Making This My Day

Going With the Flow

Water images speak to me, so I can relate to the New Morning theme "Let Life Flow." It's interesting how often water as a symbol of Spirit comes up in the world's religions. I'm thinking of how the Sufi poets refer to "the ocean" to represent God's embrace and how in Buddhism and Taoism, the flow of water represents freedom and naturalness. Going with the flow is a way to describe being on the spiritual path.

One segment of today's show focused on a project founded by Chad Pregracke which is cleaning up the Ohio River. Living Lands & Waters has a full-time staff and as many as 5,000 volunteers in a year. We saw them going along the banks of the river, picking up all kinds of trash that has washed up from the river. As they carried tires and refrigerators and bicycles to their barge, I realized that in the water those items could be real hindrances to the flow. What kinds of obstacles am I encountering in my spiritual life, and how did they get there?

Life coach Margie Warrell talked about the kinds of attitudes that can block the flow. One is resisting what is, not being willing to see things as they are, perhaps because they are something we don't want to accept about ourselves and world. We need courage and a sense of adventure to quit fighting against life.

Writer and minister August Gold and co-author Joel Fotinos observed that confusion and self-doubt can block the flow by making us believe we can't do something. They were talking specifically about prayer and our ability to create an open channel to God.

I think of the water channels all over the planet that are visible from space. In how many different ways and places have I opened myself to the grace flowing from God? Today as I ponder these questions, I'm also remembering a favorite saying from the Buddhist teacher Ajahn Brahm. It's something I learned in the river safety lessons during lifeguard training. "Whenever the current is stronger than you are, that is the time to go with the flow." My spiritual life is about going with the flow of what is stronger than I am alone.

Rolling Up Our Sleeves for Service

I love Rachel Naomi Remen's definition of service. She says it is different from helping (someone weaker) or fixing (someone broken). Service takes place between equals. And there were plenty of examples of this in the New Morning episode on Roll Up Your Sleeves that have inspired me as I go forth into my day.

Michael Ennes is the very talented gourmet chef at the "4 Star Soup Kitchen" in New York. He calls the homeless people who come there for their meals the "Soup Kitchen Guests." Not clients, not "the homeless," but his guests. He talks about building up his guests with good nutrition and the attention of a caring and listening staff.

When a suburban Presbyterian church decided to celebrate its anniversary by taking their ministry of service to an inner city neighborhood, they didn't assume they knew what needed "fixing." They asked the residents what they needed, and then they set out to work with them to accomplish it. How did they gain the trust of the neighborhood? One resident explains, "They did the one small thing they said they would do" and then they did another small thing they said they would do.

Sona Mehring of CaringBridge.org started with a small thing—the idea that people facing a health crisis needed an easy way to connect with their family and friends—and so she created a Web site with user-friendly technology to do just that. Teresa Beemer at the Ewe Bet Ranch had a similar small idea—that young people would enjoy creating something simple for someone in need, such as a knitted hat for a cancer patient. And Val Price—on his morning run, he stops and picks up litter; he's hoping to make his community the cleanest in America. Simple, daily acts of service.

I was especially impressed with Dr. Naif al-Mutawa's Islamic comic books, "The 99." I need to get some of those! The 99 different characters each represent one of the 99 attributes of God, but because the 99 attributes recognized in Islam have a "yin-yang" quality to them—some attributes seem to be the opposite of others—no one attribute is enough by itself. In his comic books, the characters have to collaborate. Nothing can be solved without the involvement of at least three characters.

What a marvelous way of illustrating the concept of service! No one can do it alone, not even God! We need each other.

Getting Out of My Own

These days I associate the word "practice" with spiritual practices, but whatever we do repeatedly we are practicing. If we pray a lot, we are doing a devotional spiritual practice. But when we get angry or frustrated over and over again, we are also practicing. Lots of us practice negative thinking, and over time we get better and better at it. I'm not convinced that negative thinking creates the bad things that happen in our lives as some New Agers claim, but I do know that practicing negative thinking leads to more negative thinking.

