Forget Kronos or Kairos - I ran on Krummy time

Yesterday, posted on older2elder about the two different types of time - Kronos (sequential) & Kairos (numinous).   Like Glennon  Doyle Melton, I strive to Carpe Kairos! - seize time outside of time, infused with magic, Divine time, moments within moments time. 

Until very recently, it felt like I ran most days on Krummy time.  The more I befriend Kronos & learn its empowering ways, the more I can feel uplifted by the Kairos moments touching my life.

Just as I can't experience interdependence without first being fully independent, my Kairos moments can't exist without Kronos first having a full place in my heart & life. 

The project I'd like to do representing the relationship of Kronos & Kairos would include creating two figures, two trapeze, with one waiting to grab the other - already in flight - in his/her hands.  The trapeze & the person with outstretched hands, the empty trapeze still moving back & forth - Kronos.  Even the person moving through the air on his/her own - Kronos.  The energies around the person, the movement itself - KAIROS!

I will settle for seeing this very Kairos-y image in my mind, knowing it's beyond my creative talents to make into something here & now. 

So....  here's what I'm making...

A Time-XED watch. 
Its face will have the expected spots for the standard numbers, 1-12, noon to midnight.  
In place of numbers will be pictures of Robin Williams. 


Kronos meets Kairos & together utterly completely fabulously transcend Krummy!

It's about TIME

So many thoughts about TIME, about taking our currently casual relationship filled with many delightful but relatively haphazard moments, to a higher level, where intentions are more formalized, expectations can be open, partnership can be forged for our mutual delight. 

Turns out TIME isn't rooted in how poorly it was used in the past, just as it has no grounding in how well it might be used in the future.  TIME is strictly here & now.  Promises mean nothing to it, ditto with regrets.  It's all about "Time to..." & doing whatever is indicated by the dots.

Simple.  Straightforward.  Unfairly maligned by folks who want to pin the blame on TIME instead of shouldering their own responsibility.

TIME - am taking our relationship to the next level.  Can hear you shout, "It's about time!"

What do I really need from TIME?

Do I really have the deeply negative relationship with TIME that yesterday's assigned poem indicates?  What I wrote is what poured out, felt both a relief & a shock to write. 

While I recognize the truth of the words.  They needed to be said, to be written & shared.  What I realized, looking at them, is that while they feel like my deepest truth, they are not. 

In the past, TIME & I have not played well together.  Let me change that - I have not played well with TIME.  Am laughing, envisioning TIME banging its head against the wall because of how often, how naturally, all my successes are discounted - by me - as flukes, freeing me to buttress my sense is that failure is my natural default.  Ineffectiveness is my default.  TIME doesn't do that - I do.

What do I really need from TIME?  It's more "what do I really need from me?"  To realize that TIME is passive, yet super charged with amazing energies to help accomplish every manner of thing.  It gives back only what it gets.  It's there to help me achieve greatly or to softly tick by as I take a snooze. 

It's illuminating to see all the times when I make good use of TIME, as it was supposed to be used.  Imagine if I came to consciously PARTNER with TIME?  To understand the things that need to be done, to have a wholesome sense of priorities.  I can be awake & aware; it takes partnering with TIME & ENERGIES to be productively active.

What do I really need from TIME?  To know how much I appreciate its patience; that I know it exists to be used productively; that half-efforts eat away at it  more than lack of any effort, that if anything has the right to feel another was a faithless suitor who promised the moon & delivered nothing, it is TIME that should feel that way about me, not the reverse.  I need to get a sense of REAL TIME & to bring into partnership with it a REAL ME.

TIME poem - illuminating!

Creating Time - using creativity to reinvent the clock & reclaim your life gives an assignment to write a poem about time by adding words at the end of a given phrase, to do it without thought, from the heart.


Time is treacherous
Time is tricky
Time plays favorites
Time is slippery
Time is mean-spirited
Time is a false suitor wanting to break your heart with promises it will not keep

time & Tide

This time last week, I was a changed woman, transformed by participating in a remarkable event ~ the CSA Conference on Positive Aging.  It lifted me up to a new level of awareness appreciation engagement.

A week later - now - my challenge is making ACTION one of my responses, to accept that following through with constructive action is where awareness appreciation engagement are meant to lead. 

Realizing that awareness without action still serves as my brain heart soul default is sobering.  Only Spirit is standing there, arms akimbo, looking at me & saying, "Are you kidding me?  Are you KIDDING me?  You experienced three perspective-shifting days ~ with a 4th thrown in for good measure ~ and you still stop short of letting them be LIFE-changing?  You do get that the whole reason for the perspective shift is to get to the lift change - right?"

