Goodbye To Daddy

My father died two weeks ago. He was seventy-seven. He died the way he had lived, without pain, without having to feel anything. 

I asked to clean out his home office. It is a small room; it was his kingdom. I knew that, for me, cleaning his office would be a final rite of passage.
 
His presence hung in the little room like the smell of old pipe tobacco, familiar, haunting. The walls gave evidence to all that kept my father going and protected him against the world, and from us.  Family pictures papered the room, old letters tacked up like friendly ghosts, travel mementoes from happier days, birthday cards and anniversary poems which told of his history among us. My eyes feasted on these closeted walls, straining to glean the silent rapture my father felt in placing here his captured feeling.

Things stuffed in every possible cranny throughout the room cradled him here those many nights he sat to pay the family bills. Round cans of eight milometer films which hold the history of our family ties: our first step, our baptism, Christmas mornings, wedding days. His favorite novels. Travel scrapbooks. Medical books, outdated now. How-to instructions for appliances, old coins, rocks. His things, once deemed clutter, now sacred.

I touched Daddy’s file cabinet. I felt excitement surge within as I opened it and slipped silently into his “secret stash,” to learn what he could never reveal about himself. My heart quickened, eager to touch somehow his internal world.

The drawers creaked beneath the strain of its bulging treasure. Old family photographs engaged my being — vaguely remembered ancestors, photos of my parents as children, familiar landscapes of our family pilgrimage, pictures of my siblings, not entered in our usual family albums.

My father’s sensitivity emerged with each turn of my hand. Old files with letters my sister and I wrote from college, telling of our adventures and noting needs from far away. A letter detailing reasons why I chose to live in New York rather than returning home after college. Old papers I wrote in college, defending civil rights, Southern literature and a social conscience. A note signed by my dad and my brother, then an adolescent, “My father promises to pay me $500 if I do not drink by the age of 21.”

Hand made Father’s Day cards, words of affection he secretly digested.  A piece of paper scribbled by one brother, “One free gutter cleaning.” Death notices of his own departed siblings, carefully clipped and cataloged. A history of his feelings and gratitudes emerged, unspoken during his stay with us, denied except in death.

Hours passed without my emerging from this secret place, my father’s interior world. Feelings so deep, wordless, memories so alive yet so secret, hidden in life from us, now so poignantly present. My father had slipped into his file cabinet a history of relationships, a lifetime of family, without so much a gesture to those of us he loved of its importance to him. We can only guess. 

I did not want to leave this place.

Alone, among all these ghosts, these treasured images and symbols of lives linked together, I got it,  firsthand, how love kept at bay was my inheritance.  Stored away in his file cabinet, he hoarded all the potential moments of his life, all the things he held dear — fantasies upon which he could muse, at arms length, in his quiet hours alone — precious thoughts he could not act upon in the real world.

Storing this in his file cabinet rather than living it. All his potential caring, all his potential fathering, his potential being-in-the-world. And here I was, alone in his study, feeling all the feelings, reliving all the memories, fantasizing about all the potential exchanges never granted in life, just as he did.

There must be some message in why he saved all these memories for us.  A message about his life, perhaps, a message I don’t think he figured out himself, but left for us to figure out.  For my part, I got what I needed for the moment. I gathered up this precious cargo, this treasure-hoard my father left us as his last embrace, and carried it gently downstairs. To share with my brothers and sister, my mother and children. To make it live within us, alive with all the meanings hidden. Alive with Daddy.
 
                                                                                      — December 1994

Playing At the Top Of Your Game

“Where do you go from the top of a thirty-foot pole?” This question, posed by Thomas Merton the day he died while attending a monastic world conference in Asia, stated at me from a box of old handwritten notes and collected writings I had put away in my thirties. Scribbled in my own handwriting on an old index card, the question stared at me and presented itself as if for the first time. At thirty-something, I found the question provocative but not particularly revelatory. In my fifties, I find it profound.

Living for fifty-plus years gives me a purity of perspective, an intuitive inner knowing, a sense of detachment I did not have in my thirties. Like Mark Twain, I finally have the wisdom (I didn’t have in my youth) to go with the experience. Rather than accumulate, I long to simplify. Rather than respond to authority outside myself, I am grounded from within, in what I know because of my personal journey.

