through the house, screaming, “Who used my tape? Where’d you motherfuckers put it?” and more. I prefer not to say more here about the physical and emotional violence. As his burning rage wounded my family and me, also over time I somehow gained superpowers of finding. Perhaps a kind of natural and organic compensation.

Of course my researching skills thankfully also grew via countless needed and essential good and healthy experiences, opportunities, and teachers.

Yet also, as the oldest child of four, I felt it my responsibility to protect my family as best I could, even though as a child I could not understand how powerless I was quite, as I’d search for and find the missing tape dispenser, or whatever else (usually) he had misplaced. Little did I know then how little power I really had.

Life remains complex. Even as social media accelerates our risks of reducing that complexity daily into this or that rather than this and that and this and that and. . . . It’s a sad truth and also a healed and healing wound in my life and in my first family’s love for each other that during our decades together my father suffered from an undiagnosed illness. He died almost 5 years ago.

I won’t go deep into that here in this short blog on finding.

I pause briefly to consider how important it is not to automatically conflate mental illness with violence. Most people living with mental illness are not violent. When the two are automatically conflated, as can happen in click-bait news reports, or in some entertainment shows and casual conversations, that does not help us grow well as individuals and as a society. Our collective health depends on complexifying our conversations around mental illness.

I’m thankful mental illness is becoming less stigmatized. Thanks go to the brave, brilliant youth of today, largely. But its destigmatization is not nearly fast enough. Not nearly enough resources are put into it yet on federal and state levels. That’s one reason I have slowly begun to speak out about my own experiences with it. To be reminded that life is wonderfully and mystifyingly complex, and to heal, we can do share our stories and respectfully deeply listen to each other.

Our human tendency is to make to-do physical and mental lists that seemingly benefit from a binary mindset. Did that. Check. Did this. Check. It’s satisfying, you know, to check things off. But the binary can flatten life’s richness and messiness into a simplistic list of choices of either good or bad. Going beyond-the-binary with a self-compassionate, others-compassionate eye turns out to be more realistic, helpful, and healing.

Which returns me to the joy of finding. And to the question of why looking for the good is important. It’s relational. As was my looking for and finding Earcell’s rings in an ash heap once her cozy home. If I hadn’t found them, it was still a win, since I did it because I love/d them. The sheer presence of being with Hoyt and Earcell in tragedy and doing what seemed hopeless was a kind of finding and being found.

I aim to look for the good also because it simply makes my heart sing. Looking for the good seems an activity humans do as naturally as birds sing. It seems innate. Like breathing H2O.

Psychotherapist Peter A. Levine confirms that. Recently reading again his Trauma and Memory on healing trauma, I was reminded what his decades of clinical work discovered as existing in each one of us: “[A] fundamental and universal instinct geared toward overcoming obstacles and restoring one’s inner balance and equilibrium: an instinct to persevere and to heal in the aftermath of overwhelming events and loss” (65). Levine names it our “primal capacity to meet adverse challenges”—an “innate drive for perseverance and triumph.”

So even when or especially when life around us is in so many ways smoldering piles of ashes . . . from a burning planet, war, inequity, and more, I aim to look for the good because such looking is not only essential but also innate. Another part of being made in the image of divinity.

Because I grew up being fed so much unhealthy theology and so many unhelpful ideas, I must pause to add a qualification. Unfortunately as a child I heard preachers preach that abuse is “useful,” several said, for becoming “wise.” Some even said it was “ordained by God.” That is not what I am saying here. Abuse is a harming no one should experience. Just as no one should feel the threat of looking for something out of fear of abuse.

Psychotherapist, author, and contemplative teacher James Finley, my dear friend Jim, shares true wisdom with us about the complexities of life that are also painful and harmful perplexities: “If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love.”

Thank you, Jim.

Thank you, everyone, for staying with me for these 4,000 words on finding, on looking for the good, and on the joy that comes from healthy community and the sustaining nature of true Love.

