Category: Sunday Letters

A few hours from now my dear 85-year-old neighbor Bob and I will step out of my car into a world from 50 years ago. The occasion is the annual Johnny Appleseed Festival in Lisbon, Ohio. We’ll walk past the vendors that line the little town’s streets selling foods and doodads, and arts and crafts. We’ll pose for pictures in front of the murals of Marilyn Monroe and of Fonzie and the Pink Cadillac that are painted on the brick wall next to the old railroad car diner, stopping to chat with the volunteer firemen next door who have their trucks on display.

When we get to the lot that hosts the carnival games and rides, we’ll get tickets for the Ferris Wheel and Bob will tell me about the time he and his wife took their Yorkie with them for a ride and how the dog thought that now he knew what it’s like to be a bird.

We’ll walk toward the old depot, admiring the dogs dressed up for the best costume contest, smiling at the teens in their hairdos and gowns, part of the Festival Queen’s retinue, and the Queen herself. A local band is playing country music on the stage and people are clapping and tapping their feet. At the end of their song, a lady comes up to the mike and says they’ll introduce us to the winners of the dog show.

Afterwards, we’ll get our traditional treat, a warm homemade apple dumpling with cinnamon sauce and a big scoop of vanilla ice cream. We’ll eat at the tables on the lawn of the Methodist church with its lovely gardens, and watch the people walk by. Then Bob will go talk with the ham radio guys and I’ll go look at the photography contest display.

We’ll meet back up, and go see the quilt show and marvel at the tiny stitches and the colorful, imaginative patterns. Then we’ll walk back to the car, watching out for the little train that carries riders around the town. The windows of all the stores have apple and pioneer day displays and taped-up coloring pages from the kids at the area grade school. The lawns and old houses, when we get to the edge of the town where we parked, are well-kept and boast the last of their gardens.

I savor the memories, thinking of it. I savor the anticipation of living it once again. It’s a good thing, savoring, a sure-fire sign that you’ve slipped into some delicious pool of joy. It’s such a versatile, thing,too. I really like that about it. You can savor an event from the past, or one that you’re looking forward to, or even this very moment right now. You just kind of sink into it, into its sounds and fragrances and textures and all, and let it live in your mind.

As you go through the coming week, pull some off the shelf and have a long, smooth taste of it. It’s good for whatever ails you. And if you’re lucky, it just might taste like apples.

Enjoy!

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by lumix2004 from Pixabay}

In face of the fact that anything can happen–anything!–I maintain that it’s wise to keep a space open for the possibility that things could turn out great. A twist of fate could drop good fortune on your path at any moment. A turn of events you could change your whole life.

Not that it has to rush in full speed all at once. It could. But there’s no rule saying it has to go that way. Good times could start tiny, with a happy little surprise, and just keep gradually getting better and better from there.

I think we have no idea how very good it could get. But it seems to me it’s a smart idea to be aware that things could go that way, whatever the odds. Personally, I like to imagine that I’m living in a wondrously good and beautifully designed world right now. I consider it practice, so I’ll be ready in case things get amazingly good really soon. For all I know, the good stuff started seeping in a while ago, and it was so quiet I didn’t even notice.

I’ve observed that it’s easier for us to build disaster scenarios than boundless-miracle ones, but I attribute that to all the toxins we swim in and ingest. Garbage in –>Garbage out. You gotta pay attention to what movies you’re playing in your mind, and to where your ideas are coming from. It’s good to get really interested in that. And, you know, it’s good to get interested in what you’re putting in your body, too. Same principle. Being a Joy Warrior means relentlessly pursuing happiness. The deep kind. The real kind. The kind that reeks of gratitude and peace. And you don’t get there by wallowing in sad stories and gobbling up junk. You get there by looking around to see what goodness might be lurking in the moment’s secret places. Sometimes when you look, you see that goodness is right there in front of you. And what a fun revelation that is! It’s like waking from a dream into a fresh, clear new world.

Sometimes I like to think of life as my personal science lab where I do research and experiments. Either things go the way I predicted, or suspected, or hoped they would go (Hooray! Hooray!), or they don’t. I either succeed or I learn. So whatever way it goes, I win.

That doesn’t mean the experiments are necessarily painless. It turns out that sometimes you learn the most when things go terribly wrong. This is the real world. You can’t walk around with rose-colored glasses on and expect to get a true picture of things. You would be cheating yourself out of whole swaths of the human experience. And the human experience is a deep, rich thing–a privilege, a gift to you. Dare to see the whole spectrum of things. Every time you notice something that injures or harms, push yourself to see something positive that balances it,

I have this personal saying, “Every now and then a moment comes along that makes all of the rest of them worth it.” I call those “golden moments.” They’ve been coming with increasing frequency, I notice. I wish you a bundle of them.

