Last Saturday we had a really interesting Enneagram day at Turvey Abbey during which two members of our group presented a session about risk. It really got me thinking and I’d love  to know what you make of it.

But what is risk? If I love public speaking and you fear it, then it’s far less risky for me. If you’re a stunt man and I tend to twist my ankle out walking, then I’d be a bit mad to try this sort of thing.

We talked about our approach to five kinds of risk, and the extent to which we Avoid, Decline, Accept, Embrace or Seek risk under each of the following headings:

1. Financial
2. Spiritual
3. Emotional
4. Social
5. Physical

It was really helpful for me to consider it under those discrete headings. I’ve sometimes thought I’m not very brave, but it turns out I embrace or seek financial and spiritual risk. I avoid physical risk and accept emotional and social risk.

One of the most interesting discussions that cropped up was what happens as we get older. Some people said they had become distinctly more cautious with age. I can understand that with physical and financial difficulties, but generally I think it’s a shame, and I don’t really get it. Do we want to slip into old age without causing any ripples? I’ve found that I’ve been able to dare more emotionally as I’ve got older, in terms of friendship and exposing emotions. There’s a way to go, but when I was younger, I was completely shut down emotionally, so I’m heading in the right direction.

Another aspect of this that’s interesting is that much-loved business concept of risk management. It sounds sensible, doesn’t it? But we can over-manage the risks we are prepared to take. I’m reminded of that saying ‘leap, and the net will appear’.

What about you? Where do you embrace risk? Where do you avoid it?

Image by jb london

Elsewhere:

Travel feels risky for some folks, but my friend Marian Van Eyk McCain thrives on it. She and her lovely husband are just back from five weeks in Sicily. You can find her travel journal and fabulous photos here. It makes me feel as if I was there.

And as Christians all over the world are journeying through the spiritually risky time of Holy Week, Jan Richardson reminds us of the free-fall feeling of allowing blessings into our lives. Who knows what uncomfortable changes they may challenge us to make?

A receptionist, let’s call her Helen, at the large organisation where I just finished working was in a pedestrian -v- bus accident a while back. The bus won. Helen was in a coma for two weeks but after three months is finally home from hospital and making good progress.

Our head chef, let’s call him Tony, delegated his corporate catering responsibilities and set to with a will, baking bushels of cupcakes which he sold to raise money for Helen’s family. He raised several hundred pounds, helping them with the extra costs you get when a wage-earner is out of action (even in a country like Britain where, thank God and politics, we have universal free healthcare, flawed as it may be).

What’s the point of telling you this? It struck me that a crisis can tell us a lot about ourselves. Tony is a really good executive chef. He organises his staff, his menus and his kitchen professionally and well. But when something touched him where he lives, he didn’t tell his staff to bake cupcakes while he set menus, he didn’t write a cheque, he took refuge in his real genius: the creative act of cooking.

It troubles me that many of our corporate and service structures are set up so that promotion is usually possible only with increased responsibility in the form of managing people, budgets and so on.

Gifted teachers (and God knows we need them more than almost anyone) can only earn serious money when they give up teaching and start running schools. Brilliant lawyers get pressured into running law firms and judged by how good their marketing efforts are. And all this happens while those who do have true creative genius for administration and management are seeing their jobs cut back as unnecessary.

Leadership isn’t something done only by those running large organisations or governments. Any time we see someone using their own particular genius, we see leaders in action: parents, fashion designers, priests, museum curators, counsellors, nursery teachers, painters, secretaries, electricians, programmers, nurses, sports people, dancers, even the occasional politician.

If you change only one life, you are a leader. If you change only your own life, you are a leader.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if everyone could work using their own unique combination of creative leadership gifts?

How can we make it so? Any ideas?

Yummy image above by clevercupcakes

Elsewhere:

Marcus Buckingham‘s book Now Discover Your Strengths was ground-breaking when it was first published for it’s emphasis on people honing our strengths, not trying to solve our weaknesses. His premise is that we will only ever be mediocre when we concentrate on our weaknesses, but if we do everything we can to develop our natural strengths and talents, there’s not stopping us. It’s a great book.

I also love Seth Godin’s uncompromising approach to excellence. He almost never writes anything ordinary but I particularly enjoyed his exhortation to be a passionate renegade.

(Read to the end of this post for the winners of my competition last week.)

I’ve been through some black clouds this week, I expect some of you reading this have, also. But millions of people have it far worse than me, and probably you as well.