Rather than invest energy in discovering the truth of the matter, I know now the importance lies in my ability to experience it, fully. I find myself choosing professional workshops, reading matter, or general sharing of ideas, not for knowledge I do not already have, but to enjoy the metaphors others use in describing their journey with a question of subject. I can see it through their metaphors and experience it in a way I wouldn’t have on my own.

This enlarges and opens new doors in a house I am already building from a different direction. Rather than seek only those who are more like me, who think like me, live like me, I delight in people’s differences as a source of richness and dialogue. This does not mean, as we age, we don’t seek a close circle of fellow soul mates, but that others’ perspective of the truth are interesting instead than threatening.

I’m comfortable at my age with mine not being the last word, or if what I say has no interest for others. We each start up different poles and therefore have a different view and experience of the mystery. Even though the mystery itself is universal, our personal experience of it can only be told in our own story and adventure.

My spiritual journey has gone full circle, rounded out and reclaimed the joy I knew as a child at play. My view of death from the top of my thirty-foot pole is a swan dive off the tower on the lake at my old summer camp. We stand in hushed silence as we watch one another take a turn, one by one, climbing the ladder to the top of the tower.

Only one person stands on the tower at a time, but we are all standing with that person, watching, waiting, being with them as they take their turn at diving. Good luck, we say. Good jump! we clap. And then the turn is ours. We climb the ladder, glance around at those who love us, who cheer us on, then relax and dive into the unknown.

Death, releasing ourselves into those invisible hands that have reached for us from the other side of our understanding, is something we each experience when someone dies. Like consciousness, we participate in death as something the other end of which we can only guess. As those around us die and return to their origins, part of us returns with them as much as part of them remains with us.

I have, indeed, opened this gift of life. I have tasted the wine. I have danced with the stranger. I now seek more passionate ways to enjoy, to share, to live out this grace. Being at the top of my thirty-foot pole allows me the time to resolve unfinished business, to redeem any dissatisfying relationship I didn’t have wisdom enough to handle in my twenties or thirties. I have eternity spread out before me now.

I have the opportunity, during this phase of my life – which Erik Erikson deems the time to resolve whether my life has integrity or causes me despair – to be the person I am meant to be and to enjoy the fullness of this awareness into which I have grown.

When I take my early morning walk, I find myself, not taking an examination of conscience, but an examination of consciousness. How conscious am I of the richness, the privilege, the wisdom of all that has brought me to where I am? Am I able to absorb and integrate the revelations available to me here from the top of my pole? Am I suitably grateful? Am I conscious of those things in me I must let die and those I must nurture?

Mountain tops and thirty-foot poles and sunrise vistas have always stirred the human spirit to reach beyond itself. So too, those internal ocean depths and spiritual valleys and spiral pathways have wooed us deep within. Within and without, above and below, loud and soft, mystery invites us forward.

I have reached the top and found there to be more, within myself, within my personal experience of becoming, within the circle that includes my own experience of death. I embrace them all as long as breath holds me in her eternal rhythm and leads me still.

Death

If we have allowed ourselves to move in and out of Center throughout our life, moving into death will not be foreign. It will, in fact, feel familiar, intimate, personal. The silence out of which we came into life is the same silence into which we will return at death. It has accompanied us, a faithful companion, in our breathing, in all of our letting-go, in each attempt we have made to create more space within for the light.

Death is passing through that hidden gate in the center of the garden and recognizing it as home lit up. We recognize the light we have been shepherding in ourselves to be one and the same with the Light that receives us in death. We can let go and become one with it, at last.

The more comfortable with mystery we have been in life, the more comfortable this mystery of death. Death cracks open all mystery and invites us inside. Perhaps this is why so many who have briefly passed over to the other side only to be yanked back into life report feelings of deep peace and joy. In the end, it is so natural.

Christopher Reeve speaks of leaving his body in a moment of death, content, happy to be with the Light, then, returning just as mysteriously, happy to be back in the light of his body, in the love of his family beside his hospital bed. Both life and death hold rapture for him now.

Life for most of us offers less dramatic experiences of what we can expect. Small moments of wholeness in which we catch a glimpse of our true self and the divine energy that emanates from the core of us. These are as close as our breathing.

We have only to close our eyes — to listen for that part of us that does not change, that informs us of our true nature, the potential of our being – to hear how close death has been to us, all along. Seeing ourselves as separate – separate from all things living – deludes us into thinking of death as an unnatural event, a tragedy. It’s as natural as breathing, as laughing.   

