Progress Not Perfection

Hands of different races

“Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.” ~ W. E. B. Du Bois

“We may never be strong enough to be entirely nonviolent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep nonviolence as our goal and make strong progress towards it.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

As you can see, I’m reworking my website. I’m getting ready to launch my podcast, and I wanted to have one place where my blog and podcast posts can be accessed.

The day I started this project, I was hoping to get it all set up, but of course, not being technology minded, I got only so far. My site doesn’t look the way I want it yet, but I’m determined to learn how to make it look exactly as I envision. It will take time and effort to learn how to do that.

As I walked away from my computer with what I call a technology headache, I remembered what Denzel Washington’s character, Robert McCall says to more than one of the other characters he’s helping in the movie, The Equalizer. He helps them keep moving toward their dreams by reminding them, “Remember, progress not perfection.”

It’s a violent action movie of a different kind. Robert McCall has a mysterious past. The viewer soon realizes that Robert must have been in a special military unit, or worked for the CIA, or NSA, because of his skills. But from the things he says, he has promised never to use those skills again. He’s trying to be a better person, to care for the others in a peaceful way. But then, of course, there are characters that need his special skills and he has to make a choice. Use them to help the helpless, or turn away and let them suffer.

I used to believe that there was never a reason to use violence. But as God points out to Neale Donald Walsch in Conversations With God, sometimes a person like Hitler can only be stopped by armed resistance. Those kinds of people don’t understand anything else and they won’t stop their dreams of domination unless they are stopped by force.

I hope that we are finally coming to a time when we don’t have to use force to stop people who have no regard for human lives, but I have to remember we’re in a transition period. Sometimes we may have to be like Robert McCall and use violence to stand up for people who are weaker than we are.

However, I have been encouraged to see that the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations are mostly peaceful. That demonstrators are covering the fence around the White House with posters and artwork advocating for the end of violence against blacks, and some of the protestors are using music and dancing as part of their demonstrations.

As human beings we, hopefully, are working toward progress in our personal growth and in the establishing of more loving and equitable societies. Change is sometimes a long process. I’m happy to see the tide turning. I’m envisioning living in a peaceful society where people are too busy fulfilling their dreams to be hateful toward each other and people like Robert McCall’s character are no longer needed.

Have a blessed weekend. Thanks for reading, liking and commenting.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2020

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards.

Have you ever experienced life shattering events? Yeah, most of us have. In The Space Between Time, Jenna Holden gets slammed by her fiancé walking out, her mother’s untimely death, and losing her job all in one week. But she receives unexpected help when she finds her three-times great-grandmother’s journals and begins the adventure of a lifetime.

The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.

 

Love Salvation

Empathy is emotional intelligence
– Marianne Williamson

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Rumi

“Blessed is the man who has suffered and found life.” ~ Gospel of Thomas

This has been an extremely emotional two weeks for me and anyone else who is sensitive and wanting to see our society change. When I’m feeling emotionally overwhelmed, I want to escape into a book, a movie, a game, or just sleep. But the time for all that is past. I need to wake up and ask myself the hard questions about how I’ve contributed to racism.

I guess I started the process when we were asked to stay home because of the virus. It seemed like the perfect time to dive deep into myself to heal all the old wounds I thought I’d healed long ago.

Healing takes a spiral path. Part of the wound gets healed, then when more growth has taken place, the old wound circles back around and more healing can take place. So what’s happening now is just giving me another opportunity to heal more old stuff.

I have a theory about how we can make some progress toward personal and social healing. We white people have to acknowledge our part in the problem. We have to allow ourselves to feel shame about that and then become vulnerable, and imagine what it’s like to be a person of color. Even if we imagine just a little bit of the fear they feel, the preparation they have to do to even go outside, then we’ve made a start to detoxing from being white and not having to think about what an encounter with a police officer will bring, or a white neighbor, or someone in a coffee shop, or even just someone on the street.

I love Brené Brown’s work because she addresses these kinds of issues. Reading her books has helped me uncover long held beliefs and attitudes I didn’t even know I had. If you don’t know her, here’s a little info. She the Endowed Chair at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work. Her work is groundbreaking because it’s all about courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She’s also a visiting professor in management at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s written several books, most of which I’ve read, The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, and Dare to Lead. She hosts a podcast, Unlocking Us, and her filmed lecture, Brené Brown: The Call to Courage, debuted on Netflix in 2019. She burst onto the scene a few years back with her TED talk on shame and vulnerability. It’s one of the top five most viewed TED talks of all time.

