The Power to Act

It’s early January with the festive glow of Christmas and New Year’s fading into the background of my daily life. The sun is warming our day, and with its bright presence, redefining winter. Today the temperature will break sixty degrees, yet there is crispness in the air. Is winter over? I sure hope not. Instead, I’ll think of today’s mildness as a wonderful fluke of nature. It is one of those rare days where all of the random meteorological conditions responsible for weather align into crystal-like perfection. It is a picture-perfect day to stop and soak in its beauty and muse about the advent of this New Year, and that is just what I am doing.

Sitting outside of a local café house teaming with activity, I’ve found a seat away from the umbrellas that will be needed soon enough to provide shade from summer’s blazing sun. Right now, my iced Chai latte in hand, I sit back with my face turned up to receive the sun’s filtered warmth. The weather today is a flawless reflection of my outlook for the coming year. All is perfection, in this moment, but it hasn’t always been that way.

Previously, I would let my outlook on life be determined by what I heard from the media—newspapers, television, radio.  Today I sum up my relationship with mass media with the phrase: Read the rest of this entry »

There is something new going on within me. I’m feeling strong and happy. Not a giddy hyper-happiness that has me flitting from one thing to another, bubbling over with joy.  I’ve felt those feelings before, and this is different. This happiness has me greeting each day with a warm, contented smile that is still with me when I climb back into my bed at night, pull the down comforter over my body and drift into sleep. It is not an emotion contingent on what is going on around me, or the attainment of a desired object. Rather, it is a mood that took root about a week ago and has been steadily growing ever since.

It is more of a feeling or a state of being. It resides within my body and emanates out of me into the world. It feels spacious—as if the boundary of my body is opening up to the Universe. I feel that if I were to stick my finger into a socket, I’d illuminate the room—I feel that electric. In Tae Kwon Do, my patterns are sharper, and there is a sense of energy exploding out of me. Each movement through the day has a new sense of grace and flow with it. What is its source?

One probable cause is that, about three months ago, I began working with a Chinese doctor to open up the energy meridians within my body. It is a gift that I gave myself for attaining the dubious distinction of joining the Medicare generation. She prescribed, along with energy treatment, a morning regimen of Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a “Thanksgiving baby,” born during one of the last seven days of November.  Actually, my twin brother and I were born on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day, but we have always celebrated our birth on the auspicious national holiday. This year the two important celebrations coincide.  I will celebrate this year with my dear husband in the West Village in New York City surrounded by my son and daughter-in-law and our granddaughters seated around an oval maple table laden with my favorite comfort foods.  I love everything about Thanksgiving – and, my cup flows over with the multitudes of my blessings.

In anticipation, I’m transported to the many images from my youth that flood this season. The brilliant fall colors and rustling leaves, the brisk morning walks, and dried corn stalks, the football games and high school rivalries – to name a few. But the most vivid of images and memories came from my grandmother’s tables (yes, there were two) neatly covered with ivory lace Irish linen table cloths and napkins. The aroma of a thirty-pound stuffed turkey would assail my senses as we Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday afternoon, we packed our car and joined the hundreds of other vehicles clogging Interstate 290 traveling northwest out of Houston.  As is our mode of operation, we filled our Starbucks cups with our drug of choice, cranked up the music, and shifted into vacation mode for the quiet weekend my husband had suggested. Turning off the highway and following the winding back roads of this rural community, we glimpsed spread after spread, each attractive farmhouse unique.  Driving up our hosts’ road, I spotted their white-planked fence in the distance.  When we turned our car onto their property, I recognized the same buttercup yellow farm house sitting sixty feet from the road nestled in a grove of spindly hundred year-old white oak trees.

The sound of the wheels of our car as it crossed the cattle guard must have been magical, like the Pied Piper playing his flute, because the Holsteins came a running – that is, as fast a cow can run. The small herd bellowed to make their presence known, as if anyone could ever miss either their mooing or the immensity of their size. There were about ten of them with two calves trailing behind their mothers. What they wanted, I later learned, was to be fed. Since our delight in their presence did not satiate their need, within a few moments, they rambled back to their pasture. As I took in the expanse in front of me, I wondered, Read the rest of this entry »

Things happen–I know they do.  But yesterday I got the news that my oldest brother Tom, less than a month after radiation treatment for prostate cancer was scheduled for open heart surgery on his mitral valve due to a bacterial infection.  He had already been in the hospital for ten days fighting the infection. The news was just too much.  I could no longer hold my anxieties together. They burst open shattering my equilibrium. I lost any resemblance to a calm and centered person, and broke down in tears.  This came after a month filled with bad news about my family members: cancer, radiation, auto-immune and genetic diseases, and even ruptured ligaments. I could easily have slid down into the muddy waters of lamentation, moaning “Why us?”  But, fortunately, my mind was pulled back to two other times when people dear to me fought their own battles with mortality; my mother Velma’s two-year journey after a stroke, and my best friend Lou’s battle with brain cancer. Like Tom, these women lived vital lives. They loved deeply and often laughed mightily–they were fighters.  And, in the end, they both departed this world very differently. One woman was Read the rest of this entry »

It was a Hawaiian summer day with temperatures in the high 70s with bright sun and strong coastal winds—another day in paradise.  If there was humidity, I didn’t feel it.  Returning home from a morning trip to the beach along the Hana Highway, a sign caught my eye for the Hookipa Bay. Impulsively, I turned into that parking lot and parked my car, emerging with my I-phone camera ready.  I was not disappointed. Standing on a vantage point overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the North Shore mountain range jetted up out of the navy blue waters. It looked like a pistachio-chocolate swirl ice-cream sundae with whipped cream clouds piled high on top. The only thing missing was the ruby red maraschino cherry. The view itself was a gastronomic delight. Closer to me, the Pacific, set off by cloudless blue skies, was a variegated swirl of aqua blue and emerald green waters set in movement as the white caps rolled in to lap the shore. The entire package was pure confection to my Houston-based, vista-starved eyes.  Oh, but that was just the beginning.

