There is a subject about which I have been thinking for several years and finally have decided to write about some of my thoughts around what loving unconditionally means in my deeply personal life and passion.  I will add a disclaimer right up front.  What is my path in this wild and beautiful life I live is my path, not one I suggest anyone else should or would follow.  It simply where I have come at this point in my life and being. 

One reason I have hesitated to open up to the extent I shall in the following paragraphs is how truly sensitive the whole subject of loving can be, emotionally, spiritually and physically.  Yet, I feel drawn very strongly to write, to share my thoughts, if for no other reason to clarify for myself where I am and why I believe I am in the right place at this moment. 

Thanks to a few experiences, the first two in my early teen years followed by a marriage in which I simply was a means to produce children, I have marveled I was able to gain any sort of positive attitudes about physical intimacy, loving, passion and intimate relationships.  For a few years in the first years of my 40's the whole subject of physical intimacy was more a shadow area for me than was comfortable to admit.  However, I worked through the more unhealthy aspects of those years, due in large part to a two-year relationship with a man who unabashedly adored and revered me.  The love we shared brought healing to both of us, hope there was more to life than the anguish and loneliness, rejection and obligatory demands both of us had lived for many years.  While I was free to be in relationship, he remained within his legal marriage, primarily because his wife was more or less an an invalid and had been for several years.  I make no excuses or justifications.  The relationship was what it needed to be for those two years.  Then it was time for me to take the next steps in my life - alone.

Through those two years and this man's love and full acceptance, through the mutuality of caring deeply for the well-being of the other I learned what the purest form of human loving can be.  To be fully united in all ways; physically, emotionally and spiritually, with shared focus in that same moment, brought the most powerful experience of pure and powerful love I ever had known with another human being.  Neither of us sought selfish, individual pleasure.  While those moments were and are rare, the fact they can be true gave me a gift I treasure in memory. 

Since that time many years ago I have moved into another place spiritually and physically.  What was then was meant to be only then, and that is not, nor has it ever been, a source of any discomfort or dissatisfaction for me.  Through the experience of giving love in all its forms simply to be giving opened me to a greater understanding of love without condition.  As the mother of several children I already knew unconditional love.  Since that time I have learned still more about loving one person at a time, one moment at a time, without expectation, without judgment, without any condition whatsoever.  This does not translate to accepting any sort of inappropriate treatment from another person.  I walked out of my current relationship for a year and a half because I refused to live in a situation where I was treated with mental and emotional coldness, disrespect and other forms of emotional and spiritual abuse.  However, I did not leave the relationship.  It was time to "put up or shut up," particularly when I knew my entire purpose in the relationship was and remains to love without condition.

What has developed in the years since has been a new understanding of relationship in which self-interest has no place and physical expression/pleasure is not a priority.  While I am most certainly not opposed to such delight, it is not important.  It seems, for me anyway, that loving without condition has taken me to a spiritual place in relationships of all sorts where I truly have learned to be present in open compassion, seeking the highest good without seeking to impose any framework of what that might mean to whomever I am sharing the moment.  That can take almost any form, as long as there is no self-interest, no self-gratification, no focus outside being fully present and fully authentic in the moment.  Indeed, I really do not seem to have a desire to seek any self-focused wants. 

Perhaps this is making no sense whatever to anyone but me.  It is incredibly difficult to articulate a commitment that goes far beyond words and the usual means of expression.  That commitment is my entire life - to love without condition, with full compassion, respecting the freedom and dignity of each person, desiring only each person's highest good to unfold and to become clear for that person.  Whatever I can do to facilitate the process is what I try to do.  One day I may get it right once or twice.  The most interesting aspect is how deep my own passions remain and grow.  I simply express them in a far different manner, one fully spiritual and connected to others in new and beautiful ways.

Watching my "toys" clean the floors. My son and his wife gave me a Roomba and a Scooba (she's director of integration for the robotics company making them), and I have given them personalities. I love to watch THEM work.