You may have seen her photo on social media this past week of a sticky note which reads, “The system isn’t broken, it was built that way.” She’s right. We have to go back to the founding of this country to unravel all the ways our systems were built to benefit whites and keep people of color in their place.

What’s happening now has come to the surface again and again, been squashed and come to the surface once more. Each time a little bit more progress has been made, but now I think lots of people, whites and people of color are becoming more united in tearing down the old systems so we can create new ones that work for all of us.

Brené Brown is only one of the current teachers that have helped me along my awakening/healing process. Gregg Braden is another one. About thirty-five years ago, I read his first book, Awakening to Zero Point, which he revised and republished. I think the new book is titled, Fractal Time. In any case, in that first book, Braden, along with other writers I was reading at the time, predicted this time of awakening of humanity. I was excited to witness the awakening not realizing the turmoil I was going to have to live through. I was naive to think I would just stand by while the change happened around me.

At the moment, I’m reading Braden’s book, Wisdom Codes, in which he gives mantras and prayers from all the great world religions to help us navigate the most difficult times of our lives. His theory is that words are keys to connecting us to our emotions, which is how we communicate with the Divine.

I’m currently on the section on love and he uses only one wisdom code from the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in it’s complete form as part of the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945. It states: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Braden points out that to truly love others, we have to practice forgiveness, for to love is to forgive those who have harmed us, and to forgive ourselves for the harm we’ve participated in.

If you don’t think it’s possible to forgive the most horrendous crimes, here are some examples from Braden’s book, Terry Waite, who survived 1,763 days of captivity in the hands of Hezbollah extremists, Alison Botha’s miraculous survival following being left for dead after the brutal attack that is the subject of the 2016 documentary Alison, and I add Immaculée Ilibagiza, surviver of the Rwandan Holocaust which she relates in her book, Left to Tell.There are so many others of course which you can find for yourself.

I’m in awe of people who can forgive after such horrendous experiences. I’ve had a hard time forgiving being maneuvered out a job that I thought was my destiny. It wasn’t and I’m happier now, but by comparison, I see my experience was small potatoes. And yet, a counselor once said to me, trauma is trauma. There is no scale from worst to least. It’s all in our perception.

So, we have to forgive and love each other for all the perceived and real hurts we’ve caused each other. But to do that we have to dig deep inside ourself and try to walk in the other persons shoes.

Love to you all. I hope you are safe and healthy. Thanks for reading, liking and commenting. Blessings to you.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2020

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards.

Have you ever experienced life shattering events? Yeah, most of us have. In The Space Between Time, Jenna Holden gets slammed by her fiancé walking out, her mother’s untimely death, and losing her job all in one week. But she receives unexpected help when she finds her three-times great-grandmother’s journals and begins the adventure of a lifetime.

The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.

Sad and Confused

“We are living in the world of pandemic. Life is not the same as it was before. We have to choose new ways of living. Being ignorant or in denial won’t make you immune to the virus. Choose to be responsible and always be careful. Watch what you do, where you go and what you touch. You can practice your freedom by choosing to be safe.” ~ De philosopher DJ Kyos

“We are not going to get the racism out of us until we start thinking about racism like we think about misogyny. Until we consider racism as not just a personal moral failing but as the air we’ve been breathing.” ~Glennon Doyle from Untamed

I’ve been feeling sad and confused these past few days with all the turmoil that’s been going on. It has shattered the quiet of the cocoon I’ve been living in for the past two and a half months.

My husband has been working from home for about 63 days. This arrangement is coming to an end. The other day we admitted to each other that we were feeling sad about that. We like being home together. There is still so much uncertainty about the virus that it makes his going back to work scary.

Some people seem to think it’s a hoax and don’t follow the CDC guidelines. They think that reopening means that everything is going to go back to normal. But I hope we don’t go back to the way things were.

The other day a Facebook friend posted three or four pictures of trash on beaches, in parks, and even around trash cans as an example of how people have gone back to abusing the planet. I don’t know if the photos were recent but if they were, I’m sad and confused about that.

Then there are the photos of people flocking to parks and beaches with no masks, congregating close to each other having a grand old time as if nearly two million cases and over one hundred thousand deaths in this country alone doesn’t affect them.

