I awoke this morning thinking how nice it was not to have to jump out of bed before the crack of dawn, a holiday is a treat in a working/commuting person's world.  My next thought was focused on the reason for the holiday and I have been with that subject since.  As my world view has expanded into an understanding of interconnected and interdependent reality we all share on a global scale, I am less and less interested in the limitations of identification with a single place, a single time, a single group of people.  The ideas of patriotism, in my opinion, too often begin from an empire-building mindset and lead almost inevitably to injustice, exploitation and other forms of destructive behaviors and ways of thinking.  Patriotism is limitation and narrowly focused choice to remain apart from each other.  Patriotism gives people permission to turn off their minds and to accept without question the poor to terrible actions and choices made in the name of more power and more imperialism.

I’ve been rambling through the thoughts Mary Rose O’Reilly collected in her wonderful “The Barn At The End Of The Road.”  (with thanks to my friend Maitri for suggesting it.)  I came across the last sentence of one of O’Reilly’s essays yesterday and it resonated through my spirit much like the deeply satisfying reverberation of a Buddhist temple gong.   “Feed your own peace…and leave your neighbor alone.”

The gist of the essay I was reading deals with the author’s thoughts while spending time at her family’s very old and very simple house by a Minnesota lake.  She had heard the sound of a loon on the lake and was somewhat surprised, given the large growth in population around the lake, the proliferation of jet skis and other disruptions into what she had considered a peaceful retreat for most of her life.  Of course, she included a perspective from her grandfather who had complained years earlier that the loons would disappear because there were too many people at the lake, perhaps ten families at the time.  O’Reilly goes on to write about the simplicity of the small house, particularly in comparison to the much larger, elaborate houses and property developments around her.    She returns, though, to that final statement…feed your own peace.

More and more I find myself expressing openly and without apology my thoughts and opinions in various venues.  As a girl and a younger woman I allowed myself the freedom of such openness only when and where I felt it was safe.  Those who have known me well for any length of time always have seen what a boat-rocker I can be, how I am a catalyst and not an inert, filler ingredient in the mix of life.  Now I have little concern whether others agree or disagree.  If the time is appropriate and the place is ready, I speak or write my truth.  However, it is MY truth and not something I believe needs to be truth for anyone else. 

Recently a very dear friend, Ann, sent me a link to an article about Christian Gnosticism, one I found extremely interesting and somewhat resonate in spots.  As I read the entire treatise, though, I found myself doing what I do so frequently.  When the continuing flow of words began to lose its energy for me, I found myself thinking how the ideas were all fine but I had enough of them.   Sometimes I wonder if various thinkers and writers realize their presentations lose power when they expand to the detailed point where the reader’s ability to draw conclusions and reach individual opinions and understandings is drowned out by the flow of commentary.  This is not to say the writings are without value.  For me, usually less said is best said.

Many years ago I experienced the gift of illumination with life-changing results.  While there is much more I could say about that experience, it is not particularly germane.  However, what is pertinent from the experience is how it began to teach me to trust my intuitive knowing and understanding.  I have lived long enough now and read/listened to enough ideas, thoughts, considerations and opinions to have discovered how much variety and richness there is in philosophical and/or spiritual thinking.  I also have learned enough to realize I now seem to be at a place where it takes very little new input to remind me of what I have already learned, observed or thought myself and to bring all of it together in creative, new ways.  Somewhere within each of us is that ability to know, to understand, to realize the truth as it applies to our particular situations.  What is my truth, though, is just exactly that.  Your truth will have a slightly different hue and a somewhat different emphasis.  Yet it still will be true.

My test for value and veracity hinges on the effect of my truth.  Does what I believe is my truth add to who I am?  Does it help me to grow and to be come more fully realized?  Do I feel a sense of rightness and resonance or do I squirm with discomfort?  (That opens a whole list of other questions about why I might be squirming.  Such times make my truth either a big mistake and not true at all, or a huge challenge to grow and expand my views.)  Does it cause harm?  I am responsible for how I express myself, what I say and what I do.  While I cannot be responsible for the choices of another person, I know my freedom and responsibility are intertwined with the freedom and responsibility of each other person.  The balance of how we each work with that intertwining is the challenge of respecting and honoring each other and the truths by which we choose to live.

