The world is a different place today.

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I didn’t know when I wrote my blogpost in the early hours of the morning yesterday that destiny had crashed into the life of someone I knew.

I didn’t know that where life continued here, out there it had ended for five people hurtling down a road to the intersection of their lives ending in one catastrophic crash.

I did not know.

Would I have written any differently? Would I have stopped to pay tribute to a man I greatly admired, then instead of now?

I do not feel right writing of this man. I do not feel worthy. Yet, I feel compelled to put into words my sense of sadness, sorrow, loss, if only to say, “You were a great man, Michael. I am honoured to have known you.”

Michael was tireless in his commitment to push the boundaries of his art out into the universe. He was committed to supporting others, furthering his craft and creating opportunities for others to further theirs.

Michael Green died on a Saskatchewan road on Tuesday. He was not alone. There were three others with him and one other in another vehicle. There was a third vehicle but the passengers in it live on. It is a blessing that not all lives were lost on that wintry stretch of road.

It is a tragedy that five were.

I am confused by the suddenness of death. Startled by the quickness of its arrival and in its wake, the deafening silence reverberating in the departure of those who followed it to ‘the other side’.

I want to reach out and say, Stop. Don’t go. Wait. There is still much to do. So much to be said. To be accomplished.

And only the silence remains.

I want to remind Michael that we have to plan that coffee we talked about when last we met just before Christmas. I want to apologize for not calling to set it up like I said I would. I’m sorry. I thought I had more time.

And now, there is no time to do the things I intended. There is no time for Michael and the others to continue to create and inspire and impact the lives of the thousands of people they touched, and would have touched, if tragedy hadn’t struck on a lonely stretch of road when three vehicles collided and forever changed the course of their lives and the lives of many.

Death is a lonely companion. It hears no song but its own voice calling those whose voices meant so much to the world around them, into the silence of its embrace.

I didn’t know him well, but well enough to know that the world has lost a great human being. A man whose gifts were shared with grace, whose generosity of spirit made it possible for others, no matter where they stood on the economic or social scale, to find their voice and sing out, loud and clear.

There are so many things that would not have happened without Michael Green’s vision carrying them into reality.

I am grateful for the things he did. The times his genius created space for wonder and awe in our world.

David van Belle’s, The Invisible Project, would not have happened without some of Michael’s brilliance opening the possibility of its creation.

This is My City’s inaugural year and its production of Two Bit Oper-eh-Shun? would not have been staged without his passion.

The panel with then Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean in attendance, needed his commitment and persistence to making it happen.

And these are just some of the things he did to create space for art and expression that bridged the world outside with the world inside the homeless community. And the list goes on.

There is so much he accomplished, and so much more he could have done if destiny had not decided his time was now.

His passing is a reminder that there is only this time right now to get whatever needs doing done. To make the phone call. Book the coffee. Create. Express. Share your gifts. Celebrate your life. Live. Be. Do.

Good-bye, Michael Green, Lacy Morin-Desjarlais, Michele Sereda, Narcisse Blood and Morley Hartenberger.

The world is a different place without your presence.

 

Take me to the edge of reason

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Journal entry Feb 8, 2015

Journal entry
Feb 8, 2015 She never imagined she could fly until one day she decided to believe in herself.

I awoke early this morning. Sleep slipped away as I listened to the dark of night sounds outside the open window beside me. In the far distance, a truck lumbered along the highway, the road wet hum of its engine tugging at my mind, urging me to leave the place where I lay to journey out into the night.

I resisted.

I lay in bed, yearning for sleep, seeking its soft, pillowy comfort.

My yearning was in vain. Sleep evaded me.

I got up. Came to the office and in a newsletter from Spiritual Directions, read a poem by Susie Tierney, that began with the line, “God, take me to the edge of reason”.

Where is the edge of reason, I wondered? And how do I find it? Do I need to? What happens when I do? Will I recognize it when I do or will I simply keep pushing into it thinking the answers lie beyond its edge? Am I willing to live the question of not knowing where the edge of reason exists without having to go and find it?

Good questions for an early morning wonder.

My fingers began to move across the keyboard. Consonants met vowels. Words crept onto the page.