I can hear their inner dialogue. “The danger is past. We can get back to normal.” As if what they want and need is more important than the safety of their friends, family, and neighbors. I don’t think those people took the opportunity to do any self-examination while they were in quarantine. They were just biding their time until they could get back out into the world and resume the lives they’d been living before the pandemic.

What I’ve been hoping would happen during this world wide crisis, is that most people would take the opportunity to do some reevaluation of how we’ve been running the world. But it seems fewer people have been doing that than I’d hoped.

And then there was George Floyd’s death caused by a white police officer kneeling on his neck to restrain him. And stories of people calling 911 complaining about people of color going about their normal lives but somehow the caller thought they were a threat. The police discovered in many of these cases that there was no emergency, the caller said they were just afraid.

Maybe fear is at the bottom of both situations. People are so afraid of all the changes taking place that they act irresponsibly and hurt themselves and others.

The thing some of us don’t get is that fear is internal, not external. No one can make us feel afraid. We do it to ourselves. Once we allow fear in, it can’t be ignored. Sometimes, though, we try to push fear away. At those times fear can manifest in really strange ways. Like, claiming to be afraid of people wearing masks. Or rebelling against businesses requiring their customers to wear them. Or getting upset when we find black, brown, or asian people occupying spaces we’ve claimed as our own. It’s becoming too common for people to make fear an excuse for bad behavior without taking responsibility for their emotions and actions.

To be fair, fear has been nurtured by so many sources in this country for a very long time. Pharmaceutical companies spread fear by advertising medications for this or that condition. Certain politicians spread fear by targeting this or that group telling us they are the cause of our problems. The NRA tells us that we’ll be safe if we own automatic weapons. Certain religions spread fear by telling us we won’t go to heaven if we do thus and so. It goes on and on. We’ve given our power away and allowed ourselves to be brainwashed. But we can stop the madness. We just have to take a step back to examine the messages and motives behind them.

Recently I read Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed. In it she has a chapter titled “Racism” which I found disturbing and profoundly accurate. Her premise is that we have all been so deeply immersed in the toxicity of racism, that we don’t even know that our thinking and feelings are tainted. We need to admit that we’re affected by the generations of racism we’ve been exposed to. Once we do that we need to do the work to detox from it.

Glennon’s assertion hit close to home. Years ago I was forced out of a teaching position at the largest high school in our county. I had two or three weeks to find a new teaching assignment for the upcoming school year. There were two positions in a school district about an hour from my house for which I was qualified. It’s a border town and most of the students are of Mexican descent. As I sat in the school district office filling out the application, my heart sank for a number of reasons. I knew nothing about the Mexican culture, I’d be one of a minority of white teachers, the school district was not as financially well off as the one I’d left, I’d be getting up at 4:00 a.m. to get to work on time, and I’d be teaching English, not drama which I was educated to teach. There were lots of unknowns and I was a little scared.

Here’s what I learned from teaching in that border district. The students were, for the most part, hard working. Their parents valued education and they valued me as a teacher. None of them ever asked me to fix their child, as one parent asked, and others implied at that old school. Family was extremely important to those students so they were motivated to study hard. Oh, of course, there were the same kinds of personality clashes as there had been at the other school. But in the end, I felt more at home, accepted and supported in the border school district than I had at the more wealthy district. And in the end, I had to admit, I’d been prejudiced against these students until I learned I was completely wrong about them.

To be sure, what is happening now shows us the tangled web in which we are caught. But we can extricate ourselves if we choose to do so. It will take time. It will take support from people like us who’re doing the work to get free of the old ways of thinking. It will take continued vigilance.

We have to admit that things are not ever going to go back to the way they were before. My husband got the message from one of his bosses yesterday that an employee has come down with Covid-19 symptoms. All employees who went back to work this week were sent home and City Hall will be closed until June 15 at the least. So he has two more weeks at home.

I’m hoping instead of weeping and whaling on social media about how terrible this or that incident is, we use those events to wake up and start taking better care of each other.

I’m going to keep wearing a mask, and using personal distancing when I’m out and about and when I begin teaching my classes in the fall. And I’m going to continue my process of self-examination. I know I harp on this theme a lot, but it’s the only way I can see for us to make a better world.

Thanks for reading, liking, and commenting. I hope you are staying safe and healthy.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2020

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards.

