What are the challenges of life about?  What are they good for, anyway?

Every one of us takes life's challenges and extracts something different from them.

Some of us use the Challenges of Life to shore up our ego.  (Oh c'mon, Kathy, don't pretend you haven't done this, too!)

Some of us utilize the Challenges of Life to learn something more about ourselves, to learn better how to dance with the partners who have helped co-create the challenges.

Some of us run screaming away from challenges, trying to get rid of the co-creators of the drama.  Others of us stick like glue in the midst of the challenges, refusing to budge, refusing to move an inch.

Others of us move like water, here, there, everywhere!  We're fluid, we've got no boundaries.  We're flowing into this container and that.  We're listening which direction to now move.  Shall we go north or south or beyond the borders?

I suspect...all of us have utilized different techniques at different times, as we face that which stretches us, which makes us grow beyond our preconceived boundaries.

I like best when I'm able to use challenges to keep my ego in check.  The ego rears its head when challenged!  What did that person mean?  How COULD they label me that limited way?  Then there is a dance of surrender, of allowing, in a way that shatters the defenses of the Ego without shattering the Self in the center, that which Knows.  Yep.  For more years than I can count, that's how I viewed challenges.  As ways to weaken Ego's grasp, Ego's need to be right.  But to do that in a way that doesn't shatter the self at the center...that's the dance.

Oh that dance of Challenge!  To stay present to what it has to teach...often so painful, so threatening.  Oh how we want to stay in that place where light & life & love soothe our egos.  But I have learned there is a deeper light and life and love...a love which blossoms in the midst of knives and guns.  This is a light and love which is born of raw compost, of raw suffering, of the hurts and pains of eons.

Two ideas clash against each other, two personalities, two ways of looking at the world!  What an opportunity...what a horror...what a place where love might birth, where a new Christ child or Buddha child or awareness child squirms through the bloody birth canal into Life! 

I think of every project we undertake, every word we say, every friendship, every marriage.  In each undertaking there comes so many places where challenges will worm their way to the surface.  To the grimy light of day where it seems that Idea #1 will not survive with Idea #2.  Person #1 can not co-exist with Person #2.  Project #1 must die for Project #2 to live. 

Sigh...

The place where Both/And can be pollinated is the place I seek daily.  So often, seemingly, failing in that endeavor.  But more often, finding this place which encompasses the two Absolute Opposites. 

And we see that the opposites are not opposites at all.  They are two sides of the coin of love. 

Just flip the coin over.  Heads & Tails are both One Coin.  And it's been that way before we first separated it into two irreconcilable halves.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must think about what these words just said, and deeply contemplate how to apply this to my own latest challenge.

Love to all of us Heads and Tails!

Precious Infinite You,

Do you realize the very gift of your being?

Do you realize how precious you are?  How valuable?  How needed on this great planet earth?

You are a signature glorious self!  The angels fashioned you out of sticks and mud and fragments of bone and blew rivers of blood and dreams of cells into your essence.

Have you forgotten that precious self that lies at the core of you, Magnificent One?  Have you forgotten the love that you are?  Oh the love that you are!  We tremble and fall to our knees to worship that love the dances in your veins, before the first thought or feeling comes to try to convince you that you are unworthy, that you are damaged, that you are wrong.

Oh dear love~~have you believed the night-visitors who whispered the wrongness in your hurting ears?  Have you believed the cloaked stranger in your own mind who defamed you, who left you sprawled and defenseless from the whispers in your own thoughts telling you, "Bad!  Wrong! You have traveled an Unworthy Path!"

Go back to the center, return to that open lotus of your darkness and light, now.  It's not separate from you, not a breath away.  Your holiday gift to yourself:  to remember the love that you are, precious, unspeakable.

When the next thought arises that threatens to send you on a long and tiresome journey away from the center of your own love, tether yourself to the reality of who you are.  Don't let the winds blow you away from yourself.  This love that you are includes the whole world if you but remember it.

For these holy-days a prayer:  May we remember the love that we are.  May we remember the shining light which strikes a divine match in this very moment, as we embrace our precious humanity, our precious divinity, our precious gift of awareness.

