Ch-ch-ch-changes…

Four “Novel Women”

 Ramona posted this on social media today, and I send it on to you:

“I asked a friend who has crossed 70 and is heading towards 80 what sort of changes she is feeling in herself? She sent me the following:

1. After loving my parents, my siblings, my spouse, my children and my friends, I have now started loving myself.
2. I have realized that I am not ‘Atlas’. The world does not rest on my shoulders.
3. I have stopped bargaining with vegetable and fruit vendors. A few pennies more is not going to break me, but it might help the poor fellow save for his daughter’s school fees.
4. I leave my waitress a big tip. The extra money might bring a smile to her face. She is toiling much harder for a living than I am.
5. I stopped telling the elderly that they've already narrated that story many times. The story makes them walk down memory lane & relive their past.
6. I have learned not to correct people even when I know they are wrong. The onus of making everyone perfect is not on me. Peace is more precious than perfection.
7. I give compliments freely & generously. Compliments are a mood enhancer not only for the recipient, but also for me. And a small tip for the recipient of a compliment, never, NEVER turn it down, just say ‘Thank You.’
8. I have learned not to bother about a crease or a spot on my shirt. Personality speaks louder than appearances.
9. I walk away from people who don't value me. They might not know my worth, but I do.
10. I remain cool when someone plays dirty to outrun me in the rat race. I am not a rat & neither am I in any race.
11. I am learning not to be embarrassed by my emotions. It’s my emotions that make me human.
12. I have learned that it's better to drop the ego than to break a relationship. My ego will keep me aloof, whereas with relationships, I will never be alone.
13. I have learned to live each day as if it's the last. After all, it might be the last.
14. I am doing what makes me happy. I am responsible for my happiness, and I owe it to myself. Happiness is a choice. You can be happy at any time, just choose to be!”

Smile on Your Neighbor

New/Old Friends

Events surrounding my nonagenarian friends, who have been having a rough time, have caused me to think about neighbors. During a recent ice event in our town, my friends were alone in their home (their son having passed away the previous week). The ice came quickly, and they had a problem with their phones so no one knew if they were in need. Friends called the police who did a welfare check, discovering they were safe. They then contacted a close-by neighbor to see if they would be available in case of emergency. When the neighbors visited in my friends’ home, it was the first time they had ever spoken, even though they had been next door to each other for years. I find this concept to be foreign because my neighbors have always been close friends, too. I hope this is true for most people! Even though sitting on the front porch visiting with neighbors is not as prevalent as before the invention of the television and computer, I hope people still gather together just for the fun of it! That common ground we all need to find is there, waiting for us to open the door, no matter what our philosophical differences may be. As a person who enjoys solitude, I know this isn’t always easy to do. But let’s remember, we don’t have to spend lots of time with people to acknowledge that we’re all in this together …

“The rich in spirit help the poor in one grand brotherhood, all having the same Principle, or Father; and blessed is that man who seeth his brother’s need and supplieth it, seeking his own in another’s good.” 

Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 518:15-19

“You are being blessed by every beneficent thought of any of your brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return, out of gratitude. You need not know them individually, or they you. The light is so strong that it radiates throughout the Sonship and returns thanks to the Father for radiating His joy upon it. Only God’s holy children are worthy channels of His beautiful joy, because only they are beautiful enough to hold it by sharing it. It is impossible for a child of God to love his neighbor except as himself. That is why the healer’s prayer is: Let me know this brother as I know myself.” 

A Course in Miracles T-5.in.3:1-8

In Togetherness, There is Responsibility

Citizens’ Advice To Congress is the title of an article in which three people express their ideas on how leaders can govern our democracy. One of the people interviewed was Antoinette Tuff. She was a substitute teacher in Decatur, Georgia when a young man with an AK-47 and a backpack of ammunition came into the school and announced, “We’re all going to die today”. She said her motherly instincts kicked in, not just for the children, but also the mentally ill young man. She started out by telling him, no, we’re not going to do this. In the nine minutes it took to talk him down, she repeatedly told him no one would be mad at him if he stood down, and that she loved him. Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who landed a plane in the Hudson River, saving all the people on board, said that he chose the least bad option — and he was glad to have it. Of our democracy crisis he states: “We’ve all gotten a real wake-up call. We’ve had the biggest civics lesson of our lives.” Everyday citizens have to keep on solving problems. A plumber in the D.C. area, Pete Kristiansen, says: “I understand laws enacted by Congress are big, important things. But we do big, important things, too. So if we can get things done, they should, too.” To our Congress he says, “In togetherness, there is responsibility.” Namaste…

