"Let the River run..."

"Let the river run,
Let all the dreamers
Wake the nation.
Come, the New Jerusalem..."
- Carly Simon

Okay, I admit it…I love Facebook.  But not for the all the reasons you may be thinking…well, maybe some of them, too.  But in addition to the social networking--staying in touch with friends from camp and from my work at the college--there is "a something more" about this site that makes me feel like I am back in the 60s and we are rallying a movement.

Take my friend Joe…he's just out of college and has such a deep and abiding commitment to social reform that he has started a green initiative "group" on Facebook.  This young man and his ideas have great potential for becoming an environmental movement of global proportion. He's found a forum for his activism that is limitless in reach.

Or consider Warren and Megan, long known for their skirmishes with the politically apathetic. They campaigned tirelessly in 2004 for Dennis Kucinich. Today they find a new meeting place to connect with those who share their "voice of reason" (and to introduce their ideas to those who may not) on this remarkably facile online social network.

On Facebook I can hear the roar of grass roots lobbying every time I log in.  I can almost feel the wet paint on my fingers as virtual placards and signs for one candidate, movement, cause, or another is painted, and posted, each day.

Part of the fun for me is to visit the pages of those causes or groups that either interest me or confuse me…and I can wander through the virtual halls of their leaders and acolytes weighing in on issues, or just quietly listening to their debates.  This is the place I go when I want to hear the cry of the people or take the pulse of the world today.  This is where I get my prayer agenda each morning.  If something is percolating in global consciousness it is may just surface here first.  If there is going to be a Woodstock today it isn't going to find its roots in a cornfield in upstate New York…no, I think it will rise from the fertile valley of Facebook where seeds of social responsibility and global ethics are sown each day.

Yesterday I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the live coverage of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker's visit to the Senate.  The level of political maneuvering was toxic.  The live coverage (even on NPR, a network which usually leaves me feeling informed) left me instead feeling a bit schmarmy.  I didn't know whether to trust that the questions being asked by Senators, who are also 2008 presidential hopefuls, were part of a political strategy or came from a genuine desire to bring transparency about the war to their constituency and inform them in making wise decisions.

Normally I would have just hoped that The Christian Science Monitor would help me find some perspective the next day…while I continued to pray that my hard-won sense of hope hadn't been crushed.  But instead I decided to go to Facebook and "listen" to the hearts of young activists who were thoughtful and cogent in expressing their perspectives, concerns and, yes, wise "next steps" for us as voters, global citizens...and spiritual thinkers. And, I could do it at 2 in the morning when all the coffehouses and student unions were closed for the night. Here I could find a community of political night-owls still ready for discourse and action.

Mary Baker Eddy once said that, "This age is reaching out towards the perfect Principle of things; is pushing towards perfection in art, invention, and manufacture.  Why, then, should religion be stereotyped, and we not obtain a more perfect and practical Christianity?  It will never do to be behind the times in things most essential, which proceed from the standard of right that regulates human destiny.  Human skill but foreshadows what is next to appear as its divine origin."

Facebook is one invention that I was very grateful for last night.  I love the fact that spiritual, political, global, environmental, and social activists are finding a larger forum for their rallying cry.  I am grateful that as a once-upon-a-time (heck, still) bra-burning, draft-resisting, war-protesting hippie, I can weigh in, listen up, drop in, sit in, attend a love-in, or march with these extraordinary young thinkers on a global scale every night...and not get arrested. 

To be able to watch the numbers climb as groups, set up to champion candidates, swell with supporters is invigorating.  I don't feel the loneliness I often felt in the early 70s when returning to campaign headquarters (after getting door after door slammed in my face), I found the office dark and the mimeograph machine quiet.  Student campaigners today can discover, with a click, that the rank and file of supporters has risen by the hundreds between classes.  With that kind of encouragement there is so much reason to stay the course. The calvary isn't just on its way…it has arrived!!!   I can almost hear Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan singing in the background.   Well, actually they are...on my iTunes...isn't this a great time to be on this planet!

So, here's to Facebook, an "invention" that, for me, foreshadows the grandeur of Mind…the all-inclusiveness of Spirit.  This is a forum that knows no hierarchy and silences only that which is mean-spirited...or unkind. 

If you haven't visited this online peace movement that knows no political color, either red or blue (and I am convinced that both want peace no matter how different their approach to reaching that goal may be), ask your child or grandchild to show you.  Ask them to give you a guided tour of this virtual Washington monument pool filled with flower children….and policy-wonks, and lobbyists...and me.  And if you are a Facebook regular, feel free to "friend" me.  I'd love to get to know you…and your ideas.

"We the great and small
Stand on a star
And blaze a trail of desire
Through the dark'ning dawn.

