The Direction of Intention

177.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

25 years ago, standing on Pismo Beach staring into the quiet morning surf, Jim E. told me that people come to the ocean to touch eternity; the rhythm of the waves carried the beat of life before you were here and will carry it far into the future beyond your life. Just for a moment, you glimpse the enormity of it all. You glimpse the belonging of it all.

This morning a dense fog blanketed Puget Sound, the foghorn moaned into the soup. The islands, the mountains, the shipping lanes were swallowed – it was as if I was standing on the edge of the world and somewhere beyond the fog was the end of all that is known. The birds were unusually quiet. As I stood at the water’s edge I remembered Jim’s words and realized that I am always standing on the edge of what is known; the gift of the ocean is available all the time when I stop assuming I know what is coming down the road, when I remember that time is a construct. When I recognize that I don’t know, when I stop assuming, then I can see.

Try it: stand in any spot, anywhere in the world and recognize that you do not really know what is coming down the road; take a gander into eternity, glimpse the enormity of it all.

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

172.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

All of us walk a path defined by our assumptions. We see what we expect to see, we see what we believe and when we believe we are not creative or not good enough, that is what we reinforce. That is what we create.

Assumptions are tricky because they are hard to see – they are the rules for the game you play. “That’s just the way things are!” is a statement steeped in assumptions. I once had dinner with a man that lashed out, saying. “That’s just who I am and I’m never going to change!” Now, that’s the statement of a man married to his assumptions! Assumptions can be scary to challenge especially if you need to be right (oily shame thrives in the dark space between right and wrong).

Growth happens when you can see and step beyond your assumptions.

Leaving the path of your assumption set is sometimes called divergence. It is sometimes called insight. It is necessary for this thing we call innovation. Divergence, insight, revelation, inspiration, ah-ha, transformation… is nothing more than seeing and then challenging assumptions. Maybe you are good enough! Maybe you won’t die if you show up and give voice to your thoughts! Maybe no one is trying to put you down. Maybe experience comes before trust.
In the same way, creativity is nothing more than your capacity to step into uncertainty. Try it. Do something without regard to the outcome. Stepping into uncertainty requires releasing control – as does challenging your assumptions. What are you trying to control? Needing “to know” before taking a step is highly over rated – as is being right all of the time – and guaranteed to keep you on a very narrow path. What assumptions are you ready to let go?

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

166.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I’m having a Buddhist moment. Sometimes I think I have lived my entire life in a state of resistance: resistance to where I am (I should be better, faster, stronger, more successful, less busy, taller, fatter, thinner, tanner, straighter teeth,….).

If I am not in resistance, I am grasping for something (the next play, the next painting, the next project, the next pay check, more meaning, clearer vision, a simpler life, presence, one more dark beer, peanut M&M’s,….).

Who am I if I am not pushing back or chasing after? What’s the point if I am not resisting or grasping? What if there are no dragons to slay and no gold to accumulate? These questions are so simple and yet if I really stop and think about them the whole castle begins to fall. I know enough by now (I hope) to understand that happiness ensues: it is not something you chase. Rather, it is something that follows and it has a better chance of catching me when I stop chasing stuff and cease pushing my present moment away.

Maybe, the point is to let the castle fall, to see who I am if I am not fortified behind a stone wall or so busy looking ahead that I can’t see what is right in front of me.

I have this sense that my happiness is trying really hard to catch me. You?

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

161.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When David O. turned 40 he had a dream. In his dream he saw the end of his life. He saw how the first 40 years passed in the blink of an eye and knew the rest of his life would pass just as quickly. In his dream he asked himself if he was doing with his life what he wanted to do with it. His answer was no.

He was a doctor and had a very successful practice. Being a doctor was what was expected of him. It was practical. It was lucrative. Some days he managed to believe it was a kind of service. It was a career but never a calling. It was work. He had no trouble answering the cocktail party question, “So, what do you do?”

