Flamingo earrings are a sacrament

Eight-year-old students interrogated the teacher, who has a thing for flamingos: “Why were you absent, Ms. Doe?”

“I was sick…”

One gave her a gift, 2 weeks before Christmas: The birds as earrings, which weren’t very comfortable, “But I’ll wear them anyway.”
…

If you Google “sacrament,” you’ll easily find some definition like “a religious ceremony or ritual regarded as imparting divine grace.” More deeply, it involves symbols that point to “larger realities” which simply can’t be grasped with the mind alone. After all, how do we describe encounters which impart divine grace?
…

This gift wasn’t the last day before Christmas break, like a parent might suggest. Do you think the timing suggests a much larger reality in that student’s heart? I do.

Do you think that child thinks Ms. Doe’s ears are pretty? I’d bet.

It wasn’t an apple or a gift card, but a personal favorite close to Ms. Doe’s heart. That child “knows” Ms. Doe’s heart already, and longs to be closer to it.

I think that’s ALL divine.

And I think flamingo earrings are a sacrament.

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Neil D. 2020-12-11

Elizabeth loving Lizzie

[Advent 2020, amidst a pandemic, visitors are prohibited at care facilities… As her mother is away at one care facility, Lizzy finds herself in another, from which she messages, “You are all the reason why I’m fighting…”]

If I could propose a perspective for your consideration… Don’t fight.

As you lie in that sterile room, you are — by human standards — alone. Human standards are wonderful and have their place in creation, but in time of deepest need, they will never be enough. You are NOT alone by the standard that matters most. Lying in that bed with you is Elizabeth. She was made in the image and likeness of eternal Love.

Historically, the soul has been frequently called the divine spark within. That spark is sitting with you right now. Inside of you. That slice of Love was carried into that room with you by a frightened child of Love we know most commonly as Lizzie. But neither Lizzie nor Elizabeth are common. They are each unique in all of creation. Never has there been, nor will there ever be, another Elizabeth and Lizzie.

YOU carried God into that room with you. And for your service to God’s child, a reward of Love awaits you, as credit to you, for your faith, if you have “eyes to see” that reward.

The divinity you carried there within you rejoiced, and is rejoicing, to be with the divinity that surrounds you; in every breath you draw is the presence of God. The very presence of mysteriously complete Love.

The full Elizabeth is a joyous mystery, swimming in the mystery of Christ’s love for her.

What we most long for when we are feeling alone is not incoming love from others, but instead is someone on whom to pour our outgoing love. For it is as much our nature to pour out love as it is to receive love. It is when we are pouring out love that we most reflect the image and likeness implanted inside of us. You feel OK when you are pouring out your love by phone, text, or the many sincere thank you’s you give to the nurses and human beings taking care of you. And your own mom is doing the same these days. You cannot suppress your nature for pouring out love.

Draw in the Spirit with deep breaths. Mix the divine around you into the divine within you. You are Elizabeth, and Elizabeth is an enormous and essential stitch in the fabric of Love’s creation – infinitely more than enough to comfort the frightened Lizzie. You need someone on whom to pour your transcendent love. This too is why your mother longs to be with you—to pour out her love and feel her deepest nature. To validate her sense of her fullness.

This respite that your mom and you are enduring is a gift—to slow down from spreading your attention to others, and turn it inward, so the larger and true You can shower love on the smaller and distracted and obligated and busier you.

You are NOT alone.

You DO have someone there with you who passionately seeks love poured out from the depths of Elizabeth’s enormous heart:

Love your self, and love God – in the ways only Elizabeth can.

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Neil D. 2020-12-10

I am being loved (3) – Moments

My gait halts. Breathing slows, deepens. From my breast swells a transparent cloud, invisible but real and virtually touchable. Mist. It envelops me but is weightless. In fact, buoyant. My ears can hear, my eyes can see, my heart can feel…

I am being loved.

That moment originates within. The divine within. It seems to be the Spirit. Its origin, my soul.

When you lock eyes with mine for a moment, in pure loving compassion and a fleeting completeness of knowing, such moments have no words. It is the fullness of words.

A momentary connection, soul to soul. Being loved by the other. It originates from you. YOU are divine. God loving me. You loving me. The distinction melts to meaninglessness. Mystics call it non-duality.

From within me. From outside of me, from within you, to me…???
See?
No words.

No words, but stark, stark, soul-moving reality.
A fullness of knowledge.
Sacred.

Spookily intimate.
Spooky, but not fearsome. There is no fear in that moment.

Why do we call it a moment? As if it passes? It was the present. Why does the present become the past? Was the moment lost? To the past?

How/why do we conceive a past or future? Only the present exists. Does the past not exist? Does the future not exist? Just because we can conceive them, does conception mean existence? Are they real, or are they artificial conceptions?

Why do we let those sacred moments dissolve?
Or do we not *let* them?
We instead *make* them pass?

Perhaps, more simply, those moments are not up to us?
They are not moments we control?
They are moments given to us.
By what? Your divinity? My divinity?

Do we “snap out of” those moments because they are too much for us? I believe so. Why else does something that seems so fearlessly perfect for a moment not seem fearlessly perfect for an eternal string of moments? Why is it fleeting? What flees? Seems like it can’t be the divinity within us which flees from the divinity of another. But perhaps it is.

Perhaps divinity is always in some kind of motion. Perhaps the Spirit is ever-moving, alive and never still? Then why do contemplative mystics cherish stillness achieved? Is it because, when their whole human persona is still, it is then that they can perceive the perpetual movement of divinity?

