Found: The Earrings that I (semi) Wrecked the Car For

I'm not always mindful.

This time it was a pair of beautiful Don Lucas Turquoise earrings. I bought them with "summer camp" money some time in the early-nineties. I worked at Brush Ranch Camps with the Lucas clan and he is a beloved jeweler from Bakersfield, California with an outpost in Santa Fe.

Those earrings are a treasure. They represent independence, friendship, the joy of summer in the Sangre de Cristos. About three weeks ago as I tidied up my jewelry box it occurred to me that they were not in the "Turquoise Section". This awareness happened at the same time I was working on a very complex project at work and The Missing Earrings became my object of fixation.

I tried mindfulness. I tried to calm the worry I'd thrown them away accidentally or carelessly left them on one of my many trips. Rationally I knew they had to be in the house. So I started looking. Thrice over through the drawers under the jewelry box; the closet; under the bed; the kitchen, even every pocket I could find in my closet. I searched the car: unfortunately a popular place to take off clip-on earrings for phone calls. No luck.

I called my Mother. I have a secret wish all the things I've ever lost are with her: she's put them away for later, for a time when I might be old enough to stop losing things. I imagined opening up the safe years from now and finding those--well she may be reading this so I won't mention what I cannot find. She laughed. Calling the farm to ask if lost items are there happens with some...pattern.

The next morning while driving into work, it wasn't my iPhone that distracted me or the radio: it was the earrings. I was digging in the coin tray below the steering wheel on Lakewood Blvd. praying they were right there under a quarter. I was jolted out of that activity by the curb meeting my front tire and then the back once I corrected the wheel. I'm really lucky I didn't pop the tires. Or hit a parked car. Or a person. I drove down Ross Avenue imagining the increased cost of lost earrings + two tires + a possible new set of hubcaps. Or a life. Not worth it.

I went on to work and reminded myself to breathe. I imagined how happy the new owner might be to have them, or that, despite my 100% (nearly house scan) they would come back to me, falling out of a shoe. It's happened. I told people at work I'd lost them: I've heard if you're missing something tell someone. They remained missing. I went through the drawers again when I got home. And the glove box of the car.

Today, three weeks later, I went looking for something else: a string of beads needing to be re-strung placed in the front closet with two other items due for repair. And there in the corner of the box was a little bag with two perfectly luminous Don Lucas Turquoise earrings inside. I leapt with joy. In my heart I was back at camp staring at those beauties: the color of the sky on the best days in New Mexico. Back with the feeling of owning something very special. Laughing at myself for the attachment lesson I missed in all of this: after all these are just things.

What is the lesson of "lost and found"? Be more minimal? Create new rigorous practices of care for objects one loves? Give my good jewelry to my mother to put away for safe keeping (that's what she would say.). I guess it's all of these and many things. Slow down. Don't look for things in coin boxes while driving. Find peace in trusting they were right where I would find them. I'll work on it a little more and if you see me wearing my Don Lucas Beauties know that I am very, very happy. 

Real Quiet: The Sanctuary Sabbatical

What part of the day do you spend not talking?

I've been watching our human practice of “chit chat” these last frenzied weeks of Advent and Christmas. At the few silent retreats I've been to over the years, it was a study I experienced and left in the dining halls of Omega and Upaya. We wore name tags that said "In silence" on them so our fellow retreat-goers would kindly support our practice to be quiet. At Omega my friend and I whispered to each other in laughter on the way back to our dorm. It wasn't easy. But it did reveal something: there is noise in my life.

My same friend encouraged me to look at chit chat: what is the gain, how can small talk get smaller or bigger, or be walked away from?

I sat at a wedding recently before the ceremony began: I watched ebullient meetings of old friends happen across pews: conversational joy and laughter. I watched one friend sitting in silence reading hymns. He wasn't up for chit chat. I started to do the same. "Choose se your words wisely" I can hear my mother's voice in my head.

Today and tomorrow are part of a new practice called a "Sanctuary Sabbatical"; at Plum Village we called them "Lazy Days": Days for dreaming, for creating and for being quiet. I've turned off Netflix and written letters of appreciation to those I love. I made a list of things I am looking forward to in the coming year. I've started a Four-Quarter Plan for 2019.

