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

New Paradigms:  Easier Said than Done

So many people are talking about new paradigms these days, it seems, just when the world of commerce is filled with reproductions and echoes of earlier times.  The majority of humanity seems to want to go backwards rather than forwards, while a certain small percentage understand all too clearly that we have outgrown the earlier forms and patterns and that it is essential that we craft an entirely new way of relating to ourselves, each other, and the universe in which we live.
Certainly new and untested ways are intimidating, but history is filled with examples of scary things that became humanity’s salvation.  If there is one theme that echoes most strongly from the pages of all history books, I think it is that perhaps because of the divine spark living within each of us, we have the ability to adapt and surmount any challenge we may ever face.
Again and again I have reminded myself of this, that nearly all of the things we fear possess no guarantee of being fatal.  Countless people before us have gone forward against unimaginable odds and triumphed.  Like us, they did not know at the time whether or not they would triumph.  They only knew that “as long as there’s life, there’s hope” and that they must not give up.
I wonder sometimes whether I’m just spouting words, relating personal growth experiences in which others have no interest, but I’ve been told upon numerous occasions of how my own life lessons provided instructive echoes for someone else and I have therefore concluded that I am frequently living as some sort of test case by which others can make better progress.  So I continue to be more open about my life experiences than the majority of my friends advise me to be.  My life is a puzzle which I’m putting together one piece at a time, in spite of frequent doubts and confusion.
At the moment I am sitting in my new home, 10,000 feet up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, knowing that winter (or rather the first snow) could even be only a few hours away (history seems to say that snow can come anytime after September 1).  Though I don’t expect it to happen today, I live with that possibility.  At the moment, I also live with the knowledge that only about thirty percent of my home is adequately insulated.  But it is not time to panic.  People were living here a hundred years ago without any insulation at all.  (Never mind that this morning I woke to the first snow of the season...sigh.)
I have often said that I long for the time when money is no longer an issue for anyone, when we finally understand as the Native Americans did, that there is enough for everyone and that there is therefore no need to hoard one’s financial resources or refrain from freely giving to anyone in need.  As much as I have tried to live by this rather progressive ideal, I struggle to be at peace with not having a predictable paycheck.  Various odd jobs have kept a minimum of food in the refrigerator and nearly all of my bills paid on time each month, but for the educational loan for the computer school that turned out to be a scam, I have no answer.  Time will tell, just how this will be resolved.  In the meantime, I try to have faith that the resolution which occurs will also be the one which blesses me in the deepest and most lasting sense.  Beyond all that, I suppose I worry as much as anyone in such a situation would.
I attempted (and have not closed the door to this yet) to derive income from doing psychic and Tarot readings by phone, facilitated by two different Internet websites.  During the first week, things went rather well and I felt very gratified to finally be doing a form of spiritual counseling.  I began to think that this activity could finally be the “missing” piece which would allow me to finally make being Sister Who the economically self-supporting life-work for which I have longed.  Then the calls began to dwindle and during the last two to three weeks, I have received almost no calls.  Am I to try something else?  Is there a way to somehow breathe new life into this activity so that I begin getting many calls again?  What’s going on?  Sometimes I have speculated that my guardian angel is discouraging people from calling so that I will have more time to work on my home and get the insulation put up before the worst of winter gets here.  
I remind him (unnecessarily, I imagine) that I still need to be able to pay my bills and he offers little reply, but I have in fact been able to pay all my bills on time while living with a frighteningly low balance in my checkbook--with the exception of the computer school loan.  The only sense I can get of why this would be, is that there is something much greater at stake than the mere exchange of dollar signs and economic balances, but I have yet to figure out exactly what the point of this inability to pay this educational loan is.  How I long to view the whole terrible episode of my experiences with the computer school and its accompanying educational loan, purely in retrospect rather than as a current struggle.
How are we ever to grow, if we cannot envision the happy continuance of life without the current expectations of a regular paycheck or pension check of some kind, without the current forms of social and economic relationship which (within the larger picture of history) are very recent innovations?  I insist:  Life came before these things and Life will follow after also, but it will be in forms we perhaps cannot even imagine now.
During my youth, my own and other parents would commonly buy clothes that were a little too large for their children and remark, “You’ll grow into it” because they had at least a little awareness of just how rapidly their children were in fact growing.  Similarly, God provides space and opportunities that often seem (and sometimes are) a little too big for us, specifically so that we can “grow into” them.  Contrary to popular belief, I have found that God really does occasionally give us more than we can handle.  In some ways this may seem cruel and it is perfectly reasonable to become extremely angry with God at these times--and I for one think God both expects and allows for that (people being angry at God).  Is this inconsistent with the notion of divine love and wisdom?  Only to the extent that we do not understand how it fits within the larger picture of life and personal growth.
Yes, we may learn by mistakes and failures, but we also learn by clear instruction and positive success.  Why one is used at one time and not at another time, and the other is used at other times, we can only speculate.  In both cases, however, life goes on and within each moment is both a ministry to perform and a lesson to learn ... lessons which are frequently best noted afterwards rather than during the moment of struggle.

