By Debra Basham, on June 20, 2015
We live in an illusion and the appearance of things.
There is a reality. You are that reality.
When you understand this, you see that you are nothing,
and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.
~ Kalu Rinpoche
As a child I loved puzzles. As an adult I enjoy Buddhist teachings. I heard this quotation by Rinpoche at Emrich retreat center in Brighton, Michigan while there on a silent meditation retreat, the title of which was Be a Lamp Unto Yourself. Another puzzle or another teaching?
When I visited with a woman who is recovering from having three cancerous ribs removed, I was seeing clearly the truth of the teachings. She is understandably grieving, understandably in pain, and understandably angry that the doctor who removed her ribs did not take into account how difficult that would be for her given that she previously had her left leg amputated at the hip.
Prior to having the ribs removed, she was remarkably independent and active—totally adept with the aid of a pair of crutches. Now, she is adapting to being in a wheelchair, often very uncomfortable as she sits on the stump causing nerves to fire.
Her choice of words were very telling, “I am angry. That surgeon did not take the quality of my life into account. The only focus was to cut out the cancer.”
Often, frightened and overwhelmed by a medical condition, we can fail to be a lamp unto ourselves. I will not share my bias about the cruel slash and burn twin treatments of surgery and chemotherapy than can destroy lives in the guise of curing a disease, or my preference for whole-person health systems that actually assist the person coming into balance and provide opportunity for the body to heal itself. I would rather have you learn a powerful guided meditation to help us imagine a world of infinite possibilities I learned while sitting under a catalpa tree smelling the sweet blossoms falling all around us.
Imagine you are out on the ocean with many other boats. It is a beautiful day. The water is smooth. You put on your scuba equipment and dive down deep to the ocean floor. Everything is peaceful; the ground is solid beneath your feet; you move effortlessly.
As you surface from your dive, huge waves are rolling. The sea has become stormy! People on the boats nearby are yelling for help as they face being tossed overboard or the boats being capsized. The Coast Guard has been called.
You determine the best help you can be is to go back to the depths where you are safe and calm with your feet securely on the stable ocean floor. Once there, you imagine your arms stretching up to the surface of the water and you begin to help the people caught in the storm.
You lift many people onto the Coast Guard vessel where they are safe.
Next, my imagination had me lift a Saint Bernard, then an elephant, then an airplane before I was shown hospitals where this same amazing process of helping people was happening. Later, when I shared what I had seen in the meditation, another person at the retreat shared resuscitating children from this deep place of calm.
For quite some time, many of us have had a sense we have a way of being with difficult situations more constructively than focusing on what is unhelpful. Complaining (even about something we see as downright wrong) is disempowering. Even those who are unskillful or acting out of blatant greed or the ignorance of self-interest are better served by our compassionate wisdom than our anger.
I hope you will also find this vision powerful as you imagine situations in your life that can be more just, creative, and helpful. Clearly there was no “I” doing the lifting, rather it was about our sincerely intending to help all beings come to the end of suffering. It is about our being used by LOVE, as depicted in this poem by Teresa of Avila (1515–1582):
Christ Has No Body
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
Fortunately, we are everything!
* Posted this last night and went to Pilgrim Congregational Church this morning because my wonderful friend/colleague, Linda Beushausen was speaking. From the sermon title “Rowing Your Boat Gently and Merrily Even in a Storm, the cover of the bulletin (see image below), the scripture (Mark 4:35-41 about Jesus’ calming the sea), to singing Row Row Row Your Boat and I’ve Got Peace Like a River, you have to agree we are all in the boat together!
By Debra Basham, on June 7, 2015
People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.
This has been a very nostalgic week. I received an email message from a woman I worked with some time ago. Her email message:
I don’t know if you remember me or not. I was a patient in the early 2000’s, and you helped bring me out of a dissociative stupor.
I would love to see you again, to say thank you if nothing else. I will be in the your area in a few weeks.
If it’s not possible, please know that I’m thinking of you every day with tremendous gratitude.
My heart was so touched, I was brought near tears.
Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
I assured her, yes, I do remember her…
After all of these years, I still keep the hand-made afghan from her in my car, and this lovely needlepoint she made sits by my massage table here at the house.