I was talking to a family member about this. She’s going through her own issues. We were discussing how to honour our own suffering without allowing it to define us.

Whether it’s physical, emotional, mental or practical, we all have problems, and sometimes they threaten to take us over.

The problem with problems

Image by Marja van Bochove

The problem is that the problem can run away with us. You know what that’s like: you focus on what’s wrong and so you feel worse and worse. Your thoughts drag you further and further down, like a muddy whirlpool. Your thoughts create a worse reality than you were in five minutes ago. Your suffering and problems will begin to define who you are if you let them.

But… if we don’t acknowledge our suffering we’re in danger of creating a Pollyanna on Prozac unreality for ourselves.

What doesn’t work

1. Beating ourselves up: “but so many people are worse off than me, I’m a really bad person to feel so sorry for myself”. That’s just going to make you feel guilty about feeling bad, on top of feeling bad.
2. Minimising it, telling ourselves what we’re going through doesn’t really count as “suffering”.
3. Other people telling you you just need to buck your ideas up (caveat: very occasionally that can be exactly what you need)
4. Ignoring the problem, telling yourself “I’m fine, really”. Because you’ll either go into a kind of emotional paralysis or your brain will kick back and pick up on the lie, which will make you feel worse.
5. Dwelling on the problem, brooding about it endlessly.
6. Doing nothing about it. A really bad option.

What does work

Here are a few suggestions:

1. 

   Image by D Sharon Pruitt

   Create a ritual to honour your own suffering. Sit down, clear some space for yourself, your feelings and thoughts and journal or draw them. Don’t censor yourself with any “shoulds”, and don’t minimise how you feel. Or light a candle or some incense and sit with your suffering, acknowledge it fully, for five minutes only. Or write a story about how you feel and then store it somewhere, perhaps in a beautiful bottle (to subvert the notion of bottling up your feelings), or bury it in the garden.

2. Use other people’s stories of hardship as inspiration, not as a stick to beat yourself with.
3. Do something physical, if you can. There’s nothing like movement to shake up the cobwebs and get those endorphins jiggling.
4. Gather a list of favourite inspirations that will give you some energy. I love this, and I often get up and dance to this or this.
5. Get some counselling or therapy or practical help. Sometimes we’re too proud and think we can or have to do everything ourselves (that’s a big issue for me).
6. If you’re religious, pray in your own tradition. If you’re not, find some kind of grounding meditative technique.
7. Find one aspect of the problem you can do something about, even if it’s just changing your attitude to it. Make a start on dealing with this aspect in some small way. Do something else small tomorrow. Baby steps build momentum.

Well, I feel better for even having written that. What are your suggestions for both honouring and dealing with your suffering? I’d love to hear them.

Competition results

Now, one way of healing ourselves is sharing with others, so I’m delighted to announce that I’ve drawn names out of the hat and two FREE places on Magpie Girl’s course Power Stories go to…

Drumroll…

Kel and Sulwyn!

Congratulations, I’ll send your details to Magpie and she’ll contact you shortly. I’m SO sorry to those who were disappointed.

Main image above by D. Sharon Pruitt

Elsewhere:

I love the way in which our faiths roll into each other. We are drawing to the end of Ramadan, and Abdur Rahman explains here the importance of these last ten days and their connection with seeking forgiveness.

Meanwhile, the Jewish High Holy Days are almost upon us, beginning with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah  next Wednesday, and lasting for ten days until Yom Kippur. Norman at Jewish Contemplative talks here about celebrating alone. “Each of us alone. All of us together.”

I was thinking about money the other day.

To explain: I currently work as an interim human resources project manager, taking on a series of short-term contracts. I just started a new nine-month contract, which is quite a long-term deal for me, a longer commitment than I ideally like. But as anyone who works freelance knows, there’s a sense of worrying that the work will dry up.

So I started thinking about how long I really need to work each year to support myself. I took this nine-month contract as a baseline and started playing around with some calculations.

And I had one of those eureka moments.

They say time is money, so I started thinking about what I buy in terms not of how much it costs in money, but how much it costs in my life passing by.

How long do I have to work to “earn” that book, that pizza, the groceries, that weekend trip?

I started a spreadsheet to record my purchases in time as well as money; it was a  revelation. It really helped me distinguish between what is of real (non-monetary) value and what’s just a passing fancy.