Oh, my heart is aching.
We're coming to the edge,
Running on the water,
Coming through the fog,
Your sons and daughters.

It's asking for the taking.
Trembling, shaking.
Oh, my heart is aching.

We're coming to the edge,
Running on the water,
Coming through the fog,
Your sons and daughters.

Let the river run,
Let all the dreamers
Wake the nation.
Come, the New Jerusalem."

See you there,
Kate

"Conviction of the Heart"

"One with the earth, with the sky
One with everything in life
I believe it will start
With conviction of the heart…"

-Kenny Loggins/Guy Thomas
Conviction of the Heart

My relationship with Kenny Loggins' Leap of Faith CD is a conundrum.  The first time I heard it (click on the title of the song below Kenny and Guy's names to hear the song yourself), I was both captivated and shocked. The African/Carribean percussion rhythms on "Conviction of the Heart" were delicious.  But the raw candor of his lyrics on songs like "Leap of Faith" and "The Real Thing" left me reeling and angry.  I wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and never listen to the CD again. 

His call to live with emotional integrity poked at all of the most tender places in my heart. Those dark corners where my deepest fears about not being worthy of love smoldered -- just waiting to burst into flames, and devour all that I held dear. What if I had only convinced people to love me by doing good? By giving generously? By being nice? Would they hear these songs, and suddenly realize that their love for me was as uncertain and fragile as my love for myself?

I felt taunted and threatened by songs that were meant to encourage and empower.   However, my long love affair with Loggins' lyrics has spanned three decades, and I am not only a lyrics-junkie, but a loyalist. Remember, I am the one who still loves George best, proud to never have become Paulist, forty years after first hearing George's,  harmony vocals on "All My Loving."

But back to Loggins and Leap of Faith.  I had to decide whether I could bear avoiding the CD altogether, and thus deprive myself of the pure joy of hearing his young daughter's voice on "Conviction of the Heart." I am a sucker for the introduction of children's vocals in songs.  Or I could choose instead to find a few tracks to savor, while avoiding the poking and prodding of Loggins' invitation to look more deeply into the nature of relationships - personal, environmental, and global.  I chose the latter and listened to "Conviction of the Heart," over-and-over-again as I drove from my office or to our daughter's preschool in 1991.

Since "Conviction of the Heart" was one of the songs I could listen to without imploding emotionally, I must have heard it a hundred times a week. And no, this is not an exaggeration.  The compelling "One with the earth, with the sky, one with everything in life.." heard over and over again must have started to really sink in.  I started to  recognize the presence of this universal truth in almost all of the spiritual literature I read.  The Bible, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, Eddy's Unity of Good, the Tao, Gibran's The Prophet…and later, Morgan's Mutant Message from Down Under, and Redfield's Celestine Prophecy all pointed to this remarkable truth: we are one.

"One with the earth, with the sky
One with everything in life
I believe we'll survive
If we only try...

One child, one dream, only one life
One earth, one sky, only one world
I believe it will start
with conviction of the heart...

How long must we wait to change
This world bound in chains that we live in
To know what it is to forgive,
And be forgiven?

It's been too many years of taking now.
Isn't it time to stop somehow?
Air that's too angry to breathe, water our children can't drink
You've heard it hundreds of times
You say your aware, believe, and you care, but...
Do you care enough
To live with Conviction of the Heart?"

In 1991 this song brought new focus to my prayers -- my views -- about myself and my relationship with the world beyond the boundaries of my own skin.  "Conviction" poked at my corpo-reality -- an absurd sense of personal life. One that is defined by what is inside of the skin.  An "I AM" that now seems as bizarre and ridiculous as thinking that the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around the earth (i.e. everything inside of my skin was me, everything beyond the boundaries of my skin was not me, or "other")  I began to consider that there was another way of looking at my relationship with the world. That my reality was not corporeal, but spiritual, and that this spiritual reality was much more inclusive and expansive. 

Just as the molecules of my fingernails are very different than the cells of my fingers, so the air just beyond my fingertips very different than the "flesh" of the finger itself.  But that both were an extension of the "I AM" -- of my consciousness.  Neither air or finger cells are more me, or less me, than the other.  Both allow me to serve God's purpose in this space, and at this time.  The air allows me to breathe, my fingers allow me to touch -- both are important. 

When I began to look at the world around me as simply an extension of the "body" of my thinking -- my consciousness of being -- as the body of my work, my family, my environment, I began to take better spiritual care of it. 

And not only did I care for this "body" with greater conviction of the heart, but I ceased to have an antagonistic relationship with it. 

For many years I had suffered with grass and pollen allergies that were quite aggressive.  I remember thinking that the large bushy-headed pampas grass just outside the front door of our house on Aberdeen Lane was my enemy.  The minute that devil bush started pluming out, I avoided the front door.  I had to sneak in the back sliders off the kitchen if I wanted to avoid itchy, puffy eyes and a red nose at school.  And as a 13-year-old, "blotchy" was not an option. 

