Janet McNeill

<June 18/10>

On my very lovely walk this morning (beautiful day!) along the boardwalk (in the Beaches area of Toronto, Ontario, Canada), I articulated the key tenets of what I guess you might call my “religion.”

They are:

• Gratitude
• Walking
• Community
• Service
• Solitude / silence
• Music [added later; see P.S.]

I could elaborate on each of these, of course. Walking also takes in Nature, love of the Earth, & maybe canoeing, kayaking, swimming & snowshoeing… Community takes in love, family, conversation, smiling, friendliness & friendship. Gratitude takes in joy & leads to a happy spirit. Service takes in activism & caring & doing (which also lead to a happy spirit!). Solitude & silence are things I cannot exist without & sometimes wonder whether others might benefit from a wee bit more of…

& music!! Well – music sometimes catapults me right from practically comatose, down at the bottom of a Very Deep Pit (or even a Not-all-that-deep-but-still-definitely-in-a-pit-Pit) into outright exhilaration!!

Janet

P.S. on July 1^st: I’ve been doing this odd nomadic gig lately. Some of the time I’m living out in the boonies, sometimes I’m in the small city of Pembroke, Ontario (up river from Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, & down river from leaking “legacy” pollution at the Chalk River nuclear facility; Gee – sure makes me feel better to know the pollution there is “legacy” as opposed to new…or, hmm…..does it??, & home to (notice I am not saying proud home: many of us here are not merely not proud but frankly appalled about) SRB Technologies, a tritium-emitting local business that has just outrageously been issued a 5-year license by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (boy are they un-aptly named!?!?!? Ought to be more like the Canadian Nuclear Danger Commission); check out the Tritium Awareness Project Web site to learn “the truth about tritium”…)

And some of the time I hang out in Toronto, Canada’s largest city & kind of an all-around pretty fun place…

Well.

On my long walk in Pembroke this morning, I observed, as I have on other occasions, how church-y this town is. It has a quite extraordinary number of churches. Off the charts, really!

Not sure what that’s all about, but the limitations of “organized” religion seem more & more apparent to me as the years go by.

I’ve written elsewhere about what I see as the problem with religion.

What sprang to mind this morning as I noticed Pembroke’s considerable churchy-ness is the sort of somewhere-else-ness of most religious teachings. “Heaven” is somewhere else. “Divinity” is somewhere/someone else. “Salvation” is some other time. “Holy” is other places or people.

Me, I’m convinced all these things are right here, right now, always.

Hmmm. In ‘Pulling Down the Pedestals’ & ‘I’m not OK – YOU’re OK’ I’ve written about our tendency as individuals to see others as…better – more whole…than one is oneself. I don’t think this attitude & the dominance of religion & its “God/holiness/sacredness is somewhere else” message is a coincidence, exactly…

Certainly Eckhart Tolle’s thoughts about presence, & about the pain body (& everything else he talks about!) resonate hugely for me. (I’ve written about ET in a few blog postings – ‘Ducks Unlimited’, ‘Pain Bodies on Parade or Oh, To be a duck’ & ‘Flap your wings’, among others…)

Dear friend Lynn has just given me a copy of the book This is It – The Nature of Oneness – Interviews with Teachers of Non-Duality, including Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, by Jan Kersschot.

That phrase “This is it!” resonated for me right away.

All is here – right here, right now, in this moment – & it is plenty!

The heck, I say, with the fear & poverty mentality we’ve been so immersed & drenched in for so long.

This is it!

P.P.S. on July 24^th: It became necessary to add that 6^th item – music – to the list the other evening when, under the great spirits & energy-enhancing influence of some lovely, sing-y, dance-y, cheerful tunes, I got hours & hours of useful work done, instead of succumbing to the temptation to veg out in front of a movie. Music sure can be magical!! (Pat Conroy said, “Without music, life is a journey through a desert,” and isn’t it true??)

I went out for a walk in the dark the other night (to watch the meteor showers down at Pine Point beach), and felt like a bit of an idiot, taking a flashlight and a “bear bell” with me.

I currently live in eastern Ontario (Canada), in a beautiful small town on the Ottawa River that happens to be frequented by bear visitors. This town is in the “boonies,” sort of: not too far from the “wilderness” of our huge, beautiful treasure of a park, Algonquin Park. (We are extraordinarily blessed in this part of the world to have about a zillion beautiful lakes, and some remaining forest. Very, very blessed indeed…)

So, there are bears in my town sometimes. I’m not at all freaked out about this. Actually, I think it’s very cool to live in a part of the world that isn’t utterly paved over and subdued – and I get quite a kick out of this bear business. On the other hand, I’m not really up for a close encounter with one, so I took my bear bell along on my walk – feeling a bit foolish (folks might think I’m not brave or something, hmm?), but also very happy to have the bell (thanks, Phil!)

