The Standard Introduction    

 Life is a collaborative effort, encompassing more than we know.  In a time of "information overload," news, communication, and travel across great distances is common, yet we often talk at each other without listening, communicating, or understanding.
 Humanity needs its icons, but also its iconoclasts to grow beyond the good and bad qualities that now limit and describe us.  The essences of both God and us remain, in the midst of questions, to be discovered, experienced, and expressed.
 Please share in this on-going dialogue, remembering to indicate whether and how you wish to be identified.
 Blessings, love, and peace to you.                  ---Sister Who

Community and Individuality

While in college, I’d often hear, “Where is ___ ?”, followed by “It’s not my turn to watch him.”  At the time, it sounded amusing.  Years later, however, different versions of the same sort of reply sound disconcerting.  The truth may be, “I don’t know” but “It’s not my turn to watch him” seems to go too far, dismissing any responsibility for the welfare of another.  While I cannot be responsible for all of the choices and consequences of another’s life, I am responsible for what I contribute and I am responsible for contributing something positive.
In the biblical story of the beginnings of humanity, first there was Adam, then there was Eve, and next came Cain and Abel.  The progression was from individuality to the discovery of “the other” to the smallest unit of community (also known as “family”).  Each step brought new challenges of integration, tolerance, and even celebration of diversity.  Too often this multi-facetted story is interpreted with punishment for every mistake instead of seeing the changes effected by God’s response to human actions, as being the most positive growth which could come out of the otherwise negative event.  These events were thereby transformed into a steps of growth and away from being merely occurrences of wounding.
During a recent gathering, people I knew only from phone conversations and electronic correspondence became faces I could finally see.  Equally visible, however, was how disconnected and distant their relationships to one another were, specifically due to unrealistic expectations and a lack of tolerance for differences.  There was such an abundance of blaming, accusation, and avoidance, that many opportunities to nurture new friendships were completely sabotaged.  
Almost amusing, however, was how very much alike all of the players in this strange game were.  Everyone seemed to embody his or her accusation.  Those who accused others of manipulation, were themselves manipulating others.  Those who refused to honestly confront situations as a peacemaker, accused others of doing the same.  I sometimes tried to slip in a comment or two, but found doors of understanding to be closed.  Ultimately, I could only watch and shake my head at the strange social game.  
I imagine many of us have been in the position of seeing someone making a mistake and realizing that the individual was somehow bound and determined to make that mistake.  So we had to stand back and let the lesson of life unfold, praying that the damage wouldn’t be irreparable and that the specific individuals would learn.  
In Germany in the 1930s, I suspect there were enlightened people who could see exactly what was about to happen.  How they must have struggled inwardly at the unfolding of that terrible time, realizing that there was nothing they could do to stop the national and world events from happening. Somehow, perhaps even for reasons we will never fully understand, the events which unfolded were necessary to humanity’s growth.
In the story of Cain and God’s conversation after the murder of Abel, when I choose to see the conversation as God’s attempt to heal Cain and the first attempts at community, I discover new insights regarding divine love.  What Cain did was wrong, but it was not beyond God’s ability to transform that mistake into the beginnings of something good.
The challenge of the relationship between individuality and community is to integrate the two so that they are mutually supportive rather than competitive, so that both are included without either one attempting to engulf and annihilate the other.  There needs to be a mutual concern, but not a complete merging.
Within social situations, this means I need to be responsive to whether or not others are having as good a time as I am, but their experience does not become my own.  We are not Borg drones (from the world of Star Trek), all thinking and feeling the same identical thing.  We are a collection of people with diverse feelings and thoughts, choosing to be mutually supportive.
It is not a question of not having fun just because someone else is not having fun, but rather of understanding that within every social setting will most likely be the full range of human experience.  Some people will have a very good time, some will have an okay sort of time, and some will have an experience they do not wish to repeat.  Each different type of experience does not negate the existence of the others.
The real question of course is what kind of experience do you wish to have, within a particular social setting.  I recommend an experience which is honest, compassionate, and unique to one’s self in its particular details.  It is possible to empathize with someone who’s not having a good time while laughing along with someone who is.  To disconnect from the one who is not having a good time, expresses that I am a person lacking in compassion.  To disconnect from one who is having a good time, expresses that I have become short-sighted and am failing to recognize that each moment of life includes all the extremes of happiness and sadness.  To be completely swallowed up by another’s experience, expresses that my understanding and grasp of myself as a unique, distinct, interactive, cognitive, and self-directed individual within the spectrum of life’s possibilities and the possible expressions of divine love and spirit, is lacking and needs to be nurtured in some way.  
No choice needs to be a question of “either...or”.  As one grows and matures in mind and spirit, “both...and” embodies the pursuit of understanding and putting into practice the ideal that just because one person wins doesn’t mean someone else has to lose.  
There really is a way for us all to be winners and still honestly integrate those more difficult moments of life experience, but we will need to be watching and listening within each moment of life for those (usually unexpected) divine whispers of insight.  
Cain thought he’d made a mistake (which he had) and was so afraid of God’s anger that he failed to see God’s love.  Too much attention upon hiding the bad may distract us from finding the good potential within each moment of life.
Before Cain, there had never been such a thing as family or community.  God didn’t expect anyone to get it right the first time, but rather to be willing to engage in learning how to care for each other without losing track of the individual, unique divine spark within each person.  We must learn how to nurture the spark within another without buying into the deception that we must sacrifice our own to do so.  
It all comes down to acknowledging another’s possibly negative communication and then deciding to express the light of our own soul rather than simply reflect back the darkness the other may have expressed.  Shine on, my friends, shine on.

“Fear may come before and during the current step, but it does not follow after.”  --Sister Who

Happy Birthday

To celebrate my thirty-ninth birthday, I set aside other responsibilities and decided to go hiking in full costume and makeup, the one day I allowed for this in the midst of this incredibly busy and productive summer.  The goal was the one particular high valley, perhaps the only place in the nation or possibly even the world, encompassed by four mountains reaching above fourteen thousand feet.  Hard-line hikers insist there are only three, due to official classifications, but there are four names in any case:  Mounts Democrat, Lincoln, and Bross and Cameron Point.  The note-worthy characteristic of these four is that they are so close to each other, that it is possible to hike to all four summits within only one day (if the weather permits).
On August 5, 2001, this is exactly what I did and had a marvelous (fabulous?) if also exhausting time doing so, meeting a number of friendly and wonderful people along the trail as I did so.  
I found it interesting to notice how each of the summits was slightly different than the others.  Democrat was a rocky summit, very much like Mount Bierstadt.  Cameron Point seemed to be entirely composed of very fine gravel and, viewed by some as simply a “false-summit” of Lincoln, had no official marker on its summit.  Lincoln was the one which made me rather nervous, being a much smaller summit with sandy chutes going off between tall rocks in various directions.  I noticed on the way down that slipping through one of these chutes would produce a considerable free-fall before landing in a boulder field far below.  Bross was simply a very, very large mound; rockier than Cameron Point but basically flat on top and criss-crossed by narrow roads used by four-wheel-drive vehicles.
When I finally got back to my car, I looked up to the left at the first summit I’d climbed and followed the ridge line nearly a half of a circle toward my right to see the last summit I’d climbed.  Wow.  
How had I done it?  One step at a time.  I turned thirty-nine years old this year.  How had I done it?  One year, one month, one week, one day, one moment at a time.  I am now engaged in what looks like the very long process of remodeling my home.  How?  One task at a time.  
To look at the whole hike, the whole life-span, the whole project all at once, is overwhelming.  To begin the journey, however, I only have to move one of my feet forward, I only have to do the task which is immediately in front of me.  Repeating this again and again, I eventually find myself back at my car with four more mountains now behind me.  Somehow, even having been there and participated in each and every step, I am dumbfounded by the accomplishment.
On Saturday, the current plan is to begin videotaping four more episodes of my television show.  Always when it seems it might be over, a new beginning in a new form waits just ahead.  As one mountain fades into the distance behind, another rises just ahead and I begin to climb again and thereby to continue building my spirit’s wings.
When they heard the news, many of the strangers along the trail immediately wished me a happy birthday--which was wonderful but also challenging.  Aren’t birthdays usually celebrated within the context of a family?  My only family is the numerous faces and friends I’ve encountered in more places and situations than I could list.  
Perhaps there’s a lesson in that too, though, that we begin in a limited physical context and spend our lives growing into the full dimensions of our spirits, far beyond where any physically described family tree could reach.  When we finally understand, then it is that we are never alone but rather more alive and interconnected than we ever thought we could be.
May one and all and everything, blessed and loved ever be.



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