My best friend since we met in 1st grade has been Betty Jo.  We have been best friends for nearly 57 years, regardless of years now and then when we haven't been in touch.  There probably is no one who knows me as well, loves me more, or can reveal where "all the bodies are buried" than Betty.  She always has been "the wind beneath my wings," truly content to be supportive, loving and generous while I did the shining,  the alto harmony to my soprano melody.  Of course, when we sang duets in church and she would lose her alto place and start singing soprano, I would just switch to alto and we always sounded fine to us.  My mother didn't always agree, but what did she know?  Betty saw me through my first serious love when we were 15, sitting in the cafe on Washington Street listening endlessly to "Blue Christmas" when he went home for Christmas with his family in California.  We have laughed with each other, shared tears and anguish, prayed together and loved each other for so long neither of us really remembers much of life without our best friend. 
From Betty I learned loyalty.  Who else would listen to all my insane ideas, try to execute some of them and take the heat when someone had to get into trouble for it?  Who else would help me plot how to get into the church kitchen before anyone else could after Sunday service and nab a couple of doughnuts?  From Betty I learned perserverance and simple faith.  Even in the worst of her days when she lost her husband due to a freak accident during a thunderstorm on the Ohio turnpike on July 4, 1968, Betty was steadfast and a woman of great faith.  Betty's intelligence of spirit and her soulful living taught me there are far more important things than one's IQ scores that measure the quality of living and what true brilliance is.  Betty is a brilliant diamond, my best friend.

Probably one of my strengths for which I have the most appreciation is my sense of humor and positive spirit.  Once a friend told me I laugh even when there are tears running down my face.  My children's paternal grandmother said she thought I was made of rubber since no matter how terrible something was that happened to me I seemed to bounce right back.  As with every strong diamond's facets, there one in which one might see the determination it takes to believe, to have hope and keep looking into the sun no matter how heavy the clouds are trying to block the light. 

Just this morning, during a phone conversation with the manager to whom I report in my job, we were discussing one of the current challenges for the team.  (Since I am, by far, the senior team member in age and experience, she and I tend to talk more openly than we might otherwise.)  What I said to her may have sounded like a trite phrase to someone more cynical, but it was just what she seemed to need at that moment - and it was what I really live by when the clouds are thick and storm-laden in my own life.  We cannot have rainbows unless there are clouds, and the most vivid rainbows show when the clouds are the darkest.  It only takes one ray of light breaking through behind us as we face those clouds and we see that rainbow.  Maybe it will even be a double.

"A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity."

Recently l came across the above quote from Buddha and added it to my Zaadz profile. I also used it in a posting to a conversation on Global MindShift in which I have been participating. Responses, if any, have been interesting. Most will react positively to three of the four qualities. Almost everyone ignores the same one - a life of service. This revealing and deliberate blindness gives me much food for thought and not for the first time.

Several years ago I began to give significant thought to career and other leadership questions. Did I want to pursue a continuing path up the corporate administrative ladder? Did I want to continue to allow myself to be placed in positions of leadership in various organizations? What price would I expect to pay if I chose positions of visible leadership? What would be the cost if I chose not to be as visible? Why did I think I might want more leadership responsibility or not? The fact I would even take the time to think about and carefully examine such considerations probably makes some raise their eyebrows. The fact I might think there is a cost to being a recognized leader would certainly get some reactions and even arguments. Did that matter?

In my early 40's the idea of corporate promotion and increased leadership responsibility was attractive, even very desirable. Twenty years ago and even today women leaders are a minority of the corporate population. When I was part of the Gas Accounting staff at Exxon (before the Exxon-Mobil merger), women could expect no higher position than unit manager. I have not made any effort to keep informed about whether or not that has changed, nor do I care particularly. At that time Exxon was one of the largest corporations on the planet, so such a low level of management possibility did not make the company particularly attractive to an independent-thinking, strong woman. In fact, I left Exxon in 1987 out of total boredom. My next position in a major corporation grew into one of contract administration for an ophthalmic pharmaceutical subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, since split and sold to competitors. Women fared somewhat better and I probably would have stayed and continued to gather respect and responsibility, had there been corresponding opportunity. It was the loss of that position due to the sale of the subsidiary that made me begin the serious questioning.

From my teens I have been a leader in other ways. Accepting responsibility and performing associated duties to maintain such responsibility came naturally. I have a creative, active mind, as well as significant personal strength and energy. For many years I also had the need to be recognized and accepted to fill the yawning hole created by feelings of not being acceptable, not good enough, not many things I thought mattered. As much as anyone else who walks this earth, my strengths grew from my fears and weaknesses. I learned to use the strength to conceal the weakness, to protect my fearful spirit. Eventually, over time and with experience I learned I truly am strong and I lost much of the fear. It tries to reassert its black power once in a while still, but it has lost the larger part of its old energy.