I got down to the end of my street – bear bell still in silent mode (a magnet keeps it silent when it isn’t needed), and I saw (and heard) a woman jogging along Rutherford Drive – with her dog – a bell of her own ringing cheerfully and audibly.

And I thought, “Yes! I’m not alone! If she is wearing a bear bell – unabashedly – then I am not such an idiot/buffoon/twit to be carrying one myself.”

And then I thought, “Wow! What a metaphor!”

How often do we all go around holding ourselves in – feeling foolish, or alone, or afraid – only to discover we’re all holding ourselves in, feeling foolish, alone, and afraid?

William Crisman, author of the book The Opposite of Everything is True – Reflections on Denial in Alcoholic Families (a book I’ve found most, most helpful) said in the book “…for (like everyone else) I define myself by bouncing against others.”

It is so, it is so…

If only we could all “let go” a little more – ease up on ourselves (and everyone else), and just admit honestly to our foibles and fears and neuroses and pain.

After all, we are all in the same darn boat, hmm?

Janet

P.S. We evolved to be tribal creatures, yes? Not “islands” unto ourselves…

P.P.S. Associated ‘quote of the day’: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, who also said, btw, “Sin is that which separates.”

The “Pollyanna lady” (that is to say, I, Janet) awoke this morning feeling as though there was a huge ROCK sitting on my chest. I felt heavy. The world felt heavy. LIFE felt heavy.

I was not a happy camper.

So I made a cup of coffee and went back to bed with my newly-arrived treasure, the book Broken Open – How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, by Elizabeth Lesser. I’d encountered the book and read about ¾ of it a couple weekends ago, while away with a friend (thanks mucho, Penny!!). Arrived home and promptly ordered 3 copies. What a book!!

It seems downright magical to me how words can be such a powerful un-locker of our emotions.

Within a few moments of cracking the book (reading the entries in the last 2 sections, ‘Birth & Death’ and ‘The River of Change’), I was teary and feeling cracked open myself, and suddenly said out loud a thought I had not articulated at all before that moment, “I am lonely and terrified.”

Yikes! Until I said it out loud, I had not known I was feeling lonely and terrified. Lesser’s words/stories made me feel all opened up – and when opened up, seemingly, we can articulate emotions we didn’t even know we were feeling.

I’m not exactly used to feeling lonely and terrified – and I don’t suppose my personal circumstances or “reasons” for feeling this way right now matter in the slightest. We all feel that way, hmm? At least some of the time. It’s the human condition, is it not??

Like you, dear Reader – like everyone – I’m just another “bozo on the bus.” “Bozos on the bus”(1) is the title of one of the essays in Lesser’s wonderful book, and I love how she helps us realize we’re all in tons of good company, being less-than-perfect, less-than-always-wonderful – that we all have foibles and insecurities, and that that other bus that supposedly contains all the “perfect” people, with their perfect bodies and families and lives – is nothing but an illusion. We’re all on the same bus – with all the other bozos. What a relief!!

Well. I got myself out of bed, turned on the computer & downloaded my e-mail (there was a work-related task I knew I had to do before going out for my walk), and learned from a good friend that Thomas Berry died two days ago [he died on June 1, 2009. The next post tells you much more about this very special man].

Thomas Berry has been one of my major heroes for some years now. A big, big thinker, Berry studied, understood and articulated the entire range of human endeavour on the planet – as well as grasping and articulating the Universe story from the Big Bang on.(2)

It certainly feels to me as though a very big light has gone out.

It doesn’t help very much with those feelings of loneliness and terror, of course.

But I made myself go out for my walk,(3) went to my beloved Pine Point Beach, and sat by the river for quite a while in silence, gazing out at the water, the hills and trees on the other side of the river, listening to birds sing and the breeze rustling leaves in the trees. I let sand run through my fingers and I thought “Ahhhhhhhhhh…….”

No great insights, revelations or epiphanies. I had some quiet, sad-ish thoughts about the relationship that ended so abruptly nine months ago now – grieved some for all the related losses – and thought, again, “Yes. I suppose we are all lonely and terrified – one way and another – and yes, we are all just ‘bozos on the bus.’”

And of course, my sadness and my tears will not break me. They are real – very real – but they are not life-threatening, and they will pass.

And for now, at least, life/Life goes on…

Janet

P.S. Right at the front of her wonderful book, Lesser has the Anaïs Nin quotation “And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Breaking open, hmm? Joanna Macy has said, “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.” Seems like breaking open is a good thing, doesn’t it?

P.P.S. Within a few hours of this “down in the pit” mood, btw, I felt restored to my usual (relatively) sane self. Moods really come and go, don’t they? Leonard Cohen sings in his song “That Don’t Make It Junk” (I have this song on his wonderful “Ten New Songs” CD) “I don’t trust my inner feelings – inner feelings come and go.” And they do…they do…

(1) Lesser credits clown-activist Wavy Gravy with the “bozos on the bus” phrase.