MaryBeth ingram
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Yes.
What’s missing is deep thought, or probing investigation into why it’s just so quickly “yes“. You all go much deeper than I do. I admire that. I guess my “yes“ comes from years of pathway preparation. Where this will unfold and or blossom in my life will be fascinating to witness.
For me, context is everything on this topic.
I’ve been an employee. I’ve been an employer. I’ve been paid to do work. I’ve paid others to do work. I built a small service and consultancy business that still thrives today under the ownership of another family member.
I’m more than happy to be done with the tasks of tracking income from sales, expenses, depreciation of equipment, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), travel, marketing, and this is a small list! No more complicated, agonizing tax return filings. I’m retired now and it’s all straightforward and simple. But I’m 74 and many of you are in the thick of your careers.
In 2023 I read a work of poetry at a retreat in Ireland, not my own work but that of an author whose work resonates deeply. The room erupted and I was approached asking how much I charge to present works of poetry or prose, what was my Instagram page, where could they find me online reading other works. While I was extremely complimented, I knew that I wanted the freedom of reading what was meaningful to me, choosing from what came across my radar and struck a chord. I don’t want deadlines, pressure, or quotas of how many readings to produce. Rather I desire to be captured by something that reaches into me, animates me, and wants to be expressed, to be read out loud, to be shared. I created a Facebook page, MaryBethReads, and began posting videos, reels, and I’ve probably done less than 50, and that’s ok. Each one speaks to me and then I speak it out from my heart and give it away hoping it will touch someone else. Money would complicate it and I’m blessed to be able to offer it this way.
Context, again, is everything. I needed to build my business to pay bills, start a retirement fund, be able to contribute and donate to worthy causes. There is NO SHAME in making money. I needed to make money during those working years. I’m not wealthy but I’m ok and I’m grateful. I have no idea what I’ll do with the meditation training when the program ends. None at all. Perhaps it will want to be expressed as well. Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see.😉
Reading the essays already posted, I realize that I immediately took my thoughts to classroom experiences and not the expansive landscape many of you have shared.
Whenever I feel safe, have trust, and where vulnerability does not bring judgment, that is ideal for learning. From my lived experience, that was always true with my late husband Terry. I learned SO MUCH from him. He opened my heart, my eyes, he never judged; he accepted and guided.
I’ve been fortunate to have good experiences in ‘classroom’ settings as well. A 5-day spiritual formation retreat in Nazareth KY was special – silence was practiced from dinner to breakfast, teachers were wise and compassionate. I had one of my few direct communications from/with Spirit during that retreat.
Peter Block has written extensively on building the ideal container for learning environments and I recommend his book, “Community: The Structure of Belonging”.
Less-than-ideal learning environments have often been in education, even as far back as primary education and on when I had teachers who relished embarrassing students. “There’s no stupid question” is often not the case!
In my career where I was in corporate training classrooms, I strived to provide welcome and connection, however, I was often placed in the worst room in the building for a training seminar. One time I was given a room, more like a warehouse with windows, cement floor, no decor and the floor was littered with dead bugs because it was basically a deserted area of the building. Another time a training session at a conference was set up in a corner of the dining room where dinner was to be served and all we could hear was the clanking of dishes being set for 300 people and then suddenly, a test of the sound system that blared rock music. Oh, there are many more, but I accepted the unexpected challenges and out of it, used humor (and a broom) to soften the harshness of a venue.
That framing and context of learning with your mom is, well, delightful! I was right in the kitchen with you. Thank you for sharing.
Ankur … I love this essay. So introspective and such a beautiful description of a turn from triumphalism to humility. Accomplishment takes us only so far until we realize that it doesn’t fill up the hole we carry within. Thank you for sharing.
Melanie and Liana – we had staff from Hospice when my husband was living with ALS and we got close to several. Terry was in Hospice for a year and a half and the bond became very strong and important to both of us. It was a complete shock that the moment Terry died, all contact was dropped even to the point of not being able to meet up for coffee until about a year elapsed. I can certainly understand the need to make room for the next patient needs and I can understand the need to hold to boundaries. I have no idea how to build a bridge between these two polar opposites of compassionate care and the shock of being dropped from that care. Just a reflection. The work you both do is full of heart-expanding attention.
