Parinama

When my daughter was a baby, I thought I understood what it meant to be a mother.  It was clear that my purpose was to keep her safe and supported and growing in curiosity, strength, and resilience.  The loving had a clarity and reciprocity that was overflowing. But, as she was constantly changing and needed different things from me, how to do these things of mothering and what it meant to be a mother kept changing.  It wasn't always easy to know what she needed from me or didn't need any longer or what loving meant across the divide of adolescence.   I have sweet memories of my beautiful mother as a young woman and how she cared for me as a child.  I have a sense of her always in the background keeping the family fed, the house clean, bringing in money from her job at the bank. She was a loyal wife, daughter, and friend.  She never imposed herself onto others but went along to make things easier for everyone else and tried to keep the peace.  We ...

  We are compelled by a strong desire and the promise of intense pleasure to know our world, our life, our bodies, and ourselves. Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul What is in you that wants to come alive, to live more fully, to be awake? Despite strong longing and desire, there can be a voice inside that stops us from taking risks, moving beyond the comfortable and known, learning something new. For years and years, the voice of fear, shame, exclusion, and oppression cries, "You can't do that!", "This will be a waste of your time and money!", "You will fail!" And we are stopped in our tracks by it and after a while can't remember why we wanted to take that risk in the first place. You might start but then stop, loose the "stick-with-it-ness" when you get down to the hard job of trying something new and seeing how imperfect you are, how far away your efforts are from the fantasy of what you hoped for.  It is often the insatiable and un...

  We all need a strong backbone to keep our bodies upright, strong, mobile, fluid, and healthy.  We also need a strong backbone to face the challenges in our lives.  We usually think of spiritual practices as softening us, making us more tender hearted, compassionate, generous which they do.  But spiritual practice also helps us to build up the courage we need to stand up for what we need to thrive, our jobs, respect, due process, relationship.  We need backbone to speak up for ourselves in negotiations, to move our creative work out into the world, to keep our selves aware and safe in situations where others are trying to take advantage of us.  We need also need strong backbones to fight injustice in the world in large or small ways, to leave a legacy of peace and compassion not vitriol and despair. Hiking is helping me build up the backbone that I need in my life now.  Hiking for me is both physical and spiritual in challenge and practice.  Hiki...