It seems like a pivotal time. The blizzard outside is letting up its torrential winds and wild-flying snow.  Maybe fifteen inches settled in the driveway, requiring the plow last night after dark.  My job is to start the cars, broom them off, scrape away ice and snow.  Then I rock the cars out of their ruts, back and forth, back and forth, finally allowing equilibrium to move the stuck vehicles.  You then move the cars onto the recently-plowed earth and the plow begins to tackle the other parts of the driveway where the cars previously parked.

So much has happened and not happened in the last month or two.  In the last year.  In the last three years.  In the last...never mind...things are always happening and not happening, aren't they?  Change is the only constant, they say.  I believe them.

I spent November writing that novel for NaNoWriMo.  Finished the 50,000 word requisite by the end of the month, uploaded the scrambled novel for an official word count, and then received a pretty on-line icon stating "Winner!"  Yesterday, during the heart of the blizzard, I finally typed the last words.  At 64,000 words it's really a "novella" perhaps. 

More than simply a novella, it feels like the actual writing of this book has knitted something together within myself.  Something which involved opposites, polarities, dualities.  The worlds were somehow sung together through the writing of the words.  The owl of death and the eagle of sight soared together, side by side, no longer enemies.

I remember the Native American elder who insisted to me, all those years back, that the owl and eagle could not co-exist.  Could not be One.  Which was bad news for me, as in dreaming an owl sat on my left shoulder and an eagle on my right.  Oh dear.  Bad news.  Which one to disown?  Which one to kick off?  "Get off my shoulders, shoo!" 

But, no, the book finally allowed them both to exist, no matter what the elder said.  The two main characters are dreamers, one an Ojibway medicine man and the other a young school teacher.  It's back in 1932, in an actual town around here where Henry Ford tried to make a model community.  They've been dreaming about each other since childhood.  Society says they can't be lovers, can't marry, can't make it.  But they did!  Opposites have united.

What next?  In eleven days my year-long outdoor commitment comes to an end.  It will be 365 days of Opening the Door, Walking Outside.  The end approaches.  It's been a year of so much learning, so many gifts, a few challenges.  I put my heart and soul into that commitment.  And how I appreciate all of my friends who have stopped by to visit or read or comment.  The support has been monumental.  I believe when we make a commitment, we're not just making it for ourselves.  In some strange way we're making it for all of us. 

And so that door will close.  Or it will close and open and close and open. The indoors and the outdoors will no longer be separate, will be put in categories of "in" and "out". 

What comes next?  I am actually pondering--only pondering at this stage--of ceasing to blog for awhile.  (Yeah, right!!)  But there is another part which wants to combine the discipline of the novel writing/outdoor commitment and actually write blog-like essays about this spiritual journey.  And then to actually send them into publishers.  To see what happens.

OK,  that's the update.  I am wishing all of us Gaians a lovely holiday season!  May our hearts open wider than we ever dreamed.  Love, Kathy

This morning still dark the magic white rabbit dashed across the road in my headlights.  I swerved.  For a moment it seemed as if the rabbit would live, would discover the other side of the road, would not turn to blood and guts and frozen breath.  But then came the dreaded thump.  Tire met rabbit.

Childhood songs from the little white Presbyterian church rose, unbidden.  I was dead on the road in white rabbit skin; I was the murderer.  I was road and song and the tears and the unexpected creation of this blog which was already writing itself probably wrapped up in ego and divinity. 

What was I thinking when the rabbit rushed head-long to its death?  When it looked over its left shoulder and found Death waiting in the bushes and scurried instead toward the Light of the Headlights.  I was thinking about a silly outdoor blog which involved the words "Yellow Snow".

Perhaps on another day the I that is Kathy would think herself only the murderer (but, Officer, I'm innocent!) and chastise herself endlessly.  Perhaps she would cry endlessly about the woes of the world, the suffering of the world that causes innocent rabbits to die by evil silver Buicks coming out of nowhere.

Perhaps, as Rabbit  I would lament, "Oh why did I have to die?  What did I do wrong to decide to cross the road at that moment?  I was only dreaming of--what was I dreaming of?--nibbling the last of the grasses or perhaps my lover waiting on the hillock."

