Archive for the ‘becoming’ Category

Avalanched — by Good!

Posted: November 12, 2015 in beautiful, becoming
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It has been an avalanche — of generosity.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Yesterday the stucco went on the wall, beautifully textured over the pilasters and cap. Yum brown and perfect! The contractor discounted the price by $1,200.

Today the decorative lighting goes up. A friend paid for it all, and for the night-time flood lighting too, $3,200.

In a week or so our concrete contractor will be back to connect the underground drains to the street. He gave us a $5,000 when he built the wall and laid the base material for the walks.

A month ago the stone pavers went in. Now the large stage and walkways are gorgeous in warm browns and dark charcoal greys. The discount — it was close to $10,000.

Last night we hooked up the irrigation valves to the sprinkler system. A beautiful, green carpet of tall fescue will go in Saturday. The labor for the irrigation and sod installation — free.

It’s been like that at The REFINERY.

We set out three years ago — a relatively small church — to create an interior courtyard on our site, a sacred space for outdoor worship, for weddings, for picnics, for parties, for children, for everyone, for our community.

A few months from now we will dedicate this space with a huge celebration. It will need to go on for a week. There are that many people to thank!

The architectural plan — donated. The landscape plan — donated. All the funds spent — they were freely given over several year by many people, in huge and unexpected amounts, and in small regular amounts, a $20 gift here, $10,000 there, $9 here, $1,200, $50, $1, $18,000  — it poured in, it ran over the edge of the cup, it is still coming in, we are almost there, amazing!

What do we make of this?

Several things come to mind.

Despite all the difficulty of life, vision remains — art also, and beauty and hope. And we see that resources follow vision and are multiplied by generosity which is inspired by a new thing made lovely. Gorgeous dreams inspire people, and above all there is God — and he is good.

More could be said.

What seems appropriate is simply, “Thank you!”

Savoring Beautiful Processes

Posted: November 3, 2015 in beautiful, becoming
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I turn the heat down, just a smidge, to avoid any crispy from forming along the edges.

I add another 15 seconds to the microwave so that the syrup will be hot on the plate.

Another 20 seconds more for the wafffle in the toaster.

Add the salt and pepper to the eggs, at the last moment throw in just enough crumbled bacon in to taste, not enough for a heart attack.

Put the pieces together — crispy waffle, hot buttery syrup, perfectly soft eggs and bacon.

I move to the couch, my dark red plate in hand, find a comfy corner, put a couch pillow on my lap, put the plate on the pillow, eight inches from my mouth, my fresh, cold drink one foot away.

I’m ready.

I cut the waffle, stir it in the syrup, put a piece of egg and bacon on top, put it in my mouth. Ahhhh, the mix! The crunchy, soft, savory, salty, sweet combination — perfect!

Good arises out of good.

Good things come from good processes.

Good processes take planned steps, take time — require waiting, require patience, create anticipation, create beauty, create good reality.

This week, friends and I will muck about in the church garden. We will be pulling out old plants, laying down new irrigation pipe, putting in new water valves, spreading wood chips, planting flowers.

Steps, pieces, processes — these are to be enjoyed, savored and loved. To take the time, to put something together carefully, to prepare assiduously, to grace reality with order, to sit back, to settle in, to take the first bite, to see, taste, smell, feel and hear beauty — this is what the good life is all about.

Not Alone

Posted: August 24, 2015 in becoming, beginnings
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The myth of the alone, insane, artistic genius runs deep in Western culture.

Vincent Van Gogh.

It isn’t so.

I just finished reading Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s fascinating, well-researched, thought-provoking biography of Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent fought with everyone he knew, sabotaged every close relationship, longed for family, but lived alone even when he had house companions like Gauguin. And yet not.

He suffered deep social pain, rejection and abandonment, and at times he was isolated by mental illness,  but he was not unconnected from other people.

His art, his letters, his paintings all reveal a profound link to others. They reveal the wars with his parents, the parasitic relationship with his brother Theo, his attempts at pastoring, his efforts to build family with with his prostitutes, his effort to create family with his fellow artists.

Gauguin, Pissarro, Monet, Bernard, Rembrandt, Millet, Delacroix  — all these and many others influenced Vincent.  He lived inside his own inner dialogue with them.

Vincent’s art was a product of his relationships.

Even when Vincent was an island, cut off from others in a locked room at St. Remy, struggling with his mental demons, he was in reality connected by great techtonic plates — below the surface of  deep water — to those he knew on the mainland of rationality. They were always in his head, his heart, his paint.

