[I somehow managed to de-publish this for a few hours. Sorry!]
I'm back from the retreat which, like so many things, I entered kicking and screaming, and ended up not wanting to leave. Shrug. I don't learn.
I'm on my way across the bay to see Dennis so he can watch me fall asleep on his couch while insisting that no, I really am watching the Simpsons. I didn't sleep much this weekend, thanks to my affinity for post-midnight labyrinth walks and breakfast being served at 8:00.
A snippet of a Paul Simon song I was listening to on the way to work Friday morning kept sneaking up on me in the labyrinth.
And here I am, Lord
I’m knocking at your place of business
I know I ain’t got no business here
But you said if I ever got so low
I was busted,
You could be trusted
Prayed about trust this weekend, prayed about fear. I cried a lot. I always cry a lot. One of my friends who doesn't cry finally figured out how to do it this weekend...I told her I was happy to share my Crying Superpower with her, and now we can fight crime as the Kleenex Krusaders.
I read A Year to Live: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine, Can You Drink the Cup?, and Creative Ministry, both by (surprise) Henri Nouwen. The Levine book didn't do much for me; the two Nouwen books were interesting in that they were written at two vastly different times in his life, and in the earlier one you can start to see the man who wrote the other book a couple of decades later peeking through. Nouwen couldn't have written the brilliant Cup at the time he wrote Creative Ministry, because he hadn't yet lived the life that broke him open and created that book.
There's something there for me to notice, that growth happens slowly and it isn't a crime to be in a growth stage. I so often try to propel myself ahead to places I'm not ready to go. And then I get pissed off and decide that what I am experiencing right now isn't valid or isn't interesting or isn't worth examining, because it's not Where I'm Going. Not that I know where I'm going, but it isn't here so what good is here? Very hard to be present to what's happening when that idea takes over my brain. It's using the future to poison the present.
Off to that comfy couch and the moose pants and some nice kisses.
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