Category: Sunday Letters

It’s not “official,” but there’s no doubt that summer has arrived in the area—full force! People greet each other in the morning saying, “It’s gonna be a hot one.” And their words prove true.

It was too hot yesterday to do much of anything outdoors, except to savor the sun and the luxurious green, and the constantly changing sky-show overhead. For a while, I found myself drifting back in time to my childhood summers.

Remember how, when you were a kid, you’d stretch out in the grass watching the clouds and see a whole menagerie cavorting across the sky?

Remember how the fire-breathing dragon would morph into a pony or bear?

Oh! The stories that could fill the sky on a summer afternoon!

Funny how it’s always the clouds that catch our gaze, and not the endless blue on which they float, isn’t it? How we’re built to see the figures and not the infinitely deep and mysterious space in which they float?

It’s how we live our lives, fixing our gaze on the thoughts and memories that drift by, on the stories we make up to give shape to the passing events. It’s how we create meaning for ourselves, and from that meaning, how we make our decisions. Imagination is a powerful thing.

But every now and then, it’s good to remember to notice the sky – the deep, formless context in which we live our lives, the space from which all our thoughts and perceptions arise, the infinite consciousness that teams with the invisible life force that powers our very being.

The dragon in the clouds seems so real as we stare at it, imagining its fire-breathing snout, its wide-spread wings, its sharply clawed feet. But moments later, it is no more; it dissolves into the mystery of sky.

Our problems are like that, too. Our interpretations, our plans, our dreams all seem so real. And then they are gone, and new ones come to replace them. But we ourselves remain, because we, at our core, are more sky than cloud. We are the vessels through which the story-clouds, the dream-clouds, are created and experienced and lived. We are the meaning-makers, dancers in the mystery.

May you dance with joy, and spin wondrous clouds as you go.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by giografiche from Pixabay}

“With my luck,” a friend began, “I’d trip and fall and break my leg.”
“Well, you know,” I said teasingly, “our thoughts create our reality. Be careful what you wish for.” We both laughed.

But it’s true. If you go around thinking of yourself as a clumsy fool with terrible luck, life is likely to accommodate you. Remember that phrase I mentioned a while back, “What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.” That’s really how it works. There’s a host of technical reasons why and how it happens. But the bottom line is that it does.

The proofs the Prover brings aren’t always literal, of course—although they can be. I wasn’t suggesting my friend would actually fall and break his leg. It’s more the essence or quality of our thoughts that the Prover proves.

The other day, I heard a guy put it this way, “When you do low vibrational stuff, you get low vibrational people and situations in your life.” I think that says it pretty well. And “low vibrational stuff” includes the thoughts we think, our self-talk, our mental movies.

When you find that you’ve fallen into a pity trap, or get mired in boredom, anger, sadness, or fear, one of the quickest ways out is to check what you were thinking then choose a different line of thought. Ask yourself what’s good about the moment and see what comes up. If you’re really bummed and your brain tries to tell you that nothing is good about the moment, tell it, “Well, besides that, what’s good?” You are, after all, conscious enough to remember to check your thoughts. And that’s a good thing in itself.

Another good thing is that we always have alternative thoughts available. Whole hosts of them! We just have to keep asking what’s good and move in its direction.

One alternative that I find puts things in perspective for me is a little paragraph by author and public speaker David Icke. He says the trick to freeing ourselves from something we’re experiencing is not to identify with it.

“You are not your emotions, or thoughts, or the things your remember, ” he says, “or all the sensations your physical body is registering. You are the one who is feeling the emotions, listening to the thoughts, remembering the memories, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling. Those are the things that you are experiencing. They come and go. Whatever comes and goes is not you. You are a vehicle for all that is, and was, and ever will be to use in its endless explorations.”

If that’s the case, why not choose a different line of thought, different things to say about yourself, a movie that turns course and runs in a more empowering direction?