Anyone of us, with our various versions of insanity, can retreat from others because of relational pain and hurt, and yet even there we will not be alone. We will always bring with us the voices of our community, our critics, our family, our friends, and our self.

What is insanity? What was Vincent’s mental illness? I’m not at all sure. But perhaps insanity has something to do with us not being able to work out our relationships with our community, family and sweet ones.

We are connected, and we are all a bit whacked; the issue of life seems to lie in how we mangage to come to terms with that.

That struggle, that deep longing for connection, that is one of the great forces of life that results in great art, in great pain, and in great love.

“Love,” commanded Jesus.

All beauty comes from that.

The Spaces To Which We have Grown Accustom

Posted: January 15, 2015 in becoming
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Life is complicated — my life, your life, the lives of the people we talk to.

What do we do with this?

Fortunately, there is a very simple, useful approach to complications. It’s doing the one next good thing that we can think of to advance health and progress.

We best manage complication by doing the next simple thing we can do.

Today I made a phone call I had been putting off. It got results. Yesterday I bought materials for future project. It’s now a step closer to getting it done. On Monday I fixed something broken at the house. That’s how you keep your stuff from turning into Junk.

I wonder, what keeps us from doing the obvious thing? Fear, anxiety, low self-esteem, past failures, apathy — such things paralyze us and keep us from realizing amazing possibilities.

I wonder how many of us are living lives which ignore our potential and our giftedness. Are we, perhaps, even refusing a future God is offering us.

To explore this concept I wrote a fable about a woman stuck in a small world of her own choosing.

…..

The Spaces To Which We have Grown Accustom

“You could move to the larger room,” he suggested.

“Well, I have never really thought much about that,” she said. “I guess I could.

He walked into the smaller of the two bedrooms in her condo. It was crowded, a small bed, desk, book shelves, old books.

There was twice the space in the empty master suite just a few feet down the hall. Years had past since her roommate, living in this master suite, had moved out of the condo.

The larger master bedroom included a dressing room, two walk-in closets and a master bathroom. It was a much bigger and brighter space, with a large window opening out onto the patio.

“I could help you move your stuff,” he said. “It wouldn’t take long, and this smaller room would make a perfect office. He paused. She look stunningly unexcited, so he added. “I think the bigger space would be so much more luxurious for you. You could even have a bigger bed.”

“Well, that is so nice of you,” she replied. “I have been thinking about a new bed.”

They stood in silence for a moment, as if contemplating an insurmountable possibility lying on a divine plateau somewhere between his mind and hers.

“Well, just give me a call,” he said to break the awkwardness.

She didn’t, but instead left things as they were — bricked and mortared within the dim interior of the tiny cubicle to which she had grown accustom.

After he left, she retreated to her small room and muttered to herself, “I never did much believe in heaven.”

More of my fables and antifables may be found at http://www.antifables.com

My proverbs about taking next steps may be found at http://www.modernproverbs.net

Not Growing Beyond Who You Are

Posted: December 31, 2014 in becoming, journey, thriving
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The ficus tree in my backyard is huge, and it provides good shade for my whole yard, my pond and my house.

It can get bigger, and I can trim it, I can even cut it too the ground, but as long as it lives it can never go back to being a seed, a first sprout, a simple sapling, a young tree again. It’s roots go deep and spread wide now. At the base the trunk is thick and scared. Such is nature. Once organisms grow, they may reproduce, but they themselves don’t return to their original state and size.

And so too it is with humans. We are physically age-size specific. This also seems to go for our emotional, psychological and spiritual development also. When we have grown out of an immature view of life, then we see with experienced, shaded eyes. When we have surpassed simplistic views, then our concepts will become deep and complex.

This seems to make sense, but it isn’t necessarily alway so.

The other day I was looking through some old journals, the records of my thoughts fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years ago I wrote in a journal that it is “important to take a gentle look in one’s own direction. We are greatly in need of a tolerant, gracious, forgiving attitude toward ourselves. To be able to overlook others imperfections, we must be able to overlook our own.”

Odd, or not, but I have spoken and written the exact same thing, even recently. This idea concerning the importance of self-love is part of my tree, and it has been so for some time. Perhaps, I apply this idea now just a little better than when I first wrote it, but I don’t know. It is still something I am working on, and what began in me has grown to be me, and is still part of the me I am becoming.

Like the trees, we change, we enlarged, we scar, but for the healthy, some things remain the same. We are, when we age well, a compilation of the truths we have gathered along the way. We don’t grow past them, and they don’t necessarily expand on us. With true things, with the best things, “was” tends to be “is,” and “will be.”