Later in the week, my partner (co-developer of Subtle Communication Systems), Joel Bowman, and I met one of his former students as we walked through the WMU Engineering Campus. When she realized who he was, she said to him, “We had to do a presentation and I had been painfully introverted. I realized I had to overcome that to be what I wanted to be. Your class changed my life.”
Not everyone we touch will come back into our lives to say thank you, but whether someone is in our life for a lifetime or for a season, there is always a reason!
By Debra Basham, on May 26, 2015
It turned out to be a beautiful day, even though it started out cloudy and sprinkled a bit at the end of the Memorial Day Parade. The sky is now ribbons of blue and pink.
It has been a day of memories for me, for sure, as May 25, 2003, we had my mom’s Celebration of Life ceremony. It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend that year.
Most of us have heard the story about the woman who cut the end off the ham, put both pieces in the pan, and put the pan into the oven. When asked why she did that, she realized she did not know why, but she would ask her mother (who had done that).
Three generations back, the truth comes forth—her grandmother’s pan was too small for the ham to go into without cutting the end off!
Socrates once stated: “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and that certainly applies in this situation. Perhaps it applies to much more in our lives as well.
Today I discovered an amazing woman. Her name is Meggan Watterson, and she has traveled the outer world of religions in search of the divine feminine before going within to find it. Here is a powerful excerpt from the Introduction of her book, REVEAL: A Sacred Manual For Getting Spiritually Naked (Hay House Inc., 2013):
What I want the spiritual process revealed in this book to give you is what it gave to me: a sense of empowerment that allows you to shed any feeling of being a victim and own everything that has happened to you; a feeling of embodiment that allows you to let go of every notion about the body except that it’s sacred; an awareness of true love as a limitless source within you, not something or someone outside you; a feeling of self-worth that lets you accept that love is your birthright, not something you must prove yourself worthy of; the audacity and authority to know that you don’t need to keep your power hidden, that we all have a direct connection to the Divine; a belief in service and meaningful work in the world that doesn’t deplete you but rather demands that you receive as much as you give; an experience of the love and support of spiritual community to remind you again and again that you’re not alone—that women do the work of saving each other’s lives.
The readers of this blog who know my birth story have supported and nurtured me as I faced the inner pain of learning my mom discovered she had syphilis at the same time she learned she was pregnant with me. My dad had had an indiscretion. She and I spent my first trimester with her being treated at a syphilis sanatorium. She was understandably embarrassed, afraid, and angry. While this was not known by me until I was forty-something, her thoughts and emotions and beliefs about all of that affected me.
I am so thankful she was able to share with me before she passed from this life. I remember telling her about the vague sense of womb trauma resulting in not feeling loved or wanted. The gift she gave me was worth more than fortunes: “I could not have not wanted you, I did not even know you. I have loved you since the moment I laid eyes on you.”
Louise Hay (sometimes called the Queen of Affirmations) said, “You’re the only thinker in your head.”
Yesterday, awash in many emotions, two wonderful women friends again held my tender heart and assured me I am loved and wanted.
Yes, women do the work of saving each other’s lives. Today, as I remember my mom’s passing from this life, I remember the gift of love she gave me and I vow to pass it on.
By Debra Basham, on May 19, 2015
I look at the post date of my previous blog entry and I realize it was 13 days ago. Where has all the time gone? These days are extra busy. I find myself doing laundry after ten and making soup before nine.
We brought my mother-in-love home from the hospital on oxygen where she will now be getting support. What an intense time of meeting nurses and social workers and learning to operate machinery and setting up systems to keep things organized.
On Saturday when I picked mom up at the hospital to bring her home, the nurse/aide helped her into the front seat while I was opening the hatch for loading in the oxygen tank. Coming around to the passenger side of the van to buckle her seat belt, I noticed the seat was in a reclining position.
“Lean forward so I can bring your seat up,” I told her.
As she leaned up, I pushed the handle. The seat flew forward smacking her in the back.
She immediately popped out with, “I should have had a V-8!”
We both laughed.
We laughed later when we realized we had carefully put her oxygen tube on her, set the concentrator to “2” as we had been duly instructed, but I had never turned the oxygen on!
