in clover: listen to my word....

When I was a little girl, I talked A LOT.  My family nicknamed me "Jabberwocky."  Sometimes, out of necessity and for the sake of her sanity, my mother would "tune" me out.  I understand.  My children are jabberwockys too.  There are times when I just can't take it in and I tune them out. 

Sometimes, when I was a very small girl, sensing my mother's distraction, I would pull on her sleeve and say, "Listen to my word.  Mommy, listen to my word." We've always thought that a funny and odd thing for a little girl to say.

Last Wednesday night my spiritual direction group wrapped up a month long exploration of Celtic spirituality.  I shared this incredible blessing from John O'Donohue.   I thought it particularly appropriate on that night.

 
For longing

Blessed be the longing that brought you here
And quickens your soul with wonder.

May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
That disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
To discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

May the forms of your belonging - love, creativity and friendship -
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.


 May the one you long for long for you.

May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

May a secret providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.

May your mind inhabit your life with the sureness
with which your body inhabits the world.

May your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.

May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.

May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.

John O’Donohue

With a handful of dark green pipe cleaners and some quick instruction, we set out to weave a St. Brigid cross, mindfully.  Despite my reassurances that whatever you created or didn't create, it was ok, the important part was experience, well, really, the opening to the experience, folks were nervous about doing things "right.".  No matter how many times I said it, they had trouble accepting that the outcome was of little or not consequence. 

Brigid Crosses are traditionally woven from reeds.  I had a bag of materials in the garage, saved for the occasion but Michael unknowingly "decluttered" them.  In the end I decided on pipe cleaners because I knew it would be easier for their unfamiliar fingers to manage and might help keep our focus on the meditation, rather than making a perfect cross.   I said over and over again, "Remember, it's just a pipe cleaner!"   

But even so, as we wove our pipe cleaner crosses, you could feel the judgment (and tension) begin to build.  

For most of us, our minds told us that we were:

inferior or superior
too perfect or too sloppy
too fast or too slow
too determined or too hesitant
too focused or too scattered

The interesting thing to me was the nature of this judgement. This was not the "judging of one's neighbor" that we are warned against in the Bible.   

This was different.  

We didn't judge the woman to our left or the woman to our right or the woman across the room.  We judged ourselves, pure and simple. 
We were so judgmental of ourselves,  we had no choice but to laugh at ourselves.  The only other option would have been to judge ourselves for being so judgmental! 

Do you see what tricks the mind plays? 

That voice that urges you to peek at your neighbor out the corner of your eye...to check your measure against your friends...that voice is not God. The voice that says you are not good enough is never the voice of God. That voice is not Holy or Sacred and that voice surely does not speak Truth.  That is a small, small voice. It only sounds big because it is trapped in your head...it's bouncing around and echoing off the walls of your mind until you can hear nothing else. 

That small voice should not be able to drown out the love and longings that God speaks to you,  but all too often we ignore the God-Voice that says we are beautiful, we are powerful, we are loved.  We only hear that small, small voice that says we are not enough. It's small but it's loud and man oh man is it ever persistant. 

We can't quite tune in to the God station....

we create our own static.... 

we can't quite make out the voice of the Divine.

But if we will stop and listen and acknowledge and reach out...if we share our small thoughts and big fears with trusted soul friends, we can turn the volume down on that small voice.  We can remove the static and tune into Love. 

When those small, mean thoughts cross my mind, my friend and mentor taught me to say, "Hello, old friend.  Not today."  I can choose to let those small thoughts pass on by.  You can too.

Recently a friend sent me this quote from Sue Monk Kidd's book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. 

"Mindfulness has been called a powerful form of self-healing by many teachers and practitioners. How this process creates healing is part mystery and part grace. Somehow in a slow, hidden way, we're able to be with the depths of ourselves--our true natures, our souls--while at the same time observing our thoughts and feelings and not becoming caught up in them."  

May you have the courage to listen to the voice of Love.
May you have the courage to reveal your true nature. 

Can you feel me pulling on your sleeve? 

"Listen!  Listen!  Listen to my word!

You are beautiful 
You are powerful
You are magnificent
You are infinite
You are eternal
You are loved

You ARE enough

Namaste, 

Lisa 

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in clover: everything old is new again...

My dad commented, "Back to the future!" 

