Self-Esteem, part 2

There are other ways we define ourselves besides our relationships and our jobs. One of these is defining ourselves by our pasts.

I had a friend who had been told all her life she was stupid. If you went back and looked at her report cards, they were average, but she had absorbed what she had been told. It took a lot of hard talking by myself and others to get her to attempt to go to college at 43, but once she did, she made it through not only college, but grad school, and became a teacher, her dream since childhood. What artificial limitations do you believe about yourself? What’s stopping you from living your dreams?

I was overweight as a child and a teenager, and for years I thought of myself as fat even when that stopped being true. I allowed that and the fact that I am an introvert, to hold me back from fully participating in things. We need to develop a strong enough self-image to allow us to live life without the fear of rejection making us timid.

Last for this time, there may be something truly horrible in your past – child abuse, serious illness, neglect, drug abuse, or any number of traumatic things. Again, defining yourself by the past – whether good or bad – leaches the present of its power and promise. Try to begin to think of yourself, not as a victim, but as a survivor. Be a cancer survivor. Be an abuse survivor. We don’t always have a choice in what happens to us. But we always have a choice in how we remember the past. Tell yourself a new story about what has happened to you. You are a survivor. You are a worthwhile person. Believe it!

Self-Esteem, part 1

I’ve been thinking a lot about self-esteem lately as part of a potential workshop a friend and I are putting together.

There are several ways to look at this. First, we must be careful how we define ourselves. Women in particular define themselves by their relationships. A woman is likely to think of herself as someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s child. Men and women on the career ladder, are more likely to define self by profession, such as, I am a librarian or I am a partner in a law firm. The problem with defining ourselves by outside things (Eckhart Tolle calls them “forms.”) is that these things change. We can lose our relationships through death, divorce, or other ways. If you only think of yourself as Tom’s wife, what do you do when Tom leaves? If your sense of self-esteem is tied up in being a lawyer, what happens when your firm goes through a hard patch and lays you off, or you retire?

So who are you when you aren’t a wife or a mother? Who are you when you aren’t practicing law?

One way to look for the answer to this is to remember what you liked to do as a child. What were your dreams as a teenager? Reach back into your past; reach inside and discover who you are under the externals. If you don’t know who you yourself are, the ups and downs of life can swamp you and leave you floundering.

More on this in a day or two.

Long Live the Weeds

I was at a writing workshop today. When the instructor gave us free writing time, I put together some thoughts in reaction to a poem by Theodore Roethke, called “Long Live the Weeds.” (You can read the whole poem at http://home.comcast.net/~innaleo/Perevody/roethke_orig.html)

“Long Live the Weeds” really resonated with me. When I moved into my mobile five years ago, the gardens were a mess. They got worse as my time was spent moving in, and other necessary things. The day I went out with a couple of friends to finally get all those weeds pulled, was amazing. It felt so good to tackle a big, but uncomplicated job. No thinking, no planning – you just grabbed hold of a weed and pulled. Afterwards, after the pulling, after the hauling away, the garden looked fresh and new.

I have also pulled weeds in my own life – old situations not forgiven, old habits that were unhelpful, old beliefs that no longer served – all sorts of things. Sometimes it was hard, like the ground cover that comes back year after year, even though I’m always convinced I finally got it all this time, but it feels so good when it’s gone again. Some things had deep roots and it took a long time to dig them out. Some pulled out so easily I couldn’t figure out why I had left them there for so long.

Thank goodness for those weeds, though. Not only did they give me something to work at, a way to improve, but my life is so much freer and more open now, open in a way I never would have realized without that work. One more benefit – weeds have made me vigilant. In my physical garden, I grab those weeds as soon as their little heads peek out of the soil. I hope in my spiritual garden I am doing better attacking those things that bring me down as well. It is good physical and spiritual exercise to do this regularly and helps keep me on my toes. Yes, I do appreciate those weeds in my life, even those that keep coming back. It is definitely worth the struggle.

Earth Day, 2008

Earth Day, 2008
by Karen L. Oberst

I recently heard of a bumper sticker that said, “Save the Earth. It’s the only planet with chocolate.” Since I consider chocolate to be one of the four major food groups, this is a sentiment I heartily endorse.

On this Earth Day 2008, there are many more serious reasons to save the earth. They range from the practical – this is the only home we have – to the philosophical – we are all made of the clay of the earth, and to it we return. Without the earth there would be no us. Our human race developed on this particular dirt ball in space in this particular solar system, at this particular time. Our fate and the earth’s are intertwined.

For me, however, a citizen of the United States of American, there is an even more compelling reason. We of the developed countries have poisoned the land and rivers, pumped carbon dioxide into the air, and generally done as we pleased in the name of progress. Yet it’s our less fortunate brothers and sisters who are paying the price for this in submerged farmlands, desertification, famine, disease, and death. The poor always pay for the luxuries of the wealthy. And most of us are wealthy compared to the rest of the world where so many subsist on a dollar a day.

So think when you turn that water on. Think when you turn your heat up or your air conditioning on. Think when you see that factory belching smoke into the air. Give some thought to our mother the earth, and our brothers and sisters who share this precious blue sphere with us. And the chocolate.

