Rilke comforted me today with his reminder to trust in the difficult ... actually to do more than to trust but to actually 'kiss' those scary dragons. I've been kissing dragons this week as I struggled to learn a new skill involving technologies that I have no natural affinity for. However, I love learning and was so excited{that is, vaguely manic} about the new learning and so I didn't pay attention to the toll it was taking on my poor brain.

Paid no attention that is until I was in a store standing in front of the little pin pad, finger poised to push the numbers of my debit card, and 'poof'' the correct sequence of numbers was gone from my mind. So, I put in a number sequence three different ways, three different times - each time it was rejected wondering if the cashier was going to report me for fraud - she didn't and the bank"solved" the problem by automatically shuting down my card. I felt like an orphan: lost in America without access to money. Not to mention the fact that I also seemed to have a tangled mind without access to my brain. Well, that took care of the list of errands: no access to money, no errands to accomplish!

Went home, poured a cup of coffee and sat. Just sat and stared at the cat, feeling astounded and very foolish at what had happened in the store. Was also aware - since I couldn't run errands and was just sitting - how weary I felt. I wrote about yielding yesterday and as I sat I became aware that logically, if I would yield to the fact of being tired and allow myself to do nothing, my brain would relax and my pin number would naturally float to the surface of my mind. Except yielding felt like giving in. Giving in to the fact that I found technology much more difficult than I like to admit even though I joke about it: giving in to the fact that it feels funny to put my thoughts right out into the world: giving in to the fact that I have resisted this learning for a while now. Which of course, is exactly what yielding is: allowing oneself to soften and accept what is.

Not until the moment I felt my resistence to yielding to what was happening in my life, did I recognize how tight I was. So tight that my brain was frozen!! Then I remembered: learning something completely new is discombobulating: if the learning is truly new, then that new piece sort of shoves the normal parts of life around as it finds a place to fit and as a result of this jostling, life loses it's familiar comfort.

Discomfort is why it's really, really difficult for grown ups to learn really new ways of thinking and living. Children take to the unknown and unfamiliar like Lewis and Clark heading out on an expedition but most grown ups take to the unknown and unfamiliar as though fire breathing dragons lived in their expedition backpack. I could feel a bit of the dragon's fire myself as foolishness burned my cheeks and mild panic stirred my gut as I realized my bankcard - and brain - were frozen.

As a means to discovering how to unfreeze my card, I sat down at the computer to go online to my bank. When I sat down, out of the corner of my eye I saw a card with the saying by Deepak Chopra that today I put on the masthead of this blog: Surrender is faith that the power of love can accomplish anything even when you cannot forsee the outcome. Oh yeah I thought, love is why you've entered the territory of dragons: love of words, love of teaching, love of sharing your experience, strength and hope, love of your sense of call as to the meaning of your life. And if this expedition is difficult and discombobulating (I find the latter concept more distressing than the former} what does it matter if the reason for the expedition is love? And if all this is based in love, well then, kiss the next darn dragon you meet!

Love always expands ... love always calls us forward on an expedition into the land of dragons. The land of dragons is whatever is beyond your known comfort zone for on ancient maps the cartographer would draw a dragon on the edge of the area of the map that was known. The image of the dragon was a caution: beyond here there may be dragons for this is uncharted territory. Rilke - that wise poet - however, knew the importance of being willing to go past our comforts when he said: perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. Kiss the next dragon you meet ... it may be love at first sight!

Yield ing

Another achievement! Admittedly it has taken the past two hours to figure out how to find/buy images and then how to download and upload however: succcess for, voila! the image appeared!

Have you ever been reading either an article or book and suddenly a word or phrase enters you like a laser beam? Last week I was reading Centering by M.C. Richards and the word yield lodged in my heart. I went to my beloved dictionary and discovered that yield is a glorious word for it has two meanings that tie together into a delightful concept.

The first meaning of yield: to produce or return as fruit, profit or result (syn: bear, supply, bring forth, earn, harvest, gain) the second meaning is: to surrrender, submit or defer to (syn: give, abandon, concede, relinguish, give right of way to.)

I was pondering the meanings of yield and it hit me: in order to produce or bear fruit one must submit; defer to the processes of becoming whatever one desires to be. Just as a seed buried in the ground needs to yield to the work of the soil in order to crack open and become whatever the seed is meant to be, so too must I be willing to take actions of submission toward the unknown in order to expand and grow into life.

To be honest the word 'submissive' leaves a nasty flavor on my tongue. As a woman in my mid-fifties who grew up in a time and place where all "good" females were submissive, I tend to be instinctively repelled by the word. And yet I have learned in my life, that only the disciplines attached to surrender enable true growth. Having said that, I'm aware that getting to surrender is always a process which is why I chose a yield sign for this posting.

Yield as a traffic sign says to stop and look before moving ahead and the sign also cautions to give right of way to oncoming traffic. Wake up and pay attention before moving forward is the directive I hear when I see YIELD within my heart.

Hearts are very tuned to yielding for all forms of love require one to have the ability to give the right of way to. Whether the desire in my heart is for relationship with a person, a dream, dedication to a creative action like writing or painting, scrapbooking or gardening, my Highest Self or the Spirit of the Universe, in order to expand and grow into the love, I need to create space in my life for the development of what I desire. Creating space whether psychically, spiritually or in my bedroom closet is an act of will: it cannot be simply 'thought' into being; physical action is required. Yielding is all about choosing and taking action.