My sister-in-law also shared a funny story about one day when they were racing to the doctor and my sister-in-law ran through on a yellow light. Mom’s quick-witted quip was that they could stop twice the next time!
These are tender times for so many of us. One dear friend has her mom in the our local hospice residence. Another is bringing her younger brother home with hospice care today in a city in a nearby state. We are each facing the long journey of the only inevitability of our lives: our transition from these physical bodies.
Speaking at a nearby church next Sunday morning—Memorial Day—the title is “The Last Minute” and I will open with this:
Way back in the days of full-service gas stations, a minister waited in line to have his car filled with gas just before a long holiday weekend. The attendant, a member of the church, worked quickly, but there were many cars lined up ahead of the minister.
Finally, the attendant motioned the minister toward a vacant pump. “Reverend,” said the young man, “Sorry about the delay. It seems as if everyone waits until the last minute to get ready for a long trip.”
The minister laughed and responded, “I know what you mean. It’s the same in my business.”
Whatever is present in your life right now, it is best to remember we are each getting ready for a long trip every moment of our lives. Take a lesson from my mother-in-law, and don’t wait until the last minute. Let’s all make every day one filled with heart-felt laughter.
By Debra Basham, on May 3, 2015
I am listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn talking about the difference between thinking and awareness. The gift in listening is that it has turned off the fears of dying, and the preoccupation that there might be something wrong with me. I can point to the “facts” connected to my concerns, such as that my right abdomen is very bloated (an ongoing symptom I have had following the hysterectomy I had in November 2012), and the observation I have had for a few months that my right breast is lower than my left.
My mom was terrified by life. Admittedly, I learned fear there. Perhaps Mother’s Day is a perfect time for me to forgive her for teaching me fear by taking responsibility for who I am now as an adult. I can begin by integrating what I know about thinking and awareness: the difference between that which flows through the mind—in terms of thoughts, feelings, and emotions—and that which is aware of these things.
Jon said the Buddha said all of his teachings can be condensed down to one sentence, “Nothing is to be clung to as I, Me, or Mine.” Mindfulness is not about suppressing your thinking, it is about not self-identifying with those thoughts, feelings, and emotions that flow through your mind.
“When not examined in the larger field of awareness, thinking can run amok.” Our thoughts, feelings, and emotions can make us miserable. It is not my mother’s thoughts of fear around her life that are causing me distress today; my distress comes from my identifying with her thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
I value the use of metaphor, symbolism, and story to help get a person out of primitive brain (fight or flight response) and to get into the relaxation response. A great free online source is available at Lightworker.comand I chose to use the Inner Child Cards:
What is real about my fear something is wrong with me physically (abdomen bulging and right breast sagging)?
 Eight of Swords
The children in the Eight of Swords card are walking, through a cave or labyrinth that represents a soul journey into unknown territories. A labyrinth often has one winding path that leads towards an ultimate goal. It is often used in initiatic procedures. When deep transformation occurs, we are often guided into the secret places of our minds in order to resolve old karmic patterns and subliminal fears. Oriental mystics say that the true self resides in the cave of he heart. We must go there to restore our wisdom.
The spider represents the enigma of the web, which weaves in and out of itself. Our minds are similar. We reshape and recreate our thoughts continuously. The snake, coiled in a figure eight-the symbol of infinity-is the psychic power and life force within. This snake reminds us of the ancient kundalini energy wisdom that travels up and own our spines, and has been likened to a fiery dragon , sleeping within the root chakra. The ability to readapt in life situations is essential if we are to successfully respond to the calling for change and maturation.
You may feel that this is a trying time in your life. Put worries aside, for you are entering a sacred journey. Overcoming fear is possible if you are willing to confront its deceptive face. Perhaps you are not honoring this time of initiation. The way to do so is to illuminate the deep fears that block your life and be ready to come to terms with their potent meanings. This is a unique opportunity to clean the house of your psyche. There is always light at the end of a tunnel. And a general question: What is real about death?