So I often wonder what it is about living a life of service, developing a servant heart, that causes such rejection, crossed eyes and the desire to flee into anywhere else in so many people. Probably one of the first and largest issues is the lack of understanding of what a servant heart is. To be of service is not to be subservient, no more than it means being overbearing. Most people placed on pedestals as heroes in the Western world are anything but servants to or for others. Most who want power will use it to coerce, to control, to direct and manage everything in their paths to further their own interests and satisfy their own desires. Yet they and most other people stumbling along in life do not understand what true power is.

Power in its purest and most desirable form is compassion, unconditional love. This is the heart of the one who would live as a servant. Mature, unconditional love is not blind, is not sentimental or slavish. One who learns such love, such incredible compassionate living, usually sees very clearly the reality of who others are, accepts them and continues to love without judgment or, even when appropriate, agreement with everything others say and do. The servant heart is one that loves and supports for the other's highest good without placing one's own expectations or conditions on another. The servant heart is one whose spirit is free and who chooses to give appropriately, to withhold giving when it serves a higher purpose, to be present in silence or to share a song in the night.

Did I choose to pursue management positions and corporate growth? Do I place myself in positions of leadership in other organizations any longer? The answer to both is no. At this point in my life the question of career positions no longer interests me. I work in a support role for a major financial institution in the mortgage banking field, contributing through my position to the success of one of the company's premier sales executives. What is the price? I leave the job in my desk drawer at 5:00 p.m. every weekday. I have time to read, to enjoy the music that enriches my life, to pursue other interests, to sleep in peace. If anyone thinks I have something to offer in the way of ideas, creativity or other support functions, whether in my professional or personal life, I am glad to give as is appropriate. I would rather not sign my name. It no longer matters. To support for mutual gain, to bring joy, a moment of peaceful presence to make another's day a little easier...this is what matters to me.

The truly servant heart is a peaceful, joyful heart.

My first book, "Prayer Is A Love Song," is on my website (Spirit Eagle's Mountain Aerie). It was accepted by a publisher and ready for the printing when the small company went out of business.  So, I put it on my new (at the time) website and once in a while someone finds it.  The next is still in three sections and I have yet to pull it into one volume, "Meditations From The Garden."  I have another in gestation: "The Still Place," and am writing my autobiography, "No Trails in the Sky."   Now, if I could just stop commuting and working...



Gini

I honor your Gods
I drink from your well
I bring an unprotected heart to our meeting place
I hold no cherished outcomes
I will not negotiate by withholding
I am not subject to disappointment

 

Today is Juneteenth in the larger world.  It is also the 70th anniversary of the day my parents married.  While they stayed married to each other for only the first 25 years of all that time, I have this quirky memory that seems to keep all sorts of bits and pieces stored away.  So, whether or not my 88-year-old mother has many positive thoughts about this day (and I think she might, no matter she admits it), I remember and am thankful.  The picture, by the way, was taken in 1940, three years later, when my sister Caroline was not yet two and my brother Ross was a few months old.

My friend Betty Jo said once she always envied me my family.  While my parents (and Betty will agree with this) were not too good much of the time at parenting, they both were/are good people.  Betty's father was no longer in the picture and I do not know that history, but she and her two sisters were raised by a single mother, Marian, whom I adored.  Perhaps it was my older brother, my grandfather and my dad who Betty envied as part of my life.  They certainly were most important people to me, probably more influential in my values and attitudes than all the strength and dominance of my mother and her family could ever have been, all things considered.

I often think about a young couple, still in their teens in the late years of the Depression.  Pop was the middle of three sons in a small town next to a major Army installation in Kansas.  He was a gentle man whose ornery and sly sense of humor I seem to have inherited.  I know he loved my mother deeply and tried for all the 25 years he stayed with her to please her, to be the man she wanted and to provide the material desires of her heart.  He failed, often miserably, but not for lack of trying.  Finally, he left on a chilly November night in 1962, hopping a freight train to Tulsa where my sister lived.  By then his belief in his failure and unworthiness had destroyed so much of his sense of integrity and he could go no further.  To the end of his life in 1999 he never spoke against my mother.  His only comment was that he never could please her.  I think he loved her until his last breath, though.

