Tag: MINDFULNESS

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

Why can’t we just love one another?

The Guardian Newspaper at one stage years ago, offered the big questions for readers to respond to.  One of them was ‘Why can’t we just love one another?’ 

Various answers came in – someone in Newcastle replied, ‘because some people come from Sunderland.’

What would you reply? Because some people are dangerous, selfish bastards, murderers, dictators? or billionaires, gypsies, crusties, communists, fascists, woke? maybe they belong to a particular nationality or religion? Or maybe they hurt you deeply.

How do we reach across that divide? Or do we even want to? As I said in my previous blog, we all have our different lenses with which we see the world and other people and that affects how we respond to them.

all images created by my niece E.K.Mosley for my book ‘Stephen from the Inside Out’

In my 20s I was one of those who thought that all you need is love.  I was inspired by Jesus who said ‘love one another as I have loved you.’  I lived in an intentional Christian community on the North Devon Coast for 2 years and then worked for 3 years in a Christian residential drug rehab for women. Many of them had been thieves and/or prostitutes to fund their drug habits.  One told me she had sold her mother’s 3-piece suite while her mother was out.  Many had been sexually/physically abused as children. Most, if not all of them, had begun serious drug habits by the age of 12 or 14.  One told me of injecting bleach. Then and now, my body tenses with horror at the thought of what drives a person to do that.

Yet…. Yet… She is the one who gave me the mug below.  The mug which says ‘a beautiful day begins with a little love.’  I still have that mug and if the woman who gave it to me ever reads this, thank you, D.

The other side has a picture of a rainbow.

Yes, some found better lives, but many left to return to drugs, some died. The suffering was deep.

Later I married Tim, moved, worked as secretary and was also part of a church that housed homeless people in the church building. A few would join us for the daily evening services. They were all welcomed.  We would stand in a circle round the altar in the middle of the large gloomy Victorian church with the vicar blessing the bread and wine. We’d be a motley collection of maybe 15 to 20 people: quiet elderly ladies, unwell people muttering, people in work clothes, monks in holy robes, and the occasional drunk man (almost always men) swaying slightly to stay upright and making inappropriate comments. One told me he didn’t expect to live till he was 30. He never did.  I didn’t know anything about his background but I did see the scars on his arms from cutting himself.

My faith at the time, held out that love conquered all, that in ‘the end’ it would all work out. The fact that I was part of a group of people, a church community that welcomed everyone helped me sustain this. But I still felt like screaming at times.

After 4 years, Tim and I left that city, moved 3 times and had 3 children.  6 years later we moved to a suburban area.  By then Tim was a church vicar. It was here that I met Stephen who was under section at a local psychiatric hospital.

I invited him to coffee once a week and occasionally took him to the church but people there avoided Stephen. He had a wary institutional look, wore baggy clothes with cigarette burns. He was tense and restless, would ask people for money and mutter dark things under his breath.   I felt indignant on his behalf but I was also finding him challenging.  He wanted to visit or ring me whenever he wanted. Guilt told me I should say yes but Self Preservation was putting up a fight.

Below is an extract from ‘Stephen from the Inside Out’ chapter 2 (please note that I read chapters back to him and he commented. These comments are in italics):

……………………………………………………………………………..

Stephen kept reminding me I was a Christian, that I was following someone who preached the way of love. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, ‘If someone asks, give’. I’d been a fully paid-up Christian for 17 years. What was the matter with me?

In my mind, rather floridly, the Guilt Queen, 
meticulously dressed, appears; 
one smart shoe firmly on the windpipe of Self-Preservation.

No-one was helping to share the load and I couldn’t lift the weight.

The Guilt Queen purses her lips:
‘no-one said it would be easy, Susie’.

One Sunday I was standing on the drive of our house with Stephen. He was expecting to come in. I waffled. I fumbled. I said very nicely that it wasn’t a good time for him to come over today. He wasn’t taking the hint. He glowered at me, grumpy and miserable. He didn’t want to go back to the hospital. It was horrible there. Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. Did I know how horrible it was?

The Guilt Queen stands behind Stephen,
inspecting a booklet entitled,
“Hypocrites of the 20th Century”.
She holds Self-Preservation in a headlock.

Did I know how horrible it was?Yes, I knew, yes, yes, yes of course… He pulled his trump card: ‘If you were Jesus, you’d invite me in’.