The "New Morning" show on "Get Out of Your Own Way" reminded me that it's possible to shift gears when we find ourselves practicing something that is not contributing to our health and well-being. Angela Miller, who overcame an addiction to alcohol, and Stephanie Howard, who recovered from an eating disorder, certainly proved that. So did the novice climbing teams at the Nelson Rock Preserve. As one of them says, "It's amazing what you can do if you take it one step at a time."

But how do you know when to shift gears? What if you are so stuck in a practice, like resentment or fear or failure thinking, that you don't even know you are in your own way? What if you are so stuck in a practice, like resentment or fear or failure thinking, that you don't even know you are in your own way? This is when I find that tools which help you get in touch with your inner wisdom are very helpful. I was fascinated by the process that Gretta Sabinson went through putting little figures in a tray of sand. Picking out the figures from Jungian therapist Rosalind Winter's collection, then placing them in relation to each other along with other objects, helped her uncover her feelings about some changes she was facing. She literally shifted her attitude as she moved the figures.

I'd love to try sandplay therapy the next time I’m facing a transition. But for now I have some very simple tools I use to encourage myself to look at what is happening in my life and what I am practicing. I believe in synchronicity and that Spirit sends me messages in my daily life, so I find that something as simple as a card drawn out of a deck can feel like it is just what I need to look at in the moment. Every week I pull two cards. One is a "Pandora" card from a deck (unfortunately now out-of-print) of about 50 cards, each with one word and a cute little devil illustration. These are challenges, such as scarcity, selfishness, anger, miserliness, or laziness. The other card is an "Angel" card from a deck of cards, each with a word and a cute little angel illustration. These are supportive qualities such as courage, spontaneity, trust, simplicity, and delight.

What's amazing to me is that I can always see how the pair I draw for the week go together. The week I got the challenge of self-importance, I got the angel of flexibility. The week I was faced with paranoia, I got the angel card for honesty. This little practice reminds me that simply by looking anew at issues that come up in my life, I can shift gears. And it also reminds me that support is always available both within and outside of me.

Celebrating Life

I don't think I've ever commented in this blog on the little film clips from Spiritual Literacy, the book that my husband Frederic and I put together 10 years ago, that have been sprinkled throughout the New Morning shows almost since the beginning. They are from a TV series created in Canada called Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, which consists of 26 half-hours, each devoted to one letter in our Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy (Attention, Beauty, Compassion, Devotion, etc. through Wonder, X-The Mystery, You, and Zeal).

Frederic and I love this series unabashedly — and other than choosing the excerpts that are read in voiceover, we didn't even have anything to do with producing it! But we are now distributing it on six DVDs from our website, and we're happy to report that it's being used by small groups in churches, chaplains in prisons and hospitals, retirement communities, and lots of other settings. If you've seen the brief pieces on New Morning, you probably know why. They have a meditative quality that inspire reflection and discussion. The clip clip used in the New Morning show on Celebrations is one of my favorites; it's from the "Gratitude" episode on Volume 2 of the DVD series. I hadn't seen it for a while, and it really leaped out at me because it so beautifully sums up a lot of what is said and shown about the nature of celebrations in the rest of the show.

The quote read in voiceover is from the Christian devotional writer Henri J. M. Nouwen. He's talking about a birthday, but he could be talking about any celebration — a wedding, a prom, a tea party for close girlfriends, or a baby shower. He could be talking about those times when we celebrate our cultural heritage, like the Samoan fire dancer Fo'i Tuitama, or our spiritual connection, like Elizabeth Wandelmaier did when she had a Bat Mitzvah. The whole point is to celebrate life, in all its amazing forms, and to express gratitude: "Thank you for being born and being among us."

