comfortably silent together

A friend emailed me this quote by Eckhart Tolle:

With any human relationship, the question is, "Is there space?"  Use that as a little mantra.  Is there space in this relationship?  Put bluntly, it's a space when thought becomes unimportant, and any judgment of your mind, even emotion, becomes unimportant when something deeper is there: awareness, stillness, alert, alive, stillness, as space.

This is the type of quote that you could throw out to a dozen people and get a dozen different interpretations, which is one reason why I like it.  I reminds me of an experience I had the summer after moving to Portland.  I believe I had fairly recently come out to my friend KaRyn and we were at the Oregon coast with a couple other friends.  She and I were walking along the beach chatting and eventually the conversation petered out and we just walked in silence for bit.  Then KaRyn said, "Aw, we're now the type of friends that can be comfortably silent together." 

To me, that quote is about allowing that stillness and silence to exist in relationships as a...um...silent partner.  It's a stillness that allows you to see beyond the roles you need the other person to play, the expectations you have for each other.  It allows you to get a sense of their essence instead of their ego.  It lets go of trying to think of the next thing to say in order to preserve the narrative you've created together, and as a result opens up the relationship to unthought of narratives that might be more substantive and healing. 

I think it also creates sustainable relationships.  How often do you tire of certain relationships but you can't quite put your finger on why?  Maybe it's because the relationship is trying to follow a narrative that no longer serves a purpose but there's fear to alter the chemistry and balance of a relationship because it's worked in the past and is the basis for the relationship. 

I've discovered that one sign of a good friend is one who allows you the space to be something new each time you meet by leaving everything they know about you behind and letting you re-create yourself, much like Skye's Sweet Onions of Forgivness.

What about you, kittens?  How do you create space in your relationships and what does it feel like to you?

an eternity of now

Sometimes I find the idea of living forever completely exhausting and depressing. I think this feeling started to surface when I started exploring and questioning what I really do and don’t believe, especially about what happens after this life. Think about it though, existing for-ev-er is a really long time, especially when I really have no idea what a next life would look like and really only have this life to go on.

I’ve come to appreciate the idea that every moment is perfect and is exactly what I need, if I am just patient and present with the moment and listen to what it has to teach me. The other day I was wondering if maybe there won’t be a separation into kingdoms as rewards in the next life, but that maybe we’ll all end up in the same place. Maybe the separation will only come from our own ability or inability to appreciate the now.

If you’re able to find and appreciate the beauty in each moment, you’ll probably be more successful at enjoying eternity than if you were constantly wishing for a better situation or for whatever might come next. Maybe if I were better at finding the beauty in each moment then eternity wouldn’t sound so exhausting…

sherri wants to live with me

Sunday afternoon I sat down on my couch to watch some TV and noticed an envelope taped to my sliding glass door.  I retrieved it and found a hand written letter inside that said the following:

Hello my name is Sherri and my mother lives in the unit directly across from you.  She informed me that in the recent past you had a roommate and may possibly be looking for another, since the previous roommate has moved.  I just moved back home to Oregon  after living in California for several years.  I will be looking for my own place of course, over the course of the summer, however, in the meantime, I am looking for a room to rent.

I am 37 years old.  I work as a veterinary surgical nurse, however, I do not own any pets.  I am a non-smoker and I do not use drugs of any kind.  I am clean and you will find that I am hardly ever home.  In closing, please call me if you are interest.

Sincerely,
Sherri

PS How does it feel to have craigslist come to you? LOL

I'll be honest with you, Sherri, the envelop taped to my sliding glass door was a little creepy.  I felt this urge for the rest of the day to close the blinds. 

Now I have several questions.  I realize that it's not unheard of for people of the opposite sex to be roommates, but I would think it would happen when there was already some kind of established friendship or at the very least an acquaintanceship.  I find it odd that a woman would want to move in with a man she knows nothing about.

My other question is if your mother lives across from me, why don't you move in with her? 

I'm kind of tempted to take her up on her offer and then make things as weird as possible.  Like keep jars of urine on the shelf, or hang out in my Snuggie with nothing on underneath, or pretend like I have Tourrette's, or keep a blow up doll around the house and act like she's real (Lars and the Real Girl style).  I could also resurrect Jarrett's severed arm from last summer. 

reclaiming god

I wrote the following for a discussion group I belong to in an attempt to explain my relationship with God.  I thought I'd post it here as well.

I’ve found that to make the gospel come alive for me, I’ve had to rewrite the narratives of what the voices in my head tell me about who I am, what the gospel is, who my Heavenly Father and Savior are and how they feel about me and what role I play in the grand scheme of things. That rewriting comes about through the help of the spirit and through personal revelation. I think we too often allow others to define who God is and what his relationship is with us. I find that the perception others have of God often doesn’t resonate with me, (he’s vengeful, he hates gays, he’s the God of one particular political party, he dangles carrots in front of us to get us to do what he wants, he sends trials if we cross him, etc) If I rely on others’ perceptions of him, I think it makes it difficult to conceive of a God that I can relate to and resonate with. If I rely too much on others’ perceptions of him and those perceptions don’t work for me, it’s almost like I let them take him away from me. I let those voices and narratives dominate, which leaves me feeling no connection to my Heavenly Father.


I find though, that proactively taking on the creation of a relationship with him through the spirit allows me to create new narratives, new perceptions, new relationships. I think that’s a big part of why we’re here. To learn how to create. As I’ve created this new relationship, I’ve also found that I need to keep a couple of things in mind. One, I can share and talk about my relationship with God with others, but I shouldn’t try to force others to adopt my perceptions or feel frustrated when how I perceive things doesn’t resonate with them. Related to this idea, if I feel comfortable and confident in my relationship with and perception of God and the gospel, I don’t need to feel threatened by others’ relationships and perceptions. We are all in different places and I think we perceive the God that we need (or even sometimes feel that we don’t need) at certain times in our lives. The second thing I try to keep in mind then, is that I need to be open to the relationship and the perceptions changing, as I grow and mature and become. The God I needed as a child is different than the God I need as an adult. And not that they are two different Gods, I just think that as we grow and mature, our knowledge and understanding of him can become more full and nuanced and personalized if we let it happen.

increasing bandwidth

In my last post, I said that I believe that if we are downloading the gospel, we are probably less than 1% to completion.  I think a lot of members of the church, however, believe that we've already downloaded most, if not all of it. One of the stumbling blocks of Mormonism is the belief of its members that it is the only true church on the face of the earth.  Like I said in my last post, I think it can lead to complacency, which greatly reduces the bandwidth of our connection to the divine. 

I think something that could greatly increase that bandwidth is being open to the fact that we might be wrong and then owning up to it when we discover that we are.  The following TED talk is by Kathryn Schulz and she talks about the importance of embracing our fallibility, and what opens up for us as a result.  Sometimes she seems like she's trying just a smidge too hard to be an engaging speaker, but she has some really great things to say.  Below are some of my favorites:

"Trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous."

"And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweet heart and move back to your home town and raise a bunch of kids together and something else happened instead."

"This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly."

"For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us."