I let the words flow free. There was no need to train them, or urge them into making sense. They had their own mind, their own desire to form into being without my insistence I knew the answer to their meaning or that they do it in any particular way.

Take me to the edge of reason, and let me fall, laughing, into the chaos of my thinking I know the way.
How can I know the way when I must trust the way will appear with each step I take?

Take me to the edge of reason, and let me leap, light as air, into the nothing that is all the courage I need to be fearless.
How can I step free when I hold onto my fear of being vulnerable?

Take me to the edge of reason, and let me float, effortlessly, upon the waters of life flowing in every direction.
How can I know peace when I am holding back and resisting my soul’s calling to let go and be present?

There is no edge and no reason, to what happens when I allow the process to be the way.

There is simply the way becoming the path to seeing what can happen when I get out of the way of making it happen.

When I get out of the way, the way appears.

May you live your day balanced effortlessly on the contradictions and harmony of living full of life beyond the edge of reason.

Namaste.

May you walk in beauty today

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The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection. The water has no mind to receive their image. ~Zenrin Tao & Zen https://zenflash.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/water-has-no-mind/

The wild geese do not intend
to cast their reflection.
The water has no mind
to receive their image.
~Zenrin
Tao & Zen
https://zenflash.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/water-has-no-mind/

Many years ago, when my daughters were still little girls who liked to play dress-up and run through the sprinkler, I took them on a holiday to Gardum Lake, a magical place in the Okanagan. There were no televisions, no video games, no electronic devices to disturb the peace and tranquility of the space. There were only people, engaging together in community, sharing summer fun by the lake.

We stayed in a tiny one room cabin, complete with wood burning stove in case the summer night got cool. It never did.

During the day, we would take a canoe out into the lake and drift aimlessly on its smooth waters or paddle along the shore counting Painted Turtles scuttling about along the water’s edge. We saw beavers and lake otters and geese and ducks and played on the beach and built sand castles and played make-believe.

Make believe I am an angry dragon spewing fire everywhere! I would cry. And the girls would run around and squeal and hide in the bushes and I would chase them and make-believe I gobbled them up when I caught them. We’d laugh and tell stories and even the angry dragon lost his ferociousness when it was discovered he was angry because he loved ice cream  and every time he went to eat it, the ice cream would melt beneath the fire of his breath. Because I was the angry dragon, I would have buckets of lake water dumped upon me in the girls’ efforts to douse my fire. Once the dragon’s flame was tamed, we’d pile into the car and off we’d go to the nearest grocer’s to buy ice cream cones and other treats.

One night, when the girls were fast asleep, I sat on the porch of our tiny cabin and savoured the stillness of the night. Far above, the moon and stars danced in the heaven’s glow. The lake was ice still. A sheet of glass skating off into the darkness all around.

The stillness of the night called to my heart to step deeper into the silence.

I pulled on a life vest and let the woman in the cabin next to me know I was going for a midnight paddle. After a busy day chasing after her toddler son and daughter, she too thought it was a brilliant idea and donning her life vest climbed into the canoe to join me.

Silently, we paddled away from shore, mindful to keep our cabins always in view. When we had gone far enough, we both stopped paddling and let the rocking of the canoe ease into the stillness.

Above us, the ink black sky shimmered with a thousand x a thousand stars lighting the night-time sky with wonder. As we sat silently in the canoe, not moving, the waters around us stilled and once again the surface of the lake reassembled into a mirror streaking off into the dark.

I sat, barely breathing as the stillness embraced me. In the distance, a loon cried. An owl hooted. And silence descended once again in the dark.

I looked below into the inky waters surrounding me and saw a thousand x a thousand stars reflected up from the lake bottom, as if all the stars in the sky were dancing below shining up into the night. I felt as though I could reach down into the water and pluck a star out and hold it in my hand.

It was magical. Mystical. Awe-inspiring.

Surrounded by starlight above and below me, I felt the oneness of being part of something so magnificent, so enormous as this universe shimmering in the dark, breathing as one with me.

And I knew in that moment, the words of the melody I had sung with the girls around the blazing fire pit that evening were true,

I walk in beauty now, beauty lies before me, beauty lies above me, behind and below me. 