Nouwen goes on to say that a birthday reminds us of the goodness of life and so, we really should celebrate them every day. When we were not able to get away for a special trip for my 60th birthday, I decided that I would celebrate my birthday on the 5th of the month for my entire 60th year. I didn't have a birthday celebration every month, but I did celebrate more than usual that year. And each time, I said, "It's good that I'm alive. It's good that I'm walking on this earth."

Of course, celebrations are more than just about the person being honored. Nouwen ends with that point. Celebrations are about connecting with others. How wonderful it would be if every day we remembered this: "Let's be glad and rejoice. This is the day that God has made for us to be and to be together."

No Planned Journey

"A planned journey is an oxymoron." So says Terry Hershey in the New Morning show on Beginnings and Endings. For the longest time, I didn't know what an oxymoron was; I had to look it up in the dictionary: "a combination of contradictory or incongruous words." I get it now. Just like it says in that other folk saying, "It's about the journey, not the destination," what's important is what you meet with curiousity and love and compassion and kindness as you go through your life moment by moment. And "Nobody promised you a rose garden" either.

I get a little grouchy sometimes when wisdom sayings and well-meaning friends and even spiritual teachers advise me that life is all about beginnings and endings. At my age (in my 60s), you'd think I'd be done with beginnings and not quite due for endings. But that's not life. That's an expectation or a dream.

The people in today's show surely discovered that—jazz musician Henry Butler, who lost his home and most of his belongings in Hurricane Katrina, and Linda Hunt, whose beloved daughter was killed in a bus accident. Both found ways to carry on and keep giving to the world around them. And how about Olga Bloom! She's living proof that elders are some of the best mentors of how to begin things. Her inspiration to start the Bargemusic program came at the end of her own long career as a working musician in New York's theaters and studios. She thought of it because she had seen a lot of talent that needed another place for its expression. She did not have the information or the experience to come up with this idea when she was younger.

So, yes, I do get it. I get it that I can't even plan what next month will bring, let alone next year. My journey is just happening. And as Terry says, surprises are good. It's all good.

What Did You Ask Today?

Rabbi Nilton Bonder tells a story about Isido Rabi, the 1944 Nobel Prize winner in physics. When he was interviewed about his achievements, he said he owed it all to his mother. "When we got out of school, all the mothers would ask their children what they had learned that day. My mother would inquire instead, 'What did you ask today in class?'"

I, too, was encouraged as a child to ask questions. My parents were lifelong learners and modeled what it meant to be curious about something and then go about finding out more information about it. My father was a doctor with a great love of knowledge. Many evenings after dinner, he'd go to the family room and pick up a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, open it to a page, and start reading. After a while, he'd look up and say, "Here's something interesting." I soon concluded from these random discoveries that pretty much everything was interesting to him.

Several segments in the New Morning show on "The Right Questions" focused on asking questions in relationships. This process is a more complicated than reading the encyclopedia. The answers will vary person by person and from one time to the next. To me, this says that the questions need to be what Quaker educator Parker Palmer (A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life) calls "honest, open questions." They are the kind you cannot ask while thinking, "I know the right answer to this and I sure hope you give it to me." These questions can't be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." They encourage someone to explore as they are answering what they really think and believe.

Harriette Cole suggested some especially good questions for a potential mate, but really, you could use them with almost anyone. "When you were growing up, when you got in trouble, what did you get in trouble for?" This tells you something about the values taught in someone's home. An open honest follow-up question might be: "What would get you in trouble today?" Or how about, "What does the word trouble mean to you?"

I think the key to this process is to ask questions without any expectation of what is an acceptable answer, i.e., without judgment. Unlike my father's encyclopedia inquiries, these questions are not about satisfying my curiosity; they are about deepening my understanding of another person and even, perhaps, that person's understanding of him- or herself.

The Secret Is Respect

I was quite taken with the interview with Mathew Boggs and Jason Miller in the New Morning show about Wonder. These two twentysomething bachelors found themselves wondering what makes for a good marriage. So they set out on a 15,000-mile journey to interview long-married couples about how they've done it. Having just passed the 38-year mark in my own marriage, I decided I'd like to check out the findings of their Project Everlasting book and film. Always good to compare notes.

