When Nature Comes Calling Part 2

There was another nature incident at my house.  One morning walking through the garage, I heard a strange noise.  It was not a big noise, just a little one; coming from among a stack of stored boxes and things. 

It was a rattlesnake - a very handsome one, too.

I would say I am not scared of them, but that I do have a healthy respect for them.

I've encountered them before, on the trails around Phoenix; I've even been that close to them before (about 1 1/2 feet away).  I've had them rattle at me before.  I've even captured one, using a snake catcher, from my yard and moved it into a nearby vacant area.

I've never had one in my interior living space before, however.

This one was tucked in between some boxes, well protected, very difficult to reach.  I decided to call the local herpetologists.  They came, and quickly and efficiently removed the snake.

Here's the part that keeps tugging at me.  Once the herpetology fellow had placed the snake safely in the container and we were just chatting, I heard a persistent meowing at the back door.  There was a cat out there that I had never seen before.  It was very friendly and very communicative.  I explained to it what was going on, and apologetically closed the door so it wouldn't come into the garage.  Never since have I seen that cat.

Like Gibbs on NCIS, I don't really believe in coincidences.  And, although I don't believe that all of nature is conspiring just to tell me something, I do believe that (a) I can learn from any situation, and often something deeper than initially appears; and (b) there is more to the way things work than I know.  I have no doubt that the simultaneous presence of the snake and the peculiar cat meant something, and was an opportunity for me to learn something about my connection to nature (yes, a link to another Sweet Medicine SunDance teaching).  And the beauty and strangeness of the moment is undeniable.

Leaving me to wonder - and in wonderment.  Though I can't say what it means, I can say that it was a moment of magic.

When Nature Comes Calling

The house in which I live suddenly started dripping honey. 

Turns out there was at least one, possibly several bee colonies/hives in the walls of the house.  The one removed today weighed over 100 lbs.  That's a lot of honey.

So we know these things:

• if we wanted to be beekeepers, we should have given them a place to live that worked for us, too
• if we didn't want to be beekeepers, we should have encouraged them to move out much sooner
• part of the reason we didn't was pure ignorance - we didn't know what they were actually up to, had never experienced a bee colony
• bees are incredibly good at what they do, and are masters at community cooperation, efficiency, and (within their scope) protection

In the process of dealing with this, we investigated bees and learned quite a bit about them (e.g., see the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center site), including how to deal with a bee attack as victim or rescuer; also generally more about what Africanized bees are and how they differ from European honeybees (which, in case ya didn't know, are also not native to this continent, which apparently got along ok without that style of bees for a long, long time). 

We also learned some choice bits about how we face the unknown, what specific kinds of fears come up. 

Not to mention learning how hundreds of live, angry bees sound, or how the floor looks with hundreds of dead bees on it.  And, not to be too mushy or sensitive, but also how it feels to know you are responsible for killing hundreds (thousands?) of creatures that were not intentionally causing you harm - but nevertheless were causing you harm.

Wouldn't it be great if we could communicate with them?  If we were so aligned with the world and all the other creatures that we could just have a little conference with them and say, hey, that's a really bad place for you to live.  How about this place over here instead? 

Sometimes the link between the everyday world and spirituality seems a little vague, a little misty; other times, visible but just not touchable.

Healing and the New Day

Well, the spiritual impact of disease and healing seems to be the topic of choice. Not just Woman in the World and her bout with appendicitis, but my friend Joan is writing about healing, too. Ok - I'm in!

The connections between illness and spiritual awakening are familiar ones to me. It was a summer spent in the hospital thirteen years ago that launched me on some of the spiritual work I find most valuable now - not because of some big confrontation with death (although there was a bit of that), but because I'd been longing to make that change before the hospital stay but denying myself on the grounds of too little time, too little money. My body blew that argument out of the water, pointing out that there was plenty of time and money to be sick and in pain. Finding the time and money to be happy took on a new meaning after that.

But maybe more important are the profound little changes that illness and healing have brought me. Like the vow I made many years ago in a healing ceremony to caress my body each and every day of my life, viscerally remembering how astoundingly grateful I am to be incarnate. In the beginning, that vow took a lot of attention. Over time it became second nature, something I did easily, casually, reliably.

And then it expanded from there. I began seeing myself in mirrors and acknowledging my reflection in the same way, caressing the image through my glance, loving myself for being myself. It became my own private joke, a wink I shared with myself, an affirmation that continually caught me by surprise and never failed to feed me.

Now these caresses, this intimacy with myself, have become my foundation, my way in the world. Yesterday morning I glanced in the bathroom mirror and felt a thrill, seeing the lover in myself. Today was more about curiosity, glimpsing the way age is changing me, expressing itself through me. Whatever the flavor, each day is welcome. And that, I must say, is a healing many times over.

Appendicitis

This may be a "part 1" - appendicitis is, for me, a big topic.  That's because - as you might guess - I had it not so very long ago.  And it was a very significant experience.

First of all, there's the knowledge that, if it had happened in another time and place, I'd be dead.  That's all.  I'd just be dead.  So what I have now, post-appendicitis, is in a sense a new life.  I need not have had it, but I do.