It makes frugality more attractive because by being less impulsive in my spending, I’m putting time into my piggy bank. And that can’t be taken away by a recession.

What do you invest your time in?

Image by kekremsi

Elsewhere:

Sally Lever has a great post called Frugality for the Terrified – click here to read it.

And if you’re interested in the mechanics of counting time, here’s what I did:

I took as a starting point that I don’t want to work at a conventional job for more than nine months in a year. (Actually I don’t want to work at a conventional job at all, and I hope this will be the last one, but that’s another story!)

So I took my gross earnings for this nine month period and deducted a rough sum for tax.

Then I divided this net amount by nine to get a monthly amount, multiplied that by 12 to get  net annual earnings. I divided the annual sum by both 52 to get weekly earnings and then that by 35 to get net hourly earnings.

In the small corner of the provincial English town in which I currently live, there’s a local post office. It closes for lunch each day, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays it closes for the entire afternoon. I find this intensely irritating. It inconveniences me and it goes against all modern ideas of business as a service to its customers.

And yet…

I strive to live a simpler, slower life. How difficult is it for me to take into account the well-publicised opening hours of a small sub-post office run by only two staff, who work hard enough to deserve an undisturbed lunch break and some time off each week?

Not difficult at all really, but the notion of service is so ingrained in us in our 24×7 world that this post office arrangement seems almost deliberately antagonistic.

There’s a lot about service in the Christian Gospels as well: being of service to others, offering oneself in service to God and community. Service is expected of Christians (and of many other faiths, Islam for example.) But Christ regularly withdrew from the crowds. We have his example of rest, and the whole piece around keeping the Sabbath holy. I am a personal advocate of having “Sabbath moments” throughout the day.

But despite being aware all that, it still makes me illogically angry that I have to think about what time it is before I walk down to post a parcel. I don’t want that limit.

What limitations are you unwilling to accept?

Image by Post Box

Elsewhere:

Let’s give ourselves a Sabbath moment by looking at this beautiful visual meditation of seeds by Elaine at Green and Berries.

And in choosing the image to go with this post, I was delighted to find on Flickr whole groups devoted to photographing British post boxes and post offices. It shows that eccentricity lives on in my country! Here’s the Postboxes by postcode group, just for fun.

Iona Abbey

One week ago today at Turvey Abbey, I watched a friend take her final vow to become a Benedictine Oblate (lay Benedictine). The service was moving, I had a big lump in my throat as she stood on the spot in the chapel where vows are taken and coffins lie and said the words that made her part of the Benedictine family.  My friend is in her eighties.

Can we allow life to unfold in its own time? I find this less easy in middle life than I did as a much younger woman. There’s that sense when you’re young, isn’t there, that endless days lie ahead? Now I have more days behind me than in front, there’s a sense of urgency creeping into my life, a temptation to grasp and hang on, a greediness. The feeling of grabbing at life has been growing on me lately.

This week has been a respite. Knowing that someone three decades ahead of me has quietly and calmly taken this step to affirm her connection with a tradition that traces its origins back fifteen centuries has given a wonderful perspective.

The ceremony of oblation took place during a weekend of shared contemplation of Benedict’s Rule. Attending that was a blessing. Another friend made her first Petition to become a Benedictine Oblate (a kind of trainee Oblate, the same stage I’m at) that same weekend. Another blessing. Yet another friend said something self-deprecating during a discussion and we all roared with laughter. “Now don’t laugh too loudly, brothers and sisters”, she said dryly, and I felt giddy with the realisation that yes, they are my brothers and sisters.

It’s strange, this week has been very busy at work, very worrying at home (my blood sister has been in hospital having an operation, from which she’s recovering nicely), and with its share of sad news from elsewhere. Yet I’ve felt an unaccustomed serenity.

Lilac in May

As I sit here typing these words, the overpowering scent of the dwarf lilac bushes in my garden drifts up through my open window. (That prompted me to take a quick photo for you – on the right.) My cat Lucy, her solid body dressed in its silky grey fur, sits next to me purring. The sun is setting in a blaze of glory. How can we not believe in the great creative and redemptive power of life and of its Creator at such moments?

In her commentary on Chapter 20 of the Rule of Benedict, Joan Chittister says:

The rabbis taught: “The first time a thing occurs in nature, it is called  a miracle; later it becomes natural and no attention is paid to it. Let your worship and your prayer be a fresh miracle every day to you.”

There’s no need to grasp, life is enough if we let it unfold in its own time.

Main image above by Jema Smith

Elsewhere:

If you want to know more about monastic life, and about lay monastics, you will find John’s overview of English Benedictines helpful, and you can check out the UK Benedictine Oblates’ site here.

We’ve just had an election in the UK. There was no clear party majority, and as I write this, horse-trading is going on to form a coalition government.

Tactical voting

I voted, but I didn’t vote for the party I really wanted to win. I wanted to vote for the Green Party, because I really believe in their policies. But they didn’t stand a ghost of a chance in our constituency, so I voted for our local Labour Party candidate who is a good guy with good ideas, my kind of priorities and who had a chance of beating the Conservatives. Sadly, he didn’t beat them.

Why we must vote

My question ‘what’s the point’ isn’t asked out of ennui. I really do wonder whether party politics and national government are as important as we think they are.

I always vote and I always will, people have died to give me that right. But does it do any good? (A friend told me of a radio exchange recently. Woman: “I could never not vote, I’d feel I was betraying Emily Pankhurst“. Teenage girl: “Oh, is she one of your local candidates?” Sigh…)

Green politics

I know the argument for supporting minority parties: if all the people who wanted to vote for them actually did, more minority party candidates would get elected and they would steadily gain power. Greens have gained a growing amount of political influence around the world, and one really bright spot in the UK election was that we now have our first Green Party Member of Parliament, Caroline Lucas. Brilliant news.

But I’m not sure we have time for a steady gain in power. We need strong, imaginative policies for the environment, for social justice, for a sustainable economy, and we need them now.

Taking up our own power

by Duncan Rawlinson

So here’s what I think: we have the power both of the individual and of the communal as never before.

Because of the internet, we’re in a brave new world of communication. It’s not called a web for nothing. It gives us the power to reach out and discover like-minded souls, to discover information, to discover ideas. We can come together as world citizens to influence, to lobby, to ask questions. We can form our own communities. People sans frontieres.

And as individuals, we can live in ways that are kind to the planet, to ourselves and to other creatures that make their homes here. We can live responsible lives. (I know, I know, this sounds a bit preachy. But it is Sunday after all, so here I am sermonising.)

Action, not talk

By CarbonNYC

I don’t advocate anarchy, but the days when we could leave it all to the government are long gone, if they ever existed.

I don’t live up to my own principles nearly as much as I’d like. Mother Teresa said:

There should be less talk; a preaching point is not a meeting point. What do you do then? Take a broom and clean someone’s house. That says enough.

So off I go to take up my broom again. How about you?

Main image by Ben Sutherland

Elsewhere:

I just now discovered the blog Cottage Wytch, and these words quoted there by John Rogers seem to me to say everything needed in any political party manifesto.

And a blessed Mother’s Day to all my friends outside the UK (where we celebrate it earlier in the year).

For International Women’s Day 2010

I don’t know about you, but when I was younger I used to get incredibly irritated by older people who ranted on about what things were like in their day.

Well you’ll have to indulge me for a moment…

Revisiting the ’70s

In the 1970s, the excitement and energy of second-wave feminism had many women on a high. Our priestesses were Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. We relished the extreme possibilities opened to us by Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin.

We bought and contributed to vibrant feminist magazines, the polar opposite of those tedious home-making journals. There was a glorious explosion of feminist and lesbian fiction. Women met in consciousness-raising groups to discuss our lives.

The Personal is Political

We instinctively and intellectually knew the truth of it when Carol Hanisch wrote The Personal is Political. It all matters: what we wear, who we sleep with (or don’t), what we buy, how we raise our children, what we eat, the availability of contraception and abortion, our work, our financial independence, our religious beliefs and practices.

These ideas and ideals are still with us, translated by social justice groups to concepts like purchaser power, political boycott and workers’ rights.

Faith and spirituality

Most of us in the West at the beginning of the ’70s were familiar only with Christianity in all its patriarchal glory. Some had begun to flirt with Buddhism, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had given us transcendental meditation via the Beatles in the late ’60s. Britain at least was far less multi-cultural than today, and few of us were familiar with Islam or Hinduism.

Around this time, groups of women were exploring the origins of goddess worship and the history of witchcraft. Starhawk first published The Spiral Dance in 1979, exploring and affirming ancient/new female spirituality.

Christian women were pushing back against the patriarchs, exploring new language in worship, and fighting for the ordination of women. We still have a very long way to go, of course, especially in the Catholic church.

What the hell are we women doing now?

The women I knew then wanted more than equality. We wanted to reinvent the paradigms, to change society. Hell, we wanted revolution! Kate Millett said It’s more about changing the recipe of the cake than getting an equal slice.

So with this richness behind us, what in the name of the Goddess are women doing?

A search on Amazon this morning gave me 48,000 books under the search term feminism and 105,000 under diet. Our society is addicted to the underbelly of celebrity as explored by the tabloid press (which would not exist if we didn’t buy the papers and celebrity magazines). Young girls are clamouring for pink plastic tat bought at shops catering specifically for them, encouraged by their mothers. Female corporate lawyers are aping their male colleagues, aiming to earn the big bucks by billing 2,500 hours a year (that’s 9.6 hours a day folks, not including holidays, lunches or essential work not billable to clients).  Cosmetic surgery, for men as well as women, is rising inexorably and makeover shows are big business on television.

Why? In the West at least, we are mostly educated women. We have the history and tools to change ourselves and to change the world. We have the huge individual and collective power the internet gives us. Why don’t we change? Why do we allow ourselves to become indoctrinated? Why do I still hear women uttering that famous phrase Well I’m not a feminist but… as they protest injustice? Why on earth would any of us fear to be identified by the finest of the F-words?

Image of Egyptian Goddess statuette by ego technique

Elsewhere:

It’s not all hopeless. Natasha Walter’s book Living Dolls is making waves. Women for Women are helping women survivors of war. The BBC has a new series, Libbers, starting tonight. And I found out about the BBC series via this excellent exploration of feminism today at a blog that’s new to me, Everydaystranger. She also discusses an aspect I haven’t touched on above: the internecine  fighting that is the less glorious side of feminist politics.

Yesterday I went see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum. I didn’t take my own camera, but you can see a gallery of the spectacular photographs here.

I lost track of time as I wandered entranced past the images: a red kite hovering, river dolphins playing, and white hares boxing. I gazed into the eyes of a jaguar and a very cold fox. There were special junior photographer categories: this subtly amazing image won the ten years and under category. I’d love to be such a gifted photographer now, let alone as a child!

One image was conspicuous by its absence. The space where the overall winner had hung was replaced by a statement that the photograph Storybook Wolf had been disqualified because the photographer had allegedly used an animal model. The picture was posed.

I knew about this drama before I went, but I kept coming back to this enigmatic wall space. I realised something. Humans are animals, and we behave in many of the same ways: we kill to eat (at least carnivores do) and to protect, we mate, we fight, we care for our young, we often live in groups, we grow old and die.

But can you imagine an animal thinking I really want to win this prestigious photographic prize, I think I’ll hire a human to pose for me and pretend I tracked them down in the city street at night and caught them in their natural habitat?

Why do we distort our urge to create or observe what is beautiful? When does our calling to do great work become corrupted? How can we live with more integrity?

What do you think?

Image at the top of this post by Tim Parkinson

Elsewhere:

Blisschick is being challenging again at Radical Gratitude, quoting Meister Eckhart and Anthony de Mello, and asking us to be thankful even for the bad stuff. And Towanda quotes Henri Nouwen calling us to bring our pain home or risk not knowing our own truth. This seems to me linked to Blisschick’s post. Eckhart, de Mello and Nouwen, what a powerful trinity.

Isn’t the photograph gorgeous? How could anyone hate such a beautiful thing?

I hate them because bonsai are produced by snipping and clipping and binding and confining what nature would have grow glorious and luxuriant.

They seem to me a perfect metaphor for our humanity. We allow ourselves to live small lives. Thoreau famously wrote that we live lives of quiet desperation. They often look like such special  lives from the outside: perfectly formed and artfully displayed. But such shallow roots.

Today’s Gospel reading was the Transfiguration:

…he took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray. While he was praying his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white…Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, but becoming fully awake, they saw his glory…

Luke 9:28-36

Just imagine the lives we could live if we were to become fully awake to glory. Our roots would shatter those decorative pots and sink deep into the good earth, while our branches would stretch to the sun.

Image by cliff1066

Elsewhere:

Christine’s post about the Transfiguration gives us the transformation of the disciples who witnessed it, while Claire, in Transfigured, shares a beautiful and very personal meditation.

And thanks to everyone who spoke up last week for one or more of my books – I’ll be in touch with you very soon.