How and with whom I wish to spend my time

"Service to God and each other is the rent we pay for being.
It is the very purpose of life, and not something we do in our spare time."

-- Marion Wright Edelman

I have an increasingly strong passion for surrendering to this service calling full-out and full-time, especially in the realm of helping families heal, grow, share learning, and thrive. This inner voice is growing in volume and insistence. I don't know where following it is going to lead me, but I know the nature of the work, and I know I've been born to do it. Over the last 5 years I have been practicing, and preparing for this next phase of my journey. I'm both excited and scared about it. I invite any of you who hear a similar voice and feel a similar way to reach out and connect. Several of you already have, in ways that have moved and inspired me. I feel a gathering of like-minded souls coming in the near future, where we can have a more focused conversation about this. There is so much good work to do, and it's such a perfect time for it.

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Ah yes, synchronicity again. I went to sleep having written the above, and then dreamed about a meeting I will have today with the son of the family I referred to yesterday, and I remembered asking him to buy and read The Knight in Rusty Armor before we meet today, so I picked up my copy and opened it randomly, and there was my buddy and role model, Merlin, spouting forth:

"Ambition that comes from the mind can get you nice castles, and it can get you fine horses. However, only ambition that comes from the heart can also bring happiness."

"What's ambition from the heart?" questioned the knight.

"Ambition from the heart is pure. It competes with no one and harms no one. In fact, it serves one in such a way that it serves others at the same time."

"How?" asked the knight, trying hard to understand.

"Here's where we can learn from this apple tree. It has become handsome and fully mature, bearing fine fruit which it gives freely to all. The more apples people pick," said Merlin, "the more the tree grows and the more beautiful it becomes. This tree is doing exactly what apple trees are meant to do - fulfilling its potential to the benefit of all. It can be the same with people when they have ambition from the heart."

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Keep spreading those appleseeds, Annie!

Jim Spivey

Here comes the next great adventure.

"A crisis event often explodes the illusions that anchor our lives."

--Robert Veninga

"We are each one of us angels with only one wing.
And we can fly only by embracing each other."

--Luciano De Crescenzo

I began a whole new adventure yesterday, thanks to my friend, G.B., who is a judge here in town. I had my first of what I suspect will be numerous court-appointed mediation cases, where I was invited to step into the fire of a family crisis that has not so surprisingly turned into an ugly lawsuit between father and son, with an angry sister in the middle. The surface-level argument, and the corresponding money and property involved, is no reflection of what is really going on. It is simply the more obvious "crisis event" that has materialized to "explode the illusions that anchor the lives of this particular family." In a stuffy lawyer's conference room, the drama played out in hellacious fashion. It was hard to be in the middle of it, sitting there quietly while good, but hurting people seethed and vented, but I could only find an emotional place from which I could make a difference if I let it play out so that the real story revealed itself, and it did, at least partially. The next step is to meet with each member of the family individually, before their court date of October 9th, to see if any one of them sees a possibility that is bigger than the "lose-lose-lose" that is currently setting itself up. I'm hoping they can find the strength and the means to communicate with each other, instead of through lawyers, and possibly even that deeper wisdom that awakens them to the importance of "embracing each other" as family. I have no idea how this is going to play out over the next several weeks but, from looking in the faces of the son and daughter, in particular, I strongly suspect that an internal process has just begun that will not have its steps dictated by external deadlines and legalities. I sense there are more powerful forces at work than those.

A perfect threesome

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."

- Will Durant

"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure."

- William Saroyan

"The quality of an organization can never exceed the awareness of the hearts and minds that make it up."

- Harold R. McAlindon

These three quotes seemed to naturally fit together in conveying a powerfully consistent theme while exposing several popular myths along the way. The theme: that education, wisdom, and quality of life is an ongoing journey (both personal and shared), not a destination. The myths: 1) that the objective and natural outcome of learning is "knowing stuff," 2) that the key to being good is "avoiding mistakes," and 3) that the quality of our organizations is "someone else's responsibility."