After much soul searching and internal debate, I have decided to return to ebay as a seller, keeping the id Michael and I created in 1998.  I seem to recall that it was Michael's suggestion to call me "lextique"...as we struggled to hastily establish my new ebay account.  My friend was having some success on the new and novel site, selling vintage items over the internet. It had a weird name, ebay, and we didn't have a clue how it worked but we thought we'd give it a try.


My first ebay sale was a first edition Tasha Tudor children's book.  I bought it for $1 at a local thrift shop.  I had no ebay feedback and no photo in my listing.  It took Michael and me the entire weekend to figure out how to list that one item. It was NOT pretty!  After all that work,  I quickly became bored with the listing when after several days, it still had no bids.  And then, in the last minutes of the auction, a exciting flurry of bidding took place...eventually driving the price to $56! 

I was hooked.  The scanner I bought so that I could include photos in my auction listings  was rapidly replaced by a digital camera, capable of holding up to a dozen photos at a time...it was all quite high tech!  I listed auctions until  very late at night and almost every lunch break from my bank job was spent in line at the post office.  For years, I had longed to quit that corporate job for something more creative. 

I took up selling vintage items while still in college.  When Michael and I met for our very first date, he was a bit shocked to see my entire car piled high with all sorts of "junk" destined for the booth I had just rented at a new antique mall. He was game, though, once we married, to help me scour yard sales, thrift stores and flea markets for fabulous finds we could use in our own home and bargains we could sell at a local antique mall or fair.   



When Big C was an infant, we teamed up with my father and uncle who had begun importing antique furniture from England...sight unseen! Both Michael and I were working 50 hours a week or more at our "real" jobs so with the birth of Big C, we had little time for antiquing.  When my Dad told me I could consign a few pieces of the English furniture in Lexington, we jumped at the chance to rent space in a new antique mall.  This time we had quality furniture to go with our well priced yard sale finds. Maybe I could quit my job....


Sales were up and down and the best we seemed to do over time was break even. Although I wished I could quit my "real" job, I knew that the business as such was not genuinely viable.  


And then I sold that book....and I began to imagine the possibilities.  That one ebay sale changed everything.   I loved my ebay clients.  I still get Christmas cards from some of them. I mailed things all over the country and sometimes I mailed things across the big pond right back to the country they came from.   I sold items to celebrities (like a member of the band Matchbox 20) and to folks who lived just across town.  Aside from my young family, being an Ebay seller became ithe focus in my life.   


I quit my job and sold happily on ebay full-time for ten years.  I took charge of selecting the inventory we imported from England and added French pieces as well. I managed the W. Ky store from afar and sold my wares at numerous antique venues in Central Ky, eventually opening my own brick and mortar store here. 


Ebay grew and grew until it became less of the community I loved and more of a hassle. With the addition of thousands and thousands of new sellers, fraud became an issue.  The economy began to suffer and sales in general began to wane.  The events of September 11th forever altered the import business, making it much more difficult and expensive to bring containers to the US. Big C was very busy with sports and I hated to miss even one game and then Little c was born with health issues. Michael took a traveling job. Eventually it just all became too much.  I closed the doors to the brick and mortar stores and allowed my ebay id to go dormant. 

For years people have been asking what I'm going to do with all that inventory...tucked away in storage....I've never really had an answer.  When I started this blog, I thought I might set up a shop on Etsy, in the vintage category.  But I never did anything about it.   



And then one day this summer,  the universe began whispering in my ear. "Put your toe in the water..." 

So I looked into Etsy again but learning from scratch seemed very daunting.  Old dog / new tricks, and all...


So the universe whispered, "Why don't you dance with the one that brung you?"

I worked through a bunch of reasons why I should not.  I was actually kind of mad at ebay....for changing.   But after arguing with myself, eventually I arrived at, "well, why not?"

This poem, from Rumi, kept coming to me:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty & frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-- Rumi

Well, ok...so why not? 

Here's a few of the items I chose to begin with.  If you'd like to see all my listings, just click here: 

 lextique

  
a french fishing creel....

several pieces of french enamelware....

 

  
a french wire market basket....

old english gardening tools...

a french ag award placque...

Same as it never was....

Although my devoted ebay clients have given up following me by now, my (perfect!) feedback picked right up where I left off.  A few hours spent getting up to speed on listing practices, image hosting, USPS fee schedules and bringing my PayPal account up to date and just like that, I'd shaken a good deal of  rustiness off. 

And while my inventory remains the same, I am not the same.  Becoming more contemplative in life is sure to change me as an ebayer.