I've also made a not-doing list: a wonderful practice I learned from my friends at Dorrier Underwood: if something has appeared on a to do list more than three times, move it to a not doing list. The action of declaring is empowering: to declare to not to; to declare to set aside time to not do other things and to do one thing.

I've declared these days before the New Year to be a Sanctuary Sabbatical. I am reading, working on an important work transaction and taking care of myself. I am making time for those I love and things I love. I am watching winter through the window. The light in December is always extraordinary. This place of quiet and reflection is a sanctuary: it can be an hour or a day; it is as you declare it to be. I'll see you in the dining hall with our little signs that say "In Silence". There is, as Wordsworth wrote, a bliss in solitude. 

1,440 Minutes in a Day and How to Fill Them

Last night I attended a lecture by my dear friend Bonnie Pitman, the Founder of the Do Something New (TM) Practice. She taught us many things: to look, to pay attention, to find the bliss of solitude. She reminded us that we have 1,440 minutes in a day.

Set a timer for sixty seconds and sit with me.

It's spacious, isn't it? Time feels so different when it is identified as time: a division of space (24 hours) into smaller spaces (60 minutes) and into the smallest spaces (60 seconds). Conscious intention makes sure we don't miss it: the human being on the elevator, the leaf that falls below the crepe myrtle, the glow of a slow sunrise.

I don't want to miss it. And the way to not miss it is to be with it. To say to time: sit with me in silence and give me a parentheses to breathe. Because otherwise I forget.

This is existence. We choose what we put into this parentheses: consciousness or unconsciousness.

And we have so many magnets pulling us away from being in the present: technology, movies-on-demand, email. We need the parentheses to remember.

I practice this intention by placing three minutes into the beginning of every meeting I lead. I learned this practice at the Festival of Faiths in Louisville, Kentucky. It takes something: an ability to stop one energy in the room and invite a new energy; a willingness to let go of what people might think; a worry they will look at their phones or use the time to prep for the meeting. It takes making a different commitment: to invite the self to stop and choose silence, reflection, to breathe and go inward.

So drop into Friday with me --and later on, in the middle of email or at the beginning of a meeting, take just three minutes and put them inside of a parentheses. Set your timer on your phone and follow the breath. You'll still have 1437 minutes to conquer the world, and chances are those three minutes will give you what you need to do it. 

9/11 And Other Etchings

We all have our stories: before 9/11 I remember my parents talking about where they were when Kennedy was shot: certain places on their university campuses. Now we have a new etching: the place we were, the way it felt, and the things we did in the moments after we saw things we never thought we would see in our lifetime.

I was living in Uptown: near Downtown Dallas. I didn't know that the choices I made in September 2001 would haunt me, likely forever. It can't be unseen. My memory of 9/11 is a relationship I should not have been in: the black sheep brother of a best friend: reckless, rebellious, ridiculous. That's where I was, or rather he was with me. We woke that morning to strong coffee and shock: quickly realizing the things that really mattered: being with the ones we loved. And that wasn't each other.

Awkward--both aspects of that fall morning in Dallas, when the planes stopped flying--both memories I would rather forget.

But I can't: they are tied together forever. This person left my house both immediately and permanently. At least I like to remember it that way. In his wake were two precious friendships-and they have never come back to me. The risk wasn't worth it. But for a few moments that morning, 9/11 has him in the picture: both of us standing in front of a big box television crying and word-less. We knew in that moment of truth on television, our fake relationship was over. He gathered up his things and left.

I couldn't go to work: the museum and parts of downtown were closed. I drove to church with a few hundred other people: we were all dressed for work. Hoping for normal. I sat in the Memorial Chapel at the Church of the Incarnation: looking at life, and death and choices.

Like so many of us, 9/11 had a connection point beyond the television for me. In 1998, three years prior, I lived for a summer in New York at 110 Liberty Street, just across the street from the World Trade Centers. I walked that morning path: past the Brooks Brothers that was the temporary morgue, I rode the trains into the same station, I spoke to the doormen, and the guy at the coffee stand. I knew the families who lived in the buildings with the glass windows blown out. I knew the rhythms too well.

In the church that day I prayed for all of them: the doormen, the coffee-seller, the church family at Trinity Wall Street, the family I lived with. I prayed they were all somewhere else in that moment: already at pre-school, off in the country, not quite at the door yet. I wanted a different outcome for all of us. I wanted all of us to be somewhere else in that moment. I still do.

And so we created new rhythms that day. We learned what it was like to walk on the Katy Trail without airplanes. We finally found our New York friends and told them we loved them.

I broke up with my boyfriend.

I created a different life: one with a little more purpose that it had on September 10th. Wisdom? Reality? Somewhere in between, but the good news, inside all of this bad news is that we came together as a nation and found a deeper kind of love: real love. 

Death Comes to the Hummingbird

On one of the lazy long-houred afternoons in Vail, Colorado I sat out on the porch, reading a book. I stopped to study the window of the house: a perfect reflection of the sky. I paused to try to take a photograph, of the sky in the window, the reflection of a reader seated below. I decided not, to, though and went back to my book.

The Hummingbird saw those clouds too, but in a different way and tried to fly right into that sky. The sound started me and I looked to the deck of the porch in dismay. It was a long second or two and I watched this perfectly perfect creature arch his back sucking in a breath and literally expire.

Part fairy, part insect, part bird, I waited. Hoping for "stun" instead of "death". I wanted the bird to revive, to resurrect, but I knew. I knew because I watched it happen: soul, spirit, electricity was in the tiny body of this creature and in a moment all that was left was the body: a shell of translucent wing and green feathers: iridescence fading. A small drop of blood at the bird's beak was the last thing it would say.

I wish I could tell you we all knew the right thing to do at the right time. Edward, my ten year-old came out, fell into a "state" (he called it that) and said he needed to go inside and be sad. Baker, less outwardly impacted went on with his pool game. I didn't know what to do. I've never watched an animal (or human) die before. It was beautiful and horrifying at the same time. It was real: real life and then real death.

Yesterday I watched the brilliant documentary about Mr. Rogers: a man I spent many hours with when I was 3 and 4 and 5. At one moment toward the end of the film, part of an episode is shared about death when a small silver fish in his on-set fish tank dies. He chose to weave the real-death moment into his show: scooping up the fish and respecting it with a "proper burial" in the artificial turf outside of his TV home. It was touching. I thought about the hummingbird.

I missed the moment, and we did it in a different way. Our hummingbird's shell of a body was swept over the edge of the porch onto the earth below. I don't know what I was thinking (I wasn't). I played the scene over and over as witness to the miracle of what life is.

The next day it was gone: back into some creature's part in a great cycle of living and dying. I can only console myself that, like the sands of the Tibetan Sand Mandala, we swept that bird into paradise.

Paradise, where the glass is a mirage and tiny wings and hearts go on beating for ever. But maybe that's just a reflection, too. 

Patti Smith at Bedtime: The Mindful Family

"These Are The Words"
(from "Pope Francis: A Man of His Word" soundtrack)

Awake everyone, the dawn has come
Life is streaming from the sun
A garden blessed, the bird that sings
Nature gives us everything. 

Full Song 

I stumbled on this precious song tonight. I can't stop thinking about Patti Smith--and especially as a mindful, contemplative leader of our time. I've watched her performance at the Awards for the Nobel Laureates in honor of Bob Dylan a dozen times, if not more. If you watch Patti sing: her courage to stop and try again after losing the complicated lyrics, her commitment to get it right, her nerves: you see the artist at work when everything is at stake. If you watch the audience: they are rapt: some with mouths open, some crying: it is clearly a moment that called all to be in the moment. I wish I'd been there. 

Tonight I'm just playing "These Are the Words" a few times. Scott is reading. Edward is listening to a book. I have not seen the film yet: Pope Francis: A Man of His Word but as I study it, it appears Patti Smith wrote most of the songs for the soundtrack. "These are the Words" is just one. And to me, here on retreat, I'm hearing the message. 

Nature gives us everything. 

To the Contemplative Leader, to the Mindful Human and the Mindful Family, yes. On the Mindful Family Road trip I need four things: 

A Trail 

Water 

Good Shoes 

Breath 

Simplicity is key. And I think that's why I love Patti Smith's lyrics. They're simple. And they tell the truth. She is exactly who she is: whether in a polished soundtrack or performing in front of millions of people on live television. It's not about her: it's simple: it's about the music. Nature gives her everything she needs. She is so present in her courage it's contagious. 

Nature gives us everything. 

The Artist and The Green Apple

All he wanted to do was hike to the old apple tree in the orchard and pick an apple or three.

"Go for the ones up high" a neighbor advised us, "they're more ripe!".

We met Laura on the trail as she walked the property where our tiny house sits in the middle of the Santa Fe National Forest. When we'd seen her earlier across the pond and through the reeds, she called out "hello, neighbor!" A few minutes later she came up the hill and met us on our own hike.

"I live down by the river," she told us, "my cabin is the most...rustic structure on the property. But I've just spent a year in a teepee in the rockies, so this is heaven."

I didn't know which part of this encounter to marvel at: the tall woman with blonde choppy chin-length hair and leather tassel earrings who walked up out of the woods. Alone. Or the apple she was mindfully eating. Or the teepee, or the most rustic structure on the 150 year-old ranch we were temporarily calling home.

Edward, who knew already knew the magic of the apple tree and it's exact location proudly told her both. He was marveling, too. She told us about the ranch and how the trails weave in and around river and creek and pond. She told us she walks the trails most evenings at sunset. And in August, I bet she also eats an apple a day on the way home.

The next day after an excursion into Santa Fe, we had to rush home to have the "Laura Experience". Baker, Edward and I explored the trails, and intentionally (Edward's intention) ended up at the apple tree. He instructed me which apples to pick, based on size and color (a new expert). We took five.

Three for our "snack picnic" and two for the tiny refrigerator in the tiny house. He ran back to put the two in the fridge "for safe keeping" and returned to sit and enjoy the three "plein air".

The Green Apple: loved by Manet, Cezanne, Monet and Georgia O'Keeffe and now Edward Hofland. I told him Green Apples were to these artists the pinnacle of skill: the ultimate. He has good sense. We studied ours carefully and ate it slowly. We sat in the sun, sweat beading up on the boys' noses, loving those apples and when we were finished, we loved throwing the cores into the pond "for the fish". ("Full circle" Edward exclaimed saying something about fish manure.)

This moment was created by another moment: the meeting with Laura: the friend I will likely never see again: goddess of the ancient orchard: taking her walks and eating apples in season. We had to be there for it: to learn and see the mindful practice and to want it for ourselves.

Edward ate apple number four today on the drive to Colorado. I noticed he stored number five in the refrigerator here. This mindful ten year-old nomad packed in his treasure for another day. 

And Now I'm Here: The Mindful Roadtrip

We are on our third Mindful Family Road Trip. This is a tradition inspired by my Executive Coach, mentor and Friend Nancy Dorrier.

A Mindful Family Road trip is a practice in Being. Being in the moment. For this trip, it started off with a dinner the night before we left. I sent the boys next door to the Dollar Tree to pick out four fresh notebooks for us to use on the trip. When they returned we worked on our wishes for the trip in both destinations: Santa Fe and Vail. We also wrote our checklist of things to remember to take—everyone participates and “owns” what makes it into the car and what didn’t. We forgot our fishing pole: even with the list.

A Mindful Family Road Trip takes the road less traveled. We found this Tiny House far up the mountain from the little village of Tesuque, north of Santa Fe. To our delight, it is nested over a set of orchards lost in time. We have the valley to ourselves: two ponds with a cistern that once drafted water from the nearby river. It was and is Utopian –even covered over by time and the absence of the farmer. A network of trails take the traveler past apple tree, willow, campfire site, rocky ridge, a darting cotton tail and an old paddle board Edward immediately rehabilitated and enjoyed. It’s pretty special: not a human in sight: we are enveloped by nature, held in this nest: a perfect place to practice mindfulness and being together.

We were welcomed by a teasing thunder-lots of threat in those dramatic clouds but very little rain. The cool air was enough and we settled in with agreement it was time to meditate and do some writing. As I set the bell on my Insight Meditation Timer thunder opened our silence as well as closed it, as if to say nature was in the mindful moment with us. We sat for three minutes and then wrote for four. The topic was “meeting the Tiny House” and the prompt was “I saw the feather in the window sill”. We write by hand (the brain-to-hand connection is key to creative writing) and each of us shared our writing with another giving feedback (two to three phrases directly taken from the reader’s writing and read aloud). Each of us had precious, personal observations of our day together –memorializing what matters most. The responder allows a space for recognition and appreciation and invites careful listening.

On the second evening (enjoying a vegetarian version of Cowboy Nachos-even the cowboys are eating healthy) we made a list of all that happened yesterday. Some wrote in prose style-others listed with detail how we as humans met the day and how we were inside of that day: actions, feelings, interpretations and joys. Edward (age 10) ended his writing with “I went back to the house and listened to book, made dinner, and now I’m here”.

And now I’m here: watching the sunrise drift up over the mountain’s edge. Two boys reading, wrapped up in blankets on the floor of this tiny house. It is quiet save for the wings of a hummer and the turn of a page. This is mindfulness.

The Mindful Family Meets the Tiny House in the Canyon

I saw the feather in the windowsill: dappled in grey and white stripes.

Whose feather? Whose hand, whose eye who found it, discarded on a swirling flight over canyon and river? 

I smelled it on the trail through the orchard. The scent of memory. Hiking not far away from here when I was a girl. I knew the trail then. 

Someone planted the orchids in the pond. Someone watered the orchard and saw feathers and black beetles here: scurrying into little holes in gravel to places I cannot see. 

I sit with my questions.

Where is the trail head? Can I drink the water? 

A winged creature darts past me. Waking me up. A bug or a bird? I don't know. And I wonder about this, too. 

Kind hands. That's who. 

Kind hands made this utopia farm, and the feather and the seed pod left on the windowsill for me to find. For me to find and wonder into this place where I leave you now with a story on your windowsill. 

A Letter to A Contemplative Leader

Dear Friend, Dear Contemplative Leader:

Join me in a new way of being: being up for a very bright future full of possibility and miracles. Join me in this moment. The one you imagined in the moment before. Because here we are. Together.

There is power in silence. It is the place leaders find peace. And discernment. This spacious place we all know, yet forget to seek. It is always with us on the inside. As constant as our breath. If you are breathing you can also be meditating. The tool is in you.

Silence can give us the words we need and at the time when we need them. We can respond from a place of emotional fortitude. Not reaction. Interpretation. We can fact check our own stories. We have time for this.

There is power in togetherness. We are stronger together. I need you and you need me. I see you in the elevator and I say little prayers for your children, and your mothers. And the beautiful work you create every day. I see you. Ask me for the cup of sugar. It’s waiting in my cupboard. Ask for what you need. 

There is power in understanding. Contemplation opens up skills for deep listening and loving speech. We need this. Our children need this. Urgently. You, dear contemplative leader, can show them a different way to respond. A kinder, gentler way. We were born to love each other.

There is power in awareness. I want to be awake and alive with you in this moment and the next. I want to practice and grow and practice and grow some more. I want to fail and succeed and be present for my heart in both of those spaces. Contemplative Leaders leave lots of space to fail. You do, too, contemplative leader, because you know that in failure there is truth. And in truth we grow the most. Through practice we learn to be okay with uncertainty. You are perfect in your imperfection. More vulnerable in your truth.

Dear contemplative leader, we want the same things. We share these values: we—balanced and gracious are up for something greater than ourselves: mindful, compassionate, fearless and so devoted to leadership we look to the next generation to teach us because we know where brilliance lives. It lives in all of us. Contemplative Leaders help other contemplative leaders lead.

Dear Contemplative Leader, don’t forget to breathe. The breath is a rhythm. Rhythm leads to pattern…pattern leads to practice. And don’t forget to write. To be curious about where compassion is sourced in the world. And Dear Leader, read lots of poetry by Mary Oliver, David Whyte and John O’Donohue. And so I leave you with the words of Mary Oliver:

Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?