Age allows a certain wisdom. We learn we can’t hoard energy. We can’t control or will it. We are energy, localized in a human body. Sacred energy. It does not belong to us. It is on loan, for our delight, for our creativity, for our compassionate contribution to the spiritual evolution of life. As the energy of our body ebbs, the energy of the one who first gave the gift enters.

If we have been open to recognizing this divine energy in the persons, the insights, the words, the natural state divine energy has taken shape for us throughout our life, we will recognize this divine energy in death. Perhaps that’s what people speak of when they tell us they saw their whole life pass before their eyes just before they thought they were going to die.

This is the light we have discovered in our darkness, has shepherded us through our experiences, that has informed our life. We follow it now, in instant flashback, through all the steps of our life, and beyond, to where it bends and returns to the Light that has sustained us throughout. If we were conscious of this connection in life, death is a validation. If we were unconscious of this in life, we will be delightfully surprised; that’s all.

Dying is part of living, not the end of it. Science tells us that energy is not lost, but changes form. The mystery of our matter and what happens to our matter at death is not something we can know. We can only look at the moon, and all things that cycle in nature, and ask the question. The answer lies in our future. It resides at the Center.

What of this spirit whose longing for matter set life in motion? What of this light we have harvested within us all these years? What of this breath that has cradled us and witnessed us? What of this life that has poured itself through us? Does this end with death? Does it carry us forward in that eternal river that flows, far beyond our mind can carry us?

We can only wonder and listen to our breathing, and be at peace. It is our breathing that marks for us that we are not dead. It is our breathing that holds the mystery we have never been able to crack. Our breathing, that mystery that has companioned us in life, becomes our bridge.

The Corporate Blues

Jesus passed the Pool of Bethzatha. Crowds of sick people — blind, lame, paralyzed — sat waiting for the waters to be stirred. At intervals, the angel of the Lord came down to the pool and stirred the waters. The first person to enter the water after it was stirred was cured of any ailment or suffering. One man waiting there had an illness that had lasted for thrity-eight years. Jesus saw him and said, “Do you want to be well?” “Sir,” replied the sick man. “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get there, someone else gets there before me.”   (John 5: 1-7)
The man in this parable is not unlike many of my male clients who climb the corporate ladder. This man, in any modern parable or myth, has been climbing the corporate ladder for thirty-eight years, with every one getting to the top before he does. Just when he works hard, has all his numbers, some one else sneaks in just ahead of him and gets the promotion. He’s devastated.

“I grabbed on to the rope and all I could think about was getting to the top,” John said in contemporary metaphor. John, a client who is up there in the corporate world, knows only too well the exhaustion of that lame man from Bethzatha. “The pace is killing me,” he says, “but the only way I know how to fix it is to just go faster. No matter how hard I work, no matter how many butts I kiss, I’ve discovered it’s not the ladder to success and security I’m climbing, but Jacob’s Ladder — the ladder between heaven and hell.”    

The corporate world honors ego, not soul. Ego is outer-directed, goal-oriented, efficient. Soul is inner-directed, process-oriented, diffuse. Our friend in the gospel parable has lost all feeling in his legs — in his foundation, in his vitality. He has lost touch with his life force. Jesus, in modern reframe, is a metaphor for soul. Soul comes along and confronts the exhausted ego: “Do you want to heal? Do you want to be whole?”

The paralyzed man’s feelings of defeat, depression, loss of identity pull him down, enable him to get in touch with a deeper need for meaning in his life. He first complains of his situation, defends, then becomes despondent. His emotions pull him in, within, which allows him to shut out the noise and demands of the outside world so he can hear an inner spiritual noise –his own inner voice, his soul.

The angel came down and stirred the waters of his emotions. This allowed him to move within, where real healing begins. He knew what he had been doing outside — fighting to get to the pool, fighting to get to the top — hadn’t worked. He looked to the inside, to his soul, for direction.

Our contemporary corporate climber, in a similiar existential crisis, may, at this point, enter therapy. As a therapist, it is my job to sit with this person long enough until he or she can hear that inner voice and respond to the crisis from within his or her own person. Jesus, in the parable, shows the cripple how he was looking to the outside for what was already within himself. Towards the end of the gospel story, Jesus tells him: The pool is within you. The strength, the wisdom, the answers are all within you. Get up and walk.

Once our cripple could experience this spiritual pool within and not look for healing outside himself, he could feel the stirring. It stirred within. He could move into the pool of his own vitality. He could stand on his own foundation, find his legs and walk. His emotions helped him to move within, to find his new meaning, his new direction. The river within began to flow.

