Wheel of the Year

Ohhhhhh thheeeeeeeeeeeee
Wheel of the Year turns round and round,
Round and round,
Round and round,
Oh the Wheel of the Year turns round and round,
All through time!

M1 asked me last night why she's considered a summer baby as mid-September is totally Fall territory in our minds.  I told her it's because we've lost the cross-quarter days of an agricultural calendar & the general population is confused and calls June 21st, Summer Solstice, "The first day of summer," when in fact it's mid-summer, (hence it's other name, 'mid-sommer').  May 1st/Beltane is the first day of summer, and spring begins way back in February as the days slowly begin to be noticeably longer, and (some) seeds and bulbs start germinating in time for mid-spring to be in March at the Vernal Equinox.

Yes, that means that fall is upon us, in August!  The second major harvest festival of the year! And we have another two harvest festivals -- Autumnal Equinox to catch the dog days of summer, and Halloween where we thank our ancestors and all for another year of harvests, & put the earth to bed.  And winter begins after Halloween when the cold, damp darkness hunkers down for the year.

But because we've lost the observation of the quarter days as seasonal changes (rather than religous and festive dates), we have this silly thing where summer begins at midsommer & winter waits all the way until the longest night of the year to say, "ok, now it's srs bizness."

Another thing we discussed was people are allowed to have their opinions.  Their opinions may be wrong, but they're allowed to have them.  :)

And still the Wheel of the Year spins round & round...

Teacups

My leadership coach thoughtfully provided me with a parable the last time we talked 1:1.  It was this:

A business man trying to get to the next level in his business tried everything he knew of and was not making progress.  He asked everyone he knew and no one could help.  Finally he met someone who told him of a faraway master who could solve anyone's problem, be it love, health, business, or anything else.  The man thought to himself, "I will go see this master, perhaps he can help me.  So he travelled across the sea, he travelled through the desert, he travelled through the mountains until finally he came to the master.  The master asked, "What have you come to me for?"  The man explained why he had travelled so far.  The master said, "You are not yet ready.  Come back again when you are ready."

Mystified, the man left.  He travelled back home, back through the mountains, back through the desert, back across the sea.  He went back to work, wondering what he was missing that would make him ready.  He worked very hard for many months.  After these months, he thought surely he was ready now.  So he gathered his travel plans, he travelled across the sea, he travelled across the desert,  he travelled through the mountains, until he again came to the master.  "Master, I am returned, I believe I am ready now."  The master looked into his eyes, paused, and said, "Go away.  You are not yet ready."

Perplexed and a little upset, the man left again.  He travelled back home, back through the mountains, back through the desert, back across the sea.  He went back to work, wondering what was missing that would make him ready.  He worked very hard for many more months.  After these many more months, he thought surely I am ready now.  So again, perhaps with more trepidation this time, he gathered his travel plans, he travelled across the sea, he travelled across the desert, he travelled through the mountains until he came to the master.  He said, "Master, I am returned.  I believe I am ready now."  The master looked into his eyes, paused, and again said, "Go away, you are not yet ready."  

The man said, "Master, with all due respect -- what do I need to do to be ready to even receive an understanding of the steps I must take?  It is expensive and frustrating to come this far only to be told I am not ready!"  The master said, "You are not ready, but let us take some tea together."  The man thought, "Finally!  We are getting somewhere!"   

They sat down to tea.  The master, as the host, bid the man, as his guest, pour himself a cup first.  Then the master poured his own cup, and then reached over to pour more tea into the man's cup.  The man's cup was already full though, and the tea started spilling on the table.  Still the master kept pouring.  The man said, "You are spilling the tea, what are you doing!?"  Still the master poured.  The man jumped up and away from the table to keep the tea from spilling on his clothes, saying, "Why do you continue pouring, the teacup is full and the tea is spilling off the table!?"  The master finished emptying the teapot, sat it back on the table, leaned back and looked at the man.  He looked deep into his eyes and said, "When you come to me, you cannot hear what I have to say because you come with a full mind.  Until you empty your mind, you cannot hear what I have to say anymore than the teacup could accept any more tea.  Anything I said would have been lost on you, like the tea on the table."

