When We Come To It

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Pat

I look around at what’s going on with this coronavirus and I wonder, “Will we come to it?” Is this the time when we will be brave enough to listen . . . to change course and accept a new normal and not go back to status quo?

We have such power to carve out mountain ranges, genetically modify our food and our bodies, rearrange rivers, go to the moon and outer space, blow up countries; and, yet, one small microscopic virus has silently and invisibly swept across our world causing countries to shut down, stock markets to plummet and people to die. Can we accept the challenge in what’s happening; that it can touch each of us and is no longer just happening to someone else?

I don’t think we’ve dealt with something like this before on a global scale; though, in the past, we’ve had plagues and pandemics far greater in number than this one. Have you ever thought about that? Why this one? Maybe, this is it.

Maybe this is the time when we come out of this on the other side and there will be countries, beliefs, families — people in general — coming together, settling differences and living in harmony. I felt it early on as a child in wanting peace in my home with my parents. Events happen, catastrophes occur and we always wait for the dust to settle so we can get back to our normal lives, instead of looking beyond and consider something different.

I suspect there’s been a lot of the same tug-and-pull down through the ages and, still wonder, if now we are able to come to it? Come to reconcile conflicts within ourselves, others, and face what’s there in our lives that have been trying to get our attention. Truly learn to be kind and live in peace with one another, particularly now, when we have the capability to seriously damage or destroy this world as we know it?

I believe this is a major crossroad in humanity where we have an opportunity to be quiet, listen and hear and, maybe, for the first time, get the message on what’s calling to show us how to do that: consider maybe we’re the problem and feel life and love we’ve been given. I think we’ll hear and answer the call this time. I’ve already seen so many stories with people reaching out to one another in innovative ways to connect on the internet and many others. It’s beginning.

Over the years, I’ve become more sensitive to life and death and can’t watch anything close to violent movies or shows or even play “bloody” video games with my grandsons. It stays with me. Even to the point where Hubby helps capture spiders and moths for me in the house and puts them outside. I know it sounds crazy, and maybe over the top, but I can’t help it. He has gotten used to my many quirks over the years and I feel if I smash a bug I can’t go back one minute before and put life in it and bring it back to the way it was crawling or flying. But, you know, we don’t have many bugs.

Or, I have a strong feeling when I smell fresh cut pine. It bothers me, even though we’ve chopped down our own Christmas trees for many years when the girls were young. I always sense a feeling they’re stuck planted right where they are with no ability to run. Can you imagine the feeling when the sound of a chain saw starts coming your way and you can’t move (aghh – one of those dreams waiting to happen). Then, there are the cattle trucks I pass on the highway and get emotional knowing their fate, even though I enjoy a good hamburger. It’s not perfect and I still have a lot in reconciling balance within my own life.

The world out there is much different than mine. Big entertainment is popular with killing and blowing things up. People seem to take pleasure in getting even and watching things die. We puff ourselves up and think we’re all so powerful in what we can destroy and conquer but can we put life in one flower or create the song of a bird. Maybe that’s what’s going on in this coronavirus is that it will show us what’s precious. After this, I don’t think we’ll be able to go back to the way it was. Too much will have changed and what was before will no longer serve us. Nature, sun and the moon, earth and many universes beyond will move on. Question is: Will we give up our power plays and petty differences to move on and be there with them?

I came across this poem the other day that spoke to the many things I’ve described above. It seemed to resonate in ways I’ve long felt but never until now seen words put to them so beautifully. It’s really powerful if you listen to Maya Angelou’s voice from the video while following along with her words in this poem. Maya Angelou reading her poem “A Brave and Startling Truth”.

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
By Maya Angelou
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we discover
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign lands

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged may walk into evenings of peace
When the religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Not the Garden of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade, the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Can come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety and
without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when We come to it.

Like Maya Angelou presents in her poem, I believe we’ll come to it. We’ll find a way. It may not be my way or your way . . . maybe, a third way, like William Ury talks about, the perfect blend of both ways plus a little more.

It will happen, if we allow it and do our part and when it does maybe we will see something miraculous. Another true wonder of the world – the human realizing they’re true potential.

Pat from the ‘ol kitchen table

Mountain Road

Posted on November 7, 2018 by Pat

Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

I know I’ve been on this mountain road before at night but it’s different this time. Maybe, because I’m dreaming and sense there’s a reason. Funny (you think?), that in this dream it takes place where we’ve just left the voting polls and we’re on the road to get onto the main highway for home but it’s shut down. There’s been some type of roll over, and, in the mountains that could mean hours.

I remember some years ago, when a logging truck lost it’s load, it took a good part of the day before it opened up again. There was another time when some type of tanker truck was in an accident and the highway was shut down for cleanup. It took hours to get home from work when traffic was rerouted weaving for miles through forest access roads to get around it.

What do we do now? We thought maybe we would see how far we’d get by walking; at least, it was doing something rather than just sitting in the car. There was one of two routes we could choose. One was go back to the car and back to the voting polls where we came from or walk out to the highway.

We chose to walk out to the highway – maybe not such a good choice, but everything was gridlocked and no traffic was moving. So, we began walking, for a couple of miles it seemed, up Crow Hill. After walking awhile past people sitting in their cars, it seemed senseless that we left our car like that. It was time to rethink this decision.

I wanted to continue on and hubby wanted to go back to the car and turn around to get back home from there. So, we decided to do both. We’d split up and I would go on and he’d go back and somehow we’d meet in the middle or at home. This is where a message began to form infused more with feelings.