“Defeat is an event, not a condition.”  --Sister Who

High Expectations Versus High Expectations

I have observed as a potential and frequent problem, that many people (in America, at least) have high expectations of life in a way that puts them at a great disadvantage whenever hard times come along.  
I mentioned to a neighbor recently that because I do not have the financial resources necessary for satellite television and because of the somewhat remote mountainous location of my home, I have been living without television since I moved here several months ago.  He immediately responded that he absolutely could not live without television.  I imagine others would say the same of microwave ovens, central heating and air conditioning, indoor plumbing, computers, and telephone service.  
Certainly it is more desirable to have these resources than to be without them, but I worry that narrowing our perception of “normal life” to only that which includes them, greatly exaggerates what might otherwise be nothing more than a difficult season of life.  The fundamental difference between urban and rural mentalities, my Gay paraplegic rancher friend in Wyoming agrees, is that ranchers and farmers understand that it is normal to cycle between good years and bad years and that this is something for which to be prepared in whatever ways one can.
The high expectations I recommend, are those which draw out the very best in myself and others.  I maintain, for example, the expectation that when I have finished mourning a particular loss I will begin again to rebuild my life and to grow into a larger, more perceptive, and more knowledgeable person than I have ever been.  I maintain the expectation that--given enough time--I will find a positive way to adapt to any and every situation and obstacle I encounter.  I expect that there will always be a way--though it may take a while to find it--for an honest and decent person to survive, no matter how deceptive and treacherous the surrounding society and world may become.  I also expect that somewhere--somewhere down the road--I will understand just a little more why God allowed things to turn out as they did.  Finally, I expect that God will be present within even the most confusing and adversarial events of my life and that I will feel the presence of divine-love-directed-toward-me whenever I plant the seed of my-love-directed-toward-the-Divine by prayer, song, or even dance (which are actually all forms of the same thing).
That someone else is experiencing more pain, suffering, poverty, or trouble than myself, has never been much comfort to me.  Numerous people have told me that such awareness has been very helpful to them and I have no judgement to offer in that regard; I’m glad such awareness was helpful to them even if the same awareness is not helpful to me.  I have yet to hear of someone immediately prior to major surgery being told by the anesthesiologist that since no pain-reduction medicine is available, the patient should simply remember those who are experiencing even more pain in order to endure the surgery.
The point of this discussion is not the comparison of our lack of resources or particular pains (as if we were actually in some sort of competition to determine who has the greatest lack or pain), but rather the encouragement to look within whatever experience is available, to find new and better resources than we had so far realized we possessed and to allow life to take on unique and unfamiliar forms whenever necessary, specifically because of the transcendent wisdom and love that mysteriously orchestrates the universe within all of its vastness and within all of its infinite detail.  
We are among those details and never so small or insignificant that we can be overlooked by God.  Divine love and guidance may never fully satisfy our very human expectations, providing the life which we have requested, worked towards, and envisioned for ourselves, but we can expect life to be more multi-facetted and awe-inspiring than we have so far discovered it to be, specifically because of a spiritual reality best described as simply divine.




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