"in the quietness of now..."

"oh, abide with me,
where it's breathless and it's empty;

yes, abide with me,
and we'll pass the evening gently;

stay awake with me,
and we'll listen more intently..."

Oh, Carrie.

Carrie Newcomer's  "Abide,"  is a most perfect description of the shared silence I so value in our marriage.

There are many day -- and even more nights -- where we share the space of our small home without sharing words. And yet, I have rarely felt so completely heard, understood, and known.

It is this "quietness of now" which allows each of us to serve our communities in the ways that we are most inspired to do -- moment-by-moment. I feel loved and supported in the deep silence of this space we occupy together.

To know that the person I am with, is listening into the quiet - with me - is such a comfort.  And it brings great peace.

Mary Baker Eddy wrote in her 1898 communion message:

"My sense of nature's rich glooms is, that loneness lacks but one charm to make it half divine — a friend, with whom to whisper, “Solitude is sweet.” Certain moods of mind find an indefinable pleasure in stillness, soft, silent as the storm's sudden hush; for nature's stillness is voiced with a hum of harmony, the gentle murmur of early morn, the evening's closing vespers, and lyre of bird and brooklet.

“O sacred solitude! divine retreat!"

I have been so blessed to have a life partner, children, dogs, and a friend, who share my love for simplicity, solitude, and silence. In these relationships, I have found the most profound kind of companionship. They are my sanctuary - my home.

I feel blessed -- pure and simple. I feel so blessed.

offered with Love,

Cate 

"deeper, and deeper - still..."

"Every valley

made me lift my eyes up, 

Every burden 

only made me stronger,

Every sorrow

only made your joy 

go deeper and deeper,

deeper and deeper..." 

Today in Sunday School I was blessed to have six visitors from Adventure Unlimited's Compass program.  Their mid-year retreat was being held at the ranches and they came into town for church.  I was so happy - since my normally bursting class of Link School students were in Peru this month for their expedition. 

Since we are a class of high school juniors and seniors, it didn't surprise me that our spiritual discussion circled back to college.  Since one of our class charters is: "what happens in Sunday School, stays in Sunday School" -- we never share what anyone else has said during class.  This provides a safe space for speaking our hearts.  So, I will not share anyone else's comments here -- only my own.  

When I got home - after Sunday School - I wondered if I'd ever written a post about an experience I'd had in high school -- and one that I shared with the class today.  I searched and found I hadn't.  And because every experience has to have a song - here is Meredith Andrews' "Deeper" to kick things off.  It reminds me to use the noise, in order to find the silence.  

During my junior and senior years of high school I was obsessed with getting good grades so that I could get away from the smallness of my life.  Our family of ten lived in a tiny house before tiny houses were even a "thing." It was a 1,000 square foot carriage house on a beautiful estate.  But it was tiny.  The first floor was 20' by 25' and the second floor was the same size, but under the eaves -- and right in the middle was a wide staircase that took up even more floor space on both levels.  I shared a long narrow bedroom with my four younger sisters.  

With two adults, two in high school, two in middle school, two in elementary school, and infant twins, it was less than 100 square feet (10 feet by 10 feet) for each person.  Thanks to my parents' compulsion for tidiness and their mutual disdain for clutter -- it was actually quite charming and livable.  But there were times when the noise was unbearable for me.  I loved stillness, quiet, solitude -- I still do.  

Because we lived in a rural community and I didn't drive, going to the library or a coffeehouse was not an option.  In the winter months I couldn't even escape outside.  I was stuck in the house with giggling girls, crying babies, and arguing middle schoolers.  

My junior and senior years were all about grades.  Grades and SAT scores.  I spent every lunch hour in the library and stayed after school whenever I didn't have to work or babysit my siblings.  But there were still many nights when I finished doing dishes and had piles of homework to tackle or studying to do - before I went to bed.  

So, after the kitchen table was cleared, I would stack up my books, lay out my papers, and get to work.  I loved studying.  Some things never change!  But most nights, the chatter and pre-bedtime noise in our house was cacophonous.

One night I couldn't take it anymore.  I went to my mom and told her that I had a very big exam the next day, and still had to prepare for a college placement test that had me a bit rattled.  I told her that she needed to make everyone be quiet so that I could study.  

