Kahil Gibran: Embracing Defeat as the Source of Wisdom

Kahil Gibran's poem Defeat gives me a new perspective on making mistakes, not measuring up, not meeting expectations: Defeat is our teacher, our companion on our path who reminds us the path is the point not the destination which may on any given day prove to be nowhere we want to be anyway.

Defeat can remind us that some destinations are not what they seem when we fix on them, that if we persist in directing all our efforts toward them they will prove to be desolate or worse, desolating of our souls: Perfection, fame, praise, awards, power, recognition, riches, to name a few, are glittering prizes with empty or decaying centers if pursued and grasped for themselves.  If you make them the point the path itself is pointless.

This has reminded me that the theme of my storyworld --the fruits of the Spirit--is supposed to be the point of the whole project.  The vision was to have these fruits embodied in the characters.  But somehow I've lost, or in some cases, never gained, the ability to embody them in my own life.  I forgot to make Spirit my own destination.  With that dereliction I've turned my project into an empty exercise of ego.  No wonder the words have wearied of me.

Love, joy, peace, hope, faith, mercy, patience, justice, grace to name just a few of these blessings of Spirit must grow in the compost of defeat as the ego has no need for them.

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Sunday Serenity #390

OneJourney.net

Spiritual quotes from sacred books and philosophers across time and cultures grace beautiful, images of nature and human communing wrapped in uplifting music.

Enjoy in

Love Joy Peace Hope

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The Power of Words From the Heart

Read the handwritten ER doctor’s note
 that's gone viral on Reddit: 'via Blog this'

This is the handwritten condolence note to a man who'd recently lost his wife to breast cancer.  It is from the ER doctor who treated his wife a few hours before her death.  For the first time in her career she sent a personal note to a family because this woman, in spite of her pain, and been 'engaging and cheerful' and the loving bond between the couple had so moved her. (Gender is a collective guess of those commenting on Reddit based on the handwriting.)

It was the son of the couple who posted the photo on Reddit, remarking that it had changed his life.

This story has moved me on many levels.  The obvious personal encounters aspects of the story in which individuals impact each other's lives both unwittingly and on purpose by their behaviors has me enthralled of course.  This is a good story even in this minimalist state and I can imagine it as a movie or novel.  But I believe there is another level to these encounters: the spiritual level of human interconnection.  That would be another post.  Though I'm not sure I could express my thoughts without writing a novel.

The level of personal encounter might have been the aspect I'd have most likely expounded on a few weeks ago.  Now, because this is the latest of several recent encounters that have reminded me of the power of writing by hand.  In February I checked out a book from the library, The Golden Thread: A History of Writing by Ewan Clayton, which is the story of the alphabets and writing tools from the early stone tablets to the digital age. [a book I'd like to own because of it's exquisite line drawings and photos] This got me thinking about the difference between various writing tools and the impacts each has on the output.

Of course this led to personal reminiscence for I'd been writing stories for over two decades before my first word processor in my early thirties and even tho I'd taught myself to type at age 11 on my mother's typewriter and received my own for my 13th birthday, I'd always written my rough drafts by hand.  While working on the rewrite of Candy Kiss I happened to write a few paragraphs on clean paper while reading through the hard copy and was thrown into a time warp where I wrung out some insights.  I've been working on a post about that which is not ready to go live yet.

I was thinking about saving this image for that post but decided it deserved its own post.

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The Story We Tell Creates the Story We Live

As a writer, storyteller and poet and one for whom story has been a source of joy for decades I have noted that story has the power to shape reality.  The stories we tell create our beliefs, our beliefs create our actions and our actions create our life which is the individual story we live.

But none of our individual stories are lived in isolation from the millions of other individual stories lived on this planet now and in the past and future.  It is my belief that every story impacts every other story as ripples made by fistfuls of pebbles cast upon a still pond and in the process create the Story that is lived out by the global family of humanity.

In the ten years since the events of 9/11/01 I've been dismayed to watch as the predominant story being lived became one of fear.  I became hesitant and often just opted out of posting anything to commemorate that day for fear of being an unwitting contributor to the miasma of fear, anger, bitterness and hate that seem to be automatically associated with any reference to the day.

Every call to 'Never forget', every image of the smoking buildings, planes and craters in the ground, every memorial and every roll call of the lost ones whether aloud at a service or via page after page of names and faces in a newspaper seemed to be a call to remember to be afraid, to be angry, to demand justice.

There is only one outcome to that Story if we do not endeavor to change it and that is more smoking buildings, planes and craters in the ground, more roll calls of the lost and the morphing of the meaning of 'justice' into little more than a synonym for 'revenge'.

This year I've discovered two organizations attempting to change the Story from one of fear to one of Love and Peace.  The first, featured in the video at top is One The Event and the second featured in the video below is The 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment.

One The Event is being held in Seattle from Friday through Sunday and streaming live from 10 AM Pacific Coast Time each day. There will be inspirational speakers and musicians from around the globe. Sign the petition on their site. 

The 9/11 Peace Intention Experiment is being held live on line beginning at 10 AM Pacific Coast Time and repeated each day at the same time for seven days thereafter. It is a communal meditation with participants from around the globe. Register to participate.

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My Visionboard

This is what I've been fiddling with since yesterday afternoon when, while cleaning out my email inbox of five days worth of non-personal stuff I found an announcement from Oprah.com about the new online visionboard creator.

I gathered from the examples shown that most people make these with many fewer pictures and add text and decorations mimicking scrapbooking. But I wanted as many images representing as much of what was meaningful to me as possible in a single collage.

I was going to explain a bit more of my motives for the images I chose and what they represent to me but I think it is fairly self-explanatory.

BTW on Oprah.com I go by enjoystory. I don't spend a lot of time there and when I do I'm mostly a lurker, reading the articles and other's comments and whatever other content users put in public view.

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The River of Dreams

I'm going to try to duck in and out of here real quick tonight as I'm deep into my The River Why project for Book Drum. The deadline is looming, Feb 28 is a little under 10 days now, and I don't want to break the hyperfocus I seem to be in this evening.

So I'll leave you with this Billy Joel video that came up in one of my searches for media and info relating to The River Why. Having my head full of the scenes and themes of the novel, I was struck with a sense of wonder as I seemed to see them being played out on this little YouTube screen. I've loved Billy Joel music since Jr. High but had never thought of him or his songs as spiritual but now I can't see this one as anything but.

My favorite verse:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the jungle of doubt
To the river so deep
I know I'm searching for something
Something so undefined
It can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind.
In the middle of the night.

*shivers*

Note the flyfisher in the very last frames.

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