Spirit gets exasperated with me.  It sees, as the others don't, that the reason for shelling out all the money time energy required to go to the D.C. conference - attendance plus transportation plus lodgings plus meals - was not for my entertainment or other edification.  It was to gain new insights, learn different angles, get fresh perspectives & inspiration in working with & advocating for olders elders ancients;  to get moving even more decisively in the direction of a long overdue overhaul of our culture's abysmal attitudes around edging our way upward in years. 

It's a shock to realize how strongly well-informed inactivity & energetic dithering still feels to me like actually doing something. 

It feels like my biggest, most determined gremlin specializes in buttressing resistance.  While I am pleased with the fact of actually getting some work done, it's sobering to realize that it's the teensiest fraction of what calls to be done.  I applaud those actions, because they are a triumph, and am giving that gnarly resistance gremlin notice to prepare for more in the future. 

One of the ways that pesky gremlin has of turning intentions into flat nothingness is through the sense of time that was entrenched in my life through my mother, only sister & oldest brother - aka the three most dominant influences in my pre-John life.  (Much as I adore & admire my hubster, he has an artist's Dali-esque view of time.)

The best way to describe my core family's view of time is through describing wash day.  We didn't have a washing machine in our house, which meant lugging baskets of laundry to a local wash-a-teria.  But the weather had to be just right - not too beautiful, not too wet.  

If the day was too beautiful, Mom would say, "It's too fine a day to do the wash - let's go for a drive."  If it was raining, she would say, "We can't go today - the clean clothes will get wet."  An overcast day with no forecast of showers - that was our ideal wash day.

One thing I have to remember is that Mom's approach to wash day never made sense to her baby girl.  It seemed to me that a sunny, blue sky day was perfect for doing a wash & dry.  As for getting the clean clothes wet - just cover each basket over with a clean sheet & then dry the sheets on our outdoor clothesline or, if it was nasty weather, on the one in the utility room. 

It's important that I remember how her thinking always seemed off-kilter to me, but I didn't say anything because a) I was a kid &  b) when I grew older & the one driving her to & from the laundrymat, I'd rather do something else, too. 

Now, it is essential to reconnect with that younger self who thought it was looney tunes to wait for mediocre conditions to do something that needed doing NOW, who thought, "If it needs doing, doing it." 

Resistance to DOING the right thing at the right time in the right way is wrapped so snuggly around me, it feels normal.  What's important to know about that is that acting differently, especially acting effectively, will feel ABnormal (which it is) & wrong - but Spirit will keep going until its right messaging is processed & perched in brain heart soul. 

To get to where Spirit wants me to join it means working through & past a sense of "This isn't right!  This isn't the way things are meant to be - STOP!"  

It's letting that younger me say, "This is a beautiful day to do the right thing at the right time in the right way - you go, girl!" 

It means opening a door into a new dimension of time & energies & blissed action.

bottom line

What a blessing to be reading Scroll II from Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World.   

It cuts through whatever is going on in the world around me & gets to the heart of reality – LOVE.   

That’s it.  

Always was,  always will be.   

Everything else is smoke & mirrors, monkey chatter, faint hearts & false crowns.

We are born to greet each day with love in our heart, with gratitude for all that is.  

That’s it, all she wrote.  

Everything else is detail & distraction.

tick tick tick

One of those mornings where my post-4:00 a.m. slumbers tumbled with thoughts that ached to be written down almost (not quite) as much as I hoped to get back to sleep.  So it's funny that what's getting posted has nothing to do - well, not directly - with the topics that teamed up with the sheep being counted!

Just now, in the bathroom, was thinking about how much I seriously bugged the rest of my family - well, maybe not Dad, but he died too young for me to ever know.  But the rest?  Absolutely!

From my youngest years, I was a digger, where the rest were glossers.  My goal was to get at what was happening, at drawing a bead on events & the WHY behind stuff, a quality that irritated & irked my "let things lie" brothers sister mother s-i-l (although she likes to think otherwise).  

That inquiry turned inward, as I made my way through my late 20s, into my 30s, and had the unexpected experience of having professional rugs pulled out from under my firmly planted feet.  Turned into questions about what made ME tick, what was it about me was so different from the rest of my biological grouping, from others around me. 

Praise be for marrying a laid-back fellow who was okay with all my delving & digging & pondering the tick tick tick of life, in spite of not sharing my passion for getting at the why!

The longer I'm married to John, the deeper I believe we're each born with certain characteristics that circumstances influence, can send off in this direction or that, but that don't change our core.  I was born a digger, although it took me decades to let it rip.  

KEEP MOVING FORWARD is my mantra, in spite of a few health issues.  Walk briskly with me down the Pennypack Trail for a few minutes & you'd soon find me getting a bit wobbly due to a bothered left leg/foot & breathing funky.  Am in a race between the decline of my general fitness & 02/07/17, when Medicare kicks in.  