“A feasible as well as rational means of improvement at present is the elevation of society in general and the achievement of a nobler race for legislation, — a race having higher aims and motives.” Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 63:23-27

“Our function is to work together, because apart from each other we cannot function at all. The whole power of God’s Son lies in all of us, but not in any of us alone. God would not have us be alone because He does not will to be alone. That is why He created His Son, and gave him the power to create with Him. Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself, as holy as He is. Through our creations we extend our love, and thus increase the joy of the Holy Trinity. You do not understand this, because you who are God’s Own treasure do not regard yourself as valuable. Given this belief, you cannot understand anything.” 

A Course in Miracles T-8.VI.8:4-11

Let It Out

One Billion Rising

Photo credit: Richard Quick

Women’s circles are powerful vehicles for creation and, also, release. While watching an episode of Better Things (a fabulous, irreverent television program), I thought of times when I’ve been part of a group of women who supported each other in a common cause. Lest I be thought of as sexist, I’m sure this could happen with any gathering of people, but it seems not as many men are open to the type of emotional honesty which is requisite for powerful purpose. The show which caused me to think on these things involved five women who gathered on Father’s Day to release pent-up resentment towards their ex-husbands. After writing and reading their pain, they burned the papers in a fire pit, held hands, and howled at the moon. I felt empowered just watching them! During the summer of 2020, while we were all in some form of quarantine, the people of Eureka Springs went outside and howled at 7 p.m. each evening. It felt really good. I hope some men were doing this, but the voices I could hear were women’s. I know the man in my house wouldn’t howl, insisting he couldn’t make his voice do that. Cheers to everyone who has the courage to express their true feelings, whatever those may be!

“Our self-made roles are shifting, and they seem to change from mourner to ecstatic bliss of love and loving. We can laugh or weep, and greet the day with welcome or with tears. Our very being seems to change as we experience a thousand shifts in mood, and our emotions raise us high indeed, or dash us to the ground in hopelessness.

Is this the Son of God? Could He create such instability and call it Son? He Who is changeless shares His attributes with His creation. All the images His Son appears to make have no effect on what he is. They blow across his mind like wind-swept leaves that form a patterning an instant, break apart to group again, and scamper off. Or like mirages seen above a desert, rising from the dust.” 

A Course in Miracles W-186.8:3–9:6

“The chief difficulty in conveying the teachings of divine Science accurately to human thought lies in this, that like all other languages, English is inadequate to the expression of spiritual conceptions and propositions, because one is obliged to use material terms in dealing with spiritual ideas. The elucidation of Christian Science lies in its spiritual sense, and this sense must be gained by its disciples in order to grasp the meaning of this Science. Out of this condition grew the prophecy concerning the Christian apostles, ‘They shall speak with new tongues.’”

Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 349: 13-22 

Home Is …

 

There’s nothing like a new circumstance in life to bring about self-examination of motives and acts. In my decision to move to Colorado later this year, I am coming face to face with why I am reluctant to do so. Of course, I love it here in Eureka Springs. No place has ever felt more like home, and I am happy here. Life is easy in its routines and I wish for nothing more than I have. It is scary to think of living in an apartment, yet it’s exhilarating to imagine new scenery and the possibilities of duplicate bridge and organist opportunities. The only reluctance I have in leaving this safe space is the fact that I really, truly do not like to socialize. But yet, I recognize that too much alone time allows me to lose empathy for others. It’s easy to slip into a complacent judgmental attitude when I’m not directly witnessing the difficulties of fellow humans. This is a rambling post as I’m thinking my way through this change which is both anticipated and dreaded. I just want to Be, not to do. And that can happen anywhere!

