Category Archives: Writing. Loving.

Jealousy comes from a certain kind of poverty consciousness.  A jealous person is a hoarder, more concerned with taking than with giving.  And while I’ve planted several vices and faults over a nice swatch of karmic turf, I’m grateful to say that jealousy is not a seed that I have planted.

I do not want what belongs to someone else.  I don’t want what you have.  I don’t want what God gave to you for you.  It’s all that I can do to make space for my own psychic and material stuff.  Why would I want someone else’s?

Time has a way of erasing faces and sometimes names, even if one remembers the incident.  And so, I remember a lovely Sunday morning in a quiet café with a new “friend” that I was getting to know.

“I’m jealous of you,” the woman said.

We had been talking about nice things–music, the weather, etc.  But then, she put on this frowny face.  I want to head for a bomb shelter when I see a frowny face.

“I feel jealous of you. You always seem to get what you want.”

You know how in slapstick comedy, when somebody says something really dumb, the person who’s listening gags on their drink and spits it out?  Okay, so I didn’t spit out my tea.  All I could do was stare and know that this person would not be a friend.  Looking back, I wish I’d been present enough to say, “Do you think you’re woman enough to handle it?”

Now, see (as my mother would say), this is the problem with perception.  We see what someone else has, and even though we have enough, we think that we could use more.  We forget that the person we are envious or jealous of has paid a price for what they got.  But we get mad at them because God allowed them to have it.  Jealousy is stupid–and lives in a hoarding heart.

Like everyone, I’ve had moments when I wanted an easier time of it.  I’ve desired many things:  a problem-free (new?) car, a boyfriend that does the laundry and cooks dinner, more money, a massage once a week—a best seller.  But I will tell anyone in a heartbeat, “I do not want your stuff .”  Because that would mean I want someone else’s life, and really, at this point, I’m pretty content with my own.

Jealousy is a waste of vital energy.  First of all, it’s a tremendous expression of ingratitude.  It’s like saying, “God, you made a mistake with my life.  Can I have hers?”  Ew.

Second, it’s like putting yourself down.  It’s placing someone else above yourself, making their life experience more valuable than your own.  And third, it’s like asking God to give you somebody else’s sorrows in order to experience whatever is perceived as another’s joy.  Again, ew.

When I spend time by myself–writing, for instance–I am happy.  I am quiet.  I feel at ease.   When I am healing my creative self, aware of smiles,  colors, and sounds–I am happy.  When my heart is open,  words, whether hard or soft, flow with the ease of warm honey–I am happy.  It’s taken a long time, but I finally recognize this experience as spending time with my own soul.  It’s private.  It’s soft.  It’s sacred.  It’s healing.  And I wouldn’t trade it for anyone else’s experience.

No one can take those things from me, so being jealous is a waste of vital energy.  Do I get everything I think I want?  No.  But I get what is mine and try to share the best of it.  Hoarding is not my nature.

But hey, if anyone wants what I got, she will have to pay the karmic price.   And I don’t think she’s woman enough to handle it.

On Bread, Laundry and Morning Routines has been reposted.

Grrr.

Common sense.

My grandparents were farmers who, when we visited, involved us in the process of planting and harvesting. They were practical people, with a solid understanding of nature and the folly of rigid expectations.  They planted, made sure they had done their best work, and accepted whatever results nature provided.  Their common sense fed scores of relatives for decades.

Fast forward to their granddaughter—that would be me—as I sat in my own vegetable garden in Oakland, California, dreamily pulling weeds.  With each clump of dandelion or grass, I felt like I was letting go of some unresolved issue. I like to think of it as my Zen moment of gardening.  Inhale, pull a clump, and exhale; inhale, pull a clump and exhale.  By the end of an evening of weeding, I would be—excuse the pun—grounded.  But I didn’t have my grandparents’ wisdom:  whatever grows in the garden, after I have given it my all, is perfectly what is meant to be.  When I think about it, that perspective is a metaphor for living.  But back to vegetables.

