Good Morning!

It has been odd not blogging daily for the past week or so. First WordPress was having technical difficulties for about a week and telling me my page didn't exist. Then, I've been needing a lot of sleep. Last night I went to sleep at 8:30 pm. I woke up at 5 am to call a friend who asked for a wake up call. Then I meditated and dozed until 6:30 am. 10 hours? I rarely do that. I do have a little bit of a sore throat. Maybe that's it.

I have 2 blogs started. One is called "Grateful" which started as an exploration of the word. I'm not sure the word is all that interesting. It comes from a Latin word that means "pleased." I actually wrote a whole blog on this on my laptop, clicked "publish" and somehow lost it. The other one is on the pun of being "grounded." I haven't written much on it yet, but I've got ideas about it.

Things are flowing more smoothly in the world for me right now. I've been given so much. There are lots of adjustments still to be made and lots for me to let go of and open up to. Most of my progress seems to be inner progress. Some of it is showing up in more outward ways, though.

I was miraculously given a car that runs. It needs some maintenance and I want to have it checked out for anything it might need beyond that. I had an incredible energy work session on Monday night that is the highest I've ever been on energy like that. Ever since I saw Swami Vishwananda several weeks ago, it has been easier to access that connected transcendent state of being. I feel like I'm getting my sea legs with it.

People in my life are being supportive and showing up so clearly with me. I just feel so cushioned and held. All the love I've ever wanted is surrounding me. Sure, I'd love to be dating someone, and at the same time I'm not lacking in love at all.

So, I feel a little bit caught up. I'll work on "Grounded" and "Grateful." Those are ongoing.

More to come!

Blessings & love, Ann

Maybe, Maybe Not

Wheee!  I found the whole story.

This is very much like what I am saying about incest. Everyone wants to say it's all bad and that perpetrators are some kind of monsters. Maybe. Maybe not.

Jack Groverland told this story in a taped sermon from Unity of Boulder that a friend sent me. Now I've found it on Rob Brezny's www.freewillastrology.com today:

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How Pronoia Works

There was once a poor farmer who could afford to own just one horse. He cared well for the animal, but one summer night, it escaped through a weak fence and ran away.

When his neighbors discovered what had happened, they visited to offer their condolences. "What bad luck!" they exclaimed. The farmer replied, "Maybe. Maybe not."

A week later, the fugitive horse sauntered back to the homestead, accompanied by six wild horses. The farmer and his son managed to corral all of them. Again the neighbors descended. "What great luck!" they exclaimed. "Maybe," the farmer replied. "Maybe not."

Soon the farmer's son began the work of taming the new arrivals. While attempting to ride the roan stallion, he was thrown to the ground and half-trampled. His leg was badly broken. The neighbors came to investigate. "What terrible luck!" they exclaimed. The farmer replied, "Maybe. Maybe not."

The next day, soldiers visited the farmer's village. Strife had recently broken out between two warlords, and one of them had come to conscript all the local young men. Though every other son was commandeered, the farmer's boy was exempted because of his injury. The neighbors gathered again. "What fantastic luck!" they exclaimed. "Maybe," the farmer said. "Maybe not."

The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

Brezny & Groverland know what they're talking about. Have you discovered this in your responses to your life yet?

Love, Ann

Thank God for Blogs

Word Press has been down all day (and leaving the most amusing and friendly messages about the status, thank you), so it’s 2 in the afternoon and I’m finally just blogging in Word until I can post this. Christ may have risen, but Word Press has not yet.

I was reading Heinlein’s “Expanded Universe” last night and in the foreword to “Solution Unsatisfactory,” he addresses something that may be ailing me. Until I read this, I had no idea that Heinlein never intended to be a writer. I thought it was his life’s ambition given the kind of success he had and the mark he made on not just writing, not just sci-fi, but the world. Clearly, the man spent hundreds of thousands of hours of his life writing.

He came to it by accident. Basically, he needed to pay off a mortgage and writing is what did it. He fully intended to quit after that, but he couldn’t. He tells how, at a writer’s meeting, one of the members asked if he knew any retired writers. He didn’t. Do you? I don’t. Apparently we don’t retire. We may stop selling our work, they say, but we never retire. In fact, Heinlein says if he goofs off for more than 2 or 3 days without being strenuously occupied elsewhere, he feels ill, gets the jitters and only writing 300,000 words will get him to feeling good again.

Rut roh. I wonder if this has happened to me?

I mean, it used to be that I plagued certain email lists with my unsolicited prose. I got a few replies and a little support for it, but not a lot. It wasn’t particularly satisfying. Unfortunately, I need an audience. I know this about myself.

For the past year I’ve done a little bit of professional writing for some friends to use on web pages they build. It’s kind of fun. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth, but other times, words flow effortlessly from my fingertips and it’s a blast. I know this blog is read. I can see the counter go up every now and then.

Hopefully, this is a place where I can express and hone these ideas into a book. Your comments help me with that . . . a lot.

We question our thinking about it and rise again, following Christ’s example, and the example of the best teachers of any culture you care to name. Personally, I include Krishna, Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Mohammed, Buddha, Rumi, Victor Frankl, Moses, Abraham, Osho, Mata Amritanandamayi, Swami Vishwananda, and many, many others whom I have not yet met. There are teachers and awakened ones in every culture, and more of us wake up every day.

Christ is risen, yes. He isn’t the only one, nor did He mean to be. He set an example.

I’m trying to follow it, and I’m asking you to join me.

Incest is not the end of our lives. We are meant to rise again.

Entitlement/Indebtedness or Gratitude?

I am not yet complete with this subject. I am tempted to say it may be a while, especially as it has already been decades, and I am totally open to resolving it instantaneously and being done with it forever, and anything in between. It comes to me, as I contemplate that that in another sense, I am never going to be "complete" with this.

Entitlement/Indebtedness is the yin yang of duality. Gratitude is the Whole. No that's not quite right. Gratitude is more like the door to the Whole.

My definition of God is "the Whole that is greater than the sum of the parts." Gratitude is a door to God, to self realization, to Truth. (mental note: put up a definitions page)

As I continued my meditations on the entitlement issues (see previous blog) I realized that on the other side of this pernicious question I found sense of an indebtedness that could never be repaid.

I don't mean indebted as in indebted to Spirit for our lives, I mean the ugly one, the idea that nothing we do will ever be enough. I mean the unreasonable one where we think that if we don't make our beds just right we will die, or rather, be killed.

When we are raised in dysfunctional families, these fears seem real. They may have even been real when we were children. These fears tend to generalize to our entire lives. They generalize to any authority figure or authoritative concept, including employers, the government, money as a concept, or any number of things that we see as having any power over us.

There is another choice.

"Choose once again."   A Course in Miracles

Like I said, I'm working on that one. To say much more right now, might be premature. I can think out loud some more, but not, I think today.

Tomorrow is Easter, the Resurrection.

This is a personally meaningful holy day for me. I feel like I have been resurrected many times in my life.

Gratitude… being grateful has restored the years the locusts had eaten.

As Robert Frost said, "and that has made all the difference."

Full Moon Blessings

I'm so excited by what just happened that I decided to blog it write away. (Sorry, still reading Spider Robinson!)

Lots of people have frustrations about the time of the full moon. We did, too, and they all turned out to be blessings.

So, Erica and I go out to her car to go home from work and her ignition won't turn. Seems like a mechanical thing, not an electrical thing, so she keeps jiggling the key, trying to get it to go. No go.

She was getting pretty exasperated, really, but she was controlling it and trying not to cry. I understand that one. I've been there.

I was checking inside to feel whether it was best for me to stay with her or get on a bus and head home so she and her boyfriend could deal with the car without having to take me home.

So, one of the guys we work with, Craig, comes out to his really cool 1947 car and starts showing it to Jane, our receptionist. I decided to hop out and go see the cool old car. Craig drives me and Jane around the parking lot (hitting a curb on the way) and then back to park next to Erica.

So I tell Craig what's going on and Erica says sure, he can try the ignition.

He does.

It starts!

So Erica calls her boyfriend who is halfway to where we are. They're going to meet and work out what to do.

In the meantime, I'm now wondering whether Erica should take me over to Audrey's where I might be able to get a ride in to work tomorrow. Just to check, as a back up I called Audrey to see if she was even in town. She is, and furthermore, she is planning on riding her Harley to work.

(I've never had a friend that rides a Harley, especially not a girlfriend, and I think it's pretty cool!)

Oh, and Audrey's mother has just been in an accident. She isn't hurt, but when Audrey called her earlier, she was dealing with the police and paramedics, and if she calls, she needs to take it and call me back. No problemo!!!

Excellent!

Erica, in the meantime, is fighting back tears, and trying not to burst with frustration. Understandable. When she hears of Audrey's magnanimous support, she just relaxes totally. She smiles. Her face shines. All is right in the world again.

Me, I'm all humble here. Audrey and Erica have been supporting me for months and months. Finally, I'm able to feel like I did a little bit to help Erica in return.

And… Audrey doesn't know it yet, but after she left, and in the middle of typing this blog (after she fed me dinner!) I did all the dishes in the sink and started her laundry. I hope it helps.

I just feel ridiculously blessed to have such fabulous friends. 

May you have a very Good Friday, Ann

Mornings

I love mornings.

It's a good thing, too. If I'm not up by 5:30 am, this blog doesn't get written until the end of my day. That's okay, at least it gets written, but it isn't necessarily my most "on" time.

This week I've ended up writing at the end of my day a few times. I didn't really like that. I didn't feel so inspired. I have kept my commitment to Break the Silence every day, though. Easter is Sunday. That's the end of Lent.

Isn't it funny?

I was never raised Catholic, but I make the joke that I avoided being raised Catholic by virtue of my mother's adoption. The theory goes that a Catholic teenager got pregnant and my mother and her adoption were the result. I may never know. Mother has so far refused to find out, and I can't since I am not her. A friend of mine offered to check the Mormon records for me. I tried that once upon a time. I may not have known how to do it.

Anyway, mornings are my thing. If you want to catch me at my best, catch me in the morning.

I used to think I was a member of a vanishing species, "The Morning Person," but then I met some new friends and found a group of people who actually wake up as early as I do. I feel like I'm in the minority. I could be wrong. I don't know any studies on that. Do you? But sometimes it feels like a lot of the people I know are "Night People." Not me.

I've wondered how things would be different if my parents had not been adopted, if my father had not spent a couple of years in a foster home, if, if , if…

Pointless, really.

I love Katie's question, "How do I know X should have happened?"

Because it did.

When we argue with reality or with what happened, it's like saying God didn't know what the plan was.

How could that be true?

Good morning!  Ann

Entitlement or Gratitude?

The single most difficult and insidious difficulty I have had in gaining a true perspective about incest and everything else in my life may be the sense of entitlement that undercuts even my best intentions.

When we believe we are hurt or wronged or betrayed, we start to think that somebody owes us.

They don’t.

How many times have we thought we were special or deserved special treatment or that because we (fill in the blank) that others owe us. It doesn’t stop with thinking the initiator of the incest owes us. It goes way beyond that. Next, the non-offending parent owes us. Then other members of the family.

We begin to think that society owes us, too.

Nobody owes us anything.

At the same time, we are always fully and completely supported by the Grace of God (the Universe, Spirit, Goddess, name your term.)

More on this later.

Love, Ann

Christs or Christians?

Hello All,

I agree with a minister I once heard who said we don't really need more Christians, we need more Christs.

