Becoming a Crazy Old Lady

It was my friend and colleague Cindy Morris who provided the news.

Cindy graduated from Cornell University’s agriculture program enough years ago that the professors have all probably changed a time or two since and she once owned the European Flower Shop in Boulder, Colorado. Like me, she has fairy in her blood and holds court with the plant people on a regular basis. We were chatting over the telephone and I reported having brought in about thirty-five geraniums to overwinter in my house. Summer had given way to fall and the nights were getting cold enough to make the geraniums shiver. It was time for them to come in.

“I’m not exactly one of those crazy old ladies . . . yet . . . but I know that some people would find bringing in thrity-five geraniums to join all of my other indoor plants to be, well, a little excessive,” I said.

Cindy’s reply was immediate.

“Don’t kid yourself. You and I are those crazy old ladies.”

Then she laughed that deep, throaty laugh of hers that I love. It always suggests a knowing that might be hers alone or might be shared. In this case, she intended for it to be shared, whether or not I was ready for it.  It was the same kind of matter of fact comment coupled with a knowing laugh that I imagine Carl Jung making in a private conversation with Freud. “You know, you’re crazy as a loon. But, then, so am I. In fact, since we’re all just drifting through the dream, we might as well make the best of it.” Like that.

When I first commented that I hadn’t yet become a crazy old lady, I was thinking of the woman who lived across the street when I was growing up. She often took her meals on her tiny front porch, scooping food into her mouth and, without seeming to think anything strange to it, putting the plate down for her cats to join in, then taking it back for another bite. Her house consisted of narrow aisles winding among stacks of newspapers and assorted objects de debris. 

Surely I hadn’t yet become her. Had I? And how old was she, anyway, when I was ten or twelve? Surely she was truly a crone and not sixty, like me. Or was she younger than I now make her? It’s hard to tell. Everyone seems old when you’re ten or twelve.

I began thinking about what a ten or twelve-year-old girl might think of me. Would I appear to be a crazy old lady? Okay, okay, some people assume I qualify without giving it another thought because I’m a practicing shaman. But that’s just small-mindedness. Okay, I also have a penchant for herbs, some of them odd little varieties like mugwort. A few centuries ago they burned women like me at the stake. Some people I’ve met appear to still prefer that as a valid way to dispose of shamans and herb lovers. What else? As far as I’m concerned, fairies are real, trees have a lot to say to us if we will but listen, and the energy of things can be seen and felt. Maybe a ten or twelve-year-old would think me crazy. And maybe a four-year-old would agree with my model of the world because she wouldn’t yet have been socialized out of the knowledge that the world in which we live is truly magic.

What else might make me a crazy old lady? Well, some adults would say I’m crazy because I left a perfectly rational life in corporate America to be an entrepreneur and, with that, came to value happiness over cash. I might be seen as crazy, too, because I sometimes choose to dress age-inappropriately, say exactly what is on my mind, and believe that love trumps just about everything. Can’t help it. It’s who I am.

I’m embracing cray old ladyhood and thank you, my dear friend, Cindy Morris, for bringing it to my attention. Somehow it’s a relief to be a crazy old lady.

But now I’m wondering what other women think qualifies them as crazy old ladies.  If you think you’re one (or even a crazy young lady), I’d love to hear from you.

 

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall (aka crazy old lady)

Giving our Gifts

When Norman Borlaug died on September 12, 2009, both his death and his life were news to me. I’m sorry for that and I’m not sure how he managed to have escaped my radar screen until he died. Sadly, I know that many others also first learned of him as he passed, like some beautiful but obscure comet, here for a moment and then only a bit of space dust to remind us of the passing.

Borglaug was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and is widely credited with being one of the founders of the Green Movement. That would be impressive enough, but his contributions to the world, in the form of an impressive body of work in agronomy, are thought to have saved over a billion lives. That one person could make such a contribution on the planet and not be a household name is a bit distressing.

Pop vocal artists die and get months of press. Politicians do illegal and/or immoral things and are the subject of dinner table conversation for an entire season or more. Stop a young person on the street and he is likely to know the local NBA star by name, and maybe by stats. How is it that Norman Borlaug traveled under the radar screen for so many of us all of his life?

The answer to that question may be important. As a culture, we Americans seem impressed with glitz and money more than contribution to humanity or planet Earth. I’m not going to harp on this, just connect it to the process of giving our gifts to the world.

When Norman Borlaug died, my mind went to a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with a client friend. She has some important things to say and a book that needs to be written, but she’s danced around it for at least a couple of years.