[More love letters]

Neil D. 2020-11-28

Shitty blame boardgame

Here’s the game. We each sit on a different side of the gameboard. We all start with an equally-sized pile of blame in front of us. Each time we win a move, we get to move a piece of our pile and “place blame” in front of another player. The winner is the one who places all of their blame pile onto others first.

Piles of blame are piles of shit. At the end, the one who moved the most shit has the shittiest hands. Anybody want to play?

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2020-11-24

If you doubt for a single second how deeply and unconsciously ingrained the blame-game is in our psyche, here is a far more tasteful review of its history, starting with religious origins which continue to this day, despite the example of The Cross celebrated by Holy Week.

https://cac.org/a-temporary-solution-2021-03-29/

Most of the article is his own potent synthesis, but Rohr also quotes a Jordan Peterson favorite, Russian philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Cold starts in nature’s cathedral. Cheryl

This morning I rose with the sun at dawn. An angel stoked my heart with tenderness, and the sun set afire a red-leafed tree outside the window where she poured me coffee. The angel talked about classrooms of little angels. And those moments in the middle of the day’s dawn moved us both in our midlives, removed from childhood angelicity, but in the dawn of later life’s glories.

I had to ride Cheryl home. Cold, she stalled when I didn’t let her warm up enough. Then we rolled, and it was bone-chilling cold, my visor fogged. This was the first 1m13s of the music piece here:

Then, I turned out of the neighborhood onto the main thoroghfare where the day’s Sun was spreading its wildfire among the leaves that hung on into early November. And the movement that starts at 1m14s into that piece welled up from inside. It’s a glorious, glorious day, and a gift of extraordinary weather lies ahead. Have you gone outside yet, to feel the flaming tongues of Nature’s cathedral licking at your heart yet? Go now…

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(More on that same musical piece)

(More on Cheryl)

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Neil D. 2020-11-07

Beware of therapy goals! (2) Envy and the Pitfalls of Validation

This article by another author presents envy as a sort of mirror of shame— a gap between what we have and what we want.

I think this is the grave peril of self-help as well as therapy to “work on things,” instead of doing inner work. Dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, etc. are part of our biological hardwiring. This makes us goal-driven creatures. And evolution has programmed us with negative emotions when we fail to achieve goals.

What the author presents as “expectations” is what I often have written about as ideals or idealizations. If your self-help materials or therapies have you “work on something,” beware. High expectations can lead to more pain than good. Some schools of therapy urge you to take little steps, so you can keep feeding your addictive hardwiring with incremental achievements. I think that has its place as the “gentleness” I mentioned in my prequel; but it can make us prey to therapy. What you should be working on is understanding your inner self (see my prequel Beware of therapy goals! (1) You’re prey.)

Knowing your fuller self enables you to recognize more realistic boundaries around your expectations.

Knowing your fuller self also more realistically tempers our desires to achieve ideals.

We are programmed to unconsciously and reflexively identify desirable ideals. We say we want to be “more like her,” or we want to be more of “this,” or less of “that.” Knowing your self reveals how much of “this” you are, and how much of “that” you don’t need, and that you are not “her.” That can yield what that author presents as humility. And that puts a foot on the ship of contentment, and a little less suffering.

Wish to be more You, and as you discover that you already are You, disappointment with unachieved goals lightens.

To know how good You already are demands that you study who you are, and that doesn’t mean affirming your good of which you’re already conscious; instead, plumb the depths of your dark Shadow, because it’s the You of which you’re unconscious.

Your Shadow is the perfect “textbook” custom-tailored to You as the subject! Over and over throughout the history of the best human thoughts recorded in writing, we are repeatedly urged to know our own evil and potential for evil in order to be more good—AND content.

That author presents this as “Expectation vs Reality”

“Betrayal — the worst of all pains — comes when that expectation is broken. The pain and sadness you feel is your body telling you ‘HEY, that false reality you’ve been living in, yeah not the best idea to keep living like that,’ and adjusts your view of the world to fit whatever data point you’ve just learnt.”

“Validation is like truth without facts. You feel like your belief is right because other people say so, but that doesn’t hold up to reality.”

“The reason why validation is so dangerous is that it actually puts you in the same spot as the liar. You’ve created a false reality around yourself that’s fundamentally rooted in experience, not fact.
So again, we become prone to betrayal and suffering.”

[Regarding why you should plumb the depths of your Shadow:] ”
Humility — low expectation.
Entitlement — high expectation.
Entitlement is really just the expression of expectation. Humility on the other hand is trying to minimize that expectation, and feeling satisfied with where you are.
Since we’re so goal oriented, it’s hard to feel super humble all the time, because it implies a satisfaction with your current state… Our biology doesn’t like that. We’re wired to self improve… Buddha believed our pain is caused by our goal-oriented nature, and constant striving to fulfill our desires.”

“…the expected outcome… When we don’t achieve it, we become sad — a sign that we aren’t well conditioned to the reality of the universe, and that our expectations based off previous experiences were actually wrong.”

The unfortunate hard truth is that you may be the only one to blame, explained by the same author here.

Each one of us constructs a perspective on reality according to our experiences. Two people can look at the same thing very differently—AND both be very “right.” Envy is a powerful emotional signal not so much that you are wrong, but that reality has alternative perceptions and you’re preferring a change in your perspective.

FeelWithNeil wishes for you to see the alternatives because many may be “true,” not just yours, and not just yours at a given moment. There’s an infinite space for you to grow into.

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More to come in this series on therapy goal pitfalls. To be alerted when published, at the bottom of this page under Leave A Reply, enter your email (remains private), and checkmark “Notify me of new posts via email.”

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Neil D. 2020-11-03