Human fault lines

'"Techno-hubris" is a term I read a couple days ago as the media tried to explain why Japan would build nuclear reactors along quake fault lines. Watching and listening to the reports of nuclear reactors failing as a result of the 8.9 quake, many of us just wonder why would they take such a horrific risk?   The answer is so human, it seems almost silly considering the consequences - the ego of our individual self easily falls prey to hubris.


Hubris in it's simplest definition indicates pride but actually, hubris is much more than the sensation of feeling 'proud', hubris is the  pride of the ego - the arrogant, presumptive pride that takes our creative wondering what would happen if I .... and runs with into the world not taking into consideration the long term consequences  to a world containing more than just "me."


We humans are funny and complex creatures.  We want to succeed with our new creations: it is our nature to desire to bring our ideas into Life, but we do not necessarily enjoy the process of blood, sweat and tears which is the true path of all creativity.  Our ego provides an easy way out of this dilemma. "Forge blood and sweat, just do it and whatever you do is okay because you did it!  Because it is your unique creation it is wonderful."  Those are the words of our ego. The older I get the more obvious it becomes that my ego is about 8 years old!


Of course there's the reality that doing something new and difficult often requires an attitude of just do it! in order to begin.  As a place of beginning something new and scary just do it! is fine. Why doesn't it work for us to continue creating from this beginning place? Because that initial place of just do it is full of fear and fear is the fuel of the ego's hubris.


The hubris of our ego is found in the next part of the phrase of just do it - the part we don't actually say aloud.  The complete phrase is just do it and damn the consequences!   Our ego really does not care what about consequences: it's MY brilliant creation so it's just fine!  See why I say that my ego is about 8 years old. An eight year-old really does not care how their behavior impacts other people or life in general. An eight year-old just wants to do what they want to do.


The ego of my inner eight-year old is my human fault line.  I call it my fault line because an eight year-old, no matter how intelligent they may be, has little experience and therefore no capacity for true wisdom which is the ability to combine knowledge and experience and then apply what results judiciously. Judiciousness implies consideration of what may be affected by my behavior.  Eight year-old children are not naturally judicious as they are almost always willing to damn the consequences in order to get what they want.


When I build life according to the demands of my ego which by nature is willing to damn the consequences, I am building along weakness: the places within myself that are fearful of being worthy of acceptance; the places within myself that are terrified that I will never get what I really want; the places within myself the perceive life as a limited resource - these are the places within myself that have experienced disappointment, humiliation and rejection. 


 Disappointment, humiliation and rejection are personal experiences of pain that create 'cracks' in our psyche. Our personal response to these 'cracks'; these openings or splittings within our Spirit have the capacity to define how we experience life in general. 


There are two primary means of dealing with Spirit-cracking caused by pain.  One is an ego response which has an immediate infusion of the sensation of "strength", which is arrogance: "they" are stupid: "they" are less than I am and therefore do not understand me: "they" are  not are deserving of what I am, therefore what happens to them is of no consequence.  If we respond to our pain by agreeing with those ego responses then an attitude of presumptive arrogance develops as part of our perception of living.  This is how hubris can begin to take hold within a person - or nation.  


Hubris may appear outwardly strong with it's swagger and aggression but since it is built on the weaknesses of the many guises of fear, hubris is always internally weak.  Swaggering or not, hubris is a fault line capable of creating 'earthquakes' within our Spirit when too much pressure is exerted.  These personal earthquakes are not pretty: rage, greed, cruelty are outward manifestations - deep depression and anxiety may be the inward manifestations.  Being human, none of us are exempt from these expereinces at sometime in our living.


The other response available to the pain of disappointment, humiliation and rejection is that of seeking the ways and means of discovering and creating love.  Love is the opposite of fear. Oddly however, we frequently perceive love as "weak" because love tells us to respond to our painful realizations from the point of view of imperfection.  


Love suggests an awareness that each and every one of us is imperfect and therefore capable of hurting others.  Love evokes the awareness that we also have caused others to experience pain, disappointment and humiliation and therefore our own healing requires the discovery of forgiveness and compassion directed toward our own self.  When we are able to understand the need to forgive ourself, we begin to create the compassion and forgiveness needed to extend outward to forgiveness of other people.