On a day when the United States celebrates its independence I celebrate balance and the process of finding it, for balance is process and not destination.  Independence is a good thing until it overshadows interconnectedness and interdependence and creates imbalance.  Finding one’s truth and becoming peace within one’s spirit are individual processes, but such process is not independent or exclusive of relationship and balance.  Today, as true for every day, I shall continue to feed my own peace and to honor my neighbors and their efforts to find the same place along their own path.

There is probably no single person who has been more influential, more important, more gentle, more accepting or more understanding in my life than one man, Ross Francis Smith, my paternal grandfather.  Certainly, no one ever has demonstrated (until I had children) such total unconditional, non-judgmental love as my Grandpa.  While I frequently wondered if I ever would be good enough, something enough for my mother, I never doubted my Grandpa loved me absolutely.  He was born July 9, 1886, and passed from this life at the end of January 1972.  We lived with him in his house in Kansas after Grandma died early in 1953 until moving to Missouri in late August 1961. 

The picture I have included is a scan of the only picture anyone has of my siblings and myself with Grandpa, taken probably in 1954.

Clearly, I have many memories of my Grandpa and it is difficult to choose one.  How can one summarize into one memory the person whose effect made an incredible difference in how I live to this day?  Even at my worst, when my hot temper boiled over after another argument with my older brother and I slammed one of the two doors onto the covered back porch forcefully enough to break the glass again...and again... and again...Grandpa would get another pane of glass, clean out the frame and install another window.  I could not tell anyone how many times that happened.  He never showed any anger, any impatience or said anything negative or critical.  His only comment, when I was probably close to 13 years old, was to suggest people might find my presence more pleasant if I learned to control my temper.  He did not tell me to stop or criticize the fact I reacted strongly.  His words were quiet and gentle.  I never slammed one of those doors again, at least not hard enough to break the glass again.

Many years later, late in my Dad's life, I asked him if he ever had heard his father speak a negative word to anyone.  Surely, a father of three obstreporous sons as my dad and his two brothers could be would have had a few words once in a while.  Pop thought a while and slowly answered that neither he nor anyone he ever knew had ever heard anything negative come from Grandpa.

Grandpa was a lifelong, devout Methodist.  He and Grandma were both from farms a few miles outside the town in northeastern Kansas to which they moved and built a house and a prosperous dairy store business after their marriage in 1908.  Grandpa taught Bible classes off and on for many years and counted a large portion of the town's population as his friends all his life.  One can expect that a man from a small Kansas town would have been very conservative politically and religiously, and perhaps even somewhat narrow in his thinking.  Nothing could have been further from the truth when it comes to his ways of thinking.  He was well-read, largely self-educated after graduating from school (an accomplishment at the end of the 19th century), and endlessly curious.  He was articulate and wrote with grace and beauty.  From him I came to appreciate a wide world-view, the explorations of history and sociology, and read all his small library at an early age.  By the time I was beginning my teens I had been reading Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and all sorts of other books.  When Grandpa bought a recently published book by Lowell Thomas, "To The Top of the World," about his travels as the first invited Westerner to the city of Lhasa in Tibet where he met the young Dalai Lama in 1950, I inhaled the book and remember long discussions with my grandfather about Tibet and other subjects encouraged by Thomas' writing.

Probably the single-most precious memory I carry with me about Grandpa was our last long conversation in the fall of 1971.  With my children's father and three young children, I had driven from southwestern Louisiana to visit my mother and sister and her family in Tulsa, OK.  Grandpa joined us there, along with my older brother and his family and second younger brother and his family.  Somewhere I have a picture of Grandpa with all his then-alive great-grandchildren: Paul, Sandra, Mike (my sister's), David and Doug (my older brother's), Philip Jr (my brother Phil's son), and my three older children, Amanda, Bill and Catherine.  Later there would be six more, although all were born after Grandpa left this life.