The secret, Boggs and Miller discovered, is respect. They were very impressed with the way the couples interacted with each other, all the while demonstrating that they not only loved each other, they respected each other. I agree. Respect is key.

The same quality was evident in the friendship of Annabelle Gurwitch and Tonya Pinkins, who have been friends for 30 years. They come from very different backgrounds and have learned that their different perspectives on life can come in very handy, especially when one is faced with a challenge and needs a new way of looking at it. They respect each other's viewpoints and have built trust out of that basic attitude.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is often quoted as saying, "My religion is kindness." But what is kindness? It's having respect for others enough to want to do good deeds for them.

I was once talking at a lunch table at a conference about what I thought were the most important spiritual practices. I mentioned the famous line from the mystic Meister Eckhart, "If the only prayer you say in your whole life is thank you, that would suffice." Someone at the table said, "That just sounds like good manners. Are you saying that spirituality is just good manners?" Yep. I think so.

Many religious traditions talk about humans as being made in the image of God. And so when we interact with each other, we should be respectful, we should be kind, we should have good manners. After all, this is not just some lump across the room from us. This is the image of God.

Simmering

Howard Thurman, an African-American theologian, mystic, and founder of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, used to advise people not to just leap out of bed in the morning, but instead to pause for a few minutes upon waking to let things "simmer." I thought of that when Dr. Dale Atkins said during the New Morning show on Clarity that one of her five S's for a balanced life is "Savor."

Simmering—and savoring—gives you time to become aware of important things about the upcoming day beyond your "To Do" list. When I take those extra few moments in the morning, sometimes in bed, sometimes over a cup of coffee and my journal, I can assess how I'm feeling physically and emotionally, look at what I need to attend to during the day on a soul level, and identify who might need my support and where I might need support. I also use those moments to remember that it's a new day and what happened yesterday is in the past. Sometimes I find I need to summon my energy (I'm not a morning person), especially if it's still attending to yesterday's issues and news.

Sometimes, too, letting things simmer is not enough to get me in balance so that I can see clearly what's right in front of me today. But to help in those times, I'm taking two more pieces of advice from today's show. Another one of Dr. Atkins' sanity saving S's is "Surroundings." I do have special places that nurture and restore me, but my favorite, Antigua in the Caribbean, is a little hard to get to on the spur of the moment. But Dr. Atkins is right; I can go there in my mind's eye, summoning up the peaceful harmonious feelings I experience when I am there. I can also look at pictures that take me there. There's even a virtual tour online of my favorite beach.

The second suggestion came from Skip Ewing, a singer/songwriter and ordained Buddhist priest in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh. We're currently putting together an e-course on Practicing Spirituality with Thich Nhat Hanh, so I have been trying out some of his suggestions for becoming aware, getting clear about what is important, and living a balanced life. Ewing gave a simple practice that I really like: "Take a breath and be happy that you are breathing."

Repotting Myself

Since I don't have a green thumb, when it came time to repot some of our house plants, I asked my friend Joy, who I think has green hands, to help me. We went to the neighborhood plant store and got some potting soil and some stones to put on the bottom of the pot for drainage, and then we picked out some pots. "Don't get too-big pots," she advised. "You just want to step up to the next size." She later explained that if I put the plant in much bigger pots, they will spend all their energy growing roots to fill out the pots instead of creating new leaves and flowers. That makes sense to me.

For the New Morning show on "A New Beginning," Diana Holman and Ginger Pape were in the studio talking about their book Repotting, using the gardening term as a metaphor for life. As Timberly struggled to get an African violet out of its pot, I identified with the plant. It's hard to be pulled out of your nice cozy pot that you have grown into, filling every little corner of it with a piece of you. I look around my home and city, reflect upon my family and friends, and I can see that my roots have grown deep and broad.

Do I need a little more room in order to grow? Have I depleted the nourishment in my current situation; do I need to find some fertilizer to help me grow? What would that be? Study, silence, a vacation? Am I stuck, root-bound, doing the same old same old things day after day? All good questions, which could be asked daily. Certainly, these are good things to ask myself as the seasons change, and plants indoors and out throw out evidence of real growth.

Still, I'm strangely comforted by that image of a plant being set in a pot just a bit larger than the one it's been in. That way, roots, leaves, and flowers can all grow. So I'm going to tweak the metaphor. Repotting is good for us, but for mind (flowers), body (leaves) and soul (roots) to have a chance to grow holistically, it may be best to take it one step at a time.

A Scrapbook of Surprises

I stopped into a stationery store that I hadn't visited for several years last week and noticed that it had doubled in size and the new section was devoted entirely to scrapbooking supplies. Timberly was right when she said on the New Morning show about Milestones that scrapbooking is huge these days.

There were aisles of special papers, racks and racks of stickers, a wide assortment of colored pens and markers, and a variety of tapes and glues. It was a bit overwhelming for someone like me who is not into crafts. But, I told myself, I used to do a lot of page layouts and pasteups of our newsletters, in the days before you could do all that on your computer, and I did that well ... maybe I should take up scrapbooking. It didn't look so hard, when Sandi Genovese demonstrated how to make a 12-page birthday scrapbook.

Not this month, though. Maybe this summer when we clean our storeroom. I know of several boxes in there that are marked "memorabilia." That means they are full of things that could go into a scrapbook or a time capsule (explained on the show as a box with three-dimensional things you couldn't put in a book). Some of this memorabilia I haven't looked at in decades. (Maybe I should just throw it out instead of taking all the time to put it in a scrapbook.)

I like to keep stuff that reminds me of happy times. Just looking at a party favor or a stone I found on a favorite beach, I seem to re-experience a time and place. But after looking at The Scrapbooking Journey: A Hands-On Guide to Spiritual Discovery by Cory Richardson-Lauve, I realized that a project could be more than just remembering or recreating a past experience. It could be a mindfulness practice. I could make a scrapbook of things that "caught my eye"—unusual shapes, a striking color combination, a face, from pictures I have taken or images I've found on the Internet. (Google Images is great for this—just be careful not to violate a photographer's copyright.) Or I could create a scrapbook of my hopes and dreams. Or my fears and fantasies. The possibilities are endless.

>From the story about Sylvia Boorstein's 70th birthday party, I got another idea. She talked about her early life and how when she was a young woman, she would never have imagined that she would at 70 be teaching meditation in the way of the Buddha. Every moment is precious, she reminded us, and everything in life is a surprise. Speaking like a Buddhist, she called me to the present moment, "Oh, look's what's happening!" That would make a great title for a scrapbook. Take one day, any day, and look what's happening: all surprises.

Seeing Ourselves Through Birds

Anybody regularly reading this blog has probably noticed that I sometimes take a rather odd route from the ideas or images in a New Morning show to the experiences of my day. So be warned: how I got from the show on "How We See Ourselves" to this post is not very obvious!

To begin, just before I tuned in the program, I was sitting at my computer watching a webcam trained on a pair of Peregrine Falcons in San José, California. This pair, named Clara and José, have three babies (called eyases) who are growing by leaps and bounds. Last week they were just bobbing heads that poor Mom had trouble feeding; now they are practically pursuing her around the nest box.

I was delighted, then, when I turned on the TV and the first segment on New Morning was about birds. I didn't know there's a park in New York City where Chinese immigrants take their birds for a day of singing in the fresh air. I may just have to go down there and hang out with them for a while. (The webcam does not have sound.)

There's a listserv for people watching the falcons, and I enjoy reading it for all the information about these birds' habits. But mostly I find it fascinating to see how much we humans project our qualities upon the falcons.