The route for discovering forgiveness and compassion is one entailing our blood, sweat and tears.  Forgiveness which creates understanding and therefore compassion is difficult - it is just plain hard work. Work we do not want to necessarily undertake because the work itself is painful since it requires us to let go of our outward persona suggesting that we are not like "they" are. Our ego is quite vocal about telling us to avoid pain at all costs because it does not wish to lose it's position of superiority in life.  


Courage, which is true strength, can only be found by digging beneath the ego's persona because courage is found in the heart.   Paradoxically, it is the perceived 'weakness' of choosing the difficult work of love that creates true strength.  


Building our lives along the crevasses within our heart by choosing the route of compassion and forgiveness is paradoxically, the way of creating true strength.  When we choose to perceive our pain as that which is part of being human rather than as that which was 'done' to me, our world widens and we come to understand that we are all connected in this imperfect world.  


Each time - each moment - no matter how small or how infrequently, that I am able to choose this perception of living: love rather than arrogance, I am filling in those 'cracks' in my psyche with love rather than fear.  Little by little, fear is transformed into the creativity of love.


Creativity arising from the heart - from the courage of one's heart - always adds beauty to the world.  Perhaps as we people become more and more sophisticated in what we are able to create, we might consider a new criteria for birthing things into the world: will this idea - or action - or new creation add beauty of goodness to Life?

Naked

The good news I realized yesterday after posting is that I have learned to shush my inner 'critic' while writing.  The bad news is once the posting is out into the world, my inner critic wakes up and natters on and on for the rest of the day about all that was not right with what I put out into the world. Usually by late afternoon I'ved resolved that that was my final foray in the world of blogging. 


If instead of my inner critic nattering yesterday, my inner-editor could have been a bit more vocal before I hit the 'post' button, I would not have been so discouraged.  Rereading yesterday's posting I discovered my ability to use tenses incorrectly was alive and well.  As I said yesterday, one trait I share with my mother is the fear of not being good enough and really, there is nothing quite as effective for encouraging this fear as posting one's inner thoughts for the world to read.  I felt very naked yesterday afternoon.


Naked, that is, exposed.  Unprotected.  Ah - unprotected captures the sense of shame I felt yesterday.  Not simply revealing who I am without my costume of persona - my persona is the ever-confident Mary - but rather feeling unprotected by having the persona stripped away by my inner critic: 'she calls herself a writer but she can't use tenses properly'!!!  "She still writes about the pain of her relationship with Mom."


Okay, I'll try using more clarity. My mother was an amazing woman: so committed to her beliefs she birthed eleven children into the world. So strong and intelligent she began a business that continues successfully with my brother. Such a seeker and lover of learning that she was willing to question and learn and travel the world right up until she died. My mother was in many ways the kind of woman I desire to become - and in many ways am.  But all of this does not change the reality that our relationship was difficult and painful.  


Relationship and love are two very different realities.  It is quite possible to love deeply and yet not have a compatible relationship. It is also quite possible to have a compatible relationship with someone you do not especially love or love deeply. Sometimes in life one has deep love and intimate relationship - but not always or even frequently.  Love and relationship are great paradoxes of living. The older I get the more life seems to be shrouded in mystery because my experiences of living seem to contain more and more paradoxes. This is one of the big problems with awareness. 


Awareness is a strange experience.  Those of us who seek consciousness or awareness begin this quest  believing it will bestow clarity and make life easier to understand. Instead, in my experience anyway, the clarity of awareness reveals the paradoxes of living: the depth of the intrinsic mystery of living.


Here's a paradox I've discovered about writing. When I articulate my experience of engaging this mysterious thing called life - which is what I do when I write and blog, I use words to part the veils - the curtains - covering windows into our living. The intention of doing this is so an 'ah-ha' of insight may be glimpsed and a bit of clarity; a piece of the puzzle of living, drop into place and give someone permission to explore that piece of their life.  


