“Thank you, Angel,” I said with a smile to my three-year old grandson as he handed me something. I turned to finish speaking to someone else in the room.

“Van-Van,” he said, not yet finished with our exchange.

“Yes, Archer,” I said, focusing my attention on him once again.

“Van-Van,” he said in his slow deliberate manner. “I like it when you call me ‘Angel’.”

Archer has a way of breaking through the surface of things and bringing me to my knees. You can see on his face what makes his heart sing and what hurts his feelings. He pulls all the stops. He responds immediately to quiet, unnoticed nurturing — simple warmth and kindness.

Archer’s innocence and openness to the feminine principle in the world – feeling, connecting with, resonating with, valuing on a deep level – stirs my soul. It makes me sad to think he’ll someday soak in the world’s contempt for the feminine, particularly when it shows up in a man.

We each have feminine and masculine energy. Our feminine energy is our ability to feel, to resonate with and to join, to have compassion, to be creative, to just be. Our masculine energy is our ability to think things through, to get things done, to fix, to achieve and to get ahead in the world, to do. These energies support and thrive on each other. We need both.

I see this working well, for now, in Archer. At three years old, he allows everything to slip deep into the pores of his soul; he delights in every new experience, is astonishingly creative, feeling, connecting. He can also think through a complex problem, do anything after one demonstration, compete with his peers in his Montessori class, take center stage. Soon enough, I’m sure, someone will tell him boys don’t weep or draw beautiful pictures or hold Mommy’s hand.

I love the way today’s young fathers are with their young children, affectionate, stroking, holding. They provide permission to their young to honor the feminine value in themselves. The feminine is more about placing value on things than it is about emotion. If a child learns to value others, to value others’ feelings and abilities and needs, think what our future generations can be.

What so often happens to our young is that they are programmed early to take on the world’s agenda rather than their own soul’s agenda. The world values competitiveness, achievement. We send our young on raiding expeditions: Be the best, shut out the other guy, get there first. Our young learn quickly that we value only masculine energy. They deprogram their feminine.

This hurts all of us. We come to see nature and the environment as something to be dominated and manipulated rather than as mutual companion in life. We come to identify financial success as security rather than develop a relationship with ourselves. We place our well-being in something outside ourselves. 

Our young girls enter the working world disguised as men, competing with men on men’s terms. They subjugate their feminine energies – their intuition, creativity, their ability to bring people together in inclusive ways, their ability to place value — in order to compete with the masculine energies of the workplace — logical reasoning, driving energy, a take-charge attitude. The feminine is lost. Everyone goes home tired, too tired to relate.

The work place will be a more humane, inclusive, cooperative place when the masculine and feminine are both honored. Families will be a more nurturing, structuring, empowering place when the masculine and feminine are available in both parents. Individuals will be more fulfilled, creative, generous and capable when the masculine and feminine are both embraced.

Sitting on the floor with my three-year old grandson, surrounded by twenty-five miniature dinosaurs, watching him organize, speak for, play with, delight in each subtle difference and personality, I smile and join in the game. Each dinosaur takes its turn telling a story while the others listen. Archer is a good storyteller.

“Van-Van,” Archer looks up and says with intense discernment, “I think I like playing dinosaurs with you most of all.”

As a child, I loved the story of the troll who lived under the bridge and who tried to capture the three billy goats as they crossed his bridge on their way home. Each goat told the troll that the brother who was to follow would be better to eat. The third goat faced the troll and won the day.

I’ve imagined my troll, throughout my life, hiding behind certain risks I took, behind the intentions of those persons I couldn’t clearly read, beneath the transitional bridges I had to cross. There was always that unknown element, that spirit of adventure that accompanies risk-taking, that exhilarated lift once on the other side of safe.

Now that I have aged a bit, I’ve come to see the troll as a redemptive figure rather than a destructive one. A troll is one who intercepts you on your path and confronts your complacency. A troll is one who challenges you to look at your choices and attitudes so you can stretch to grow into a more authentic you. A troll is one who forces you to look and see.