Searching for the good during hopeless-looking times is also one way to preserve, renew, and grow my own, your own, our own humanity. In the grips of a collective psychosis and forces of unchecked greed that pit human against human in increasingly inhumane ways as we witness humans abused as capitalism’s objects and the earth abused as commodity, not respected and protected as holy gifts of creation in and on which we are all interconnected, our looking for the good is more important than ever.

May we make space for each other to be Thing-Finders together. For there’s not a moment to spare. We’ve got to get going.

One image of Pippi recurs and makes me smile about her spirit while “getting going.” At one point Pippi scrubs her kitchen floor by tying scrub brushes to her feet and skating around. After, she, Annika, and Tommy go on a picnic. That’s the kind of joyful world I keep imagining.

Thank you, Pippi.

Thank you, all. Peace to you. Happy looking. Happy finding.

And thank you for reading.

Georgia of Santa Fe & Julian of Norwich: Love as Reseeing

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

During my formative years we moved a great deal owing to my father’s volatility, every two or so years pulling up stakes and heading elsewhere. Each new place had a small evangelical church where I was taken three times a week. Once Wednesday evenings for suppers and sermons and twice on Sundays, mornings and evenings, a punitive deity began to patrol within my soul seven days a week, eyes watching for transgressions. Like my wanting to have a life larger than the one prescribed for women. Like my persisting in wishing for a denied bikini as a teenager. Like my wanting to speak my truth but being relegated to nursery duty and dirty diapers. This inculcation wounded me deeply. I am still healing.

I still don’t quite know how. But I trust my practice. Maybe because of how much time I spent and spend in Nature listening to Silence. Maybe because of my mother’s consistent gentleness. Maybe because of kind teachers K-12 and beyond. Somehow I developed a different, my own idea what a Christian was, which didn’t match what was shouted angrily from the pulpit. A Christian was kind, listening, and open to healing and growing. A person who saw life as it was. Someone you’d feel safe around. Someone whose notion of a Deity was one of kindness, inclusivity, compassion for self and others, and a goodness that opened into Mystery.

I had to sort through a lot of misinformation growing up. I’m reminded of my charming and sober-eyed Cuban immigrant granddaddy who knelt a lot before others during his career of fitting women’s feet into high-heeled pointy-toed shoes at Rich’s. He didn’t like it when someone tried to take home a pair of shoes that mixed two sizes, a 7.5 for the buyer’s slightly smaller left foot, an 8.0 for the right foot. He learned to recognize such. He called this sagacity in English: “knowing shit from Shinola.” Shinola being a popular brand of shoe polish in the 1940s. My granddaddy’s colloquialism seems like something an early Church father like Paul might say, if he’d been alive during World War II when everyone knew of or had used Shinola polish. For Paul’s, see Philippians 3:8: σκύβαλα or skubala.

We’ve gotten away from seeing things as they are. Collective delusions rise. One way I root myself in reality is through mindfulness. Simply being attentive to What Is/what-is. This is not a left-brain activity. Mindfulness involves my mind, heart, soul, self, body, others, nature, and daily events. This “What Is/what-is” Reality/reality reminds me that the 6th-century C.E. philosopher and theologian (Pseudo-)Dionysius called God ὅ τι ποτέ ἐστιν or “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming.”

This “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming” fluid name for Divinity has a wonder-full openness to it inviting us to keep our eyes open. Too, the painter Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (1887-1986) made art that convinces me to look more deeply at everything. We see the fruits of her re-looking here online: https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/exhibitions/rooted-in-place/, and we hear her philosophy in words: “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.”

Centuries earlier, another who took her time to see is the 14th-century plague-survivor, writer, theologian, spiritual companion/director, anchoress, and Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. Using different words, she reminds us of the same truth: Looking is everything. How we see is crucial. Julian writes in Middle English in her Revelations of Divine Love: “God is nerer to us than our owen soule.” Said easily: “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh.” “God is nearer to us than our own soul.” Often translated as “God is closer to us than our own soul.”