Now, I will be the first to admit that books take time (for most of us). And I have experience with needing to add a few chapters to my own learning before my book chapters could line themselves up. But I suspected that my dear friend was suffering from expert-itis. She just felt she didn’t yet have the credentials to write about what she was already teaching with great skill.

I encouraged her to get on with it and while I encouraged her, I gave myself the same pep talk. We women–more than men, I think–seem to believe that we must have our own equivalent of Norman Borlaug’s many awards (the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Padma Vibhushan, and the Nobel Peace Prize among them) before we are qualified to give our gifts to the world. What a waste.

I would like to think that this has nothing to do with that American cultural tendency to be enthralled by glitz and money. I don’t see it on the surface for my client friend and I can’t seem to find it in the inner recesses of my own mind when I go excavating, but I do think that my friend and I have both been subjected to enough cultural influence that we each have at least some bit of an interior three-act play going on in which we achieve modest fame and fortune. If not household names, well maybe our names will become nationally known and respected in one little subgroup of one modest category of our areas of expertise. In other words, we’re not immune.

We might not be immune, but I have met would-be writers who refuse to begin the books they have in mind until they can get a nice advance from a New York publishing house. (Never mind how fantastical that notion is these days.) And I have known other writers who have meaningful things to say but who shelac them over with what they think the public wants to read because they want to be rich and famous more than they want to say something genuine and authentic. In some quarters (fortunately not those in which I am invited often), having fifteen minutes of fame is seen as more important than giving one’s gifts to the world, even if those fifteen minutes are achieved by doing something nefarious.

If only a few more of us went about our lives doing the kind of good that Norman Borlaug did (without his awards but with a similar lack of household name recognition), if we just gave our gifts today and tomorrow and next week without wondering what the payoff would be–or if there even would be a payoff at all–how much Norman Borlaugesque good to the planet and other human beings would result?

I can’t imagine . . . but I think I’d better get on with my shamanic work, get on with that book I keep telling myself I don’t have time to write, and get on with my mentoring of other writers.

How about you?

 

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Like, You Know What I Mean?

She was using the word, “like,” like a machete hacking its way through a jungle tangled with subjects and predicates. If verbs were the equivalent of jaguars stalking her and nouns the equivalent of screeching birds, it could be said that she was slicing her way through that jungle with heart pounding, trying to make her way to safety as quickly as she could.

Unfortunately her machete was as dull as the typical answer to the social media question, “What are you doing right now?” Why? Because the word, “like,” is little more than a substitute for, ”Uhm,” when used multiple times in a sentence–every sentence–on and on and on until the listener just might hope that the jaguar gets her.

In her defense, I suspect that the woman I overheard chattering away at the gym was a young mother who probably spends the bulk of her day interacting with small children with vocabularies that total about fifty words. She might simply need a regular dose of adult conversation to reclaim the English language. Or not. I found myself contemplating how the next generation will use the English language if what they are getting from their mothers is a daily dose of “like” that is enough to give them verbal diabetes.

Of course, “like” is not the only word that is abused in the English language. “Awesome” is another. The view from the top of a fourteen thousand foot mountain is definitely awesome. Heroic acts can be. So can sunsets and mystical insights. But whether we like it or not, everything is not awesome. Has the overuse of the word come from the practice of trying to level the playing field for humans so much that every child gets a prize after the competition is over (whether or not her team has actually won) and every handcrafted item is called “art” (whether the crafter has talent or not)? Or is “awesome” just another machete hacking its way through the English language.

When it was suggested that there was “trouble in River City,” the culpret was identified as that deadly destroyer of morals . . . pool. The anidote offered was the musical instrument.  Is telvision the new pool? If so, what is the antidote? Books? And can life really be reduced in this way? I think not.

On the other hand, I have had to turn off the television more than once to save it from the hatchet when I heard one more basketball player utter, “Know what I’m sayin’?” or “Duhyuh know what I mean?” When I began to hear those phrases coming out of the mouth of my youngest sister (who rightfully could be considered the woman on the street, though I, of course, think she’s special), I knew things were seriously out of hand.

When I heard “like” coming out of my own mouth a bit too often, I knew it was even worse than that.

I’m a professional writer and editor. Words are important to me. Words strung together in sentences that make sense and paragraphs that ring true are more tastey to me than anything the finest Denver or Boulder restaurant might provide. And sometimes a book is, indeed, awesome. I want my own spoken language to have some merit because I know that the words falling from the fingertips become compromised when the spoken language gets sloppy. I also know that when I am inundated by sloppy spoken language, it seeps into me like ground water making its way through the cracks in my foundation of words.

