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Here is the link to the Susan Cain Ted Talk.
I have now read Susan Cain’s book, The Power of Introverts, and watched her at Google and enjoyed her Ted Talk. People see me as an extrovert, and, at times, I am, and I know how much renewal time I need. I love solitude. I love reflective time. This is an excellent look at how each of us individually, and as a society, need to look at where we nourish. We need to work together. We need to work alone. We need to go to the wilderness, to go out and walk, and to honor the wilderness within, that beautiful place to cultivate and pull from the wildness that is uniquely our own.
It is Valentine’s Day and my heart is full, full of the joy that living brings. I look out on a tree, white with plum flowers. The buds are swelling on the Maple trees. It is Spring. I attended a conference on Aging on Sunday, a gathering of people interested in exploring, augmenting, and expanding, the next stage of life, one in my case, which may be another thirty years. It was a gathering at the Rosen Center, and I felt Marion Rosen, even in her passing, was there, watching what she brought to life and light, expand and spread.
The Heart is about Courage. It requires courage to love, because love risks loss, and loss can hurt. Those we love may die, and certainly they, and we, will change. We are constantly letting go. We too, die to an old self, and come to meet ourselves new. We do this over and over again. We live the seasons, the phases of the moon. We, too, have tides.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions… For the god wants to know himself in you.”
Whatever your image may be of “god”, know the heart is huge, as it stretches to know the contradictions, loves, and joys that bloom, fruit and flourish in you!
This whole week we live with extra awareness, with more noticing of blessings and giving thanks.
My husband had surgery two and a half weeks ago and is awakened from dreams/nightmares of being invaded.
Naturally! Surgeon’s hands were inside. His psyche knows, and yet the medical world considers him healed. We know there is more.
We need time to heal, time to nourish the soil within. The leaves are falling.
Let each of us feel the feathered fall of leaves, cushioning the inner to better receive, and breathe through change, trauma, and gifts.
Though the days shorten, the light is bright and sharp, cutting clearly through the branches of trees as leaves fall.
May we each give ourselves space to be.
I am with the words of Sue Bender:
“In that tiny space between all the givens is freedom.”
We, in the northern hemisphere, are turning toward fall, shorter days, longer nights, craving foods that are orange, rich with vitamin A, to nourish our eyes.
A bird just chirped outside my window with a message given and received. Time. Tier time.
My son and his wife are moving to England for a year, and I am aware of stretching the moments of this next 28 days, of building a scaffold of support.
I think now of the neck of the giraffe. The giraffe has seven vertebrae, as do we, and yet, each one of theirs can be over ten inches long. The giraffe’s heart is 2 feet long and weighs about 25 pounds. Its lungs can hold 12 gallons of air. In this moment, I’m envisioning myself as a giraffe with a long, flexible neck, a huge heart, and lungs moist with care. I find myself in tears these days, tears liquid with love.
My son is making a film and, through it, I feel myself in the workings of his mind, as he once was in me. I am touched, punctured perhaps, as with the song of the little bird this morning. And so this poem comes, brought from a bird, reminding me to trust and continuously build and replenish an inner nest.
Inner Nest
Bird drops notes outside my window,
ear cups thimble
air woven in tiers
Rainer Maria Rilke:
The inner – what is it?
If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds
And deep with the winds of homecoming.
Steve Jobs in a commencement address said:
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
In the book Breast Strokes, I write of watching the leaves fall off the tree outside the chemotherapy infusion room. My hair was falling out with the letting go of autumn leaves. When the designer of the book read those words, she knew she had an image for the cover. She chose a tree dropping leaves like feathers. She filled the space with a metaphorical touch of wings.
I am reading The Power of Kindness, The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life. by Piero Ferrucci.
He writes of a man who, on the advice of a sage, spent years in a cave meditating because he wanted enlightenment. Years later, he meets the sage again and asks why he is not yet enlightened. The sage apologizes and says he made a mistake in his meditation advice. The man returns discouraged to his cave and continues doing what he knows; he meditates in the way he was originally told, and what happens? Enlightenment.
Ferrucci continues: “Why did this this man succeed when he just stopped trying? Because he could let himself go. The Indian mystic Ramakrishna used to say we must be like a leaf that has fallen from a tree and is whirling in the air, without any reference point. Trusting, we let ourselves go. We know we cannot have total control. Perhaps for a moment we panic, then the tension dissipates and we are free.”
Today I watched as men re-painted the lines in a parking lot. The newly painted lines stood in sharp contrast to the faded, fuzzy lines across the way.
I also watched toddlers toddle, each step an achievement, well-balanced by arms, a low center of gravity, and the overseeing eyes of mom. I walked more carefully in imitation, aware of the ground and paved paths. It’s tough to toddle on grass.
I met a friend and we spoke about how to balance giving and receiving. She had given a great deal of time and energy to someone who was now rejecting her. She felt hurt.
I continue to see that any giving we do must be because we want to do it; we must understand the benefit to ourselves. Then, it makes no difference to us whether or not our giving is received, because we’ve already received the gift of our own giving. It is enough.
We are mesmerized when we watch a child learn to walk. We want to help, and we know the child has their own timing. We watch and wait. Sometimes the lines are clear, and other times they are faded, fuzzy, and gray, and yet, always, the guidelines are there, shiny and white, when we pause to feel what we need.