She looked at me like I were a tad insane.  She said, "this is your life and you need to figure out how to do this."  I knew she meant that nothing was going to change -- I needed to change my expectations and my approach to the problem.  

I went back to the kitchen table and put my head in my hands and closed my eyes.  The noise seemed louder than ever.  There were two thoughts that came to me.  

One was that I had everything I needed because the kingdom of God was within me and so everything God was, I included.  There was an infinite well of intelligence, wisdom, grace, patience within me.  I just needed to go deep and draw upon it.  

And the second was more of a feeling.  As I sat there in the cacophony of my family's living, I let myself hear the noise and then I let that noise boomerang me back - like a rubber band - deeper within myself.  The edge of the noise became a bubble of stillness for me to retreat into.  The louder the noise, the deeper I would go within -- to find my core stillness.  

That became my "space" of focus and clarity.  To this day, when I need to find a place of transfixed focus, I will go to a coffeehouse or a bustling cafe and let the chatter and ambient "noise" drive me deeper, and deeper, and deeper still.  

In that place I feel completely at one with all the intelligence of the universe.  In that place I am able to draw upon all wisdom of the ages.  In that place I feel as wise as Solomon because I was drawing on the same infinite well of divine intelligence. 

I did well in high school.  

When my dad was killed - not long after I graduated - it was my choice to respond in a way that felt wise and responsible to me.  I never doubted my access to the infinite well of intelligence, just because my educational path took a unexpected turn.  I always knew where to go to access an infinite source wisdom -- and I knew how to get there.

We are told that our path in life is defined by our circumstances.  By chance and choice -- often the choices of others.  I felt that way - many times - as a child.  As if my parents' decision to have ten children pre-determined my path in life.  As if my dad's decision to leave for work 5 minutes early put him in harms way on a rural road and changed the course of my life.  But that thinking,  gets us absolutely nowhere fast.  

It casts us as victims of circumstance -- borne blindly by chance, or the choice of others.  We are not. We are divinely sent into every moment of our lives for a holy purpose -- and that purpose is to know God more deeply and trust Him more humbly. 

The noise I grew up with as a child, made me reach deep within -- for the stillness of a quiet heart.  The detours I took - as I pursued my desire for learning - made me an insatiable lifelong student, rather than a college coed on a traditional four-year plan. 

Every day, we are given countless opportunities to either feel like victims of our circumstances, or hungry children seeking a deeper stillness, a holier trust, a higher goal -- to know how to reach the kingdom of God within us.  It is only there -- in this quiet kingdom -- that everything makes sense.  

offered with Love, 

Kate

  

"a need for solitude..."

"I have a need for solitude
I never feel peace
in crowded rooms.
I like the sound
of silence coming on..."

The following, remarkable photo taken by my friend, Todd Herzer, was the perfect reminder to revisit the following post from 2010 - about my once, insatiable need for solitude.

  
Sometimes re-visiting the depths of my own spiritual journey starts with a photograph or a song. Mary Chapin Carpenter has sung me down many a dusty road.  With my hands on the wheel, sobbing, driving hard and fast just to get away from the sadness, her songs have been the answer to my  prayers for a song that will make me feel less alone.

Her CD "The Age of Miracles," was borne on the wings of her own "miraculous" adventure through a life-threatening health-related crisis.  A wilderness experience that led her into a period of what she characterized as" painful depression, fear, and anxiety." 

The lyrical content of this CD is masterful, sobering, intuitive, and deeply moving. What it takes me hundreds of words to hint at, she hammers home with three verses.  When married to her musical vision, it is a CD that makes my heart weep, sing, and soar.  Her songs have always reminded me that I am not alone on this wilderness path.

There are cuts on this CD that I can't help but listen to with my eyes closed.  It is almost as if I am remembering how it felt to have lived through the moments that gave the song birth.  She is singing from her own experience, but like a tuning fork, it is resonating with my own.

There is one song that, when I read its title, "I Have a Need for Solitude," I couldn't help but wonder if we weren't actually "twin daughters of different mothers."

For me, solitude is not just a refreshing interruption from the otherwise social norms of people and events. Solitude is my natural habitat -- like salt water to a sea anemone. I need it. 

It is the oxygen I begin to gasp for, after a long day of truly wonderful conversations, and deeply inspiring interactions with people who I truly love. And it has only been by the grace of God, that I have learned to accept and appreciate the importance of these shifting levels of aloneness in my life.  But that was not always the case.