It takes practice, of course. Some of the ruts we get stuck in are pretty sticky. But every time we choose to look for the good the moment holds, for its opportunities, for its invitations, we get better at it and stronger. We catch ourselves sooner, before we slide all the way into our habitual pits. We start to discover that it’s freeing and fun to be in control, to remember we’re explorers in a universe of possibilities, that we can choose to nudge our paths in new directions, to step into a brighter, truer reality – even if we take only one small step at a time.

Wishing you a lifetime of endless discoveries of the good.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay}

“What I don’t know I make up,” I used to tell people as a kind of joke. I left it up to them to figure out where fact gave way to fantasizing.

I was listening to some talk about ChatGPT this week. “What is ChatGPT?” you ask. (Here’s a good description.) Basically, It’s an online tool that’s sort of like a cross between an unimaginably vast library and a great personal assistant. A big bevy of those First Adopter types are praising its capabilities. It’s passed the bar exam, scored well on the SATs, and developed detailed business plans, for example. It’s fast and smart. You’ll be hearing about it more and more, I’m sure.

Well anyway, it turns out that when ChatGPT can’t find an exact answer for you, it, too, will make stuff up. And it’s very good at it, I hear. The Artificial Intelligence developers label the phenomenon “hallucinating.”

I thought that was an interesting word choice. When I make stuff up, I think of it as imagining. But what’s the difference when it comes down to it? Regardless of which term you give it, it’s a story our brains fabricate, both the living and the machine kind.

Personally, I thought it was a bit eerie that a language tool rooted in Artificial Intelligence would make things up. Why would it do that? It doesn’t have an ego to defend, after all, or emotions to sort out. It’s not trying to entertain. Maybe it’s a technique it uses for problem-solving. That’s one of the purposes our own story-making serves. Fortunately, ChatGPT doesn’t hallucinate anywhere near as much as we humans do. It’s more of a cut and dried here-are-the-facts kind of operation. We, on the other hand, are living in our dream worlds, our story worlds, more than we’re not.

To borrow the AI developers’ term, we’re usually living in a hallucination. There’s not necessarily something wrong with that. It’s the nature of the human mind (and maybe machine mind, too) at work. It’s a way of figuring things out, of looking for solutions.

What separates us from the machine, though, is that we can turn our attention away from our imaginary stories and focus on the here and now, with all its colors, and tastes, and sounds and smells. We can feel the air moving through us and around us. We can notice our bodies and adjust them at will. We can respond to the action around us. We can decide to play a different movie than the one that we were engulfed in minutes before. Or we can go back to it. But in the meantime, if only for a moment or two, we can be here, consciously alive in the midst of a living, mysterious world. And isn’t that amazing? And isn’t it amazing that we can be amazed?

Wishing you a week where you abandon the trance repeatedly to rediscover the mysterious reality right before you.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay}

When I saw the tiny maple leaves, just emerged from the tip of a branch, I thought about watching one of those time lapse movies. You know, the ones where you see a whole day sweep by from sunrise to dusk in a mere minute or two.

I imagined a little maple seed, the kind that twirls to the ground on helicopter wings, settling into the soil, sprouting, enduring a winter, coming back taller and stronger each spring until one day, it stood before me, a proud little sapling, unfolding its bright new leaves. Soon it will produce helicopter seeds of its own, and the story will go on and on.

The thought reminded me of an exercise I learned once where you traveled back through the history of something to appreciate all that contributed to its presence in your life. If you were eating an apple, for instance, you could trace it back to the store where you bought it and think about all the people who were involved in operating the store. Someone ordered it; someone sold it to the store; someone unpacked it from its crate and set it out for display.

Before that, it traveled on a truck that came from a distributor who bought it from an orchard. The truck had a driver, who worked for a company that bought produce and delivered it to stores. And the truck traveled over roads that were imagined and engineered and built and maintained.

