A Primary Nutrient

Posted on Wed 12 15 by Lisa Sorensen

22 December 2015

It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.  ~Mother Teresa

A Primary Nutrient

When we were going through my mother’s things after her death, an old, wobbly Christmas decoration surfaced from a box she hadn’t opened in years.  I had only the vaguest memory of the object from my childhood years and no conscious attachment to it, but my hand reached out, as if by instinct, and the little angel choir went home with me.  I put it into another box of holiday stuff where it stayed for the next couple of Christmases.  Then, one year, those angels seemed to spring to life, jumping into my hands of their own accord once again.  So, for the last few years, I’ve been putting them where I would notice them regularly and I find myself touched by their small forms, their simple faces, the humility of their bowed heads and the community of their song.

This year, I finally actually noticed what they hold in their hands.  Some carry instruments; a trumpet, a guitar, a concertina, and a bell.  Others have seasonal trimmings; a tree, a candle.  And then there is the one, the brightest angel of them all, who carries a heart.

There is a general rule of thumb about how long a person can survive without essential elements.  For food, it is generally considered to be about 3 weeks.  For water, that number shrinks to about three days.  For air, the number sheers off to a mere 3 minutes.

These three things, food, water and air, are foundational elements for survival.   Perhaps because it is the element needed most frequently, and also because I have been working to be more aware of my breath, I have come to think of air as the primary nutrient.

But now that little angel holding a heart between her hands reminds me that love is also an important, front-row instrument in the choir.

Technically, we can survive without love, but babies lacking it do not do well.  Without touch and cuddling, they suffer even if provided adequate food, water and air.  Their brain development is hindered, their immune systems falter, their social skills to care and empathize wither.  They fail to thrive.

We have a basic need to be loved.  I don’t think we ever outgrow this.  Which makes love another primary nutrient.

Love is a lot like air.  Like air, love is present around us nearly everywhere.  Like air, it is available most the time.  It is invisible and yet affects everything.  The desire to connect, to see and be seen, is a pulse beating in any moment.  It’s present in the opportunity to pull in a breath, see what is claiming my attention, and place my focus on kindness.  It’s in the splitting open of a pomegranate and marveling at the beauty of nature spilling garnet jewels on my countertop.  It’s in that place of spritiual calm within that expands out infinitely beyond.

I constantly forget all this.  I forget and think that people need to be lovable, when it is I needing to love.  I forget and judge myself harshly, making myself or others out to be unworthy.  I forget and think of caring as more of a commodity of exchange in which give and take need parity.

But that little angel, despite her years of being stuffed away in a dark box, keeps singing her song, reminding me that the melody of life asks us to hold our hearts in our hands and offer them to others.  In doing so, I nourish myself at the identical moment that I am giving of myself.

Love is all around.  I’m dipping in, ladling this nutrient over everyone and everything I can.  It’s an amazing celebration.

 

The first time I heard Love is All Around was the edited version in one of my all-time favorite movies, Love Actually.  Here’s the original, time-capsule rendition by the Troggs.

 

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Touchstone – The Most Wonderful Moment

Posted on Fri 12 15 by Lisa Sorensen

17 December 2015

The feeling of connection we get when we do something fun with people we love is one of our most powerful sources of happiness. ~Christine Carter

Touchstone Most Wonderful Moment

This week, between scattered list-crazed afternoons and doing one thing while thinking of another (or two), I’ve had small but significant pauses.  Moments of catching myself and stopping, at least in my mind, to take a deep breath and remind myself what it’s all about.

What it’s all about is love.  Showing it, sharing it, giving it, receiving it.

In those pauses I’m aware that my most wonderful moments are those of connection—with people, with nature, with spiritual awe.  With the profound miracle that is being alive.

And, in those times when I remember this, even in the busy business, connection is possible.  With the clerk helping me.  With the rain drops beginning to fall.  With the pocket of calm within just waiting for me to notice it.

 

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The Most Wonderful Moment

Posted on Tue 12 15 by Lisa Sorensen

15 December 2015

               Your heart is like a flower.  ~Thich Nhat Hahn

Most Wonderful Moment

I woke up recently to a sky dappled with silvery, puffy clouds and sunbeams glinting in the dewdrops dangling from the tree leaves like a zillion tiny white christmas lights.  In the last couple weeks, I’ve mentioned songs that’ve drifted through my head.  That morning it was Andy Williams singing the holiday classic ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’.