 Ace of Crystals
In northern folklore and legend, a belief exists that during the winter months when the Earth is silent and asleep, under her blanket of snow the gnomes are busy weaving crystals from the light of the Moon, Sun, and stars. When the rebirth of springtime arrives, the gnomes offer these precious gems to the sky, and through the gentle rain of springtime, magnificent rainbows are created.
The hardworking gnome in this card has uncovered a beautiful crystal for you. The time has come for you to accept the promise of hope, unity, and abundance that this crystal brings. The rainbow in the sky is a bridge uniting heaven and Earth and representing the harmony of all people. The Chinese called the rainbow the t’ai chi, or “Great Ultimate,” uniting yin and yang.
When the Ace of Crystals appears in your reading, great potential is being uncovered and tremendous possibilities are present in your life, for this card depicts a dynamic rebirth on the physical level. You may be birthing something magical, be it a baby, a business, a book, a relationship, or a new phase of self-expression. You are blessed by the presence of the glorious crystal brought to you by this humble gnome. An ace in any suit says, “Yes!” Begin anew. Many ideas and dreams that have been hidden for years are now revealed. Join the light of a new day. Blessed be.
By Debra Basham, on April 20, 2015
I have been revisiting a pattern of physical pain that was years ago key in my journey. Back then—ah, interesting—it was a “back” problem that caused me to quit my job and totally redirected the work I do in the world. It is how I became interested in holistic health, and it is something I am profoundly grateful for.
Over the winter I had some slight symptoms, but this past week I have been experiencing a lot ofdiscomfort in my left hip, knee, and leg. It is odd that it comes and goes. Some times I have barely been able to hobble around, and other times I have had absolutely no sensation of discomfort.
This morning I looked up hip and leg problems in Louise Hay’s Heal Your Body. Ah, fear of going forward in major decisions, nothing to move forward to…. The affirmation: I am in perfect balance. I move forward in life with ease and with joy at every age.
I drew an Angelic Messenger Card. The messages are by Meredith L. Young-Sowers, and the photography was done by Carol Duke. You can access them online, but I was blessed to be gifted a deck by a friend who had allowed us to rent her home on Pine Island the past three winters. In the three years of using this deck, I have never previously drawn this card!
#14 Inner Authority
Present Challenge
Gaining confidence in using your inner wisdom to sustain relationships.
By drawing this card of Partnership you are being urged to reconsider your opinion of yourself. In appreciating your own inner beauty and inestimable value you become better able to support and interact with the diverse opinions and attitudes expressed by others.
You may be feeling that others often disregard you, fail to meet your needs, or override or undervalue you and/or your efforts. You may feel sometimes overshadowed by others who have more inner authority. You long to be fully united with your own true nature, to eliminate the inner hollowness and find renewed deep health and purpose. This card comes to you in order to encourage you to nurture your inner authority so that you are better able to move into meaningful and fulfilling relationships.
Angelic Message – Inner Authority
Inner authority is spiritual energy born from union with the Divine. Inner authority is seen in what you say and what you don’t say, in the quality, tone, and reverence with which you approach all living things. When you speak out of love, out of commitment, out of determination, you are ordering the forces of energy within you and the Universe toward the harmony of purpose, and explosion of power. This inner combustion takes place when you turn your attention inward and give time to your spirit.
You do not need to ask permission to love yourself, because loving yourself is the natural state of humanness. You are encouraged by the Universe to find and live the fullest expression of your own unique nature; nothing less is sufficient to you or God. Your inner authority develops as your need for outer authority diminishes and as you listen continually for the voice of your inner mind, your spirit.
Possessing inner authority is at the core of creating and sustaining lasting relationships and spiritual community. True community is based on each person’s willingness and ability to maximize each opening to spiritual growth while also honoring this process in the others. People have an underdeveloped inner authority from a lack of commitment to the purpose of their own life, which is to give rise to their spirit’s fullest bloom.
Inner authority comes not from an immediate material or spiritual “success” but from perseverance. You gain inner authority with the belief and inner expectation, that you do have an essential inner beauty that is priceless, worth struggling to uncover and to know. You’ve come into this life having already lived and blossomed before in many extraordinary ways. Your search now is to uncover this lifetime’s essential core so that you may also indirectly absorb the learning from past lives. Your journey is the awakening of your inner authority, and this voice, this spiritual energy, can contribute to your fulfillment in relationships and act as the force to bring you and your Earth into peaceful times.