Stop and look is the first actions of yielding: Is something nagging at you in your gut or heart? Are you lonely, resentful, irritable and/or bored? Stop and look at your feelings and ask what they are telling you. Yield to them as yours. If you are feeling them then they belong to you. That's the good news since if they are your feelings: your responses to your life, then you may change them. The people I know who remain unhappy and anxious in life are people who refuse to accept their feelings as theirs: they tend to blame other people, places and circumstances for their feelings. They are wrong: feelings belong to the person having them.

About a month ago I was ridiculously frustrated with time and it was making me very irritable. I did not seem to have enough to accomplish what I wanted to do and kept thinking 'there's just not enough time.' And then one day I actually heard myself and realized that I did not believe what I was saying: in fact, I believe there is enough of virtually all that I need. And so I yielded to both what I was saying and what I believed and stopped. I listened and looked around and said 'what can I do to change my perception?' By asking the question, I woke myself up and the answer that appeared [kind of like oncoming traffic that I saw because I stopped at the yield sign] was rather simple: begin getting up early again. Winter is the one time of year I find it easy to sleep in until 6:30 or 7 whereas normally I'm up between 5 and 5:30. I had been allowing myself to sleep in and so I was losing my favorite time of the day. I truly did not have enough time because I was sleeping in! Yielding to what I desired, more time, meant setting the alarm and getting out of bed when it rang. Simple.

Simple but not necessarily easy for choice demands using ones will to take action. Yielding always demands the use of will for stopping, looking around, making choice of direction and then setting the actions in motion. Without actively using my will, desires are simply wishes. And wishes rarely become anything except dis-ease with life for wishing is the province of children who are rather powerless about the conditions of their life.

The easiest way I know of to feel a healthy sense of adult power is by making the choice to use my will to connect to a power greater than myself. I learned this trick twenty some years ago when I was very unhappy because with 3 very young children I felt as though I never had time for myself. When I realized that the cause of my unhappiness was a day filled with the demands of other people, I made the decision to set my alarm 30 minutes before the rest of the house woke up. The alarm would go off and before I could talk myself out of the extra sleep, I got up so I could go sit on the patio and for coffee and conversation with my HP [Higher Power] while I was completely alone.

When I made that decision I yielded to both the fact of my unhappiness and the fact that I could change my feelings by changing my actions. It was one of the best choices I have ever made and I still begin each day with coffee and conversation with my HP on the patio. It has been those early morning conversations that have taught me how to learn to yield to love.

A Beginning

Magic is truly afoot for I plowed through my terror of new technology and began.

The longer I live the more convinced I am that fear of appearing foolish stunts our growth {for foolish challenges ones security about being 'knowing'} more than any other defect of character and technology almost always leaves me feeling foolish. It does seem kind of foolish to begin a blog without figuring out how to get my image on the page and how to navigate the layout tools but what I know is that either I will figure it out or more likely, someone who reads this will explain to me how to engage the processes that are necessary. Either way, sometime in the near future this will indeed look like an official blog page.

About the title of this blog

A couple weeks or so ago two posts on the same day appeared in my inbox containing the Leonard Cohen poem God is Alive ... Magic is Afoot. To be honest, the poem itself is not one of my favorites but the title made me so happy that I kept it as unread in my inbox just so I would see it when I checked my email. During the same time period I was working up the courage to enter the technology world where blogs reside and was mulling on a title for my blog.
Finally I grasped the obvious: use the words that make you happy!

But I worried. Not the obvious worry about copyrights but about using the word God in the title of my blog: how many people will be turned off? How many people will think this is religious propaganda of some kind? Then I yielded to my gut - the deep gut where my spirit resides - and realized that the title of the poem made me happy because the six words sum up not only what I believe but how I live my life: I live in the happy magic that the spirit of Creation is alive in all living things and most especially within people.

Personally I find the word God to be rather small and narrow considering the possibilities available for experiencing God. The foundation of my spirituality comes from three decades in a twelve step program and to that end God is for me a 'Higher Power' - a power much greater than my simple humanness - a power that infuses my humanness with life. The names I have used for my Higher Power include: Universal Energy, Creative Energy of the Universe, Yahweh {because I have no 'image' in my mind for this ancient Hebrew name}, Source, Sophia {the Divine Feminine}. I have heard HP referred to as gravity and for one person, a tree as expressions of an energy of life which is real but beyond the human.

Although I do not believe the 'title' one gives to the Creative Energy of the Universe is important, the word God is in the title of this blog because the intention of the blog is to share my experience, strength and hope about living ones life with meaning and for me the essence of meaning is found in the relationship I create with the Creator of my life.

Abracadabra is the word of incantation of magic that is most familiar to people. I was chatting with my brother John the other day and he said to me, "do you know what abracadabra means?" "No" I answered. "I will create as I speak" he told me. Later I went online and discovered that the translation of abracadabra as I will create as I speak is from the Aramaic word Abrahadabra. The URL for this blog is thankyoumagic because what I know is that I do create as I speak - whether 'in my head' as thoughts or out loud in conversation or in words appearing on a computer screen or ink on a page. My life changed and became magical when I began using the words thank you as my personal abracadabra word. But this has become too long for one days post and so I will share about thank you as abracadabra tomorrow.