Hold open the possibility open that miracles may appear at any time. Because, for each and every one of us, they may. Be prepared. Start practicing now. It could make all the difference.

Sending you happiness bubbles.

Warmly,
Susan

I know it feels painful to discover that reality differs significantly from the image you had of it. We get so invested in what we believe to be true. We forget altogether that our beliefs are just that, and that the information on which we’re basing them may have limitations we hadn’t considered.

I admit, it’s hard to get your bearings here, the way everything keeps shifting and sliding and all. The best that any of us can do is to do the best we can do, moment to moment to moment. It’s like the famous poster from the 1960’s where you see a yogi-like figure in long robes on a surfboard riding an enormous wave. Across the photo in bold white letters is printed, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

The world is giving us surfing lessons big-time now. And it feels like high tide. It’s part of the adventure of being here. We get to live all the drama from inside it.

By the way, did you ever watch somebody learn to surf? It isn’t a pretty sight. Or graceful. Or smooth. They fall a lot. Sometimes they get injured. Sometimes they even get killed. That’s the kind of adventure we’re in. We risk death every moment. Threats surround us from our very first breath, from before that even.

But here’s the thing. Most who are learning to surf succeed. They get the hang of it, of the unpredictability of the ride. They get the rhythm and flow of unexpected curves. For some, it becomes a kind of dance or meditation. For some it’s a challenge of skills, a grand game. But you only rise to those levels to the degree that you let go of fear. Most of us are just paddling around as best we can, scared of dying, trying to get enough balance to stand. Our big glory is that when we fall, we climb back on, regardless of our fears and regrets. And these days, that can be one mean feat.

I love that about humans–the way we keep getting back on the board, working at making it work, even against all odds. Even when we have no idea why. God bless us all.

And God bless you, individually–you, who’s reading this letter right now. These are bewildering times. Balance doesn’t come easy for any of us. We’re riding on storm-tossed seas.

It’s okay to be afraid. Useless, but okay. It’s okay to be sad, or angry, or miserable. Just get back on the board and keep paddling. Eventually you’ll rock with the waves, rolling over their crests and into their valleys as if you were born to do it. Because, obviously, you were.

It doesn’t have to make sense. It might be a long while before we’re in calm seas. Life isn’t going to be what you had imagined it would be. But it’s still your life, your chance to ride the waves. Kinda wild, isn’t it? Kinda outrageous.

Just hold on, and rock and roll.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Kanenori from Pixabay.com}

Awe: A moment where you’re stopped in your tracks and dare not move lest you disturb this trance of pure wonder and admiration at the immense perfection of it all. That’s a lot of words. You can’t really put the experience of being awe-struck into words, I guess, except maybe an exhaled “wow.”

I was looking at a list of positive emotions that’s pinned to my bulletin board when my eyes focused on the word “awe.” “Now there’s something I haven’t felt in a while,” I said to myself, licking my lips at the delicious memory of awe. I’d been so caught up in life’s drama that I forgot all about it.

So I pulled one of my favorite awe-invoking stories from the shelf where I keep it in my mind and paged through its richly illustrated pages.

The first thing I see as I open the story is vast and velvety star-studded space, like those pictures you see now and then from the Hubble telescope. All those nebula and everything, whirling in endless space.

Then I zoom in and find this one spiral galaxy and recognize it as the Milky Way, and it feels like home. Our sun is on one of its spirals. You can’t be sure which one because NASA itself says one thing on one page and another thing a few pages later. But it really doesn’t matter. Like the poet said, a rose is a rose . . . regardless of what you call it.

Anyway, somewhere on one of those sparkling arms is our sun, and there we are, on one of the planets dancing around it in its own little orbit, and oh look, it has a tiny little moon. And here we are, conscious beings, living on the surface of that planet that is so perfectly suited for life, and where life abounds on land, in the sea, in the air. And all the parts are related and interwoven with each other and necessary for each other in order for it all to exist.

And not only that! Have you ever read that description of how, if things had been different by only a little bit, it wouldn’t have been possible for the planet to support life, ever? Yet here we are.

On this planet dancing around a sun in the arm of spiral galaxy that’s one of many in a universe that just goes on and on.

And the specks of life that are human, in this little dancing atom of a world, can imagine all of that, and invent words like “awe” to describe how you feel when you think about that story.

I smiled and put the book back on its shelf. Awe was every bit as beautiful as I had remembered. You don’t have to have a complicated story to get to it. Anything that amazes you and makes you feel both big and small at once can put you there. A sunset. A baby. A concept. Music. A friend. A dog. A grain of sand. A tree.

It’s kind of neat how everybody gets to feel awe at one time or another. That in itself can push you into a little puddle of it. I like the way that awe puts me in touch with the mystery of it all, of our being here, wherever here is, capable of wonder, and despite all odds, alive.

Wishing you an awe-touched week, my friend.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay}

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