The apple was one of many dozens that came from a tree that thrived in an orchard, soaking in a summer’s sun and rain. And before that it was a blossom, tended by bees, growing on the tree that produced the seed from which it grew. When it ripened, someone picked it and placed it in the crate that was loaded onto the truck.

And now it was in your hand, and you would bite it and taste what how delicious it was and how crisp and juicy and sweet its flesh. And it would nurture you. You were the whole reason it came to be. You and the workers in the orchard, and the builders of crates and trucks and roads and grocery stores.

It’s a worthwhile exercise. It broadens your sense of the connectedness of things and leads you to appreciate the wonder of life’s endless unfolding. And in the end, it leads you to the big questions: How did it all come to be? Where did it come from? Why am I, a tiny life form on a small speck of planet in the midst of a giant and dazzling universe, capable of wondering why? And how am I so lucky to be holding this apple right in my very own hand?

Wishing you a week of sweet wonders, my friends.

Warmly,
Susan

_{Image by günther from Pixabay}

One of my friends posted a news clip on Facebook the other day that told the story of a shopkeeper who put up a billboard over her store facing the highway. In big, white block letters against a dark blue background, it simply said “You Are Enough.”

Now let me ask you something. When you read what it said on the sign, didn’t you feel a little relieved somehow? “You Are Enough.” It’s such a powerful reminder. It’s comforting and reassuring. And all of us can use some of that these days, given the perils and uncertainties of life. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the challenges facing us, by the daily demands, and by all the expectations, both our own and those we think that others hold up for us. It’s easy to worry that we won’t measure up.

Then here we are, cruising down life’s highway, and somebody’s put up a sign to remind us that we are enough.

I like how easy the message is to take, too. It’s not trying to flatter you into thinking that you’re some superstar or something. It’s not saying you’re the best. It’s just reminding you that you are all you need to be right now. You’re okay. The next moment that comes along might need you to be something different, and you’ll be enough for that moment too. Because that’s how versatile you are, you wonderful ordinary human being.

Once I heard somebody on the radio say, “Good enough’s the new gold standard.” The perfectionist side of me found the statement annoying. To me it smacked of “settling for,” of not doing your best, of compromising your standards. I generally lean more toward the “good enough is never good enough” side of the scale.

In real life, though, you rarely get to perfection. Few things or situations exist that couldn’t be tweaked for the better. And we have only so many resources available at any given time. So I finally came to realize that it’s wise to do the best you can from where you are with what you’ve got and then to brush your hands together in satisfaction and say, “good enough.” Sometimes I even laugh at my “good enough” stuff. It’s far from perfection, but it meets the requirements of the moment perfectly well. Just like me, “good enough” can be clumsy, or unfinished, or in need of a coat of paint. But it’s serves the needs and desires of the moment just fine, regardless.

The sign the shopkeeper put up over her store wasn’t fancy. But it got the job done. It said all it had to say. It was enough.

Accepting that you are enough, that what you’ve accomplished is enough, doesn’t mean you give up on wanting to be more, to do more, to do better. What it does do is let you is feel at home with yourself, confident that who you are, just as you are right this very moment, is okay. You are enough. In fact, if you look at the whole of you, you’d probably have to admit that you’re rather amazing all in all. But it’s okay not to admit it, or even to doubt that its true. Because you don’t have to know that you’re amazing. Right now, it’s perfectly enough to know that you are enough.

Claim that.

Wishing you a week strewn with good signs.

Warmly,
Susan

Saying goodbye to April is like watching the petals fall from the garden’s last tulip. It’s such a sad-sweet feeling. In case I haven’t told you, I am in love with springtime. It holds meaning for me on more levels than I could ever hope to tell.

This particular last day of April holds special meaning. For one thing, it begins the week when I will mark my 77^th birthday, which feels, I must say, like a significant landmark. Someday I’ll share with you some of the rewards you reap for getting this far. One of them is an awareness of the preciousness of life.