My adverse relationship with all things pollen-y continued through adulthood.  It made springtime difficult -- at best. That is, until Loggins Leap of Faith. My obsessive listening  to the "Conviction of the Heart" lyrics, began to penetrate more deeply. That ego-based, or personal sense of existence, paradigm that I'd long-held started to shift and my understanding of who I was in relation to the world expanded.  

As I walked within this larger body of being I was suddenly not in opposition, but in cooperation with everything around me. Much in the same way that the hand and and the eye need to cooperate to throw a ball. Or the ear and the feet work together in executing a beautifully choreographed and balanced arabesque during a piece music -- I ceased to be in conflict with my own being. I ceased to think of myself as separate from the "I AM" that existed outside the boundaries of a false corpus/epiderm-based sense of self.  I began to act out from a more inclusive sense of the "only I or us" -- the one Ego that has, as its center and circumference -- God. This "I" is infinite -- without border, boundary, or constraint.

And I never suffered from grass/pollen allergies again.  Immunity was unnecessary -- since there was nothing outside of this all-inclusive oneness from which to be immune -- no infection, irritation, interference.  No foreign anything.  All that was -- was real. And if it was real, it was of God and was already included as part of the body of my consciousness of being.   Or, as Eddy says in Science and Health,

"All that is, is the work of God and all is good. 
We leave this brief glorious history of spiritual creation
In the keeping of God, not of man,
In the hands of Spirit, not of matter,
Joyfully acknowledging now and forever
God's supremacy, omnipotence, and omnipresence."

Hey, here was a new job description…"leave things in the hands of Spirit and joyfully acknowledge God's supremacy, omnipotence and omnipresence."  And as it says in First Thessalonians:

"In everything give thanks,
for this is the will of God
in Christ Jesus concerning you."

Eddy further drives this message home when she says:

"
One, infinite God, good unifies men and nations,
constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars;
fulfills the Scripture, 'Love they neighbor as thyself,'
annihilates pagan and Christian idolatry, --
whatever is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political and
religions codes; annuls the curse on man,
and leaves nothing that can
sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed."

[emphasis added]

In the 1996 film "Phenomenon," John Travolta's character recounts to an audience gathered around him at a local fair that one of the largest living organisms on earth is an aspen grove (one I visit each summer) near the Continental Divide.  Scientists discovered that this grove, long thought to be tens of thousands of individual trees, was really only one tree, sharing an underground root system -- each of the once-believed individual trees, just an extension of that one single root. 

Hmmm. If I am not defined by what is inside this thin layer of skin -- if I am more than I see -- then I am not defined by the shape of what this skin contains.  And if I am not defined by the shape and form of what is "within" this skin, where does this leave me on the question of gender?  If I truly am one with everything I include in the body of consciousness -- men, women, trees, dogs -- where does that leave me on the question of speciesism, food chains, hierarchies, wealth and poverty, the environment?  

If there is only this one all-inclusive body of being, where does that leaves us as we consider our responsibility in caring for one another? What defines our "self", or family, our community, our neighborhood, our circle of concern? Al Gore once called "Conviction of the Heart" the unofficial anthem of the environmental movement.  I see it as a call to action for true health, human rights, environmental responsibility, education, social justice, economic parity…

"One with the earth, with the sky
One with everything in life
I believe we'll survive
If we only try.."

with conviction,
Kate

Being a Verb

Four weeks ago on an early Spring Friday night we found ourselves sitting in the back of a packed college auditorium waiting to hear one of the freshest political voices of the decade. 

Barak Obama found his way to the podium as students, faculty, administrators and guests gave him a rousing ovation in obvious  admiration for his already strong legacy of thoughtful choices and decisions as a freshman Senator.

He "had me at hello"...smart, humble, clear, concise....thoughtful, purpose-driven and generous...a social advocate of the highest caliber I was ready to offer my services -  in advance -  of a 2008 bid for the presidency.

His statement on holding national office rang true with what we were experiencing of his candor and irreverence for pomp and circumstance when he said, "I don't care about the title of Senator...I don't want to be something, I want to do something."   I sat back in my very comfortable auditorium chair and had to fight to stay engaged in what he was saying...rather than spin off into my own orbit of self-examination....so I took out my PDA  and pulled up a blank memo to capture that sentence for digesting later, and went back to listening to one of the most riveting hours of nonpolitical musing on the state of education in this country that I, as a  former teacher and school principal, had heard in a long time...but more on that in another blog.

In going back over, what became, a long list of bulleted "quotes" from that evening later that weekend, I again was stopped in my tracks by his statement that in essence said,  "I'm not seeking to be something, but to do something..."

