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an everyday life

an everyday life

Tag Archives: Self-Knowledge

What’s love got to do with it?

11 Sunday Jul 2010

Posted by Janell in Home Restoration, Life at Home, Prayer, Soul Care, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Everyday Life, Prayer, Self-Knowledge, Soul Care, Writing

Is it my fault that I’m better at starting projects than finishing them?

The more I live, the more I realize that fault has nothing to do with it.   The simple truth is that I’m okay with unfinished business.   Tying up loose ends, for me, is analogous to eating canned spinach, something I might do, only because it’s good for me.

I’m not one who needs closure.  If I’m not enjoying a television show, I’ll just walk out of the room.  Sometimes, for the rest of its television shelf life.  But  while I don’t need closure, that’s not the kind of world I live in, either here at home — with a husband who happens to love decisions and lining up ducks in a row —  or in this great big beautiful world, where we pursue high school diplomas, college degrees and all sorts of certifications.

If my husband were here, looking over my shoulder as I write, he would be nodding his head in agreement.  My husband loves to have a plan to execute, while plans for me, are nothing more than one possibility.  Life was once tense until we figured out we each  regarded “plans” differently.  Now when I causally mention a movie I might like to see “this afternoon,” he knows I’m only dreaming out loud, that I’m not really making definite plans to go buy tickets and sit in a theater.

Pity my poor husband who believes in the holiness of made beds every morning and a well-ordered kitchen.  Though I finally bought in to his way of thinking on the bed, my kitchen is never orderly when I’m in the business of entertaining with food.  My wonderful husband has cleaned up my kitchen messes since the beginning days of our marriage, where it seems my goal is to dirty every bowl and pot in the kitchen.  Almost twenty-five years into our marriage, we each, by now, know our roles and lines:

I apologize for the mess and say, ‘Thanks, Honey,” as sweetly as I can.

He in return smiles, shrugs and says with matter-of-fact acceptance, “That’s my job.”

It’s good to know and accept our lot in life.  And perhaps it begins by knowing and accepting ourselves (and each other) for who we are…. and for who we are not.  It begins with knowing ourselves, followed slowly by self-acceptance, followed by a steady diet of prayer, mostly of the canned serenity variety:  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

This thread of thoughts is helping me sew up one large loose end that has been hanging and dangling in the wind since Daddy died.  When Daddy decided it was time to tie up loose ends here, I was in the midst of writing a research paper, a  final requirement to complete  my spiritual direction coursework.  But after-wards, words and thoughts wouldn’t come, no matter how much I wanted them to.  The writing part of me  just shut down for a while, that’s all.

But tying up loose ends is very much in my business plans right now.  Both at my sister’s place as well as completing that final bit of writing for class.    Words are finally coming and I’m so happy I could weep.   I go to bed thinking about the project and wake up with new ideas.  Then I write.  Steadily.  I’ve almost got a first draft.

I’m writing on a subject that has attracted me for more years than I can count,  with an eye toward how self-knowledge (specifically, knowing our spiritual type) ties into spiritual direction.  The coupling of spiritual direction and self-knowledge is as old as the hills, of course.  It’s scattered upon most every page of the Bible, from Eve to Noah to Moses to Jonah to Peter to Paul  to Doubting Tom.  Dick and Harry too, I imagine, though their stories never made it to print.

Spiritual direction and self-knowledge are natural  companions, in any encounter between God and humans.  Even beyond the pages of the Bible, we find in  the fourth century B.C. writings of Plato that everyday Greek saying, “Know Thyself”, said to be one of three inscriptions carved into the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.  The apparent wisdom lying beneath this Greek proverb was this:  seekers had to first know themselves before they could properly apply guidance received from Apollo’s mouthpiece, the priestess called the Pythia.

Then and now, self-knowledge is good soul food and a good meeting place to encounter God.  Tying up loose ends has evolved into a spiritual practice for me, for there is always something of God in it when I’m picking up a loose end.  God knows that loose end will be tied strictly out of love for others:  My husband;  My children:  My sister.

And speaking of my sisters… in that photo at the top, showing my sister’s newly renovated kitchen, where Sis is busy preparing for her first dinner party and I’m busy snapping photos…. well… about those lovely kitchen cabinets.  Would you believe me if I told you that they’re not quite done.  They need another coat of paint.

But just between us — aren’t they pretty anyways?

Quiet on the Set

23 Saturday Jan 2010

Posted by Janell in Life at Home, Soul Care

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Everyday Life, Frederick Buechner, Knowing God, Quiet, Ranier Maria Rilke, Retreat, Self-Knowledge, Soul Care, Thomas Merton, Wishful Thinking

“Your solitude will be a hold and home for you even amid very unfamiliar conditions and from there you will find all your ways.  All my wishes are ready to accompany you, and my confidence is with you.”

–Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

My Quiet Spot in our Texas Home

When I was in my thirties, I lived in the perennial hope of Helen Gurley Brown’s myth that a woman really could have it all.  For me, this entailed happiness and wealth and professional prestige and contentment in family life.  It was a list connected by ‘ands’ —  not ‘ors’.

But no matter how hard I played the game of life, I never landed on the space marked “All,” even though I packed life to the gills and then some.  Too often, my ‘some’ slipped through the cracks of a sad busy life; and ultimately, this led me to reassess who I was and what I wanted out of life.

Seeds of salvation were sown in the quiet moments of a retreat with good friends.  Being surrounded by the deep piney woods of Texas — at a point when I was wondering whether some essential part of me had gotten lost in the chase for worldly success — was a rich metaphor that I failed to grasp until later.

Too focused on digging down to the core of my being — preoccupied with figuring out who I was and who I was becoming – I then had little appreciation for the birds-eye view.  But what is most important to who I am today, I walked out of that quiet weekend with a new sense of direction and a longing for something more.

It is good to retreat from life to take time to reassess life priorities, choices and actions.   However, to find a quiet place to think is not easy where societal noise is so portable, with cell phones and laptop computers, not to mention trains, planes and automobiles.

Away from the whirlpool of noise that drowns out any ability to think, the quiet waits to give life.   The quiet invites me to catch my breath and to expel whatever darkness threatens to eat away at my soul; it helps me to breathe in the aroma of fresh possibilities and reconnect with the truth of my being and the deepest longings of my heart.  The quiet allows me to let go of unwieldy props and masks that make me clumsy and allow me to hide and forget my true self.

There in the quiet, pretense is unnecessary.  I am free to once again seek my truest self and longings.   And to know and claim and wear my true self is so very important, because as Thomas Merton writes, “To know ourselves is the other side to knowing God.”

The Bible tells us it was in the sounds of sheer silence where Elijah heard God when Elijah was in retreat, running for his life from the wicked Queen Jezebel.  It is no surprise then, that it is in the quiet where we best discover out true selves.

But what is the quiet? — what does quiet look like?– and how does quiet differ from silence?   Frederick Buechner offers us answers, as he draws this shimmering definition and contrast out of his book Wishful Thinking:

“An empty room is silent.  A room where people are not speaking or moving is quiet.  Silence is a given, quiet a gift.  Silence is the absence of sound and quiet the stilling of sound.  Silence can’t be anything but silent.  Quiet chooses to be silent.  It holds its breath to listen.  It waits and is still.

“…The quiet there, the rest, is beyond the reach of the world to destroy.  It is how being saved sounds.”

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?”

-- Thornton Wilder, "Our Town"

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© Janell A West and An Everyday Life, January 2009 to Current Date. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

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