But today I drove on, the songs of faith and grace dying away just as the light of sunlight entered the birth canal.  Yesterday was a day of wonder.  I am still broke open by the wonder of yesterday.  Yesterday my friend, Jan, who once lay broke open near where the rabbit died on the side of the road, almost completely decimated by a rollover accident, whispered the Secret of the Universe to me.  I helped pray her soul back into the world all those years ago in a magic dreaming world, and she karma'd back the gift yesterday.

What did she say that made a difference?  I remember the way I appeared at her door unexpectedly yesterday morning with tears veiled imagining myself somehow separate from God, from enlightenment.  The same old Last Straw, the same old Last Rabbit that separated me from the All.  If I could just break through that ONE LAST HURDLE than life would be perfect, enlightened, everything.

What words did Jan utter?  When we left she was hugging ME for helping HER, so perhaps our words grew so intertwined that we were both broken open by the raw vulnerability in them, both broken into white rabbits bolting across the dark road toward the light.

When I opened her door yesterday it was with an embracing of my/our humanity that had been subtly pushed away in my quest to become One with the All.  I didn't even realize the tension of holding parts of humanity separate.  I thought I wasn't holding anything apart.

What happened yesterday was that subtle subtle layers of resistance were suddenly allowed.  And what compassion burst!  Tears have fallen, layers of tears upon tears, for the space of this place we call a day.  When Humanity arises in myself (grasping especially but also fears) the heart keeps opening wider and wider and melting into a bigger puddle of itself.  And when I see it in others (the grasping, the ego, the pushing  away) now what arises is simply this compassion that swells like the sun when it bursts pregnant and red over the horizon.

Will this be gone tomorrow?  the ego frets. Don't write these words in a blog everyone will read because tomorrow you will have forgotten again and...  

  And I move toward ego and hug her, oh how I love her, this broken being, this beautiful being! 

Oh look at us so divine, so human!  All desire to "be enlightened" has once again dropped away.  THIS, THIS!   This is all I ever desired...

Look at the marvels of creation everywhere, and the falling apart of creation, so that new creation arises.  Oh this is why we came here!   Don't you too remember?

The porch is slippery today.

New ice, everywhere.

The problem with ice is this:  we don't always know it is there.

You can start out with self-assurance and breezy anticipation for the forest or car or garage or mailbox and suddenly...the foot slides on the unseen.  Slide, slide, slide,  up, up, up, you're out of control now, you're in mid-air, you're nowhere, where are you?, you're falling, you're falling, you're...

Ice.

It's very unexpected.

Let's back up to the house again.  You open the door.  This time you are aware you're opening the door.  Isn't it a firm handle, a strong, handle, this door-opening appendage?  How amazing!  A handle which turns, which lets us in and out.

Your feet cross the threshold.  How many thresholds have we crossed?  In the ins and outs of our days, how many times have we gone from here to there?  How many times have we shut one door and found ourselves in a new space?  But in the meantime, here's this threshold and you look at it and notice perhaps it needs sweeping, or it gleams beautifully or perhaps the sun glitters off it with little icicles tinier than the head of a pin.

You may think:  Ice.  And watch your step as it moves onto the porch.

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps you pause to watch your shoe instead.  The miracle of a shoe that moves!  To think we can walk.  We can feel the energy building in our thighs and buttocks and calves and all the way up to our shoulders as we swing our step between here and there. 

A moment ago we were sitting inside and our heart and mind was involved in its heartbeat, and now we're moving.  What a joy to have shoes!  And how many shoes do we have?  Is our closet full of a half-dozen shoes or twenty shoes or thirty?  Do we only have two pair?  One?  Are they old and well-used and scuffed or do they shine and gleam?  You look at your shining shoes and perhaps you see beneath them to the porch and notice the slick of invisible ice and you may think:  ice.  And your whole body adjusts, like a dance, ready to take that next step into the unknown with the knowledge of ice.

