Category: Sunday Letters

Two weeks ago, we started our look at the four phrases “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.” We thought about what it meant to feel regret over something, and then what if meant to ask forgiveness. The final two phrases link together as organically as the first two did. “Thank you,” when said from the heart, always rides on the waves of love.

For me, after I’ve said, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” saying “Thank you. I love you.” is like walking through a door into a spacious room filled with glowing, pastel, dancing light. The Yes, however you conceive it, embraces you and infuses you with the comfort of its limitless love.

“Yes,” it beams to you on waves that flow into your heart and mind in a way that fills you with amazement and joy.

All because you said “Thank you.”

Imagine that!

Okay. Back here in the day-to-day world, our thank you’s aren’t generally quite that profound. We utter them out of courtesy, giving them hardly a thought, fulfilling the requirements of good manners. That’s kind of cool in itself when you think about it. We still have manners. We still want to connect with each other, to signal our respect for each other. “Thanks,” we say to strangers. “Thanks,” we say to co-workers and neighbors, to loved ones, to family, to friends. “Thanks,” we say to the morning, to the night, to the Yes.

I’ll tell you a hard truth, too. Sometimes it’s really difficult to think of a single thing for which you feel anything but a cursory gratitude. You have to work to name one single thing. You name something grudgingly, knowing you would be grateful for it if you were in a different mood. Know what that means? It means you need a nap.

But even when you’re worn, even when you don’t feel the gratitude in your heart, naming some things that you know you are thankful to have or to have experienced–just naming them–will impact you more deeply than you expected.

Practice is the key. Practicing just to see what happens. For fun. For curiosity’s sake. As an experiment. Just because you feel like it, for no particular reason at all.

I’m sorry.

Forgive me.

Thank you.

I love you.

That’s it. May it serve you well.

Warmly,
Susan

I found it. The article I mentioned last week was exactly where I thought it was, so I retrieved it easily. I had the name wrong. It was originally “Four Simple Phrases that Change Everything.” I told you last week that I thought it was “Four Magic Phrases . . .”

What I once thought simple has turned out to be so multifaceted and multi-layered that I can only think of it as magical, in the most wondrous, childlike sense of the word. I keep slipping, I’ve noticed, into this trance of awe where everything surprises me with its intricacy and perfection. It’s beyond comprehension. But there it is: everywhere.

Take, for instance, synchronicities. I don’t notice them often, but when I do they are usually quite fun, and interesting. The night before I dug out my old drive to retrieve the article, I was surfing from channel to channel and happened to land on one where the fellah speaking was a philosopher and he just happened to mention the Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono–the very one to which I referred in my introduction of my article. Then he shared the four phrases around which my article was centered. And he said them in the same order I do, although you can choose any order you like.

I’m sorry.
Please Forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.

I thought that was cool, a kind of nod from the universe that I was on the right track. It’s not like you run into a practitioner of this offshoot of traditional Ho’oponopono very often. It doesn’t generally come up in everyday conversation.

The second synchonicity about the article happened when I opened it. I noticed the date of its original publication: July 25, 2015. How about that! Exactly six years from today.

I considered reprinting the original article as-is, but after working with the four phrases for over half a decade now, there’s more I want to say than what this original article said. I don’t mean to tease you by saying, “Not yet.” I’m telling you good things are in store.

So . . . synchronicities slide me into trances of awe. You can go down quite a deep and twisty rabbit hole thinking about them, for sure! So I just smile at them, consider them a wink from the universe, and carry on.

Another thing that nudges me into the awe-pool is a greeting from my hawk. (I don’t mean “my” in a possessive sense. It’s just a shorthand for “my friend the hawk.”) He called to me twice this week, and when I called back, he flew to the open space above my head and circled there while we called to each other. We have quite a history, we two. Those were magical moments for me.

I ran across a list of positive emotions the other day. Awe is one of them, and definitely one of my favorites. But the top-of-the-list one for me is contentment.

