Honoring my Brother with every step

There is one way to feel gratitude with every step. Raise money for a great organization . Next step attend an event that is in a beautiful place. Walk with your hubby and newfy in this beautiful place with other people raising money for the wonderful organization. Watch people with MS struggle up the hill wearing T-shirts that say "I can, I will, I do." Cheer them on. Make up Team Newfy songs as you hike. Here are a few:
1. These Newfs were made for walking...and that's just what they'll do
2. I won't be your newf of burden
3. Hang on Newfy...newfy hang on
4. Newfy walking in the rain
5. Walk right in..sit right down...my newfy going to go to town
6. Walk like a newf
and on and on.

Then have a great cup of coffee in Steve's honor.

Great day...join us next year.

Small steps toward gratitude

As Ric and I...and the wedding dress...round out the first year of our newest wedding I have been focusing on ways to improve our marriage. A new dress and new Katubah deserves a new relationship, and since the only way to change a relationship is for each individual to change, I decided to take a workshop on Jewish Marriages.

I am struggling with some of the lessons, and thought I would share it here and see if anyone else has this experience. According to the course there is power in turning complaints into gratitude, which I do agree with. Sort of. Most of the time.

The first step is to ask what I am feeling...am I angry or resentful or disappointed or let down or overwhelmed? Admit it. OK...got that part.

Next I am advised to be willing to let go of the negative state of mind. Hmmm...am I addicted to this sad thought? Would I rather be upset? This is what Victor Frankl talked about...we never need to be a victim of someone else's behavior. My happiness is based on my own choice to be happy. OK...I can choose my own state of mind...and I am willing to move on to a more positive attitude. 

So now what? I am supposed to ask what I actually know...what are my assumptions about this situation  Maybe there is something in Ric's past that makes him react strongly to an event or to a set of circumstances. Maybe he is having a flashback to something in his past. Or maybe he is afraid of something bad that will happen in the future. Or maybe I am. So let go of all the assumptions. 

So far so good. Sort of...this takes work. 

Now for the really rough part. Can I accept this is from G-d in some way? Hmm...this is rougher for me. Maybe I can see something difficult as paying a spiritual debt, or a tikkun olam (healing the world) or about tshuva (returning me to my spiritual path) or a nisayon (test), but the theology is rough for me. 

If this is true then everything that happens in my life is something I need to be grateful for. Everything, according to Jewish tradition, comes from G-d. So this means that I deserved this or earned this? OK...for small things...but what about big things? This sounds a bit too much like notions of karma...everything is decreed based on what I have done in past lives. I might have been really bad...in fact i think I was. OK...so tikkun olam for my past actions. 

Maybe something rough DOES prepare me for the future. Maybe something hard DOES wake me up and help me make different choices. Maybe it is not punishment, but a challenge that will help me grow.

Giving thanks for things that are scary or rough or challenging is really difficult. But some people have done this in powerful ways. 

Here is one piece from a mother who lost a son recently
four spiritual options

Then there is a famous story about sisters in a nazi concentration camp who gave thanks for the fleas in the barracks. The fleas ended up being a blessing.

I know people who have said thank you for legal challenges, and the challenges have gone away. I know people who have expressed gratitude for medical issues and gone on to live healthy vibrant lives. But still.....not sure that I use this in all situations. 

But I think I can try this in my marriage...at least try. Maybe I can start by letting go of my assumptions that I know how things are going to work out, or that I need to be in control of life. Small steps toward gratitude. 

Thoughts? 

I will let you know how I do with this. 

Places in our soul

The dress has traveled to many places with me this year. Some I enjoyed and was sad to leave.Others I happily waved good-bye to. Thinking about this I remembered a story that I read recently.

Rav Yitzchak Hutner told: I once took a walk with Rav Kook and another man amidst the mountains of the land of Israel. Rav Kook told how impressed he was by the landscape.       The other man asked him, “But you were in the Alps.  What is so special about these mountains?”  

 Rav Kook replied, “The Alps did not speak to me.” (Shivchei Harayah, p. 195)

This story speaks to me the way that the red rocks of the American southwest speak to me. I have been in many places that are geologically amazing, layer upon layer of rock leading back into the past, that are similar to canyonlands, but were silent.

I remember walking through Mesa Verde and hearing people wonder why the Anasazi moved into the rock ledges. I was so surprised to hear the question. Of course that they moved into the rocks...the rocks sang to them. The DNA of the rocks vibrated with the DAN of the old ones...and I can feel and hear this.

The same is probably true of Petra and the people who originally lived there. I was so excited to go deep into those canyons and feel and hear the rocks...but they were silent. Not for others, but for me.

However the rocks in Safed called and chanted and reached for me. The houses built out of stones like a gathering of caves around the central high point, for a moment, transformed into Mesa Verde before my eyes. The rooms I walked into embraced me with prayer and chant and song. The same thing happened in the tunnels of Jerusalem. I am linked to the rocks in Israel through my DNA.

