“Deep listening is miraculous for both listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand.” -Sue Patton Thoele

I have never been much of a listener. I have always used my ability to articulate as a way to know myself. I am a fast thinker and am often onto the next idea while half listening to the people I love most. I have been working on my listening skills for a long time, although most of my work comes in the form of apologies in the moments when my unskilled ears and deliberate tongue intrude and bring both misunderstanding and shame in its wake.

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“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time” -John Lubbock

I am changing gears at work and releasing much of the day-to-day responsibilities of the business that has defined my days for as long as I can remember.  I have hours at a time now when my mind is free from the multitude of details that constantly needed tending and the many complex relationships that required attention.  I am finding myself strangely unhurried and feeling the weight of the exhaustion that I have not had time to acknowledge.

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I spent the last few days away with a dear old friend that I have known for 20 years or more.  We walked on the beach, celebrated a wedding, meditated and talked about relationships:  their gifts and sorrows.  We laughed until we cried a couple of times. Our sorrows are different as we each journey through life but the places in us that need and resist remain matched in their growth.

My friend is a lover of poetry and her collections by Mary Oliver move me to seeing life experience with clearer eyes. Embodying our sorrow as a small love that is yours to tend and care for is a gentle and effective way to hold onto our sorrow lovingly without being it. Ms. Oliver is a master of using the fewest words to contain and transform the deepest universal experiences of life.

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“You can’t touch love, but you can feel the sweetness that it pours into everything” -Annie Sullivan

For a long time I believed love happened in the giving and receiving of affection, attentive listening, and showing up. It was in the exchanges where I knew that love was circulating in my life. I never knew that the love that came in was actually sitting in me steeping and changing me just because it was in me.

Maybe for a long time, I was not a worthy container of love. As soon as it came in, the cracks in my self esteem and the doubts that trailed the love would let it leak away. It took me a long time to realize that love given or received is a substance that actually stays in you and sticks to you in drops with each kindness and loving touch.

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“Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

I love weddings. What is more reassuring than attending a ritual whose goal is to promise to love. Regardless of our knowledge or experience with it’s failure, we all want to believe in love and support the couples who are bold enough to take the leap. Wedding rituals are so universal that there is an element of cliché. Yet, even within the anticipated rituals of cake and first dances, they are also a completely unique experience for the couple that takes the leap to define their life together publicly.

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“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend of mine gave me this quote framed more than twenty years ago when I was moving away to a new life. It has been hanging in my home ever since and has come to be one of the truths that I come back to over and over about learning to relate. As soon as we think we have a relationship figured out, we fall into the easy pattern of assuming we know someone. Then something happens that surprises us that wakes us up again to the truth that when it comes to the work of relationships, life is a spiral.

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“Prayer is not a way of making use of God; prayer is a way of offering ourselves to God in order that He should be able to make use of us. It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God’s voice to us….” -William Barclay

I am trying to not just pray like this, but live like it, too. I want to come to my life even when I don’t like how it is going and offer what I have, feel full enough of myself to be of service, to let life lead me. I rarely think of my life or work as an offering, which really even if you aren’t religious is the most we can hope for ourselves. Is money, recognition and status bigger than the willingness to show up and offer yourself up to the people and work you care about.

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“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity” -Francois Gautier

Clarity is another act of grace. It is not at our beck and call, but rather an internal re-organizing and fresh perspective that comes through us when we are open and listening. Clarity is attracted to humility. It can fill us with an authentic and deep connection to our own truth when we give up the idea that we know. Clarity eases the anxious heart with it’s simplicity and focus. It has nothing to do with the situations out there, clarity is a gift that unfolds from the inside and marks our path distinctly and without doubt.

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“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need….” -Rolling Stones

This song starts to play in my head at interesting moments. Lately it is on instant replay as I sort through current events and try to organize them in categories of what I want and what I need. Here again I seem to be proving the Daniel Gilbert’s theory  of Stumbling Around Happiness, which demonstrates that we humans have as little accuracy in remembering what happened in the past as we do at predicting how we will feel in the future. Our mental filters are selective in both directions and our belief that our experience is unique prevents us from really learning from others about things, which we have no experience.

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“Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be.” ~Robert Brault

I have been struggling with the big changes that are happening in my work. The idea of the change, which feels light years away is taking shape and bears little resemblance to the fantasy I imagined in my head, although it fulfills all the requirements that I set for the change. I didn’t figure in the part about having to let go of the whole deal, I thought I would just get someone else to do the parts that I couldn’t manage.

I get glimmers of what it would feel like to really get out of the kitchen. Change addresses and start fresh. These are met with equally strong impulses to put my hands back on the pieces that feel like they are mine because they happened first in my imagination. I fantasize about something in between, a balanced blend of autonomy and interdependence. Like my other fantasies about how investment would look, it probably only exists in a balanced place in my mind.

Looking for a constant in any of these spaces feels like trying to hold onto sand. The more you try to wrap it in your hands, the faster the grains slip through. It is hard to get my bearings. One thing that helps is reminding myself to not take it all so seriously. Then I try to remember what I accomplished to get to this point. I want this to feel like enough, like a personal victory.

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