Julian’s use of “God” is not small-minded nor male-dominated. It belongs in the lineage of Augustine’s pronoun “It” for Divinity, Dionysius’s “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming,” and Hildegard’s evergreen Viriditas for the rejuvenating Spirit in Nature. Though alive at the same time as Chaucer and the Cloud of Unknowing‘s Anonymous, the anchoress also has a gender fluid view of Divinity.

Julian’s eyes-wide-open, steady, gentle, fiercely wise, joyful emphasis on God as Love in a world of “health or happiness and suffering” (“well and woe”) has over the centuries softened her own God-language into what is Best for those who read her. As one laboring in the bureaucratic, phrenic discourse community of “higher education,” and having also experienced diminishment via Church language, I find God-language not the most helpful for dialogue with my soul, Self, interior parts, or the diverse world. Julian’s wisdom and inclusivity draw me in to see that her “God” is one of Mystery, not dogma.

Whether calling God Whatever-It-Is, Whatever-It-Is-Becoming, It—or Love, True Self, Presence, Self, Christ, Higher Power, Ultimate Reality, Yahweh, Ground of Being, Divine, Spirit, or any other, or none, I am habitually looking in all places and in all ways and on every day how to be kind, listening, self-compassionate, compassionate to others, and open to growing and seeing life as it is. Someone others feel safe with.

We all fail. But what a worthy intention to have. To return all throughout one’s life to “How can I be Love?” so when a final breath comes, I exhale a last time in peace.

We have so much healthy psychology now around “True Self.” We also have an expanding interior galaxy that we can look at up close through the wiser lens of the beyond-the-monomind paradigm, as Internal Family Systems’ Richard Schwartz practices. We no longer need to posit a True Self against a single “False Self,” with all the negative baggage coming with the word “False” and any artificial binary approach. Rather we can see our various interior parts as what we have not in ourselves yet fully recognized, embraced, dialogued with, brought in from lonely exile, reassured of our love, listened to again and again, unburdened, befriended, healed, and invited to be Self-guided. This process introduces us to the ongoing unfolding nature of Divinity or Love in ourselves, in others, in Nature, and in what we experience as time. Philosopher Ilia Delio explores this Reality/reality and calls It/it the “Not-Yet God.” This “not-yet” Divinity takes us back to Dionsyius’s loving “Whatever-It-Is-Becoming” Reality.

Whatever a person’s choice, faith, wisdom tradition, or other kind path, perennial wisdom lives on in diverse forms, and when we listen, we discover what we can best hear given our experiences, and at this time what most honors our own life and journey, helping us best live the questions. As Rilke reminds.

Experiencing that Ultimate Reality is Kindness is more important to me than what to call It. I suffer from severe anxiety, and Kindness is more significant to my well-being than words can say. When I become anxious filling in more forms and spending infinite hours calling Anthem’s Accolade and Delta Dental lines, talking with other human beings who are trying to help me find ways I can access the labyrinth of ever more expensive healthcare and dental insurance, even as I am painfully aware of present and former students, friends, family, and millions of others in the U.S. who unfairly do not have the basic human rights of healthcare or dental insurance, and as I hold all that in tension with  my gratitude for having insurance at all, I find myself in my anxiety returning to fellow seekers like Georgia O’Keeffe and Julian of Norwich for nourishment to keep looking.

I eat their words. I steep in them. I write them in permanent black ink on cards and carry them with me or put them on my desk for daily seeing and reseeing.

They remind me that repetition is my friend. Just as my wounded mind-heart-soul-body-self can repeat fearful stressful thoughts loop after loop, I can steep my thought-loops in O’Keefe’s and Julian’s well-earned truths about seeing and reading deeply and attentively, returning to What-Is/what-is:

“Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.” ~Georgia O’Keeffe

And

“God is nearer to us than our own soul.” ~Julian of Norwich

Sometimes I carry Julian around with me on a 4”x6” card, so I can hear her saying in the original: “God is nerer to us than our owen soule,” “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh,” “God is closer to us than our own soul.”