The beauty of the day was not the only thing that precipitated this.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s ‘You Are Here’ has been on my nightstand lately.  In this slender book, he writes a paragraph that prompts the reader to think about the most wonderful moment of their life.

Wow.  The question took my breath away.  Why have I never thought to consider this?  To think about the most wonderful moment of my life.  What a gift!

I proceeded to eagerly tear into the wrapping of that gift.  I began searching through memories, sifting out particularly good ones and brightening over them.  At breakfast, my husband and I explored together.  With a nostalgic smile, he told a story about a young him mastering a trick on his bicycle that I’d never heard before.  We relived lovely shared moments.

In ‘You Are Here‘, Thict Nhat Hanh offers a few prompts.  When will the most wonderful moment happen?  What will it be like?  Has it happened already or yet to come?  He says that often, no matter how old we are, we do not think it has happened yet.  That we hope it is still to come.

After posing this inquiry, Hanh then suggests that each present moment contains the opportunity to be our favorite moment.  This was the heart of his message — that we can create magnificent present moments by sincerely engaging our attention, our awareness. The gift, the present is our presence.

A little later, as I dealt with AT & T, his advice seemed way beyond my grasp.  Except maybe not.  This was exactly the kind of weary, dreary chore he was inviting me to imbue with something more.

I recognize that my attitude and my connection to myself are essential ingredients in how I experience any given moment.  His words, reminding me that any moment contains the possibility of wonder-full-ness, inspire me to pay attention to how I can engage in a way that supports and helps create what I value.

This is not a head-in-the-sand, Pollyanna stance.  Yes, we are surrounded by hurts that stream at us from the media, that arrive in worrisome news from a friend.  These moments too have a precious quality to them.  There is a need for compassion.  Sharing moves to a deeper level.  These are opportunities to focus on the love we have and want to share.

When I’m present, I’m noticing what a wonderful time of year it is.  There’s beauty in the dewdrops.  There’s delight in the familiar traditions like eggnog and cookies and the lights at the top of the local brewery that flash ‘Happy Holidays’ alternately with ‘Hoppy Holidays’.  There’s the sweet gifts of a good conversation over a cup of something warm with a friend and a cozy night at home by the fire.  There is the present of being present for sharing beauty, caring, joy.

I hope there are most wonderful moments, past and present, sweetening your life today.

 

Here‘s Andy Williams’ ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’.

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Touchstone – Dipping Deep into Joy

Posted on Sat 12 15 by Lisa Sorensen

11 December 2015

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.  ~Dr. Seuss

Dipping Deep into Joy

Dipping into one memory, lingering over it, has led to a whole host of other memories springing forward.  I’m soaking up what has become a parade of nostalgic and poignant, sometimes humorous, recollections of the season.

This season is so ripe with memory because all of us share years of history with it, with family, with the traditions that we maintain as we celebrate this current year.   The resonance of all this runs deep.

I keep finding a common thread in my recollections—people who have been important to me are in each memory.  There is joy in rediscovering these moments with these people, some of whom are still here and some of whom are not.

My father is one of those who is not with me physically anymore, but reminiscing recently, he has so been with me in spirit.  I smiled recalling the year that, in the process of showing his son how to operate the remote control airplane Santa had delivered, my dad proceeded to nosedive the plane, smashing it to smithereens.  Oh, did they both feel bad.  And, how many years we’ve laughed over that since.

Looking back, peeking under the trees of our past, savoring these times is one of the gifts of this rich time of caring and sharing with those we love.

Bring on the egg nog.

This week, the song drifting through my head is Luis Armstrong singing ‘What a Wonderful World’.

 

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Dipping Deep into Joy

Posted on Wed 12 15 by Lisa Sorensen

8 December 2015

Rejoicing opens us tremendously, dissolving our barriers, thereby enabling intimacy to extend to all of life. ~ Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

Dipping Deep into Joy

In contrast to so many Christmases in the past, this year, I don’t want to miss the season!  I want to fully immerse, to sink into the caring, kindness, giving.  To be a part.  To celebrate fully.  To add to.

I know I’ll get caught up in the bustle and lose touch with the heart of this holiday.  I’ll try to do too much some days.  I’ll do things without realizing they aren’t important to me until after I’ve done them.  I’ll second guess myself on the gifts I give.

I’m accepting this.

And, meanwhile, I’ve set the intention to dip deep into the joy.  I’m opening up to discover how my heart can sing out, clear and honest.  I’m reaching into grateful places to explore how I can add to this season that honors the resilient human desire to care and give.

This sounds complicated and time-consuming, but it hasn’t been.  It’s more about asking the questions, in bed before I rise or in the car as I drive to town, and then trusting answers to rise up of their own accord, in their own prescribed time.

This tiny action of seeking and cultivating joy nourishes my spirit.  It centers me in small, deceptively simple ways.  And, it’s gifting me with tender moments.

Like moments of recalling snips of my Christmases as a kid.

I grew up in a house built by my father in the midst of thousands of acres of verdant orange trees marching in orderly rows.  Most of them were valencia orange trees, but in our small tract of orchard my father had planted a handful of navel orange trees for his family’s use.  Although we kids had free rein of the orchard, and regularly picked and ate on the spot whatever was in season, still, in each of our stockings each year, there would be one plump, heavy orb – a shiny and pungently aromatic navel.

We didn’t really appreciate them.  We would toss our orange off casually and eagerly rummage through the pecans and walnuts to get to the bite-size Hershey candy bars wrapped in glittery gold and silver foil.  To us, the orange was like coal in Newcastle.

That tradition of the navel never faltered through our years of growing up.  It varied only slightly, one winter when we were traveling at Christmastime, but even then there were oranges, purchased by my father the orange grower and set on the small mantle in our hotel room.

A delight of recalling this is getting to appreciate what I couldn’t as a kid.  Growing up as my parents had, in poor conditions with bare necessities an uncertainty, the contents of those stockings represented inconceivable wealth.  Nuts.  Candy.  A gleaming piece of beautiful, perfect, ripe fruit.

Now I understand that fruit as a token of great abundance.  As a symbol of the hard work my father willingly and tirelessly engaged in to support his family.  As an appreciation of the bounty of the earth that he tilled.

I remember other gifts from my childhood.  There was the year I got roller skates and another when I got a new bike of my very own.  Good gifts.  But it is that simple navel orange that I recall so poignantly, that brings my father’s smile to my face, and shows me so much about a man I loved so dearly.

That navel orange just keeps on giving.

Memories can do that.  They hang out in traditions and ornaments and recipes.  They are deep-rooted keepsakes that will reach forward to nourish joy.  Like love, they can remind me of the goodness of a heart I’ve known.  And in so doing, refresh the goodness of my own.

When I remember this goodness, mine and others, barriers do dissolve, and joy is just begging to be shared.

 

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Touchstone – The Gift of Kindness

Posted on Sat 12 15 by Lisa Sorensen

4 December 2015

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince  

Gift of Kindness

Coming to enjoy Christmas continues to be an ongoing process for me.  It’s a process of growing out of insecurities about doing things ‘right’, working to tame some of the critical voices that press me to get with the program, to measure up.  As I manage to quiet these voices that come from the desire to fit in, I realize there is an inner guidance just waiting to help.  Another inner voice, one with wisdom, willing to help me be more present and genuine.

I’ve resented this holiday for years, but now it is giving me a huge gift as I lean into exploring these old attitudes and open the boxes to new ideas.  I’m pleased about laying down the battle to make myself conform and focusing instead on ways I can nourish and celebrate the love I’m lucky enough to share with others.

All this winnowing has left behind the sweet, strong kernels from which the Christmas season sprouts.  Kernels that emerge from the rich, fertile soil of the heart’s desire to connect and to care.

This song from the Lion King keeps floating through my head tonight.  I do find that love is all around….

 

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The Gift of Kindness

Posted on Tue 12 15 by Lisa Sorensen

1 December 2015

The existence of parallel truths is what gives our world its tremendous richness, and the grand scheme of things is far grander than our minds habitually imagine. ~Maria Popova, NY Times review of Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall

Gift of Kindness

Fall is clearly moving on.  The days shorten, the nights mantle my yard in silver white frost, the fragrances of simmering stews and baked goods delight me.  I love fall’s exuberance.  The pomegranates and pumpkins, the deer fattening up on acorns, the warbles of the Sandhill Cranes lilting in the sky as the birds arrive for the winter, the cheer of pulling off coats as friends gather.  It’s easy to lean into the celebration of gratitude and joy and the culminating hurrah of Thanksgiving that unites loved ones in a day of feasting.  What’s not to like?

December is when I unravel, the specter of Christmas flipping me over to the dark side.  As an adult, I’ve never been at ease with this month.  The bustle overwhelms me.  The consumerism that equates and quantifies love with material goods unsettles me.  The pressure of the media and the dominant cultural models to conform and buy! create a debilitating tug-of-war within me.  I try to reason myself into a better, lighter place.  But as the traffic snarls the exit ramps at the mall and my mail boxes, actual and virtual, are filled with ads and deals and cyber sales, my mind fumes with internal tussles and my heart sinks.

Over the last few years, I’ve begun looking at all this head-on with the intention of changing my attitude.

After all, Christmas is the holiday of love.  It is a celebration of our caring and being cared for.  It honors the flow of life that fundamentally relies on both giving and receiving.  It venerates the great gift that is birth; that of being given life and the opportunity within it to learn to love.

I want to make my peace with this holiday.  So, I’m tackling my attitude—exploring it, delving into the core of Christmas, and hoping to let it teach me to  expand my capacity for compassion.

My negative feelings about Christmas have a long history.  They have a place in me, for better or worse, that I need to honor.

I worry for the future.  I am concerned that my own family of man is not wise enough to look ahead and provide for the basic needs of our offspring and that instead we will consume our earth into a dirty, dusty desert.  Some days, I fear that the fundamentalism driving extremes of thought and action will pound wedges in the world that disastrously divide it into tribes of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

The gifts I would most love to give my nieces and nephews are the opportunity to enjoy good air and safe water, brilliant clown fish swimming in a healthy ocean, a global community with forward-minded objectives.  These would be the gifts of my heart.  And probably, of everyone’s hearts.  And yet the time of giving in this country that I’m graced to live in, in affluent, free-enterprise America, seems directly at odds with these heart-felt desires.

For decades I’ve struggled, unable to find my place to stand, wobbling between trying to fit in and throwing a hissy fit, and finding no comfort in either.  Now, I’m focusing on the season’s crux – compassion.  Compassion for the hard scrabble fight I’ve put up when really I only wanted to express my deepest caring and be cared for.  Compassion for my family of humanity that is equally conflicted and confused, pulled in multiple directions by numerous perspectives, but also ultimately wanting the gift of being heard, known, respected.

I have feasted on the gratitude and plenty of November.  December is its own feast.  Of love and kindness.  The Dalai Lama, a man who has lost much, claims that his religion is kindness.  For what could be more profoundly sacred, a greater gift than the extension of a heart in an act of kindness?

I am trying to accept myself enough to give up on ‘doing’ Christmas ‘properly’, and instead turning inward, trusting a desire to calibrate joyful loving in my own way, listening to the guidance of my own heart and mind.

I’ll be listening in for the questions.  What gifts lift the wings of my heart?  Where are the moments, simple and small though they may be, where I can offer caring?  How can I increase my capacity for love and understanding this month?

 

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. ~ Aesop

 

 

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Touchstone – Stopping In My Tracks

Posted on Sat 11 15 by Lisa Sorensen

27 November 2015

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude

Stopping in my Tracks

This month, as I’ve focused on my relationship with gratitude, I’ve experienced how powerful a practice it can be.

It’s easy for me to take so much for granted.  It’s natural to do so.  The ordinary things in life can drop to the background, unnoticed, seemingly unremarkable.  Sometimes it’s a little lurch of fear about losing those things that can remind me how much I depend on them.  Sometimes it’s just the angle of the light coming through the kitchen window or a chance glance at a face I care about that brings me back into touch with my good fortune.

I want to cherish these moments, to nurture them and let them stop me in my tracks with unbridled appreciation.

Loving attention feels so good—both to give and to receive.  I find this to be true with people.  And I sense it to be equally true with the world in general.  Stopping to savor the extravagance of a flower, the twitter of a bird, the giggles of a child, these things are all aspects of life’s miraculous bounty.  Discovering small, ‘ordinary’ beauties increases gratitude, amplifies joy.  It seems to me to be a way of honoring, of bowing down in respect and recognition, and also raising up in celebration for the gifts of life.