This was not a random dream that just happened to come to me on election night. I sensed more in my heart for my neighbors, family and friends in our neighborhoods and across our country where we were at a crossroads with the choices we’re making. There’s not just a high road or low road – just choices. We make them all the time and find ourselves in the strangest places wondering how we got there.

Even now, as I sit here to write this the next day, rather than 4:30 am, I still feel the gentle tenderness of the message: that is, look at where I am and pay attention to how I got there. It’s not necessarily a bad thing – just navigation and choice. Most of the time, we get sidetracked, take a shortcut or we lose things along the way and have to go back and get them before we can begin again.

If we don’t notice, we can be way off course and it may take longer and be more difficult to get back. But, in the end somehow we’ll always find our home, that field beyond – together. It’s our choice and we can work together to make it easier.

Out Beyond Ideas

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense ~~ Rumi

(Excerpt from the translations of Coleman Barks © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes)

Pat from the ol’ kitchen table

New Beginnings – Changes ~~ to Live or Die

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Pat

(Thank you for coming to my new site – If you’re new welcome and if you’ve come from my old site I’m happy you’re back – I hope you resubscribe! Please be patient – it’s still a work in progress)

“When one door closes another door opens, but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.” ~~ Alexander Graham Bell

One thing I’ve begun to observe in these new beginnings – changes are that they come in many package forms.Like many of you who may be experiencing life changes swirling around, in and out as if out of control hardly able to catch our breath, the changes presented to us can be good and some not so good.

But I’m beginning to notice how they are different not whether they’re good or bad but what opportunities they can bring in growth and reflection even if the package appears not too appealing.

Nobody likes changes because we find ourselves out of our comfort zone and forced to face things we’d rather put off for another day. But if we choose to step back and take another view, changes can bring not only something new but they can bring freedom – a break away from the old – if you dare to embrace them.

Let me explain some of my personal new beginnings – changes I’ve been experiencing in the past year. Near the end of last year 2011, I was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor. That will stop anybody in their tracks with all the emotions and thoughts flooding in at once. I realized with the ebb and flow of life that there are things people can do for me and with me and there are other things ultimately only I can do for myself when it comes to my body.

I was blessed to have loved ones supporting me along with a fantastic doctor team and medical technology but they can’t physically take over the task at hand and make the decisions I was pressed to make whether I wanted to or not. No procrastinating here.

I say that because of what my acupuncturist presented me with. He told me that the universe gives us choices and presents each of us with crossroads throughout our lives and he felt this was a gift and that I was, indeed, at a crossroads – I could choose life or I could choose death and either choice would be okay.

At the time, all I could think and feel was “I’m tired – tired of beating the wind”. But somewhere I must have made the choice to live because I started the radiation and chemo treatments and finished early November 2011 resulting with the tumor gone. Before this went down I should have gotten a clue earlier last summer when we lost our 30-year old horse to colic not long after our son-in-law had an emergency health issue in which he almost lost his life. Some big new beginnings and life catcher change packages not asked for but presented nonetheless and the universe finally got my attention.

A new year began and in March 2012 my youngest daughter had her second child. What a thrill to have another baby in the family and I observed the adjustments this new life was bringing into her family – another new beginning – change package.

I’ve been working full time in the corporate world, like most of you. But recently, at the end of April, that job took a turn and went out of state – another new beginning – change package. What do I do now in my ‘golden years’? When I took this job almost 4 years ago, I didn’t think I would enter the corporate world again. Before then, I thought I would explore my passions and personal interests and see what I had to offer the world but because of money flow situations it played a big part in the decision of getting back in the corporate world and taking another full time position.

Another new beginning – change package came also in April in losing my husband’s 93-year old mother and very much a mother to me as well. It’s a new beginning for her as well as for us realizing the emptiness left without her. This was a hard one and always is when you lose someone you love no matter what age. It brings up emotions you don’t want to feel and old-time questions we never seem to have answers for when someone dies. At the same time it takes us out of this world for a moment to reflect on the preciousness of life and take a review of our priorities.

Finally, last month in May, I was sitting with family in Richey Stadium at Denver University watching my oldest grandson’s high school graduation ceremony – I remember that new beginning – life package when I graduated from high school so many years ago. So many possibilities this graduation holds for him. It’s a day you look forward to when you get a bigger taste of independence shifting the focus from school, friends and having fun to first glimpses of the future – scary.

If we live long enough, life seems to bring us around full circle back to where I’m at now still lingering at this new beginning – change package of what I’m going to be doing now. I feel like I’ve been given my life back and I want to find ways to make it fulfilling, valuable and helpful to others. This will be my life beginning – change gift to you sharing my life stories whatever the package looks like with the hope you will be encouraged as we all make these journeys together on this big ball we call Earth. You’re not out there alone loving, laughing, crying and praying.

Don’t ever allow yourself to think this is all there is and life is boring. When new beginnings – changes come, whether they appear difficult or exciting, pay close attention and welcome them with openness no matter how uncomfortable. You may be at a crossroads about to discover the new found freedom you can have with the opportunities they present – something new and exciting never before dreamed. Let me know what new beginnings – changes you have in your life. I’m interested in how it’s going for you.

“When you are inspired . . .
dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive,
and you discover yourself to be a greater person
by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” – Pantajali

Pat from the ol’ kitchen table