My grandson, Archer, is a troll. At fifteen months, he stops me dead in my tracks whenever I see his face. He pops up out of nowhere with that mesmerizing smile of his and captivates me completely. I forget immediately whatever busyness that temporarily holds me hostage and come straight back to the present moment. He makes me forget what I know and to know, more deeply, everything I forgot, about living, about seeing, about being.

His exuberance and reckless spontaneity knock me off my mindless track and unwrap the gifts of nature and awe. No more clinging to wrapped gifts — no more just getting by without encounter.  Archer places value on the smallest of wonders: a feather lying on the ground, a bird calling overhead, a car splashing rain on the wet pavement. He stops to listen to a barking dog down the street, points to a frisky squirrel at play. He makes me look. He allows me to see.

His need of me is pure — unconditional reliability, genuine availability, open receptivity. He lifts me out of myself in spite of myself, tricks me into being my best/whole self. Archer is a visible image of everything invisible that I believe.

He reminds me that we each arrive in this world knowing, but that, as we adapt and conform to cultural expectations, we forget the truth of who we are, of why we’re here. He reaches inside me and gets me in touch, again, with my starting point, that thread of truth within that will unravel my path into a more vital and human me. He wraps me in wonder until I surrender.

Archer moved with his parents to Hilton Head Island five months ago. As I play with him in his living room and delight in his playful laughter, he scurries under the coffee table and flashes that contagious, killer smile. At that moment, everything I know and believe is constellated into one timeless flow of sacred energy that warms my whole body and vibrates my soul.

“Where do you go?” Archer asks me as I’m getting into my car for the long ride back to Atlanta. I can hardly answer that question myself, let alone, answer him.

As I drive over the bridge that takes me away from his world and back into mine, I hear that gleeful laughter singing my heart. I smile, enlivened from within by this treasured image of my little troll under the coffee table. His image becomes for me a transformer, a crossover into wondrous feelings and journeys. The world seems alive and fresh, eager to throw itself at anyone who has eyes to see. “This is it!” I hear him. “Don’t miss it.”

That childhood story from long ago is alive and well. As the third billy goat over the bridge, I am truly graced. I have encountered the troll and have won the day.

As a child, I loved the story of the troll who lived under the bridge and who tried to capture the three billy goats as they crossed his bridge on their way home. Each goat told the troll that the brother who was to follow would be better to eat. The third goat faced the troll and won the day.

I’ve imagined my troll, throughout my life, hiding behind certain risks I took, behind the intentions of those persons I couldn’t clearly read, beneath the transitional bridges I had to cross. There was always that unknown element, that spirit of adventure that accompanies risk-taking, that exhilarated lift once on the other side of safe.

Now that I have aged a bit, I’ve come to see the troll as a redemptive figure rather than a destructive one. A troll is one who intercepts you on your path and confronts your complacency. A troll is one who challenges you to look at your choices and attitudes so you can stretch to grow into a more authentic you. A troll is one who forces you to look and see.

My grandson, Archer, is a troll. At fifteen months, he stops me dead in my tracks whenever I see his face. He pops up out of nowhere with that mesmerizing smile of his and captivates me completely. I forget immediately whatever busyness that temporarily holds me hostage and come straight back to the present moment. He makes me forget what I know and to know, more deeply, everything I forgot, about living, about seeing, about being.

His exuberance and reckless spontaneity knock me off my mindless track and unwrap the gifts of nature and awe. No more clinging to wrapped gifts — no more just getting by without encounter.  Archer places value on the smallest of wonders: a feather lying on the ground, a bird calling overhead, a car splashing rain on the wet pavement. He stops to listen to a barking dog down the street, points to a frisky squirrel at play. He makes me look. He allows me to see.

His need of me is pure — unconditional reliability, genuine availability, open receptivity. He lifts me out of myself in spite of myself, tricks me into being my best/whole self. Archer is a visible image of everything invisible that I believe.