Second, there's the impact of the experience.  When I was feeling well enough to stand up and wash myself, I had the rather painful luxury of being able at the same time to look at myself in the mirror.  It was like getting a preview of what my body would look like in 5-10 years if I didn't take care of it.  It scared the heck out of me.

The combination of those two things was a little like that old movie, It's a Wonderful Life.  I got to see two alternate realities, with the opportunity to choose either of them - or something different.

In the Sweet Medicine Sundance healing paradigm, an illness is sometimes referred to as a "knock of spirit."  That is, it's our higher self's way of saying, hey, bud, wake up!  Is this what you really want to be doing?  Appendicitis was like that for me.  It's easy to say that at the time something like that happens, but - speaking for myself - the proof of it really comes later.  Did I really take the opportunity to change something?  Or did I just make a big fuss about how profound it was and go back to exactly what I was doing before?

I was just looking at this a few days ago, and realizing that I had indeed, without really acknowledging it (though certainly intentionally), made some significant changes in my life.  They're not really huge - certain things that I used to do with less dedication are not negotiable anymore; and I'm more likely to be guided by my body's needs rather than attempting to silence or distract from them. 

The changes are subtle enough that, until I sat down to write to a friend and did some reflection about my life now, I had not known they were in place.  I wasn't exactly trying to make them; I simply did.

Hunger for the More

It's striking to me how relentlessly life can seem a struggle, cycles of feeling thwarted, lost, adrift in doubt and negativity. In truth, though, flooded in all that self-pity, the real world is drowned.

Reality is fairly simple. Yes, there is pain, and dishes to be done. And that to do list looming...But what is to be gained by poking and prodding at each of those details, searching them for meaning or, worse, for a different reality than the one that truly is?

How do I stop playing with misery, knowing that there is more to my relationship with God than supplication? It is not so hard to love myself, or to see how each day is precious, or even to see that joy is somehow fed by my breath. It's easy to see the light bouncing off the faces of those I spend time with, reflections of the curious wonders of life and the delight of sharing them with others.

These are secrets easily known if only I am willing to stop the habit of denying them. And a good weapon for that is realizing how much the negativity bores me, always looking and sounding the same, creating the same predictable outcomes.

But there's a stronger weapon yet: hunger. It's not just a matter of rising above it all, untouched. There is something here, in my human moments, in this body and this life, something that needs tending and transforming. But working at, making it a struggle...that's not the point. What is life if I stop arguing and instead open to my longing, letting it guide me?

What if I stop trying to prove that I'm worth something more, and instead just choose it?

Making Changes

Several years ago, I found the absolute best system for making changes in my life that I have ever come across: the Sweet Medicine SunDance Path .  The combination of teachings and ceremony on this path are hands-down the most effective tools for making conscious, proactive, holistic change that I've encountered.  (I've linked above to the Red Lodge description because it comes closest to describing how the teachings, ceremony and experience fits together to create the fertile change ground I've felt.)  Because of this, I've been able to make my life much better, much faster, than I had thought likely possible.

And yet - there are still places in my life where I'm just not where I want to be, where I've been stuck for a while, and I don't know how to move from where I am.  Some of them are pretty important.

This week, I found myself (ok, it wasn't an accident, or unexpected) observing a workshop on making organizational change. One of the techniques they used was Force Field Analysis, a social science technique developed by Kurt Lewin.  Here is a vast simplification:

1. related to the change you desire to make, list the forces driving the change and the forces opposing
2. evaluate the driving forces - which are the strongest? which can be easily increased?
3. evaluate the opposing forces - which are the strongest? which can be easily weakened?
4. develop a plan of action based on the above analysis

I think this is usually applied in business or social settings rather than individual (but it's so new to me I don't know for sure).  In this setting, there are application worksheets and 2nd-level analysis and so on. 

However, for me, in my state of stasis, the idea that by simply increasing or decreasing the strength of one force will change the balance of forces in such a way that the change can happen - in whatever time frame - is really exciting. 

It gives me a new tool, a new approach, for those things that don't respond well to the tools I have.  If the nut won't come off with the open-end wrench, maybe you need a socket wrench with a long handle.  If you can't pull the screw out with a hammer, maybe a screwdriver would work better. 

I'm already making my list of driving and opposing forces.  I'll let you know how it comes out.

Here are a couple of places to fine force field analysis information:

• On valuebasedmanagement.net
• At Mind Tools

Walking Our Own Road

A friend of mind is a health coach and also a spiritual seeker - she writes about the intersection of the two on her Blogger blog: The Path to Enlightenment Is Paved By... I love that title - the way it makes you think about the end of the sentence, realizing that each of us have to pave our own way, in our own way.

She's taught me a lot about how that's true with healing. We're both kind of unique, having each healed ourselves from some pretty major arthritis. We both got it young (me at 14, her in her 20s I think), and we both had a lot of pain for a lot of years. And we both found our way out to the other side. So, the irony is there is that we're pretty similar in our uniqueness.

But we're really different, too, and we each created our healing our own way. Her strategies, discipline, and sequence didn't look very much like mine at all, and we each embraced truths along the way that didn't hold true for the other.

Healing, enlightenment, oneness...there is no one recipe, formula, or law to get there. What matters is the going - "the will to do, and the willingness to engage," as another friend of mine says. That old "we make the road by walking it" thing - each of us, our own footsteps, our own way.