We were all gathered in my sister's home one evening when Grandpa and I sat down together for a chat.  I had chosen to go another path in my spiritual journey a few years before, one with which he had little exposure or understanding.  Yet, he told me that night how he never doubted I was living life as I knew was best for me and he was content with that, regardless whether he understood my reasons or not.  He did not ask for explanations, only to know I was at peace with where I walked spiritually.  His blessing continues with me even 36 years later.

The last month has been increasingly challenging at work.  While my job has not been in jeopardy, I have watched the majority of the people working in the office where my desk has been located as they have made the preparations to close their jobs and the office location.  You see, I work in the mortgage banking business and most people in the U.S. are all too familiar with the current downward trend of the roller coaster ride that the mortgage business usually is.   What has happened within my employer company is the closing of less profitable parts of the business, consolidation where possible and general belt-tightening.  The company itself is a major bank and is doing just fine for its stockholders.  They stay doing just fine by such moves as the one I have been observing.

My heart has ached for many of the good people whose lives have been upended so suddenly.  Some of them have worked together for many years, beginning when they all worked for a small, local mortgage brokerage that grew to a regional mortgage bank and then was swallowed by the much larger company that now has opened the door and said good-bye to this group and five other offices across the country.  Some of the folks never have experienced a corporate lay-off, and some in this often brutal business know well how the cyclical nature of the business makes for a somewhat unstable professional life at times.  Those left in the office location where I have been are the account executives, divisional management staff and two of us who are employed by other business lines altogether.  While we all still have a bi-weekly paycheck, all of us are finding new locations to continue our jobs.  It is all disruptive, to say the least, and often emotionally difficult.  Keeping the balance of genuinely caring while carrying on with the tasks at hand make for often tenuous challenges.

Sometimes I think I must be crazy to stay in this business.  It certainly isn't the love of my life although I understand the financial world reasonably well.  However, when one's partner cannot obtain medical insurance for the very reason he needs it (diabetis and severe hypertension), an employer who makes it available is a major deciding factor.  I, too, have a chronic condition and must keep my own health needs in balance.  I have chosen to work where I do and with those whom I support because it provides for needs and because I know I make a positive difference in the lives of my professional associates.  Ambition and corporate ladder-climbing long ago lost their appeal.  Being of service and support is all I really care about now. 

So today almost all of those whose jobs have ended left while the morning still had hours to go.  There are two or three left and they will be gone in another day or so.  The place echoes with the pain, uncertainty, fear and tears while here and there the small opening buds of hope have left the perfume of a new tomorrow.  While this is not the time for me to experience such crisis, I have shared this particular path often enough in the last twenty years.  I have known various ending to have become magnificent beginnings.  Yet, it is difficult to say very much about such positive experience to someone who has yet to come to complete acceptance of the new path they must find.

My path simply curves a little one way or the other as I move to another location a few miles closer to home (for which I am thankful).  Things will settle down for a while...until the next change.

Do I believe in that 3-letter word?  No.  Do I know Sacred Reality, Being-ness?  Yes.  The usual 3-letter word name used by religious belief traditions is the effort of humans to describe awareness of something larger, more encompassing, more than any of us ever can define.  I do not need to believe.  In every cell of my being, through all the mental and spiritual life of who I am, I know this Sacredness. 

As I have come to understand theistic traditional thinking, loaded with paternal autocratic domination and truly terrible relational characteristics, I also have come to realize there is no such being as a god who knows all, sees all, controls all, has all the answers and runs the whole show, the Ultimate Rescuer.   This has meant living and being at peace with few, if any, answers, uncertainty and the knowledge I am responsible for my life and my choices.  Rather than being frightened by the awesome possibilities, I am energized and emboldened.  As we become more fully alive, more aware, more of who we are capable of being, we also become more attuned to the Sacred Reality intertwined in our very genetic code.