Too Much Noise
In the stillness and the quiet
The house is still and quiet. The only sounds are the low gurgle of the fish tank filter and my fingers tapping on the computer keys. The soft light of morning is just creeping over the pine trees out my back window and the streets are blanketed in just enough darkness that the cars outside my front window drive with their lights on.
In a few minutes, the house will be a flurry of activity. The boys will stumble down the stairs with messy hair and hungry stomachs. The dogs will need to go out. Cereal will be poured. Showers will be turned on. Coffee will be brewed, the dishwasher unloaded.
But for now, for a few more moments, the house is still and quiet.
As a child, I could never understand why my mom didn’t like the television and the radio on when we were at home. “Too much noise,” she would tell me.
Too much noise?, I pondered incredulously. How is that possible?
But now, now I get it.
There is just too much noise.
Noise on the television, noise in our workplaces, noise outside our car windows. Noise in the media and magazines, noise on Facebook and Instagram. Noise coming from internal pressures to do more and be more. Noise telling us to do this or be that. Noise complaining about this issue or that problem. Too much noise filling up space in our heads and blocking out sounds in our hearts.
Too.Much.Noise.
Lately I find myself craving less noise, and more sounds. More laughter and listening to the voices that really count. More music. More meditation, prayer and reflection, more awareness and gratitude, more stillness and quiet.
Clumsy feet are thundering down the stairs now; the morning frenzy is about to begin. Maybe you are already in the midst of your own frenzy.
We can never completely block out the noise, of course, nor do I think that we should. But maybe we could all use a little less noise? And a little more sound?
So here’s my wish for the day: May we have the wisdom to recognize the difference between the noise and the sounds. May we learn to hear our own strong and true voice inside, and may we have the courage to listen to it. And may we all have a few moments of stillness and quiet.
How do you quiet the noise?
*****
Note: This post originally appeared on the author’s website.
Simple Prayer, Profound Meditation
please… please.. please…please.
I whispered the words softly, quietly.
As I stood in the bridal waiting room at the back of the church, ten years ago, ready to step out to a church filled with family and friends where my soon-to-be-husband was standing at the altar, I breathed those simple words.
Please. Please. Please.
I chanted the words silently, but strongly.
The words were half prayer, holding a sea of emotions, hopes, and fears. Not a prayer for divine intervention, but rather an appeal for serenity, strength, and mindfulness. As one of the most basic religious exercises, prayer has been shown to improve calmness, by strengthening brain regions that foster compassion and by calming brain regions linked to fear and anger.
And the words were also half mantra meditation, helping to calm my mind – my monkey mind, as Buddhists call it. Derived from the Sanskit work for “mind tool,” mantra meditation involves chanting a single word or phrase in order to focus the mind. Eventually the mind focuses more on the rhythm of the words, and less on the words themselves.
Please.
Please don’t let me trip walking down the aisle.
Please don’t let me break into uncontrollable sobbing.
Please let my husband feel as sure about this day as I am.
Please.
Please let this be more than just the wedding I dreamed of, but also the marriage that we both deserve.
Please make us family.
Please give me strength.
Please give us strength.
Please.
Please…such a simple word, but a profound word. As I chanted that simple word in sighs and whispers, the clouds of nervousness, anxiety, and worry parted. The rays of strength, confidence, hopefulness, and faith shone down.
Please…the holiest of prayers because what follows can contain the depths of our heart. The Spirit knows what follows that little word please. The Divine knows the unspoken that lies hidden in sighs and tears and deep breaths, even if we don’t.
Please...my favorite prayer, my truest prayer.
And thank you. The only response that ever seems appropriate for all that the Spirit bestows.
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How do you pray? What is your favorite prayer?
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This post originally appeared on the author’s website here.
Benediction for the Wind (on the occasion of a killer tornado)
What better way to
get people praying
than to remind us
of random chance?
What better way than
the cold logic of air
rising, falling, killing
here, not there;
this one, not that.
Where I come from
we name them
by a year: 2011,
1957, 1925, and
remember deaths,
695, 255, 12.
What better way for
the screaming winds
to set us praying
than the cold logic
of random chance?
What better way
to hold sanity and
loved ones close than
to set to praying?
Where I come from
we know the scream
of the green clouds
well; we know to hug
the floor close; where
I come from the wind
teaches us to pray.
Kinds of Love
Happy Valentine’s Day. If, you know, that’s your thing. If you happen to be one of the people who not only is in a relationship, but is in the kind of relationship where you send each other flowers and mushy notes before your romantic evening out, then good on ya’. But if you happen to be one of the many, many people who doesn’t have a love interest, or broke up, or lost your long-term partner to death, or prefer to be single, or don’t feel that you can be out about your sexual orientation, or know that your partner will forget to buy you something special or have agreed with your partner that both of you couldn’t care less about Valentines, then where is holiday for you? Where does the love in your life, wherever you find it, get the honors?
