Way Closes

In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer puts forth a familiar notion, but with a twist.

We've all heard some sort of saying about what happens when a door closes, most often the quip goes like this: When a door closes, god opens a window.

What about something much bigger and more full of possibility: When a door closes, the rest of the world is open. Picture yourself on the outside of the closed door, with the door behind you. What's open in front of you? Everything.

Thanks, Parker.

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces.
May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself”1

As Parker Palmer writes in response to this poem in his book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation,2 “What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been!”

Who have you become? Are you becoming? This is the ultimate adventure of discovery. On cool Saturday mornings before the heat of the day arises, a small group of us have been gathering on the back verandah of Adelaide House, an historical building in the center of the center – Todd Mall, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia. With Palmer’s book as our guide, we’ve been crunching handfuls of homemade muesli and chewing on what the “many years and places” have taught us about who we are now and who we may yet become.

For the next five weeks, on Tuesday evenings Alice Springs time, we’ll open up the back verandah to you here on the headSpa blog. Grab your own snacks for now, muesli recipe to follow…

Palmer talks about looking for clues to our true self in our early dreams and aspirations. Try this: On a piece of paper or spreadsheet program, make columns for each decade (or half decade) of your life. Use the following questions to fill in the columns with clues.

1. What were you good at during this time?
2. What were you telling others you wanted to be and do?
3. Whom did you admire and want to be like?

Keep the nature of clues in mind as you sit with your columns: clues have to be decoded. There isn’t necessarily anything obvious about them. Dig around a little in the things you’ve written and work on deciphering them. What are the connections to what you’re doing now? Where is there paradox? Where is the connection direct? What appears to have been forgotten or left behind but is actually alive and well in the present moment?


1May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself” in Collected Poems 1930-1973 (New York: Norton, 1974)

2Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000) p. 9
Buy the book at www.amazon.com

The Rising

As part of our 9/11 commemoration, we jacked in the double headphones to the iPod and listened together to three songs from the wonderful tribute album by Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising." It was amazing to watch the sun set over desert hills, their dark silouhette growing, the skyline of NYC draped over them on the tracing paper of our minds.

Recommended listening:

City of Ruins
The Rising
Into the Fire

May your hope give us hope
May your strength give us strength
May your love give us love.
(Into the Fire)
http://brucespringsteen.net/songs/IntoTheFire.html

Thanks, Bruce.
Check it out at the iTunes store or on http://www.brucespringsteen.net/albums/rising.html

Last night was a night of marking the old and the new, the sorrowful and the hopeful. First, we marked the anniversary of September 11, 2001. On that day, Paul was living in London and Jana was living in Cleveland. We had only met a couple of months before and were beginning to recognize the qualities of true companions in one another - you know that feeling, there are friends and then there are companions, true companions for the way. So many people were spurred to different ways of living after 9/11. Ours was to go with companionship and to value relationship over the other many, sundry realities of life going on for both of us at the time, much of which was good but none of which was as life-giving as going for it together.
Last night on a beautiful pile of quartz jutting out of red sand desert, looking across to all the peaks of the McDonnel ranges east and west, sun setting in perfect orange pink against the fullest empty blue sky you've ever seen, we remembered that we have sought beauty and peace on each anniversary of September 11. In fact, we have been now in three of the most beautiful places on earth on this day: on little Frank Island off the west coast of Vancouver Island, on the Isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, and now here in the middle of the biggest island on earth, surrounded by the sand left soft by seas millions of years washed on.
Seeking beauty and peace and finding it on an epic scale in places like these, even for a day, is a gracious gift.

gifts from the inland sea

When the first European explorers came through these parts, they were convinced they would find an inland sea. They weren't necessarily wrong, just eons too late. I've got the evidence to prove it.

The other day I was walking down a fabulous local path, a section of the Larapinta Trail from Flynn's Grave to Simpson's Gap, and stopped for some reflections using headSpa's "waystations" portable labyrinth flags. Following the suggestions on the flag, I drew a straight line on the ground, which happened to be rich, red sand in a clay pan off to one side of the trail. I thought of an issue I'm dealing with - the perrenial question in my life, "What's next?" I felt the distraction and tension of not knowing how to be here well and also not knowing what to do next.

One of the suggestions for reflections on the flag is to imagine the distance of the line as the distance between anxiety and acceptance of the situation simply as it is right now. You walk along the line to symbolize your willingess to let go of the stress and the desperate wish for things to be different and just accept the current reality. Well, it took me a few walks up and down the line, but I got to a more peaceful place eventually. At the moment I decided to stop walking, I looked down and saw a beautiful little white spiral shell, of all things, in the middle of the desert! Because I'm really drawn to the symbol of the spiral, and to the sea, I took this as a great affirmation that being in this place, in this reality, in this moment is okay. I am okay.

No, balloons were never part of my perfect day story

Waking up at 3:30 in the morning to cook and serve breakfast to guests of Outback Ballooning does not appear in any of my perfect day stories. And yet, somehow, it fits. Common themes across many versions of my perfect day include cooking for people, offering hospitality, a fun and festive atmosphere, getting up early (though 3:30 is stretching it a bit) and being outside in an amazing landscape. Boom – it’s all there with this new part-time job I just picked up. I rather doubt I would have given this job a second look if these things that matter to me and enrich my life weren’t on my radar, albeit in different form. The next time I write up a perfect day scenario it won’t have anything to do with balloons, either, but these themes will carry through. That’s the way my winds are blowing and, like a balloon, I can only fly with the wind.

Writing up the story of your perfect day is the main attraction of Journey Four in One Day: A Travel Guide.

Journey One: The Rear View Mirror - Double the Pleasure

“The present joys of life we doubly taste by looking back with pleasure on the past.”

Marcus Aurelius