Remembering about children

"Children are not less than us; they are not subordinate to us. They are simply younger people. We have the same soul at 60 that we had at 40, and the same soul at 25 that we had when we were 5. If anything, children are wiser than us and have forgotten less of what life is about. They are closer to God and are sacred gifts from Him to us. They know more than we do about what's real and have at least as much to teach us about that as we have to teach them about staying alive."

I occasionally get asked for parental advice in dealing with a "problem child" or a particularly difficult situation. I am in no position to pose as an expert on the subject. Who is, really? I usually resist giving "transactional" advice on specific incidents. One thing I have found to be helpful is adjusting the attitude we have toward our children. It is so seductive, as a struggling adult holding onto unresolved baggage from our own childhood, to want to "fix" a child. When we shift into seeing our children through a different lens - more as God's gifts to us to bring awakening and healing into our lives - we not only have a different experience of them, but they seem to flourish in the acknowledgement and recognition. Children who "act out" their own or the family's pain are carrying a great gift in their arms. They are inviting us to be better adults and better parents. Treat it like a sacred opportunity for yourself, and it becomes one. I'm off to go be with my child to see what lessons he brings today.

Stop whining, and become the solution

"A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life."

-- James Allen

Yes, I have always grudgingly respected the righteous, tough talk from this guy. Not that it was always easy to hear or understand. When things aren't working the way I want, it's so much easier to complain about it. But to search for how I'm at the root of those things - the generating core of it - man, that's rough. I can feel the benefit, though, not that it makes me giddy or anything, but when I give up being right about what's wrong, I put myself into a place where I can change things from the inside. It's a hard place to stay, constantly being responsible, but fortunately things dramatically improve every time I'm able to get there. And the circumstances I find myself in NEVER change when I'm whining about them. As Marianne Williamson says, in equally confronting fashion:

"It's never really a circumstance that needs to change - it's we who need to change. The prayer isn't for God to change our lives, but rather for Him to change us."

The pursuit of happiness

Not too long ago someone sent me a quote about the pursuit of happiness that went something like this:

"The trick in achieving happiness is to know how to stop feverishly 'pursuing' it once it shows up."

If anyone out there recognizes this as something you might have sent me, please send me the real quote, and I'd be happy to credit you and its author for your contribution.

Anyway, I bring it up because I had reason to pause this morning - thanks to a great phone chat with a friend - and reflect on how incredibly blessed my life is right now. I had a new client who I had never met before except by phone - someone referred to me by another friend here in town - fly into Houston Thursday evening and stay with me and my family overnight, then join my morning "bagelatte" ritual, as Jake calls it, and then spend the bulk of the day sitting outside overlooking a golf course on a gorgeous Fall day in Texas sharing our life stories, getting to the heart of his joy and his pain, and exploring the possible journey that lies ahead. I enjoyed myself tremendously, felt like I was making a real difference for another human being, and I find myself embarassed by how good it all is. I almost feel guilty getting paid for this (but not quite). And I am so used to chasing happiness, feeling bad about myself and the world, that I don't often feel very comfortable being with it when it lands on my head. Thank you, B.M.S., for helping me see this again and stop chasing and squirming (at least for the moment), and thank you, B.B., for inviting me into your world with such courage and generosity. I think I can enjoy this goodness for a little while.

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A final thought at the end of the day. Anne and I just watched the movie, "Grand Canyon," before going to bed. It's a quirky little movie about life's irrational and serendipitous connections among us funny little human beings. It was a very fitting movie to see after seeing the news earlier about people blowing themselves and others up in buses and mothers beating up their children in parking lots. I am now more than ever blissfully aware that I live a very irrational life, and I have more serendipitous connections with people all over the world than I can count and, like the last line in the movie when Danny Glover asks a group of family and friends standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, "What do you think?", I have come to realize something very imporant about myself and the world: "It's not all bad." :-)