Abundance

Abundance.

This is my word for 2014.

A word that I have so rarely used in my life; the concept of abundance has seemed almost foreign to me. I have spent much of these first 40 years of my life attaining, building, earning and in many ways enjoying the fruits of my labor, but the idea of living in abundance has never really occurred to me. Perhaps I was confusing this term for the extremes of excess or gluttony or avarice. Abundance is none of these things.

My childhood was not filled with abundance. Greed, envy and judgment? Yes. But definitely not abundance. This lack of security resulted in fear of scarcity and a relentless pull to make ends meet, provide for the family and “build a life for myself.” According to the Catholic priest Richard Rohr this is the task of the first half of life, to build one’s container for living and I would say that I have managed to complete this task relatively well.

Only recently have I begun to sense a feeling of fullness, a calm roundness, deep, joyful pleasure in my soul. I wasn’t sure what I was sensing and then I had a dream. It was what I like to call, “a healing dream,” the kind that when you wake up you feel at ease and reassured.

The dream took place in mid-air. I could not see myself but I was somehow suspended and floating in an ethereal space. I stared at a large floating cauldron. It was luminescent and large. It gave off a type of hologram depth and it seemed that I would never be able to reach it.  I watched and into the container poured tears from what I understood to be all of human kind. The significance of this was profound to me and I wondered, while dreaming, what it all meant. The constant flow of tears seemed oddly soothing and I knew there was comfort in that vessel.

When I awoke I thought of how many tears were being poured into that hovering bucket, yet the bucket was never full. There was such an abundance of tears but it all was calm and good. Then the word abundance struck me. As I mulled over the word I started to think that abundance is not just a thing to have but also something to feel. Abundance is not as much about having a lot, as it is about deeply living into your soul. And perhaps this is the reason I had been feeling so full recently, my soul work was paying off. God was doing God’s work on me.

As I enter 2014, I would like to continue nurturing this feeling of abundance. Not through accumulation of material goods but rather through continuing to feed my soul with gratitude, meaningful relationships and sharing my many blessings with this wounded human race.

Twilight Time

Twilight Time

“Heavenly shades of light are falling…”

I loved singing this song when I was little when the impending night brought a creeping sadness, the endless miles of desert road stretching out in front of that Olds ’98. My mother would wonder why I would cry while I sang. “Are you car sick?” I would shake my head and try unsuccessfully to explain why the end of the day brought tears.

My interior landscape was held hostage by anxiety. Unsure of what I was feeling, I decided that I must have been the victim of a car accident in a previous life. Perhaps this horrific end to my prior earthly existence took place around sundown and I happened to be the unfortunate passenger in the back of a large, American sedan. I held so strongly to this belief that I finally had to make my mind up that if I were indeed snatched from my former life through a vehicular collision then I certainly would not meet the same end in this life.  

Recently, as we drove west into the sunset, I glanced back at my children buckled safely in their seats. In my head I started to hum that childhood tune and again sadness flooded in. I thought of those days on the road with my parents and brother when I would worry what the next day would bring or if the next day would come at all.

Then, I remembered a time when I was about 7 years old and I woke in the back of our car at dawn to find my father standing outside and observing the sunrise. My mother and brother lapped on top of one another in the front seat. I got out of the car at the scenic overlook that was our motel for the night and approached my dad. We watched as the sun rose above the mountains. I noticed that my father had a tear in his eye. As a child this only added to my confusion but as an adult it feels poignant.

A moment of profound connection.

A completion of a loop.

My tears shed at the end of the day and my father’s at the beginning.

Perhaps this is how God works, entering our awareness at vulnerable times and creating deep meaning through darkness and light.

I still wonder about my previous life but if the end of that one opened the door to this one, I am endlessly thankful.