I’m not done, not fully grown yet, and I am looking these days to keep changing, to provide more shade for other people, but I want, I plan, and I think it extremely important, to keep my roots, my trunk, my core, my simple, young, beautiful truths always about me.

A mature person — that person shelters within themselves the incipient, pure, stable essence of all they once were that makes them who they are becoming.

Of the best things I have learned this is one — not to let go of gentleness toward myself and others.

Apricity 101

Posted: October 3, 2014 in becoming
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Being curious — apparently it’s good for learning.

Professor Charan Ranganath, the senior author on a recent study on curiosity, says that “curiosity recruits the reward system” of the brain. It puts us in a state where “we are more likely to learn and retain information.”

Cool! I love the feeling of curiosity. When I’m curious, apparently the research shows that dopamine goes to work in my head. From my experience it does; I can feel it coaching my neurons right now. I can feel it calling out to the universe of knowledge, “Come in here! Come into my brain too!”

According to the professor, dopamine is the information sucking chemical, enhancing our curiosity rushes, aiding stuff in settling in.

This week I ran into the word “kerfuffle.” I got a dopamine rush out of it. It put me in a kerfuffle. A kerfuffle is a commotion, uproar, tumult or brouhaha. Love it! My brain is an uproar.

This week I also came across the word “apricity.” It was love at first sight! Apricity refers to the warmth of the sun in the winter. Think an old dog laying in the sun in January.

Nice! Think of the apricity of a beautiful smile. It wakes up and warms the freezing cold heart.

Not everything wakes up the brain. This week I got a little frustrated, and a bit angry. I upgraded my smart phone and lost my account password and a bunch of documents.

I’ve noticed that being angry, getting frustrated, does the opposite of being curious.

At first anger or upset may stimulate a pay-attention state, but the angrier we get, the less effectively we tend to think.

About the tenth time I tried to reset my password on my smart phone, my brain went on strike!

At some point anger decreases our ability to think, it gorgonizes our ability to take in new information. Anger kills data intake. Anger is the enemy of curiosity and learning.

Yeah, what to do?

Thinking about it, I think I’ll fight anger and frustration with curiosity and wonder. I think I’ll ask what I can learn about myself and about others, from everyone of life’s frustrations. And I think I’ll keep looking up new words on my new and improved smart phone!

Come to think of it — when I am tempted to be angry or frustrated — I will to rebelliously revel, bask and sun in the opportunities for learning present there.

I plan, pledge and commit to get goofy-good at enjoying and learning from the winter-warmth of life.

Curious, I will sit at the hearth of the apricity resident in every single one of life’s wonderful, frustrating, kerflufflng upgrades!

Orchestrated

Posted: August 20, 2014 in becoming
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“Demo the porch,” said Richie. “It will solve a bunch of your problems.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Extend the porch out to here,” he said, pointing to the area about six feet out from the door of the house that I was hoping to turn into a counseling center, “and slope the rest of the porch down to the your walkway. That slope will end up about here,” he said, walking out on to the dirt and pointing down at his foot.

“Wow, that low,” I said. “That’s perfect! Then the walks on both sides of the courtyard will be about the same height.”

He had solved it! Richie, in only a couple hours on the site, had figured out solutions to the grading and leveling problems of the courtyard we are building at the church.

Orchestrated. That’s how I see it.

When we set out to do this project, a seventy by seventy foot interior courtyard garden for the church, it seemed impossible. We had no plan, no money and no professional support. A small old, dilapidated house sat in the middle of the site, surrounded by concrete and asphalt.

But, it had already been orchestrated. We just didn’t know how.

There was Vickie, the realtor, who introduced me to Joaquin, who had a business partner named Jesus, who bought the house. Joaquin put it on a truck and drove it down a two foot embankment, over the sidewalk and down the street.

We waved goodbye, and hooted. The house flew. And Jesus gave us some money for it.

Orchestrated.

Then there was Janet, the landscape designer, who volunteered to draw the design, and her boss who volunteered hours to solve design problems — free.

Then there was Josh, who revised the plan, created the fire exit plan the city demanded, added the detail for the wall, free, and printed out all the large scale drawings, three times, free.

Orchestrated.

Then there was Richie who came to me through a friend, Eric Richards, by referral. “I know a guy,” said Eric, who does this kind of stuff. He grades stuff and he’s got all the equipment to do it.”

Come to find out, Richie just graded the brand new Del Mar Race Track, and now he was at the church, volunteering all his experience and expertise, to us — at very little cost.

Orchestrated.