As I stood leaning up against the rusted green metal fence, a golden-tanned young man sauntered by on the other side of the fence, dressed in the Island’s ubiquitous garb of flip-flops and knee-length floral bathing suit. My gaze telescoped back in from the distant mountain range to follow him until he unobtrusively slipped below the edge of the cliffs in front of me—surf board in hand. Just above him was a sign that threatened, “Danger Keep Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know when I made the decision that rain was my enemy, but I did. Growing up, I headed for cover every time storm clouds gathered overhead. I hated even the idea of my hair getting wet, rain running down my face and dripping off my nose, or cold, soggy clothes clinging to my body. When I had to go out, I’d don protection—rubber boots, rain coat and hat, and/or an umbrella to fend off the prospect of getting wet. When I had time, my first response was to wait out the downpour inside. To sit at the kitchen table, gazing out into the inclement weather, willing the storm to move on. How things have changed.

Driving home yesterday, I was stopped at a red light on the corner of Beltway 8 and Briar Forest Avenue. Sitting in the stalled traffic, I became mesmerized by the movement of the black storm clouds gathering in the distant early evening sky. Startled, I realized that I was willing those clouds to move unabated to my neighborhood. Like a sports fan praying to God that her team would win—and others lose—I was cajoling the weather gods to have the rain to fall on my yard.  The other neighborhoods be dammed. Not a loving thought.

But here in Houston, Texas, we’re in the middle of a fifteen year drought. This year alone 95% of Texas is recording “exceptionally low” levels of rain. The consequences are ubiquitous—small farmers are losing their crops, produce prices are raising, we city dwellers are Read the rest of this entry »

We were in the last day of a ten-day training in beautiful Maui, Hawaii. The focus of our work was to understand and advance a Crystal Heart—a heart from which all our essential qualities, like strength and compassion, flow naturally out into the Universe, unimpeded by thoughts of self. To access this heart, we focused on the largest barriers—attachment to things, ideas, beliefs, concepts—so that we could relax their grip on our hearts. It had been an emotionally and spiritually challenging exploration, but the schedule was set so that we had most mornings off to do whatever nourished us.

Most mornings, I awoke around 7:00 AM, threw on shorts and a tee shirt, packed my bathing suit, wide-brimmed hat, sunscreen, beach chair and jumped into my rental car, then headed to the beach.  En route, I’d go to my favorite eatery, the Green Banana, eat a breakfast of organic oatmeal, almonds, cranberries, Acai berries and low-fat yogurt and top it off with my “drug” of choice, a sugar-free green tea latte. Some mornings I’d fire up my lap-top and Skype to visit with my husband or check in with a client. Fortified, and with the business of the day behind me, I’d Read the rest of this entry »

Like wiggling into a deliciously well-worn, tattered pair of jeans that somehow have become too small, bind at my hips and are two inches too short, I’m struggling with how to let go of the old and embrace the new me.  It is so comforting to reach for the hackneyed and well worn, the tried and the true, not just in clothes, but in life. Even when the evidence of my growth is obvious to those around me and I’ve experienced profound moments of profound immensity, I find myself walking to the closet, flipping the overhead light switch, and without thought, as if in darkness, reaching for my old unproductive behaviors.  As if those old jeans still fit.  Even when the waistband is cutting into my stomach, and the discomfort is enough to get my attention, there is a sense of comfort and security in the known. Even on good days, when I consciously reach pass by the old and select the new slacks, tentatively slip them on, even when I can see how great they look on my body, I still long for the comfort of the familiar.  The question is, how do I shift from the old to the new–from the constricting to the expansive–when it’s my own view of myself that has to change?

I grew up believing that the world was dangerous and that I needed to be on-guard. I felt cut off from support.  In the end, it was always up to me–I was the responsible child. It left me tentative and overly conscious, frightened and small. And paradoxically, like the mother who fears for her child’s life and finds the will and power to pick up a car, I had situational moments of faux strength.  Yet, like the jeans of my youth, these old behaviors are now too constrictive and bind my spirit. The world that I live in today is supportive and Read the rest of this entry »

Who am I is a question that has been the cornerstone of my journey for more than twenty years.  First introduced when I was thirty-nine years old by an eighteen-month period when my idyllic existence collided with life, it began when my forty-nine year old husband was diagnosed with lung cancer that had already metastasized to his brain. He died fourth months later on January 8^th. Four months after that my father had a major coronary at sixty-nine and died dancing with my mother to “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” That September I had ruptured my L-5 disc and had back surgery to remove the shards. By spring, General Electric Medical Business Group reorganized and my position was relocated to Atlanta.  And the final straw was that I had to petition to get my husband’s ashes returned from Baylor Medical School, where he had donated his body for research, so that I could finally lay his ashes to rest.  That period of my life, replete with searing personal loss and heartache, left me wrestling one of life’s most pressing questions, “Who am I?”

Until then, my life’s travel had been along winding, bucolic New England back roads, spotted with small rustic towns, situated in a fragrant moist sea of mature oak and pine trees, with clapboard white church spires reaching up toward the heavens. I had been through mill towns situated along robust rivers where the water was dammed and used to run the looms that wove the fabrics they sold. And through the hustle and bustle Read the rest of this entry »