There was a time when I seemed to need solitude in a way that was almost crippling. My need to be alone felt insistent.

There were days when taking our daughters to school, or having people come into our home, was terrifying. It was as if the sound of other people's voices, their shapes slicing through the changing light, the movement of air, the rustling of atmospheric ions as they stole from room-to-room, felt like someone was sucking all of the carefully negotiated alone-ness out of my perfect solitude -- and I couldn't breathe.

Unfortunately, my profession as a spiritual healer seemed to give me an endless supply of "get out of jail" cards --justifications for why I needed to leave a party, a gathering, a dinner.  My work gave me one great excuse after another for demanding my solitude. 

I would seek it out from daybreak to well-past midnight.  Often staying up through the night, because it was only after my family went to bed, that I could most easily find it.   

There was a point in this chapter, when my favorite place in the world was a three foot by five foot windowless, cedar-lined closet under the eaves of our house where I had a little chair, table, lamp and fan. I would take my phone, and go there for hours on end, just to take be alone in the dark, take calls and pray. For me,  it was a slice of heaven. It became a self-imposed tomb that I never wanted to leave.

Yes, I did learn to cope with the need to be out-and-about as a mother, wife, professional, and member of my community.  But it was a coping - not the peaceful shift from alone to "in company" that I knew was balanced and right.  The ache for solitude was never far from reach. I took it with me wherever I went. And when society became too much, I would retreat. I would leave. I would excuse myself and find a place to hide - a bathroom, a closet, the backseat of my car, under a quilt, in my head -- all alone. 

Social gatherings felt cloying, dense, and paralyzing. Solitude was like walking into a fresh, sweet, light-filled clearing -- a high mountain meadow, fragrant with the scent of chamomile and pine. 

But as much as I loved it, and as happy as it made me,  it was not freeing or liberating.  I truly thought that I couldn't be "me" anywhere else. My need for solitude had become a prison, instead of the open space I thought it was.  I was trapped in the self-certainty that without solitude I could not be inspired or creative. It felt like madness, and I didn't know how I would find my way out of the labyrinth of my own creating -- or if I even wanted to.

And then something quite beautiful happened. 

On a very ordinary day - while I was sitting all alone in my perfectly silent kitchen - I realized, that in all spiritual actuality, solitude was impossible. 

And in that moment, I started to feel the grip of my need to be alone, relax.   Solitude was no longer the holy grail in my life. Just like that.

As I sat there surrounded by blue and white gingham and bathed in golden light, I found myself asking, "Why would I  want something that was never going to be true in God's eyes."

It was as clear as day to me that I couldn't be me - truly me - all alone, without you. And not just the "you" of my immediate friends and family -- my husband, my children, my friends.  But all who I am blessed to have waft through my life -- like the perfume of hyacinth blossoms on a warm spring day.

I realized that I could express love, without "you."  I could not discover myself as generous, kind, compassionate, honest, forgiving -- without you. Each of the you-s in my life, allow me to more fully be who I am. God's beloved and be-loving child. 

Although it's been a struggle at times to remember that I really do want to be this "best me," -- and not someone who seeks out closets and solitude like a drug -- I now find, that even in those lovely moments when the gift of solitude does descend like a divine surprise upon my day, I am no longer more at peace than in a crowded room or a noisy kitchen. I've stopped seeking something spiritually unattainable -- since, in Truth, we can never really be alone anyways. We live together as "one universal family, held in the gospel [the good news] of Love."

We are not, as Mary Baker Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "isolated, solitary ideas." We are each, and all, members of the body of Christ, the spiritual collective called "man." In Truth, we are but individual saplings - the branchings of a vast root system.  We are the offshoots of one spiritual organism -- one that is even larger than "the aspen grove," which stretches its arms across the Continental Divide. We are one with "the earth and the sky, one with everything in life," -- and I am as much you, as I am myself. We are His.

Yes, to answer the unasked question, I still love my solitude.  I love my alone time when the house is clean, the silence is golden, scent trails of lavender swirl with the shifting breeze. In that space figurative notation paper hangs in the air -- just waiting for poetry and music to find their positions, like birds on a wire, and become a song or a prayer. 

 But I no longer like my life better without people in it. I no longer think that I need soliude to be myself -- to breathe, to feel peaceful, or to hear God's voice. 

