Let your freak flag fly!

Wrapping up my Personal Commandments (for now) is "Let your freak flag fly" -- also known as be your real, true, playful self without concern for what people will think. Here are a couple of videos to inspire - if you haven't seen The Family Stone, it will make sense eventually, I promise.





And the Disney version...

The lesson of delight

So it was The Thing this year for all the bloggers I follow to choose a word for the year and that sounded good to me, so I chose a word that I felt would reflect my philosophy of Enjoy and Love. And that word was "delight". It's been an interesting word to focus on because I quickly learned that delight is a strange bedfellow. Delight involves a sense of surprise. It isn't really like mellow joy. There's a little shock with delight. And here's the crazy thing, delight shows up in the strangest places, where you least expect it. Often the places you don't want to go. Suddenly, delight!

Good enough is good enough

I don't think this phrase needs much commentary:) Any recovering perfectionist knows what I'm talking about. And it is always such a relief when someone I admire says I don't have to even try for that elusive perfection! This was written on the back of a painting given to me by a wonderful art handler I used to work with. It immediately popped into my mind when I was thinking of how to capture this feeling in a picture. I love it!

When in doubt, feel

I stole this Personal Commandment right from Jon Bernie's wonderful teachings:

"When in doubt, feel. That’s all.

"Mental torture happens because something hasn’t been felt. It’s the surface siren, the car alarm. That annoying thing that goes off when you’re trying to sleep (if you live in San Francisco, you know exactly what I’m talking about!). So instead of going out and smashing that car with the alarm, go in and feel. Because the torture is a mental alarm; the obsessed, unhappy mind is the result of emotional energy that has not moved, like a weather system that’s been trapped. It’s dangerous; it can cause physical illness, can cause all kinds of destruction. So, when in doubt, feel."

You can find the whole teaching here.

For me this process is really aided by physically feeling my body. Feeling my feet on the ground (preferably on a wonderful walking trail like in the picture above) and feeling my breath going in and out. After years of acting like I didn't really have a body, the second half of my life has been a process of getting reacquainted with it. We're so lucky to have these amazing bodies! It reminds me of these lines from Mary Oliver's beautiful poem, "Wild Geese":

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."

Ah!

Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude

I'm in love with Brother David's lovely videos. This sums up my Personal Commandment of "Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude" so well.

Let the light shine

"When a candle is lit in a dark room, it illuminates the room to some extent, but its power is limited. But if you use the same candle to light another candle, the total brightness increases. If you continue to do this, you can fill the room with brilliant illumination... If we keep our own light selfishly hidden, it will only provide a limited amount of illumination. But when we share our light with others, we do not diminish our own light. Rather, we increase the amount of light available to all. Therefore, when others light our candle, we issue forth light. When out of gratitude we use our candle to light other people’s candles, the whole room gets brighter... This kind of light is continuous and inexhaustible."

- Master Sheng Yen from "Rich Generosity" (Tricycle, Spring 2009)

My next Personal Commandment is "Let the light shine," which is probably just another way of saying "The blessing of love," but there's something about this phrase in particular that works for me.

I received this quotation through Tricycle's Daily Dharma emails right about the same time that I posted my musings on helping others with a smile and a sense of well-being. And the symbol of light really fits that feeling for me. When I'm helping people in this kind of loving way, my sense is that my light is resonating with their light. And I really do believe that's why we feel good in that moment. We are flooded with light and we both benefit from the interaction.

I have the great good fortune to have a job where I get to interact with all kinds of people. And some of my very favorite people are those that have been cast out of society to some degree. I can tell you that they are filled with light. Many of them are veterans, which fits the otherwise mostly unrelated song that popped into my mind when I finally found the right words for this Commandment. It's not quite the same phrase, but when I look at the faces in this clip from a family favorite, I see the light.