Spiritual Opportunity
The guidance available to you through the flower image on this card is to take a long, hard look at the future you hope to create and to realize that it will never be simpler or more difficult than in this moment. The multiple colors, shapes, and designs within this flower show you, symbolically, that your life is never all good or all bad but is rather a continual blend of the emotional and spiritual experiences and energies. Your life is never totally clear of obstructions or factors that need resolution. The challenge is to begin to create, one moment at a time, knowing that today, like tomorrow, will have its conflicts.
Your guidance suggest that you can step up to today’s opportunities because you have the seeds of spiritual love and awareness already in your life, now within this magnificent blend of sorrow, joy, loss, and gratitude. In placing more emphasis on exploring your own inner authority, you’ll be less easily sidetracked or put off by the demands and expectations of others and more able to create the future you choose.
Application
Write down what your inner authority spiritual voice “sounds” like to you. Observe the people and circumstances in which you already use your inner authority. How does it feel when you use this more aligned inner energy? Why don’t you use it with certain others? What do you need in order to use this inner authority voice more often?
Ask those you live with or your closest family members or friends to discuss the idea of an inner authority voice. Ask each person to share with you information about the times and the ways they are able to use their own inner authority voice. Ask each person how each can help the others call forth their own inner voices more often. Place a small sticker on your daily calendar identifying the days in which you feel you are actively using your inner authority and thereby reinforcing this new alignment.
Letting this amazing message seep into my consciousness, I felt myself affirming God’s will in my life, and for just a moment I slipped into an old belief system that God might be asking me to do something I do not really want to do (or feel capable of doing). Almost instantly I gratefully recalled these words of truth I had just read yesterday in the Deep Spring Center Thought for Today!
As I was sharing all of this with a dear friend, I noticed that throughout the document the voice to text function had replaced “inner authority” with “in her authority.” Our world is recovering from the Patriarchal view of God as a strong-armed father who knows best. What an injustice to this quiet, sacred, vibration of the Divine within our hearts.
I have begun affirming the truth: I am in perfect balance. I move forward in life with ease and with joy at every age IN HER AUTHORITY. You are welcome to join me. I think we might just be rewriting HIStory.
By Debra Basham, on April 3, 2015
Years ago, I opened a sermon with this illustration: Three guys have been stranded on a desert island for a very long time when one of them finds a magic lantern containing a genie. The genie grants them each one wish. The first guy wishes he was off the island and back home─and poof!, he is back home. The second guy wishes the same thing─and poof!, he is gone too. The third guy says, “I’m lonely. I wish my friends were back here with me.”
It is really important to keep our wits about us when we are making our wishes, isn’t it….
One of the things about wishing is that it can come as a result of not being present with or appreciative of what currently is. I have been very aware of that the past few weeks as we were preparing to leave Pine Island and come home to Michigan, especially given that the home we had been wintering in for the past three years would no longer be available to us next season.
As a child, feeling homesick was a very common emotion, and I can bump into that feeling even as an adult, so I made a conscious choice to do my best to stay present. I wanted to neither feel grief about letting go of a space that had been very nurturing to me, nor to long for another place that is filled with people that I love.
Wrapping my days with this intention, I organized my departure well enough to enjoy nature visits with Nancy, a friend I share both Michigan and Florida with. Nature seemed to respond to my intention in spades!
Visiting one of the nearby eagle nests, Nancy and I were treated to soaring eagle chick, not once, but twice! And the day before my departure, she and I had the most amazing dolphin sighting.
Our encounter was so prolonged, and unusual even in a setting where dolphins are common, I looked up the symbolic meaning of dolphin. Please honor the author by checking out the link for yourself, and enjoy this wonderful summary:
Christian symbolism conveys the dolphin as an aspect of Christ. Dolphins seen in Christian art are symbolic of resurrection. Some artists utilize the protective, stabilizing, compassionate demeanor of the dolphin as a message of wellbeing to the pure of heart.
Some artistic renditions speak of dolphins transporting the spirits of the faithful to Christ’s side upon leaving their physical bodies.
