Perfection

Greetings on this perfect Saturday Morning!

Observing lately how it is that we so often devalue ourselves, I was struck with the beauty of my granddaughter Thursday evening at her very first full band concert. She is in 5th grade and in her first year at a charter school, grades 5 - 12, with a huge participation in the band program. She plays flute, first year, and she is very good. I brought her a rose, and when I congratulated her, she said, "I did great!" Even now tears come to my eyes,

Holding this tiny being in her first years, I would repeat, looking into her eyes, "Hello Andrea. You are strong, you are smart, you are beautiful." Her parents did, too. She believed it. She knows it. And I pray it means she will never undervalue her perfect self.

Most of us are raised with a different perception, most parents coming from a place of fear and self-consciousness and not so able to tap into pure energy. Every child with stable self-esteem has come from someone who was able to do that for them; to say to them, "I see who you are and I know you. You are perfect exactly as you are." I was not equipped to do this for my children. But these days I tell them in other ways and speak to them in Spirit as well to say,

"I trust your plan with God is perfect, and I will keep breathing with you to let go of any other perception."

God knows each of us in our perfection. We are created exactly to specifications that God deemed essential to the Whole. And I am not talking about a pontificating grandfather/God sitting on some throne far and away. Consciousness is God, we are God. God exists as a Source we can only imagine, but not understand. Not completely, not now. But I believe that God is the constant that maintains the balance of the Cosmos. The Grand Design creates us from energy/light. Every cell in our bodies remembers this Source, The All That Is.

I have been carrying a lot of body weight for years now. I've explored all the reasons why. I know all the means to reduce my weight in traditional terms. I understand nutrition and exercise. And while I will choose some of these, I seem to be emerging from this reality into a new state of being. It is my intention, and I've been asking for help in remembering the person that I am in a fit and healthy body. One day I heard, "I am Light."

I am recalling how to maintain balance, and this phrase, repeated to myself, helps me to feel into the ways in which I have devalued myself and to remember, gradually, gently, how to act in this dimension with respect for myself. I am also accepting that the way that I am and have been is also perfect. Creation lives in me, perfectly, exactly as I was, as I am, and as I will be.

I am Light. You are Light. And because we are all Light together, on this day, May 21st, when fear grips some of us, holding this truth that we are Light sustains us.

In Light, Breathing,

Phyllis

What is Your Vocation?

In Gratitude, Good Morning!

Isn't it just when we least expect it that Wisdom speaks to us, and we are changed? Yesterday was such a time for me, and Victoria's message may inspire you as it did me.

I have mentioned White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church, led by Reverend Victoria Safford. Every Sunday we can, Mom and I drive to this lovely church where we often meet my daughter-in-love, Carin, and my perfect grandchildren for the service and brunch afterward.

Victoria posed a question in yesterday's service that then produced a conversation between Carin and myself that doubled the message for me. Victoria asked, "What is your vocation?" Not, what is it you do for a living, not how do you make money or spend your time. From the root of the word, "vocation," what is your true voice? How is it that you express true Self?

Having read this blog, you know a lot about what I do. From waking to "channel" in 1983, through study and revelation, from ordination and counseling lots of folks, tripping and getting back up, I've considered this journey an expression of faith, my calling. So I thought I knew my vocation. Then I heard in my heart yesterday that this was not the core. As I listened to Victoria, I breathed and closed my eyes and heard Wisdom, my innermost voice, speak:

"Your vocation is to know God and to support others as they come to know God."

I knew it was true. This is who I Am. The simplicity struck me and I knew this was the insight that had been eluding me for weeks, perhaps months, no, all of my life.

Victoria's message included a discussion of what jobs we do to maintain our lives - work that is not our vocation. Our maintenance life feels heavy, demanding, but a necessity to support life. Out in atrium Carin and I talked about the message. I did not express my new insight. It was too soon and too new to me to speak aloud what I was feeling. Instead we talked about maintenance, essential activities, for Carin, of raising children, keeping a house, tending to marriage. And for me, managing a client schedule, running errands for Mom, shifting as our relationship changes, reacting to situations in the world that sometimes just feel wrong. Life feels big and we've learned to react to our lives and our responsibilities.

It seems to me that our goal, surely my goal, is to breathe and consider every maintenance task a meditation. Digging a ditch, washing a dish, walking a dog, each a meditation. Inspiration sometime comes during programmed meditation, but it most often comes when we least expect it. It comes in moments with a child, while driving my mother to the doctor, during a television show, in the shower. True voice speaks while we are otherwise occupied - if we intend and allow it. With such intention we become constant meditators instead of reactors to our task-filled lives.

My intention has changed. I speak to the population I now choose to serve. As guided years ago, I breathe and speak aloud my intention so the Consciousness is invested with my new vision. I attract and engage with those who are seeking God, whatever it is that they might call "God," and so I learn God better and speak my true voice.