He reminds me that we each arrive in this world knowing, but that, as we adapt and conform to cultural expectations, we forget the truth of who we are, of why we’re here. He reaches inside me and gets me in touch, again, with my starting point, that thread of truth within that will unravel my path into a more vital and human me. He wraps me in wonder until I surrender.

Archer moved with his parents to Hilton Head Island five months ago. As I play with him in his living room and delight in his playful laughter, he scurries under the coffee table and flashes that contagious, killer smile. At that moment, everything I know and believe is constellated into one timeless flow of sacred energy that warms my whole body and vibrates my soul.

“Where do you go?” Archer asks me as I’m getting into my car for the long ride back to Atlanta. I can hardly answer that question myself, let alone, answer him.

As I drive over the bridge that takes me away from his world and back into mine, I hear that gleeful laughter singing my heart. I smile, enlivened from within by this treasured image of my little troll under the coffee table. His image becomes for me a transformer, a crossover into wondrous feelings and journeys. The world seems alive and fresh, eager to throw itself at anyone who has eyes to see. “This is it!” I hear him. “Don’t miss it.”

That childhood story from long ago is alive and well. As the third billy goat over the bridge, I am truly graced. I have encountered the troll and have won the day.

“Don’t get old on me, Mama!” my daughter used to chide me. My Sarah, in high school at that time, has always known just how to get my attention, and she does.

What I heard her saying to me was, “Mama, I want you vibrant and present in my life.” Sarah confronts two aspects of how I choose to, or choose not to, connect with those I love. She has always needed to connect with my aliveness. She has always wanted me to be fully present in her life, in the moment, in her moment.

That doesn’t seem like alot for a child to request of a parent, yet it calls into question every choice I make about how I choose to connect to the world and to those persons in my world. My choice touched Sarah’s life on every level.

Show me your aliveness, Mama. Show me the vitality of your passion, the delight you take in experiencing, the richness of your friendships, the fun you have in choosing color and fragrance and feel of everything you pull into your life. Let me connect up with and experience in you all the possibilities that lie ahead for me as a woman, in terms of personal power, in terms of desire and fulfillment, in terms of generativity and joy.

If you don’t do that in your lifetime, Mama, I will have to make up in mine for your lack. I will have to get, do, achieve all the things you didn’t. I will have to run harder, do more, stir up more energy, take more risks, for I will have to balance, compensate, live out your unlived life. Let me have my own life, Mama, to make my own choices, for me. Don’t ask me to do what you chose not to do with yours. Keep passion alive or I’ll have to do it all.

Give me your presence, Mama. I need you focused and awake. I need you in concert with the earth beneath you, the cosmos around you, the breath within you. I need you to be with me when you’re with me, planted right here on the earth, not preoccupied, not distracted, not wishing you were somewhere else. I need to feel your energy, to indulge myself in the warm pulse of your loving, to bask in your delight of me.

I need to see in your eyes the world embracing me. If I can’t find these things in you, Mama, I will have to race through life with a knawing hunger that will blind me to everything that doesn’t sing my praises. I will have to do and do and do until I think I’ve lulled everyone into believing I’m special. I will not be free to rest in the gentle presence of who I am. I will gag on the pain of my own self doubts.

I’m watching you, Mama. I’m watching every wrinkle, every smile, every yes, every no. I’m watching how you hold me close and let me slowly move away. I’m right over here, soaking you in with my heart, learning from you, needing you to love the journey all the while you’re letting it go. I stand on your shoulders. You are my stand on the earth. When you’re gone, I need to know how to stand by my self, to hold this world close, to love it, then to let it go. I’m watching you, Mama. I’ve always watched you.

Children know in-utero whether we are present, available, anxious, vitally alive. They absorb our emotional, spiritual, intellectual energies, know intuitively if they are wanted by us. They know us at our depths before we know them. We cannot trick them as we might bluff the world. Children are our truth keepers.