I’m not willing to sequester myself because I have to interact with the world to spark my internal writing mechanisms. What is a writer to do? I’m not sure. But this little post is a plea sent out as a request for mercy. Sharpen your machete and I promise to sharpen mine.

 

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Advice to a Ten-Year-Old

When he asked me what I would say to my ten-year-old self, I was taken aback for a moment. Not only did I not have an immediate answer, I also felt it was too personal to talk about.

It was a strange reaction because the person who had posed the question was my husband. We had finished dinner and were still sitting at table, under the shelter of a small tree. We had too little of this quiet, intimate time together, time to spend in the intimate sort of conversation that only true intimates can have. And here I was, unable and unwilling to say anything.

I know I must have disappointed him when I said, “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.” It was true enough, but it wasn’t the complete truth. I didn’t tell him that the question seemed to pierce some very private place in me that I was not yet ready to visit.

But the question stalked me for a couple of months and I found myself wondering what I would say to my ten-year-old self.

She was in the throws of change at ten. She had just moved from the only place she had ever really known, thus far, in her young life. That it was the only place she’d known does not mean that it knew her. She couldn’t have voiced it then, but if she could have, she probably would have said that she was not at all certain that any place could know her.

Her body was changing, too. She was getting taller–an odd experience for one who had always been among the smallest in her age group. Her body was also changing in other ways. Hair was sprouting where it had never been and little nubs of breasts were appearing on her chest. She was a bit gangly and awkward. She rode her bicycle around and around the area of a few blocks that summer, in the new town, in the new neighborhood–where she knew no one.

So what would I, a sixty-year-old woman, tell that girl of ten? What would fifty years have done to inform me in a way that would be remotely understandable to, let alone useful to, that girl? I was sitting on the deck of a client friend’s mountain home, early on a Saturday morning, when I asked myself those questions. I had been invited for the weekend and I was sharing that weekend with my client friend, her brother, and another woman, also a client friend. It was glorious to have a weekend to relax in the mountains. Lake Granby was within view, the air was crisp, and my guard against whatever it was that had stopped me cold on the question was down.

But now I was curious. It wasn’t just the advice I might give to my ten-year-old self that interested me, I wanted to know what the others with whom I was sharing this cabin would say to their ten-year-old selves.

Tim was the only one up as early as me, so I wandered indoors and posed the question. I wasn’t at all sure he would be willing to answer it. After all, he might find it as personal as I had or be as stumped for an answer as I had initially been. He wasn’t, on either account. Debbie joined us when we were thick in conversation. Then our host, Peggy, ambled down from her bedroom and joined in.

Here is what my three companions told me they would tell their ten-year-old selves. I won’t attribute any one comment to any one of them, just to keep it interesting and give them a bit of privacy:

• Stay yourself.
• Don’t compare yourself with everyone else.
• Don’t try to figure it all out now.
• The priests, the teachers, and the ones in charge are not always right. But keep it to yourself until you can do something about it.
• Be gentle with yourself.
• You’re amazing! You’re going to be and do so many things that are going to leave an imprint.
• You have no idea how much potential you have, but you’ll figure it out.
• Everything is going to be okay.

This last one pretty much says it all for me. But I might add a few of my own:

• You won’t know it for some time, but this move you’ve just made–the one you didn’t want to make, the one you fought–is actually a turning point that will change the direction of your life for the better.
• You can be known by places, but you must open yourself to them and let yourself be known.
• This small corner of your life is a wonderful start, but your life can and will be so much bigger. Take a deep breath and take a running jump right off that cliff. Keep doing it. Live life without a net. You’ll know what that means in a few years, but begin to think about it now.
•  Yes, you did choose your parents and in a few years, you are going to see what a great choice it was. For now, know that angels are watching over you and that you are being guided. Pay attention. Be open to the guidance.
• By the way, everyone else has angels watching over them, too, and everyone else is also being guided. Curiously, many people don’t know that.

Well, now that I’ve gotten started, I can see that I could keep going. But I won’t. I’d like to know what advice you would give your ten-year-old self.

 

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Letting Go

I had just taken out a couple of dying elderberry bushes when I injured my knee for the second time in two months. I had tripped on a limb y-joint and I heard the “pop” when  my knee corkscrewed as I went down. For a split second, I was afraid I’d seriously damaged it this time. But when I tested it, limping to the house for an ice bag, it didn’t seem quite so bad as that nauseating popping sound might have suggested.

