Awakening

The first time I heard the song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” tears sprang to my eyes before I even understood why. 

An ache opened up in my chest, and I immediately felt guilty. I was about nine years old, and my mother was not absent. She was right there, trudging up and down stairs with endless loads of laundry, making school lunches, managing the relentless physical machinery of a household full of eight children. By any reasonable measure, she was working herself to the bone for us.

Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1976, I auditioned in New York City for a dream job. If I got it, I would spend the entire summer at Disneyland in California, singing in their Bicentennial show and parade. I didn’t have any sheet music, but I wanted it so much, I convinced a friend to cut class and go to New York with me as my accompanist.

Thousands of performers showed up to the open call.

There’s a conversation so many of us find ourselves having these days. Sometimes it’s with a friend over coffee. Sometimes it’s at three in the morning with ourselves. How do we navigate a world changing this quickly? How do we “be with” the pain erupting in unfathomable ways, in our country and around the globe, without being consumed by it? How do we honor the deep sense of loss and disorientation as cultural norms dissolve beneath our feet, while feeding a genuine hope for a new world that is unfolding?

There’s a conversation so many of us find ourselves having these days. Sometimes it’s with a friend over coffee. Sometimes it’s at three in the morning with ourselves. How do we navigate a world changing this quickly? How do we “be with” the pain erupting in unfathomable ways, in our country and around the globe, without being consumed by it? How do we honor the deep sense of loss and disorientation as cultural norms dissolve beneath our feet, while feeding a genuine hope for a new world that is unfolding?

There’s a conversation so many of us find ourselves having these days. Sometimes it’s with a friend over coffee. Sometimes it’s at three in the morning with ourselves. How do we navigate a world changing this quickly? How do we “be with” the pain erupting in unfathomable ways, in our country and around the globe, without being consumed by it? How do we honor the deep sense of loss and disorientation as cultural norms dissolve beneath our feet, while feeding a genuine hope for a new world that is unfolding?

Have you ever met someone and known from the start that an angel had been sent to grace your life?

That’s how I felt in October of 2012. Frank had gone off to Japan for a fifteen-day adventure, leaving me with an unusual stretch of solitude. In a stroke of serendipity just weeks before, I’d reached out to Peggy Fitzsimmons, having heard remarkable stories of her de-cluttering magic. She happened to be free in October, and we booked five full days of work together.

Over the last six months, I’ve been thinking a lot about my role in the ongoing global transformation. My central, guiding question is: How can I be part of the healing process, instead of contributing to an increasingly divided world?

A synergy of urgent crises has accelerated the chaos, causing strong currents and energetic rip tides of upheaval. It seems that everywhere we look there is pain, from the pain of disconnection to the pain of injustice and staggering loss.

In my last post, How to BE with a Crumbling World, I suggested that before jumping into action, we must slow down and have compassion for ourselves and for each other, as we navigate these precarious times.

Compassion is caring born of sorrow. It beautifully opens our hearts to care for one another, and brings empathy as we share the burden of pain.

But unrelenting pain is debilitating. Most of us have never been taught how to cope with it effectively.

It was 1997, and I was sitting in a training room next to my co-leader. The workshop was called Process, the fourth in a series of five 3-day CTI trainings, offering a solid foundation of co-active coaching skills.

Facing us, in a horseshoe arc, were two dozen students, eager to take the next step toward their dream of becoming a Life Coach. I took a deep breath, and said a silent prayer for guidance. We were about to introduce an exercise that always creates tension.

Have you ever had so much to say, you struggle to find words? It’s been five+ weeks since George Floyd’s death, and I think about him every day. A lot.
I’ve cried, I’ve expressed outrage and fury, dipped into hopelessness, and felt the hot, searing desire to punish. I’ve read countless articles and poignant Facebook posts from Black Americans who have been generous enough to share their experience. I’ve watched powerful videos, vulnerable in both their honesty and their anger, from Black women telling it like it is.

It’s Earth Day, and I am newly touched today by the endless generosity of this magnificent planet. Even as she works to metabolize the increasing toxicity of human impact, she offers life and beauty to us every day.

The context is the experience of “sheltering in place” as a response to the Coronavirus. I’m fully participating in this ritual out of the desire to stay safe, and to flatten the curve of its spread.