Run, Pass and Win

 

Life's a team sport and we play all positions.  There will be days when you make the passes, days when you get your team to the 22 yard line, times when you fumble the ball and days when you touchdown.  

Shakespeare said life's a stage and we're merely players on it.  I would add that life is a Superbowl and we each have a position in the game and while we do play to win, it's the playing itself that makes it a great game. While the win is awesome and the lose disparaging, the game goes on and how we play the game makes all the difference in the end. Life is fair, regardless of what some say, and there are rules - universal rules.  One of the rules is to stay aware and move together as one.

While we are all in the game, playing various positions, each trying his best to win, we are also all playing our own specific position, positions we've trained for, we're familiar with and we even think we're good at - good enough to play for an NFL team, good enough to play football with the big guys. 

As you run, see the layout of the field, know where your team is, where the other team is, and keep your eyes on the end zone.  Keep your eyes focused on where you're going, run fast and run hard. 

But, each player knows one thing for sure.  A guard isn't a center.  Each man has his place in the game and if he plays it well, passes to his team member, watches, catches and runs, he can take his team to the end zone, touchdown and contribute to the big win. The team is only as good as the individual players ability to play well, cohesively, together on the field. 

While the individual players are each only as good as they've trained to be,  a team is only as good as how well it plays together. If they move as one man, watchful, careful and aware, then a clear shot at a win is within sight. The game is won play by play, yard by yard, but always moving together toward that touchdown. 

The cohesion of a team is welded together by the individual connections among the players with each other.  Each one builds a bond with another player until all the players are bound together with a common goal in sight.  I think the team loses - not when the score is down - but when a player is traded off the team or a player is down.  On my scoreboard, the real lose comes when the matrix of the team is torn, and the group's unity disrupted.

Look around now.  What game are you playing and what is your goal.  What would be a win? Who's on your team, where are you going together. How well are you playing your position and how well are you playing with your team.  It's not each man out for himself. There's no time for competition among your mates.  There's no time to second guess your moves.  Just go for it, reach with all that's in you and keep on going with all the gusto you've got. Trust your team members. Trust the cohesion. Together you win, but really, the competition is not the other team.  You are your own competition.  Remember, focus on your position and compete only against your own weaknesses.  Keep your eyes on your strengths and use them for the team.

Make a Date with your Inner Genie

Artists, scientists as well as all other magical people know that if they focus their attention in the present moment and search for answers and thoughts, while allowing their beautiful inner genius to connect the dots among those varying ideas, theories, themes and harmonics, something truly new emerges.

A new idea is born, a new theory is discovered. Buddha realized enlightenment from sitting still and thinking, meditating, for a long time. Think again about Mozart, Beethoven, Einstein, Emerson, Whitman, Shakespeare, Jesus - the list is infinite. They all entered into their own personal present moment and found waiting for them inside a beautiful concerto, a new scientific hypothesis and spiritual revelation to chase down, with a pen, computer, microscope, telescope or a team of others. 

One thing all these people had in common was a passion for their art or science.  It was like a jealous lover, calling them day and night, stalking them, whispering to them all the time.  They were only happy when they were creating. The driving force behind the desire to formulate hypothesis, research and find answers to questions is that same kind of passionate pursuit.

  

Being busy may seem like a good excuse for not getting into that magical place of creation, but it is exactly the reason why so many people don't experience it.  Busy means just that - you're moving here and there, quickly consumed by a deadline, a task, all of which is future-focused. It may even be tedious and boring rather than joyful because it's not in the present and it's not your own joy you're pursuing. Rather, it's someone elses.

If you're feeling sluggish, tired and weary - even sick - it may be because you're focused too much on the past, and putting all your vitality and life-force energy on the past.  That's like sending your spirit down a black hole. We all have within us something I call our "inner tyrranical dictator," that inner voice that tells you that you must be out there serving, doing for others, making you virtually a slave to an external system - church, government, school, institution.

Of course it is good to care about others. Service to humanity is our most noble endeavor, but as we are filled with our own creative light and joy, we can then direct it outward to light the world and serve our human family. Without that kind of in-filling, outward directed service can become so all consuming of your time and your life, that you feel drained and even guilty if you spend an hour in your garage workshop, or in your spare room studio, or on the beach meditating or even reading.  It is that very negative force within us that actually blocks our inner creative flow.

So, if you hear your inner genie whispering to you and you find yourself struggling against it, resist it not and just go ahead and do what you're longing to do.  Don't tell them I said so, but call in sick and go do what you love, if only just to make a date with it and return to it after work another day.

What if you reached for your inner artist or your inner scientist and dove into whatever thoughts, ideas or dreams that you're interested in and really spent some time on them?  You would enter into the present moment, focused intensely on something that interests you and even brings you happiness and joy. You would find that childhood joy of play return.  You would feel energized and healthy.  You would even feel younger. You would feel alive again. You would feel happy.

If you are any sort of artist (scientist, too), you would engage in something Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced, "chicks send me high"), a wise and wonderful psychology professor and former chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago,  called "flow."  It is that creative flow into which we enter when we dive into our own creative inner genie. Csikszentmihalyi suggests it is that inner flow that we tap when we get into our creative passion. 

I would add to his thesis, that as co-creators with the Ultimate Life-Force Creator, we get in touch with the very life force and source of the universe when we get into our creative flow.  It is a most spiritual of all encounters and experiences. We enter timelessness.  We connect with the heartbeat of all of life.  We enter into a kind of Zen moment that is timeless and exhilarating, life-giving and joyful.  We enter life. 

Sometimes we  have to slow down our minds, focus, light a candle, put on some music in order to center our frenzied minds and then allow that interior focus to have his way with us.  And, then, our own inner music begins as our own inner candle is lighted and then we begin to slowly find ourselves lost in our art or research.

    

Also, just in case you're interested, 

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written several books, which are Flow; The Evolving Self; and Creativity, the Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Published by HarperPerennial (a Division of Harper Collins Publishers); 1997.

Moonlight dreams

Quietly she rises in the northern sky, boldly whispering to the clouds to part for her. Lingering expectantly, she hearkens to her children to remember their fragile dreams and wish once more.

Softly, mysteriously, dreams and wishes succumb to her hallowed allowing.  Every child knows this. Every lover who has ever walked beneath her loving gaze, hand-in-hand with their beloved, knows the power of her luminescent presence.

Tonight she will begin her weekend journey, yet again this month, through our skies.  Hushed in awe, bravely, we  slip our most daring dreams, our bravest hopes before her magnificent midnight orb, and know, with a childlike knowing, that she will hear and answer. 

Our Earth mother is reflected in her great allowing that whispers back to all our dreams, "yes," and dream more and more.  Let yours dreams, hopes and desires grow larger until they burst through the veils of time and space which you have made real in the illusions, conflicts and barriers which punish dreamers, squelching their vibrant souls. 

Each wish is a prayer uttered into the limitless longing with hope, the fertile blend which gives them birth.

So, look heavenward tonight, and feel your own soul glowing in the presence of her magical incandescence.

Liberty and Dignity for All

"The way to see by faith

is to shut the eye of reason,"

Benjamin Franklin,
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1758

Faith is born from peace, out of a sense of liberty and dignity, mutually supporting each other. It is fear, the opposite of faith, that purges faith in ourselves, individually and as a nation.

In our fear, we have sought control reaching for our own ways and means through our own intellect or reason and consequently overlooked an innate part of ourselves which is stronger. Faith would reach for our "illiative" sense rather than our intellect where we spin our theologies and reasonable economic and political arguments.

Soon after I graduated from college, I realized that one could not encounter God through the reason branch of our brains. It seemed to me that faith is not reasonable. Faith in God is not reasonable. It is not reasonable to give your life for another, to sacrifice your time, money and talent during a natural disaster. Love, in fact, is certainly not reasonable, nor is falling in love, getting married and having children. All these great moments of passion that occupy our human lives are not reasonable.

Perhaps, when we are faced with some of life's greatest challenges, such as the economic decline that is thrusting our nation, and most likely the world, into an uncertain future, and we need as much as ever to turn to a "heavenly father," many of our most intelligent, best educated people don't know how.

Through our years of scientific data-gathering, the ever-increasing technological hard-wiring of our brains, CNN-style surface information processing, we seem to have lost the ability to look below the layers of our lives, our current events - personal and global - and listen with an entirely different and yet even more real part of our being, a part which St. John Neumann called our "illiative sense," that innate part of our being that "just knows" something. It is with that aspect of our minds - not the brain, but rather the part the ancient Hebrews called "the heart," which isn't the organ either, where our faith can be found. When we use that part of our minds, we are most likely using the frontal lobes of our brains as receptors, like antennae sort of, to "hear" that illiative sense, to hear the Spirit. Spiritual people have long said that the human spirit, the "mind" of man, is far larger than the physical body. The spirit lives in the body, but is not completely contained within it.

I have known so many people who have struggled with understanding faith. They've sought it, studied, spent years reading the writings of others, even felt a bit hopeful through the poetic verses of others - Rumi, Merton, Milton, Shakespeare. One thing these all - and there are an infinite number of others - held in common was their faith which seemed to emerge in radiant verses flowing abundantly out of their creative minds, some would call their "right" side of their brains, that non-technical, can't-balance-a-checkbook, can't-program-a-DVD-player, can-barely-answer-a-cell-phone, part of us. Painfully, they know who they are. They are so well connected with that other part of themselves, the faith center, the creative genius which inhabits their bodies and fills their lives, even through the darkest of times, with light, love and joy.

Last night's State of the Union Address by President Obama speaks to that part of our minds, our hearts, our souls. He spoke to the soul of our nation, to our faith as a people, gathered together under a common goal - freedom and liberty and to uphold the dignity of every human being - who at one time washed upon our shores, broken, beaten and poor, but today may struggle to survive almost anywhere on the Earth.

Obama's was a visionary speech, not new really, but as needed today as others like it more than 200 years ago, at the founding of our nation. Then, as now, we needed a leader who would call us together as a coach calls his team together before the big game. When, as a fledgling nation, our leaders gathered in Philadelphia to sign a bold and dangerous claim for independence, Benjamin Franklin spoke on behalf of our brave new cause, "If we don't hang together, we will surely hang separately." Spoken at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 7/4/1776, he saw the absolute need to come together, putting differences aside for our very survival. It was a case of either we do this together, or we don't do it all, because if we aren't strong enough to defend our cause, we will lose our necks on the scaffold.

Today, as then, we, as Americans, and as human beings, must hang together, put aside our political, religious and even cultural differences, reach deep into our hearts for our common faith, once again look to and accept the love of our creator and remember our unique kindred bond. We are all one, all connected on our deepest level where our dignity and freedom abides, running together like an underground stream, from our Creator to and through all of us.

Today we can be proud, but tomorrow and the next day, we must love ourselves and our neighbors, our enemies, all brothers, friends and foes, from the place of faith welling up from within us, emerging far below reason's careful eye.