Still, I realized I needed to take a moment to contemplate what was going on. So I sat on a step with the pack on my knee and did just that. I immediately connected the injury to the telephone conversation I’d had right before going out to do the pruning. My longtime astrologer and dear friend, Sally McDonald, had called to give me details about the cancer she was having surgery for in a few days. The cancer had been a surprise to her. She was still in shock. So was I. And I was afraid for my friend.

Sally was not the first among those dear to me to be dealing with life threatening illness. My husband had been managing life with metastasized prostate cancer for two and a half years. My youngest sister’s hepatitis C had reactivated six months earlier, after a six-year remission following the birth of her son and a liver transplant. While I was ridiculously healthy, those around me were not, and when friends asked me how I seemed to be managing so well, I talked about how I  didn’t believe in death, how grateful I was for every day with my loved ones . . . and how living with their illnesses was a little like living with a persistent and constant slight fever.

I hobbled inside to see what Louise Hay had to say about knee problems. I had a good deal of faith in my own ability to sort out the energetic reasons for problems, but Louise Hay was always a good place to start when it came to physical maladies. Louise related knee problems to fear, inflexibility, stubborn ego and pride. Fear? You bet. Inflexibility? Stubborn ego and pride? Those three were, no doubt, there. I was human, after all. But I wanted to dig deeper.

So I thought about the elderberry bushes. We had been living in our beautiful home for eighteen years and the elderberry bushes had already been mature when we moved in. I had planned to do just a bit of pruning that day, but there was so much dead wood in two or three of them that I ended up removing those completely. It was time to let them go. I knew I needed to do the same thing with one of the lilac bushes. The blue spruce next to it and lilac bush in front of it had edged it right into oblivion.  And a year earlier, I’d hired a friend to take down two trees that were struggling. While there was so much vibrant life in my yard, not everything was making it. Like all mature yards, some things were past their prime and dying.

I realized that a part of me was resisting it. I was resisting the departure of bushes and trees that had been friends for years and I was also resisting the illnesses of those I loved, fearing that they might depart, too. I was trying to hold back time and change. That was where the inflexibility was coming in. Despite my deep spiritual understanding that everything and everyone survives what we think of as death, a part of me was stubbornly hanging on to some point in time in the past, a point in time when bushes and people were younger and healthier.

Of course, at some level, I was clinging to some past version of myself, too. At sixty, I found it curious that I was now likely in the last quarter of my life–if I was lucky. How could so much time have passed? There was so much left for me to be and do.

I realized I needed to let go at a deeper and more profound level than I ever had. I knew that love lived on, that it was the most enduring thing in the universe, that one instant of love for anyone or anything reverberated on and on into infinity. I’d experienced it and I needed to trust it now. And while I’d practiced and taught the art of making death the aly for many years, I needed to trust the very cycle of life and death at a more profound level, too. There comes a time when life and death look back at you when you look in the mirror each morning and I had come around to that very point in this life–as I, no doubt, had come around in life after life before this one. 

Ice, elevation, ibupropin–and a great massage therapist–got the knee back on track. I got my mind, spirit, and emotions back on track, too. I contemplated the divine paradox: none of us are getting out of here alive and all of us are getting out of here alive. I might as well let go and ride the wave of this life.

Three weeks passed. And then I was in a thrift store and came upon a set of gorgeous, never used, Mikasa china: eight plates, twelve bowls, and twelve bread plates. I gaped. And I thought about the china I was using every day at home. My grandmother had purchased it as a wedding present–forty-one years ago. I had left the troubled marriage in 1979. How I had managed to end up with the china, when so much else had been lost, was a long standing mystery. My second husband had been cheerfully eating off that china our entire marriage. It was time to let it go.

As I loaded my cart with the treasure, it occurred to me that this find might not have come to me if I hadn’t heeded the message about letting go and trusting the cycle of life and death. I had wanted to divest myself of that china from another life for some time and my opportunity to do so was presenting itself almost effortlessly.  As soon as I had gotten the message in more profound areas of my life, I was open to it in other, more mundane areas.

Apparently, all I’d had to do was let go.

 

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

My Father’s Daughter

I sit at my computer, staring at the blank Word document, the nascent rumblings of an idea beginning to spark along the neural pathways of my body–beginning not at the brain and moving outward, but at the heart. By the time the idea actually hits the brain, my fingers are already moving on the keyboard. This isn’t exactly the way my father said it would be, but on a good day, this is how it works.