He awoke from his dream and bought a camera. He began taking photographs of the seashore. He wasn’t interested in taking pretty pictures. He was interested in seeing the place where he lived, really seeing it. He wanted to engage. He wanted to be a part of this place, not merely move through it. He told me that photography became a way of putting down roots, an attempt at belonging.

As he began exploring his external geography, he also explored his internal geography; it is impossible to do one without the other. He recognized that, in putting down roots, he was creating a kind of legacy. With belonging comes commitment: to say, “I am part of this place,” means the place is also a part of you. The geography becomes you; you become the geography. You sense the air and feel the rhythms.

David O. told me that he was coming alive or perhaps he was coming back to life. Yes. I think he meant that literally: life is waiting for us to come back to it. All that is required is to awake from the dream (I’m a doctor) and recognize that you are so much more than what you do.

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

148.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[continued from 147]

Judy and Kim performed this poem from memory for me. The last phrase was Kim’s, which he delivered with great gusto and brought gales of laughter to us all.
Golden Retrievals by Mark Doty
Fetch Balls and sticks capture my attention
Seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s -oh
joy-actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again; muck, pond, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you can never bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning
– tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work;
to unsnare time’s warp(and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now; bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

Kim and Judy, like the golden retriever in this poem, call me to be here and now. That is among their great teachings for me. Bow-wow!

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

147.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When I need to remember joy and rekindle my belief in humanity I get on the ferry to Bainbridge Island to visit my friend Judy and her husband Kim. They are without question the most abundant, gratitude-filled people I know. The precious few hours I have with them are laughter-filled, life-full, and rich in mischief and poetry. They are like fine chocolate (the highest compliment I can give). I took the ferry yesterday for a visit.

Four years ago, they were hiking on a remote trail when Kim suffered a massive stroke. Judy’s phone had a brittle connection and within minutes a helicopter found them and Kim was airlifted to a hospital. He survived. He spent months in intensive care. He lost the left side of his body completely and has very limited use of his right side. He lives his life in a wheel chair. Judy uses mechanical lifts to get him from chair to bed, bed to chair, chair to toilet, etc. They had no health insurance (they both worked in service organizations, teaching, providing mediation, helping communities around the world in need learn how empower themselves and better their lives. Health insurance was beyond their means). Judy is Kim’s full-time caregiver. She has someone come in 3 hours a week to relieve her. Their life is mostly lived within the confines of their small home.

This is their circumstance. Within their circumstance they choose life! Kim teaches children about people with disabilities. He serves on the library’s board of directors. Judy works with ESL students and continues (somehow) her work in mediation. Kim can no longer read so they read books together. There are streams of friends coming in to read with them, to talk politics, to share recipes, poetry, make music and art. We celebrated and then ate with great attention the first tomato of the season. We stole cookies from each others plate and created titles for poems about hummingbirds and good shtick for comedy routines. We listened to bird song and appreciated the sun on our faces. We savored life as we lived it in that moment. I left to catch the ferry home when members of their sangha began arriving for their weekly meditation group.

Kim and Judy’s life is not easy. Their limits are strict and unforgiving.
And, they teach me that vibrant life knows no limitation; vibrant life merely requires us to choose it.

[to be continued]

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

144.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Lessons come to me in loops; I get the learning, incorporate it into my life, and then it loops away until one day I find myself learning the lesson again. Today, the lesson that looped back is about focus placement. For the past several weeks I’ve been focusing on the struggle. I’ve been seeing a thick muddy swamp that I need to cross.

I’ve wondered why I am so tired lately and incapable of sustaining my intentions. And then this morning a client told me about her greatest learning and she said, “ I’ve learned that I need to put my energy and focus into the light and not into doing combat with the darkness.”

I laughed. I know better and have learned this lesson many times and will probably learn it again several times before my focus no longer slips into the swampy darkness. Today I’m re-learning that I need to put my energy and focus into the light. I have the capacity to see what I want to create instead of focusing on my obstacles. No amount of mud can daunt me when my focus, my energy, my will, my intention are on what I create. In fact, the swamp often disappears when I stop insisting that it is there.

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »