New Year's intentions – 2016

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At the risk of boring some of the long-time readers of this blog, I'm once again posting my list of New Year's intentions, as I've done twice before. I hear from readers that this list has been meaningful and that it has been borrowed, adopted, adapted, and printed out. May it be helpful and welcome yet another year.

The list is largely the same as I when I posted it last year but for a few changes. As before, I use the word "intention" rather than "resolution," because it implies something to work toward, move toward, rather than something at which you either succeed or fail. Part of the reason I like to revisit this list – need to revisit this list – is because these are things I still keep moving toward myself. The process is lifelong.

Here's what I'm intending:

  • Experiment more.

  • Create more; consume less.

  • Trust more; worry less.

  • Read more; write more; watch less.

  • Write more of what lasts longer.

  • Waste less time.

  • Spend more time in "creative idleness".

  • Spend less; save more.

  • Pray more, including for the people who read the words I write.

  • Use more paper, lots of paper.

  • Use a pen more, a keyboard less.

  • Love more.

  • Talk less but say more.

  • Figure out how patience and urgency co-exist.

  • Hope always.

  • Cook more; eat less.

  • Start sewing again.

  • Play the piano more.

  • Pursue truth, beauty, and goodness at every opportunity; realize every moment is an opportunity.

  • Stand up straighter.

  • Speak more often in the strength of my own voice.

  • Find the way to do what needs to be done; sit quietly and wait for the Lord.

  • Accept paradox.

  • Pray more, pray without ceasing.

  • Hope more absolutely.

  • Be more available to and vulnerable with God and others.

  • See the signs, ask for signs; be more willing to step into the unknown.

  • Use less; have less; give more away.

  • Shorten my to-do lists.

  • More intentionally be a conduit for the flow of God's grace to the world.

  • Be silent more often.

  • Pray more fervently for safety coast to coast but live less fearfully.

  • Remind myself as often as needed where true hope lies.

  • Start fewer projects but finish more of those I start.

  • Be encouraged.

  • Be excited.

  • Hope more purely.

  • Be more attuned to the burdens of the people I pass on the street as well as those with whom I share a table or a home.

  • Love God with ever more of my heart, soul, strength, and mind.

  • Thank more.

  • Eat less sugar but more dark chocolate.

I'd love to hear some of your intentions. If you want, you can share them in the comments below or on Twitter (@NancyNordenson).

~~~

[Photo: taken of berries and bare branches this week at the American Swedish Institute.]

An adventure now going forward

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I've been reading the book pictured in the photo above: Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope by Gabriel Marcel. Isn't that a great book cover? Classic 60s. The book was written in 1951, but this edition came out in 1962. Homo viator, according to Wikipedia, means "pilgrim man," meaning "man [let's add: or woman] on his [her] way to finding God." It's a book like the one I mentioned here, over-my-head much of the time and requiring rereading of many sentences and paragraphs multiple times but offering a tremendous reward of insights for the effort. In fact, I made a post a couple weeks ago of a quote I found in this book and received notes of appreciation for it from readers. 

On this threshold of the new year – 2016 – I want to offer you a couple more excerpts from the book as nuggets of hope and peace.

“Absolute hope…appears as a response of the creature to the infinite Being to whom it is conscious of owing everything that it has and upon whom it cannot impose any condition whatsoever….”

“Hope is engaged in the weaving of experience now in process, or in other words in an adventure now going forward.”

“Might we not say that hope always implies the superlogical connection between a return and something completely new? Following from this it is to be wondered whether preservation or restoration, on the one hand, and revolution or renewal on the other, are not the two movements, the two abstractly dissociated aspects of one and the same unity, which dwells in hope and is beyond the reach of all our faculties of reasoning or of conceptual formulation. This aspiration can be approximately expressed in the simple but contradictory words: as before, but differently and better than before. Here we undoubtedly come once again upon the theme of liberation, for it is never a simple return to the status quo, a simple return to our being, it is that and much more, and even the contrary of that: an undreamed-of promotion, a transfiguration.”

 

May 2016 be for you, dear reader, an adventure moving forward, a weaving together of restoration and renewal, a transfiguration.

~~~

[Photo: taken of the featured book. How convenient that the cover so nicely matches the rug in my office.]

Gathering 2015: a review of this year's posts

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[NOTE: The links in this post are no longer correct]

I spent a couple hours this morning reviewing my blog posts from 2015. In The Art of Thinking, Ernest Dimnet wrote, “To keep no track of what one learns or thinks is as foolish as to till and seed one’s land with great pains, and when the harvest is ripe turn one’s back upon it and think of it no more.” I agree with Dimnet and so look back at posts, journals, book notes, and other evidences of – and learning from – this life journey, this blog being a piece of that. I believe in being a student of one's life.

But I also reviewed my posts in order to gather them together in one place with some kind of organizing structure for readers' use. New subscribers have come on throughout the year and may find this a handy list of posts, and even regular readers miss posts or may like to revisit posts. Here they are – well, most of them – grouped into categories. 

A couple preliminary comments: 1) this is the year that Finding Livelihood came out so that category got a heavy weighting; 2) these categories are fluid and artificially narrow - for example, most of the posts could be under a single category of "paying attention to your life" or "living with intention" or "living a meaningful life," and the posts for books could be distributed under multiple categories, and the posts "on hope" could just as well be listed as "on love" or "on pilgrimage."

I offer this list to you as a place in which to dip in and read, to peruse at random or with strategy, in the hope that whatever words you choose to read or re-read may come alongside you as you wind up your 2015 and launch whatever is next.

On astonishment and gratitude:

On pilgrimage and choices:

On love and community:

On leisure, rest, sabbath:

On books and the ideas they contain:

On writing and creativity:

On hope:

On Finding Livelihood:

On work: 

~~~

About this blog:

[Photo: taken of the Christmas day landscape. True color, no filter.]

So this is Christmas: hope always

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One past Christmas Eve, the church we attended put on a unique Christmas program. It wasn’t the classic beginning-to-end narrative of the Christmas story but a play composed of character scenes. It featured not only the characters from whom you would expect to hear, such as Mary or an angel, but a shepherd and Joseph and others.

Joseph’s monologue, in particular, interested me. He spoke about the fact that while he had accepted what Mary told him about carrying God’s son – the virginal conception, the divine incarnation – he found himself stuck at the no-room-in-the-inn part. That, he found harder to accept. If this was God’s son about to be born, and if this was God’s plan they were participating in, and if God was providing the way, marking the path, then why wasn’t there room for them?

He told of voicing this frustration to Mary, to which she responded: “Allow it.”

I suppose the rest of his monologue went on to have Joseph reporting Mary’s further explanation and her encouragement to him to let God work out his plan in whatever way he wants and to trust him, but I stopped listening at “Allow it” and lingered there.

“Allow it” calls to mind Mary’s famous “Let it be to me as you have said” but with an even stronger note of agency and for something on a more human scale than the angelic annunciation. A statement of active passivity, a consent of both heart and mind. “Allow it” and relax. No bracing, straining, plotting to change or avoid. “Allow it” moves in and out with the breath. In this drama of the playing out of divine mystery in human life, “Allow it” seems to me to be one of the strongest, albeit paradoxical, statements of hope I can think of.

Merry Christmas, dear reader. Hope, always.

~~~

[Photo: taken on the star atop our small Norfolk Island Pine.]

Christmas is coming: ready?

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One week until Christmas Eve. Are you ready? That’s the question I was asked twice by clients yesterday and numerous times by friends over the last week. No, I’m not ready if by ready you mean all gifts purchased and wrapped, tree up and decorated, house decorated, cards sent, cookies made, menus planned, and stockings hung. In fact, the only way you’d know Christmas is coming by looking at my house is by the single string of lights (only half of which are working) hung on a 3-foot Norfolk Island Pine we bought last weekend and a 10-inch tall flat wooden tree from IKEA that we’ve had for several years. I see that my husband has brought up from the basement our Christmas coffee mugs but they’re still in a box on the kitchen floor. As of last night I’ve bought most of our gifts but some won’t have arrived by Christmas. Cards will likely not get sent.

I’m behind.

I’m telling you this not to underscore my failure to be ready, whether by lack of planning or simply because of busy-ness, but to come alongside you if you’re not ready also. A couple days ago I noticed there was a “home tour” happening online where bloggers were posting pictures of their decorated homes, room by room displays of swagged greenery and glittered trees. Lovely, all lovely, but honestly, it made me feel like there was a competition going that we all were in, even if we hadn’t signed up. No, I’m not in that competition.

You know that song by Alanis Morrisette, “That I Would be Good”? I’ve embedded the video below (if you’re reading via email you may need to click through to website version). The pattern of the song is that she identifies all kinds of “failures” and for each counters that she’d be good in spite of it. Here’s the first verse, but you can read the rest of the lyrics here:

that I would be good even if I did nothing
that I would be good even if I got the thumbs down
that I would be good if I got and stayed sick
that I would be good even if I gained ten pounds

 

I’ve been dreaming up my own lyrics related to Christmas:

that I would be good even if I baked no cookies
that I would be good even if I sent no cards
that I would be good if some presents were mailed late
that I would be good…

You get the idea. Maybe you’d like to sing along also with lyrics of your own.

The good news is that Christmas comes anyway to those of us not ready. I’m redefining ready. Jesus was born; God is with us; love is all around, even in my sparsely decorated home (and yes, even in “these” days). I’m here to celebrate. Bring it on.

~~~

[Photo: taken of the wooden tree from IKEA. Merry Christmas!]

When you're dreaming of escape

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This morning I read this quote by Gustave Thibon and then all day waited for the time I could set aside my client work and copy it out for you. This is the kind of thing you may want to read a couple times; I think it’s worth the time. If I had read this while writing Finding Livelihood, I may have tried to find a way to work part of it in to the labyrinth chapter – that chapter about how sometimes it seems we’re going over the same ground again and again, about how staying in place is a pilgrimage too.

 

“You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs.”

 

There is so much beauty of language in those lines. So much wisdom.

~~~

[Photo: taken from the passenger seat of a moving car, just before Thanksgiving, of a full moon at twilight over a nearby lake.]

Tips for writing (aka living)

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Readers of this blog may or may not be writers, but I consider that you are all thinking, imaginative individuals who try to pay attention to the inner and outer dimensions of life. That, I think, is our point in common here, or at least one of our key points in common. So whether or not you consider yourself a writer you may be interested in a new thing I’m experimenting with on Pinterest.

[UPDATE: These tips are now on my website. Find them here and also on Instagram.]

I’ve started a board with writing tips, such as the one featured in this post. Yes, they’re tips for writing, but slyly, that means they are also tips for trying to live an attentive life, because writing and living an attentive and intentional life are often one and the same from the perspective of spiritual practice. The quote from the poet Jane Kenyon featured here is an example. Read it and see if doesn't have something for you. It resonates with the gist of my little essay "Saving Your Best Strength" in Just Think. 

In the book The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom by Christine Valters Painter, which I've just started reading, Painter refers to the process of writing or any kind of creative expression as “a container for internal awareness.” Maybe your container for awareness is a journal, or letters you write to a friend, or simply a catalog of thoughts you process as you go about your daily activities. I think that anything that furthers the process of writing, nearly by definition, furthers the ability to be an aware person, and visa versa. 

I’m hoping you will find something of value on this Pinterest board. So far, I've loaded 13 tips and have more ready to add in the weeks to come, many of which link back to posts on this blog. Here’s the link: https://www.pinterest.com/nancynordenson/advice-for-writers/.

You don’t have to be “on” Pinterest to access these, but if you have a profile, let me know and we can be fellow followers and sharers.  

~~~

A couple other things:

On Sunday I sent out my monthly email “Dear Reader” newsletter for December. Subject line: on waiting, hope, and (advent)ure. If you don't already subscribe, you can read it at this link.

And finally, if you’re like me and give books as Christmas gifts, please consider giving a copy of Finding Livelihoodor Just Think. Any of the other books I mention on this blog or in my newsletter would also make great book gifts.