Gratitude is twofold–love coming to visit us and love running out to greet a welcome guest. ~ Henry Van Dyke

 

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Stopping in My Tracks

Posted on Wed 11 15 by Lisa Sorensen

25 November 2015

True abundance does exist; it flows from sufficiency, in an experience of the beauty and wholeness of what is.  ~Lynne Twist

Stopping in My Tracks

I desire to fully appreciate the goodness in my life, but sometimes there’s a catch.  Fully acknowledging good fortune can create a sense of vulnerability.  Loving deeply can raise a cold clammy specter of worry around loss.  Feeling intensely happy can stir up fear that being ‘too’ happy is just asking for it.  Just asking for the other shoe to drop.

Several weeks ago, I lingered in bed when my husband left early for an overnight trip.  I didn’t get up to see him off, which is uncommon to the point of me not recalling ever doing this before.  When I heard his tires crunch the driveway gravel as he drove away, I was suddenly seized by panic.  How could I not have said goodbye?  How could I have lazed in bed instead of getting up to wave, to wish him safe travel, to let my heart quietly extend out with him?  This quick, a host of terrifying ‘what if’s’ roiled through me.

It’s true that, sometimes, the other shoe does drop.  It’s true that a really wonderful day can be followed by an awful one.  It’s true that bad things happen around the world and, right here too, to the people I know and love.

Acknowledging all this can stop me in my tracks.  It can make me afraid that I don’t deserve so much.  And that feeling so lucky will somehow trigger that other shoe to drop.

Still laying in bed that morning, staring up through the skylight as the sun began to lighten the sky, I noticed that the moisture on the glass had frozen hard.  In the process, ice crystals had formed in exquisite organized patterns, like fern fronds, in cascades of delicate, graceful tendrils.

Nature helps balance me in this way.

Over and over, I stumble across this kind of organizing order in nature, an inclination towards beauty, a system that offers forth endless life in lavishly bold colors, textures, abilities.  Again and again, I find a generosity and abundance.

Looking at that pattern in the frost, my anxiousness for my husband eased.  Reminded of this cornucopia of earth’s processes, I cannot believe in a system of metes and bounds where happiness is weighed and measured so that a compensatory dose of grief can be doled out accordingly.

With this reminder, I know that there is nothing to gain from downplaying joy or good luck.  And, in fact, everything to gain from building deep connections and caring passionately for family and friends, earth and sky, gratitude and joy.

I don’t want to opt out on this moment’s pleasure because of worry about what might happen tomorrow.  I don’t want to throw joy under the bus of fear.

In fact, it is joy that I want to stop in my tracks for.  To look for it.  To let life’s wonder awe me.  To notice and appreciate the extraordinary in both the unexpected and the ordinary moments.  To soak up and savor the times that are chock-full of beauty or laughter or connection.  To amplify these times with my attention and appreciation.

Life will proceed in its treacherous, marvelous, intricate, vigorous, unpredictable way.

Perhaps practicing gratitude involves trusting life, finding grace and beauty in the overall scheme.  Beneath the ups and downs, finding deeper, steadier oscillations of life, like gratitude and satisfaction.

I believe love and joy and gratitude are more like muscles we develop than random occurrences that happen to us.  With practice, those muscles strengthen and support my life.  Celebrating things I value honors those things.  With intention, I am reminding myself to stop in my tracks and wonder at the marvelous, and not be afraid to bodaciously embrace and nurture all the good fortune I can.

 

 

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Touchstone – The Heart of Gratitude

Posted on Fri 11 15 by Lisa Sorensen

20 November 2015

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.  It turns what we have into enough, and more… It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. ~ Melody Beattie

Heart of Gratitude

I am finding there are so many ways that gratitude can be a comfort and a strength.  It can be a place of stability.  It can provide a sense of connection.  It can bring to mind kindness.

Practicing gratitude is a way of consciously opening the flow of awareness and energy toward the foundational, nourishing aspects of my life.

It is a way of getting in touch with my needs, and often discovering that they are being met in ways I can easily overlook.

It is discovering a deep appreciation for aspects of my life that I can otherwise take for granted because they seem ordinary.

Forgoing appreciating all these things now feels like missing out on a deep and profound wellspring of sweetness.  A wellspring of joy that’s just waiting to be tapped in to, to be sipped and savored.

 

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