Suddenly Self-Preservation emits an elemental roar.
Guilt Queen is thrown. White noise.

‘I’m not bloody Jesus!’  I screeched into his face, before storming off, slamming the front door and bursting into tears.

Tim, my lovely husband and also vicar of the church, offered some basic theology,

‘You’re right. You’re not bloody Jesus.’

He then added, ‘If Stephen turns up whenever he wants, you’ll end up being overwhelmed and shutting him off for good and then nobody wins. Lay down some ground rules.’

Stephen surprises me by leaning forward and firmly agreeing with this: ‘Obviously, I needed some ground rules. I didn’t have to go back there. I was informal, I could have gone somewhere else. There was no excuse for my behaviour. All I can do is apologise. Quite frankly, I was a menace.’ He warms my heart; I hadn’t even thought of the other options available to him.

Without that piece of crucial advice, my connection with Stephen would never have survived.

………………………….

Why can’t we just love one another?  What do we even mean by love? Jesus’ version was pretty hard core although he is miss quoted. He said ‘love one another as you love yourself’ – that last bit gets lost.

I grew up with a mix of love being about ‘being nice’ and also ‘being kind to those less fortunate than myself’ and very little about loving myself because (and it was true) I was very fortunate.

As a result, I didn’t feel able to be direct, so relied on people to know social etiquette: not overstaying their welcome, not ringing me at 2am or asking me for money.   I did not understand that love might mean holding my own, being clear, even if I am ‘more fortunate’ than them. That love might mean, knowing that I too have needs and vulnerabilities. Perhaps most important, that maybe love means acknowledging I’m part of the mess, not above it all.

It was a vital awakening and it took me years to wake up to the fact that the problem was not Stephen – Stephen could not be anything other than he was. That was his gift.

Stephen never did ‘get better.’  He lived intensely.  He suffered and he enjoyed the moments that he could.  Below are 2 poems of his, one on a good day and one on a bad day:

POEM ON A GOOD DAY

'Ah the radiant beauty and scintillating charm

of the resplendent flowers, illuminating

the tranquil propensity of the garden

in the bright shining sun.

The persistently beautiful rhythm of the birds

chanting their ecstatic songs.'

Stephen
AND ON A BAD DAY

'This Life –

ah this wretched Life –

for me it seems to have no purpose, no point –

just an agonising struggle –

and I am not strong enough to overcome.

Alas, I am afraid I am not.'

Stephen

So… what about ‘all you need is love’?  Do I still think that? no. I still go with ‘Love others as you love yourself,’  but I see it as a practice.  We practise loving ourselves and others.  We practise receiving love from others. And we practise not expecting an outcome or thanks.  That, in my view is a more than a life’s work.

'In our love,
however little, 
we create a web 
which breaks a person's fall.'

S.Stead

The Space Between

I lie on my back and watch the clouds, squinting at the glare – blue sneaks through and the sun catches me.


Clouds like thoughts passing

Like thoughts there are layers – the lower layers of cloud pass more quickly, trotting past while the larger, mature clouds above seem to sit and ponder. Yet when I close my eyes for a few moments and open them again, the scene has changed beyond recognition. A blue sky with scraps of wool and tiny swirls of white, lies above me – where did all those clouds go? Where did all those thoughts go?

And now it’s hot. I sit up and see a tangle of butterflies hovering and flitting over a lavender bush nearby.

They drop and twirl
    float and catch
       those butterflies like my thoughts
          drawn by the sweetness of a spire of lavender

then distracted by another,
     lifted by the breeze,
          spinning in the light.

All this air around us

All this space that we don’t account for because we experience it as having no colour, no solidity.

We walk through,

We see through;

Without that air, that space, we’d be locked in, locked up, trapped and dead.

I feel so gloriously grateful for this space between, that I cannot touch, cannot see, cannot smell, yet it gives me life.

What about the space where thoughts appear? The great sky of awareness?

The thoughts flit, ponder, twirl and hover, or like clouds, bring heaviness or rain. Sometimes they wounds us,but they do all pass. Like the butterflies and the lavender bush and the bugs landing on my arms they give colour and weight and interest but it’s all the space in between and around that lets me see them. It is the space that allows me to respond.

Quiet for the mind is like sky to the clouds – Give it plenty – glorious, rolling miles of it, tonnes of cubic metres of it.

Give those thoughts space to roll and skitter, 
    thunder and threaten, 
        gather and scatter, or 
             disappear leaving a fresh brightness.  