To be human is to be forgetful. Keys, papers, files, someone’s name, a car somewhere in large parking lot. Sometimes we forget this forgetfulness. To forget our forgetfulness is to become somehow less human. When we forget that we forget, we may skim the surface of our lives for hours, days, months, years, and even decades.

I’m grateful for those who remind us not to forget the simplest things—like looking two or three times or more at a flower. How remarkable a flower becomes even if we only give it a seconds-long second glance.

We also forget looking isn’t time-consuming. We’re likely to put off attentiveness, as if it will cramp our style, keep us from making our way down our to-do list. But as we are reminded by the Anonymous monk who wrote the many brief letters of Cloud of Unknowing to a 24-year-old woman spiritual directee/companion, contemplation takes no time at all.

Contrary to what we may think, contemplation is as quick as an atom, the Cloud’s Anonymous says. The same is true of a painter’s countless glances at an iris, a lover’s many glimpses of the beloved. There are never too many looks. Who says to their lover, I’d look at your beauty and exquisite youness more, but truly I just don’t have the time. Instead we can’t get enough. You just don’t grow weary of looking and re-looking, each time seeing something new.

That’s why respect and love seem synonyms. Both root in the act of reseeing. Respect linguistically sprouts from reseeing. Its spect is in the spect-acles through which we “see,” and re– simply means “again.” Re-spect is we see again and again.

It reminds me of translating. You look again and again at a word and at a passage you love, and you return to it again and again. You revise—you re-vision—you re-see it all, until you see it, truly see it. Then you look again. By looking you are loving through seeing. Another reason we do this is that the world and all creatures in it are becoming, changing, and need re-seeing to see what newness is there.

As Benedict says, “Always we begin again.” To paraphrase, “Always we see again.”

We forget to see. We forget to look. We forget to recognize Love is closer to us than our own soul. We forget Love is all we are and all there is and Love is before all that too. We love those who remind us of these simple human truths.

Looking up close at Julian’s work, going beyond her fame, we see Julian is not too well-known for saying: “God is nearer/closer to us than our own soul.” I hope this little blog might contribute to changing that, bringing it forward in our collective consciousness.

I hope we see within it Julian’s wrestling with larger themes. My favorite translator of Julian is the award-winning author, teacher, and translator Mirabai Starr, whose Revelations presents this truth beautifully as “God is closer to us than our own soul.”

Most readers who find Julian are attracted to this Christian mystic’s more well-known “All will be well” quote or one of its many variations. If we read through again and again, steeping in Mirabai Starr’s alive and accessible translation, looking for every time Julian’s “All will be well” wisdom comes, we see it resonates again and again with her lesser-known quote: “God is closer to us than our own soul.”

Returning again, reseeing Mirabai Starr’s translation of Julian’s Revelations, we first look at two passages with “God is closer to us than our own soul” as grounding:

  • God is closer to us than our own soul. He is the foundation on which our soul stands. He is the energy that keeps the essence and the sensuality together so that they will never separate. In true rest our soul sits in God. In unshakable strength our soul abides in God. In endless love our soul is naturally rooted to God. And so if we yearn to know our soul, to have oneing and dialogue with it, we would be wise to seek our beloved God, in whom our soul is contained. Our essence can be rightly called our soul. Our sensuality, too, can be rightly called our soul. This is because they are one in God. Our sensuality is the glorious dwelling place in which our beloved Jesus is enclosed, and our natural essence is enclosed within him, while the blessed soul of Christ rests inside the Godhead. I clearly saw that it is necessary for us to experience longing and contrition until we have been led so deeply into God that we truly and completely know ourselves. I also saw that it is our Beloved himself who leads us into this depth, through the same love by which he created us and redeemed us, in mercy and grace. Still, we cannot come to a complete understanding of God unless we come to truly know ourselves. . . .
  • It is also true that [Love] is closer to us than the heart can think and the tongue can tell.

