Come, Find Me

 

Today, I share another Island of Silence from Journey Girl; Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary. During this Pandemic of Covid-19, we may tend to stay focused on how so many things around us are changing. We are called upon to make more decisions in our ordinary day to day life. With the world at odds with “either-or” scenarios of successful return to what we call ordinary life and many of our ordinary play spots, like parks and entertainment venues, we need to remember that special part of you that is still calling for the creation of fun in the midst of these serious times and unanswered questions. That part of you is your inner child. Take some time to recognize this child today and find a way to add fun to your day. This day. There’s no time like the present!

Chapter 13 Island of Silence

“The giant pine tree grows from a tiny sprout.
The jouney of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet.”   Lao Tzu

A very special child wants your attention today. Your mission is to find this child. It is truly a child, but it has been with you since infancy. Even though you have grown up, this part of you still remains a child and it relates to you as a child. That is possibly the reason you cannot hear this child. It has frolicked with you and your friends when you were a child and knew how to have fun. It is the playful side of you that still wants to have fun now as an adult. It often says, “More, more, more,” until the adult in you stands his ground and says, “Enough!”

This child in you most often thinks in pure, uncomplicated ways, very directly telling you what it wants, what it thinks, and how it is feeling at the moment. This child in you does not want to get lost and ignored as you go about your adult responsibilities. It wants to partner with you to round out your total personality and be able to show up in you in your old age. This child will not abandon you. It sincerely hopes you do not abandon it. This child does not want you to be afraid of it and it does not want to hold childhood secrets that can be lived safely and truthfully when you grow up.

It wants to show up in both your smiles and your tears. It is present in your fearful moments when you are bravest and feel the courage of a lion. This child can even play an important (though mostly silent) role in your adult decision making. This is your inner child and you most often recognize it as your intuition and imagination, and sometimes as a strong innate impulse. This child is part of your self-identification and also shows up in your sense of humor. The child knows that sometimes its impulses need some adjustment and perspective. That is one of the reasons this child wants you to recognize it.

This child is not an imaginary friend. It has been with you from the start on all your journeys. It has been silent and hidden some of the time, noisy and demanding at other times. It is an influencer of your moods. It is absorbed in playing and it has a remarkable acuity to focus in the moment. On the flip side of that, the inner child relishes and partakes freely in total nonsense.
Sometimes this child manifests within you when it wants you to change direction or loosen your grip on a problem you can’t solve. It can be a distracter, an enabler, a supporter, a pioneer on a quest, or a surprise guest that pops out at inopportune times.

Your inner child lives very close to your heart. Science has proven the human heart has an intelligence of its own, much deeper than puppy love. The heart knows what it knows. That is why your inner child can cut swiftly through some of the clutter of the rational mind and be real. In that way, it can help you with a reality you may be facing but not understand.
This child asks you for your heart awareness and attention. That is why you are looking for this child today on this Island of Silence. It wants you to know it does not need to be left back in the past of your real childhood. Like Peter Pan, this part of your personality, both troublesome and helpful, shares a life in you that never dies. It can be a great benefit to you then to build a common practice of acceptance and loving compassion with your inner child. It can help you soothe the areas of your life that are particularly stressful, isolated, and lonely. You can be partners for good in life.

When you finish this time with your inner child, promise each other you will not lose this awareness of your physical, psychological, and spiritual make-up of yourself. Join together in a united desire for both child and adult:

May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be well. May I be peacefully at ease.

May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be well. May you be peacefully at ease.

 

 

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Our Family Soul

 

During this time of Covid-19 and our attempt to begin both to return to our working world and our social and cultural pastimes, we are reminded often to pay attention to “safety” for ourselves and others. In fact, not only to pay attention to this safety but to feel our responsibility to be faithful to safe practices, like mask-wearing and social distancing. We hear often, and it is reinforced in commercial ads that “We are in this together.”  And “We will get through this together.

While there is some dissention about  clinging to our individual rights and freedoms, the larger picture and message is one of concern and even some fear of the unknown and left-over effects of both the Pandemic and our individual actions.

There is an upturn of care and thoughts of our family and neighbors; our health care workers; our first-responders; our grocery personnel; our food supply chain truckers who have kept food on our tables. Things could already be so much worse without the bravery and commitment of these people who work daily among the invisible enemy of this disease.