Let's say your mind thinks "ice" even before you open the door and you get all philosophical and ponder the value of frozen versus liquid.  Which is better, which is preferable?  you wonder.  You agonizing search your heart and soul and being, Please God, tell me which one I should choose, ice or water, ice or water, but your soul stays silent and you open the door and if you're not careful...the ice chooses you.  And that's today's philosophy.

Let's say you're nicely aware and you step over the threshold and shut the door and you casually look down and see the ice and walk oh-so-carefully down the steps and you don't fall, don't go up, don't go down, don't stumble, don't feel the thud as your arm or head or shoulder or buttock hits the ice hard cement. 

You're free!  You walk on to your car or your mailbox or the forest and perhaps you will rejoice because you're not lying on your back looking at the sunlight and wondering "What....?" but I cannot tell you that falling or not-falling is the better path, the more noble path, the more efficient path.

For I have fallen and seen the world pause in a moment of the most exquisite grace imaginable.  Where the falling was a prayer and the answer to a prayer.  Where the fall happened in such slow motion that eons passed.  Where the shoulder landed on cutting slate and awareness watched the world turning round and round and round and stared for a long time at the blue skies above in utter gratitude and openness.

No, I cannot suggest you fall or do not fall.  They are both noble paths.

Instead, be aware.  Ice forms at this time of year.  It can be slippery. 

It can be miraculous.

Even the short trip across the threshhold to car or forest, mailbox or the Universe can reveal the spirituality of ice.

OK, dang.

Gonna write a blog.

Even though goodness knows when and if it will be possible to respond to any comments!  I am in the airport flying between Detroit and San Diego right now.  Ready to spend four or five days with my bebs, my oldest son, Christopher.  Haven't been out on his turf before.  Can't wait, can't wait!

I swore I wouldn't write a blog during November.  Too busy with the NaNoWriMo and writing that dang novel.  Over 20,000 words now.  Some of the words lookin' good, some of the words lookin'....well...not so good. But am doing it!!  That's what counts, right?

I want to share something that has been happening on the awareness/spiritual front in the last few days. For any of you who care.  It's been so interesting.  Awareness has shifted.  You know how awareness sometimes feels like buzzing bee-like thoughts around our head?  We're aware of our thoughts.  Awareness seems to be centered there.

Well, suddenly, a couple of days ago Awareness went and took a dive.  It dove into my solar plexus.  How very odd.  Like in this place of Silent Knowledge. 

From the place of Silent Knowledge, Thoughts happen.  They just gabble on and on.  Such as the way this blog is doing right now.  Blah, blah, blah go the Thoughts.

From this new place, Awareness is very Silent.  Thoughts continue, but awareness only observes them as Possibilities.  Instead of thoughts being the center stage, this Silent Knowledge is the center stage.

(I am not in this place right now, that's why I'm babbling.  The thoughts are leaping excitedly and playing games and saying, "Oh how cool!" and ignoring the place of Silent Witness.)

But you can't ignore the place of Silent Witness for long because it continues to settle within Itself.  In the place of silent witness, it runs the show.  It is the silent space of awareness which Knows, which provides the next step.

I don't know how to express this, because it's in the realm beyond words.  This is the place where Awareness chooses the next step.

Except when the thoughts come in and say, "Oh forget you, we are choosing the next step instead!"

When the Silent Witness chooses, it's the exact next beautiful step.  I suppose whatever step is the next beautiful step.  But this sense of the Silent Witness choosing fills me with such...peace?   joy?  ecstasy?  that I don't know how to put the next sentence in place.  So I won't.  Love to you all, and special love to the Silent Knowing within all of us.

In the end
the coming and going
are the same

you open your wings
not knowing.
Branch
or emptiness?

the tree bark infinite,
the sky your nest

you never know if
you're landing
or taking flight

Oh if we only knew what kind of weather we would be today...

Will we be sunshine for sixteen of the twenty four hours?  Will we cry like rain for sixteen minutes?  Will our breeze come up and ruffle the sunflowers before dinner?  Will a hurricane swirl our heart for ten minutes before lunch? 

Will clouds come and go across our horizon?  Or will we be perfectly blue, the kind of blue that dances and hugs and twirls?  Will the autumn leaves fall at our feet and turn colors in the irises of our friends?