These observations made by Julian are foundational for her most famous saying, “All will be well.” They remind us God is our “energy” and “essence” and human “sensuality” and “rest” and “unshakable strength” and “soul.” They evoke our soul’s true etymology with its roots in divine Love. Our part is to “seek our beloved God” and “truly know ourselves.”

If then we compare these truths with the passages where some variation of “All will be well” appears in Mirabai Starr’s translation, rereading, reseeing, and steeping in them, we see Julian’s famous “All will be well” not as the platitude we’ve accidentally made it out to be, but as a well-wrestled-to-and-experienced truth for the anchoress. I have carried these words around on cards, too, or had them nearby during my work day.

Mirabai focuses us on Julian’s experience by using Julian’s most famous words as title for her translation’s Part II: “Every Kind of Thing Shall Be Well,” as Chapter 27’s title: “All Will Be Well,” and as Chapter 31’s title: “I Have the Power to Make All Things Well.”

Here are a few passages below from the text itself, translated by Mirabai Starr. They show “All will be well” not as a static axiom from the anchoress but as an experiential truth for Julian, emerging from her ongoing, ever-evolving, full-of-questions dialogue, part of her practice, of her returning to Love in gratitude and in suffering, in “well and woe.”

We love Julian’s Revelations in part because she models engaging Presence by living the questions.

  • “Oh, good Lord, how can all be well? The transgressions of your creatures have caused such harm!”
  • There was not a single question or doubt I raised for which our good Lord did not have a reassuring response. “I have the power to make all things well,” he said, “I know how to make all things well, and I wish to make all things well.” Then he said, “I shall make all things well. You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well.”
  • Once our Beloved said, “Every kind of thing shall be well,” and on another occasion he said, “You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well.” My soul recognized a number of teachings contained in these phrases. . . . When he says, “You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well,” he is referring to this level of care. He wants us to know that he will not forget the least little thing.
  • And so I draw deep comfort from these words, “I have the power to make all things well,” and I know that our Beloved has many great blessings in store for us.
  • It is enough to know that our Beloved intends to bestow a great blessing on us, which he has kept hidden and treasured in his holy breast since before time began. This is the deed, known only to him, that will make all things well. Just as the blessed Trinity created all things from nothing, so the blessed Trinity will make all things well that are not well.
  • And so how could it be that every kind of thing shall be well? In light of this teaching, it seems impossible! The only answer I could find in any of my showings was when our Beloved said, “What is impossible for you is not impossible for me. I will keep my word in all things, and I shall make all things well.”
  • For when I saw in a showing that God does all that needs to be done, I did not see any sin, and I saw that all is well. And then when God did reveal something to me about sin, he reassured me that “All will be well.”
  • But then an answer came into my mind, as if offered by a friendly intermediary: “Accept this in a general way, and contemplate the grace of our Beloved as he reveals it to you,” the voice said. “For it is a far greater honor to God for you to glorify him in everything, everywhere and always, than in any one special thing.” I agreed. I realized that if I were to act wisely and follow this teaching, maybe nothing in itself would make me particularly happy, but I would also not become especially anxious or distraught about anything in particular, either. For “All will be well.” To behold God in all things is to live in complete joy.
  • During our lives here on earth, we experience a wondrous mixture of well and woe. We hold inside us both the glory of the Risen Christ and the misery of the Fallen Adam. Christ protects us in our dying and, through his gracious touch, uplifts us and reassures us that all will be well.
  • Yet often when our falling and our misery are revealed to us, we become overwhelmed by shame, and all we want to do is run away and hide. Our courteous Mother does not want us to flee. Nothing would distress her more. She wants us to behave as a child would when he is upset or afraid: rush with all our might into the arms of the Mother.
  • I saw that there is no greater stature in this life than that of a child, who is naturally humble and free from the encumbrances of power and intelligence, until our Divine Mother brings us up to the bliss of our Divine Father. This is what Christ meant when he uttered these sweet words: All will be well. You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well. The bliss of our Motherhood in Christ will begin anew in the joy of our Father God, and this new beginning shall be ever renewed, without end. And so I saw that all her beloved children whom she birthed by nature return to her by grace.
  • He did not say, you will not be tempted; you will not be troubled; you will not be distressed. What he said was, “You shall not be overcome.” God wants us to pay attention to these words and be strong in absolute trust, in both well and woe. Just as he loves and delights in us, it is his will that we love and delight in him, and fully trust in him, and all will be well.
  • The more clearly the soul sees his blessed face by the grace of loving, the more it longs to see him in his totality. It is true that our Beloved dwells within us and is here with us, calling to us and enfolding us in his tender love and will never, ever leave us. It is also true that he is closer to us than the heart can think and the tongue can tell. There will be no lack of well-being there.
  • This blessed friend is Christ. We need to bind ourselves to his will and guidance, and join ourselves ever more intimately with him, no matter what state we are in. For whether we are clean or unclean, we are always the same in his love. In well or in woe, he wants us to never run away from him.
  • Then none of us will be moved in any way to say, Lord, if only things had been different, all would have been well. Instead, we shall all proclaim in one voice, Beloved One, may you be blessed, because it is so: all is well. We see now that everything happened in accordance with your divine will, ordained before the beginning of time.
  • Throughout the time of my showings, I wished to know what our Beloved meant. More than fifteen years later, the answer came in a spiritual vision. This is what I heard. “Would you like to know our Lord’s meaning in all this? Know it well: love was his meaning. Who revealed this to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why did he reveal it to you? For love. Stay with this and you will know more of the same. You will never know anything but love, without end.” And so what I saw most clearly was that love is his meaning. God wants us to know that he loved us before he even made us, and this love has never diminished and never will. All his actions unfold from this love, and through this love he makes everything that happens of value to us, and in this love we find everlasting life. Our creation has a starting point, but the love in which he made us has no beginning, and this love is our true source. Thanks be to God!