May you walk in beauty today.

Namaste.

All I need to feel at peace exists within me.

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It wasn’t as warm as the weather report said it would be, but once I dropped down off the escarpment, the wind died down and it felt less frigid.

Though, I hadn’t quite planned for how cold it was. I’d worn my gloves and not my mitts and my fingers felt the chill. I walked and tucked my hands into my jacket pocket. For a moment, my mind wanted me to believe that I was stupid to not wear my mittens. I told it to be quiet. It had nothing to do with my intelligence and everything to do with not wanting to be disturbed by less than thinking interrupting my walk.

It didn’t matter what I wore. The sun was shining, the birds tweeting and twittering all around. The day was glorious.

I dropped by Ellie, The Wonder Pooch’s memory place in the woods, took a picture of her two hearts nestled amidst the trees and snow and text them to my daughters, “She’s always with us,” I wrote.

And it’s true. Over six months since the wonder pooch’s passing, and still I feel her presence. I also still miss her quiet padding along beside me, tugging at the leash, stopping to sniff at every leaf and branch upon the trail.

Walking without her does have its advantages though. I can sit on a bench for as long as I like and not have her nudging me to get going, get moving along! Which means, I can sit and enjoy the silence, close my eyes and breathe into the soundscape all around, mapping the sounds as I learned to do from Sherri Phibbs of the W.I.S.H. Studio.

I listened deeply to the world around me. I listened to the birds, the chittering of a squirrel, the grass rustling in the soft breeze that meandered through the creek bed. I listened to the silence of the snow hanging at the edges of a tree branch as it let go with a soft whoof and fell to the ground. I listened to the way the fir tree needles grate against one another when the squirrel who was stealing all the bird seed skittered back across their branches. And in the distance, I listened to the muffled sound of city traffic carried across the miles by the wind.

And I listened to the stories the wind had to tell me of the faraway places it had roamed, the sites it had seen, the wonders it had witnessed.

I listened and felt the awe of the moment descend around me and envelop me in the possibility of a world where each of us is doing more today than we did yesterday to create a world of peace, love, hope and joy all around us.

In the quiet of the woods, I sat and listened to the wind and felt my spirit softly settle within me.

Yes. There is war and hatred and intolerance and abuse and homelessness and disease and cruelty and distrust. They all exist in this world.

And so does love.

It exists along with peace and harmony and people getting along and helping one another. Love exists in tolerance and kindness and giving and cures for diseases and loving compassion. It is there in gentleness and trust and treating each other with respect. It is there in one person helping another to get up, in caring for those who have nothing, those who are sick, those who are feeling blue.

Love exists in giving up a seat on the subway so a mother and child can sit.

It exists in letting a driver merge, in not cutting someone off, in smiling at a stranger, in holding a door open.

In all the intolerance and anger and hurt and pain in this world, love exists.

It’s just sometimes, amidst all the noise we forget to stop and sit quietly listening to our heart beat, listening to the trees rustle, the birds tweet, the wind whispering stories through the trees.

I listened to the stories the wind had to tell me and remembered that in this moment right now, all I need to feel at peace exists within me.

I am grateful.

Go ahead…Click

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The View Through My Window This Morning

The View Through My Window This Morning

I got blown away this morning by one short paragraph. Imagine, all it took to stop my heart, deepen my breathing and open my senses wide open to the truth were a string of vowels and consonants strung together to create a vision of wisdom for my soul to feast on.

My blog-friend Val Boyko shares a quote and photo from Zen philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh on her blog this morning entitled, That Particular Moment. 

The quote she shares begins with, “When something upsets you, when something happens that is not to your liking in your family or your community, you want to change it right away.”  What Thich Nhat Hanh writes afterwards is so simple, so elegant so filled with loving kindness putting it into practice cannot help but create a better world for all.

Go ahead…. Click.

Photographer and a new blog find for me, Mary Hone, shares beautiful photographs of the journey she and her artist husband, Al Hone, are taking on backroads of America with their dog and fifth wheeler on her blog, Tales from the Backroad. On Tuesday, Mary asked for help with votes in a competition she’s entered at Fine Art America. It’s a simple and elegant way to make a difference today simply by clicking on the title above each of Mary’s photos and voting (you need a FB account). You’ll make a difference today and give a feast to your eyes and all your senses.