When my own marriage had come apart, interestingly enough with my belief I never could please my children's father as a significant part of that situation, I eventually decided to accept my Dad's request to move West to live near him.  Until then I had not experienced a relationship with my father on an adult level, and I wanted to know him better, to appreciate him for the man he was.  By then he was married to a woman two years older than me and was very happy with her.  Peggy is not a person with whom I normally would form a close relationship, and it really wasn't an issue.  I cared that my Dad was happy with her and that she was good to him.  He tolerated a great deal of nonsense with her and her rather strange family, but his happiness was all that mattered. 

Over the last dozen years of Pop's life I had the opportunity to spend time with him, enjoy his conversation and see some of my own children get to know a little about him.  I think a couple of my kids walk a little funny after Pop pulling their legs with his wild and very funny stories about his boyhood in Kansas.  He could tell a whopper with such seriousness and veracity that anyone would be fooled until the very end of the story --- unless you looked at his twinkling blue eyes.  He had a poker face but his eyes always gave him away.  Once in a while I could talk Pop into making breakfast for me, but he would never make those wonderful, light biscuits that seemed to float off the plate, a Sunday breakfast treat I had enjoyed so as a child and teen.  That was something he did every Sunday morning until he left my mother, make biscuits and serve her breakfast in bed with bacon, coffee and whatever else she may have wanted.  I wonder if Mother ever has realized any small part of his love for her or if all she can focus on are the mistakes and poor choices he sometimes made.  I wonder if she ever really knew his gentle soul.  Somehow, I doubt it. 

So, in a month with Father's Day and the anniversary of my parents' marriage, sometimes on the same day, I honor my father and his father.  Another blog will see more of the story of my grandfather.  His birthday was in early July.  Perhaps then I will share a little about him and his role in my life.

I believe---
that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become.

I believe---
that no matter how good a friend is, they're going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.

I believe---
that just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.

I believe---
that true friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance. Same goes for true love.

I believe---
that it's taking me a long time to become the person I want to be.

I believe---
that you should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them.

I believe---
that you can keep going, long after you can't.

I believe---
that we are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel.

I believe---
that either you control your attitude or it controls you.

I believe---
that heroes are the people who do what has to be done when it needs to be done, regardless of the consequences.

I believe---
that money is a lousy way of keeping score.

I believe---
that my best friend and I can do anything or nothing and have the best time.

I believe---
that sometimes the people you expect to kick you when you're down, will be the ones to help you get back up.

I believe---
that sometimes when I'm angry I have the right to be angry, but that doesn't give me the right to be cruel.

I believe---
that maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you've had and what you've learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays you've celebrated.

I believe---
that it isn't always enough to be forgiven by others. Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself.

I believe---
that no matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn't stop for your grief.

I believe---
that just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they don't love each other. And just because they don't argue, it doesn't mean they do.

I believe---
that you shouldn't be so eager to find out a secret. It could change your life forever.

I believe---
that two people can look at the exact same thing and see something totally different.

I believe---
that your life can be changed in a matter of hours by people who don't even know you.

I believe---
that even when you think you have no more to give, when a friend cries out to you, you will find the strength to help.

I believe---
that credentials on the wall do not make you a decent human being.

I believe---
that the people you care about most in life are taken from you too soon.

(author unknown)

The day my son Bill came within a breath of dying.

Bill was born a couple of weeks early, brow presentation, bruised, funny-looking, poor color.  You name it: that baby looked like he had been the loser in a title boxing match.  The only saving grace was that, even with a brow presentation, his was a fast labor and delivery, only about six hours.  (Just call me Speedy".)  His color didn't seem to get a lot better and four weeks later he started having what seemed to be a lot of colic, too much intestinal gas and an appetite that had not increased significantly.  It was a Sunday early in November and I called the doctor because things did not seem right.  There was no fever, nothing I could really put my finger on.  The doctor did not seem very concerned (not the regular pediatrician either) and told me to keep watch on him and call the office if things didn't improve.

The children's father (ex-husband for the last 23 years) left early on Monday for a business trip.  I was alone in a town in southwestern Louisiana where I knew few people, two children all of 16 months and 1 month of age.  Bill didn't seem to be any worse, just not really any better through that long, long week.  He still had no fever, slept reasonably alright for a young infant but seemed listless.  Their father returned Thursday night and I was becoming more and more uneasy.  I had an appointment scheduled the following day for both babies.