In my soon to be published memoir, Journey Girl; Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary, I reveal how an invisible birth mother, who was never fully explained to me, nor honored in my home growing up, affected me to the point I had to “complete her” in my adult years and make the truth of her a present part of my ancestry and my children’s and grandchildren’s lives going forward. While there was no ill-intent in the secrecy, it was bound and complete, until I could figure out who I could question and where I could search for answers. She was part of my Family Soul. Just as we are now gaining more insight on: We are all part of the Human Family Soul. The call is for each of us to build that up in the way for us most open to do it.

Journey Girl

From: Chapter Eleven,  — Island of Silence:  “Remembering Your Birthright

Science recognizes that we have a family soul. It is evident in our reliance upon DNA. It is required that we give our family medical histories in all new patient interviews. This gives the medical professionals pertinent information they may use to compile a profile of who we are based partially on what was present in our mother and father. They can then use this information to help them determine a satisfactory physical profile of their patients and make medical decisions of treatment with an awareness of possible threats to their physical wellness that arise from history. Science and soul are not at odds.

The fields of psychiatry and neurology and writings in classic literature suggest a longstanding belief that we are more than what we think we are—and this points to our relationship with who came before us in more than a nostalgic sense. Noted psychiatrist Carl Jung said “our souls, as well as our bodies, are composed of individual elements which were already present in the ranks of our ancestors.” This is a partial description of what I mean by a family soul. We often read that the eyes are the mirror to the soul in religious text. Author Ralph Waldo Emerson sounded his agreement by writing, “the eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.”

Jung also advised, “Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.” Maybe our whole human being-ness is a theory that evolves along with the miracle of the soul. You sound or look like your mother (only I did not). You notice he stands just like his father or you see your own likeness in a newly discovered photo of your grandmother. Through spirituality, psychology, and science, the miracle of the soul is full of new discoveries.

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It’s Heart Time on the Planet

 

Couple jumping dolphins, blue sea and sky, white clouds, bright sun

 

 

“The full potential of the heart and its intelligence has is yet to be fully unfolded and understood. Much like the electricity changed the outer world, learning to harness the power and intelligence of the heart can change our inner world.”  

During this time of rapid and massive changes, due to the presence of the world-wide Corona virus, Covid-19, we all have a chance to look outward into our external world and inward to our soul, heart and value system. Many people from different backgrounds are experiencing an impetus for positive change in ways they never had before. Other people are desperately sick with the virus itself and very near their last breath. Many families are encased in a private grief of lost dear ones and distanced from others who could give them physical comfort.

These are enormous changes — over a time span of which we do not yet know.. What do we do with this rapidly changing world in our food and goods delivery systems, our at-odds and feisty political parties, our religious worship practices, our education and health systems, our jobs and financial structures? All of these things touch us daily and will be changed forever even when the virus is gone.

One of the most important aspects of the changes taking place is a rediscovery of what’s been hidden in plain sight all along…its the heart. Along with the chaos, there is a new emergence of heart-based awareness and intelligence. I studied some of this in 2012 with Barbara Marx Hubbard, an evolutionary visionary and with the HeartMath Institute.

A unified message is emerging in public service announcements because of the gigantic way of delivering help, services, and companionship.  “We’re all in this together,” and never has it been more clear how inter-connected we are to one another throughout the world. There is a human presence of using the vast internet programs and platforms to build up the human and the human spirit from its loss of many things including free mobility by air, sea, or car. There is a recognition of the sacrifices and struggles of all of the world health care systems, and the nurses and doctors closest to death on a daily basis.

There is singing. There are thank you’s.. There are pep talks, “We will get through this, together.”  There is a remembrance of forgotten populations of our society, the poor, the sick, the elderly and individual efforts to give where it is needed. The commercials from the banking systems, retail, personal services all point toward, “we’ll be back” but in the meantime , “take good care of yourself.”

All of this points to a fundamental fact. Goodness and health is based in the heart. And the heart knows what is best in both our actions and our thoughts. I have signed up for a short course summary of the HeartMath Experience. It will be a good precursor for my cardiac evaluation coming up this summer. I intend to put some of the summary reminders on Napkinwriter so my readers can attune their hearts to wholesome practices and communication. Good nutrition is a great baseline, but there is so much more your heart is asking for.