I’ll wish you some of that. Especially as we come to the end of this week’s ramblings.

Have some serenity. Be at peace. Just for a moment, bathe in contentment.

Ahhhhh.

Much warmth,
Susan

Just short of two weeks ago, I stumbled into an invisible revolving door and ended up in a different world. This has happened to me before, and probably to you, too. A ways back down the road, when I first recognized this phenomenon, I named it “the revolving door experience.”

Here’s what happens. You’re lah-dee-dah-ing in your ordinary way at your ordinary pace when all of a sudden some event swoops into your reality and pushes you into this invisible revolving door. You spin around, and then suddenly land on the other side in a whole different version of the world. Everything looks the same pretty much. All the people and your relationships are the same. The story line seems a continuation of the one that was playing out before. But somehow, absolutely everything has changed.

If you’ve been there, you’ll know what I’m describing.

Anyway, I did the spin a few days ago, waking up in the local hospital’s ER. Not to worry; it’s all under control. But the spin had me pretty dizzy for a while. I felt like I was in a warping time tunnel. I speculated that we are all experiencing some significant shift in the force. It feels like a wave rippling through the planet’s energy field, leaping a slight rift in the timeline. I first noticed it at the beginning of spring. It’s as if someone struck a huge bell or a gong and the ripples of its sound have just begun to reach our ears.

While I was working at acclimating to this alternate new reality, I jotted down some random thoughts. I’ll share them with you, just for fun, and because, well, that’s why we’re here together. Right?

It all comes down to this. All you have is Now.

But Now holds everything. It’s the stage for the dance, the blank page on which the story floats, the nothing from which everything rises. And here we are, conscious and self-aware, smack dab in the middle of it.

We really don’t know much of anything. Pretty much, everything we take as true is little more than supposition, some more solid-seeming, some fantastical. You have to have a story; it’s what defines things and lets you navigate through this place.

So we weave these stories we live in, right? We gather the material for them as we go along, borrowing from everyone, making discoveries, adopting traditions, falling prey to the mind-shaping of the current official narrative, maybe breaking free.

The thing is, everybody’s story is different from everybody else’s. I call the view from in here, in the center of it, where the phenomenon I call ‘me’ is, I call that view my Reality Bubble. I live in my Reality Bubble; you live in yours. Some people’s bubbles have lots of places that harmonize nicely with other peoples’ bubbles. Some people’s bubbles clash with others. But everybody’s bubble is their true, experiential reality just as much as your is. The key is to respect that.

Remember: We really don’t know much of anything for certain. Have some humility as you walk through the world. Confidence is one thing; arrogance is another,

Personally, I know this: I know that I believe in Truth, and in the pursuit of it as a sacred path. I know I believe in the reality–and supremacy–of Love, and of Goodness, and Beauty. I believe in hope, too. These days, hope is crucially important. Hope: the faith that things will work out, a way be found, a sweet light illuminate our paths. And I believe it pays to hone a fine sense of humor, too.

One of my favorite descriptors of an ideal attitude is the phrase “divine nonchalance.” It has that row-row-row your boat ease about it. Flow with the river, trusting it will take you exactly where you need to go to get what you need. “Trusting.” I have a card on the bulletin board above my desk with this acronym:

Totally

Relying

Upon

Spirit’s

Timing,

Inspiration,

Nurturing, and

Guidance.

Somebody whose blog I use to follow wrote that years ago. I’ve always liked it. Christopher Foster, I think. Thanks, Christopher.

It’s good to weave bits and pieces of inspiration and of joyful moments into your reality bubble, by the way. They can be refreshing and comforting places to take shelter when ill winds blow.

I’m orienting quite well to this new version of reality in which I find myself. Things seem to change at a rather speedy pace here. Choppy waters in this stretch of the river. But don’t you just love the adventure of it all?

And isn’t it beautiful, really, that here we are, touching each other like this, through all the changes?

Life is good.

Warmly,
Susan

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

Today was my mother’s birthday, so I wrote a poem for her.

