Category: life

Talking About the Weather

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Somewhere in the middle of planning my upcoming trip to the midwest, I thought, “This is a bad idea. It’s going to be very cold there.” An alarming thought for a former Coloradan to have.

You see, in Colorado, we are tough, and those of us from mountain towns have the luxury at scoffing at the rest of the world when an inch of snow shuts down an entire city. We accept no excuses. Twenty-four inches in forty-eight hours? No problem, we say.
But now I live in coastal California where the majority of people understand that it’s simply follish to live anywhere water freezes without the help of GE. Why voluntarily be cold–or hot for that matter? We’ll stick with 70-74 degrees Fahrenheit thank you very much.
Having recently returned from Colorado to California, I’m fairly convinced it’s a miracle people from vastly different climates can even talk to each other. The world makes itself felt in a cold climate in a way we 70-74 degree-ers do not experience. You have to plan the weather into your life with time to scrape the car window and snowblow the driveway. And then there are days you have to cancel your plans on account of Mother Nature just to stay alive. If you ignore the weather in California, you might get wet.
Back in California, I was sitting at a picnic table that the nearby tree had covered with tiny flowers no bigger than my fingernail. Yes, in January, but stick with me here winter people. The flowers looked like little green cups. I picked one up and turned it over and inside a tiny bug was weaving its way through the white stamen, each tipped with a yellow dot, and stopping to clean its wings.
The world must make itself felt in gigantic and mysterious ways to this bug, such as when a strange force literally turns its world upside down. That upturning can happen to any of us, regardless of the weather–a death, a birth, an unexpected success, the loss of a job. And during and around all these events this world that is the source of endless opportunities for wonder, that offers so many tiny bugs in tiny flowers, continues.

Birthing Love

Rachel Henry2 Comments

This year I actually wanted to send Christmas cards (not to be confused with the actual sending of them). Every year, as people go their various ways for Christmas vacation, I find myself wanting to connect with all my friends before they leave, whether they’re close and I saw them last week or far and I haven’t seen or talked with them in months.

I’ve been wondering why the need to be together is so strong right now and why waiting until January feels like missing a critical moment. After all it’s only a couple of weeks. No other two-week period has that sense of urgency for me.

I think it’s because the Christmas spirit, which people of any or no religion can enjoy, comes alive when we notice love being born into the world. Love is always being born into the world, but we are impatient and easily distracted beings and often miss it. Luckily, we are also ritualistic beings, and so we build into our lives times to stop and pay attention. When an entire culture pauses and takes the time to celebrate that love, you can feel it.

And when you do, you might want to send Christmas cards or drop five bucks in the Salvation Army bucket or let someone go in front of you in line. Because we are the ones who birth love into the world. As with children or art or any other act of creation, it comes both from us and through us—we participate in its coming into being but are not its only source.

We tend and grow this love in our many relationships, and so of course, when love is in the air, there is an urge to reconnect. To all of you who will probably not, despite my best intentions, receive cards from me: I love you.

Note: The blog and I will be on vacation for the next two weeks. Wishing you all a merry Christmas and joyful new beginnings at the solstice and the turn of the year.

Momma Told Me

Rachel Henry5 Comments

I don’t know why we’re designed to go two steps forward and one step back, but I’m convinced we are. Last week: Zen master. This week: whiner.

I exaggerate last week’s accomplishments, but I did have this miraculous moment of getting over myself. One of the software systems at work appears to have been designed to decrease productivity, and I generally spend a lot of time and energy hating it while using it.

This time a moment of spiritual brilliance flashed upon me. If I changed the goal from finishing the task to being present and paying attention, I could stop fighting the inefficient system because its inefficiency would no longer matter. So I changed the goal. My mind cleared up. My patience increased. My work probably improved, though I have no way to measure that.

Fast forward to this week. While working on another not favorite task, I said to myself, you could use this time as practice; where is your attention? I replied, somewhat snappishly, I don’t want to practice, I want to be miserable and complain. I clearly saw myself making that choice, but changing my approach still didn’t interest me. One step back—at least.

I kept this up most of the day and wore myself down sufficiently that, by the time I was chopping kale for dinner, I could consider the option of simply relaxing and accepting my sour disposition. Then this line from William Stafford’s poem “A Message from the Wanderer” came floating in: “Tell everyone just to remember/their names, and remind others, later, when we/ find each other.” Some days that’s all we can do, remember who we are, and that’s OK because that day is not eternal. The next day we’ll be capable of making different choices.

I’ll end with the rest of Stafford’s stanza because he sums it up so beautifully:

“…Tell the little ones
to cry and then go to sleep, curled up
where they can. And if any of us get lost,
if any of us cannot come all the way—
remember: there will come a time when
all we have said and all we have hoped
will be all right.”