I find all I need in two statements from the Bible:

"Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven."

"The Kingdom of Heaven is within."

Oh, and there was a corollary to that:

"Greater things than these, ye shall also do."

Discussion to follow tomorrow… I think. Depends on how the Spirit moves me.

Love, Ann

Mothers & Non-Offending Parents

It's always a little scary to talk about the seemingly safe parent. They may have been a seeming refuge from the perpetrator of the actual incest.

But they're not.

At the least they are blind to what is going on, at the worst, they are aware and tolerating it. Neither of which is pretty. Neither of which takes parental responsibility and removes the child from the situation. Not to mention that the marriage they have with a pedophile has got to have some problems.

Still, I can afford Mother the same compassion I afford Daddy. "Forgive them. They know not what they do."

Mother should have known.

Who would I be without that story? She knew or she didn't. I'm still perfectly fine either way.

I can take it to the most basic thoughts. Woman married to man is what I come up with.

My mother eloped twice in high school. Those marriages were annulled by her father. I have never, and probably will never know the full story of why she thought she had to elope to escape her parent's home.

That makes her marriage to my father her third in less than 4 years and before she was 20 years old. For some reason, she was desperate to be married and out of her parents home. What I saw of my grandparents is probably not the same as what she, as an only, and adopted child, was dealing with. Maybe they were older and wiser by the time I was born. I am the oldest of four children. I was born 8 months & 17 days after the wedding. Premature, weighing less than 5 lbs when I left the hospital.

My father is a sweet talker, too. He's one of those people who can sell ice cubes to Eskimos. Mother says that whenever he was feeling guilty about his affairs, she got a nice piece of jewelry. I've seen them. They are indeed nice. Daddy owned his own business, traveled a bit for conventions. We lived pretty well. In the 60's it was not quite a given that a woman could get a job that would help her enough to support 4 children. Possible, yes, but that's a lot.

It's easy to have compassion for that. What would I have done in the same situation? We may like to think we would have done the right thing, been heroic, etc., but unless you've been there yourself, you don't really know. And even if you have, it could have been different in her shoes.

How do I know my mother should have stayed with my father? Because she did.

Obviously, this is another "whose business" question. (See yesterday's blog.) Whose business am I in when I have judgments about what my mother should and shouldn't have done? Most definitely not my own.

Well, that's a start. I'm sure I'll have more to say on this from time to time.

I'm really grateful for the way my mother and I grew closer by living through this together. We both know that we are okay, no matter what happens.

And I'll tell you a little secret. The subtitle of this blog, "There's one more mile to go" . . . was her idea.

Love, Ann

Whose Business Am I In When I Think That Thought?

This is one of Katie's best questions.

This is part of why I sound uneasy about my father's marriage. I have both information and judgments about his patterns and choices that are really none of my business. Still, they do make me sad. It is very sad to see a perfectly capable and lovable man struggle as much as he does.

Turn it around.

That's when it gets really uncomfortable.

Where do I find this pattern in my own life? Where do I find that I, a perfectly lovable and capable person, am struggling where I need not struggle?

Well, just about everywhere. Money, love, work, health. There is still struggle for me in all of those places.

If I sound sad or uneasy, it is my own.

Thank God for my father-as-mirror. This is what The Work is for! I see ME out there wherever I look. And that is where I can wake up and realize that is all about me, not the person I think I'm judging.

One of the most powerful Worksheets we can do is "Whom have you not forgiven completely?" "Who do you think you can never forgive?"

I can never forgive (fill in the blank with a name) because (fill in the blank with the reason.)

Then Inquire:

Is it true?

Can I absolutely know that this is true?

How do I react, how do I live my life, when I believe this thought?

Who would I be without this story?

Turn it around.

Go to Katie's web site http://www.thework.org/ for more on this. Read her book, Loving What Is and I Need Your Love – Is That True?

I've got some Work to do.  

Love, Ann