“We all must learn that Life is God. Ask yourself: Am I living the life that approaches the supreme good? Am I demonstrating the healing power of Truth and Love? If so, then the way will grow brighter ‘unto the perfect day.’ Your fruits will prove what the understanding of God brings to man. Hold perpetually this thought, — that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being.” 

Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 496:9-19

“Yet where He is, there must be holiness as well as life. No attribute of His remains unshared by everything that lives. What lives is holy as Himself, because what shares His life is part of Holiness, and could no more be sinful than the sun could choose to be of ice; the sea elect to be apart from water, or the grass to grow with roots suspended in the air.” 

A Course in Miracles W-156.3:1-3

A Violet in the Garden of Truth

 

Torii - Gateway to the Sacred

Photo credit: Blake Lasater

Kahlil Gibran has an essay titled The New Frontier, in which he asks groups of people who they are. This paragraph is of particular importance, I think …

“Are you a religious leader, weaving for your body a gown out of the ignorance of the people, fashioning a crown out of the simplicity of their hearts and pretending to hate the devil merely to live upon his income? Or are you a devout and a pious man who sees in the piety of the individual the foundation for a progressive nation, and who can see through a profound search in the depth of his own soul a ladder to the eternal soul that directs the world? If you are the first, then you are a heretic, a disbeliever in God even if you fast by day and pray by night. If you are the second, then you are a violet in the garden of truth even though its fragrance is lost upon the nostrils of humanity or whether its aroma rises into that rare air where the fragrance of flowers is preserved.”

“Shepherd show me how to go,

O’re the hillside steep;

How to gather, how to sow,

How to feed thy sheep.

I will listen for They voice,

Lest my footsteps stray.

I will follow and rejoice,

All the rugged way.”

Mary Baker Eddy - from the poem, Feed My Sheep

“Let us together follow in the way that truth points out to us. And let us be the leaders of our many brothers who are seeking for the way, but find it not. And to this purpose let us dedicate our minds, directing all our thoughts to serve the function of salvation. Unto us the aim is given to forgive the world. It is the goal that God has given us. It is His ending to the dream we seek, and not our own.”

A Course in Miracles W-fl.in.2:5–3:4

Passing Through Illusions

“Whatever suffers is not part of me" [ACIM ​W​orkbook ​L​esson #248]​ These words​ could possibly be taken as an unfeeling, heartless statement. I see it as an expression of pure Love which allows us to pass through illusions into the reality of good, God. The death of a loved one is difficult in many ways, but I think the myths we have concocted surrounding this passage may do more harm than good. We say things like, God took her to be with ​Him because she was so good. Although these words are spoken in the name of kindness, I’m not sure they help anyone ​who is grieving. As we begin to understand divine reality, we are released from the stories we tell ourselves in favor of the Truth which sets us free. I'll always remember reading the book, "Beloved Prophet", which is the story of Kahlil Gibran and the woman who loved him. She sat at his funeral with a peaceful smile on her face, and when asked why she wasn't upset, she responded that she had never felt closer to him. What a lovely realization of Oneness and eternity!

"It was the divine law of Life and Love, unfolding to me the demonstrable fact that matter possesses neither sensation nor life; that human experiences show the falsity of all material things; and that immortal cravings, ‘the price of learning love,’ establish the truism that the only sufferer is mortal mind, for the divine Mind cannot suffer." Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 108:5-11


​"​A Course in Miracles - LESSON 248​ - ​Whatever Suffers Is Not Part Of Me.

I have disowned the truth. Now let me be as faithful in disowning falsity. Whatever suffers is not part of me. What grieves is not myself. What is in pain is but illusion in my mind. What dies was never living in reality, and did but mock the truth about myself. Now I disown self-concepts and deceits and lies about the holy Son of God. Now am I ready to accept him back as God created him, and as he is.

Father, my ancient love for You returns, and lets me love Your Son again as well. Father, I am as You created me. Now is Your Love remembered, and my own. Now do I understand that they are one.​"​