Vern Harper said it a different way: “The faster you go, the less you know.” The more we take on, the more we attempt to juggle without first balancing what we have, the less conscious we will be of what we do. Without grounding ourselves (finding or identifying our legs) in a conscious way, about how we use our energy, how our choices color our outcomes, we find ourselves at the mercy of our unconscious demons. We lose touch with our own vitality.

Our cripple felt his angel, his emotions, stir him from within. He began to feel — to feel life in his legs again. He found the strength he needed to do what he needed. Our soul, likewise, asks us, when we lose touch with our interior world, when we dry out, shut down, “Do you want to be well? Do you want to get in touch with your true vitality?”

Healing and energy and power, all within.

Work-Soul Connection

Business is the pulse of our country’s value system. The workplace reflects the moral conscience of our post-modern world, says Matthew Fox: “It is at work more than at church that the real moral – and immoral – decisions are being rendered about the health of our planet, our bodies, our children, our very souls. Work is the adult arena for spiritual decision-making.”

In addition to efficiency experts, then, we need soul experts in the work place. All persons have soul – that innate capacity to reflect, to experience deeply, to use imagination to enlarge vision and vitality – but not every person finds it easy to access soul. Nor does every business.

Soul is not measurable like a bottom line on a spread sheet, but it colors every interaction between employer and employee, between company and client, between citizen and world. You know, just by your dealings with a business, whether the work force feels valued and included in decision-making, if environmental concerns are utilized, if there is a commitment to working with the local community for shared prosperity.

It’s not what is done, but the way it’s done that suggests soul. Soul grows along side the product or service and manifests in the interactions with the public. Consciously or unconsciously, a business creates its own theology of work, its own rituals and ethics. It manifests whether or not it values human beings, whether it honors the earth, if it is committed to conservation of resources.

I was touched by the story of the manufacturer who pre-paid his employees a full years’ salary when his factory had just burned to the ground. Is that not soul? Does that not suggest a particular theology of work or work ethic? It’s not just the generosity of his gesture, but what it said about his grasp of employer-employee relations, the importance of family, his understanding of how the emotional wellbeing of his workers has a direct relation to the wellbeing of his company.

You can tell when a business or enterprise is out of touch with its richer possibilities. Workers are drained, demoralized. All they can see is the piece of paper in their hand with the next scheduled meeting or deadline. Work becomes purely instrumental in getting what liberates them outside the workplace rather than an expression of their talent or passion. Creating more sheltered time, time to reflect and renew, is lost. The business for whom they work focuses on profit and expansion. It makes no room for shepherding the human heart.

Businesses that enhance human life, that value and work to restore and sustain the natural enviornment, are more environmentally sensitive, family friendly, worker empowering, and community oriented. It is an extension of our own soul work, when we get involved with a business, to be aware of the mission statement and business ethics it adopts. Our concern for the earth spills over into our concern for a business philosophy that reflects community wellbeing.

The first known people to work our great land, to harvest its fruits, were Native American. These peoples were grounded in a work ethic or spirituality that called for no decision-making of any kind without consideration of how it would impact their children, down to the seventh generation. How well are we who inherited this great land doing in this respect? Are we really leaving the world a better place, environmentally and spiritually, for the generations that come after us?

It’s time for us to stretch our imagination, our mental muscle-power, and our financial resources to create more person-centered technologies in order to enhance American business without starving the American soul. 

Competition In The Work Place

“Busy has become a four-letter-word,” Sheila winced, speaking of the work ethic at the office. “If you’re not busy, something’s wrong with you. If you slow down, people think you’re not ambitious enough. The panic around competition fosters decision making from the dark side.” 

Sheila had just come from a meeting in which she learned about her employer’s plan to replace her department with more sales. “’Restructuring’, they said. ‘Tightening up the bottom line’.” Her company was opting for more foot soldiers and salesmen over people with creative ideas. In terms of the bottom line, aggressiveness does seem to be more valued than creativity. 

Competition in the corporate world is stark. It forces us to think in economic terms instead of human terms. Competition grows between workers within the same organization – to keep their job, to get a raise – rather than the team working together to compete with other, outside companies. The focus or purpose becomes that of the individual, with no focus on the good of the whole, even when the whole means the rest of humanity, as in environmental considerations.