The problem with Valentine’s Day is that it only addresses one particular kind of love – what the ancient Greeks called eros. Erotic love; passionate, pulse-racing, grabbing each other in dark corners love is a glorious thing, and there’s nothing wrong with celebrating it with some flowers and chocolate. But let’s not kid ourselves that eros is the only—or even the most important—kind of love. Of course, the Greeks acknowledged other kinds of love: the unconditional love of agape, the friendship of philia. But I think that there is room for celebrating quite a few other kinds of love as well. How about:
Canifelios: The love shared between people and their pets. Get real. How much time do you spend cuddling with a human partner compared with the physical affection you lavish on a cat or dog? The mutual love of a human and a pet includes loyalty and mutual care and wordless devotion. It includes the physical intimacy of stroking and snuggling. It gives you the rush of the hormone oxytocin that is also associated with the connection between mothers and infants and adults in the first flush of falling in love.
Compania: The love of long-time best friends, or couples who have stayed together across decades, or siblings or cousins who are there for each other every step of the way. Compania is founded in deep trust that the person will always be there for you, in inside jokes that you’ve shared for years, in the profound knowledge of one another’s quirks and failings as well as gifts and talents. Compania leads us to stick up for one another, to tell the truth in love and to choose a judicious white lie every now and then, to hold one another up when we think that maybe we can’t keep going.
Biophilia: Love for nature, for all living things. Biophilia leads us to find renewal in nature, to rest in the shade of giant redwoods or beside singing creeks. Biophilia is lived out in gardens where people become intimate with the soil of their particular location, at feeders where people celebrate and support the flashing beauty of birds, at summer camps where kids swim in lakes and get covered in dirt, on backpacking trips filled with the scent of pines and stars so bright that whole galaxies lean into this sphere of love.
Logoros: Love of learning, and of books. Logoros sucks up our time with articles on the internet on brain chemistry and economics, and keeps us up at night with books that we simply can put down. It leads us into new worlds, expands our hearts with compassion for people who don’t even exist, expands our minds with knowledge that we many never use, but which makes our understanding of the world that much richer and more complex. Logoros may seem abstract, but in reality it is an expression of our connection to this world in all of its details, the need to touch the particulars of our shared human life in the way you would explore a lover’s body with your fingertips.
Thelios: Love for the All, for the Connecting Principle, the Ground of Being, God. The love we return to the love that will not let us go. It could be love for a personal god who holds and comforts and carries us. It could be love for the wonder of the creative universe, an awe-struck connection to the sum of all the beauty that surrounds us. Big Love.
So if you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day with chocolate and flowers, by all means feel free. But feel just as free to celebrate the ways you love with a tug toy, a phone call, a walk in the woods, a new book, a prayer. There can’t be too many ways or too many days to honor love.
How to Vote as an Act of Prayer
We’d love to cast a vote for compassion, freedom, justice. But they’re not on the ballot. So we can’t let the ballot reflect the extent we allow ourselves to envision the world we want to create. Hold that bigger vision in prayer or meditation before turning to the act of voting: a land where justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an everflowing stream. A land where we bind up the broken and the captives go free. That’s the ballot our hearts and souls can cast, every day and with every activity.
But meanwhile, it’s time to vote! So the following are my ideas about how to turn that activity into a form of prayer.
Before your vote, do thorough research about all of the positions, even the tiniest. You may not love this research, but find organizations or friends who do love to do it and read what they wrote. Print up a sample ballot, mark it up, and stick it in your pocket. Clarify your mind. Scrambling around trying to sort through obscure races in the voting booth will take you right out of praying mode and into guilt and panic!
Walk into the polling place with gratitude that it is there. As the election judges check your name off the list, offer a moment of gratitude for them and their service. Offer a moment of gratitude for all of the check marks on that list, for all of the people in your neighborhood who take time to affirm their freedom and power to vote.
As you walk into the voting booth and set up your ballot, offer gratitude for all who have worked for your right to do so: founding fathers and suffragists, freedom riders and voting rights activists.
Now take out the ballot. Offer gratitude for all who would offer their time and their families and their lives for public service, whether you agree with any of their positions or not.
Look at the names on the ballot of the candidates you will vote for. As you check a candidate’s name, visualize that person’s strongest, most powerful, courageous and bold self. Vote for that candidate affirming the possibility of who they might become in office with strong community support and accountability.
As you check names, visualize yourself at your strongest, most powerful, courageous and bold self. Offer up gratitude for all of the civic leaders and organizations that will help you to be such a person. Commit to being a citizen activist. Cast an invisible vote for yourself beside each candidate’s name.
If you vote on community initiatives, take time to visualize all of the activists who worked to support freedom and justice about this initiative. As you check a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box, imagine all of those affected by the initiative who vote with you. Especially imagine those who cannot vote, because they’re school kids, or their immigration status doesn’t yet allow them to vote, or because they served time for a crime, or for any other reason. Imagine your beloved ones who have died and won’t be casting a vote. Put them all into your pen and let them help you put in that check mark.