 

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SHOWING UP FOR LIFE

Today, Napkinwriter posts a guest piece written for DAILY OM on line by Madisyn Taylor. I check in on her writing often because she talks about things that make a difference to me or give me a new way of looking at an old routine. Today is about SHOWING UP for life, and very fitting while we all are on some type of temporary hold in our life patterns because of COVID-19. If we are not on hold, we are either fast-tracked into a day full of urgent needs by the first responders and health care personnel who are overwhelmed by the instant demands of their day, and emotionally bonded to the human loss of life and separation from loved ones as they succumb to the disease despite all of their efforts.

Then the greatest number of us are in a “hold” pattern until we get into the staged re-entry of our lives as they were in January and February, knowing that even then we will be entering into a “new normal” before normal ever appears in our life.

Yet, we still have to show up in our life which means new routines and creations to keep physical and mental and emotional areas healthy. We have to move forward in some way that is meaningful to us. And so, most of us do just that. I offer you a few thoughts on that.

Showing Up For Life

BY MADISYN TAYLOR
If you show up for yourself in your life, the universe will show up for you.

The way we walk into a room says a lot about the way we live our lives. When we walk into a room curious about what’s happening, willing to engage, and perceiving ourselves as an active participant with something to offer, then we have really shown up to the party. When we walk into a room with our eyes down, or nervously smiling, we are holding ourselves back for one reason or another. We may be hurting inside and in need of healing, or we may lack the confidence required to really be present in the room. Still, just noticing that we’re not really showing up, and having a vision of what it will look and feel like when we do, can give us the inspiration we need to recover ourselves.

Even if we are suffering, we can show up to that experience ready to fully engage in it and learn what it has to offer. When we show up for our life, we are actively participating in being a happy person, achieving our goals, and generally living the life our soul really wants. If we need healing, we begin the process of seeking out those who can help us heal. If we need experience, we find the places and opportunities that can give us the experience we need in order to do the work we want to do in the world. Whatever we need, we look for it, and when we find it, we engage in the process of letting ourselves have it. When we do this kind of work, we become lively, confident, and passionate individuals.

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Right Now Normal is Abnormal

 

Today is a special day in Spirituality. No matter what I’ve claimed and left behind in the traditions of Catholicism today IS Palm Sunday. I am in a dress with makeup on and I will bake something special. I am playing old CDs with the musical doxology and other songs of a spirritual nature and I will create here at home and the nearby outdoors for I am grateful for the gifts of faith and family freely given to me.

Today also begins what the scientists and CDC is also the beginning of two of the hardest weeks of sickness and death due to the pandemic virus COVID-19 attacking the world, and has been focused on the United States of America for the past four weeks, having arrived here earlier than that.

Healthcare in NYC, the epicenter, of the disease in America, is scrambling to provide adequate hospital space and the necessary PPE Personal Protection Equipment to the growing need. Healthcare professionals are coming in from other states to help the overburdened system. Ventilators are in such high demand and number needed so high, they are in a race to get one before a patient dies from the respiratory virus that shuts down the lungs.

And I know I shall rise and persist upon my own path of life. They say we have an unknown future. But we have always had an unknown future as those so fully know when an instant tragedy bested them. What we have is now and our actions and thoughts in this day.

I don’t know. And becoming friends with “I don’t know” is grace, itself. This is the second set of words that confirm me today. The first was another writer/artist speaking and she brought a quote in that said, “You can’t make the abnormal, normal. It is NOT normal.” I think therein, I give up the fight. I do not try to trick myself by doing “what is normal” to do. What I do is what rings true for me within this abnormal time. My interior world feels fairly normal. But as my gaze and my hearing focuses in on the outside world-wide — it is anything but normal. And that is what it is.

I do not know the future, but then I never have. A normal future is palatable. An unknown future leaves so many questions in its wake. Most of us try for the most normal we can manage for this abnormal time of Covid–19. We are plagued with the big question— how long? Someone tell us please when we can return to normal

With a return to normal, will survivors (because that is what we all are now) go back to the jobs they had? Will they, once again, work from an office rather than home? Will small businesses be there for the employees to return to? Will the economic structure hold for ourselves and our families? Will we bring the good, bad, and ugly back with us in our ways of life, or has this forced “time-out” reshape us in ways that we want to continue with and shed other stuff we would see as of no value?

This all remains to be seen. But for today, Palm Sunday, I am raised up, in the spirit of Resurrection, because others have reached through “social distancing” and touched me with their normal thoughts and actions. And for me, today, that is enough. It is normal.

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