Giving Thanks

Rachel Henry6 Comments

Here’s something to aspire to: “For all that has been, thank you. For all that is to come, yes” (Dag Hammarskjöld, second United Nations Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize recipient). I’m not there yet, but this holiday is good practice.

This year’s selection from the cornucopia of things that make me grateful I’m alive:

Cake batter—and cookie batter and icing of course and the way all of the above cling to the insides of bowls and the edges of beaters demanding that we lick them off.

Cats—because when looked at rationally they are an odd choice for a companion but when looked at non-rationally they are cute and funny and cuddly, at least when they’re not attacking you. Plus they purr. You really can’t beat purring; that was evolutionary genius.

People who make things by hand—weavers, woodworkers, drywall hangers, bread bakers, especially those amazing folk who can take scraps of this and that and presto, there’s a table or a fancy dress.

Home—a sense of belonging, a feeling of safety and peace, an awareness of being loved.

Monastics—monks and nuns of all religions, lay people who are exceptionally contemplative, everyone who holds that sacred space in the midst of daily life. They are doing it for the rest of us.

Camping—all types, car, backpacking, anything that involves sleeping on the ground, frying your toast in a pan, waking up to the smell of pine trees and going to bed having just been reminded of how vast the Milky Way is.

Moments—the ones that take my breath away, the ones filled with laughter, the peaceful ones, the silent ones, the shared ones.

Friends and family—without whom, none of the above would be as fun or loving or wonderful.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

L.A. Inspiration

Rachel Henry4 Comments

The L.A. freeway system should be one of the marvels of the modern world. As I spent some quality time sitting on the I-10 a few months ago, the magnitude of the system impressed me.

Think what happens on L.A.’s freeways every day. Millions of individual units travel to work, to the doctor’s office, to the grocery store and home largely without incident. They’re not required to follow a certain path. Rather, the system’s design allows them to take any route they can dream up.

It’s not surprising that there’s gridlock; it’s surprising that people get anywhere at all. Movement happens because we created this incredible system in which each highway connects to all the other highways and to the main artery roads that connect to all the surface streets. None  of the streets got missed! None of them end in the middle of the block!

Last weekend, I drove past the San Diego docks, home to a collection of gigantic cranes for lifting containers on and off ships. These massive machines inspired the same thought as did sitting in traffic in L.A.—if we can create this, then surely we can create something better. Think of the years, probably lifetimes, of mental and physical work that people have poured into this infrastructure—the planning, the engineering, the sheer creativity. There didn’t used to be freeway systems, and now there are—look what we are capable of!

Whether these cars and machines are the answer to our woes or one giant mistake, they point to an encouraging truth: our potential is vast.

When I Was Your Age

Rachel Henry1 Comment

Seen on a book flap this week: “Hailed as the most prominent lyrical poet of his time, [Dylan Thomas] made four trips to the United States and died in New York in 1953 at the age of 39.”

New Yorker cartoon recounted to me by a friend: An obituary page with captions under the pictures that said, “A little older than you,” “A little younger than you,” and then in the middle “Your age exactly.” Thirty-nine is my age exactly.

 I generally hate hypothetical questions because they pit things against each other needlessly, but this book flap made me wonder whether I’d rather be a really successful writer, as Thomas was a poet, or likely to be alive at 40. I would rather, of course, be both, but unlike choosing between your parents being run over by a mac truck or your sister being eaten by sharks, this decision was easy—I’d rather be alive. Because there’s a lot more to life than writing.

Which I’m not sure I could have said without feeling guilty ten years ago. Not that I didn’t value the other parts of my life, but in my head, I earned my existence through my accomplishments.

I’m more and more certain that existence isn’t available to be earned—it’s a gift. People don’t bring you more gifts on your seventh birthday than your sixth because you learned multiplication in second grade and that’s a bigger accomplishment than addition and subtraction. We can receive or reject gifts but can’t do anything about the giving of them. (OK, you can invite more people to your birthday party, but you can’t control whether they give you the stupid brush and comb set or the cool Batman action figure.)

Entering mid-life reduced the urgency of accomplishment for me. I still sometimes think that just means I’ve failed—a possible explanation but not a good one. A better one may be that aging allows us to recognize the wonder of existence, pay attention to it, and enjoy it.

Rachel Henry2 Comments

There are small mysteries in this life, like why no one can create a generic Ban-Aid that actually sticks to your skin. Then there are the larger mysteries.

Like this one: Did you know that for every kernel in an ear of corn, there’s a strand of silk that brings the pollen to that kernel? Each individual kernel is important enough to warrant its very own pollen delivery system.

corn plant showing silk
By Pollinator at en.wikipedia, from Wikimedia Commons

Those tufts of silk coming out the top of an ear of corn don’t appear all that well organized. It seems altogether possible that one if not many strands would be missed, yet in all the corn I’ve eaten in my life, I’ve seen very few unpollinated kernels. And it’s not as if corn sellers can pick out the cobs with a few unpollinated kernels here and there.

