The Direction of Intention

289.
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My family had a tradition after opening gifts on Christmas morning. We’d pile together in a wrapping paper food fight and pelt each other with paper wads, tackle each other, bury each other in the tissue, ribbons, wrappings and boxes. Exhausted and exhilarated, with our bow-festooned heads poking out of the pile, we’d take a picture. We’d laugh and throw the paper again. We’d dog pile my father, my mother shouting, “Don’t hurt your father!”

This many years later I barely remember the gifts I was given or the stuff that I thought was so important to give, but I remember in vivid detail the paper throwing bacchanalia, the play and abandon in the celebration of our love for each other, the joy of having parents and brothers and a sister. Now, I like to think that the gift-giving part of the process was necessary only to generate the paper to throw.

Once, while spending the holiday at my sister’s home, I heard her shouting to her children as they piled onto my brother-in-law, “Don’t hurt your father!” All grown up now, my nieces and nephews carry on the tradition with their children.

Our rituals reveal the truth of us. I hope your rituals leave you laughing and yearning for more time with the people you love.

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258.
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Recently, a woman in class used this glorious phrase: she said, “This week I’ve learned to linger. I’ve learned not to move too fast to the next thing.”

On this day of Thanksgiving, I am particularly grateful for all the people that I’ve met in Hastings, Nebraska who, among their many gifts to me, have helped me learn to linger.

Lingering looks a lot like tossing Runza fries to ducks. Lingering is spontaneously making sack puppets that drink beer through eye glasses-shaped straws. Lingering is playing hide-n-seek in high school halls with my twin. Lingering is a big red chair in the Blue Moon with a mocha and my favorite insatiable curious mind asking really good questions. Lingering is not going back to the hotel too soon, u-turns, mischief, and a really good soundtrack. Lingering is breaking boards in the back yard after drinking Fireflies and eating pizza. Lingering is a stroll through Prairie Loft, and gardens, and secret passages in barns.

Lingering is this capacity for love that I have learned that is as big as the Nebraska sky.

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233.
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I had to go to the Radio Shack in the junction today and bumbled into a mass of zombies, goblins, superheroes and heroines, witches, mummies, frogs, ladybugs, princesses, multiple genetic copies of Darth Vader AND Luke Skywalker, hobos, vampires, miniature bankers (definitely the most frightening costume), and even a few headless horsemen. It was impressive! Had any of them been taller than 3 feet I might have felt something other than warm and fuzzy (though I pretended to be frightened more than once). The parents dressed in costume, too – they were taller than 3 feet but were careful to let us know that they didn’t really think they were monsters. The shopkeepers were also in costume and jolly passing out candy to the mob.

There was panic in the Radio Shack because they were running out of candy. The manager opened his wallet and sent one of his employees running (literally, he said, “Run! Now!”) to the market to get more candy. He didn’t want any of the kids in costume to be disappointed and the bucket was nearly bare. It was personal and I loved him for that. He looked at me and exclaimed, “We’ve gone through bags and bags of candy and still they keep coming! I don’t want anyone to go away disappointed.”

After leaving the RadioShack (I turned down the mini-Snickers that was offered me. The manager thanked me for leaving candy for the kids. He was so earnest that I laughed out loud), I sat on a corner and watched the heaps of generosity. Every direction I looked, I saw people helping people cross the road, enter shops, herd kids, calm high excitement, feign terror, bow to little royalty, share, share, share.

This is who we are. It is always so close to the surface and beyond beautiful when it reveals itself. And, you’ll be happy to know, the Radio Shack employee made it back to the store, huffing and puffing, with arms full of candy just moments before the bucket went empty. The manager nearly wept with relief.

It’s the little things that make living so grand.

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173.
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I spent the last week on the ranch of my great teacher, mentor and friend, Tom. He is very old now, a fragile little bird. Several weeks ago he was taking his daily walk and fell and broke his hip. His hip is on the mend but his mind has escaped the game and the world that he now creates has a new and restricted access code. He can see out (sometimes) but no one can see in. I love him and held his hand and adjusted to this new phase of our relationship as he told me stories that I already know but was delighted to hear as if for the first time.

Several years ago when my grandfather passed away, my father said, “Well, I’m on the front line, now.” Life looks different from the front line. Your priorities shift. Your investments become clear. You are less in a hurry to get through your days. The people in your life become more important than the status you might acquire or the stuff you might attain.

Martin Prechtel writes beautifully of the initiation of the boys into manhood in his Mayan community of Santiago Atitlan. Through his writing I understood for the first time that the initiation is meant to confront the young men with the reality of their own death; people cannot truly serve their community until they realize that they are mortal. Service to something bigger makes sense and becomes a priority when “something bigger” extends beyond your lifetime. What is it to work on the cathedral all of your days and know that you will never worship there?

Common story, community, only makes sense (or is accessible) when you are in service to the seventh generation, when it is more important to build it beautifully than to see the finished form. This, I think, is where we are off the rails. Our immediacy is our Achilles heel and makes our politics ugly, our communities fractured and our debates/concerns inane. Would we pay our teachers better than our athletes if we were looking farther down the road?

I am not yet on the front line but I can see it from here. Would that I’d had these eyes when I was 20! What might you see, what choices might you make, if you understood that you are always on the front of the ancestral line?

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139.
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In my head today I am having the most interesting conversation. The crux of the matter is this: could I love myself, truly love myself, if I did nothing for the rest of my life? What if I sat on a park bench tomorrow, gave up all pursuits, let go of all ideas of service or gain, swore off all forms of productivity; could I still love myself?

I am the son of good puritan Iowa farm stock. More than once in my life I have heard people speak of my father as a good man because he was a hard worker. Both of my grandfather’s were blue collar, hard working business owners that “did well” in the world. One was a milkman; he owned a dairy in Monticello, Iowa. The other had a business fixing sewing machines. They belonged to service clubs and sometimes attended church; we don’t talk about those things when we talk about how good they were; we talk about what they did and how hard they worked. We talk about the virtue of their toil.

This is no flippant question. I work with too many people that hate themselves because they are not doing what they want to do or they think they need to do more to be valuable. I am hard on myself if I do not achieve everything on my list each day- as if I didn’t do enough to earn my love.

What if loving myself had no requirements; what if loving myself had no conditions? What if loving myself had no connection to my doing or not doing? What if loving myself was the beginning point, the first assumption, the prerequisite,… the structure of the land so that all of my behavior (my actions), like water, followed this path of least resistance?

I do not think I would do less work. I am certain I would work differently. I am certain I will work differently. How can I possibly be truly powerful if my center point is anything other than love?

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122.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Here are some thoughts from Ana-the-wise (with my comments in parenthesis):

Pure intention comes when you allow that you are the most important person, when you stop relying on others to find your value (your intentions split when beneath every action runs a river of need for others to give you your value; your intention splits and becomes, “to seek my value in others”).

Value what you do. Value your self. You have all the elements you need to create for yourself what you desire. No one is going to recognize your value for you – value can’t come to you if you don’t value yourself first and value your opinion of yourself above all other opinions of you.

Valuing yourself is really a question of being, not a question of doing. Your value has nothing to do with your achievements. You are unique in the universe before you ever do a thing.

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