Friends are weirded out that I'm not anxious about my frayed fitness, not using the money that goes toward books & workshops & conferences on blood work & MRIs & regular doctor visits.  For years, I chalked it up to Lockhart fatalism, but is seems much more.  Someday, I'll die.  But will i have truly fully exuberantly LIVED?  

Right now, the things that call out to be done require that I learn & experience as much as possible, right now.  Sure, I can see their reasoning, but the past year has shown me the wisdom behind taking the tack I took.  

Everything gained over the past six years has set me on a path where NOW it's possible to move boldly forward, to get projects out of my heart into my head & out to the world.  It feels like I finally have the wherewithal to be the mover & shaker this irksome daughter/sister was born to be, rattling the rafters of the world with new visions of better & better & better living for everyone, regardless of perceived borders & self-imposed boundaries.
 
As I write this, am reminded of the line from Field of Dreams - If you build it, he will come.  As I write this, it hits me that all of my digging & delving & wondering really came back to the same thing - what was it about me that drove my family up a wall so much that my three surviving sibs & even Mom felt so exasperated by me, that made my brothers & sister spell it out that the last place they wanted to be was anywhere near me?  

The answer ~ drum roll, please ~ was discovering I'll never know, that the truth is that each of them really don't know, that a lifetime of conjecturing won't yield KNOWING.  But last night, my oldest brother called to find out how the conference went, sounded genuinely excited to get the details, complimented me for being a natural at connecting & building relationships.  

Seems my entire life has been about digging out what makes me tick, appreciating it's different from others, respecting those differences even when they drive ME up a wall.  It's why I invest my barely disposable income into experiences that take me deeper into inquiry understanding inspiration.  It's why I have even bigger plans for the next six months, putting me in an ab fab place to celebrate not only my Big 65 but even more so my life.  

Ever since I got home early Sunday evening, I've told all & sundry what a mind-blowing, transformative experience the weekend had been, from every aspect of the trip down to D.C. to Ashton's book talk to the International Conference on Positive Aging to my stay with Mina & Tim.  But until just now, until literally writing this blog posting, it didn't hit me that the most magical moment of all happened a full two days after checking out of the Capital Hilton - my oldest brother called, sounded proud of his baby sister & praised me for being who I am.  


Over the years, people have looked fairly askance when I talk about how my life is & has always been touched with magic.  Magic is life working the way as it was intended, the way we were created to experience.  Ever since meeting loving marrying John, my life has seemed filled with magic.  I would not be here if the two of us weren't opening new possibilities experiences worlds for each other.  

I thank the generous loving AWESOME Universe that brought us together, that made me able to do what presents itself to be done.  I thank the countless friends & pleasant acquaintances whose financial emotional spiritual support helped keep us in place when our lives were in upheaval.  We could not be where we are if they had not been there when we were in truly dire straits.  

All of them - especially the Universe & our steadfast belief in All That Is - help us keep moving forward, finding what makes us tick & making it matter.

SACRED CITIZENSHIP ~ oneness, respect & love

Stephen Dinan's recently published book, Sacred America, Sacred World - fulfilling our mission in service to all, promises to be a welcome respite for anyone buffeted by the 2016 presidential campaign, a singularly bizarre experience whatever your political stripe may be.  

I've just made it through the foreword, written by the incomparable Marianne Williamson, which has me eager for the rest of the book, which will include "questioning the limitations as well as the highest principles of both the right and the left." 

All the rest of Marianne's foreword leaves me filled with anticipation for what will come.  All but that thought about sacred citizenship. If there is one thing that seems emblematic of today's right ~  not the alt-, but the semi-traditional !~ is its deeply rooted sense of American exceptionalism, which seems contrary to any sense of "oneness," certainly across nationalities.  Consider that statement within the alt-right (white nationalists) & just forget it altogether.
 

How does "oneness" agree with Americans who long for the return to gays staying discreetly closeted, who want transgender children to use the bathrooms that match up with their original sexual designation, who see all African-Americans as poor drug-addled violent?  Who want to benefit from the labor of illegal immigrants at the same time they want to send them packing back south of the border?  

How does "respect" come into play with people who seek to stay firmly within their own racial or religious "kind," criticizing shunning condemning those who are different from their own beliefs traditions culture?

And "love" - it feels like so many people have even forgotten the meaning of the word.  Across all ethnic, cultural & even religious groups, hate seems more readily expressed than love understanding compassion.

Like Stephen Dinan & Marianne Williamson, I will pray & work actively toward a new thought & political system that will be hallmarked with "sacred citizenship" based on & embodying oneness, respect, love.  Five days ago, I would have scoffed at those words, at that hope.  But I've learned that a miracle embraced believed lived can turn into reality.  

Maybe it's not that the hope is impossible in today's political environment, but that it is the very thing needed to turn the current insanity back to balance health wholeness -  and holiness.