It’s not that I have no familiarity with what spills out onto the computer screen.  Whatever is spilling out has often been forming somewhere inside of me for days, weeks, or months. I have a flickering thought and seem to work with it, deep within my body, for a time. But I’m less like a brood hen, sitting on her eggs, giving them the heat of her body and the time needed to hatch, than like a monk going about his daily chores and somehow meditating at the same time. 

Sometimes I’m in the shower when the flicker of an idea comes wandering into my consciousness. Or driving my car. Or meditating. Some inspiration–that is, some drawing into the body of an idea–begins the internal process that, in turn, gives rise to what spills out from my fingers and onto the keyboard. When the words come, when they hit like raindrops onto the screen, they seem to pouring from my heart.

Heart to brain, back to heart, and then back to brain. Is that how it works? Or is it 8th chakra (the one outside the body) to brain to body to heart to brain? I’m not sure. But I know that however it works, my father never described it to me.

I’m sorry for that. We talked about books and writing when I was growing up. He was, himself, a writer. Something of a frustrated writer, because he was never published, but a writer, none the less. I think it must have pleased him when I learned to read and the first little sparks of interest in the written word quickly blossomed into a nice campfire, then a conflagration.

Writing is like fire (at least as much as it is like rain). We’re consumed by the flames that come from our pens and keyboards in a conflagration of the spirit.

I’d like to think it was that way for my father and I believe it was. He wrote at night, when most of the family was asleep. He sat at his desk (an arts and crafts dark oak one when I was small, then an industrial gray metal one later on), chain smoked cigarettes, drank beer, and sat in what appeared to the observer to be a meditative state–or at least a pensive one–for long periods of time. The quintessetial brooding Irishman. Of course, that “observer” was likely to be nothing more than a mouse, out from hiding in the quiet of the night, or me, back from a date or out of my room to get a glass of water during a late night of study.

He wrote thoughts and observations on scraps of paper and advised me to do the same. “When you get an idea for a story or anything you might want to write on later, put it down in writing, right then,” he told me when I was still a teen. “Even if it is just one good sentence . . . or two good words . . . write it down.”

It would be years before I understood, through my own experience, how important that advice was. Ideas are sometimes like dreams–ephemeral, disappearing as soon as you turn your head if you are not careful. It is important to capture them, like dream butterflies, in the net that is the pen or keyboard. Beautiful sentences are that way, too. I have lost many a beautiful phrase, sentence, and paragraph because I failed to stop whatever I was doing (that seemed more important at the time) and write it down.

I have, actually, pulled over to the side of the road to write something that would not wait. I have also rummaged in the nightstand for scraps of paper and scribbled something that nagged at me enough to prevent sleep. And I have captured my thoughts on paper when I was supposed to be attending to a meeting. It’s glorious when it happens like that, but it doesn’t happen that way as often as I would like. Still, I imagine my father smiling on the other side when it does happen.

My father tapped out his stories on a little Royal typewriter. I used that typewriter when I first cranked out papers in college and I inherited it from him. It gathers dust in my office closet but I couldn’t give it up any more than I could give up the old LP of Bing Crosby singing George Gershwin. He loved them both and so do I.

If my father were alive today, he would love tapping out his thoughts on a computer and he would marvel at the mystery of the machine. He would love its efficiency and he would love that delete key. He didn’t live to see a personal computer, let alone long enough to see his daughter’s name on a book cover, but I felt him behind my left shoulder (along with St. Germain) when I wrote my first book. And even though it was nonfiction, instead of the fiction he dearly loved, if he had lived long enough to see it, he would have surely claimed me as my father’s daughter . . . and I would have shook my head in agreement and whispered that it was also probably that brooding Irish anscestry.

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

My Mother’s Daughter

Every May, I am reminded that I am truly my mother’s daughter. Some dominant gene becomes activated that sends me out to survey my flower beds and think hopeful thoughts about what I might accomplish in them this year. By July, sweet hope has turned to gritty, raw survival, but in May, there is always hope. 

Spring waits for no one. Depending on the fickle Colorado weather, I am sometimes able to get out in the yard in April to cut back the dried and brittle stems of last year’s growth: purple coneflower, hostas, Annabelle hydrangeas, chrystanthemums, daisies, meadow sage, sedum, coreopsis, and all the rest. The roses–David Austins, miniatures, and assorted others–along with the tangle of clematis and honeysuckle, could be cut back earlier, but I never seem to get it done until April.

By May, the grass sprouts where I don’t want it and remains intransigently absent where I do. I know that if I do not pluck it from the flower beds, along with its evil cousin, the weed, the two will have taken over my beds by the next time I turn to look.