Go ahead… Click.

Yvonne, at The Presents of Presence, is a breast cancer survivor and a woman of deep faith and beauty. In Wasting a Mind Away, she writes with loving kindness about caring for her Aunt Mable whose mind has been devastated by loss and disease.

Go ahead… Click.

Mark Kolke, the man who originally inspired me to begin blogging 8 years ago, has a blog today on a decision coming down from the Supreme Court of Canada today on Assisted Suicide. A touchy, divisive and important conversation is being held right now on our Eastern slopes to decide, do we or don’t we allow those who are standing helplessly by while loved ones struggle to breathe, ease their pain and suffering. Mark’s post, There Will Be Change, is worth the read. Let’s hope those who make the law of our land agree.

Go ahead… Click.

Have a wonderful Friday!

If Humpty Never Fell

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Break Free Mixed media on canvas 30" x 30" ©2015 Louise Gallagher

Break Free
Mixed media on canvas
30″ x 30″
©2015 Louise Gallagher

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,”

BY MOTHER GOOSE

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Source: The Dorling Kindersley Book of Nursery Rhymes (2000) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176327 

A bird will never learn to fly if it stays in the nest and never risks falling. A mother bird knows her offspring must fly free of her sheltering wings. It is the call of nature.

A child will never learn it has the capacity to fly freely if the mother holds on too tightly.  We must teach them they can fly, even when we fear they will fall. It is the call of love.

The same is true for ‘the inner child’. The child who feared thunderstorms, snakes and the boogeyman, must learn as an adult that it is free of childhood fears by testing the boundaries of how far it can go today, free of the calling of the past.

We will never learn to break free of our comfort zones if we stay inside the boundary of our fear.

Breaking free is scary. The known fills our vision, luring us back into the comfort of what we are familiar with, those things we tell ourselves that keep us safe from falling.

The unknown looms large upon the horizon, calling us to test the boundaries, to break through the walls of what we believe keeps us safe from falling, just so we can see how far we can go.

It can be terrifying to step outside the walls of our secure and predictable lives to travel the unknown territory of our dreams. Even though we have a sense that the possibility of great reward lies out there, beyond what we know as our life today, we hesitate, make excuses, procrastinate for fear, out there, in that strange and unknown land of living our dreams, we might fall, get hurt, face failure, lose our way.

Frightened of what we cannot know until we attempt it, we negative fortune-tell our way into holding back from stepping forward. To make sense of our fear, we rhyme off our long list of predictions of all that can go, might go, will most definitely go wrong if we risk stepping out from beneath the shelter of our tried and true.

A baby bird will never fly free if it stays trapped within its shell.

We will never know how much we’re capable of if we stay trapped within the limiting beliefs we tell ourselves to keep us safe from falling.

Imagine if Humpty Dumpty never fell. Or, imagine if the all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had been able to put him back together again. He wouldn’t have been the same anyway. He’d have been all cracked up!

Go ahead. Crack the egg. Let Humpty have a great fall. He might like being all cracked up. Or better yet, he may discover he didn’t need the king’s men and horses anyway because the freedom of breaking free of his shell is worth the risk of breaking open and living life off the wall.

Be determined as a dandelion

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Change copy

Journal entry Feb 3, 2015 Watercolor, acrylic, pen

Changing the world is a big job. Changing yourself even bigger. Especially when the change within is not cosmetic, but entails focusing on fundamental core issues like letting go of past hurts and pains, being present, courageous, or finding value in all things.

Change is possible. In fact, change is here to stay. Accept that and it becomes easier to recognize, nothing stays the same, even us. We are creatures of change. From the moment we are conceived, we are constantly changing, growing, evolving.

Yet, even though change is inevitable, we resist and in our resistance, lose the grace that a dandelion possesses naturally.

For change to be graceful, act like a dandelion. Be determined, committed, stalwart. Be rooted deeply into the earth beneath your feet and be willing to let yourself fly to pieces. Surrender your resistance to letting go of who you are and allow the winds of change to blow you in every direction while holding true to the essence of your nature to continually grow and evolve into who you truly are.