Have you ever experienced life shattering events? Yeah, most of us have. In The Space Between Time, Jenna Holden gets slammed by her fiancé walking out, her mother’s untimely death, and losing her job all in one week. But she receives unexpected help when she finds her three-times great-grandmother’s journals and begins the adventure of a lifetime.

The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.

My Quest

Stars

“Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright’s pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.” ~ Maya Angelou

My life long mission has been to understand human nature. That’s why I became a writer, and why I am now preparing to launch a podcast about the importance of story. As my first three guests all expressed, stories are what makes us human. It’s why stories were told around campfires, why civilization after civilization created myths that we still study today. That’s why we continue to create modern myths. On some level we’re on our own quests to understand ourselves.

These ten weeks of staying at home, I’ve been writing and exploring the stories that have great meaning to myself and my podcast guests. And I’ve been reading a lot. I’m trying to make sense out of all the crazy stuff going on.

The latest book I picked up is Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer by Gregg Braden. As I read the second chapter about the link between hurt, love, forgiveness, and wisdom, I realized why millions of people flock to the box office to see some of the big block buster movies of the recent past. These movies are our modern myths. They examine the link between experiencing pain and suffering and the decision to heal or not and they do it on an epic scale. The characters make a kaleidoscope of choices that we get to examine. Actually all stories do this for us. That’s why we’re such big story consumers.

Gregg Braden wrote something that made me pause. He asserts that the size of our “hurt” reflects the size of the opportunity to open up to love and forgiveness, which eventually leads us to wisdom. And I found that to be extremely profound. Braden has studied ancient cultures all over the planet and our human story throughout the centuries has always been the same. No one escapes experiencing pain. The wisdom that’s been passed down to us is a result of people who have dealt with their suffering. We don’t learn anything positive from avoiding feeling our pain.

When I have suffered huge painful events, I’ve recognized that I have a choice. There are two paths I could take. I could try to avoid the pain. Or I could embrace my suffering and move toward, forgiveness, love and eventually the gift of understanding what wisdom the pain was trying to get me to see. It’s my choice.

After a particularly life shattering incident years ago, I wanted to mask my pain, to blame others for it, and to seek revenge. I held onto those feelings and made my life miserable. I fell into a kind of dark pit and don’t really remember much about those years. I was going through the motions of being alive as I nurtured the hurt. I had put myself into a cage.

I’m not sure what brought me out of my stupor. It might have been my father’s death. When the extended family gathered, we shared so much love, and some family drama too as happens during family crises. Suffering brings out our best and worst natures. But one thing was clear, we shared stories about my father that showed what a positive influence his love had on all of us. I thought, “I want to be a person like my dad. I want people to remember me with love.” And so I acknowledged that it was time to examine my pain and start working on forgiveness.

Fortunately, I was teaching English at the time and in some of the stories, the characters had to deal with horrendous situations. I was able to do some self-examination through osmosis. The characters kind of pointed the way for me to deal with my own pain. Forgiveness and healing didn’t come to me for a long time, but I felt better and better as I let go of my suffering.

I’ve taken this great opportunity of being home, to re-evaluate my life. What grudges have I been holding onto, what wounds have I left unhealed. It’s been a revelation how many wounds and grudges I’ve glossed over and ignored. But I want to deal with them now or else I won’t be able to move forward when we come out of this crisis. Of course, it will be an ongoing process, but I know from experience, it’s worth my efforts.

I hope you are staying safe and healthy and maybe even doing some reevaluation as well.

Thanks for reading, liking, and commenting. Welcome to my new followers. I’d love to hear the creative projects you’re working on or any “aha” moments you’re experiencing.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2020

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards.

Have you ever experienced life shattering events? Yeah, most of us have. In The Space Between Time, Jenna Holden gets slammed by her fiancé walking out, her mother’s untimely death, and losing her job all in one week. But she receives unexpected help when she finds her three-times great-grandmother’s journals and begins the adventure of a lifetime.

The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.

We Have It Backwards

Cart – Before – Horse

“Never ruin an apology with an excuse.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” ~ Plato, The Republic

“The only purpose in your life and mine is the restoration of our Identity ~ our Mind ~ back to their original state of void or zero (Buddha), of purity of heart (Jesus), and of blank (Shakespeare) through nonstop cleaning.” ~ Ihaleakala Hew Len, Ph.D.

Somehow we think that the way to change the world is to resist, hatred, greed, and disrespect. But the old phrase, what you resist persists, is true. I’ve learned this sometimes the hard way, and sometimes in moments of grace.

When I was a teenager, I had a fight with a friend. It nearly ended our friendship. But one day I got inspiration. It occurred to me that if I apologized to her, we could work things out. I did apologize even though, in my mind, she had misunderstood what I’d said or done. I didn’t feel I was in the wrong, but she was my friend and I wanted to mend our relationship. Her reaction taught me a lesson. Using an apology often opens up the discussion.

A few years later, I was a teacher’s aide at a Montessori school. I worked with three and four year olds. One day I had a confrontation with a young student. I could tell he was angry. So, I said to him, “It’s okay for you to be mad at me. I’m an adult. I can take it.” The relief on his face had a huge impact on me. Children aren’t given permission to have their own feelings, especially if they’re negative. And he needed to be given permission to be angry in that moment.

Giving an apology and forgiving someone are two sides of the same coin, and both are extremely difficult for humans. I’m not sure I understand why that is, except that perhaps we don’t love ourselves and so we hide behind our armor of mistaken beliefs, and perceptions.

I’ve recently been reading two books that have shifted my thinking about how we interact with each other. The first is Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed, in which she recounts her ongoing mission to heal from addiction and to love herself as she is, both the dark and the light she carries inside.

That’s been a huge struggle of mine, loving all of myself. You might call it my life’s theme. I’ve not been addicted to substances, but I’ve had my addictions. And who can say they’ve lived a completely blameless life? We all have both dark and light within. It’s most difficult to acknowledge our dark side because we feel such shame when we’ve hurt others. I know what that’s like.

So, there are times as I’m reading Glennon’s book that I laugh and other times when I cry. I can relate to so much of what she’s going through. The bottom line of her book is that we’re here to accept who we are and not be ashamed of our mistakes or triumphs. Some of us are ashamed of our triumphs as if dimming down our talents helps anyone else.

I told you all the above to get to this point. The other day I read a profound entry in Pam Grout’s book, The Course in Miracles Experiment. On May 11, the daily lesson was about Dr. Hew Len, and how he transformed the population of a mental hospital for the criminally insane in Hawaii. The situation among the inmates and workers was desperate. Other doctors who had been put in charge of the hospital had left in despair. They didn’t know how to help the inmates who had all committed violent crimes, or bring relief to the staff. The turnover was probably tremendous.

When Dr. Hew Len was appointed director of the state hospital, he didn’t call any patients to his office. What he did was sit at his desk with a file of a patient and used the Hawaiian technique of Ho’oponopono. He searched for the darkness inside himself that had caused the atrocities committed by the incarcerated patients. The ho’oponopono chant is this: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.” This technique is based on healing through loving oneself. Instead of working on the problems of each patient, he worked on his own unhealed places and little by little the patients began to settle down and find interests like gardening, or arts and crafts. The employees stopped calling in sick. And patients were even able to reenter society. Eventually the facility was closed.

The thing about this story is, it’s not new to me. I’d heard it before reading it in Pam Grout’s book. But I’d finally come to the place where I had the ears to hear the message and feel it in my heart. The only people we can change is ourselves. And that is the only way we can effect change in the outer world.

Ever since that day, whenever I meditate, send Reiki, or even at various times of the day, I will say the mantra, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.” I say it when I’m tempted to call someone an idiot for not seeing the world the same way I do, or when a politician or business person puts profits above people, or when someone is so frightened that they take a gun and shoot innocents, or when they protest the lock down. We all get frightened when we think our world is crashing down around us.

The world is never going to go back to the way it was. Since I’ve been waiting for this change, I say thank heaven for it, but it’s still a difficult time to be alive. So, I will continue to say this mantra acknowledging my own fear and grief. I want to search my psyche for beliefs that are just plain wrong and that keep me from healing.

I’m sure you’re tired of hearing and reading this but it’s true. We’re all in this together. What affects me, affects you.

I hope you are safe and well. Thanks for reading, liking and commenting. Welcome to my new followers.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2020

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards.

Have you ever experienced life shattering events? Yeah, most of us have. In The Space Between Time, Jenna Holden gets slammed by her fiancé walking out, her mother’s untimely death, and losing her job all in one week. But she receives unexpected help when she finds her three-times great-grandmother’s journals and begins the adventure of a lifetime.

The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon . Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.