This dolphin meaning is mimicked in ancient Greece where legend tells us the dolphin was responsible for carrying the souls of the dead to the Islands of the Blessed.
- Playfulness
- Transcendence
- Gentleness
- Harmony
- Intelligence
- Contentment
- Friendship
- Community
- Resurrection
- Generosity
- Power
The following evening, as we had left Florida and were heading north, we walked to a small restaurant near the hotel we were staying for the night. As I walked the short block, I was having cellular memory of other times and places I had walked to dinner. It was so clear that dolphin meaning was working:
This is a key understanding because the dolphin meaning is connected with themes of duality. It has to do with the dolphin being both fish and mammal. It is both of the water, and an air breather. Ergo, dolphin symbolism talks to us about “being in two worlds at once.”
As I bid farewell to Florida and hello to Michigan via some delicious days with Stacey and Doug and Brad and Christina and Adam and Courtney in Tennessee, I say thank you to two worlds. There is great love for all!
By Debra Basham, on March 18, 2015
Maybe the most important teaching is to lighten up and relax.
It’s such a huge help in working with our crazy mixed-up minds to remember that what we’re doing is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting it spread.
We’re letting it blur the sharp corners of self-criticism and complaint.
When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön
Perhaps other cultures have an easier time of it, but as Westerners, it may not come as a huge surprise to you that humans are not usually very compassionate with ourselves (or with one another). Previously, I have written and spoken about how ingrained blame and shame are to those of us who grew up hearing the story of Adam and Eve. In that story, the female archetype caused the male archetype to do something bad. In the book of Genesis, Chapter 3, Verse 12:
The Man said, “The Woman you gave me as a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree, and, yes, I ate it.”
God said to the Woman, “What is this that you’ve done?”
The freedom comes from our being able to sit with the pain of what is. I love how Gary Zukav and Linda Francis have provided a better way of relating through their Spiritual Partnership Guidelines.
Essentially we are able to become aware of our reactions, especially strong emotions, and take responsibility for our feelings, experiences, and actions. Imagine if the story we were told as a foundation for our faith journey went more like this:
The Man said, “I am sorry. We did not intend any wrong. The fruit was there and we both had some.”
God said to the Woman, “That is a good man you have there.”
Of course, we do not have to pretend we are in relationship with a good man or a good woman. We are all capable of bringing a greater consciousness to each of our relationships. We can learn to act from the healthiest part of our being, and to easily say, “Oops,” if we notice that we were not in integrity about something.
This winter I have been focused on learning more and more how individuals can overcome the biology of addiction. Tommy Rosen of Recovery 2.0 fame is someone I have come to appreciate in that area. I read about an experience he had at a facility for recovery of 13-20 year-olds. When he asked this group why they had come there, he expected to have them say they were there because of drugs and alcohol. What he heard, instead, in every case, was they were there because of anxiety and trauma.
You can download a free pdf version of the Spiritual Partnership Guidelines. You have to love what it says at the top (and bottom) of the page:
PRINT • SHARE • PLACE EVERYWHERE • EXPERIMENT WITH YOUR LIFE
And remember to enjoy yourself!
By Debra Basham, on March 8, 2015
Hank’s friend was in Michigan this winter rather than in Florida golfing with Hank. John lost his spot on Jerry’s golf league. About 1:00 pm today, John’s phone rang. Hank was calling to get the name and address of the golf course they were going to play on Tuesday. “I will call my brother and call you right back with that information.”
Jerry answered the phone, but John could barely make out what he was saying about his dog, Max. “I cannot think about golf right now. We left Max at Kathy’s so we could all go out to dinner last night. When we got back, Max had broken through a screen. We have been out looking, but he is still missing. We may not even be golfing on Tuesday.” John hung up the phone near tears himself.
“He will try to find his way home,” I said. We both knew how difficult that would be. Max had gone missing from somewhere other than his own home, and would be trying to find his way to a “seasonal” home, along the crazy-busy roads in that area at this time of year….
Never realizing how significant it would turn out to be, John and I had had the opportunity to be part of a happy ending when a lost dog named Sophie got home safely thanks to social media (See: The Tool is Neutral).