When spring began this year, I made a commitment to myself to savor every day of it. One day, as I was stepping out into a soft, dewy morning, I remembered the line, “See every day as if it is your first, or your last.” It struck me, and I thought to myself that this could be the last April I will ever see. (You never know.) And how I have reveled in her days!

Each one brought new life, new warmth, new color, the songs of returning birds, the start of the parade of flowers. It was as though the Great Yes itself was sending a visible supply of fresh hope into the world. Every single day. And how swiftly they have passed! Even the cold and rainy ones, despite my wish that each one held three times its allotted hours.

Perhaps it sounds silly that someone could grieve the passing of a month’s worth of days. But that’s how it feels, and I’ve known my share of grief. I heard a story once where a woman caught her husband deeply sobbing one day. When she asked what was wrong, the man told her that he just learned he’d lost one of his best friends. The woman told him she was sorry he was feeling such terrible sorrow. And he wiped his eyes and told her his tears weren’t tears of sorrow, but of happiness. “Happiness!” she said, surprised. He smiled at her and told her that only now did he realize how much he and his friend had loved each other, and what a joy their friendship had been.

My grieving over April’s going is like that. I’m so full of the joy that April gave me that I’m moved to tears.

I think that when we lose loved ones – or even cherished possessions or circumstances – after the initial shock and adjustments have passed, the grief that remains is deeply colored by memories and images of the things we appreciated and so enjoyed, as if we were storing them away for safe-keeping.

One of the most comforting things anyone said to me when, decades ago, I lost a son was, “You never get over the pain, but it finds a special place in your heart to dwell.” The pain, after all, is focused on ourselves, on our loss of the physical experience of someone or something in our lives. We hold onto it because it’s all we have left. But inside it, like a thousand-petaled blossom, are all the memories of that precious experience and of all the adventures and secrets and dreams it brought into our lives.

So I say farewell to April with a heart full of gratitude for her loveliness, and a tear in my eye at her passing.

And tomorrow morning, it will be May.

Wishing you days touched with tender beauty.

Warmly,
Susan

When I was surfing through miscellaneous videos this week I happened across one that said, given all the stress in our worlds these days, it’s important to give ourselves a little extra care. She recommended that we each do 3 things daily to care for ourselves, even if they’re only very small things.

That seemed like good advice, of course, but it brought to mind articles I’d see in magazines with titles like “10 Things to Do for Instant Happiness.” They’d list ten little things in an inane kind of way and you’d get a little smile from it and go on with your day. None of them ever said, “No, Seriously! Do these 10 things.” But maybe they should have.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to see if I could come up with a list of mood-brighteners. I jotted down these:

* Spend a few quality minutes with your pet. Even if your pet is a plant or a rock.

* Go for a walk. Find a tree. Look at its bark, its shape, its leaves, its movement. Put your hand on its trunk and see what you feel.

* Watch a bird fly. Imagine what it feels like to fly like that, to see what a bird would see.

* Put on some great music and let it move you.

* Stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself out loud three things you really like about yourself.

* Get a brief glimpse into the world of elephants from National Geographic on YouTube.

I was right. It was fun to see what ideas flew into my mind. (And finding the elephant video was pretty cool, too.)

But then I remembered what I wanted to focus on was the idea of doing three things each day to show yourself that you care about you. Seriously. In fact, I think consciously choosing to do just three things for yourself each day could be a game-changer.

I already do lots of things in a day because I know I’ll enjoy them. Lots and lots. I dive right into most days on the lookout for treats and surprises. It’s healthy to expect joy in life. But what if I decided to do something inspirational, or pleasurable, or beneficial with conscious attention to the fact that I was doing it for myself simply as a way of caring for me, of appreciating myself? What if I asked myself what I could do for me and then followed through on whatever idea came to mind? What if I took just a moment each day, one in the morning, one at noon, one at night, to do something that brought me comfort, or satisfaction, or contentment, or peace?

