Grace and Ease

A few years ago when I was living with Cindy, I struggled with various aspects my life. Cindy, in her wise and motherly way was always so open to the moving of the universe. I always though of myself as open. Until lately, that is. Perhaps starting seminary has something to do with it. In many ways I feel more open to anything that may come my way than ever before. In other places I am finding that I am simply not confortable being open, that its just not right for me; and I am learning to accept that I have bounderies of thought and I am trying to be true to myself by respecting them. The funny thing about this though is that I am learning that my boundries are tremendously liberating. The more bounderies I want to put into my life, the more focused I become on what it is that I really want, the easier everything seems to become.

Cindy used to tell me to imagine it happening, or to just simply do it, with "grace and ease". That was three years ago! I had trouble undertsnading at the time, but now . . . . I am just now getting it! I am enjoying and delighting at my own suprise over this. School is challenging. Trying to descern who I am and what I want to do is extremly challenging. Maintaing marriage and other life long friendships when life is so full of the chaos of new creation is a new challenge. But what I am finding is that in all the challenge, the worry, the struggle, the concern, the whirlwind--in the middle of all that I feel a calm. A silence and stillness in the eye of the storm. And as I stand there, focused on my needs and taking small steady steps toward them. It is all happening. Almost as if by magic the needs to do this new thing, the steps to traverse down my new road are all there. It is almost as if they have been there all along waiting for me to find them. And the beauty of these steps and slience is that suddenly they are all happing with grace and ease. Not that it is all suddendly easy, because it is not. But it is suddenly do-able, doing, and done. Sometimes I wonder if I have been lifted up, because in the stillest of moments I look down on my life and am overwhelmed with amazement watching the whirlwind and seeing that, yes, indeed, I have embraced and been embraced right back with grace and ease.

Time

So my world has changed quite dramatically since last I posted in this blog.

I am now a seminary student at the Claremont School of Theology. the schedule is demanding, but I am loving it. My biggest struggle is time. So much to do and the time speeds by.

The struggle of the semester is balance. Trying to "satisfiy and harmonize" all the various elements of my life so that "nothing is out of proportion or unduly emphasized", to qutoe the MS Word dictonary. Each week I am trying a new study schedule.

It has been hard to balance the demands of academia and family and social life. Painfully I have allowed my family life to suffer. It causes me pain because it disappoints those I love. While that is not my goal I admit that I have become apathetic in allowing it to happen; it seems natural to me because I come from a long line of workaholics, they do this and it is all I know. What I have never encountered before is the idea that it could actually bother anyone. So I am now faced with a situation I have never even dreamed on encountering. This is a "growing edge" for me as I know it is something that I can't and don't want to maintain (Gerald May). Yes, I want the cycle to stop with me. Here I am in the "times that are a' changin'" (Bob Dylan).

I am struggling with time. This week I have until 5pm on Tuesday to finish all that I will do before leaving for school on Wednesday, so that I can have a "family night".