I have long been focused on the difference between living my life as a verb, rather than a noun.  But Obama's comments demanded that I revisit how effectively I have been letting my own life articulate that philosophy. 

For most of my adult life I was all about the nouns...or at least thought I was.  I needed a child so I could be a mother, I wanted to be published so I could call myself a writer, I wanted a classroom and a group of students assigned to me for nine months... so that I could see myself as a teacher...you get the picture...without the permission of a noun (the right...or any for that matter ... person, place or thing) I was not validated. 

My journey out of this noun-based thinking came through what Mary Baker Eddy refers to as the "stress of circumstances"....

In 1988, after years of longing and praying (while both single and married) to be a mom, I was finally blessed with some hope that my dreams would be coming true.  My husband and I were asked to adopt an unborn infant.  I would soon be a mom.  I had waited for so long for a baby so that I could begin my adventure into the inner sanctum of mothering, what I knew was my native land, indigenous culture, and first language...mommydom...filled with lullabies, chocolate chip cookies, and Babygap.   I had helped my parents (and later my widowed mom) raise my seven younger brothers and sisters and I knew I could do it...I had the skillset and the long playlist of lullabies in my toolbelt to get me started, and as a former elementary school teacher and principal, I knew kids.  All I needed was a baby (noun) and I was good to go.   Now it looked like I was finally going to get my chance to be a mom (noun).

After our son was born, I enjoyed some wonderful days of bliss with him before it became clear that his birthmother was reconsidering her surrender and although it took quite a long time for her questioning to become conviction, my peace of mind was shattered with her first indication of uncertainty.  How could I go back to NOT being a mother? 

Since this is a blog and not a novel (and you can always call or e-mail and ask for specific details if you are so inclined...it's a healing that I never get tired of sharing) suffice it to say she did finally decide to parent "our" son herself and I learned some valuable (more so than I could ever have imagined at the time) lessons on the importance of being able to  "surrender" (verb) in the office of motherhood.

My healing essentially came when I ceased to think that I was waiting for a baby (noun) to mother (verb).  To "mother" is a verb.  It includes expressing the qualities of care, order, nurture, affection, support, joy, attentiveness, etc.  Being the expression of these qualities is active...not passive.  You can do it anytime, anywhere, with anyone....it doesn't require a person place or thing to validate it's right to be.  To "mother" is to be a verb...qualities in action.  I didn't need to wait to DO it...and in fact it was exercising my right to "mother" (verb) that brought forth the child (noun)....not the other way around (and that truly is another story). 

I now share the mothering of our four daughters and one son with their birthmothers, their fathers, their step mothers and fathers, their partners, aunts, uncles, grandparents (birth and step), teachers,  coaches, camp counselors, bunkhouse moms....the world family.  

With the realization that being a verb was life...a whole world of opportunities and possibilities opened up before me.  I stopped waiting to get published before I thought of myself as a writer...I was, and am, a writer because I WRITE (verb) and always have written... voraciously...and suddenly I found that I was being published....often!

I ceased to wait until we owned a house (noun) in the right location (noun) before I would invest in home improvement with all the design skills and talents I enjoyed expressing, but started improving whatever space I was in....my office, a friend's backyard, the rental house we were in...first by bringing in beautiful thoughts, then possibly (if asked) by sharing ideas for how it could be rearranged or maybe even how a change in paint color or a decrease in clutter could bring out the beauty of the space...and without realizing it we were in "our own" home making improvements and investing our time and talents more broadly...not more significantly or in a way that more fully demonstrated my sense of "home" but just a further and fuller demonstration of those verbs that were already fully validated by their utility...not through a facility!

And the list of verbs that gave birth to nouns goes on and on!!

This "principle" has been most fully realized in my career as a Christian Science practitioner, or spiritual healer...there was a time when I thought my "practice" was defined by patients....NOT!!!

My practice of spiritual healing is defined, determined, validated by the PRACTICE (verb) of spiritual healing...first in my own heart, life, thinking....by the way I look at the world and those around me....the way I embrace my neighbor, the way I act on calls from the global community to engage in making a difference spiritually, the way I nurture the children (all children...of any agelessness) in my home (consciousness)....and then the calls from patients come in....not because I am a Christian Science practitioner....but because I practice the science (in the laboratory of my life) of being (verb) Christian (verb....loving, honest...you know the rest) unconditionally...without the need for nouns....just be cause it is who I am....I am a verb...

Thank you Mr. Obama for the timely reminder....

Now I am looking forward to turning words like summer and winter into verbs....as in, I summer (verb) in the mountains and I winter (verb) on the beach....ahhh...can't wait to see how those verbs give birth to nouns!!!   No more waiting for summer....camp all year round...heaven on earth!