[Smugness disclaimer: I hope it doesn't seem like I'm saying that these commandments are how I act all the time. Goodness no! These are just reminders to the Future Me of things that work well. I'm really making this list as a toolbox of things I can try when things are clearly going wrong:) If they're useful to you in any way then that's lovely, but my intention isn't to tell anyone how to be. Perhaps you will enjoy thinking of your own Personal Commandments, which may be radically different from mine. I'd hope so:) We all have our own light to shine.]

Let it break your heart

Continuing on, my second Personal Commandment is "Let it break your heart." I really do feel, for myself, that the more heartbroken I can be the more present I am. Maybe heartbroken is a loaded word, but it is truly how I feel. Not heartbroken in a romantic sense -- I'm very, very lucky in that aspect of my life -- but heartbroken seeing how truly vulnerable we all are. It is a sweet sort of sadness, because when I'm feeling this kind of heartbroken and raw I see all the love, too. And I want to hold everyone in my heart with a deep sense of connection.

One surefire way for me to break my heart when it gets too rigid and cold is to read The Sun Magazine. The interviews, essays, memoirs, fiction, and poems are always thoughtful and well-written and the photography is beautiful, but the section that regularly cracks me wide open is Readers Write where people send in their stories relating to different posted topics, topics like "borrowing," "beauty," and "slowing down." And they knock me out. Every time.

Sy Safransky started The Sun in the mid-70s and went ad-free in 1990. That's right, ad-free. Take that Oprah!:) If you're looking for a source of honest, provocative writing to keep you human, I recommend checking out The Sun, an artistic endeavor well worth your support.

Don't push the river

I continue to love Gretchen Rubin's wonderful Happiness Project. After enjoying her blog for several weeks and following along with the weekly assignments, I went ahead and bought the book, which just hit #1 on the NYT bestsellers list. Well-deserved! And in it and on her blog she pretty regularly mentions one or another of her Twelve Personal Commandments, such as "Be Gretchen" and "There is only love." It's been making me think about my own "personal commandments," phrases that I find myself living by. So I thought I'd explore them individually here as a series of posts. I have no idea how many I'll come up with, but the first one definitely needs to be "Don't push the river."

To me "Don't push the river" is about not fighting how things just ARE. Not that we have to passively accept everything, but there are some things that are pretty much out of our control and it would and could be a constant source of frustration to ram one's head against them day after day. Traffic, weather, big changes in the workplace, these are all basically out of our control and for me it is much easier to just accept that that is the way the river flows. We can certainly figure out the best way to maneuver our way along the river and engage with the situation that way, but we can't ask it to stop flowing or to flow the other way. Or if we do, we can't be too disappointed when our wishes aren't granted.

Another aspect of this phrase for me is when I find myself trying to force a situation to be a certain way. This is about how I can come up with some kind of plan and then try to make it happen without the right sensitivity to what needs to happen or what "wants" to happen. I can get really into my ideas of how things "should" be, but I like to think I'm getting better about stepping outside of the situation a little and seeing how my plan relates to what's actually happening. And often when I'm getting kind of rigid in how I'm going to make it happen this phrase will pop into my mind as a kindly reminder.

Because I'm me, this commandment (and probably others) comes with a song. I'm really not sure what Van's getting at here and I'm fairly certain it has very little if anything to do with my Personal Commandment, but it's such an excellent tune that I have to share it with you. This is definitely one to enjoy!



A side note: The photo at the top is of the Harpeth River, which flows by the hill where we live. It is one lovely, twisty river. If we take our usual route to work we pass over it three times and I try to be conscious of each crossing and look over at the river just flowing along. I've fallen in love with it a little I think. And it has struck me that there is something of a fairy tale quality of passing over it three times, like getting three wishes.

I stopped on my way home this afternoon to try to catch a picture of the winter river, with its deep greenish water and some snow along the banks, but I knew my batteries were low and sure enough I wasn't able to take one. But I did have a magical moment when I saw a blue heron flying low over the river, traveling along with the flow of the river. Such a beautiful image. I'll remember that for some time. So graceful and seemingly effortless in flight, his big wings slowly beating: swoop...swoop...swoop. He wasn't pushing the river either.