The posters on the list admit as much, with such comments as (and I'm paraphrasing here) "I know I'm anthropomorphizing, but isn't José just the best dad the way he sticks around the nest and cleans up after the kids?"

Or "Did you see that look José and Clara just gave each other as if to say 'What are we going to do with these kids?' " The birds are described as "clever" and "affectionate." There's lots of talk about how the family is bonding.

So here's how I connect this to today's New Morning theme on "how we see ourselves." It is always instructive to notice what qualities—both positive and negative—we notice in others.

You know the old saying, "If you spot it, you've got it." Could it be that we on the falcon listserv are noticing in the birds what we really see in ourselves?

Seeing Outside the Box

"Imagination has to be practiced," Episcopal priest and theologian Michael Battle said on the New Morning show on being "Outside the Box." I agree, but I think imagination is also a quality that many people either take for granted or assume is a gift that they must have naturally and can't develop. "I'm not very artistic," they say. Today's show gave us several examples of people who might not have thought they were capable of doing something artistic, creative, or outside their comfort zone (one way to define outside the box), and found they were: carpenters writing poetry, Mary painting doors, the three mothers singing in concerts.

The segment that really made the point that imagination can be developed with practice was Sandra Regalado's exercise on the streets of New York. She took ordinary objects—a glass vase, a lampshade, a piece of foam, bubble wrap—and asked people to tell her what it was and what else, besides the obvious use, would they do with it. I loved this and wanted to go out in my neighborhood and repeat it just to remind myself how imaginative people can be. This would be a great exercise for a youth group to do in their town. And the adults they interviewed would probably get a big kick out of it, too!

Let me share a "pop vision"—the sequences of images—that came to me as I watched this segment. First, I loved it near the end when a guy told Sandra that a piece of bubble wrap would make a good carpet. I could see that. They laid the bubble wrap down on the street and declared it would make a good "red carpet." We get a lot of bubble wrap in the packages of books that come to us for review, so I saw us opening the mail and laying down a red carpet of bubblewrap from our door. Then on screen, somebody walked down the bubble wrap carpet and the bubbles popped. What a grand entrance that would make. I thought, "Wow. I would never have thought of that. From the very ordinary comes this extraordinary moment!" I saw paparazzi flashes going and the crowd gathering in, and I'm walking down the bubble wrap into the rest of my life, and people are clapping and cheering, and I'm just beaming.

And then the crowning vision came to me. I remembered the saying from the Talmud that when a human being walks down the street, a whole host of angels precedes him or her saying, "Make way, make way for the image of God." There they are, just ahead of us, if we see outside the box.

Taking Responsibility

I was reminded the other day that one of the tasks of adolescence is learning how to take responsibility for one's actions because they all have consequences. The subject came up in a conversation about the United States, which, if you think about it, is in its adolescence. The country is only a couple hundred years old, and compared to the countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, it is a mere kid. So one of the tasks Americans need to be about these days is learning what their way of life means in terms of its impact upon others—and then taking responsibility for that.

For example, consider our plentiful and cheap food supply. What makes that possible? Where does it come from? When we eat meat and poultry, do we think about what happens at the places where most of it comes from—factory farms?

Michelle Alley-Grub and her husband Chris have done that research, and what they discovered made them dedicate their lives to giving some rescued farm animals a safe, pain-free, and loving home. New Morning's visit to their Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary brought tears to my eyes. I loved seeing the laying hens scratching around in the first straw they had ever known. And the little pig (reminding of the Babe from the movie) running across the barnyard. The description of Michael, the old goat, chained to a fence for 14 years, broke my heart, but it was great to see him happy having his chin scratched now.

I know many horrible things happen to the chickens, goats, cattle, pigs, lambs, and other animals that end up on our plates. The first step in taking responsibility is being informed. And here's a way to do that that the adolescent in all of us will enjoy: watching a series of award-winning web films modeled on "The Matrix" movies that expose the horrors of factory farms from the animals' point of view. The website also puts you in contact with organizations you can join and other ways you can take action for farm animals today.