I don’t think understanding the corn fertilization mechanism down to the mitochondria or the molecular exchange across cell walls reduces the mystery of such an intricate system—for every ear in the history of corn!—one bit. If anything, the biological complexity provides more of a sense of wonder, one more opportunity to say how on Earth did it develop the ability to do that?

We sometimes think that if we know the how, we understand the whole, and if we understand it, there’s nothing to marvel at anymore. If we can explain it, we’ve mastered it, and it’s no longer worthy of the same level of respect. We can move on to figuring out the next thing.

But I think that the more we know, the more amazing and mysterious something can become. Corn silk can be transformed from those annoying strings that insist on clinging to your corn to a source of life. How cool is that?

Finding Faith

Rachel Henry2 Comments

If you want to really effectively lose your car key, a stellar location to make the attempt is at the beach when the tide is coming in. Which of course is where I lost mine. Approximate odds of finding key in this situation: zero.

But of course I had to look. I’m not sure where that compulsion comes from, but I think it’s built into standard-model humans. I don’t know anyone who would leave the beach without searching.

I went one way and my friend went the other, and I thought, what the heck, I’ll ask St. Anthony (patron saint of finding things) and St. Jude (patron saint of lost causes, yes, seriously) for help.

I didn’t expect to find the key and knew that if it did, it would be due to great good fortune rather than any action on my part. Crediting my own finding skills amidst incoming tides and the shifting nature of sand would require some serious delusion. If my key and I were to be reunited, it had to happen because of something outside of me, but I still had my part to play. I had to walk a few miles, pay attention, and be open to the possibility of the key turning up. In other words, I had to practice faith.

I walked a couple of miles, paid attention, and maintained a steady attitude of non-expectant openness. OK, not really. I walked a half mile, forgot to pay attention, walked a little farther, started creating possible endings in  my head, remembered I was supposed to be non-expectant, got really tired of paying attention after about a mile, and attempted to not to completely give up hope for the second mile.

It felt a lot like meditation, and it felt as if this is what we are called to do. Show up, pay attention, be open to wondrous happenings but not expect particular results.

We didn’t find my keys. The run was not the triumphant, pre-race workout it was supposed to be, but the time at the beach was exactly the practice I needed.

Uct (no, that’s not a hairball)

Rachel Henry6 Comments

I call my car Uct for multiple reasons.

  1. That’s what the letters on the license plate spell.
  2. It’s nicely non-gender specific.
  3. I kind of like the way it sounds.

Uct was in the shop for a week, and I had a rental car, a shiny new Jetta. (Uct came into the world in 2006.) The Jetta had many features Uct does not: remote keyless entry, electronic windows, a really comfortable seat. (Uct would like the record to show that it has reasonably comfortable seats, just not really comfortable seats.) I also liked the way the Jetta felt on the road.

Since the Jetta and I spent a week together, I began to feel unfaithful to Uct, so when I went to pick up my faithful vehicle, I was relieved to discover that I was happy to have it back. The Jetta might have been new and shiny, but Uct is familiar. I know exactly how it rounds the corner into the parking lot when I’m late to work; I know where its edges are when I pull into my narrow garage.

Another way of putting this is that Uct belongs to me in much the same way we belong to our family members and friends. There will always be someone shinier than we are, someone with better clothes, more money, more success, a flatter stomach, or a cooler car, but those who love us don’t really care. They love us, the whole package—they don’t measure us by our various attributes.

The idea of belonging to another person can bring to mind a controlling relationship, which is certainly unhealthy, but I mean here a deep and intimate knowing that leads to acceptance of all the parts of another person and a consequent ability to treasure him or her. So to all those to whom I belong, thank you for loving me, manual locks and all.

Strike Anywhere

Rachel Henry10 Comments

Wouldn’t it be nice if our mental, emotional, and spiritual lives required no activation energy?

Activation energy is the energy you have to put into a system to start a chemical reaction. Paper doesn’t burn on its own—you have to provide the match or the lightning bolt. Applying this concept to life in general is a brilliant idea I am stealing from a biology professor I recently interviewed.

Activation energy in life is the oomph it takes us to force ourselves to begin things: go to the gym, do our taxes, write a blog post, bake a cake. Even when I know the result will be enjoyable—cake!—beginning is often difficult. Lying down on the couch seems like a better idea. Sometimes, I really need to lie down on the couch, but oftentimes, activation energy appears to require the power burner on a professional gas range when a match will do.

The problem is that I don’t usually recognize the illusion. Whatever I’m avoiding appears to be a long and arduous journey fraught with peril when really the first couple of steps are just a little muddy.

I think being more conscious of this difficulty with beginnings will help me remember that my resistance isn’t as powerful as it seems. Instead of telling myself, wow, this is way too difficult, I must lie down on the couch, I can say, oh, that’s just the activation energy talking; I only have to take a few steps and then the reaction will continue on its own.