I had dressed Amanda already and was hastily pulling on clean clothes the following mid-day, watching Bill constantly.  Before my eyes I saw a five-week-old baby go into shock.  He seemed to fade in front of my eyes.  We were out the door and on the way within less than five minutes.  I had no one to call and did not want to stop to call their father, so anxious I was by then.  Fortunately, when I got to the doctors' office a few moments later the office nurse put us in an examining room almost immediately.  The doctor walked in quite soon afterwards.  He took one look at Bill and asked if I thought I was ok to drive the two or three blocks to the hospital.  It would be faster than waiting for anyone else.  I asked if his office staff would call ahead and have someone available to help with Amanda until her father could get there from work.  (He didn't arrive until AFTER his workday was over, about four hours later.....one clue about why he's an ex.)

To this day -- and BIll is now 38 years old -- I am amazed how he never had any fever and showed so little evidence until he was dying that he was critically ill.  The doctor told me later he found it difficult to believe until he saw x-rays of Bill's by-now distended abdomen with a huge abcess located in the tube between his bladder and umbilical cord that had not fully closed, and also the results of the blood work.  Bill had a raging staph infection cause, most probably, by bacteria on the instrument used to cut his umbilical cord.  Since his umbilicus had seemed to be closing and showed nothing out of the ordinary, that was another mystifying lack of clues.

The children's father showed up before 6:00 p.m. and took Amanda home to find a neighbor who would stay with her for the evening.  He returned to the hospital after also calling his parents who lived three hours away in Baton Rouge.  He had not been back at the hospital long and joined me in the pediatric ICU room where Bill lay in an isolette with oxygen pumping.  This was late in 1968 when there was far less available to treat small infants who needed an oxygen-rich environment.  Quite suddenly I noticed Bill's chest began to heave.  He was struggling to breath and not having much success.  Without taking my eyes off my tiny son who weighed only ten pounds I made his father get the nurse who was only steps away.  There was no such thing as the types of monitors available now.

I don't think she even called the doctor herself but knew exactly what to do for Bill.  The very few moments we stood in the hall outside the room were at least 100 years long.  What had happened was that Bill was in the last stage, one most people never reach if they contract peritonitis, when the peritonitis paralyzes the diaphragm and the lungs cannot pull in air.  Somehow she got a tube inside his lungs and kept his little body going and air moving in and out of his lungs.  The doctor was there soon, although I have no memory of time then.  It was forever.  Bill passed that crisis but the situation was beyond critical.  Patrick Unkel was straight with me, something I always have appreciated.  I want the truth.  I don't care how tough it is.  Give it to me honestly and I'll deal with it.  I know if someone isn't being straight with me and that gets me into a really bad place when the situation is serious.  Dr. Unkel told me he did not expect Bill to live, but if he made through the night there might be hope.

During that long night I stood beside the isolette watching my little fellow lie there, white and unresponsive although breathing.  He had ceased to suck by now, not wanting food.  I released him to the Love who created him but asked if he could stay anyway, if that was what was best.  That is the night I learned the meaning of faith.  Believe in the very best, hope for everything, but accept what is.  About 3:00 a.m. Bill started wanting to suck.  His color began to get a little pink, something I had not seen in him for the five weeks since his birth.  I think he knew I was holding him in a very full heart but with open arms.  He was free and he chose to stay.

Seventeen and a half years later tears ran down my face as I watched the youngest boy in his high school graduating class of over 850 students, a young man who was immensely popular throughout the school with students and staff alike, lead his class across a football field as valedictorian.  The high school then was one of the best in Texas, a school from which the top graduates were courted by military academies and the top academic universities across the U.S.  Bill had been accepted to three of those schools, courted by others, and chose his dream school - M.I.T. in Cambridge, MA, where he earned a BS in physics and an MS in transportation.... He also found a beautiful, very intelligent and truly wonderful girl who has been his wife for the last 17 years.

Bill always has known there is purpose to his life.  His humility and his sense of humor have kept him well-balanced and a truly nice person.  Once, when I remonstrated that he had not told me about some of the honors and recognition being accorded him at the time, his response reflected something he seemed to have learned very well.  "Mom, I'm only doing what I'm capable of doing."