I express my true voice not marching with it, searching, seeking, pontificating. It comes with my breath, with ease. And so it comes not only with clients, but on the street, at the co-op, with people I love and with folks who surely challenge me. Not in words, but in the energy, through the Consciousness from which I come.

For each of us, the revelation of true voice comes perfectly timed to the whole of our lives. Do I wish I had the simplicity of this back when I was struggling, before my ordination, at any time when clients challenged me or a message for my church seemed stuck in my throat? No. Well, I may have wished it, but the struggle, too, was essential. As Wisdom said: "You cannot be rescued from your struggle if what you are learning from it is necessary for your growth."

Each moment is a moment in becoming. To accept ourselves, "as we are, where we are, when we are," is our journey. True voice, our inspired vocation, is within us and reveals exactly as we are prepared to live it.

Peace, with Breath,

Phyllis

A Fine Old Tree

Happy Spring Morning to you!

This has been such a week of tears. Beginning with the reflections in my last post and yesterday the loss of a fine, stately tree from my neighborhood.

I'm struck by its loss and realize how inextricably be are woven together with all of Earth.

I've lived in this building now for nearly 23 years, in three different apartments, but all of them facing our neighborhood at the rear of the building, and the tree has always been some part of my view.

I am not schooled in tree identification, so I am not sure what species this lovely, old tree was.

On one hand, I am hoping it was not destroyed to satisfy someone's capricious action. On the other hand, I dread the loss of more trees if it was infested with one of the diseases we've heard about.

It seems to me that its huge, green canopy was always the size it was when I woke yesterday morning, so it had probably reached its maturity many years ago. It spread its generous limbs over the fence that separates our parking lot from neighborhood houses. And, although I had never thought of it, it always filtered the light that floods my apartment. And now it doesn't.

So my world has changed in a way that seems only important to me, but the loss of a tree is symbolic of larger Earth changes. Reflecting, we can appreciate how much we count on the steadiness, the comfort of what we know best. So, while grieving the loss of homes, crops, businesses; while we say goodbye to loved ones and try to find a way to go on without them, it is sometimes the single tree or another personal shift that brings our New Earth into focus.

The loss of this old friend is a reason to breathe and to offer gratitude for his/her life and all the gifts it provided us. The loss also reminds me of the abundant helicopter seeds it spread abundantly every spring, creating a clean-up project for our maintenance folks. Now it seems a small price to pay for all its benefits.

The light in my world is changed forever. And I think about all those areas in our own country and so many other countries where acre after acre and mile after mile of destruction has changed the light and the quality of life for thousands of people. My loss is small in comparison. But any change that affects our personal world calls for grieving to honor the value of what was. The grieving moves us forward, breathing into the next change and supporting Earth in her shedding and growing.

Honoring, grieving, moving forward, we observe all the unique ways we are Becoming.

A Human Being is Dead

Peace to All of You,

This gray day in Minnesota, is a gray day all across the globe, and I feel compelled to sign on for the first time in weeks to acknowledge it.

We could not have known as we woke yesterday morning, the first day of May, 2011, that by the end of the day a world figure would have been assassinated. We could not have known as we sat in church, holding one another in the Sacred, that by the end of the day people all over the globe would be celebrating the death of an infamous figure.

Today I do not celebrate. Today I am sorrowful for the nature of human; that we still hold such hate for another person that we would celebrate that person's death. Worse, that we would celebrate the murder of any one other human being. Today I feel less human because I am part of a culture that can hold this event as a victory without acknowledging the Spirit of this now dead being. I see only the exacerbated contrasts in our human nature. And I pray for balance.

Part of my Consciousness feels I should apologize to you for bringing this negative energy by my words. Another, greater part, says these words must be expressed if ever we are to raise the Consciousness. How long are we to continue in the tradition of "an eye for an eye?" I pray we can be done with this. Let us honor the Spirit of any person and, seeking justice, find new and inspired ways to bring our humanity into balance.

I hold Osama bin Ladin in the Sacred. I do not understand him, nor his terrible actions. I acknowledge that his assignment, like that of Hitler and similar human villains, springs from a script none of us can understand.

Years ago when the bombs began dropping in the first stages of Desert Storm, I heard from Spirit that my assignment was to hold in the Sacred every human being on both sides of the conflict. From the Ayatollah to President Bush, from our soldiers to the Muslim citizens who would die, I was to see them all as a part of an event so mysterious we could not fathom it.

So I stopped screaming and breathed and encouraged others to do the same;

to stop reacting and judging and simply to breathe into the mystery of The Sacred.

We are all sacred expressions of the Creator. Each of us with an assignment. Each of us still judging and being judged. I am crying for all of us today in my own human reaction - and breathing. Always breathing for our possibilities.