“Companies don’t care about their workers anymore,” Shelia said, speaking of the dark side of decision making. “The only thing they care about is, ‘How much money can I make?’ — not we, owners and workers together, but ‘How much money can I, the owner, make?’”  If the accepted values are competition and individual gain, then taking into consideration the needs of those behind me in line means falling behind myself.

For an individual company to keep moving ahead, it seems, getting new business is more important than creativity or human relations. Personal worth is measured in dollars rather than in personal gifts and talents. There’s never enough.

Isn’t there a story about a tree in the middle of the Garden of Enough? Wasn’t there more than enough to go around in that garden, but the two inhabitants wanted more? More knowledge? More power? Aren’t we still fighting over the rights to such a Tree of Knowledge — the knowledge of how to create a leaner, meaner money machine — no matter the consequence to the garden itself? Concerns for the environment always seem to lose to concerns for the bottom line.

“The corporate world has injured my self worth,” Sheila moaned. “They took what I had to offer them, my creativity, used it, then they dismissed it as insufficient. There was never any positive feedback, only negative motivation to develop more, more, more business.” Even the salesmen who had good people skills and took good care of their existing customers were told this was no longer good enough. New business was the only way they could hold on to their jobs.

Each of us has to determine for ourselves what is enough. Sheila tried to work it out within her own situation. “I’m going to have to find something that will ensure my having an internal sense of success rather than an external one.” That may mean a lower salary. “I’ll have to enjoy it myself and appreciate my own abilities. I can’t be dependent on external rewards or motivation; but, how do I find a career at my age,” she asked, “with that kind of internal reward?”

Thomas Moore, in Care Of the Soul, offers insight. “The more deeply our work stirs imagination and corresponds to images that lie there at the bedrock of our identity and fullness, the more it will have soul.” (185) The more our work awakens in us a feeling of our own worth – a real appreciation of our own gifts – the more satisfying and liberating it will be. What we do has to have some integral connection with who we are as a person.

We are human beings first, workers second. Does what I do allow me to be creative? Allow me to be in and to nurture essential relationships? Contribute to my feeling of aliveness? Free me to act with conscious integrity? Does what I do allow me to make time for beauty in my life, for soul time, allow me to “bend time” so I can include those things that heal and hold and whole me?
Does what I do flow from my essence and not just something I have to will myself to do?

If these factors are present, perhaps our present circumstance or career choice is enough. If they are not, all the competition and energy with which we choose to participate in the race toward emotional security will never be enough.

“What do I have to do to take my life back?” Sheila asked. Joseph Campbell once observed that all mythic adventures begin with people who were initially lost, stuck, confused about something. I told Sheila she was right where she needed to be. She was asking the right questions that would lead her to the next right step. 

Who Rings Your Bell?

“They ring the bell, and if you’re lucky, you get the cheese, the crumb from the corporate table,” my client began. He was discouraged, complained of low self-esteem, exhaustion. “The only trouble is, the harder you work, the more you conform, the cheese, the crumb, keeps getting smaller.”

Tom is a talented, sensitive young man, trying to have a piece of the American Dream. Part of the dilemma, for me, is with the dream itself. It used to be that, if I work hard, I can make my dream come true. Now it’s, “I deserve it.” Our life work is no longer the outpouring of our giftedness but the badge of our entitlement. I’m entitled to the prize because I expect it.

Exploring this with Tom, he sinks deeper into his chair. “We want it all, don’t we? We want to love what we do and get all the rewards that are out there. But they promised us! They say, ‘If you behave the way I tell you to behave, I’ll give you the reward, the cheese.’” Tom was angry that the control was all theirs — his time was all theirs. He felt trapped, in a box. “They beat you into submission,” he sighed. “It sucks the life out of me.”

We started talking about his life, where he felt most alive. “The sports part of me is the soul part of me,” he said, his passion beginning to stir. “That’s where I take risks, am a free spirit.” Tom was a surfer. His dream was to one day live at the beach. What he loved about himself had nothing to do with what he did as a living. He leaves his soul at home when he leaves for work.

He began complaining about not being allowed to do anything creative, “original,” in his job, that he does what they tell him to do, that at the end of the day, he feels “used up.”  I shared with him my belief that energy that revitalizes you and opens up even more energy is soul energy, when what you do comes from your passion and aliveness. The rest is will energy, when you will yourself through something. Will energy exhausts and drains you.