On my hands and knees, weeding and pulling grass, I can sometimes leave my body and hover a little above, watching the solid form of the woman so intent on her work. Sometimes she’s a wild woman, the female equivalent of Green Man, with dirt under her fingernails and bits of leaves and twigs in her hair. At other times, she is more fairy-like, an aging pixie talking to her flowers and herbs. Always, she is her mother’s daughter.

My mother grew up on a series of farms in Illinois. Her father was a dirt farmer and he was dirt poor, never owning any of the farms he worked. He was a tenant farmer. My mother worked the fields as a child, weeding in the hot summer sun. By the time she left home, she had no desire to grow vegetables, but had somehow come to love flowers.

The summers of my own childhood were spent reading books, riding my bicycle, and watching my mother work her little patch of earth. With trowel and fork, bare hands and shovel, on hands and knees or bent over at the waist, she produced flowers to rival any botanic garden. She had her favorites. Sweet William was one. And when she was older and her health prevented her from doing the hard garden work she had done as a younger woman, she still put out pots of impatiens and planted a huge, old birdbath with petunias.

As a young woman, I was first interested in houseplants, another of my mother’s loves, and we bonded over them. It took a bit of time for me to come into my own green thumb outdoors, but I am grateful that I came to be the avid tender of flower and herb beds some years before she died.  

Now I am near the age she was at in my favorite photo of the two of us. She’s clutching a cigarette, one she has yet to light, against her chest. The sun hits her short, curly, hair in a way that produces a halo effect. She’s as brown as a sparrow, thanks to the sun, and she is wearing a summer top she probably sewed herself. 

I’m next to her, my pale Irish skin sunburned, my hair pulled back and away from my face, gold hoops dangling from my ears.  She has a wise smile on her face, a smile that says yes to life, even though she’s had more reason to suffer than she ever deserved. At about thirty, I have the big, toothy grin of a woman who has recently escaped from violent circumstances and sees her life spread out before her like fields of lavendar. (Thirty years later, my smile is more like hers. I’ll probably never be as brown and wrinkled as her, thanks to sunscreen, good skin care, and an easier life. But the smile is there.)

My arm is around my mother in that photo and her right shoulder is up against my left. We could be a mother/daughter team, selling tomatoes and peppers at some farmer’s market. But, of course, that wouldn’t be us. We’d be selling flowers.

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Faith

No doubt about it: the internal guidance system is a major tool for navigating life. But using the internal guidance system requires something else, too: faith. I have been reminded of that, again and again, over the past few weeks.

When I listened to my internal guidance system and kept driving forward through that snow storm, as reported in the last post, faith was required of me. The road behind me was quckly becoming impassible. The road ahead was uncertain, except insofar as I was willing to have faith in what I heard through my internal guidance system. I’m happy I had faith that day. Otherwise, I would have missed my own talk.

Last weekend, I again found myself in circumstances that required faith. Actually, those circumstances really began in February, when Melisa Pearce (Touched by a Horse) and I decided to offer a workshop together in April. We both knew that April is a fickle month in Colorado. It can be clear and in the sixties one day and snowing enough to make the Easter Bunny think he’s covering for Santa the next. We each trusted our intuition and set the workshop in the geographic center of April (about as close as the Four Corners Marker is to the geographic meeting place of four states–which means just a bit off center). This was the first time I would be offering my Shamanic Writing Workshop and to do it with Melisa and her talented healing horses was a gift of grace. We did our marketing and had faith that those perfect for the workshop would sign up.

They did. We had a very good response. People were coming from out of state as well as within the state of Colorado. It seemed we were on to something.

The weather was wonderful a scant week before our workshop and all looked good, apart from that pesky storm that was working its way towards Colorado. Our workshop was to start at 6 p.m. on Friday the 17th. The day before, it rained. The forecasters believed that rain would turn to snow sometime after midnight and predicted either slushy roads or a major snow storm. We were right on that liminal edge between the two.

I needed to have faith that all would be well for the workshop, but I must admit that my faith slid sideways on Thursday. I was opening my house up to an old friend who had a four-day commitment  nearby and wanted my home to be her port in a storm. It was a very reasonable request and one with which I happily complied, though I pointed out that I might need my own port in a storm if the weather turned ugly. I would be out in the wilds of Colorado, between Boulder and Lyons. I knew I could stay at Melisa’s ranch if necessary, but what about our workshop attendees?