I understand this 'giving of permission' happens only if I am willing to be as totally honest as I am able, with my experiences of relationship and life.  It is not "I" who gives permission to explore insight, it is the degree of honesty in what I share that enables courage: courage to explore the depth available in living one's life.  


Courage - couer: from the heart. Sharing the truth in ones heart: success, pain,  confusion, learnings and triumphs as well as all the children of these experiences, is how the veils covering the depth of life are parted.  Another paradox here: depth of living that is, creativity, requires this parting of veils: delusions and denials, yet these veils also allow me to feel safe and protected in living.  How do I live while feeling exposed? I know of only one answer - I must live from the truth of my heart.  


Another paradox: the strength for honesty comes from living from the truth in my heart yet I do not always like what I see in my heart.  I would love to ignore or deny the pain - the conflicts - the inconsistencies of my human heart.  I would love to clothe these 'uglinesses' with layers of frothy pretty words.  But I cannot do that and honor who I am and the gift I have been given to use in life.  


Embracing the truth in the sentence above is both a joy and grief.  A grief because I feel naked - exposed and unprotected - in it's truth, a joy because it is my truth.


Truth is 'fact' and a fact of my Being that I am Called to expose myself through the use of words.  Expose myself by sharing my experience, my strength and my hope with words.  Exposing oneself with words is also called being a 'writer'.  I did not know this truth of being a writer when I fell in love with words and committed myself to learning the craft of writing.  


Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers says it takes 10,000 hours of deliberately engaging an action in order to become a master.  I have put in more than 10,000 hours of deliberately engaging the discipline and practice of writing and I am much, much better than when I began - although my inner-editor still takes naps and I forget to use tenses properly.  I know that I am, for me, a master because I have experienced of the paradox of becoming a 'master' which is the firm desire to become more proficient. A master knows there is much more to discover and learn. 


I am however, not yet a master at blogging. Blogging is all about a willingness to expose oneself publicly: a willingness to part the veils - the curtains - and feel the breeze on my skin telling me I am standing naked where I may be seen.  Standing naked I am profoundly aware that possibly I will not liked or admired once the lumps of cellulite are seen on my skin.  


If I believe doing this - writing publicly - is a purpose of my Being, then I must continue blogging, continue to expose my lumps of cellulite and trust that in time - like maybe another 8,000 hours of time - I will become comfortable being exposed.  


Today I have begun the process of becoming more comfortable by 're-naming' something I wrote. I saw I 'named' the conflicts and inconsistencies I found in my heart as ugliness. Ugly is not a perception I am willing to continue carrying and so - because I saw it - I used my editing skills, crossed out the word and wrote the word human: conflicts, pain and inconsistencies are not ugly they are simply human.  And being human is a beautiful (if not paradoxical) experience.  Beauty comes in many forms.


If I hadn't parted the veils, if I hadn't seen that some of my human characteristics as ugly, I would not have been able to change my perception.  Which is the intention of parting the veils - to see clearly into the mystery.  Yes, another paradox and a wondrous one - each moment of life carries the potential of seeing with clarity into the mystery.  For that experience, I'm willing to shiver in my nakedness.

Gifts from the Women before me ...

I never expected that I would look like Mom.  We were so different: she tall, me short; she dark, me light.  We did not understand one another; never 'got' each other. Ours was what is referred to as a 'difficult relationship', mostly because we were so different.  Recently though, in photos of myself or when I catch a sudden glimpse in a mirror, I see her in my face.  Very strange how I needed to live well into my fifth decade before I could accept my mother as a living part of myself.

Accepting Mom as a living part of me is odd because mostly I spent my life knowing how different we were.  Yet, in my fifty-eighth year as I see her etched in my face I am understanding that deep inside my personality we are similar: I share her fear of never being good-enough.  I share her 'seeker-soul' and love of new learning.  I share her dry humor and wit.  Deep, deep within myself her energy of Being, the energy of the woman who gave me life, continues to stir and mix with my own energy and is brought into a new kind of Being: a Beingness of Life much bigger than either herself or myself with our differences that caused each of us pain.

Today is National Woman's Day and these thoughts floated to consciousness as I was reflecting on the woman who came before me and shared their living - their liveliness of Life - with my life. Today I am aware in a new way of how four women helped create the Woman who is me.