To read these examples yourself of “All will be well,” discover them in Mirabai Starr’s stellar translation Julian of Norwich: The Showings: Uncovering the Face of the Feminine in Revelations of Divine Love (Hampton Roads Publishing/Bookshop.org).

Repetition is our friend. We read again that Julian says, “God is closer to us than our own soul.” “God is nerer to us than our owen soule.” “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh.” “God is nearer to us than our own soul.”

I invite you to join me in steeping in these passages from Mirabai’s translation of Julian and in “God is closer to us than our own soul,” reading one or more again, slowly, perhaps alongside O’Keefe’s “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.”

We were perhaps taught that reading fast and faster is best, but it’s simply not true for most of us. We are meant to read, we humans, as ruminants, reiteratively, recursively, again and again, digesting words. The deep repetition of unrushed reading is our friend.

Returning to words that can heal us reminds us of our essential humanity as we recognize and experience the truth of Love as the essence of our aliveness and rest.

Peace.

Unmediated Life

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

You can also listen to this blog on Carmen’s YouTube channel.


I walk about two hours a day so I can feel the ground under my feet. It’s unmediated.

Unmediated is “not mediated: not communicated or transformed by an intervening agency.”

In the middle of unmediated, hidden there, is media. Media is the original plural of medium. Medium is from an ancient root *medhyo– for “middle.”

Mass media is a medium of communication such as newspapers, radio, and television.

Mass media often stands between us and the real news about our lives.

On my walks there’s nothing much between me, my body, and earth. I don’t traverse the earth on Google Earth by moving my mouse. I don’t read of its wonders in an ebook. I don’t watch a colorful documentary on YouTube. I see earth’s flowers, smell its grass, hear its birds, taste its fog on winter days, and touch its soft feathers when they molt to earth.

The media scholar Marshall McLuhan and I became friends when I was eleven. We met at a public library. My mother dropped her four kids off while she went grocery shopping. For the bring-one, take-one bookcase, I took in a paperback ordered at school from Scholastic and took a book home titled The Medium is the Message/Massage.  

Later I found there The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and my favorite, Understanding Media. These changed me. Luckily I had no idea he was a “philosopher” or someone a pre-teen should not read. I understood enough, and he stayed with me. I returned to his work often over decades.

