Parinama

  Joy and grief come in through the same open door of the open heart.   Because joy cannot be pinned down (that is what makes it joyous) joy is infused with grief.   When the layers of armor protecting the heart dissolve and the heart becomes tender and open, both grief and joy seep in like a fog rolling through the valley at dawn.   Closing the door to grief necessarily closes the door to joy.     Joy like grief cannot be manufactured.   They are experiences that take us by surprise and catch us off guard.   And they are intertwined with each other.   I catch a song on the radio and am suddenly back with an old friend long gone dancing together on a Saturday afternoon.   I see an old woman struggling to stand and am softened with memories of my grandmother whose knees ached when she stood.   I am with myself at the end of a restful Sunday afternoon my heart aching in a spacious peace that overwhelm at work ha...

  When my grandmother Philippa was nearing 80 she said to me, “I’m not good for a anything.”   We were out celebrating Nunzio’s 90 th birthday (my grandfather, her husband) at an Italian restaurant in Boston.   We had a back room reserved for the 20 children and grandchildren gathered. I had taken Philly to the bathroom.   By then, she was having trouble getting up and down and walking by herself.   A heavy woman, the diabetes made her knees ache. When she said this I was helping her off of the toilette.   I told her, “I love you grandma, you mean so much to me,” but I felt hopeless to sooth her.   What are our lives good for?   What gives them purpose and meaning?   Old people, especially in our culture, in their frailty and illness are particularly susceptible to feeling isolated, forgotten, and unworthy.   No longer working or caring for others but needing care and assistance, they have lost the financial and ...

  When we pursue goals that are not connected to the deeper parts of ourselves, we are drained of vital energy.   Action taken in service of our deeper callings generates energy for creation and manifestation while actions taken out of fear or shame, habit or willfulness leads to exhaustion.     It is difficult to hear the call of the soul.   There are many competing voices from family and culture to commercials and religion that can mute what is in our hearts longing to be acknowledged.   We face financial and caring obligations that absorb the days of our lives.   It can feel like what the soul wants is irrelevant given all our responsibilities.   But if we ignore the soul’s imperatives, fail to listen deeply and take up the challenge, the burden of its calling will be offshored to those closest to us.   We will unconsciously expect those we are in relationship with to be responsible for our unlived lives.   Fi...

    Sacred: late 14c., past-participle adjective from obsolete verb sacren "to make holy"   What is sacred in your life?   What do you make holy?   How do you make something holy?   Sacredness to me is not a place but an experience of tenderness and an acuity of the senses exquisitely tuned into sensing. It comes unbidden when I feel the cool early morning air on my skin and smell the fragrance of the earth or when during a walk in the forest a bird pauses at eye level right by my shoulder to sing.   To notice these things is to make them holy. Looking into my daughter’s eyes for the first time was holy as was the translucence of her tiny ears.     The feeling of sacredness comes unexpectedly and brings us from the mundane to the holy in an instant. My walk along the Charles River when my daughter was in surgery was not unlike a pilgrimage I might have taken along an ancient Spanish trail.   Each step was a ...

  I recently read through journals I wrote almost 40 years ago when I was in my early 20’s.   What struck me was how much I am still am me.   There is a “me-ness” about me which is woven into the fabric of my being and that hasn’t changed in all these years.   The 57 year old was inside of the 20 year old just as the 20 year old is inside the 57 year old.   I am like the acorn that held the dream of an oak tree deep inside her hard shell and the grand rising oak holding the memory of the seed. While the day-to-day worries are different, they still have a feeling about them that is the same.   Joy still fills up my heart, dread weighs in the stomach, shame darkens the solar plexus.   But while I am the same, I like the acorn, have also been transformed.   What has changed is my capacity to hold feelings in the container of my being, to abide with my innermost parts.   And this is the source of my growth.   When I w...