What if I made that a habit? What if I committed to doing it every day, no matter what?

I kind of like those “what if’s.” They intrigue me. I think I’m going to give it a whirl. How about you? Seriously.

Wishing you a fine week.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Neil Morrell from Pixabay}

I ran across a description of the human mind as being made up of two parts, the Thinker and the Prover. I had never heard it put that way, and I liked the simplicity and accuracy of the idea.

Earlier in the week, I had been thinking about the phrase, “What you think about expands.” Now I had a simple explanation for how that happens.

Here’s how it works. You get caught in a loop where your Prover goes out to bring your Thinker evidence. And the evidence stimulates you to think that your thought is even truer than it was before. Then, because you’re looking at it with such renewed interest, the Prover brings you even more proof. And your thoughts – with their attendant emotions – intensify. And the Prover brings you more proof.

I sometimes call this a mental movie loop. It’s some story you keep playing over and over in your mind. Maybe if you focus on it enough, you imagine, what happened will somehow change. But at least in our current world, thoughts don’t change events that happened in the past, no matter how passionately we think them

Well then, you tell yourself, maybe if I keep letting the movie play, I’ll see why I’m feeling what I’m feeling and how absolutely justified I am.

Movie loops might spin around forever if some distraction didn’t intervene. Luckily, distractions abound. You can always take a reality break, check out what’s happening, take a breath, take a stretch, look around. (Personally, I like to ask myself three questions: “Who am I? Where am I? What was I doing?” They get me oriented in the here and now instantly.)

Sometimes we get so hooked into some emotionally charged movie-loop that we leap right back into it after it’s interrupted. The Thinker thinks the story line. The Prover brings evidence as proof.

But here’s an interesting thing about the Prover. Its only purpose is to bring you evidence for what your Thinker is thinking. And that means if you change your mind completely and start wondering if this other viewpoint might be true, the Prover will bring you evidence to support that thought. The Thinker is in charge. And here’s the key: You are in charge of the Thinker! You can choose what to think about.

We do that all the time, of course, decide where to put our attention.

When I was a little kid and I went to the movies, a whole string of short features would play before the main one started, and then more would play before the second one started. I always liked those short features. They let my attention move from place to place and my emotions to change with each little story.

These days, I think of looking out my window as a kind of “short feature.” It puts me in the present and lets me shift my thoughts and check in on what’s going on around me. I just look outside my window and tell myself what I see. And it’s different every time, and refreshing. It’s like a little vacation from whatever mental movie had my attention. And then I get to choose whether to resume what thoughts I was thinking or to entertain new ones.

And that reminds me of this wise line: “You can’t stop thoughts from coming to your door, but you don’t have to entertain them.” Remember about the Thinker and the Prover and decide what kinds of thoughts you would genuinely prefer to entertain. Because one way or another, the Prover will bring you proof.

Wishing you fine thoughts and refreshing “short features.”

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by mohamed_hassan on Pixabay}

Let me tell you how this letter came to be.

I was settled at my keyboard with the day’s chores behind me, relaxed and gazing at the orange and rose and turquoise sunset outside my window. My mind was leisurely scrolling through random topics when it paused on a shred of lyrics from the Moody Blues’ album, “Threshold of a Dream.” I hadn’t heard the Moody Blues in years!

I could remember some of the opening lines, but one phrase eluded me. So I zipped over to You Tube and listened to the track. I found what I was searching for, and as a bonus I got to hear one of my all-time favorite lines: “Face piles of trials with smiles. It riles them to believe that you perceive the web they weave. And keep on thinking free.” Good advice.

I slipped into a dream of my own while the song was playing. (I’ll tell you about it another day.) And when I came back to the music from my dream, I discovered several songs had played without my consciously hearing them. The one that was playing now was “The Minstrel’s Song.”