Thresholds

In Anam Cara John O’Donohue talks about many mysteries. None are so mysterious as human beings. On page 82 he says, “The face is the threshold where a world looks out and a world looks in on itself.” He speaks of the face being the threshold between our inner world – our thoughts and feelings, our personalities, our hopes and fears, our loves and hates, in short, our minds and souls – and the outer world, the world that is not us.

When we meet new people, whether they be family, friends, or strangers, we meet at this threshold. There are those we may know very well indeed, yet there is no one that we know completely. That mystery is always there. No two people think the same thoughts. No two people react the same way. No two people have exactly the same background – even twins are self-contained individual worlds.

Quakers have an expression to “look for that of God in everyone.” I hope to be able to view the people I meet each day not only as human beings created by God, but also as someone containing a whole world behind the threshold of his or her face. It is sure to make life more interesting.

Loving the Darkness

Loving the Darkness
by Karen L. Oberst

A few months ago, I was thinking about the “dark night of the soul.” My troubles were too minor to justify them with such a name. I felt more like I was in the “late afternoon of the soul.”

Nonetheless, the question that arose in me at that time was, “How can we learn to love the darkness?” While doing some reading in Celtic spirituality (One Foot in Eden by J. Philip Newell, and Anam Cara by John O’Donohue. specifically), I have found at least a partial answer.

We can love the dark because that’s where life and growth begin. Children grow and develop in the darkness of their mother’s womb. Seeds begin the process of growth in the darkness of the ground. Caterpillars become butterflies in the darkness of a chrysalis.

Darkness – the death/rebirth motif – is part of the natural cycle as seeds sprout in the spring, flower in the summer, are harvested in the autumn, and rest in the winter. Indeed, sometimes that promise of, or time of, rest can be very precious to us.

Seeds grow in the dark, and dark is a necessary condition of growth, yet the darkness does not cause the growth. The sun is beaming down even when the seed cannot see it. Rains fall and provide the necessary water. In our dark times, we can take comfort knowing that God is there, even if invisible to us and that if we can tolerate – or even embrace – the darkness, light and growth will eventually come.

Finally, we know that in our darkest of dark times, our death, God is waiting for us on the other side, with light and love.

Avis Matutina Deprehendit Vermem

This is an old article of mine, originally published in NovelAdvice, an online journal for writers, Sept. 5, 1998. I think it’s still amusing.

Avis Matutina Deprehendit Vermem
by Karen L. Oberst

Proverbs, epigrams, maxims, adages–we all know those short pithy sayings from our childhood.  Look before you leap.  He who hesitates is lost.  A stitch in time saves nine.  The early bird gets the worm.  Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.  Measure twice, cut once.  To err is human, to forgive divine.

This month I would like to take some of these and have fun with them.  The idea for this came from a quote I stumbled across recently: “Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed.” (William Jennings Bryan)

The first proverb is: The member of the genus avis, which bestirs itself prior to others of its kind, will procure the elongated creature of the genus vermis.  More prosaically: The early bird catches the worm.  In ANGUISHED ENGLISH, Richard Lederer reports a sign from a mall that read, “The early bird gets the worm!  Special shoppers’ luncheon before 11 a. m.”

Here are some other restatements:

* The late worm lives longer.
* The early bird may get the worm…but the late night bird gets the cold pizza.  (Jeff MacNelly, “Shoe” 7/22/98)
* The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
* “No thanks, I’d rather sleep in and have a donut.”
* “I told you…the early bird catches the bus.”  (Charles Schulz, “Peanuts” 7/25/98)  Said by Snoopy to Woodstock and his friends as they stand forlornly on the curb in the rain.
* The early worm gets caught.  (John Igo)
* I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird, and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.  (Franklin Roosevelt)

If you would like to take this as your motto, the Latin version of the maxim is the title of this article.

A proverb that is almost too easy to play with is “To err is human, to forgive divine.”  A few quick variations are:

* To eat is human, to digest divine.  (Mark Twain)
* To err is human, but to really foul up requires a computer.  (Unknown)
* To err is human, to purr feline.  (Robert Bryne)
* To err is human, to moo bovine.  (Unknown)
* To err is human–but it feels divine.  (Mae West)
* To tear is human, to repair divine.

Another proverb is: the one who vacillates, shows irresolution and is otherwise indecisive, will deviate from his course and go astray.  Or, expressed another way: Is dubitat errat.  He who hesitates is lost.

* He who hesitates is sometimes saved. (James Thurber)
* He who hesitates is not only lost, but several miles from the next freeway exit.  (Unknown)
* He who hesitates gives somebody else time to jump in and make a fool of himself.
* He who hesitates may see more clearly the way to go.
* He who contemplates is lost in thought.
* He who circumnavigates is right back where he started.  Or, he who circumnavigates ultimately gets nowhere.