Navigating grief – such a journey and I wish you didn’t need to take that path yet that path can be such a teacher, eye-opener, heart-opener. I don’t of anyone who’s avoided this trip of grief and words are impotent, even these few words of mine. My heart to yours.
Oh yes! My career was spent in the classrooms of corporate America teaching communication skills and it was often difficult to keep ‘connected but separate’. Students often want to befriend the teacher and it can be very genuine and not intended to curry any favor yet still, you open yourself to criticism not to mention difficulty when you accept an invitation outside the classroom from someone and then realize you can’t honor another invitation! It was fairly easy to manage invitations from the corporate leader who hired me but complicated when they came from students. I crossed that line more than once and felt caught. On the flip side, it felt lonely to leave the offices of a client and spend the evening alone – very much like Susan’s essay, “I’m right here and also completely alone.”
In a bit of a different scenario, but filled with similar emotion, in 2018 I found myself as an event planner (not my wheelhouse) for a symposium on Race and Anti-racism in our city. It was a successful day and my stress was sky high up to that day and on that day. When it was over, I looked around and no one was there. I would have given “my front seat in hell” as my mother would say, for someone to invite me for a drink to debrief and share the day and there I was completely on my own. God did it feel separate. It was also the year following the death of my husband of 40+ years so it was even more poignant. There was no going home and sharing the feelings of the day. Damn that was hard and as you can tell, the feeling is still there.
Appreciated today’s session very much.
Thank you Jo. You make a great point about patience as acceptance. Perhaps I’m treating it with too much of a secular lens. Because I am an Enneagram One I struggle with anger, resentment, and attempt to reform things when I conclude (selfishly) something’s not right. Perhaps I’ve got this tangled up because they’re entangled in me. I have been able to travel a good distance into the world of acceptance and equanimity. I am grateful. The Buddhist teachings have helped tremendously. At the same time, I realize patience will always be a challenge for me – pausing to breathe and consider before responding has not characteristically been my first action/reaction. Again, thanks for making me reconsider this paramita.
How is it Friday night before class tomorrow? The week flew by and I feel like I’m racing to the finish line to make it in time! However, I can say that I have no trouble identifying the paramita that I’m most connected to – exertion. And the paramita I’m most disconnected to – patience.
Exertion – “having a sense of joy in, and appreciation of, your livelihood and your practice.” Without a doubt during my life there has been, and is, abundant joy and appreciation of life, my work, my surroundings, my practices. I feel fortunate that this is so and I don’t take it for granted.
Patience – oh how I struggle! Again, a lifelong challenge to be patient. I lean toward action and a sense that NOW is the time for whatever needs my attention. Well, also NOW is the time for whatever needs YOUR attention – my Enneagram One is showing.
What an interesting pairing – exertion and patience. There are 4 other paramitas where I have strengths and weaknesses that call for attention, even for compassion. A lifelong endeavor.
I’ve enjoyed reading all your responses to this essay question. This is a difficult topic for me and not due to any trauma or life experience I can cite, but I simply have very little sense of ‘specific’ lineage. By the time I was born, 3 of the 4 grandparents available had already died. There just seemed to be no obvious thread leading any backstory about who we were, where we came from, etc. Our immediate family located in our same town was the family that I knew I was a part of. There was the occasional story shared – my mom’s father was caught in the depression and lost everything and took his own life in order to leave insurance money to his wife, my grandmother Hazel, the only grandparent I knew. Both my dad’s parents died when he was in high school and a family friend took him and his brother in. But no story was dwelt on and none of them ever led to more background of our ancestors.