I listened, and the lyrics put into words exactly what I wanted to say to you today. I knew what it was; I felt it so clearly, but it just wasn’t taking shape in my mind. For one thing, it’s Easter. And my mind was contemplating all the interpretations of its meaning and symbolism, all the memories it evoked. And for another thing, it’s spring, and I’m enraptured by its wondrous unfolding. The mix of emotions I was feeling was wide and deep. And all at once, there was this happy song, capturing it so nicely.

I smiled as I listened. I pictured the minstrel wearing the harlequin costume of a joker, an April fool if you will, prancing down a mountain path, heedless of anything but the feeling of delight that filled him. But that’s just a disguise. You can imagine him any way that suits you. What’s important is his song.

Here’s how the first verse describes him: “Words, a simple song a minstrel sings, a way of life in his eyes. Hear the morning call of waking birds when they are singing, bringing love. Love. Everywhere love is all around.”

I thought about the joy I feel in the morning when I take seed out to the birds and they come to my song and we chirp at each other for a bit, and about how grateful I am to begin each day in their company, and how it feels like such a sweet breath of love.

Then the lyrics say that all the nations hear the minstrel’s song as he walks by in their lives. It touches us all. It sings to all of our hearts. And all we have to do is listen. “Listen to the one who sings of love. Follow our friend, our wandering friend. Listen to the one who sings of love. Everywhere, love is around . . . around . . . around.”

That was it exactly, just what I wanted to say. Listen for the love around you, because truly, it’s everywhere. It’s dancing through your heart this very minute.

And that’s the story of how this letter came to be.

Wishing you a week filled with the Minstrel’s song. 

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Hans from Pixabay}

One of my favorite things about owning shelves and stacks of books is that every now and then I’m inspired to shuffle them around. I find the most marvelous things that way. Take today for instance. I stumbled across Kenneth Patchen’s Hallelujah Anyway: A Book of Picture-Poems. My copy is a paperback, a bit tattered and worn. It’s been traveling with me since I bought it new in 1966, the year it was published. It was the title that got me. Hallelujah Anyway. Even way back then, that somehow said it all.

The drawings in it are childlike and the poems are painted across them freehand. But there’s nothing childlike about Patchen’s poems. If life hadn’t kicked him around some, he couldn’t have written this one – one of my favorites: “The world’s not enough really for the kind of rent we have to pay to live in us.” That’s it, the whole thing scrawled across the page.

It tastes bitter at first bite. But sometimes when its words happen into my mind I hear them as an expression of dark humor. Sometimes you have to laugh or you’ll cry. It can get that painful and absurd here. And laughter, however contemptuous, is still the best medicine. Dark humor’s better than none.

I believe in laughter. It’s like the crack that lets in the light. In fact, when I see one of life’s storms approaching from the horizon, I often send out an immediate petition for “strength and a sense of humor.”

But there’s more to Patchen’s poem than its attitude. It’s a blatant statement of the basic truth that the world is not enough to compensate for the suffering we endure here, living inside these human-suits with all these other humans and the insane situations that they manage to create. We deserve a lot more than the world offers.

Happily, more is here. Not out there in the world. But here, inside us. It’s the part of us that wants that Something-Greater-than-the-World. Something that would let us feel whole, and content, and at peace. Something that would let us love ourselves, warts and all, and give us eyes that would see everyone else as deserving of love as well. And its inside every one of us.

It’s not always an easy part of ourselves to find. We have to learn to listen, to recognize its nudge. Life, with all its complications, gets awfully distracting. But the wanting is always there. And it calls to us and says “keep looking.”

Patchen’s poem tells us not to waste time looking for it in the world. The best we’ll find there, and then only if we’re lucky, are teachers and random clues. But life’s genuine rewards – recognition of beauty, and goodness, and truth – come from the core of life within us. And when we find them, they bring such light that all we can do, despite the world’s pain, is shout out loud, “Hallelujah Anyway.”

Wishing you plenty to shout about.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Terri Sharp from Pixabay}