We explored images of him surfing through some of the work he presently had to do, feeling the wind and battling surf pull him in directions he didn’t expect. How could he use that energy in his job now? We explored realistic expectations and alternative career options. He said something about “moving my ladder to another wall,” citing the mid-life-crisis metaphor of climbing to the top of the corporate ladder and realizing the ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall all along.

“I have to change my perspective,” he said. “Getting it right, having-it-all is a myth. I’m breathing! That’s the gift!” Tom was realizing that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow isn’t the gift, that the rainbow colors themselves are the gift. Living is the gift. Creating a meaningful life is the gift.
Our work has to flow out of our fullness. Otherwise it is just about survival, the hunt for that pot of gold we call “security” – something that changes with the whims of the times.

“What would make my heart sing?” he mused, drifting off. “It would probably be something counter cultural to the American Dream, but I really want it. I just don’t know how to get it yet.”
Clarity is the beginning of insight. The rest will come in time.

Tom and I talked some more that day, about his dreams, about the woman with whom he was engaged, about parts of the country he would one day like to live. I think he was beginning to process things in a different way than when he first sat down with me that morning. His energy was beginning to come back. He had connected back up with his imagination. He was breathing.

When Tom got up to leave, he turned to me and smiled. “I get it,” he said. “The only bell that has to ring is inside me.”

Work

Our humanity flows from the heart. Our life work, therefore, should be mindful of the needs of the heart or it will be about survival rather than fulfillment.

Early in its history, mankind set up communities. There was a division and sharing of skills, of labor. Men participated in the hunt; women participated in gathering food and child care. Both were vital, important to the whole. Eventually, there was a sharing among tribes.

Mankind builds society and then is influenced – determined, really – by his own creation, without realizing it. He is born into a society and has to build a life, create a life, from the social structures or circumstances handed him by those who set up his society.

We engage in enterprise – enter-the-prize. What is the prize? In business, in today’s economic life, the prize is an accumulation of wealth, money, what is now synonymous with security and power. Money was first introduced as a means to simplify the bartering of skills or goods. Money is now considered an end in itself. Having has become ownership of a thing rather than acknowledgment of a personal quality or gift within a person. This confuses the human heart.

This dilemma can be addressed early in a person’s life, within the family. A vocation, the calling forth of a person’s gifts and talents, must grow out of solid ground, in a strong sense of self — self esteem. If a person feels cherished, encouraged to discover his natural gifts, talents, skills early in life through the positive mirroring of his parents, his community, his social world, he will know early how he can contribute to the society in which he finds himself.

The prize is already within him — his self-esteem, his self-awareness, his self-motivation. He can move out into life with enthusiasm, with breath, enlivened, and take on whatever venture best allows him to express his creative energies. This nurtures the heart rather than depletes it.

If a person emerges from family life feeling less-than, demoralized, repressed, he has already received the message he is damned. His anxiousness will be the ground from which he acts. The energy with which he approaches an enterprise will be the drive for survival rather than an expression of his gifts. The “sweat of his brow” will be, for him, the only way he attains the prize.

The prize was deprived him even before he left home. He sees the only way of being saved, of saving himself, is by the doing. Work becomes a sentence, a burden, rather than a fulfillment. When a society is condemned to this level of survival, it places mankind in danger. It drains his resilience; he becomes depressed, jaded. Bad times become a threat to his existence rather than a natural balance in the up-and-down flow of life.

Work, as all of life, has its healthy aspects and its unhealthy aspects. A person with strong self-esteem can draw on his inner resources and not be dependent on the fickle economic roller coaster. He knows what nurtures his humanness — his family, his friends, his connection with the universe, not his economic stature. He can use his gifts anywhere.

Real poverty is a poverty of vision, when a person looks at life, defeated and pessimistic, without any hope of opportunity. Real poverty is a poverty of spirit, a spiritual malaise that so deludes a person he doesn’t even realize he is poor in the true sense — devoid of heart. He is led to believe that money rather than the quality of his relationships will nurture his humanness. 

How do we structure the work environment so we have truly human experiences within it — so we can fully develop and express ourselves as human beings — keeping an eye on the welfare of the whole? This is a question that has dodged a complete response since the beginning, for it includes society, the individual, the environment, the globe, and the future of mankind. The question itself and our attempt to imagine such a reality are part of our creative genius.

Intro

As we move from Center into the field of time, we live in a culture that expects us to be productive and to contribute to the welfare of the whole. We each have our particular work, our gift, our calling.