How can we know?  Each moment is completely new weather.  I suppose the weather forecasters are looking at our behavior yesterday, attempting to decide.  Maybe then can see there were some heavy things happening yesterday.  So they predict,   "Partly cloudy with a 60% chance of rain".

No wonder the weather forecasters simply miss the boat so often.  They have no idea how quickly storms can brew (although they can predict lows and highs, based on the way energy travels).  They have no idea how another person's sunlight can affect our own.  The hug of a friendly warm breeze can turn away a blizzard.

It's all possible.  There have been so many hugs this morning I'm predicting:  blue skies and warm weather!  But leaving it open for some clouds or teasing winds, as well.

I would like to teach people how to wake up. 

But, hmmm,  that would involve me waking up first. 

Then you look at the answer you just wrote and think, "Do I really want to teach people how to wake up?" 

Well, of course.

Do you really?

Don't I?

C'mon, be honest.  Do you really want to teach people how to wake up?

I think I do, but maybe I don't. 

How do you feel when you think people aren't already awake?

Hmmm....good question...kind of like something is missing.  Doesn't necessarily feel too good.  Feels like I think I want them to know something that they don't already know.  (Got that?)

Is it possible that everyone is already awake?  Or that everyone is already awake that wants to be awake at this stage of their journeys?

Yes.

Is there a value to not being awake? 

There must be.  Otherwise we would all be awake.  Awareness obviously doesn't want to be awake.  Or it would be.  It wants to experience separate bodies, thoughts, beliefs & that whole hullaballoo.

So if awareness doesn't necessarily want to be awake, do you still want to teach others to wake up? 

Um, maybe not.

If awareness doesn't want to be completely awake in you, do you still want to wake up?

But awareness IS awake in me!  How could we not be aware?  It's silly thinking we're not even awake.  Silly, silly.

So you are awake.

Yes, but I forget that I am.

You could teach others that we're all awake and we forget we are.

Yep, and they could teach me, too.

Let's go back to the original question:  What would you most like to teach?

Maybe the only thing we can really teach is simply by being.  We are ourselves in all our amazing love and craziness and bitchiness and questioning and answering and acting.  Other people witness us, and that is simply the teaching.

Are you sure?

Not at all.  I am not sure of anything.  Not a single thing.  Except for awareness.  I am sure of that.  And every one of us is aware.  Who we truly are can't be taught.  Ever.  We already know.  We truly do.  We just sometimes think we've forgotten.

What do you do when you're bored?  asks Siona on the daily questions.

Oh this is a juicy question!  It's the juiciest question of the week. 

So many people wrote:  I never get bored.  There's too much to do!  There is this interest and that interest and another interest and this activity and that activity and another activity.  Only boring people get bored.

I must have been the most boring person in the Universe.  So boring that the geese and the deer and the mice wouldn't even provide entertainment.  So boring, so boring. 

It all started when we moved to the middle of the woods when we were barely out of our tender youth.  And Barry always had a million things to do like building houses, cutting down trees for firewood, fixing cars.  

And I...didn't...have...anything...to..do.  

Endless boredom.  Endless years spent thinking how to entertain myself.  Why did other people have 6,000 interests and projects and crafts they liked to do?  And I...didn't...have...anything...to...do.  

The restlessness was excruciating.  Painful!  Intense suffering!    Sometimes I felt like I was going crazy with restlessness and boredom.  (Then the kids came along and a couple part-time jobs and the pain of it abated somewhat, only showing up with PMS or at odd moments.)  

But here is the scoop:  Boredom and restlessness have been the greatest gifts of my life.  There you have it. 

This blog is really a Love Song to Boredom.   Because of boredom, I became deeply acquainted with emptiness.  In a way that would have been impossible while surrounded with people and projects and things.  Boredom led into the labyrinth of the emptiness.  It led so deep into the self that I became personally acquainted with Nothing.  

And that Nothing has become Everything.

So, if boredom decides to come visiting you, don't push her away.  Invite her in, tell her stories, entertain her.  But if she gets bored with you:  stop. Just sit with her emptiness.  Be bored.  Be deeper than bored.  You might fall in love with her too.