And yet, as Mary Chapin Carpenter sings, I will always love, and welcome, "the sound of silence coming on." 

Thank you MCC -- so grateful you are in our world.  I have missed your voice.  Thank you for your words, your music, your heart that sings to us of miracles. Thank you for bringing this statement to life for me:

"My sense of nature's rich gloom,
is that loneness lacks but one charm
to make it half divine — a friend,
with whom to whisper, 
"Solitude is sweet."

- Mary Baker Eddy  

I smile when I think of this verse today. In it, I am sitting in the forest with my back to the trunk of a sturdy tree -- but not all alone, just all quiet.  Around me are countless other solitude lovers -- basking in the pine-filtered light, the wind-hushed quiet, in our aloneness -- together.


offered with gratitude -- and with Love,

Kate

"Nothing new…"

"Old Mr. Webster
could never define
what's being said
between Your heart
and mine..."

Alison Krauss' "When You Say Nothing at All," has been one of my all-time favorite songs for almost thirty years. But it speaks to a different place in me today, than it did the first time I heard it.

In those days, it was all about "Him." Today, it is all about Him. This song reminds me that my relationship with God is not in words, but in the Word. It is not found in a particular scripture or a string of quotes -- however much I love them. It is in, as Mary Baker Eddy suggests in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, that:

"sweet and certain sense
that God is Love." 

It is a feeling -- not a sentence. It is an indwelling sense of trust in the unseen.  It is that which is insensible to the senses. It is a silent, abiding confidence in His promise:

"Lo, I am with you alway…"
 

There are days when my heart is too full to speak -- or write. Days, when the best I can do, for everyone in my life, is to simply deepen into that sweet and certain place of abiding trust that God is Love. This is the place where my heart finds its ground in free fall. This is where I land when I completely let go of self-determinism and human thought-taking. This is my home in yielding to the divine.

Recently I woke with a heavy heart. The voices of "human reason" were relentless -- and, they made sense. Everything they suggested -- when weighed in the scale of "should haves" - left me feeling negligent, stupid, "Kate, you've-got-your-head-in-the-clouds" naive. I couldn't seem to drown them out with words, sentences, or inspired "thinking."

I lay there with a weight on my chest and a tightness in my throat that was almost unbearable. Words, words, words, -- tumbled around in me like an aggregate of stone and sand in a churning cement mixer. That is, until I remembered to feel. To just feel the power of the Word. I slowed my breathing. I closed my eyes. I moved my focus from my head to my heart and became very quiet -- silent actually. Not just silent in a "no noise" way -- but silent in a "no words" way.

And there it was -- that sweet and certain sense that God is Love. That feeling of "God with us." A feeling that -- no matter what was swirling around me or in my "head" -- God was with me, just because I loved.  Because I felt love. Period.  I let myself feel the love I have for my daughters, my love for camp, my love for my work. I didn't think about my work, I felt my love for my work -- without reason.

It was enough.

I was free. And with this freedom, came the joy of just being -- well, me. The me of God's creating. The me that He inspires, sustains, and calls according to His purpose. Moment-by-moment.

There are many statements from Mary Baker Eddy's writings that have fed and sustained this quiet sense of spiritual self-assurance in my heart.  I'd love to share just a couple of them here, with gratitude and love for her ongoing spiritual guidance.

:

"The infinite Truth of the Christ-cure
has come to this age through a “still, small voice,”
through silent utterances and divine anointing
which quicken and increase the beneficial effects
of Christianity.

I long to see the consummation of my hope,
namely, the student’s higher attainments
in this line of light."

and

"In order to pray aright,
we must enter into the closet
and shut the door.
We must close the lips
and silence the material senses.
In the quiet sanctuary of earnest longings,
we must deny sin and plead God’s allness."
 

I am learning that there is a quiet that is deeper than "no sound." There is a quietness of the heart. A quietness that is the felt presence of God.  It is a stillness.  Rather than a straining and a striving for the right words in "thinking about" God -- it is the actually feeling of God's presence.  It is a spiritual sense of Love that fills the breast. And there are no words -- at least none that I know of -- that can describe its meaning or weight.

In a piece that Eddy chose to include in her last collected writings, The First Church of Christ, Scientist and Miscellany, she begins with this brief statement:

"I have nothing new to communicate,
all is in your textbooks." 