She told me this story with a specific intent (of course).  I had been telling her that someone I met with seemed not to ever want to listen to me.  Besides the obvious of sending this individual a prioritized agenda ahead of time so they would be able to prepare on the topics of importance, she said, sometimes people need to empty their minds before you can get to the matter at hand.  Let them empty their teacup.  It might take 45 minutes to an hour the first time you meet, maybe a half hour the next time you meet, and so on.  Some people need to empty their teacups before they are ready to discuss in a collaborative way, so best to let them empty their teacup.

This has been very useful.  When my introvert daughter started talking the other night, I committed myself to letting her empty her teacup.  She and I talked for four hours.  When I wanted to interrupt to share something, I reminded myself, she needs to empty her teacup first... My quiet girl has maybe a teahouse going on, many teacups. My younger extrovert girl empties her teacups all the time rather than building a house out of them.  Often still tea everywhere, but that is how she connects.

In accordance with my pledge several months ago, I have found a therapist.  She asked me if I share things with my friends the day after my leadership coach shared this parable with me.  I said, "I have some friends, that I share... some things... with..."  I often feel though as though my friends come to me to empty their teacups, but that teacup emptying is not reciprocal and that they do not want me to share either my tea or empty my teacup.  Often I opt not to, because like my oldest daughter, I have a virtual teahouse at my disposal stored away and I have much to share that I want to share.  Often I opt not to because... Often I opt not to because I perceive their troubles are weightier than mine and I should not add mine to theirs.  Or sometimes it feels awkward to share something lighthearted after hearing something sorrowful or difficult.  Or simply, I start and it becomes obvious to me that while they wanted to empty their teacup with me, they don't really want me to empty my teacup.  Sometimes I know that people want me to share my tea and empty my teacup with them, and because I so often feel pressure not to share my tea or empty my teacup, I find it very difficult to do so.

For now this sits as an observation.  If you feel I am not emptying my teacup or sharing my tea (I suppose, and you'd like me to), be patient, ask some leading questions.  I may not have answers to your deepest questions, you may not have answers to mine, but come to my teahouse and share in my tea and empty your teacup and I may empty mine.  (If I don't, it's probably because I'm trying to figure out quite how if you seem reciprocal. It's complicated.)

May Madrigals

As often happens with blogs, IRL has kept me busy this month. My life has changed, the repercussions yet to be determined.  I think it's all for the best.  It is hard for me to be both in action and reflective enough to support spending much time writing. Not that reflection hasn't been happening, reflection and processing have absolutely been happening, just that the written recording of those processes have not been happening.  The thought of how much writing that would have been is rather overwhelming!

In the meantime, the aspirants have had their ethics and warding/safety classes.  They went well. Nice group of folks.  I like the discussions.

We're almost at the mid-point of the year.  I've been joking with my boss that it's nearly the end of 2015 since the beginning of the year because time passes so quickly, and yet, here we are and the first half flew by, as it does.  Yeah, yeah -- barely a month until summer solstice, but that's a matter of days in quick succession.  The wheel turns faster and faster.

It's a thing, this wheel of time.  And sometimes all the things it contains are too big to find words for.  Silence does not indicate a lack of activity, but rather the opposite.

Queen Bees & Their Hives

So, I was talking through this with Yeshe Rabbit with whom I presented a class on ethics this past weekend.  As we were going through feedback, she said, "I think one area that you don't need to "improve" but might need permission to "enact" is in projecting confidence as a leader. You did great in being receptive and kind. You also deserve to know that you are allowed to "be in charge.”

This is part of why I'm doing the leadership workshops I'm doing -- to figure that piece of things out because It's A Thing.