For me, for Sarah, and for all the Sarah’s after her, I want to be young in spirit and old in soul. Spirit soars: I want my energies up, my ideas young, my spirits light. Soul digs down: I want my wisdom deep, my presence grounded, and all my chosen connections, strong and vital. I want the awareness and the wisdom it takes to allow, to enjoy, and to mentor my children through all the adventures and stages they need. Soul gets more rich with the years. Spirit gets more free.

Sarah’s invitation to me to remain vital, present, and involved in her life, has pulled me out of foxholes and quicksand more than I can tell. She has held me to the earth. This has served as gift for the both of us. Her vitality and voracious passion for life and color and relationship have stirred my own. My delight in her, my commitment to being there for her, my respect of her emerging womanhood, have been nurturance for her. The universe must have known.

My mother and I are energized by different goddesses. If you want to know how to cook something, how to arrange flowers, how to put together a room, you go to my mother. If you want to rearrange the landscape of your inner world, to discern meaning from a life circumstance, or to learn how to simplify your life, you come to me.

It wasn’t always so clear. As a child, what my mother couldn’t understand, she couldn’t celebrate. When she said to me, “You’re such a dreamer,” it sounded like displeasure. I could have handled it better had she known to say, then, “I don’t understand how you can enjoy playing in the woods by yourself, or sitting by the waterfall. I need to be doing something, accomplishing something.” Maybe I could have sorted out our differences then, without thinking I was inadequate or bad.

Parents are gods. Little ones take in their parents’ judgments like a plant takes in water. There is no resistance, no discrimination, no understanding that their parents may be troubled, or tired, or immature, or just plain wrong.

It’s all in how it’s said. “I’m mad at you. I don’t like it when you don’t listen to me” is different from “You’re bad.” Now, my mother never said I was bad, but the way she told me I was a dreamer made me think I was bad. Mother and I have talked and resolved all this. She’s great that way. She always says that it is hard for young parents to see things from the child’s point of view.

I just know, and I want to make it evident, how a child takes in judgment. I was always ashamed I was a dreamer, different, not sophisticated in worldly matters. I thought I was a disappointment, a problem. I grew to hide that part of me. I buried it alive. Miraculously, it grew below the surface and saved itself for me until I was ready to claim it again in later years.

Surprisingly, as I grew to love that part of me, my mother grew to love that part of me as well. Now she says, “I don’t know where you came from, Van, but I love to think of you wandering around in your imagination. I wish I could see things the way you see them.” 

That’s what parents do, you know. They send their child on a journey by the things they say, by the judgments they make, most of the time, unknowingly. The child absorbs these judgments as if they are truth. It takes a lifetime to discern, to reclaim as special those parts of us.

Let’s face it. All children are sensitive. All children want to hear they are worthy of our love, even when they are not behaving as we’d like. It takes a wise parent to tell a child what behavior is expected without telling him what’s wrong with him. And if she still doesn’t listen or conform to what we need from her? Then tell him you are mad he cannot listen, not that he is “bad.”

My three-year-old grandson accidentally broke a pane in my french door. I told him I was angry the glass was broken, that I wish he could have been more careful. He cried the moment the glass shattered, watched my face. I freely expressed myself, but I consciously kept my focus on the broken glass and on my frustration, not on him.

The next day we were playing, as we are wont to do, outside in the grass. In the middle of our imaginative game, he stopped dead center and looked at me, his grin covering the entire lower portion of his face. “Are you still mad at me?” he teased. “I’m still mad about the broken glass, Archer, but I’m not mad at you.” I knew his intention had not been to break the glass.

I’m sure I used “you statements” with my own children, about something, though I don’t think I ever told them they were “bad.”  I’m glad I get a second chance with grandchildren, to be more curious about them than judgmental, to try to discern the god or goddess fueling them into little persons. Life is good. It’s never too late to reinvent ourselves.

I was a freshman in college, taking a Greek philosophy course, when I was first mesmerized by a piece of the truth. “You can’t step into the same river twice,” suggested Heraclitus, a fifth century BC philosopher. The river looks the same, but the waters touching your feet, the flow of its being, are constantly in motion. From one moment to the next, it is not the same river.