I knew from Mom that in the family tree was a relative that signed the declaration but no one had ever built the tree or worked to connect this ancestor. Fast forward to 2019 and a fellow member (Sarah) of the Episcopal church I attended at that time had researched her tree extensively and had found connections to the slave trade. It occurred to me that if I had an ancestor that signed the declaration, he likely was a slaveholder. Sarah offered to look into my tree and sure enough, he was plantation owner and a slaveholder and he wasn’t the only one. It popped up everywhere on both sides of the tree. Sarah built out a tree that reached back to the late 1600’s and it was fascinating. Yet, it feels less like lineage and more like history.
I can more easily feel ancestral connection in a broad sense – that everything that had to happen before me in order for me to be here typing this is an extraordinary set of choices made by thousands over thousands of years, some purposeful and some random. That backstory is full of ‘I will never know what and when made a difference or would have resulted in NOT ME. So I am full of gratitude for the multitude of all that has happened that allows me to be here now.
I think I’ll keep thinking on this …
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Ankur – this is a poetic tale, it is beautiful. I have read the 2nd paragraph over and over and it’s so clear and expressive – “my spirit never left”, “I still reach for it”, “cradle” – exquisite! Thank you.
I sit here nodding, saying ‘yep’, ‘me too’ and in some ways can simply say DITTO. Yet I do have my own story, similar to most posts starting with eternalism/cradle Christian. Fast forward, I met Terry who was not Christian, labeled himself “agnostic”, we fall in love so deep and so fast – we eloped 6 weeks to the day we met and then spent close to 41 years before his too-early death from ALS in 2017. I went from “I could never marry anyone who wasn’t Christian” to love that took away that boundary. In our time together, we both traveled – in and out of denominations progressing more liberal with each move. Terry’s views shifted toward Christian Agnostic and when he did find himself involved in a church, he’d always be in the soup kitchen or driving the bus to take families to visit loved ones in prison. Talk about ‘as you do to others …’! I was steeped in learning – Spiritual Formation, Seminary classes and more. He always said he was “hands and feet” and I was “head and heart”.
When Terry entered hospice in 2016, we had a chaplain, John, who visited us and John was perfect for us. Raised Catholic, he was now following Buddhist teachings. The community he and his wife were a part of at the time was called the Buddhist Christian Mother Earth Church. (Trying to be all things to all people?) John and his wife began their own Sangha a few years later and I joined that Sangha in 2021.
So where was nihilism? Well, after Terry died it occurred to me he might be right – maybe there is nothing but THIS. In an odd sense, that felt ok, even better than ok. Sort of a seize the day awakening – Life goes on and forward I will go now, on my own. It morphed into an “I don’t know” and then a sense of ‘something’ – sort of like a glue that sticks this all into relationship and I could not deny it’s reality. John Caputo writes that “God (I really don’t like that noun) doesn’t so much exist as insist”. That feels like a truth … there’s an insistence toward lovingkindness – it can be ignored and we see that every day. But it’s there. This glue, this insistence, the nothingness (nihilism?) that isn’t nothing but very much something.
Well, this felt rambling – luckily John and his wife are visiting today and the three of us do this often to reflect and journey together. Wisdom generally shows up from our time together.
At the Sangha I attend we always read a piece credited to Thich nhat Hanh titled, WHY SANGHA. There are many reasons listed in the reading but what stood out today was, “The Dharma is in you but it needs to be watered in order to manifest and become a reality”. Just this morning, in our two hours together, so much watering took place! A reflection was offered, a silent sit was experienced, and then came Dharma sharing that spilled so much wisdom.
I think there are many ways to support discovery and no single ultimate tool – but a tool box of effective steps. Perhaps there’s wisdom in ‘knowing’ which tool is best for any given situation, a skill to ‘read the room’. Asking questions would be an early tool I would use and then practice full-body listening, reflecting back and asking another question, repeat, repeat. In this way I would hope to get close to the idea Susan expressed, “When you stop thinking your thoughts and start thinking mine” and in that way help another reach the Dharma that is IN THEM. Questions help us scan our inner and outer worlds for evidence of what we seek. Sometimes the evidence is buried deep, other times clarity pops out!
This seems to be the discovery process.