This sentence was a sobering discovery some years ago. Now it is a beautiful gift. If she had nothing new to communicate, why did I think I needed to find something new to say, or a new way to say it. It is all in my textbooks -- the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures -- and this realization has given me a more laser-like focus on the richness of those source materials.

It has given me permission to be quiet - to simply share my experiences -- when it seems right. And to be so quietly transfixed on those primary texts, that perhaps anyone who walks into the room wonders, "what is she gazing at -- so lovingly." 

And the funny thing is, that these texts only send me back -- even more deeply -- in search of that feeling of "Immanuel, God with us" -- the sovereign ever-presence [that] delivers the children of men from every ill…"  

For me, this is the healing place, the transforming and redeeming place.  The place where God and men do meet.

offered with Love,

Kate

"I've come to talk with you again..."

"Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk with you again.
Because a vision softly creeping,
left its seeds while I was sleeping..."

I guess it's time to revisit this...again...

"silence..."

I think the first verse of Simon & Garfinkel's "Sounds of Silence," says it all for me today. 

Mother Teresa once wrote:

"We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls. "

Whether this is an absolute Truth, or just true for her...I don't really know.  But I do know, that something about it calls to me.  It is an invitation, an urging, an inner imperative that I can't ignore.  It feels like a living, pulsing something asking for space in my life. I glimpsed its promise last summer, when...quite serendipitously...I had time to just sit with myself.

And what did I do with it?

Well, I ended up finding that I couldn't seem to silence the "self" that always wants to record everything in my journal, And once I've recorded it, I try to immediately make sense of what I've "heard" in that silence, and then begin searching for just the right words to make it "make sense" for others. 

But, something is always "lost in translation."  And, besides which, I seem to lose the true chord of the message, each time I tried to give it a name, a form, or put its living, breathing substance into the symbology of words.

And yet, I keep coming back to something I have long-loved, but haven't always let move in, unpack, and take up real residency in my own hungry heart. It's a statement from Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"The infinite Truth of the Christ-cure has come to this age through a "still, small voice," through silent utterances and divine annointing which quicken and increase the beneficial effects of Christianity.  I long to see the consummation of my hope, namely, the student's higher attainments in this line of light."

I want to understand this...more than I can say.

There is a seed of something growing in my heart...I don't know what its voice will sound like...or if it will even have a voice that reaches beyond the silence.  But I want to sit with it, and let it take whatever shape God wants it to take.   I don't know if its song will have lyrics...but I know I have to listen. 

This time, I dare not...

"...disturb the sound of silence...."

with Love,

Kate

"silence...."

"Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk with you again.
Because a vision softly creeping,
left its seeds while I was sleeping..."

I think the first verse of Simon & Garfinkel's "Sounds of Silence," says it all for me today. 

Mother Teresa once wrote:

"We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls. "

Whether this is a Truth, or just true for her...I do not know.  But something about it calls to me.  It's an inviation that I can't ignore.  It seems like a living, pulsing something asking for space in my life. I glimpsed its promise this summer, when...quite serendipitously...I had some time to just sit with myself. And what did I do with it?

Well, I ended up finding that I couldn't seem to silence the "self" that always wants to record it all in my journal, try to immediately make sense of what I was "hearing," and then search for the words to make it "make sense" for others.  In doing so, something was "lost in translation."  Besides which, I seemed to lose the true chord each time I tried to give it a name, a form, or put the substance of its message into words.

And in the midst of it all, I kept coming back to something I have long-loved, but have always been too busy trying to "find words" to explain it to others, to let its message move in, unpack, and take up real residency in my own hungry heart. Mary Baker Eddy suggests in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"The infinite Truth of the Christ-cure has come to this age through a "still, small voice," through silent utterances and divine annointing which quicken and increase the beneficial effects of Christianity.  I long to see the conssumation of my hope, namely, the student's higher attainments in this line of light."

I want to understand this...more than I can say.

There is a seed of something growing in my heart...I don't know what its voice will sound like...or if it will even have a voice that reaches beyond the silence.  But I want to sit with it, and let it take whatever shape God wants it to take.   I don't know if its song will have lyrics...but I know I have to listen. 

This time, I dare not...

"...disturb the sound of silence...."

with Love,

Kate