This explains perhaps why certain oceans reach out to me with song, welcoming me as a  secret mermaid, and others seem to simply tickle my toes without any special connection. The Pacific calls me to me, while the Atlantic is merely a friend. The Mediterranean sea at Caesarea  and Tel Aviv laughed aloud when we met, inviting me to stay and stay and stay. 

My husband says that his Pacific kisses the Hawaiian Islands. I love the ocean there too, but also feel at home along the Monterey coast.

I have learned to accept this sense of resonance with gratitude and without question.  How wonderful that some people are called to the plains and some to the mountains and some to the sea. Perhaps this is why humans spread out across the planet, walking and sailing from one continent to another...looking for resonance. Searching for the place that sings them home. 

I love the Colorado mountains and hiking, buy my soul is filled with the sea. Someday I need to follow that call back to the shore, with or without a wedding dress, with good friends, new friends, old friends, and people I love. Someday I need to follow the song of the sea the holds the essence of my DNA.

Tisha b'av and marriages

Today is the holy day of Tisha Ba'av, the ninth of Av, the fast day marking destruction of the first and second temple, as well as the dates (different years) the Jews were expelled from Spain, France, and England. This date also marks the date of the announcement of the "final solution" as well as the deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto. There are even more connections, but clearly this is a bad day for Jews, which is marked by fasting and meditation.

Clearly not a day connected to joy or weddings, or white dresses. 

But I heard some wonderful "midrashim" about the day and lessons for marriages. 

Before the destruction of the temple, sheep, cows and goats were brought as sin offerings. Why these animals? Because each of them represent something that we need to sacrifice in our own behavior if we wish to have successful relationships. The sheep follows the crowd, making decisions based on what others will think. Sacrificing our inner "sheep" means that we stop making decisions based on our neighbors rather than on what we know is right. 

The goat represents the way we are driven by desire. Desire can be wonderful, but not if it is governs all our actions. The same is true for the cow, which represents being useful ALL the time in ALL ways. It is wonderful to be useful, unless that is all we do, multi-tasking every moment of the day, and forgetting to care for ourselves. 

So what  does all this have to do with marriages? It is said that when the temple stood there were as many prophets as the number of individuals who walked out of Egypt, meaning the G-d spoke to us..each of us..personally. But that connection, for so many reasons, is more difficult to find. So how do we connect now? By doing a mitzvah...fulfilling a commandment or "good deed."  And the most powerful way to do this is in our intimate relationships, of which marriage is one. 

So if relationships are holy, and offer us a pathway to spiritual connection, then we should bring our best self to each other. One way of doing to stop blaming others and taking responsibility for our own actions. We do this by sacrificing our inner sheep, goat and cow, so that we are open to T'shuvah...returning to the world of connection. 

We build strong relationships by changing ourselves. When we change ourselves we change our relationships and the world around it. 

Making the ordinary Sacred

Beyond making the ordinary an adventure, the wedding dress travels have helped me see the ordinary as a miracle, and to perhaps capture the notion of sacredness in ordinary activities.  According to Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk, each new level of spiritual development is called a "generation." Which suggests that the Jewish prayers that refer to G-d's covenant with us lasting from "l'dor v'dor," from generation to generation, has two meanings, one referring to time (through a family lineage) and one referring to spiritual growth. 

In order to climb the spiritual ladder to the next generation we must learn to sanctify the ordinary, physical action of our present level. 
Our daily actions, like walking, eating, sailing, hiking, 
helping our parents  or strangers can become sacred, containing some aspect of praising G-d.

Travels with the dress, and with a sense of intentionality that some would call "presence" or "mindfulness," has allowed me to expand my spiritual reach to encompass ever-increasing spheres of what might be considered boring, mundane, or ordinary activities. 

I have begun to wonder, is every action potentially an instrument of praising? Is this the source of the Jewish notion of saying 100 blessings each day? Would many of us be more open to this if it was couched in Buddhist terms?

 I have to wonder about the complaints that old white guys created these "rules" and "guidelines" to keep women out, because being present and mindful sounds so feminine. What mother has not said 100 blessing each day for the wonder and safety or her child? What woman does not understand the need to be present with friends in need, aging parents, troubled teens, or anguished filled community members? Who has not found that midnight phone calls from a girlfriends have a sense of holy-work attached to them? 

Who walks in a 3-day breast cancer/stroke/heart association/MS event without a sense of doing holy work and being present?

I invite you to share your journey with me on these pages. How are you making the ordinary sacred? How have small adventures turned into spheres of spiritual growth? How are you moving from "generation to generation?" And how can I help? 

Soul of an adventurer

The year is almost up, but the wedding dress is still white and willing to travel...and so this journey will continue. The exciting notion of being an adventuress, and changing the language and connotation of that title, is irresistible  The wedding dress has changed simple trips into something exciting, and has pushed me to try new things in new places.