Then there was John. My daughter saw him at the college, putting up a wall, and came home and told me. And a light went on. Ask John, to build the wall to enclose the courtyard.

Orchestrated.

I walked past the dirt lot on Sunday. It’s growing weeds. It will soon be a beautiful inclosed garden, an outdoor room, a venue, a park, a worship center. How will that happen?

I’m not sure?

But I know this: It will be orchestrated.

Making The Dead Things Go

Posted: July 5, 2014 in becoming
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I dumped the appendages into the trash bin, and went back for more. Dismembering is a lot of work.

I used a big pair of loppers.

Snip, snap!

I had to break out the sawzall on some of the bigger ones.

When I was done, no dead things remained, only living things, bright green leaves — orange, yellow, red and purple flowers.

I had cut, trimmed, lopped and plucked all the dead branches, dead leaves and dry flower heads from every plant in my back yard. And I had mucked out my backyard pond, dragging out the green algae and dead water lily leaves.

Done! Only good things remained.

The whole thing now looked a bit like Monet’s garden — the effect stunning — green, red, yellow, purple efflorescence everywhere.

And this is how it is.

What is dead and dying is best cropped, lopped and dumpstered, so what is alive and growing can thrive.

It’s the same with my thoughts. They need lopping.

My mental pond constantly needs mucking out. And my mental flowers constantly need dead-heading. I beautify by cutting off my old fears, dumping my regrets, lopping off my unrealistic aspirations, dumpstering my inveterate dissatisfactions, dismembering all my unforgivenesses, beheading all of the negative unlovelies dying on my eager-to-thrive green branches.

Today I spent some time with someone who needed help getting her head filled up with true thoughts, with mental beauty commensurate with her value. We talked. It helped. We were pruning her thoughts. I hope she can keep hauling out the lies and telling herself the truth and when I’m not there. Maturity lies in the ability to garden ones own mind.

Mental beautification — for all of us — it is so much about making the dead things go.

A Quiet Heart

Posted: January 25, 2014 in becoming
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The tendency with humans is to force stuff.

We force our spoons into our mouths, our expenses into our budgets, our bodies into our jeans and our ways, our opinions and our solutions onto the people we live with.

Push, push, push. Force, force, force!

But people don’t like it.

Psalm 131 offers a good alternative.

God, I’m not trying to rule the roost,
I don’t want to be king of the mountain.
I haven’t meddled where I have no business
or fantasized grandiose plans.
2 I’ve kept my feet on the ground,
I’ve cultivated a quiet heart.
Like a baby content in its mother’s arms,
my soul is a baby content.
3 Wait, Israel, for God. Wait with hope.
Hope now; hope always!

Not ruling the roost, not meddling where we aren’t wanted, not fantasizing about what we want that will never happen (and even shouldn’t happen), not flying away from reality — it’s best. We would do well if we attempted to control less.

The child content, with its mother, not with its mother to get something, but just content with her, calm, secure — that is the model of the soothed soul before God.

To just accept people, without trying to control them, would bring more peace to us and them.

And to calm down our discontent by placing our hope in what God will bring in his time and way — that’s what it means to have a quiet heart.

The Mystery

Posted: December 2, 2013 in becoming
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I can tell it’s the Christmas season — Starbucks is using their red cups. That’s okay, but there is something needy in me that wants more than holiday cups this year.

I long for something new, something surprising, unexpected, deeply satisfying, hopeful, mysterious.

Christmas has that in it, I know it does, but what I want to know is how to find my way to the thrilling edge of that.

Redwoods come to mind. A small seed becomes a 379 foot tree! And I also think of babies. My friend Tony called; his wife”s water just broke. How exciting. A new life — coming tonight!

Christmas conjures just this mystery — what is large became small! God became a baby! So he could relate to us! How odd, how unlikely for anyone to make up, how weird, how amazing, how good. How hopeful for those of us like me who relentlessly ply the beaten-down paths of petty grievances, minuscule anxieties, micro-egotisms and minor regrets.

The largest thing, God, a cosmic Redwood, becoming the smallest thing, a baby in a mother, so that we might through him become larger. I want that! I want the largest-small-thing, God, to make me larger. I want out of my smallish ways, my micro-pettiness, my microscopic loves, my seed-sized hopes, my baby faith. I want Christmas to go off in me.

I can only think of one thing to do.

Ask, for something new to come to me tonight. Ask for the mystery to come in me.

And so, I do.

“God, great and small at the same time, even tonight come near to me, move inside me, enlarge in me and expand me beyond myself. Great God of power and love, see my small, cracked, raised cup and fill it up with the mystery of you.”

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