Bees came up as an analogy — 

• I posited that Queen Bee is just another role in the hive (a pretty unique one, but a role that someone's got to fill none-the-less), 
• She countered that Queen Bee is a primary essential part of creating the “ground of bee-ing” for the hive (I love the concept of 'ground of bee-ing!), 
• I noted that hives can and do expel queens they don’t like and can raise & install new queens
• PROCESSING:
• Going from worker bee to queen is complicated: cannot approach from the side for validation from others as having done the right thing.  There is a queenly way to gather this feedback appropriately, and that’s something I need to figure out from essentially a hierarchical rather than lateral or serving space.
• Exposure and queen-ness as ‘just another role’ and one that I happen to be filling does not provide the internal source of validation and I am looking externally for validation.
•  Though leadership as service really resonates with me, I’m not sure it’s doing me a service right now, as it were, as I have been applying it as the concept of putting everyone else “first”. A woman hit on it during the workshop Sunday — she's in the military & she noted that they really drill into you ‘mission first, unit next, self at the bottom, supporting all the rest’.  And maybe that’s really effective for men (questionably, granted), but for women who have societal role of nurturer who are expected to put their needs last already and are taught to seek external verification/validation/approval often at the expense of their own authority…  I think I might need to own my big sister bossiness (in moderation, and if I may shift analogies for a moment) for a bit or something.
• The other piece that stuck out going back to the hive metaphor was that idea of the hive rejecting the queen or at least making her life really unpleasant by being unsupportive.  Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, BUT if the little girls aren’t happy, probably ain’t mama happy either… So there is some degree of need for acceptance in there as well, both of being ‘part of the hive’ but alsoof being the queen.
• And figuring out how to collaboratively create that functional ‘ground (or hive) of bee-ing’ while retaining the organizational role & responsibility accorded to being the queen and owning my decisions with internal validation (and accurate discernment & identification of when external validation is also appropriate).

Having brained it, the next trick I’ll have to figure out is in the appropriate embodiment of what that all means in vivo rather than in vitro (or caput).  As well as in figuring out where the analogy breaks down and iterating until the edges smooth out...

And now I’m going to go watch Eddie Izzard & his piece on bees again because aaaaaaaahhhhh beeeeeeeees!

Words Mean Something

Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. 

Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. 

Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.

--Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet 

Words mean something. They do, they surely do.

 I talked a little about the Be, Do, Have framework in my reflections from my first Leadership workshop last month.

As Yeshe Rabbit & I were talking through the Distance Aspirant Ethics plan for this weekend, thinking about one of the exercises triggered something in my head that I thought I would try and see what happens.

Part of what I've included in my daily practice is requesting assistance for some very specific qualities that I need to embody.  "Please help me..."  "Please grant me..."  Looking for these things as if they would come to me from outside me.  As I was thinking about the framework of this exercise we'd set up, I thought about the "is-ness" of it (am-ness?) and it occurred to me that I should see how that changes the feel of my daily practice, especially since the exercise we're proposing for them will also become part of my daily practice.

It sounds mundane, but the difference between 'Please help me find the keys...' and 'I am the key...' or 'please grant me wisdom, strategy, and strength' and 'I am wise, strategic, and strong' is tremendous.  I look forward to seeing how this tiny-not-tiny change in language ripples out into the world.

It's little things, the difference between intellectual and experiential knowing in the practical application of known things.  The difference between changing happenings from chronological to ontological time.

Writings from Writing From The Spirit Retreat

Stone meditation:

• The big soft-edged grey stone that called to me from the edge of the curb near the canal. It is a little bigger than my hand and so solid & grounding. Scraped from where the different tires had pushed it along the road & curb-sides.
• It called out to me, the perfect rock, perfect in its imperfections, holding it’s essence though under what seemed like less than optimal circumstances. It called out to me to take it home.
• It’s heaviness is grounding. So solid, brigs me back in the flurry of uncertainty -- that airy, drifting disconnect.
• It tells me secrets of the alchemists — it is not what goes into the crucible, that is the essence of the being. All the magic that happens in the crucible is possible because of the boundaries of the crucible. The boundaries keep the elements of magic within appropriate proximity to act and react and merge and separate. The crucible retains the boundaries and allows magic to happen within but it remains consistent at the end, whatever else has been going on.

It’s an alchemically philosophical rock!? Then again, it was the one that called to me to bring it home...

• The crucible is the vessel that carries, can be rinsed clean, and is what always remains.
• Through transformation, we can add things to our crucible, to our stone soup pot, to our vessels ourselves, but the transformations that stand up to time are the transformations that rinse us clean, back to our essential natures. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” (St. Exupery).
• Transformation through the elimination and removal of our limiting beliefs. The false stories we tell ourselves about who we are, that sometimes we don’t even know are false. When we become wrapped up with having and doing rather than authentic being.
• The final message of the rock:
  Shed your limiting beliefs and transform by going back to that which is essential to your being.