Friday morning brought rain turning to snow in much of the Denver metro area. I left for the ranch in the morning, set myself up for the workshop, and waited. A couple of people cancelled. A couple of others called to be sure the workshop would go as scheduled (Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday). Two women had driven in from Utah on Thursday, the storm tracking them.

What was it doing at the ranch? Raining. Just raining. We seemed to be in the metro bananna belt, in a manner of speaking. There was a bit of magic to it. When I went inside and slid beyond that part of me that feared a workshop at risk, I kept hearing a voice that said it was all much ado about nothing. I needed to have faith that all would go as planned and I chose faith over fear.

The workshop did go as planned. Apart from two or three cancellations, everyone was there. One woman had even come from what would turn out to be “snow central” in the mountains. Some brought clothes so they could bunk at the ranch that night (the equivalent of praising God, but tying down your cammel).  No lives had been at risk and no one whined. There was an undercurrent of faith in the group, faith that we were all exactly were we were meant to be and with the people we were meant to share that time.

The workshop was a huge success. There were moments of breakthrough for some participants, moments of profound self-realization for others, and many moments of pure joy for everyone.

We’re planning another Shamanic Writing Workshop together and I have faith that it, too, will unfold beautifully and perfectly.

 

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Navigation Tools for Life, Part IV, Practical Application

The past three posts have been about navigating life with tools like centering and grounding and the internal guidance system. In this post, I’m going to bring it down to practical application with a recent example from my own life. It’s one thing to describe the tools and quite another to practice them, particularly at difficult moments. I know this all to well from my own experience. But I might have a few years of practice on some of you, so I’m going to describe how I managed to avoid being a traffic fatality (okay, that may be a bit hyperbolic), or at least managed to get to a speaking engagement with plenty of time to spare and without an accident.

Those who have experience with Colorado weather know that March is our snowiest month and that fifty and sixty degree days are often puntuated by spring storms that rip the nascent leaves from trees and take the branches while they’re at it. Last Thursday was one of those spring storm days.

We have had drought conditions in Denver this winter so any moisture is a welcome sight. The problem was that I had plans, long set, to speak at CIPA College on Thursday. (CIPA College is the annual conference put on by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. It is a major event that draws speakers and participants from the four corners of the U.S.) I was scheduled to head up a panel of editors at “Newbie” College, the half-day session for new and aspiring writers/publishers. I had selected the topics and I had selected the panel. I was responsible for the session.

News of the forthcoming storm on Wednesday had me scrambling to book a room at the hotel for Thursday and Friday. I have had enough experience with Colorado snowstorms to know that having a warm port in a storm is a good idea. I got my gear together. (I’m a woman. This takes time.) I planned to leave relatively early in the morning, even though my panel wasn’t speaking until about 3:00 p.m.

There was rain mixed with snow by 6:00 a.m. on Thursday morning. The streets were still warm enough from the previous day’s sixties to melt anything resembling snow when it hit. But within an hour, the rain-snow mixture was more snow than rain and it was sticking. I hurried to get myself together and my gear in the car and left my home by 8:00 a.m., within an hour of the switch from rain-snow to snow. I could see that conditions were deteriorating rapidly and wanted to find myself drinking coffee and schmoozing with other speakers by 9:00 a.m.

The roads were snowpacked and slick. SUVs were already in ditches. I had some faith in my Subaru Outback and my driving (ah, crawling at about 25 mph), but I had less faith in some of the yahoos speeding by me in cars that didn’t appear to have four-wheel drive like mine.  It was already a horrific drive and I was only a few miles from home.

I had heard from one member of my panel and knew  she was bailing. I suspected that she wouldn’t be alone. I was prepared to be the sole speaker (and have done enough speaking gigs that I knew I could easily pull it off), but the only thing that was really keeping me pointed onward was the fact that I was the moderator. It was my panel. I felt responsible.

Still, I contemplated turning back. I had only gone five to seven miles (and had another fifteen or so to go), but didn’t want to make the rest of the drive if it was going to be as harrowing as the drive thus far. Before making the decision, I checked in with my internal guidance system.

It was a smart thing to do. I received a very clear message: The road behind you is more dangerous than the road ahead. I couldn’t really imagine that being true, but the message was very clear and kept repeating itself. I decided to go forward.

And the road ahead was, indeed, far less dangerous than the road I had just traveled. (There may be more meaning to this than just one drive to one speaking engagement, I’ll admit.) Within a couple of miles, the roads became more wet than snowpacked and the snow gave way to rain-snow.

I made it to the hotel in time for that morning coffee.

If I had not listened to my internal guidance system, I might have turned back. If I had done that, I would have missed my talk because the roads became increasingly problematic as the day wore on. In fact, I probably would have missed the Friday morning session of CIPA College, too.

As it turned out, I had one panel member with me and we gave a great session. And before the weekend was out, I had won another EVVY Technical Award for Editing and my clients had snagged an additional seven awards for their books.

Am I happy that I listened to my internal guidance system? What do you think?

I would love to hear your personal stories, too.

 

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Navigation Tools for Life, Part III, Understanding Your Navigational Tools

Imagine being the captain of a ship. You want to travel north and all of your navigational instruments give you clear information on where north is. But you have seen something shimmering in the distance, off in a direction that does not match what your navigational tools say is north. You decide that the direction in which the shimmering object lies is actually north and head in that direction.

It sounds insane, doesn’t it? But that is exactly what we are doing when we insist on being in control instead of allowing ourselves to soften and surrender a bit.

In the last two posts, I talked about the internal guidance system and in the last post, I gave a couple of very simple tools to acess it. But being willing to access those internal guidance system tools will have limited impact if you do not understand a few basic things about them.

1. You will have limited success in accessing your internal guidance system if you insist on being in control of the process. To access and hear/see/feel your internal guidance system, you must suspend the hallucination–for just a bit–that you are king or queen of the universe. You must be willing to soften and surrender a bit to that part of you that your ordinary consciousness just does not have access to.
2. You must understand that your internal guidance system is not there to make you rich and famous. You may actually become rich and famous, but that’s not the point. Your internal guidance system is there to guide you towards the next move, inspiration, perception, or understanding that is best for you–based on a complex web of knowledge and interactions your conscious mind has limited access to. Your ego may want to be rich and famous, but your internal guidance system wants the highest version of you to be enacted, whatever that is and however that happens.
3. At some point, you will have to act, not just sit back and passively observe. In the be/do/have cycle of things, there is a time to just “be” and tap into your internal guidance. But make no mistake: your internal guidance system will not do all the foot work for you. It may give you alternatives that will smooth your way, but it will not act for you if action on your part is an important component of manifesting what your guidance is showing you. The world may or may not come to your door without your having to leave home–but even if it does, it will be because you did your part to get it to your door.
4. The more turbulent the sea, the harder it will be to navigate through it on a consistent basis. The internal guidance system works best in calm waters. Meditation–in any form to which you are drawn–helps calm the waters. And you need not be a follower of any particular religious path to meditate. There are nonsectarian meditation methods, sectarian ones, and methods that might have started out as sectarian, but have become nonsectarian in common practice. In short, there is a meditation method for everyone. Find one that resonates for you.
5. The dirtier the equipment, the less the results can be trusted. This is very important to understand! Try reading text through a glass encrusted with years of dirt. You might not be able to read anything at all. If you can, you might miss something important that completely changes the meaning of the passage. Making sense of your internal guidance system is much the same. If you want a clear channel to your internal guidance, clean up your act! That means acknowledging,  working through, and clearing the jetsam and flotsam of the human psyche. The more you do this, the more trustworthy the information you receive will be.
6. If you ignore the message, you may have simply lost an opportunity . . . or you might receive the message again–stronger, louder, and less kindly. Opportunity lost is one thing, but sometimes, when it is important, if you ignore a message from your internal guidance system, it will be repeated . . . one, twice, three times, or as many times as it takes. The internal guidance system has a way of getting our attention when it is important. That means that while the first message–or first ten messages–might have been subtle and gentle, you may find subsequent ones becoming increasingly pointed and/or uncomfortable. What has that meant for me, in my own experience? When I have ignored too many messages over too long a period of time, I have become ill. I have attracted clients from hell. I have had accidents. I have become tense and unhappy. These days, I prefer to pay attention sooner instead of later.
7. Be gentle with yourself. If you have never consciously tapped into your internal guidance system or have been ignoring it for a long time, it might take some time for it to take you seriously and actually kick in with good, clear information. Give it some time. Practice in very simple ways, on a daily basis. It will eventually become activated. And when that happens, you will find you have made a good friend who provides indispensible help.

Want some navigation reference tools? There are many good books available and, yes, I do recommned my own book, Living the Dream–A Guidebook for Job Seekers and Career Explorers. Among the best resources, I believe, are two books by Penney Peirce: The Intuitive Way and Frequency.

May you navigate the seas of life well and safely, and may your ports of call be more than you could have hoped for . . . and everything you might have dreamed.

I would love to hear about your journey.

 

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall