LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver
Magic happens when we are busy being love. I don't mean being 'in' love, as if it were a substance we swim in. But being love, the walking talking ocean itself. Touching everyone and everything with our gentle wave, bringing love to everything we do.
A friend described her life of late: providing great service to people at work, realizing some visionary projects and handing some off to others, paying off debt and saving for the next big thing, tending the relationship in a new way with her life partner. She is happy, excited about life, and at peace.
Part of me is pure envy listening to all this wonderfulness. And still I am awake enough to recognize that she is Being Love. She's crossed into new territory. And she is making a difference. I am Present enough to be happy for her.
I try to remember moments of being love. Setting out for a hike, anticipating adventure. Making my husband laugh. That still, crackling point when a counseling session opens up and my client and I are deeply moved by discovery. Making art when I let it make me. Allowing myself to be all broken in front of other people. Letting their compassion mosaic me back together. Noticing that my cat has hypnotized me once again into giving him a belly rub.
How do I get back to this being love when it feels so far away? The envious part of me desperately needs to know. Does the self-care routine come first? My friend has fine-tuned her nutrition, rest, and yogic spiritual practice. She actively loves herself with the basics every day.
Or is it an internal action? A surrender to love, a YES to life, a declaration of I am here. It probably doesn't matter where it starts, as acts of self-love or reaffirming belief in love and the goodness of life. Just that it starts. In deep winter, with our much needed rains seeping into thirsty earth, seeds of being love are being fed.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
Creativity in Business Relationships
I asked my husband the furniture designer* where he sees creativity in business. He says it's all in the relationships. There's the client, vendors, collaborators, assistants. Say a client wants you to make X. You say YES, even though you've never done it before. You seek out someone who knows more about X. You envision how you could work best together, meet them, present your ideas and remain open to theirs. Others have the right materials or technology or know-how for these aspects, so you bring them in too.
You nurture all these relationships to be mutually beneficial, staying focused on creating X together in the best way. There's lateral thinking, flexibility, and intuition required to go where the relationships and the project are really taking you.
And ultimately, it might not be about X at all.
Rick Jarow, a favorite spiritual teacher on abundance and right livelihood, says our work is just an excuse to heal relationships and mend our karma. Tell that to corporate America. As we've seen too often recently, people do horrible things to others and the environment, then wave it off: Oh, it's just business! It may be business as usual, but it's usually not just.
Beautiful furniture, or whatever the offering, may be merely a benefit of developing a network of trusted collaborators. Tending relationships with creativity in mind goes a long way toward healing the wound of extreme self-reliance. Abundance for one, abundance for all.
*Check out www.gobuildstudio.com to see simple, elegant, modern furniture.
You nurture all these relationships to be mutually beneficial, staying focused on creating X together in the best way. There's lateral thinking, flexibility, and intuition required to go where the relationships and the project are really taking you.
And ultimately, it might not be about X at all.
Rick Jarow, a favorite spiritual teacher on abundance and right livelihood, says our work is just an excuse to heal relationships and mend our karma. Tell that to corporate America. As we've seen too often recently, people do horrible things to others and the environment, then wave it off: Oh, it's just business! It may be business as usual, but it's usually not just.
Beautiful furniture, or whatever the offering, may be merely a benefit of developing a network of trusted collaborators. Tending relationships with creativity in mind goes a long way toward healing the wound of extreme self-reliance. Abundance for one, abundance for all.
*Check out www.gobuildstudio.com to see simple, elegant, modern furniture.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Recipe, No Recipe
Sometimes it goes like this: Open fridge. Stare. Close door. Spiral light bulb flickers on above your head. Check cupboard, spy tin of sardines. Forage for leafy things, peppery things, orange things, more green crunchy things. No bread, but a few crackers. Go back for salad dressing, a bit of goat cheese. Pumpkin seeds?
Wash, chop, toss, add, arrange, serve. Lunch! Enjoy.
Other times it's like this: Pull out the disintegrating page torn from the old Moosewood cookbook. Gather measuring spoons to follow the recipe for cornbread you've made 523 times. This ritual needs no improvements. Every time it comes out perfectly; you are astounded again.
With creativity, recipes are only a starting point. The choreographer, dancer, children's book illustrator and author Remy Charlip created a series of Airmail Dances. He made spare line drawings of dancers in a series of simple poses. Mailing them off to trusted choreographers, he encouraged them to fill in the rest. A different dance for every choreographer, ten thousand ways to connect the dots. Remy gave space for others to create in the present moment in their own dance language, inspired by these simple landmarks.
Consider how you cook, garden, be with your children, do presentations, lead meetings, make love. There's room for creativity and experimentation in all these things. Where would we be without Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star Spangled Banner? What if Luke Skywalker had not used the Force?
There's also times when we need the comfort of the consistently astounding. We just need to awaken in the present and remember to be astounded, even if it's for the 523rd time. One client was running on automatic, producing without a sense of fulfillment, "missing all the good things." Recipe or no recipe, that is our task, to not miss this being alive.
Wash, chop, toss, add, arrange, serve. Lunch! Enjoy.
Other times it's like this: Pull out the disintegrating page torn from the old Moosewood cookbook. Gather measuring spoons to follow the recipe for cornbread you've made 523 times. This ritual needs no improvements. Every time it comes out perfectly; you are astounded again.
With creativity, recipes are only a starting point. The choreographer, dancer, children's book illustrator and author Remy Charlip created a series of Airmail Dances. He made spare line drawings of dancers in a series of simple poses. Mailing them off to trusted choreographers, he encouraged them to fill in the rest. A different dance for every choreographer, ten thousand ways to connect the dots. Remy gave space for others to create in the present moment in their own dance language, inspired by these simple landmarks.
Consider how you cook, garden, be with your children, do presentations, lead meetings, make love. There's room for creativity and experimentation in all these things. Where would we be without Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star Spangled Banner? What if Luke Skywalker had not used the Force?
There's also times when we need the comfort of the consistently astounding. We just need to awaken in the present and remember to be astounded, even if it's for the 523rd time. One client was running on automatic, producing without a sense of fulfillment, "missing all the good things." Recipe or no recipe, that is our task, to not miss this being alive.
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