The Direction of Intention

173.
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 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.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

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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