This metaphor of something looking the same but of not at all being the same has followed me down the years. I know it to be true: You can not even step into the same conversation twice, into the identical relationship you had with someone only moments before. We are constantly changing, coming to new self-awareness, to a new perspective of one another, influenced by how we feel at the moment, by how the other received what we said to them, by non-verbal cues.   

As in mounting a horse, we need to approach each conversation, each encounter with one another as a new experience of knowing the other. The ride is different every time. If this isn’t happening, then someone isn’t listening, or someone is asleep.

Predictable is comfortable but it isn’t alive. We throw the same old words and the same old behaviors at one another, thinking that, since it held the relationship in the past, it will hold it now. The relationship grows stale, with one of us often becoming disenchanted or bored.

Something as simple as a feelings-check-in at the end of the day can ensure ongoing dialog. How are we doing? Did anything happen between us today that we could have handled better? Was there something we should have talked about that we didn’t?

We are such complex, magical creatures, if only we made time to listen; not only to those speaking to us, but to our own inner dialogue, to our own evolving soul. We often answer one another without first allowing the feeling evoked by what was said to us to drop deep within and stir a genuine soul response. We say whatever fits the moment, surprised ourselves sometimes by our own emotional disconnect. We let it pass. No big deal, we tell ourselves, it’s just conversation.

It doesn’t pass. The river flows. We emotionally move on, begin keeping our most intimate inner thoughts to ourselves, not bothering to share. Our communication gets sloppy. We speak in superficial half-truths. Our partner falls behind, doesn’t sense we are not the person they knew so well just days before. A friendly distance creeps in and fills the space that was once intimacy.

Soon, we are not on the same page, not really sharing our feelings about what happens between us, what we need to be close. It seems too late somehow to return to former depths, to correct the feelings so lightly misrepresented in previous exchange. Why hurt their feelings? we say. Why confront the issue when the moment is already past? We’ll get a chance to talk about it.

The river flows. We eventually stand before one another, looking for a sign, an opening, a way back to the easy exchange that allowed one another in to that private space that is our heart, our soul-life. Before we realize it, we are on different sides of the river.

It’s not what we do for a living that grows us into a person, but what we ache for, what makes our heart sing. This changes over time and those close to us cannot really know us if we do not share this. Our talking has to move from the highlights of our day’s work to the movements of each other’s heart. It takes conscious effort to make the time to swim these waters.

Listening and emotional closeness in relationship are often difficult skills for more literal-minded persons. They hear only facts rather than listen for the feelings beneath the facts. It’s the sharing of feelings that make us feel close to someone, not just knowing their thoughts or the facts of their day. Emotional sharing tumbles into soul sharing — the dip into that eternal river of life that flows through each of us and turns our experiences into resonance and meaning.

If I had a nickel for every client who told their partner they wanted to be listened to and not placated or fixed, like a problem, I’d be rich indeed. To listen to someone’s feelings, even when we are fifty percent sure we know what they will say – their fears as well as their dreams – allows them to feel cherished, understood, known. It creates closeness. It sends the message they are important to us, that their feelings and needs are important to us.

This invisible river that flows through each of us is the eternal river – divine energy pulsing our human energy and creating in us a new body chemistry that incorporates both. All those things that are spiritual in us – our feelings, our longings, our dreams – come from this other dimension, this other level of our being that is not the physical body. It is the spiritual body of us.

Both physical and spiritual live side by side, in each partner, in the relationship, in every nuance and exchange. Like a three-way conversation, the divine dialogues with each partner as each partner dialogues with the other. There is so much to hear in each conversation we have with one another, deeper, more attentive listening is crucial.

Just as a musician knows he cannot hold a note without it spontaneously flowing into a new note, a new tone, we have to be more aware of the spontaneous flow of energy and revelation that occurs in each exchange. Rather than fear any change we may sense in our partner or friend, we need to just move with it, ask about it, allow ourselves to be moved by it — to invite the mystery of it daily to carry each of us gently to our more authentic selves.
         