They are always gathering and scattering, 
     heavy clouds passing, blue sky piercing 
        and behind them all is always 

Awareness, clear and wide, beautiful and boundless.

Lie on the grass. Look up. Watch the clouds pass. See all the space between and know that it is not the space that is ‘in between’ but us, the clouds, the butterflies, the lavender bush that intersperse this space. The space was there before us, will be there after us, encompasses all.

Mary Oliver, I bow to your poem of the One World.


Poem of the One World, by Mary Oliver (from ‘A Thousand Mornings’)

This morning
The beautiful white heron
Was floating along above the water

And then into the sky of this
The one world
We all belong to

Where everything
Sooner or later
Is part of everything else.

Which thought made me feel
For a little while
Quite beautiful myself.

Coming back to what matters

About 16 months ago, I and Tim left an entire way of life behind.  About 13 months ago a friend of mine, Stephen, left his entire life behind because he died. Within the space of 4 months, three friends of mine died. On the day I was told that Stephen had died, 13th August 2018, I had just spent the morning reflecting & brainstorming, ‘what is my deepest wish?’

 

In writing down the thoughts,  the most repeated phrase was ‘I do not want to be afraid’.  It finally formed into the following: My deepest wish is to play – to allow myself to make different patterns in the sand of my life and then allow the tide to wash them away.

 

As I finished writing , the phone rang and a voice said ‘Are you sitting down? Stephen has died.’

 

PLAYING LIFE AND LETTING GO  

I will play in the sand of my life

because it is sand

And its

Running

Through my fingers

 

Let us play together,

Let us build strange structures

Dig ditches

and fill with them water.

Let us create

Extraordinary shapes in

the sand and delicate

Patterns with shells and

Stones.

 

Let us play together

Create together

Argue

Fight

Laugh

 

Then watch the sea

In leisurely fashion

Erase

Our precious

Designs

 

And let them go

And let them go.

 

Over the coming year I played.  It was very serious play.  I discovered what it was like to be the executor of Stephen’s will, to become a mindfulness teacher,  to live in a home that was not public property (ie belonging to the church), to live without a car, and many other things.  I also discovered Extinction Rebellion.

What I kept finding was that I’d appreciate something valuable and then get carried away into planning, angsting, plotting or being utterly overwhelmed and then lose touch with the original experience.  Meditation would eventually bring me back.  That is one of the beauties of mindfulness.

 

So, with Climate Change and Extinction Rebellion.  I feel a deep love for this good earth:  my dog’s hairy face, the hundred different shades of green in the garden,  the crunch and taste of cox’s apples, the view from a hill I’ve just climbed…  Then I get caught up, rushing, worrying about whether to get arrested or not, becoming in turn furious, despairing and weepy over the burning of the rainforests, the destruction of the coral reefs and more.   That is not to be avoided but I also need to keep coming back to what matters, to let ‘the soft animal’ of my body love what it loves (see below: Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver).

 

In April, Tim set up an Extinction Rebellion Meditators Group,  a group of meditators who want their action to come out of their meditation, and in keeping with the ethos of Extinction Rebellion, want to respond deeply to this climate crisis, not react by pursuing a narrow ‘solution’ or finding enemies to hate.

It’s quite a challenge!  The group helps anchor me and keep me coming back to what matters:  connecting with the earth, myself, others, – discovering what contribution we can make, not only in relation to the climate crisis but in relation to what sort of people we want to be, what sort of society we want to live in.

Last year, two weeks before my friend Stephen died, I visited him in the nursing home he was in.  He was only 63 years old but by now he was an invalid.  He was in a wheel chair but he’d survived so much, it didn’t occur to me that he’d be dying anytime soon.  I had to travel 100 miles to visit him and was going to ‘fit in’ a visit to someone else as well but just in time, I recognised that push to ‘efficiency’ and chose deliberately not to do that and therefore not be rushed.

In the event, we sat on the porch outside his nursing home for nearly 3 hours, mostly in silence, as the sun slowly went down.  He’d had a lifetime of mental health issues and was struggling with his ‘voices’, I was struggling with the desire to ‘get on’ and with the irritation of having to light his cigarettes every 15/20 minutes by walking over to my car where there was fixed lighter.  Yet still, for large chunks of time we sat peaceably together.  When the nursing assistant came out to collect him, I said with feeling, ‘Thank you Stephen,’ meaning, thank you for the space to sit in silence together, to watch the sky change colour, to be present, to be here.  And Stephen said ‘Thank you for sitting with me’.

