“If a wild animal like a cheetah
can be tamed into forgetting her power,
forgetting her majesty,
forgetting her wild —
then so can a woman.”
~ Glennon Doyle Melton
I watched an interview in which Glennon Doyle Melton reported an experience of going to the zoo and watching the “cheetah run” with her children. She describes a zookeeper coming out with a dog on a leash and saying this dog has been a companion of the cheetah and allowed them to train the cheetah. The dog ran the race, chasing a “dirty pink bunny” behind a vehicle. The the cheetah did the same thing.
Inside her very body, mind, and spirit, she recognized the way we (women AND men) have been trained.
It is difficult for me to separate my hearing Glennon’s words from other current conditions.
I write to a friend:
His kids are moving him to a memory care facility in Tennessee. I finally see what about that pisses me off. Moving him to a facility so they can watch him like an animal in a zoo. Not moving him into their home and making the commitment to care for his needs as one would care for a newborn baby.
He is not doing any of the things that make this option out of the question. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t fight. He simply forgets whether he has eaten or is hungry; whether or not he has showered or shaved or gone to the bathroom.
Mind you, I do not pretend to know what is best for him. My reaction is not about what is happening to him. It is about what is happening within me.
I can feel some life-calling brewing. Like my dreams upon waking, I have insufficient recall of the details.
Everything is related to everything. Reading Glennon’s book, “Love Warrior: A Memoir” and taking notes:
-
Love Warrior: A Memoir
By Glennon Doyle Melton
(p. 144)
I’m trying to fix my pain with certainty, as if I’m one right choice away from relief. I’m stuck in anxiety quicksand: The harder I try to climb my way out, the lower I sink. The only way to survive is to make no sudden movements, to get comfortable with discomfort, and to find peace without answers… There is only one strategy I can count on during this time: Just do the next right thing. One thing at a time.
I can never glimpse the end of the path, but if I squint hard, I can see the next step.
I say: Give me today my daily bread. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but today, give me enough energy and wisdom and strength and peace to handle what comes…. Help me ignore the big decisions, which will make themselves, and just help me focus on the small ones.
~~~~~~~
(p. 195)
My spiral staircase of progress means that my pain will be both behind me and in front of me, every damn day. I’ll never be “over it,” but I vow to be stronger each time I face it. Maybe the pain won’t change, but I will. I keep climbing.
~~~~~
(p. 203)
Our pain is not the poison; the lies about the pain are….
Along the way, we’ve internalized the lies: You are supposed to be happy all the time. Everybody else is! Avoid the pain! You don’t need it, it’s not meant for you. Just push this button. Finally, I was being quiet and still enough to hear the truth: You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it’s hard. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody. Don’t avoid the pain. You need it. It’s meant for you. Be still with it, let it calm, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you’ll burn to get your work done on this earth.
The threads are witnessed from a safe distance. The right religion. The right treatment. The right partner. As though there is such a thing. We try to find the truth about the tooth fairy by putting our teeth under our pillow. The lies must been brought into the light. Yes, the tooth is gone and there is a quarter (OK, too cheap for today…. there is a dollar) under my pillow, but that has nothing to do with the truth.
On Easter Sunday morning I watched the replay of an April 5 IANDS interview “Overcoming The Challenges and Discovering the Gifts of Spiritual Experiences” with Dr. Nicole Gruel. I so relate to her saying that the top risk of NOTES (Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences) is the relationship loss as others (and we ourselves) cannot accept awarenesses of the larger reality accessed by our experience.
I did not go out of my way to notice that dead people talk to us.
I would never have gone.
Nor did I willingly leave the safety of the cocoon of Christianity to recognize the SOURCE of all life is “present within” each religion, but not “contained within” it.
I would never have gone.
If I had known learning Healing Touch would drive me into decades of despair dancing with the egotism of allopathic medicine, I NEVER WOULD HAVE GONE.
Something changes when you are opened to the reality of the ever-perfect within the ever-imperfect. Everything changes when you stop searching for the RIGHT choice about anything and let your inner radiance see the light that shines brightly upon a path to everything.
Later in the day I also tuned in to the Deep Spring Center for Meditation Easter Sunday gathering where Barbara Brodsky and Colette Simone took turns channeling Jeshua and Mary. I made few notes but the notes I did make are significant: The point is not to get through the incarnation, but to consecrate the incarnation. Aware of where we would not have been open to the heart, now we are able to. WOW. We are doing it.
Glennon said it this way: My spiral staircase of progress means that my pain will be both behind me and in front of me, every damn day. I’ll never be “over it,” but I vow to be stronger each time I face it. Maybe the pain won’t change, but I will. I keep climbing.
It pisses me off that his family does not know him well enough to draw out of his decaying brain things that he still knows. That he will be in a sea of strangers ignorant of the truth of him as a brilliant university professor who assisted so many on the path of learning. That someone will give him chocolate chip cookies instead of his preferred oatmeal raisin.
But even as I am willing to feel the heat of anger, I am also willing to feel the spaciousness of peace and trust.
Perhaps I can stop saying I never would have gone and see that I am going again even now.
Sharing with a friend via text this morning I wrote: Maybe the trick is learning that the REAL art is what we create outside of the lines.
Perhaps creating outside of the lines is itself a non-ordinary transcendent experience….