What is our work? Our work is to discover how we can best use our gifts and energies in ways that enhance and ground our life, our creativity, and that do not take us too far from center. When our productivity flows out of our self-esteem and creativity, we thrive. When our productivity drains us of our spirit and creative energies, we falter. 

The business world functions on its own rules and ethics. The task for all of us is to create avenues of work that support and enhance nature, our world, our human experience. Our work can be more a part of our wholeness rather than the disruption of it.

A Simple Question, Not So Simple Answer

“What’s the most important question people should ask themselves today?” someone asked Albert Einstein. With exquisite wisdom, Einstein responded, “Is the universe a friendly place?”

People who didn’t feel protected or cherished as children, people who have been wounded by life, have a hard time believing the universe is on their side. Their core belief ranges from “Nothing will turn out right unless I make it happen!” to some bottom-line assessment that life is a bad mother, and God, a bad father. They don’t feel safe.

“Nothing ever turns out like I hope,” grieves Diana. This client, a woman who feels the need to control everything, tends to overdo at every turn in order to prove her worth. In her drive for perfection and approval, she can not let go of anything. Fibromyalgia has taken over her body and is thwarting her need to be caretaker for everyone in her life.  

Rather than acknowledge her illness as a message from the universe that she needs to learn another way of being in the world, to slow down her doing, Diana saw it as a dirty trick from God’s hand. When she arrived on my doorstep, she was inconsolable. It took a lot of hard work for her to finally realize her disease was trying to save her rather than trying to destroy her.

Clients ask me how to get in touch with their spiritual self, yet when we begin to work on letting go, on being rather than doing, they shrink back, clinging to all those take-charge behaviors that worked for them in the past. I’ve learned from Einstein’s lead; I have to help clients come to see the universe as a friendly place before I can help them learn to surrender to its exquisite wisdom.

Can I trust that “it” will be there for me when I need it? Can I trust that what happens to me is what I ultimately need in order to become the whole person I am meant to be? Can I trust that as I send my energy into the universe in the form of a request, an intention, a prayer, a response is already on its way back to me? 

This doesn’t do away with the threat of harm or illness or death. It shifts the perspective, the meaning of and the suffering from what any harm, illness, or death bring. It’s not what happens to me but my attitude about what happens that determines healing. My capacity to influence my experience is dependent on my belief that I have the resources I need, within myself or available from someone who will help me, to change or to derive meaning from my present circumstance.

If the fertilized human egg has within it the blueprint that purposely directs the entire process of human development, why wouldn’t the universe also contain this propensity? If I can accept this notion of the wholistic nature of life, I can also be open to the notion that the universe is so ordered that adversity itself contains within it the pattern and opportunity for me to discover the next step I need to take toward becoming whole.

Surrender, then, involves an openness to and a conscious discernment of the messages and directives hidden in our everyday experiences, not as a passive resignation to an indifferent universe, but as a watchful steward in a purposeful one. It means always being in touch with messages from our outer lives while also listening to our inner voice.

Rather than see life’s wounding as directed against us, we begin looking for signs, listening for inner angels with messages about a better way, a more whole way, through the forest. This kind of control – listening for the right next step from a source of wisdom we have come to trust – is the only control we need. Rather than try to control the outside circumstance, we take control of our internal unfolding until it leads us to the best we have in us.

Trusting that the universe is a friendly place colors our willingness to risk, to form relationships, to be open to what we need to learn from anything and everything that happens. Without that trust that life is on our side, that whatever happens to us is something the other end of which is in the wise hand of some power or energy larger than our own, we learn only to act so as to avoid – loss, disappointment, failure. We avoid those very things from which we can learn the most.

Trusting that the universe is a friendly place brings peace of mind, resilience in the face of adversity, and a philosophy of life that leaves us open to our experience rather than suspicious of it. We find comfort in our connection to all things living rather than estrangement from nature and the transcendent principle at the core of life.

We come to trust that it is not our responsibility to be caretaker of the world. There is a universe, a Good Mother present to give what is needed to those we love to bring them to their personal wholeness. What we think they need or even want for them is not always what they really need. That is part of the mystery of wholeness and of personal growth.  

I’m sure that Albert Einstein thought his question for moderns would help them explore the physical universe and its possibilities. I’m grateful he offered us this metaphor for exploring the inner universe of heart and psyche, and the possibilities this offers for our healing.