The river within you, the river within your partner, does not have to leave one of you behind if you both pay attention to its steady movement. Don’t be afraid to ask one another what rumbles and flows beneath what each says to the other. Sink further into the mystery of the encounter. If your intention is pure, you should be able to approach any subject or feeling.

Throw your line deep. What you catch in that river may be a better relationship with your partner, with your deeper selves, with the divine that is always edging closer and inviting you to deeper living.

Relationship is built into the genetic fiber of life. It is an innate spark that live-kind, fairly early in its evolution, exhibited — the propensity to move toward other live-kind, other life forms. A plant that is standing tall when it feels sunlight will move toward that sunlight. Without sunlight, the plant cannot live. It cannot do its work, cannot accomplish photosynthesis.

As evolution occurred and animal life became possible, there registered something we describe as joy or pleasure. Science doesn’t know when it first began, but, by the time this evolutionary movement blossomed into bird life, it seems that animal life experienced pleasure, and coupling.

This relational pleasure and relational help – living in tribes or in community forms – soon became normal occurrences. It soon appeared to be more of an anomaly for life forms not to live in community than for them to live in community. With human life forms, we call this family. In families, relational energy develops, joy and pleasure are experienced, and help and support are available for survival and emotional well-being.

Relationship is not something we educate. It is something present, in the fabric of life, enlivened, given the opportunity to come into being. In families, if parents enjoy and delight and emotionally support their child, the child thrives. If parents experience their child as a burden, or as something scary, or as an extension of themselves, enlivening does not occur. The child does not receive the help it needs to thrive and to emotionally develop into a full, healthy, adult human being.

In order to step into the world with confidence, vitality and a healthy appreciation of self and others, a child has to experience this first in the family. Then, the natural movement toward being with another in relationship is well grounded. This movement out of the self allows the individual to move into the mystery of the other as well as learn those things about the self one can only learn in relationship with another. Relationships, then, are doors out of and into the self.

As part of the evolutionary process, humankind is one with nature and yet privileged. Man is the conscious part of nature, that part of nature that can reflect and make choices from a conscious perspective. This does not mean man is above nature. It means man is more responsible than a bird or plant life for the future of nature and for other life forms. This is his role in the relational web of all life forms.

Because of his ability to be conscious, self-aware, man is also capable of experiencing the divine energy in the universe in conscious ways. All life forms experience divine energy flowing through their particular form, but we do not know if they experience this as conscious energy. It is certainly sacred energy. Man has the ability to relate to the divine in personal, conscious ways.
Man calls this relationship to divine energy beyond his human understanding God.

Man evolves as an individual, within his own person, as well as a species. He evolves from his animal nature into his spiritual nature when he moves from instinctual responses to responses of the heart, or compassion. This is his personal journey into the invisible world of spirit or divine energy. He can experience this consciously and can respond to life with this energy that flows through him from the invisible world if he chooses. We call this love.  
 
All of this is grounded in the divine longing, the divine discontent that initiated life and the evolutionary movement of all life forms. This reaching out of spirit for matter, this reaching back of matter for spirit – this reaching is the primary movement of life in the universe. It is the ground for and the theater of all relationships. In this sense, all experiences of relationship are sacred.

Relationships, then, are very complex, confusing, and completely common expressions of every aspect of all life forms. It takes a lifetime to understand them. It takes a great heart to achieve the full range of divine energy offered in them. And it proves, over and over again, to be the one thing that gives meaning and aliveness to what would otherwise be the evolution of mere protoplasm.  

In our longing, we reach out, to know and to be known, to touch and to be touched, to be held by an energy other than our own. We move out of ourselves and into the mystery of the other.

Relationships are larger than the persons within them. They are a schoolhouse of the divine where we learn about giving, about not having it all, about union and loss, about forgiveness.

To contain the longing, the encounter, the surrender is an attempt to contain divine energy within our human person. It defines the human experience.