I called it . . .

Remembering Marion

The colorful birds and flowers and sky,

the leaves, the scents, the warmth, the breeze,

the memories that ride on them, going back

to the patch of lilies-of-the-valley that grew

at the side of Grandma’s house, between the house

and the little sidewalk that went to the garage, remember?

and the huge bouquets of lilacs that sat on my mother’s kitchen table

and how, if you closed your eyes, their scent could convince you

that you had arrived in heaven.

And today all of this, and more, because, in addition to it being May,

it is the anniversary of your birth a hundred and one years ago.

Imagine that.

And the remembering of you breathes from the birds’ bright feathers

and the hues that paint the tulips and phlox and from the scent

of the lilies-of-the-valley and the lilacs, and none of it as sweet

or precious as your gentle smile.

I wish for you a week touched by beauty and by beautiful memories.

Warmly,
Susan

It’s really up to you, you know. How you’ll look at it. What stories you’ll weave around it. Back in the old days, they put it this way: Your attitude determines your altitude.

It’s true. And as much as we’d all like to drop our lousy attitudes at somebody else’s feet, the fact is we ourselves are the ones who hold the reins that determine our own pace and direction.

It’s not always an easy trick to do. Like anything else that’s truly worthwhile, mastery comes with a price. It takes discipline. And practice.

I got my first lessons in this holding-the-reins business when I was a mere toddler. I had this beautiful little rocking chair in my bedroom that played music when you rocked. Whenever I was being especially cranky, my mother would point to my room and quietly command, “Go sit in your rocking chair and don’t come out until you can be happy like the rest of the family.”

That may have been the beginning of my Joy Warrior training, now that I think about it. Good thing. By the time I arrived at this stretch of the road, I needed a lifetime of training to keep the door open for joy.

At any rate, I remember sitting in that little rocker, pouting and grumpy, with tears on my cheeks, struggling to make my face smile. It wasn’t easy. I had to let go of a big wad of dark, prickly, sticky feelings in order to do it. I had to see that seeing my mother’s own smile would make letting go of the dark feelings worth the effort it took to do it

I’m still working on mastery, by the way. Maybe learning to let go of the darkness is the only lesson there is.

But I keep working at it, because it’s still true that the joy of the reward makes the effort worth it.

I thought about that last night as I sat on my porch gently rocking in my rocker, the spring breeze warm and fragrant against my face, the songbirds’ evening carol floating on the golden air. And I smiled.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Please Don’t sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay}

When my friend messaged me about the terrible fire, I just stared at her words in shock and disbelief. Less than a month ago I was standing right there, marveling over the beauty that she had constructed on this northern Michigan homestead of hers. Now she was telling me that it had all burned to the ground. The greenhouse, the chicken coop–a true palace of a place!–the tool shed with her perfectly arranged, decades-in-the-making collection of tools, the pole barn. Gone. She was thanking God that the house had escaped, and that she had saved the cats and chickens.

She would send photos, she said, when her internet was restored.

When they came, the pictures stunned me more than her words had. I stared at this pile of rubble, trying somehow to put it all back where it was, so vivid and bright, in my mind.

Then the note she sent with the photos registered, explaining that orange bird feeder in the picture’s center. She had just built it , she said, with some of the few materials and tools that had been in the house, escaping the fire.

“Of course she did,” I said to myself. “Of course she did.”

“I figure you have to start somewhere,” she said.

I thought she chose a pretty cool place to make her start. Do what you love. Do what brings you satisfaction. Start here, with whatever you got. And give it all you got.

Then paint it some bright color. Write it in big letters or images in your heart: My New Start. Let it note a moment of triumph.

We’re such resilient beings! We rise from horrendous traumas and trials, determined to go on, regardless. We learn that we can claim the moment and make of it whatever we will. Ask yourself what you want to do, then listen for the answer and go build a bird feeder.

That’s how you go about starting somewhere.

May you do it with humor and grace!

Warmly,
Susan