When I read his ideas—that most people are unaware “blissfully” of “what the media do to them” and do not notice that “the medium is also the message [and the massage in that] . . . it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio,” my seeing was changed forever. I started noticing the radio and the tv in new ways.

In graduate school, much later on, I learned McLuhan did his dissertation on grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all my favorite inquiries, and was himself influenced by Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

So I can study media and learn with and from my students, now I teach a course at University of California, Berkeley, titled, “The Meme and the Human (& AI): Digital Literacies,” inspired by that chance encounter in a public library decades ago.

Memorably, the Introduction to the first edition of Understanding Media begins, “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding.” McLuhan adds, “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” He argues that we are approaching (now are in, he might say) “the final phase of the extensions of [hu]man—the technological simulation of consciousness,” and he says that “the creative process of knowing will be collectively” because we have “collectively and corporately extended . . . our senses and nerves by the various media.”

McLuhan is an expert in pointing out the obvious that was not so obvious until he points it out: “Any extension [like a bike, car, cell phone, or social media, I add], whether of skin, hand, or foot, [or consciousness] affects the whole psychic and social complex.”

Sensory overload can prevent us from living in the present, unmediated, as McLuhan observes, “This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any ‘point of view.’” He also gave me hope by naming “[t]he aspiration of our time” as “wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness” as “a natural adjunct of electric technology,” by which he would also have meant our internet and social media today.

The essences of these “electric technology” changes are hard for us to detect, however, while they are happening. McLuhan calls it “the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation.” He compares the “content” of a medium to “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” He adds that while a movie’s content is a novel, a play, or an opera, that the “effect of the movie form is not related to its program content.”

He saw, for example, that these media come to us (as the radio did in his day) “with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate” and that “touch[es] remote and forgotten chords.” This tends “to numb our central nervous system,” he says because when it is “extended and exposed,” we are overwhelmed, and that’s one reason, he notes, that we live so much with a rear-view perspective, what McLuhan calls in one interview “the rearview-mirror view”—because we are numbed by the new technologies as they are making a new environment—we work to make the old environment that much more visible by turning it into an art form and attaching ourselves to its objects and vibes, which explains a good deal of the present-day nostalgia.

Anyone wanting to read more about this can find media scholar Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture, where she helps us understand today’s “participatory culture.”

All I can say is that awareness for me includes walking the earth and listening to egrets, my family, my friends, my students, and everyone I meet. Trying to be a real listener is a path to walk also.

And I try to listen to my ancestors and these include those I’ve lived with and translated or communed with, like Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510).

It would be wonderful if we could all read Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends published by James Clarke in London in 1908. In fact, I put that there to remind me to one day. Ah, my bucket list of books grows apace.

But we don’t really need to read von Hügel. Instead we can go back to the words of Catherine. It’s one reason I translate or have translated and one reason I look up word etymologies every day. I go to the spring, the source of the Water. It’s also why I read the Bible and other Scriptures with commentaries and history books beside me, to reveal their words’ meanings and their contexts and to reflect on living out the word: “God is Love” into today.

These practices have also been and are life-changing helps with my decades-long-undiagnosed dyslexia.

If I go to the sources of classic works translated in English and read their original words, and if I go to words’ sources, and read their origins, then I can make up my own mind what they mean for me, as factually based as possible.

It’s also why I practice and study Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems, and that’s for another blog piece. I want to go to my own sources, my own parts, because I have experienced and do experience that the pre-packaged, systemically taught monomind paradigm is not true for me. As Beatrice Bruteau (and many past mystics) said and experienced, all of us have “artificial selves” and a “natural self,” and I call these my non-authentic, non-relaxed selves and my True or Authentic Self. Students always say, “You do you” or “Be authentic.” That Self.

About the True Self, in a very encouraging way, Catherine of Genoa gives us a word still as fresh as dew for today. Catherine is famous for saying, according to the translation you read, either, “My Me is God,” or “My deepest me is God!” And I think how she worked at the hospital helping people.

