Inspiring Women: Liz Coleman: Adventure

I met Liz several years ago at her home in Nashville. (Rodger, her husband, is a long time friend.) I was struck right away by how she engaged me in conversation, her warmth, her presence (in the immediate sense of the word,) and her interests. At the time Liz was making a pop-up book version of Finnegan’s Wake. There’s a picture in my mind of a wine-drenched wake scene (or was it also blood?) and there seem to be charcoal grey mourning faces. It was a unexpected delight to discover her blog some time after that, benefiting not only from her appreciative and grateful eye towards her daily life but also learning of Brene Brown and Kind Over Matter and eventually We Love Gratitude. I would not have met many of you except through Liz, who has led me on my own kind of adventure, a regular theme of hers.

Etymologically the word is rooted in the Latin advenire "to come to, reach, arrive at."

I’m moved by Liz’s simple words and images on the theme of gratitude here (where she describes it as “the only appropriate response to so much of my life,” a reminder to me that on balance I’ve received more than I’m aware of,) and here, where she arrives at the upside or the good in the midst of error or difficulty on several occasions, a journey in attitude adjustment, especially acknowledging “just staying simply with how I'm feeling”.

I love Liz’s take on the Kindle Fire, where she admits, considering the electronic medium with respect to antique books, “I guess I'm really a better Buddhist than librarian. Let's just say I have a deep respect for impermanence.”

Liz communicates to me the adventure of awareness of one’s being in this moment, of one’s surroundings, simply breathing, that any moment can reveal such an adventure, but we have to go to it. At the same time, she notes the difficulty of practicing what one has been taught: “I'm so much like the person in Pema Chodron's description of someone who gets a prescription from the doctor and shows it to everyone and puts it up on the wall and never actually takes the medicine.” (I especially identify with this.) I appreciate that she shared this short video of Jon Bernie describing the mind needing some object or activity, but I haven’t watched it lately.

Liz has a keen photographic eye and is drawn toward beauty, exemplified here and here and here.

The sense of adventure I receive from reading Liz’s blog is the course from awareness to enjoyment to love, a continuum of appreciation and gratitude extending through phenomena and people to the whole creation. Her blog is full of delights and surprises that I may never completely mine. See for yourself.

Inspiring Women: Introduction

My aim, for the next month, is a series of posts focusing on inspiring women, most of whom I've never met in person but encountered virtually. These posts will highlight individuals whose work I follow regularly online and all of whom have touched me distinctly. I hope you experience something similar. A particular theme suggested by each person's work is the starting point. The intention is to post daily for the next 31 days, maybe even longer. Conversation is welcome.

Reverb6 Ease

6. Ease

What can you do to add ease to 2012?

Honesty

Speak directly, answer the question that is asked and deal with concerns as they happen and not procrastinate or obfuscate. It will make my life much simpler.

Service

Think of how I can help someone else, what I can add to life, what do others in my life need, when I come home what needs doing, could be as simple as vacuuming or cutting the grass, especially rather than reaching for my MacBook Air or my iPhone and getting buried in blogs and feeds.

Letting go

I don’t need to be part of every conversation or read every post on the web.

Self care

Accept that I will make mistakes and rather than berating myself, think of another way for next time. For instance, at my college we were interviewing candidates for a fellowship. The criterion was to ask the same questions of each for fairness’s sake. The question I had was about service beyond self. Instead of considering the candidate, an infantryman who’d served his country for half a dozen years, I read from the script and made it sound like I was blind, not paying attention, or tone deaf. Upon further review, I might have said, tell us more or tell us some stories about your experience and what they mean to you or what you learned, rather than just repeating the generic question verbatim. (Take the wisdom from the situation and accept the humorous side.)

Smile more.

Reverb 5 Reading

5. Reading
What has been your favorite book (or books if you can’t pick just one) that you’ve read this year?

I haven’t read many books this year. I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read, for example Brene Brown’s wise and generous The Gifts of Imperfection; Michele Norris’s The Grace of Silence, which documents not only racial history in America but the author’s coming to know family secrets; Jessica Kristie’s Dreaming in Darkness, rich with stories of survival after heartbreak and insights into the author’s own writing process; and Elaine Schuh’s The Traz, delightful and improbable romp of a young brainiac who joins a biker gang.

