Belief is EVERYTHING

Our bathroom kitty page-a-day calendar featured an interesting quote yesterday - - "Believe you can & you're halfway there." - from Teddy Roosevelt.


Reading TR's quote roused me to realize my deep belief that people who try to diminish denigrate derail others' sense of self belief commit a crime against humanity, perilously close to true evil.

Snake oil on steroids

Recently, the company who provides security for my computer tried to contact me about a possible security breach.  They sent an e-mail & they called.  BUT both the e-mail & the phone call sounded suspicious & I didn't pay attention.  The phone call was suspect because it was clearly made from a India or some such place, with the caller clearly in a room filled with other people making other calls.

I didn't know that the call was important because I've become so suspicious of such calls.  I've become suspicious that the caller id showing a local number isn't going to be from some far distant call center.

We've learned from Cambridge Analytica what folks with brains instead of butter already knew - that today's technology makes it easy peasy to manipulate our deepest emotions & especially irrational fears for their own ends.  Thanks to the hidden camera stars, we know that they used info we handed over - willingly - to get to know us better than our bestie BFF.

The question I'm facing full on this week isn't "Who do I trust?" or "When do I trust?" but it is "How do I trust - period?"  How do I trust that what I think I believe isn't a fear or prejudice brought to boil by nameless others with a purpose that is not in my best interests?

Realizing we've fully entered the realm of science fiction turned science fact.

Tapping into my Inner Molly

A couple weeks back, a young friend, wife of a former 6th grade student & mother of a lass dear to my heart, posted on Facebook that she would spend her Spring Break (she's a science teacher at our local high school) doing what she loves over that week - clearing & cleaning out her house.

Something in that posting totally clicked with me, which would seem to make no sense if you saw my house.  And I dismissed it as what I'd like to be important to me, but isn't.

Except it turns out that it is.  And, yes - my house is fiercely messy, but in some heavily walled-off section of my heart is a woman who loves order, craves cleanliness & wants to have a warm welcoming home, if only to myself, John & the cats.

I like tidy houses.  Not to the point of being impersonal, but not cluttered, not featuring open spaces piled with stuff. 

Am not expecting miracles, but am willing to kick my own butt, working to get past habits that have my adrenalin dipping in the face of challenge rather than revving up.

The combination of Molly's posting & how I responded to the recent snow storm was eye opening.  I stocked up on junk food, slept in late & did virtually nothing.  And it felt like that was the right thing to do.  The storm triggered me into doing NOTHING.  That does not set well with me.  Am giving myself a year to tap into my Inner Molly & become a person for whom a snow storm triggers delightful images of cranking up great music & doing a deep dive dust  or fridge clean, a basement review & living room lean in.

Molly's post shook me awake to a lifetime of quiet discontent at how I keep house, a chronic low-grade depression that kept me feeling sloggy instead of zoomed. 

Never saw it coming.  And now that I've seen felt acknowledged, can't pretend I don't have an Inner Molly shrieking to be let OUT, to become Deev - whole & happy housekeeper!

Daily Rituals redux

Four years & eight days ago, I was posting on DreamReweaver about a fresh realization of "a deep, forever desire for STRUCTURE."   

And an awareness that something outside of me "distracted discouraged dissuaded" me from change.  Love the last line, which - looking back - was & is my choice ~ ~  "Amazing what your eyes can see & your ears can hear & your heart can feel when you choose liberation over status quo."

Snowball's chance in Heaven!

2014 was the first time I experienced time folding & unfolding on itself.  Before then, I'd had experiences where people who had passed on were very much a part of my moment, but that's a different time mash-up.  In the time sense I'm having today, all the integral parts are - at the same time - distinctly separate & part of a greater whole.

All that I've worked on for all of my life is coming altogether in ways I could never have imagined yet which seem to be all part of a discernible piece that hikes itself back to the past & at the same time reaches forward to far distant dates.  None of it is comprehensible & it all makes complete sense.  To BE more fully & abundantly means paring down, ridding myself of the superfluous that once seemed spare.  It's free falling into a space without a net.  

I would love to take a bow for such surreal leaps, but the truth is that I didn't plan it.  Not any of it.  All I am doing, all I ever did - even when I wasn't aware of it - was to get out of the way of The One who did.  