Smell Spirituality

Most of the churches I've attended over the years have not used "smells and bells." There are no chimes to mark key moments of the service, and the minister or priest does not pass incense over the congregation or the altar. No disrespect intended, but I still laugh at the story of the drunk who wandered into a Catholic church during mass one day and tugged on the robe of the priest, whispering, "Pardon me, but your purse is on fire."

With little experience with the communal use of incense, I am still quite taken with the use of it in personal devotions -- such as the simple practice as lighting a small stick of incense at the beginning of a prayer or meditation period and staying quiet until it burns down, letting the incense define sacred time and space.

Yacine Bell in the New Morning show on "Awakening" helped me see the use of incense in a broader way. She uses incense to get in touch with her emotions, and I know that certain smells have definite effects on me. Citrus is invariably refreshing and uplifting. Nutmeg and cinnamon are calming and put me in a nesting mood, probably because they remind me of my mother's kitchen. The smell of Clorox® puts me back at the swimming pools of my childhood.

Bell takes it further than just associations with smells. She says that used with intention, incense brings you into your center. It quiets you and connects you with your own energy and the soul of the plant it came from. It also connects you to the places and the people where it originated. When you use it correctly, she points out, the smoke dances up and you are "knocking on heaven's door." Since I believe that spiritual practice consists of three kinds of connection -- to self, others, and God -- I now recognize the use of incense as smell spirituality!

I did a little looking around and discovered that there are places online where I can order things to use for smell spirituality. At SpiritualScents.com, for example, I can get a "Celtic Blend" of resin incense, a blend of frankincense, myrrh, benzoin, and lavender, to be used for protection and purification. Or I may try a "Forest Blend," since I don't get to the woods very often, and it would be nice to be in touch with that energy. There are incense sticks and cones from China, Japan, and India. I already like to burn bundles of sage, dispensing the smoke through my home as I think about clearing out old, dead energy, and letting go of the past. On New Morning, Bell says one of her favorite is sweetgrass. It integrates the mind, body, and spirit. I think I need to smell and enjoy some of that.

Lists of Loves

Today I'm thinking about how making lists can be a spiritual practice. I don't know about you, but I make lists all the time, usually "To Do" lists. I have lists on little notecards in my purse. I have a list on an Excel spreadsheet on my computer titled "To Do with Time Needed." I have lists of books I want to read stored in my shopping cart in an online bookstore.

On New Morning, Chinwe Grace Osuagwu suggested that we can discover our passions, and thereby stoke the fire within us, by making a list of 100 things we love. My immediate reaction to that, like Timberly's, was "100! How about 5?" Osuagwu's response, though, was very helpful. She said the purpose of the exercise was to stretch yourself, to see if you might discover new things about yourself beyond the obvious. So it requires more time. So you have to unhitch loves that you typically put together. So you may need to look for loves in different areas of your life (what do I love in my family life, at work, in nature, in my history, in myself?) Somewhere in all that, Osuagwu maintains, you will come upon your passions, and from there you can discern what you are called to do to be of service to the world.

Put this way, making a list is indeed a spiritual practice. The activity connects us with our true selves, with others and the whole Creation, and with God. And it's something that you do need to practice over and over again.

My favorite book about journaling is The New Diary, by Tristine Rainer. She recommends that you regularly make lists in your journal. She explains: "A list can perform any of the functions of the four natural modes of expression. It can enumerate feelings, sense impressions, intuitions, or thoughts without using complete sentences. Lists are time-savers and time-condensers. ... A list will help you focus, tame, and comprehend wayward parts of your experience."

My own journals are full of lists: Moments of Happiness. Fears. Things To Do (perhaps too often I make these). Gratitudes. Places I'd Like to Visit. Today I'll start on a new one: 100 Things I Love. But first, I'd better get some things off that To Do list to make time for this one.