I hope there is more balance in my life...last time around Ebay often took over....my time, my energy...the buyers, rather than my family,  received my patience....sometimes I was so stressed that I was ugly and angry with Michael who was only trying to help me.  I hope that is different, this time around. 

This time around I'd like to be mindful of the process rather than only excited about the result.  I'd like to remember why I chose each of these old things, to relish cleaning and polishing them...to slow down and enjoy being creative while photographing them and while writing the words that describe them.  

This time around I'd like to keep the excitement but lose the fear.  There was always some amount of fear....fear of making a mistake....and lots of fear of the future.  What if I don't make a profit this month?  This year?  What will happen?

I'd like to let that go.

Apparently even ebay selling can be my spiritual practice.  Who knew? Everything old is indeed new, again.    

Back to the future! 

peace and all good, 

Lisa

in clover: no guarantees

Tonight, a first.  My ChristCare group, Cultivating Mindfulness, is meeting at my home rather than at church.  Our topic:  The Spirituality of Gardening.  I teamed up with a friend to present this topic to another group at church in early May and it was well received.  At the time, my garden was ready to be planted...in earlyMay, my garden was chock full of unlimited potential.  

But now that it's mid June and my garden doesn't look so great. In fact, for the second year running, my garden is really struggling.  What seemed like a great idea in May...."Hey, why don't you all come to my house?!  We can sit in the garden while we talk about the spirituality of gardening"....well, now it seems like the worst idea ever. 

I'm pretty sure they are expecting a thriving garden and I don't have one.  There's no way to fake this, even if I had the time and inclination.  I could have changed the location but I didn't act on that soon enough. 

The only save I can think of is to tell the truth.  I learned so much from last years problems and failures.  I was sure I had the formula for a fabulous garden.  This year's garden was SURE to be A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.   In past years I HAVE had lovely, thriving gardens....loads of produce, armloads of flowers.  This year, I don't.  I don't know why.  It just is.

Honestly, is there really any better lesson to learn about spirituality from gardening than this? Not sure....

in clover: labyrinth walk

My ChristCare group, Cultivating Mindfulness, has been experimenting with labyrinth prayer. 








In colloquial English, labyrinth is generally synonymous with maze, but many contemporary scholars observe a distinction between the two: maze refers to a complex branching (multicursal) puzzle with choices of path and direction; while a single-path (unicursal) labyrinth has only a single, non-branching path, which leads to the center. A labyrinth in this sense has an unambiguous route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate.  (Wikipedia).

Writer Dan Johnston points out that “a labyrinth is a right brain task.  It involves intuition, creativity, imagery.”

There’s that word again....creativity! In the past, I considered the words labyrinth and maze to be synonymous. It’s so interesting to me...being mindful of the differences.

Johnston continues:

A labyrinth is a right brain task. It involves intuition, creativity, and imagery. With a maze many choices must be made and an active mind is needed to solve the problem of finding the center. With a labyrinth there is only one choice to be made. The choice is to enter or not. A more passive, receptive mindset is needed. The choice is whether or not to walk a spiritual path. 
 The only physical maze I have experienced is a corn maze. Every year, at least one is available to try at a farm fall festival around here.  Designed for young children,  it’s just my speed.  To be honest, with my sense of direction, just driving around my own town can often feel like a maze to me.  

Puzzles frustrate me.  Michael and I are very different in that way.  He loves a Rubik’s cube and can spend hours with it, if need be.  Usually he's figured it out quite quickly.  Me?  Within five minutes I want to throw it out the window. I've never solved a Rubik's cube. 

Mazes (and puzzles) are not my cup of tea.  But I have wanted to have a labyrinth experience for quite some time now.  And tonight, I walk the labyrinth for the first time in the company of these amazingly smart and unflinchingly brave women.

Last week we prepared by meditating with a finger labyrinth.  Click here to download your own finger labyrinth and give it a try! 

Please share any labyrinth experiences you have had in the comments section.  I’d love to hear what you think about labyrinth meditation.





Here’s one last quote from Johnston: 

With a maze many choices must be made and an active mind is needed to solve the problem of finding the center.

With a labyrinth there is only one choice to be made. The choice is to enter or not. A more passive, receptive mindset is needed. The choice is whether or not to walk a spiritual path.

I have no idea what will happen tonight but I am excited to find out!

Namaste,

Lisa