Month: May 2020

Attentive to Abundance

/ Linda Coggin / Leave a comment

My friend’s advice was to make sure my mind and my body were in the same place.

 Maybe that is what, for me, is nourishing about reading.  When I’m deep into the story, my mind is stayed in those lives that offer glimpses of my own. Yet somehow, I don’t linger on my own joys or troubles; today, I’m in touch with the character Clara’s courage to move forward and her pain in looking back. Informed but not attached to Clara’s past and aware of some future, I can savour what is happening now. I can hold her life lightly and leave more room for possibility.

That kind of attentiveness can happen at other times, too, and maybe that is one gift of doing less, not more, of the shifts in what are “have to’s” in my life right now.   

I do like it how it is now—my daily life anyway.  Mitch is around most of the time and we are actually quite good, in my opinion, at both having our own space and coming together at regular intervals. Sometimes we just know, and usually we ask each other, “where are you going to be today,” meaning which room. This house that seemed so small (compared to the one we left) now seems more than enough.

Life is simpler.  There aren’t as many choices I choose to make.  I don’t seem to be as concerned with finding just the right item at just the right price—I get what is available at one store.  Often I find enough right here, a can of beans, wilted vegetables that are fine when cooked, unexpectedly delicious cookies made from oats and brown bananas and small bits of nuts, seeds, or dried fruit that might be hiding in our pantry. 

The digital checkout at the library holds unforeseen treasures when the popular titles I wanted have a long waiting list.  When I tired of reading so much electronically, my friend left a large shopping bag full of books on my porch by Canadian authors she thought I should read. I just took the first one out of the bag, no deciding.  It’s a fine thing to trust someone else’s knowing.  She also noted that they have been on her shelves without being touched for a long while, ready.

Each day’s walk brings new sights to see: flowers I didn’t notice last year, flowers on plants I thought were simply vines, the odd shapes of tree trunks in our neighbourhood. The dog and I explore the mostly empty grounds of the college a few blocks away where the Garry oaks and cedar trees seem more prominent since I’m one of the few on the paths.   People I do pass, usually have a comment about the day or the dog or simply smile.  They, too, seem to notice something that matters to them. 

The air is clear to see a distance. Even on a recent cloudy day, I caught a glimpse of the snowy mountains beyond.  Yesterday, at the college, I noticed for the first time that I could see downtown, like a postcard picture sent from a coveted destination. Over all those housetops nearby, a city unfolds.

Now, I did have a reason for writing here today.  I read this morning that silent prayer, like centering prayer, is one way to savour God’s abundance.  Even when my mind wanders to the clutter of imagined conversations, I can slip back, again and again, to the hum in my ear, to the feeling of belonging in my own body, that holy is here and now.

Rewired

/ Linda Coggin / Leave a comment

The blanket I’d thrown on the chair, my chair, smelled like the dog. It’s the blanket I took off the bed to wash days ago and the dog’s been laying on it, of course. These days I don’t seem to rush into optional activity—like washing that blanket —and the definition of what is necessary has changed just a bit.   Since I’ve been sitting in the chair, wrapped in that blanket, I smell like a dog, too, and a shower might not be optional.

I’ve been somewhat casually taking a class online. The class is free if you don’t expect to turn in assignments or get a grade. I do take the computer-graded quizzes with instant results and without consequences. I guess my motives aren’t entirely altruistic since I do like to know I am in control of the right answers.

I do keep track of the assigned “rewirements,” though, an interesting name for personal actions that are suggested with each week’s lesson. Some are practices I already had intended to do, just not daily. I’m 5-6 weeks into the process of a gradual layering of these rewirements. I guess I should mention that the class is The Science of Well Being and, according to the course description, is designed to increase my happiness and build more productive habits for well being.

My reasons for signing up for the course weren’t exactly those intended. My friend, Stacy, whom I’ve spent a good amount of “class time” with, enrolled and I followed. We’d learned from popular media that students have flocked to the on-campus version of the course for several years. The course we are taking is a commercialized version of the university one. Nonetheless, for me, it is another lens with which to view some practices Stacy and I both hold close.

Some of the course’s suggested rewirements, like “social connections,” I only sustained for the week assigned due to my penchant to avoid being social. I have reworked the idea to mean having eye contact and maybe even a kind word with others that the dog and I might pass on our daily walk. The course calls this a random kindness rather than a connection, but I’m okay with that delusion. I have faithfully recorded each evening my gratitude for that day (at least 5) and recalled something I savored. I am encouraged to step outside an experience I love, to review and appreciate the positive emotions for even longer than that actual moment—the art of savoring.

On this evening when I decided to take a shower when the smelly dog smell from that dirty blanket lingered on me, too, the shower felt especially good. I am thankful for the instant hot water heater we have at this house. No waiting. I also like washing my face with Noxema and the nostalgic smell of eucalyptus that lingers. And even though it was only about 8:30 p.m., I decided to just go ahead and sit under the fresher smelling sheets on my bed and record my day’s gratitude and other “rewirement” requirements in my notebook. When I came to the savoring part I hesitated, scanning the day, wondering what did I do that I loved and could relive at that moment? It was a short pause.

THIS moment is what I am savoring: a hot shower, a clean feeling, a quiet warm place to sit and ponder. It was that moment before me I loved, to write what I wanted, and then to read without guilt or thinking of other things I might be doing.  I read the “change your mind” book my son had recommended. and read more about a 92-year-old author whose name I’d written in my notebook, and switched to the novel I’m reading—savoring the writing that’s difficult to define—almost a stream of consciousness from inside each character, the randomness of thoughts that also come in the midst of something else that is telling without overtly doing anything. This is an invitation to linger—accepting is necessary.

/ Linda Coggin / Leave a comment

 

CB+zyNlMTW61U2csfC3INw_thumb_902Linda, I love you with all of my heart. That’s what my grandma used to say to me. My sisters and I were the youngest of 26 grandchildren. I was Grandma’s favorite; she told me so.

When I was young, she often spent the night with us. She slept in my bedroom, on the other twin-sized bed and I was afraid that she would die there. My Grandma was the only elderly (in my eyes) person I was with regularly. And to be honest, I didn’t know what I would do without her.

There are lots of stories I could tell: the time I ran away from home and hid in her dirt-floored garage for hours, the times I spent the night with her and we shared popcorn with too much melted butter, the songs she sang to me and the stories she told at bedtime, homemade noodles drying on the kitchen table, variety shows (with clothesline curtains) in her back yard, and in later years her “streaking” through our living room when I had teenage friends over, her mind had slipped from the time she wrote that note.

After all these years and my regular purging of stuff that I don’t need to keep even for sentimental reasons, I still have that scrap of paper. My heart opened on paper torn from a small spiral notebook, the folded crease yellowed, the script of another era. I don’t remember when or where my grandma wrote that she loved me with all her heart. That scrap matters.

Heart space. Lead with your heart. From the heart. Heartfelt thanks. Open your heart. My heart is broken. Since Jesus came into my heart…

What does it mean to love with, lead with, open, break, or mend a heart? What is this heart anyway?

Parker Palmers considers in his book, Healing the Heart of Democracy, that “heart” is at the center of our being and knowing,

In this book, the word heart reclaims its original meaning. “Heart” comes from the Latin cor and points not merely to our emotions but to the core of the self, that center place where all of our ways of knowing converge—intellectual, emotional, sensory, intuitive, imaginative, experiential, relational, and bodily, among others. The heart is where we integrate what we know in our minds with what we know in our bones, the place where our knowledge can become more fully human. Cor is also the Latin root from which we get the word courage. When all that we understand of self and world comes together in the center place called the heart, we are more likely to find the courage to act humanely on what we know.

Sometimes, I do know when my heart is opened, but I don’t have the courage to go along.

If my heart is that center place where all my ways of knowing come together, maybe that is also some of the mystery when tears start to well up behind my eyes, my nose weeps with those backed up tears, and my voice gets a little quivery—if I actually even need to say something.

I’m always surprised by these experiences: the time the lady at the pay booth at the airport parking lot waved me through sensing I needed a break with reality; when I turn a corner and am caught by the beauty that stands in reminder of the steadfastness of the earth’s care; when my eyes fill while watching a television show or movie and I have no idea why. Are these moments that are beyond the definable ways we connect our spirits?

Mitch’s friend, Drew, a pastor near New York City, wondered about social distancing and the importance of heartfelt connection. He discovered that while we may remain two meters or 6 feet apart, our heart energy extends beyond that distance. He said that scientist and theologian, Barbara Holmes, emphasizes that the vibrational field of the human heart stretches out ten feet in front of us, and 10 feet behind us. That’s four feet more than the 6 feet social distancing requires.

Several years ago at the large university where I worked, I was walking in an area of campus I didn’t typically visit. I noticed a man sitting in a lawn chair in a grassy area, just a bit off the walking path. He had placed another lawn chair a few feet away from his. The scene seemed wildly out of place. As I got closer, I noticed his clerical collar and a tented sign near the sidewalk. I don’t remember exactly what the sign announced but I do remember he was offering a deeper conversation with whoever passed if they chose to stop and sit and open their heart.

In my experience, I know that it is true that the reach of our heart is palatable and stretches beyond our conception of time and place and emotion. So, I’m wondering if this being human is a heart pause—to be a person first—instead of after the calculated considerations we usually make. The heart is that deep center where we aren’t afraid to risk being ourselves.

Parker goes on to say,

The politics of our time is the “politics of the brokenhearted”—an expression that will not be found in the analytical vocabulary of political science or in the strategic rhetoric of political organizing. Instead it is an expression from the language of human wholeness. There are some human experiences that only the heart can comprehend and only heat-talk can convey. Among them are certain aspects of politics, by which I mean the essential and eternal human effort to craft the common life on which we all depend.

… to have the courage today to love with all my opened heart.