Sophie’s information had been posted on the Pine Island Prospect Facebook page, so I quickly posted Max’s photo there. Within minutes, a wonderful woman shared it on the Cape Coral Pet Lost and Found Facebook page. This was the area where Max had gone missing!
Going to that page, I was greeted by a photo of Max with this message: “Picked up this cutie last night at the corner of Skyline Drive in front of El Rio golf course. Please share so we can get him home. Thanks.”
Calling Jerry, I almost yelled into the phone, “Max is safe! I am looking at a photo of him right now! He was found last night, and the woman who found him has your number now!”
“A woman just called me!” Jerry quickly responded.
“Take the call. She has Max!” Hanging up, John and I shared tears of gratitude and awe. One hour after we learned Max was missing, Jerry and Max were reunited.
Professor of World Religions, Huston Smith, said, “Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home.” Grace is the only word to describe what happens when we follow the threads woven together to reveal how Max and Sophie and Hank and Jerry—and everyone and everything in life is connected in one grand web.
By Debra Basham, on February 26, 2015
How much more our beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions dictate our emotions, but weather can really get people down. A gray day can drag our mood down, or sunshine can lift our spirits.
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| Photo taken by my sister-in-law, Cindy Basham. |
Having spent the past few winters in sunny Southwest Florida, I marvel at how easily folks there get blessed by sunshine all winter long. Michigan winters are notoriously gray. It may be more the lack of sunshine that affects folks even more than the cold or snow.
My musings on weather and moods, and a writing prompt photo inspired three differently styled poems. Enjoy “Three Variations on Clouds Hanging Overhead” I wrote in February 2014.
Clouds hang overhead, hijacking the horizon as far as the naked eye can see. The reflection of these clouds in the still waters below creates the illusion of clouds being everywhere. How like problems, these pesky clouds. Feeling low, mental clouds seem to span the distance from past to present to future—dimming the light of possibility almost to the point of nonexistence.
Carrying sufficient moisture to dampen all but the heartiest of souls, problem clouds of troubled memories choke out the azure blue of present life. “Why did you do THAT? What makes you believe YOU are worthy of love? See, we knew you would fail.”
Toxic habits of shame slide into the human body unnoticed: slinking past adoration, forgoing appreciation, and leaving behind a massive, putrid, vapor of regret spread wider than the contrails obediently following behind jet planes carrying people hither and yon.
Father Sky opens wide to clouds. Billowy blankets of white on a sunny day, and even stormy fists of green and black and gray. Lakes smooth the way, providing a willing vessel for these clouds’ illusions to rest a while. The nature of our nature is to embrace all that is passing away and coming to be.
Coming to be free from shame. The sun will shine again.
Coming to be free from self-doubt. The clouds will not always be out.
Coming to be free from the shackles of prisons made of what ifs or buts…
Rising above all illusions, reflecting only colors. Colors born of water drawn up from the face of our beloved Mother Earth as infant particles of dust.
From dust we come; and to dust we return.
Clouds fill the sky, but need not bring tear to eye.
Someday, you will look back on all this and laugh.
Why wait?
Haiku
Clouds over Lake Champlain
Will these clouds drench us with rain?
Even while the sun shines
Let clouds fill the sky
Only once—without the why
Let them drift on by
Smile, and feel relief
Why give freely to a thief?
Illusions steal joy
And the last one:
Sitting by the lake, looking out over the placid water, I could see only clouds. The sky was filled with grey clouds tinged with white cottony edges. Looking down, looking up, glancing left and glancing right—as far as I could see: clouds.
Perusing the scene before me, it popped into my mind how much life’s problems are just like these clouds. The emotion of a current challenge can reflect onto the surface of those smooth areas of our life robbing us of creativity and inspiration and joy!
Looking only at what has or might go wrong is like seeing those clouds reflected in the water and letting the illusion convince us that the situation is hopeless or we are a failure or unworthy of well-being.
Once you take on as the vital truth of you, the nature of nature, you can watch emotions’ clouds drift across the sky knowing that they too shall pass. This is the nature of true freedom: “Only one life, ‘twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.”
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