Sib influence

It's seriously rare to hear about how our siblings influence - for good or ill - our behavior, but I am quite sure that I'm not alone in being way more influence by them than I ever was by my parents.  I like to think that a brother & sister can have an exemplary influence, that their kindness generosity ambition clarity focus inspired others within the family to develop those same traits.  

For lots of reasons, I took on a slew of my sister's self-limiting traits as my own, behaviors attitudes expectations assumptions that were antithetical to my nature.  Once I realized how out of whack they were/are with my life instructions I was born with, got easier to set them aside & latch onto the ones that came with my original plans.  

The past four years have been a time of off-the-charts opportunities, yet I've failed to take any one of them to full completion.  I've left them hanging around, cluttering rather than expanding my life.  Give my things, all of them, a place of their own & keep them there.  The things that have no place, move on. 

"Assure that everything is in its place & time, and your thoughts will be free to engage with what is before you."   (Rabbi Menachen Mendel of Satanov)  YES!  My thoughts have been roaming, they have NOT been engaging with what is before me.  My life is diminished by acting per my nurture instead of harking to my nature.  

Am I brave enough to, as Sister Joan Chittister puts it, "set out to find out for ourselves who we really are, what we know, what we care about, and how to be simply enough for ourselves in the world"?   To take what Rabbi Friedman describes as "a path of discovery," of what matters now" rather than what affixed itself to me through the years.  This "process of connecting to the past through memory, not just keepsakes ... is a powerful way to begin again."

Envisioning a life in which I AM rather than a hodge podge of whatever, cleared out, not only STILL creative, but now able to engage head & heart & hands.  

Am I brave enough to live according to my deep down nature rather than my convenient-in-many ways nurture?  Am I willing to BE, to connect to & engage with every bit of my being?  I'll do it in & through a way that celebrates all I AM.  

Hey - wait a minute!  What happened to the negative sib influence in my life??  Oh yeah - it's up in the title.  Will leave it there & move on.

Curiosity & Compassion - a priceless pair

In addition to gaining their insights & gleaning their inspiration, I get a special something from the life expansionist authors I love & to whom I am forever grateful ~ ~ I get language to hang around the concepts I've harbored yet never had the words to express.

Today, I had the happy coming together of uplifting authors and richly wise material.  Early in the day, I wrote a post that I thought had been inspired by Mark Wolynn's eye opening It Didn't Start With You, a book that thoroughly shook my magnolias on my first reading in 2016, soon after it came out.  

But wait!  Writing a totally different post, on another blog, realized that it had been reading reading Rabbi Dayle Friedman's wondrous Jewish Wisdom for Growing Older, which came out the year earlier, that had opened me up in the first place, pierced me through & through with fresh perspective & unexpected ahas, ready to be thoroughly marinated in Mark Wolynn's w-i-d-e reaching, many generation points of view & impact.

Between the two, an unexpected & - for me - ideal pairing, placed in my hands the two words I've struggled to come up with for lo these many years:  the natural qualities that kept my feet on the ground (even when I felt thorough messed up, insecure & screaming with confusion) were CURIOSITY & COMPASSION.  And I can't think of two qualities that would have driven my sister & older brother more around the bend.  But they worked for me!  Still do.  

Both Mark & Dayle urge people to approach life with curiosity & compassion.  Although I didn't have the language until now to dress those concepts in, they were both very real to me. 

I've always been curious about what made my funk-a-licious family tick - infinitely aggravating to people like Peter, who is the non-questioning sort;  years & years ago, when Mom asked him why he & the others were so unhappy with the person she'd evolved into, it was reported he drew himself up, looked her straight in the eye & declared, "You - ask - questions!", something she honestly never did until her final years.  Up to then, Mom was defensively incurious about her children - she'd found it to be a good protection.  But she discovered that being openly curious was a lot more fun!

What a gracious quality curiosity has, when paired with compassion.  How liberating I have found that duo to be.  To be curious without judgement, to lead from compassion - spirit releasing.  Is curiosity tempered by compassion -or- is compassion deepened through curiosity? Matters not - pair them together & they become the core ingredients of my happy life.