Adventures in a Wheel Chair
About twenty years ago on one of thirteen trips to Europe, about nine of which were made with the challenge of being in a wheel chair.
Mt. Pilatus, Lucerne :accessible by tiny red train.
Monte St. Michel: settle for cafe at the bottom.
Mt. Pilatus at 7,000 feet is accessible by a small train, a cable car, and chair lift. We used them all. The train was the scariest!
The much smaller Mt. St. Michel defeated us when my husband and son, emboldened by a couple of beers, tried together to run pushing me up the cobblestone road. The rubber rim of my right wheel went flying off about a fourth of the way up.
I settled for coffee in a sidewalk cafe at the bottom. My son and husband were gone so long, the waiters were huffily removing my cup and setting my table for the next meal. I resorted to writing a note in French saying my son and husband would be back soon to join me for dinner.
Under threat of abandonment by…
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My Tiny Personal Creed
There is a place of grace within each of us that I and others call God.
God is NOT a very old man with a beard, but the creative spirit or force both within and without us that can free us to begin wanting to live as one and can show us how to draw on resources not limited to our tiny personal part of the universe.
For many of us it is reached only in surrender either when we “hit bottom” or when we finally just recognize that we can let go of our ego without losing our unique place in the universe.
So the heart of Spirituality is about letting go of our illusion of being separate/better than the rest of humanity or even of the rest of creation and realizing we are only one tiny unique aspect of an awesome whole and that we sink or swim along with that whole and the rest of the tiny parts.
Since I am a relational kind of person and God and the universe are pretty much beyond my understanding, Jesus is my translator for learning how to grow in a creative relationship with what is beyond my grasp.
Anatomy of Addiction
Why do some people choose self-destructive addictions?
Some people are just born unsettled, ill at ease with themselves, expecting so much that eventually they just throw in the towel. The pain of failure is too great.
Any addiction in some way lessens our sense of inadequacy. Extreme-housecleaning or obsession with becoming the absolute best in a sport to the detriment of the rest of our lives gives temporary relief; pleasure such as food, drink, sex, escapist reading or watching TV all can deflect us from facing our fears about ourselves. Some of us become addicted to drama by overreacting emotionally to anything even slightly alarming as an excuse to curl up emotionally in a fetal position and expect others to rescue us from any real or imagined dangers. And any of these can move from just a way to relieve stress or feel better about ourselves to a need, an automatic response to unease or pain or fear: an addiction.
Some psychological addictions can be as hard to break as ones that develop a physical component. Some of us simply have addictive tendencies and may just have to work to find one that has the least self-destructive side effects and has the least negative fallout for others.
We can find relief in many acceptable ways to keep our demons at bay. I simply don’t know if we can get perfectly free of them.
One thing I have realized is that some of us not only feel basically inadequate, we fear that we are literally broken and live with a sense that we may at any time fall into the pit of despair or insanity.
Even alcoholism seems preferable to that, because there’s always a hope that you can manage to quit drinking, but you are not sure that you can quit being crazy once you get too out of control. Sometimes the only way to get past that is to go down into your inner bottomless pit and survive. Then instead of Jell-O at your center, you find a rock to stand on. Some of us call that God.
This I Believe
Diana, author of the blog, Holistic Wayfarer, speaks so beautifully what is in so many inarticulate hearts.
I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
I am ashamed to claim faith in Jesus Christ, unworthy as I am
to bear that name and call myself a Christian. For my sake he was
crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered death and was buried.
I love the order and witness of the Christian faith;
the unassuming birth, disarming life, unjustifiable death,
and the deserted tomb that answer prophecy of Scripture.
A burning stick snatched from the fire, I believe I am more sinful
than I could imagine and more loved than I dare hope.*
Yet I worship at the altar of Self, and often insist and want and
worry as though there were no God. As though I were not loved.
I believe in right and wrong, and that I need saving from myself.
I need a God who is wiser than my purposes, deeper than…
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Marry Me
This true story left me speechless.