A dandelion has to fight for its life. We humans are constantly trying to kill it off because we’ve deemed it a weed, and weeds are not welcome in our gardens. The dandelion doesn’t care what we think. It grows up through the cracks, along sidewalk edges and in the very heart of the garden.

A dandelion believes in itself and its right to be exactly who it is.

For today, be the dandelion.

Let yourself flow freely with the world around you while never losing your sense of self firmly planted in the grounds of your belief that who you are is not a weed. Who you are is a beautiful, inspiring, enchanting vision of ethereal grace continually changing into a bright vibrant flower of life over-flowing the boundaries of your limiting belief, you cannot change.

You can. You are. You do. Continually.

Let go of resistance and make your change a graceful choice to be present in the moment of what is, free to become all that you ever dreamed of possible in your life.

 

No matter the seas, flow back to where it begins, Love.

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One advantage of getting married in your sixties is there’s no parent or parent-in-law creating havoc with their insistence you do it this way or that. There’s no one insisting you invite great aunt Betsy whom you haven’t seen in a gazillion years or that cousin who farts at the dinner table and never eats with his mouth closed.

The guest list is ours to create. So are all the decisions.

Perhaps that is the issue.

We have no one else to blame or judge or complain about. We’re on our own and with less than three months to the big day, there are still a lot of decisions to be made, together. Ah yes, together.

Perhaps that is the challenge. Our intent is to make the decisions together and sometimes, we don’t agree.

Disagreement does not equal rejection.

Tell that to two people embroiled in a disagreement about the ritual they are creating to symbolize their two families coming together. While we both agree on the ritual we’ve created, we didn’t quite agree on how the ritual would unfold.

“I don’t think we should direct it so precisely,” C.C. said.

“I think we must,” I replied.

And the gloves came off.

Now, there is nothing pretty nor inspiring about two mature adults arguing about something that is really not all that important. Either way works. It’s just a matter of perspective.

Fortunately, C.C. is a man of deep heart. He knew when to walk away from the conversation and come back when the waters were less turbulent.

And he did. And the seas calmed.

It did get me thinking though about my victim’s voice.

There is a tape, a litany of sorts, that fires in my head almost instantaneously when in a heated conversation. “I should have known better.”

I don’t initially hear it. It is an auto-response that leaps into the fray whenever I am telling myself the story about how I am being attacked, discouraged, frightened… It has nothing to do with the other person or what is being said, or even what is happening in the here and now. It is always about the there and then, something deeply seated in my psyche’s memory bank of the past that is triggered by present experiences. And it is always from the position of my victim’s voice. My place of, “See I told you so. You can’t trust anyone, or anything. Not even the universe.”

My victim’s voice leads me quite quickly, (can you spell lightning-speed?) to that place where all I really want to do is run away, hit eject, blow everything up and ditch it all to go sail around the world, alone, thank you very much.

The advantage from where I sit today is, I recognize my victim’s voice. She can still create havoc but it is not as long-lived, nor as destructive as it was in the past. Today, when she fires up her tale of woe is me, I am better able to turn her off, to redirect her thinking to what is true and real and loving and caring in front of me. My victim’s voice would have me believe the lie, I don’t deserve happiness, joy, love, or even to shine. The truth is. I do.

We are less than three months away from the wedding. Over the weekend we picked out our wedding bands, bought the fabric to line the tent and I spent some time creating examples of centrepieces for the tables.

We also weathered a storm and though the seas got wild and choppy for a bit, we weathered the storm and are now sailing on calm waters again.  The skies are clear and while there’s still lots to do between now and April 25th, we’ve got our boat loaded with what matters most in calm and choppy seas; compassion for one another, a deep understanding of who we are, individually and together, and a willingness to always flow back to where it all begins, and ends, Love.

How to learn to do anything.

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When we learned to walk we were not overnight successes. We learned to crawl, then stand, then teeter, then take a step and most importantly, we learned that falling was okay and getting back up an essential part of the process.