Four is not a very large number, yet the depth, color and texture of  those women paradoxically makes four seem like a very big amount. First is Mom, the woman who gave me life and then did her very best to nurture me into Being.  As a mother myself I now understand the difficulty of nurturing someone who is so very different and yet so very loved: I understand the hard, sharp edges of that reality and the dark abyss of such love.  What I know today is that it was love that eventually won our tug-of-war of non-understanding.  Love always wins if we allow it to.

There was Gramsy - Mom's mother - with whom she had as difficult a relationship as I had with Mom. Between Gramsy and I however there was a kinship of understanding.  Again, I had to live many decades before understanding that the kinship between Gramsy and myself was our abundance of creativity.  It was with Gramsy that I felt an understanding of who I was decades before I could give words to describing what had intuitively connected us.  Decades before I had the courage to live from my creativity and passion it was Gramsy who provided the nurturing of those seeds of my Being.

My Aunt Arlie was the third person of the Trinity of Women who nurtured me into Being: Mom, Gramsy and Aunt Arlie.  Three women who were as different as personalities could be yet shared a sisterhood that, again, it took decades of living for me to understand. To my child-eyes, Aunt Arlie was the 'wild one; red hair and loud laugh are the textures of Aunt Arlie I carry with me. Gramsy had an innate dignity: my mother had innate authority and Aunt Arlie had a wildness I longed to have the freedom to live from.

A cherished memory I carry in my heart is of these three women, sitting outside with their bridge table set up over our blow-up swimming pool: feet dangling in the cooling water as they laughed and bid for hours while we children ran wild in the Michigan summer.  This image lives deep in my heart where it sits with my childs longing to have what they had.  That longing of childhood is a reality for I share that same deep connection of laughing-love with my four sisters. A love so fierce and deep I am aware that it is a living energy of Womanhood threading back through generations to Eve.

My friend Randy came from outside the family circle and entered my life in my fourth decade - a decade of Womanhood where I have come to believe, a 'mentor' for the next phase of living is essential. As women, in our forties most of us are completing a cycle of living where many of us have lived in 'service' to the needs and expectations of other people. I believe that the next phase of living for most women is a new kind of living in 'service' to our Spirit. It is a very difficult transition and without someone to encourage and mentor us, almost impossible to make.  That person for me was Randy.  Randy was a God-mother of my soul for it was from her I received the gift of absolutely unconditional acceptance of who I was.

Randy's personality was a combination of the Trinity of Women  I had grown from as she carried their innate dignity, authority and wildness mixed with her audacious flair for living.  Randy LIVED - audaciously, thoughtfully, elegantly, outrageously and creatively.  She shared her gift for this way of living generously and in her generosity and acceptance I began to discover my own bravery and the courage necessary for living deeply.

Living deeply as a woman engages the life-death-life cycle of Seasons and embracing this cycle of living takes strength and courage.  It is difficult to learn to not just cling to what is wiggling with life; it is difficult to allow what is alive to finish its course of living and die. Both living and dying is required for new life.

With two of these four woman I was given the privilege of taking part in their final days of living and in their moment of dying. With my mother and Randy I was gifted with seeing the fullness of a life as it completes it's circle. The gift shimmering within that Circle is almost unspeakable in its beauty - and it's lesson: you and your life is mulch for future life.  In the ending of their life I was admonished to be aware that the gift of myself - my life - is for the future of Life.  The life-death-life cycle continues in renewed growth whenever a life is lived from passionate creativity.

Passionate creativity of living. Today, as I reflect and meditate on the gifts of these Women I am aware that as different as each was in personality, each was alike in that they lived their life passionately: each engaged Life as fully as they were able to from who they were, and this is the gift of living: their 'mulch' of Living left behind.  Generously and imperfectly they LIVED.

Wholeness and well-being is found in generous and imperfect living and each of these women lived their life generously and imperfectly and in so doing they created new life.  And the new life they created continues to create new life even as their lives have been completed.  Thank you Mom.  Thank you Gramsy.  Thank you Aunt Arlie.  Thank you Randy.