At the time when little girls start playing dress-up with their mother’s clothes, I was living in a forest without food or proper clothes. Grenades were falling, people were dying. It was war. Being beautiful was something for princesses in fairy tales. Months later we were sleeping in a park in Austria, dirty, homeless and hungry, refugees from the former Yugoslavia. Our first home was a cellar, without heating or daylight. From two neighbors I received t-shirts that were too big for me.
We moved to the countryside. I started high school and mobbing became a daily routine. I was the only child that wasn’t blond and pale. Girls were proudly wearing their first bra, having boyfriends and experimenting with make-up, while I was “the ugly one”. Trying to dress up made it even worse, so I shaved my head to give them a real reason for their cruelty. The…
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giving our truth, the only truth we can know
I was considering giving up blogging. Or at least about anything serious, to just stick with being comic relief. Your post shed light on the ego problem and the temptations that go with it. Everything in the post spoke to my “condition.” I’m reblogging the post. Thank you so very much for it. Eileen
We must not,
in trying to think about how we can make a big difference,
ignore the small daily differences we can make which,
over time, add up to big differences
that we often cannot foresee.
….Marian Wright Edelman
there is an envisioning heart that responds to what is needed….beyond ego, beyond fear….directly in tune to grace…..these kinds of truths are intuited and deconstructed from our stories……..
To embrace the future, the dark, you make. Making is a letting go of your own stuff into the world, of the ideas and offspring that the breeze of time takes away as though you were a dry dandelion, a thistle, a milkweed, a poplar whose seeds travel n the winds of time, in this way that wind makes love to flowers and seeds, in this way that time tears them apart and carries them onward. The white ghosts of those seeds travel…
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the heart seeks kindness
Tara Brach, who ever she is, has captured the truth I too have found at the core of my journey. She says it beautifully.
In the silence between
your heartbeat
bides a summons.
…..Rumi
there is a place outside of definition that is conditional and constrained and as we rummage for a safe place to hide our unsteadiness, know that we can trust the infinite battle……no wins, no losses…..only steady hearts and infinite wisdom to outlast the battle….
You might ask yourself: “Can I imagine what it would be like, in this moment, to have a heart that is ready for anything?”
If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life. As we bring a courageous presence to the truth of loss, we stay available to the immeasurable ways that love springs forth…
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On Becoming A Spiritual Vegetarian
We didn’t end up with ten commandments in order to please God or win heaven. We need them because most of us are generally simply oblivious. We go for the pleasure right in front of us in that moment without stopping to think about the consequences for us and others down the road.
It’s not about being judged or labeled or punished, it’s about love. The basic ten are a gift from God because God loves us enough to try to help us not screw up our lives and others’ beyond repair. Even though God knows how blind we are and forgives us, when we make poor choices we eventually have to face and live with the crippling and often even heartbreaking consequences.
Life is not a test, a contest, or a game we play for prizes.
The rules are about relationships. The basic ten are about how to avoid killing relationships so they have a chance to grow. They are the minimum survival guidelines.
The goal is learning to love enough to have deep, lasting, nurturing, transforming joyous relationships.
The first relationship is with God for the simple reason that grace is unconditional love and God is pretty much the only place you can count on that no matter what stupid thing you do.
I’ve reached an age where I can look back and see the harm even mildly selfish choices have caused not only others, but myself. Because when we continue in a pattern of choosing immediate gratification as we become adults with responsibilities to and for others, it becomes an addiction with painful consequences for both ourselves and them.
Addiction to avoiding discomfort or pain plays out in extremely diverse ways, even in socially approved things that aren’t recognized as addictions. When our marriage relationship starts to take work or involves delayed gratification, some of us simply become workaholics. That way we avoid what makes us uncomfortable and feel virtuous while doing it. Most don’t recognize this as being an addiction, a pattern of escape with consequences similar to using alcohol, infidelity, or running away.
Take another look at the Big Ten. Take another look at your daily choices. Are they healthy for you and for your relationships? Are they about learning to truly love, whatever it takes? Or are they about running from the challenge to do the not always pleasurable daily nitty-gritty it takes to grow up and learn to love.