Thank you, rock, for grounding me today and last fall. Thank you for reminding me that the essence of being is that which is immutable and that which remains when all else is washed away.

———

Writing for me is a practice of processing. Human beings are ‘sense makers’ (or at least some of us lean that way). We want to know why things happen. What just happened. What’s going to happen. Does it make sense? All of the religions in the world, all of the divination systems in the world, all of the beliefs in the world (limiting and freeing) are stories we tell ourselves to try to help us make sense of the world.

Sometimes the world is non-sensical. Things don’t always happen “for a reason” or the things that happen are incomprehensible. Sometimes we try to apply a framework to those stories that don’t fit, trying to make sense of them according to something that has helped us make sense before but is not appropriate now, and may not have been appropriate then. Sometimes that leads to more nonsense or guilt or harmful/not right action. Sometimes our frameworks require review and adaptation and correction.

I write to make sense. To take the strands and ends, the odds & sods that appear in my brain, and lay them out in front of me. To take the jumbled pieces and see what patterns appear in front of me. Sometimes my stories are correct and true, and sometimes they are colored by my perceptions and application of frameworks and my limited perspective. Sometimes I need to process as best I can to keep trying to move forward.

———

Alas, I missed the next writing exercise — life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

———

Yeshe Tsogyal writing meditation:

• Perfect memory — that memory that surfaces what needs to be surfaced, correctly in the correct moment.
• Bees bringing wisdom to and from the flowers.
• Watching the incense rise and curl in a sun beam, being and knowing in the moment.
• I’m sort of mesmerized and distracted by the curls of incense. The shades of blues and greys, twisting in the rays of the sun.

…

• She says,
  Being and knowing in the moment. It’s ok sometimes to just be. And know. Let it be.

On Leadership

"Leadership is not just required from people in leadership positions, it is required of every one. -- Katrina Messenger

Thursday was the first day of a course I'm taking called Mastering Leadership.  Ostensibly it's mostly work-related, but also kinda not.  The first video they showed was this one:
http://youtu.be/uAy6EawKKME. It's by Dwayne Dudly on Leadership Everywhere and you should go watch it because it's good.  You never know when you are going lead someone somewhere they didn't know they needed to go.

Much of the rest of the course will be about self-awareness, acting in accordance with that self-awareness with intention, and accountability.  For folks who are part of CAYA, this should sound like a familiar refrain.

We started with a minute of mindfulness.  A "check in".  I can't remember if there was a minute of reflection at the end, but there was a corresponding "check out".

In my practice, right action requires clarity of intent & accountability, at least to myself, often to many others.  I think this is going to be a good course.  And it is obvious that it will be applicable to so much more than just work.  The tricky dynamics of work will be where results are first and initially most powerfully observed, but, as leadership does, I have no doubt that it will appear elsewhere in my life as well.  Already I'm testing theories, and had a tentative confirmation of theory.

It seems a little orthogonal to what this blog is ostensibly about, but... not really.  CAYA's Ground of Being is Joyful Service.  A leader is just someone helping a bunch of people get to where they're going.  My other Joyful Service is in connecting people with the information they need to make changes in the world.  In their lives. In The World.  Librarianship is, I think, a calling as much as any other calling.  I do librarianship sort of in a background sort of way, by enabling access to electronic resources, and at this point I do that by leading and coordinating teams of people to assist in that end goal.

One of the early discussion points Thursday was about approach to life.  There are three ways you can approach life.  (There might be a humorous fourth, but it seemed a group serious about their participation and I didn't feel it would be appropriate to bring it up in the moment...).

• Do-Have-Be: I do this, so I can have that, so I can be something (being follows doing/having).
• Have-Do-Be: I have this, so I can do that, so I can be something (being follows having/doing).
• Be-Do-Have: I am something so I do this which brings me that (being provides what one does/has).
• (The fourth is Do-Be-Do-Be-Do & it's a song and a dance of a life).

I am ever so curious to see where this journey leads.  I am ever so curious to see what this year brings.