I had a possible free continuing medical education course to go to in Fresno, but gave myself permission to go or not, and just to sleep as long as my body wanted. So I didn't go, since I woke up at 9 and the class was from 8 to 12. Feels better to do it this way (like a feather floating on the wind). Now I have time to write here, go on a walk, get the oil changed in my car, see a friend, and be leisurely with my day. Often many different choices are good, like walking on different paths through a wood; we can appreciate the blessings of whichever way we go. (I remember reading a letter to Ann Landers by a woman who had a baby with Down's Syndrome. She used the metaphor of going on a trip. She and her husband had planned a trip to Italy, read the travel brochures, all their friends had gone there, and they were looking forward to it. The plane ended up landing in Holland instead, not where they had expected, but full of beautiful things also....)
I enjoyed creating and sharing the poetic writing I posted last. When I first saw the clouds on my walk that morning, the image of blankets thrown back across the mountains came to mind, and I filed it away in my memory, feeling a poem there. (Luckily my memory is working pretty well now, much better than in the middle of chemotherapy, though I'm still forgetting some things I would usually have remembered.) The next day, when I came home late, I had the desire to sit down and write. The following morning I edited and polished it while typing it into the computer. Then during the day, I enjoyed reading comments people wrote, and I shared it with my family, coworkers, and some of the patients/friends who came in to see me at the office. There is a sense of joy and clarity and a wish to share shining through the whole thing, even when I reread it. Some of my writing (like today's) is clearly just me thinking and talking to you. Other days, with the poetic writing and with some of the spiritual/psychological writing, there is something coming through me, not just me, and I also enjoy it and learn from it, and will go back and reread things to let them sink in and more thoroughly learn them.
I have an image of dipping deeply into the well of Spirit, and coming up with something to marvel at and share; that well or current or wind or resource is always there and all of us can have access to it through our spirits (but not with our everyday busy task-oriented mind). I can recognize it in things people say, in their writing, in their being when I see them. There's a sense of it in a group of people when one person shares something deeper, and the whole group goes to a deeper, more intimate level. It has to do with the deeper (or higher)capacity that I believe God created in and for all of us, only our culture tends to steer us away from that toward more superficial things. (In fact, I think our education system, at least elementary and secondary school, is almost designed to squelch anyone going to that deeper place.) For me there seems to be a number of ways to access it: getting deeply quiet and meditating; being out in nature; music; writing; reading; talking deeply with people (one of the things that's so satisfying to me in being a doctor). There is a deeper, larger love and rightness about it. (Not the personal you-me love of friendship or child-parent or mate, although certainly they can partake of the deeper love, but something more profound, even impersonal compared to the personal love (or perhaps more profoundly personal, relating to our deepest being), something that can't be spoken in our words but resonates in our spirits, pointed to by God giving his name as "I AM" in the Bible, or "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao" in the Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu.)
I can feel it in people when they fully pursue their gifts and their callings, whatever they are (whether it's drumming or writing or massage or teaching or homemaking or serving or helping others in some way,or anything else). There's a fullness of presence, a deepness, a rightness, an acceptance, a joy, and a love in such people that inspires me. I think when each of us pursues that depth in ourselves, it makes the whole world more right, more what it's supposed to be.
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