Simple adventures, accessible adventures, adventures that a working woman...or man...can embark on give our life a deeper meaning. Helen Keller discovered this and said that "life is a daring adventure or nothing at all."  Adventures need not take us to Nepal or Machu Pichu, or to the feet of a guru in Tibet, though these are wonderful places to go if the resources are available. Adventures can occur everyday in some small way that invigorates our souls and minds. Adventures truly are born in our souls and then lived out-loud.

What do I mean? We have probably all seen someone travel who only noticed the inconvenience of the trip. There is an old joke about two men crossing the Reed Sea while the water is split around them. The people around them were in awe as they looked up at the water towering above them, but these two men were looking down and only saw the mud.

            "For this we left Egypt" they muttered? "For muddy feet we should feel grateful?" they asked. For these two men there was no miracle, no adventure, perhaps no sense of freedom, only mud. I knew people in a little town in Oklahoma who traveled the world, but were always relieved to come home and eat doughnuts at the local cafe. The rest of the world was different, and hence frightening and to be be avoided.

The same thing can happen when we travel on any adventure. We can notice how crowded the plane is, how the food does not taste like home, how hot or cold it is, and miss the beauty of the clouds, the uniqueness of the sky, the distinctiveness of smells, and the opportunities to awaken our minds. We can travel at great cost to great distances and never have more than a mind-numbing experience of fatigue.

Or we can walk in a park close to home that we have never visited and find a new world. We can take a class and learn a new skill or idea or way to approach life and find ourselves awake and alive in a new way. We can taste something, taking one dance lesson, or getting on a sailboat in a lake, trying a new 5K before committing to a 6 week course, or living on a sailboat, or running a marathon. 

We can become adventurers one shift in perspective at a time.

With our without a wedding dress. 

Connecting with design

 We had a great third day walking 8 miles on the beach and ending up at a fun resort. Every room came with a golf cart, so of course the wedding dress had to go for a spin. We had a lovely evening curled up in front of a fireplace, listening to the sea, and talking about design. Not interior design, or 2-D art design, but life design. How do we treat our lives like design issues.

 What do we want for our future, and how do we design our current life so that it leads to our future life. How do we make choices that lead, step by step, to the future we are dreaming of? So we looked at our dreams and our visions and our values and talked about ways to bring our present into alignment with the future we want to live.

This conversation reminded me of an amazing sci-fi series about a place called Amber. In this book the family of Amber changes the world, moves from one location to another, but visualizing where they want to be...and walking. The world changes around them as they walk. That is what we were doing, walking and changing our lives. We are dreaming our future and walking toward it.

 The world around us was changing, because we were changing. We were connecting with the life we wanted, and designing our present to match it. 

What is that life? One full of walking on beaches and living fully and finding adventures in every aspect of our life.

 We want to live as adventurers, we want to inspire others to do the same. We outlined a book and walked. And walked. And walked.

Walking changes our lives. In some ways it it s lost art that allows us to dream and discover and change who we are. Walking gives us space and time to dream. Walking helps us, like the princesses and princes of Amber, to shift the world around us until it aligns with our dreams. Until we align with our dreams.

walking into connection

The walking trip started with a road trip. We drove from San Diego to Santa Cruz stopping at fun places along the way. Of course, given what my life has looked like recently, I was online for half the trip making plane and packing reservations from the road. My Mom is moving to Denver at the end of the month, so there are many plans to make.

We stopped in Paso Robles and had coffee at a great little coffee shop. They were playing one of my favorite songs and had my favorite quote on the wall. Great start. 

After many more hours of driving we arrived at the Dream Inn, Santa Cruz. The fog was in, but we could still see the pier...and hear the sea. Our room had windows that opened over the shore and I fell asleep to the sound of the waves. I woke and feel back asleep, my dreams rocking to the rhythm of the sea. 
The next four days were magical. We woke every morning to the sound of the sea, packed our suitcases ate breakfast and headed off on our walk. The first day was foggy drizzle, but we did not notice. We were too busy walking and talking and walking. Just walking.
Day three found us in Moss landing. A place that clearly honors mer-people, and the home of the largest  group of endangered southern sea otters.

After two days spent outside walking along the sea changed how the world felt...or rather how I felt in the world. I belonged outside, i was part of the world, part of the estuary, part of the tide and the storms and the sand. I felt connected to the world around me, sensing the weather and the movement of the sea creatures. For the first time I looked up at exactly the right moment to see a pod of porpoises, a pair of running dear, and otter mother and baby. I was not a human on the inside looking out. I was outside in the world and part of it


Our room even reflected this. The boat was build on a sailboat, wrapped with a jib sail and furnished with objects from various ships. Our windows looked over the estuary and we heard the otters and birds singing each other to sleep. The lullaby worked on us, and we dreamed of ships and seas and pirates and mermaids. 
Then we awoke and walked again.

Gotta love a town that has a plastic horse running the mayors office!