One that especially made an impression is Present Value by Sabin Willet. It’s a book about value, the monetary kind and in life. It was timely to read around the 10^th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which are mentioned in the book, and then a company and a family implode. There’s elements of uncertainty, the characters are drawn sympathetically, even the wife who is addicted to her Blackberry who then finds herself fallen on the concrete on an icy January day. Maybe I connected with this story because it takes place in my part of the world, I identified with parents being disconnected from their children, the flashbacks to college and the idiosyncratic economics lecturer, and the timeframe of the story paralleled an unsettling time for me. I don’t know if it is my favorite reading from this year but one that haunts me at the moment.

Reverb11 #4 Beauty

4. Beauty
How have your standards of beauty shifted in the past year?

This question prompts me to ask, what is beauty?

What compels me to say “Beautiful?” What stops me in my tracks? What is different from what I usually see in the world?

Is it only the ugly, as it says in the Tao te Ching, or like Thelonious Monk’s Ugly Beauty?

I usually find beauty in color, colors of nature, pigment, textiles, design. And beauty in simplicity.

If my standards, if I have any, have changed, maybe it is a greater acceptance, a willingness to find beauty where I have not before. In an abandoned lot watched over by the same blue sky. In the ordinary, uniform dress of women and girls. In this moment, dissolved into a sequence of other moments.

And in another moment, maybe accepting impermanence, what is beautiful is subject to change and will emerge again, somehow.

Reverb11: Year In Review

High points

Getting a new job after a long unemployment (nine months or so.) Things just seemed to fall into place around it. I felt welcomed by the staff. Drawn to the place and its beautiful neighborhood. Even the day I went for my interview, in front of me was a cement mixer with the word on it "advance." I took it as a sign. Many people helped and encouraged me throughout the job process, and I think of Carol. When I told her that I'd majored in religion in college she said it was because I liked to find connections between people and things and ideas, and that's as good an explanation as any I could give. Calling her on the day I went to the interview was a confidence builder as well. And when she said "I put things off for tomorrow because I didn't believe in today," I kept that with me.

And connection with so many wonderful people online, particularly through Twitter, more than I can count, has been especially gratifying. Especially Belle and her We Love Gratitude which encouraged my daily awareness and acknowledgement of what's good in my life. And also Christa and Amanda who both invited me to post short writings on their sites, Christa's question being how we might spend a day together and Amanda's a group of seven relating a favorite childhood memory. And Jessica asked me to review her book of poetry, and her work still delights me.

Low points

In February, the roof nearly fell in and we were evicted from our house. A lot of daily disruption and uncertainty, and accepting what I can't fix or control has, if not helped, certainly kept me from making things worse. And there is completion in sight.

And at times I've struggled with depression. Negative self talk. It's better today, because I'm refocused on what worked for me before. It's practice. Being grateful, staying present, paying attention, keeping active and focusing. And I have so many people to help me do that and I need to stay connected with each one.


The year as a whole

It would be great to say the path is linear. Maybe it's more like a sine curve. At times I've really felt held by something greater, and at other times this nagging anxiety like a boy who never has his homework finished. Maybe it's better when I don't take it so seriously. It's been a hard year and a great year.

Reverb11: Writing

From the Reverb11 event:

What is my favorite piece of writing from 2011?

This one, about another man's story. This one was hard to write, due to my feelings of inadequacy. So I took time and listened to the story several times and remembered details and nuances. I tend to remember the arrow or the direction of the story or the argument but am not too mindful of the particulars. Taking time to acknowledge these gave this writing balance.

On the other hand, it's typical of me because I stop short, lacking endurance.

If I had a second choice, this would be the one. It reflects taking a new direction in life and opening my mind even in a commonplace repetitive activity such as driving. At the same time, there's the usual allusiveness, which may be a copout, pointing to someone else's work rather than writing what I mean.

I can look back on some things I've written and say there was something alive in me and maybe something will be alive in me again.