For “God,” “Love” or “Kindness” or “Ultimate Reality” or “Something More” et al., are often preferred.

Her words spark the question: What does it mean to be human?

Not to be a screen.

And what did she actually say in Italian?

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

Look at how the “Dio” and the twice “mio” rhyme. The Dio meaning God and the mio meaning my. That’s the medium being the message/massage. The è means is and the essere means to be or being. The English words essence, essential, and presence all have the same root: Latin esse for “to be” from the ancient root *es- “to be.”

I go to sleep now saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.” On mindful repeat.

I walk through the marsh saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.” Then I stop to listen to the egrets.

Because as Rilke writes, “Through all creatures extends one single space / World space within. Through us the birds fly silently. Oh, wanting to grow, I look outside at the tree / that grows in me.” [From “Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum: Weltinnenraum,” Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1906–1926, Sämtliche Werke, II]

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

If I translated Catherine’s word, which I try not to because I’d rather experience it, I’d hear, “In God is my being, my Me.”

I go to sleep now saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I walk through the marsh saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I remember how Catherine of Genoa helped people at a hospital. I try to teach and be kind.

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I teach, I sleep, I walk through the marsh. I listen. To the beautiful, raucous calls of the egrets.

Unmediated.

Without media.

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

Welcoming Practice

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

This piece is also posted on Carmen’s YouTube Channel here.

“To welcome and to let go is one of the most radically loving, faith-filled gestures we can make in each moment of each day. It is an open-hearted embrace of all that is in ourselves and in the world.”

— Mary Mrozowski, creator of the Welcoming Prayer

The Welcoming Prayer Practice created by Mary Mrozowski is a good sitting or “as-you-go” exercise. It was influenced by her training in biofeedback, Thomas Keating’s teachings on the False/True Self, and Jean Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence.

It has three movements:

1/ Focus. Feel. Sink. Hearth. Touch. Drop in. Scan body. Become aware of sensation/s. Be present with them. You are befriending them by listening to them and feeling them and being with them, which helps them become unburdened.

2/ Welcome what you are experiencing in your body as a way to say yes to the Divine / Love /God / Presence / True Self. Wel-come = will/pleasure + cuma/guest. Say: “Welcome, frustration….grief…joy…fear…anger….”

You welcome only the physical or psychological content. You are not welcoming an external situation, like cancer. Author, mystic, and priest Cynthia Bourgeault reminds, you are not “passively aquiesc[ing] to situations that are in fact intolerable.”

3/ Let it go when you feel it is time. There is no need to rush. You might go between noticing and feeling and being with (1) and welcoming (2) for a while. When you feel ready, say: “I let go of my frustration, etc.” You might also add, if you feel comfortable doing so: “I let go of my cravings for security, affection, and control. I let go of my wish to change what I am feeling. I embrace this moment just as it is.” Please word however most helps you.

This practice helps unburden acquired emotional programs and heal the wounds of a lifetime by meeting them where they are stored, which is in the body. It moves us from our got-to-fix-it mentality and returns us to unconditionally loving presence. This letting-go is not final but is repeated over time as we return to this exercise, and as we practice this welcoming, we are unburdening and undoing emotional programs that keep us operating out of the small-egoic self. This practice returns us to the Center, to the Source of the Source or Ultimate Reality, Love.

Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems work (No Bad Parts) can be a help in adapting this practice to our needs, and a therapist and spiritual direction can support us also.

Cynthia Bourgeault sums it up well:

“’By the power of the Divine Indwelling active within me, I unconditionally embrace this moment, no matter its physical or psychological content’. And by this same indwelling strength, once inner wholeness is restored, I then choose how to deal with the outer situation, be it by acceptance or by spirited resistance. If the latter course is chosen, the actions taken – reflecting that higher coherence of witnessing presence – will have a greater effectiveness, bearing the right force and appropriate timing that Buddhist teaching classically designates as ‘skillful means’”.