Can I be myself, in conversation, remembering my reality is composed of fragments?
A cliché?
Be Yourself!
Heaven knows
I’ve seen the phrase
tossed about
Tried to apply
directive to myself
and
failed
so
many
times….
She invited me to a Zoom conversation and I accepted…..knowing…..that if I’m going to grow, I need to keep jumping, and climbing.
Go—go—go!
In my eyes, she’s kind of a big deal.
A singer, 134 podcasts to her name, a blog, retired from a career in banking.
I felt….
small.
Brene Brown’s talk on Netflix taught me about vulnerability.
I learned to use…
The story I’m telling myself is….
Before our call I was telling myself,
“I am not as good as you. I do not deserve your time. I have nothing to offer.”
Like an awkward swan, I nervously told my conversant the story I’d been telling myself, right off the bat.
With grace and elegance, she paused….
She didn’t think I was small.
My mind made that up.
And we went on to share a long and uplifting conversation.
In October 2016, I wrote a poem, Ordinary, Extraordinary People.
I knew my hierarchical thinking was holding me back from a growing life.
I have been un-learning ever since…
still a work in progress.
One of my first readers, a friend and mentor, recently reminded me that the science of spirituality is summarized in three simple words:
Practice, Practice, Practice
Thanks Puneet Srivastava!
Can you be yourself, in conversation, remembering your reality is composed of fragments?
Around about the year you were born, a group - Sly and the Family Stone - sang, "I wanna thank you falettinme be mice elf agin." No; really! A deliberate strategy to get folks to listen perhaps. And today, a few years later, your writings are helping me do just that. Not always comfortably but what is the down side?
Offering up a fragment (spark) from Sly and the Family Stone, while Bruce referenced a Rilke spark, is the beauty of the Born Free Newsletter. Far from claiming to make it so, I'm content to collect Sparks at every opportunity.
Thanks Bruce, thanks Gail!!
Love the reference to Rilke "The Swan" In one of the translations "gaily descends into the water and condescends to glide". I can't help but think, as contrarian, that being who you are is less about practice and more about letting go into the now. Does right now take practice? Isn't the way we came into the world fully innocent who we are... doesn't everything we've learned make us less like the swan? Does a swan know itself as a swan? Just is! What would condescending to glide feel and be like for we humans? You?
On another note, while I'm on a roll.. in Jewish mystical tradition the fragments as your describing are named "sparks". It is thought the role of humanity is to gather the sparks into "One".
Oh, and yes, it seems the poetry is just so perfectly you.