Pip and Jane Baker, a British husband and wife writing team, created a bunch of mixed-up proverbs for a television episode called “Time and the Rani.”  As confused as these are, many of them still somehow make sense.
* Time and tide melt the snowman.
* Where there’s a will, there’s a Tom, Dick, and Harriet.
* More hasta, less vista.
* Two wrongs don’t make a left turn.
* A miss is as good as a smile.
* Out of the frying pan, into the mire.

And to finish up, here are few more “malaproverbs.”
* A feather in the hand is better than a bird in the air.  (Geoge Herbert)
* A bird in the hand is a messy proposition.
* Two birds in the bush sing more sweetly than one in the hand.

* A fool and her money are soon courted.  (Helen Rowland)
* A fool and his money are soon partying.  (Unknown)
* How did the fool and his money get together in the first place?  (Unknown)

* He who laughs last has not yet heard the bad news.  (Bertolt Brecht)
* He who laughs, lasts.  (Mary Pettibone Poole)
* He who laughs last didn’t get the joke the first time. (Unknown)
* He who cries first, gets all the sympathy.

Have I whetted your appetite for this word game?  Jump on in, the water’s wet…er, fine.  Grab a proverb, twist it up, and all the day, you’ll have good luck.  Have fun, but be careful–this can be habit forming!

Just Sheep?

Just Sheep?
by Karen L. Oberst

In church recently we sang “Come Let Us Worship and Bow Down,” by Dave Doherty. I have often sung this and greatly appreciate it. But today it somehow just didn’t sit quite right. The last two sentences read, “For He is our God, and we are the people of his pasture. And the sheep of His hand, just the sheep of His hand.” Ignoring the annoying pronoun usage, what struck me was “just the sheep of His hand.” Just the sheep?

I’m beginning to believe that one of the failings of the Evangelical church is that we think of ourselves only as sheep. There’s a lot to be said for being a sheep, and it’s not totally a bad image. Sheep have a shepherd, someone who cares for them, guards them, and searches for them when they are lost. As the 23rd Psalm reminds us, the shepherd leads us to green pastures, and finds nice quiet bodies of water for us to drink from

The real problem I see with comparing ourselves to sheep and only sheep is that it leaves us dependent. Sheep will always need a shepherd, from birth to death. That certainly isn’t what we want for our own children, to be totally dependent on parents for their entire lives. No! We want our children to learn and grow, to dream their own dreams and fly away from the nest.

Isaiah 40:31 says, “but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles.” Why not adopt that as our image of choice? I believe it would please God if we aspired to be bold and free, daring to do great things for our omnipotent God. In his book Cure for the Common Life, Max Lucado says, “God grants us an uncommon life to the degree we surrender our common one.” Do we want to live uncommon lives for God?

If an eagle seems somehow too daring, then consider the butterfly. After a long season as a caterpillar, crawling through life, it is transformed (as we are when we turn to God). Fighting free of its chrysalis prison, it flies off, beautiful and free, giving delight to all those who see it.

These animal metaphors are helpful, but our human role model is, of course, Jesus. He did not spend his days as a sheep, content to live within the flock, and be safely penned up at night. Not at all! He was out amidst the people, working and teaching in ways that amazed them. He touched the unclean and the sick without concern. He faced the authorities of his day without fear, questioning the attitudes and actions of those for whom the rules were most important. He taught about God’s love and generosity and challenges us to live that way too. If we are to truly emulate him as our example, we will also get out there and live in the world, unafraid, generous, accepting of people, working for justice for the poor and disenfranchised, being peacemakers, forgiving those who hurt us – in short, modeling Christ to all we meet.

Sometimes we are hurt or lost or alone, and then being a sheep is comforting. But let us not make that a way of life. Instead, let’s be eagles or butterflies, alive and free, daring great things for our great God.

A Tale of Two Houses

I’m uploading another of my poems.

A Tale of Two Houses
by Karen L. Oberst

Two houses side by side;
Dark and secret;
Windows covered with the grime of years;
Owners brooding inside

The window washer smiled, knocked on the first door.
The owner frowned. “Go away, go away.”
“You don’t like, you don’t pay.”
“I don’t like. Go away.”

The window washer smiled, knocked on the next door.
The owner frowned. “Go away, go away.”
“You don’t like, you don’t pay.”
“Very well, have it your way.”

Light crept in
to his house
to his soul.
“Oh, thank you, sir! What do I owe?
“First, let me clean the inside too.”
“Oh yes, oh yes! Come in, do!”

“Sir, it’s wonderful! What do I owe?
“Just this:
Look out your windows;
See those who need;
Welcome the ones passing by;
Keep your windows clean;
And offer to clean your neighbors.

Two houses side by side;
One dark and silent; brooding;
One blazing with light, joyful; and
Bright as a city set on a hill.

The Power of One

I didn’t write this – I don’t know who did – but I love the story. Enjoy!

“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a coal-mouse asked a wild dove.

“Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer.

“In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story,” the coal-mouse said.

“I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow – not heavily, not in a raging blizzard – no, just like in a dream, without a sound and without any violence. Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the 3,741,953rd dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you say – the branch broke off.”

Having said that, the coal-mouse flew away.

The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while, and finally said to herself, “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come to the world.”