After you’re done voting, and despite the lines waiting, allow yourself a moment just to touch the ballot, to offer up a blessing for democracy itself, for fair elections, for the concept of one person one vote, for the lofty view of humanity which initially envisioned such a system, and which has expanded the notion of ‘personhood’ over the last several centuries.
Leaving the booth, smile at those around you, walk to the machine and insert your ballot, offering one last invisible bow of gratitude as you leave.
Yes. Thank you. I love you.
This week I attended the memorial service of a beloved soul light. First my professor, later my friend and colleague, he was a Jesuit priest whose very life was a prayer of compassion and grace.
There is a Unitarian Universalist story about prayer that goes something like this:
Dear Whomever,
Please…
Thank you.
In many ways it captures the human elements of life – a craving for intimacy and ultimacy, uncertainty, need, gratitude. It is possible to ask the universe at large and to say thank you in general, though this is not always a satisfying prayer.
My Jesuit friend taught this Unitarian Universalist another way to pray. He said that there were really only three essential elements to any prayer and they could be prayed through almost any life situation or stages of faith. The three elements are:
Yes.
Thank you.
I love you.
Yes. Thank you. I love you.
Yes. Yes to the divine spark within me, yes to the calling to ministry, yes to showing up to my life and my work with all my human imperfection, yes to the joy and the sorrow, yes to this sometimes difficult and always beautiful world. Yes.
Thank you. Thank you for the gifts of breath and water and beloved soul lights. Thank you for radish sprouts and coffee and journals with blank pages. Thank you for songs and symbols and stories. Thank you for connection and communication and Carnival. Thank you for sight and insight and the darkness too… Thank you.
I love you. I love you, spirit of life and love, creator and created, that which was and is and ever shall be. I love you, source of hope and diversity, comfort and challenge, interdependent web of all existence. I love you.
Yes. Thank you. I love you.
It is a prayer I can pray – come hurricanes and high water, elections and power outages, while waiting for a holiday or for results from the lab. It is a prayer I pray each day.
My Jesuit friend used to say that he wasn’t a great theologian, but that he did know how to put deep spiritual understandings into ducky and horsy language. It was this gift, in fact, that made him a truly great theologian – one who will be deeply missed by all who encountered his gentle wisdom.
Yes. Thank you. I love you.
Run for Your Life!
I have always been fairly athletic, and I enjoy playing a good game that gets my blood pumping. But I loathe exercise. I’ll run all day long if I’m on a court or a playing field, but ask me to run to get or stay in shape and I’ll kindly decline. I’ve tried several times in my life to become a runner, hoping to experience that “runner’s high” that I’ve heard so much about. In fact, when the running craze first hit the East Coast in the early ’70’s, I was among the first to buy a pair of bright blue Nike’s with the yellow swoosh on the side and take to the roads. I lasted about three weeks before pain and boredom overcame me. Two to three weeks seemed to be my limit every time I tried to get on the running bandwagon.
Then early this summer my daughter called and told me she had started the “Couch to 5k” program, and that I should try it too. I was skeptical, but she was persistent. “It’ll be fun,” she said. “Right,” I replied. “Like pulling fingernails is fun.” Eventually, she wore me down and I decided I’d give it a try. “C25k” (as we in the know call it) is an interval training program that starts off with lots of walking and a little running. By the end of nine weeks, you’re not walking at all, and you’re running the full 3+ miles.
I’m proud to say that I have stuck with the program and am now a “C25k” graduate, and that I’ve kept up my running since completing the program. My daughter and I have started looking for a 5K race we can enter together to celebrate our accomplishment.
But the truth is that I still find running really boring. I run a 3 mile loop around town that keeps me mostly on residential streets and a couple of busier roads. I was told that running on pavement is easier on your joints and muscles than running on the concrete sidewalks. So, when it’s not too narrow or busy, I opt to run in the road (always facing oncoming traffic as I was taught in grade school). I watch the oncoming cars carefully, to be sure that they see me and keep a safe distance. When a car gives me a wide berth, I usually give a little wave to acknowledge the driver’s awareness and kindness.
Lately, I’ve developed this little interchange between drivers and me into a kind of spiritual practice. For the past several runs, I’ve begun to say a small prayer or blessing for each passing motorist. As I wave, I say “May you know peace” or “Know that you’re loved.” I wish health, happiness, peace, love, passion, success, and joy to the occupants of the cars that pass me by. For those drivers who either aren’t watching or don’t care to give me some space, I pray for their attentiveness, their alertness, and their foresight as I hop up onto the curb.
In offering these small blessings to strangers who pass me by, I find that I, too, am blessed. As I pray for these things for others, I am reminded of the joy, peace, love, passion and successes I find in my own life. I experience the blessings of good health, of the air that I breathe in, of the incredible machine my body is. I notice the gifts of the sky, the trees, the wind and the sun.
May you know peace today. May you know that you are loved. May you feel joy. And may you find, in some small way, the opportunity to wish that for others as you go about your day.
Love,
Peter