When we learned to read we did not know how to make sense of the letters instantaneously. In fact, we didn’t even know what the letters were before we began the process. We had to be taught, vowel by vowel, consonant by consonant what each letter and combination was. It took mispronunciation, stutters and trips and hesitations before we truly got a grasp of what it was the words were trying to say, and what we needed to know to understand them.

And we kept learning. New things. Unknown things. Things we’d never done before.

And with each new learning we got a better understanding of what we were capable of doing. We also, unfortunately, learned the habit of telling ourselves all about the things we couldn’t, shouldn’t or will never do. In the process, we learned to put limitations on our possibilities. To dig into the fear of failure and trying something new. We learned to resist the unknown, to beat ourselves up about our prowess in how quick or adept we are at learning something new and to hesitate to do things we’ve never done before or failed at in the past.

We learned to measure our progress through our perceived limitations, not our possibilities.

We are all capable of learning new things, doing something different, taking new directions. It takes time, patience, persistence and compassion to allow ourselves the grace of falling down so we can learn how to get back up again.

Here are 7 easy steps to learning anything new.

  1. Begin and take action.
    Yup. It’s that simple. Just begin. Whatever you’re attempting, whether it’s to learn a new language or break a habit, begin. Like learning to walk, it doesn’t begin with the first step, it begins with the desire to take the step. And then, it takes action.
  2. Walk the 3 Ps. — Patience. Persistence. Passion.
    Don’t give into the voice of doubt and negativity. Give yourself space to make mistakes and keep making them until you learn every mistake there is to make. In the learning, you will learn to trust yourself to do better every time. Don’t give up. Don’t look for the ‘right way’, look for the way that creates the more you want, the better, the other you’re seeking. And be passionate in your belief in you. Believe with all your heart you are capable of anything, and you will become your belief.
  3. Ask for directions.
    It’s so easy to tell yourself that asking for directions, or help, is a sign of weakness, of not knowing what you’re doing. Well, when learning something new, you often don’t know what you’re doing. So why pretend you do? Give yourself the gift of learning from others, of seeking guidance. You’ll be expanding your own knowledge base, and, you won’t feel all alone in your efforts!
  4. Test your assumptions.
    This can be a biggy for those who tell themselves “I can’t”, “I don’t”, “I never”. Testing the assumptions of your limiting beliefs opens you up to possibility. It can be as simple as removing the contraction — ‘t or testing the opposite. ‘I can’t’ becomes – I can. I don’t -I do and I never -I always. Test your assumptions and then, live for a moment in the possibility of life beyond the confines of its limitations. Don’t tell yourself it’s forever, just tell yourself, for the next half hour I will live without the limitation — and then do it.
  5. Breathe and relax. 
    It’s easy to forget to breathe when faced with something new or an unknown situation or the fear of failing. Your breath becomes shallow and your body contracts. Expand. Breathe deep and expand. Consciously invite expansion into your body as you breathe in. Let your breath relax your body as you ask yourself, “What’s the worst that can happen if I… do this or that. go here or there. Say this or that… Ask for what I want… And then expand out into the possibility that comes with setting your breath free. Dig into the passion of expanding not just your breath but your horizons too.
  6. Quit taking yourself so seriously. 
    Let go of your judge and jury. It’s so easy to convince yourself people are looking, judging, expecting signs of weakness and measuring you up for failure. Most of the time, they’re too busy looking, judging, measuring themselves to be concerned with little ole’ you and your escapades. And seriously? Aren’t you judging yourself more harshly than anyone else ever could? Let it go. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Imagine all you’ll learn just by trying. Imagine how much you’ll grow just by giving yourself the benefit of the doubt! And remember, sometimes you gotta get down and dirty with life to find the diamond beneath the surface.
  7. Be kind to yourself.
    This is a biggy. All those words you use to bring yourself down, all those nasty names you call yourself… they’re not kind to you. Stop it. Stop calling yourself down. Stop dragging yourself through the muck of negativity. Rise up. Be kind to yourself. Treat yourself how you would treat your bestest friend if they were trying to learn or do something new. Be encouraging of you. Be supportive. Be kind.

And above all, BELIEVE IN YOU. Believe in your capabilities. Your capacity to grow. Your commitment to being your best.

Believe in you and don’t let anyone tell you you’re not worth believing in.

You are.