June 23, 2015 – Books that pulled me along

Recording of post coming soon.

I was married for the first time when I was 25. My college boyfriend and I asked my dad’s oldest friend, Jerry Lucey to perform our ceremony. He was incredibly well-read, could recite Irish poetry and had an amazing presence. He was a Universal Life Church minister and ours was not his first wedding to preside over. Since neither one of us had any affiliation with any minister or judge, having Jerry marry us made perfect sense. When we met with him in his flat in the city (San Francisco) to talk about the ceremony I told Jerry I wanted no mention of “God.” God meant nothing to me – or my fiancé. The Paul Stookey song “There is Love” was the only way God was mentioned on June 27, 1987. As I look back, this stands out very clearly to me as ground zero in my spiritual journey. The next eight years played out with alcoholism and co-dependency, the pain of which brought me to my knees. And it gave me my inner life.

I get many of the inspirations for what to write on Tuesdays when I’m lying in bed, just barely awake. Yesterday I was thinking about the dozens of books that have contributed pieces to the unfolding of my inner life, my growth. I thought I’d share a few of them with you.

I have no idea how I was led to the first one, but I read “The Celestine Prophecy” in 1994. This book dawned in me the awareness of other dimensions of existence beyond the physical world, as well as other forces at work beyond my conscious mind and will. It was here that I first heard of “energy” in its new-age sense. Shortly after that, I was lead to Marianne Williamson’s “A Return to Love,” her book on The Course in Miracles, which helped me start to realize that I there might be a point to how hard my life felt.

I was still in Burlingame – where I lived in my first marriage – when was introduced to Pema Chodron! I wish I could remember how I was led to “The Wisdom of No Escape.” Thumbing through it now, it’s astonishing that I encountered this wisdom so early in my process. I imagine my self-back-then reading this passage: “We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness. … Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other.” All I saw at that point was that it was all “bad” – that there could be something “good” for me in it helped me see that my panic attacks could be telling me something.

Of course this list includes Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way.” Because of this book, I wrote Morning Pages for the five years from about 1995-2000 – from just before leaving my first marriage until Joe and I were married. These were years I chose my self, I chose my life – which I don’t think would have been possible without Morning Pages. And I still take strength and direction from this passage: “Anger is the firestorm that signals the death our old life. Anger is the fuel that propels us into our new one.”

The crack in my belief that life was “being done to me” started my transformation. The next few years included separation, divorce, living in Paris, and then coming home, facing my loneliness – I had the hardest time being single. And then in 2003-2004 infertility spurned a second big “wave” of change in me – leaving a career that was so far outside my feminine soul’s call.

Sue Monk Kidd talked about her fears in her spiritual memoir, “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.” She had a successful career as a Christian writer, which had become her identity. But then there was this voice. “There is this other clamoring in me, too. The desire I’ve carried around but never dared. The thing I thought I could never do. Now here it is. The urge to create characters and stories. The ones that are mine to tell. Fiction, the passion tells me. Fiction. …I cannot stop thinking how brave I will have to be to follow it.” And what came out was the New York Times bestseller, “The Secret Life of Bees!” Ok, I get it, these voices must be listened to! And I must listen to mine!

Ekhart Tolle’s first spiritual blockbuster “The Power of Now” played a part for me – life is all about our consciousness unfolding. In his book “A New Earth” it is this passage that has me understand why so many of us are drawn to flowers: “Earth, 114 million years ago, one morning just after sunrise: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opens up to receive the rays of the sun….Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness.” I’m now fully validated, painting flowers is not trivial in any way, it’s in fact right at the center of our evolution! Oh, is that all?

I love skipping to the end of newspaper articles, magazine stories and books. I have read Steven Pressfield’s “The Wart of Art” all the way through, and much of it over and over, the end is worth reading all on its own – it’s a call to answer our call.

“Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it. It may help to think of it this way: If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God. Creative work is not a selfish act, or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every living being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

These are just a few of the passages that I keep going back to. There are many more books that have made their contribution to me. A few more follow at the end of this post.

It’s incredible for me to reflect on the woman I was 28 years ago this coming weekend. The God that my 25-year-old-self had no place for was a God based on my outsider’s understanding of Judeo-Christian religion. The God that is now at the center of everything for me is a God that is so much bigger, so much deeper and integral to all that is. I’m truly grateful for all the pain and suffering that has loosened me from my dug-in stance that all the answers come from my rational brain and has allowed me to progressively surrender to a knowing that I, you, we are all expressions of this energy, this force, expressions of God. And our lives, our joys, our suffering – including all we create – are a reflection of our progress towards our true nature – our beauty. God is in and through these books. I’m grateful to their authors for bringing them through.

Love,

Care

A few more books:

• The Millionth Circle – by Jean Shinoda Bolen – the hundredth monkey story is worth the whole book.
• Eat Pray Love – by Elizabeth Gilbert – ok, so who spends months in Rome and only goes to one museum, the Museum of Pasta!? I love the permission to prioritize pleasure!
• A Path with Heart – by Jack Kornfield – I once did a short meditation from this book for about an hour while on a bus returning home from the city. I got off the bus and all the flowers were extra clear, sharp and vibrant – it altered my consciousness!
• Wouldn’t Take Nothin for this Journey Now – By Maya Angelou – her sovereignty emboldens me.
• Gifts from the Sea – by Anne Morrow Lindburg – just poetry.
• The Naked Now – by Richard Rohr – the idea of non-dual thinking has brought immense peace.
• All of Anne Lamott’s non-fiction – every single one. Bird by Bird’s chapter title “Shitty First Drafts” allowed me to let myself write – something I told myself I was incapable of.
• Art and Fear – by David Bayles and Ted Orland – this book affirms everything I observe in myself and others as we make art and even attempt to live a creative life.