WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO COME HOME?

Transitions and True Identity + My Favorites From This Month - May 2023

Hi, Dear One:

Let me say right up front that I realize by sending you the monthly bonus letter the day before the regular newsletter goes out probably seems like a flood of words from Mary. However, it matters to me to keep my word to you and deliver on my promise. I’ve been away for the past month and this was the earliest I could get back into writing mode. Jet lag is a bear and it made me into a sloth.

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Being on vacation is a whirlwind of new experiences and delights, a flood of inspiration, and an interruption to “ the way things usually are.” The innumerable gifts of travel are well known to you, but today I’ve been thinking about the comforts and challenges of coming home.

I love coming home as much as I love going away! My family moved house so much in my younger years and the sense of home and rootedness feels nourishing to me. I love the deepened appreciation of the small things of daily life at home and the fresh eyes with which to see them after being away.

But I have observed another less supportive pattern as well.

After the first few days of rest and laundry and the joy of settling back into the comforts of home, what happens next within me is a mild sense of overwhelm. My mind begins to race again remembering unfinished and ongoing projects, and because I can see with the fresh eyes of vacation, I often feel an impulse to add to my already long list by taking on new projects. What happens for me is that I feel an urgency to get busy. To do more. This is an old, old pattern from my childhood where I learned to believe that my worth was equal to what I could produce. It is also laced with a feeling of urgency to get it done so that I don’t get in trouble.

One of the gifts of vacation is that we get a break from our patterned ways of thinking and from the loop of old messaging we carry around with us. In a way, we are happily distracted from the old recordings and this is a good thing., so that when we come home, and the voices of the unattended parts of us suddenly get louder, we have the ability to hear their messages from a different, if temporary, perspective.

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I find the world and the world of ideas endlessly fascinating. And I’ve always had the drive to create. Put these two traits together with early conditioning to produce and perform in order to hold onto the love of a parent, and you have a recipe for potential too-muchness. Not that I am too much, but what I often attempt to take on at a given time can be. I still have a hard time saying no to myself when these ideas and activities come marching in as good. When I’ve been away and come home full to the brim with YES, I can quickly forget that too much YES can turn into exhaustion for me and that it truly doesn’t serve my soul. This is where a contemplative practice and a more contemplative stance in life are so crucial to maintaining my serenity.

This is exactly when I am in need of the PAUSE. This is when my mind is most in need of a way to practice releasing the internal chatter and patterned pressure to do or be more. This is where the practice of centering prayer or meditation has been a life raft for me. Likewise, my creative practices - especially those with no end result in mind -support a more contemplative way of simply being. I also know that I need long, rambling walks to nowhere in particular. Moving my body is crucial to my well-being and mental health. These are just a few of the ways I have learned to take care of my spiritual well-being when I am flooded with the desire to know, be, or do MORE.

I am grateful to know that even though these patterned thoughts will arise, I can see them, and practice releasing them now with increasing ability through the grace of God. It’s no quick fix but an accumulation of time spent in quiet and practice and learning to trust the Great Love from which I came. Where once these thoughts and patterns literally ruled my days, I now have more flexibility and spaciousness around them. Now I have more capacity to choose. This is no small thing. This is grace.

I will still take on too much at times. It’s okay. It’s a spiral path and each time I come back around the mountain I have a little more self-understanding, flexibility, and capacity to choose a new thought or action. Each time I choose to give myself the gift of quiet practice or contemplation, I strengthen my ability to come back to the truth of my true identity and I learn to trust and lean into the Love that is loving me through and through. I get to come Home.

“ We are all just walking each other home. “ - Ram Dass

With love and appreciation,

xo Mary

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A QUICK LIST OF FAVORITES FROM THIS MONTH:

1. The film, LIVING with an impeccable performance by Bill Nighy. LIVING is the story of an ordinary man, reduced by years of oppressive office routine to a shadow existence, who at the eleventh hour makes a supreme effort to turn his dull life into something wonderful.

2. An excerpt from a longer writing on rest from poet David Whyte.

   “Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.” - David Whyte
   From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words