That was the last time I saw or spoke to him before he died.

 

What is your deepest wish? Or wishes.

What is it that matters most deeply to you?

Make time to remember

 

Wild Geese – by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/5300846002

 

 

 

‘You do not have to be good’ – a tribute to Mary Oliver, poet

‘You must not ever give anyone else the responsibility for your life’

 

Mary Oliver, U S poet, Pulitzer prize winner and inspiring human being, died on 17th January aged 83.  One of her most famous poems, “Wild Geese” begins:

‘You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.’

 

You do not have to be good – Every time I read that sentence, my shoulders drop in relief.  For over 12 years now, my intention has been to become more ‘real,’ rather than ‘good’ and for the last 5 years the poems of Mary Oliver have kept me company.  Like many others, I’ve been brought up to be ‘good’ and not to attend to my needs or pay attention to what I want in life.  As a result, I would not ask directly for what I wanted and often didn’t even know what I wanted.  Instead my tendency was towards the ‘passive aggressive’ approach: ‘I won’t tell you what I need but I’ll make it clear how disappointed I am that you didn’t work it out through ESP and do it anyway.’

But I’m changing!

Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘The Journey’ is that call to listen to yourself.  It begins:

‘One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.

 

You knew what you had to do…’

 

For some of us the bad advice, the voices calling, are mostly external and for some its all inside our heads but those voices, that advice can be so strong, so undermining of our confidence in our own voice, our own experience.

Its painful recognising our patterns of response and changing them but it is also liberating and delicious when we realise we are not trapped!

Mary Oliver was a gay woman who found her life partner, Molly Malone Cooke in 1964,  ‘I took one look and fell, hook and tumble’.  They lived together for over 40 years before Molly died in 2005.  After she died, in ‘A Pretty Song’ Mary writes ‘From the complications of loving you, I think there is no end or return.’

Mary Oliver never explicitly wrote about this side of her life but I would recommend  a read from  https://lithub.com/on-the-overlooked-eroticism-of-mary-oliver/ written by Jeanna Kadlec.  Jeanna remarks how Mary Oliver’s poems gave her hope as a young gay woman:

‘For me, someone who grew up in the evangelical church, the experience of reading “Wild Geese” has often been about receiving permission to desire within my own body: I do not have to be good; I do not have to repent.

‘You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.’

Whatever our faith/non-faith position is we all have an idea of what ‘good’ is that matters to us. It might be being good ‘morally’ or good in relationships or ‘following God”, or changing the world for the better in one way or another.  But unless we begin by seeking authenticity, the ‘goodness’ lark will either whiplash back on us (what a hypocrite/lousy mother/shit friend I am, etc|)  or the whip will land on others (they ‘should’ be…) .  So instead when I remember, I practice being real, bringing awareness and acceptance of myself as I actually am, having compassion for this human being here at this moment. It’s a life’s work.

For Mary Oliver, her work was to love and be amazed by this world.  It was mostly the natural world but not always.  In the poem ‘Singapore,’  Mary Oliver finds herself in the airport toilet when she notices a woman cleaning ashtrays in the toilet bowl:

‘Disgust argued in my stomach

And I felt in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it….’

But she stays and then,

‘When the woman turned I could not answer her face.

Her beauty and embarrassment struggled together and

neither could win.

She smiled and I smiled.  What kind of nonsense is this?

Everyone needs a job.’

And later

 

‘I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.

And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop

And fly down the river.

This probably won’t happen.

But maybe it will.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.

 

Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only

The light that can shine out of a life.  I mean

The way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,

The way her smile was only for my sake; I mean,

The way this poem is filled with trees and birds.’

 

I want to finish with one of Mary Oliver’s poems in its entirety.  It is called “When I am among the Trees”.  Trees don’t worry about being ‘good’,  they simply ‘are’ what they are, with their roots deep down in the soil connecting with this world and their branches and leaves reaching out to the light.  If you haven’t already done so, try standing against a tree for 20 minutes, feeling the bark supporting your back, looking up through rich layers of leaves or perhaps bare branches sharp against the sky, smelling the air, listening to sounds, breathing. Its a gift.

 

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

 

Thank you, Mary Oliver, for the light you have shone on my life.