In my neighborhood, there were a lot of folks who had gardens overflowing with vegetables and fruit.  One of my best friend’s garden was a cornucopia of kale, peas, asparagus, potatoes (red, white, and blue), squash, green peppers, tomatoes, and corn.  She and her husband had spent years putting in the time and hard work to make their garden organic.  Blackberries and raspberries circled their entire yard.  And, oh yes, the apples really did hang low on the tree.

A few years before learning from my friend about gardening, I had decided to grow some vegetables.  In addition to the peas, tomatoes and lettuce, I thought I’d try some broccoli.  Broccoli, in my mind anyway, is a vegetable of perfection. It’s sweeter than leafy green vegetables and is easy to adapt for recipes.  Little bites of the crown can be dipped in a variety of sauces. The whole stalk can be creamed for broccoli and cheddar cheese soup.  Then there are the salads and–my all time favorite–tempura.

I hoed, raked, and tilled.  I mulched and fertilized.  The vegetables grew strong and basically healthy, and the broccoli was dark green with stalks an inch thick.  I purchased lots of ladybugs to eat the aphids in the garden.  I planted garlic and onions (didn’t have a clue what I was doing).  It rained, and I checked for bugs.  Obsessively.

I found holes on the leaves, signs of critters that ate their veggies.  But I had declared a no-worm manifesto, and I was determined to win.  You know where this is going, right?

One cool evening, I went to the garden and cut some stalks for dinner.  The veggies were beautiful.  Green, shiny and strong.  I checked, washed, and placed the broccoli in a steamer.   About camouflage…

When the time came to serve—I had invited friends over—I opened the pot and screamed. There, fully steamed and swollen like a green hot dog on the top of my beautiful broccoli, was a humongous green worm.  My friends laughed and encouraged me to toss the worm and eat the broccoli.  I couldn’t, but I was told by those who did, that the vegetable was perfection.

Plant, make sure I’ve done my best, and accept the results of whatever nature provides.  Common sense for a great and anxiety free life.

Happy Monday!

“Thank you, God, for allowing me to serve.”

It wasn’t so much the words that were strange.  It was that it was four in the morning, and these were the first words in my day, floating up from my subconscious dreamy state.  I suppose I could call it a prayer.

I’m no stranger to service.  I got my father’s DNA.  His life, from community councils to volunteer fire departments to the National Guard, was a perfect model of service.  Since high school when I was a “candy striper” in a local hospital, I’ve volunteered for neighborhood cleanups, helped teenage moms, taught elderly people to read, and participated in scores of projects throughout my adulthood.  But this prayer was a surprise.  Some subconscious part of me was so moved that it was expressing gratitude.

The evening before, my trio had performed.  As I looked out into the audience I saw that people were having a real good time.  This was not a drunken bar audience.  A couple of people told me later that they had been moved to tears.  Others laughed and clapped.  Happiness reigned.  Once again I realized the power—and, for me, the purpose—of performance art.  One of my brothers calls it the “human to human” connection.  It’s also, I think, the magic of service.  Happiness reigns.

What if it’s true?  What if our real purpose for being born is to serve?  What if—whether we believe it or not, whether it fits our spiritual and political beliefs or not—we are here only to take care of each other, to nurture each other, to make the world a better place moment by moment?

What does it mean to serve?  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said about service:

“Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve.  You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.  You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace.  A soul generated by love.”

I was driving a shuttle between a hotel and a retreat site where I spent a lot of my time.  This was my service, and my task was simple:  pick people up at the hotel and take them to the retreat site.  Folks were arriving from all over the world.  Some spoke English well, while others struggled to make themselves understood.  Some seemed perfectly at ease, and others seemed hesitant; they had come very far for a new experience, but weren’t sure what to expect.

Everyone was connected to his or her own story.  I was focused on my task, ensuring the comfort and safety of passengers, but I had stopped smiling.  I felt disconnected and sad.  I felt like I was using up precious air, taking up valuable space on earth.  Looking back, I can see that I felt unworthy of the task of greeting so many people from so far away.  I had always loved volunteering, but I felt my anger and impatience growing with the chattering adults and noisy children.

At some point, a beautiful woman from Hawaii climbed into the van with her two children.  She sat beside me in the front and began to talk and ask questions about the retreat site.  She’d brought the Hawaiian sun with her smile, and her laugh literally filled the van.  Throughout the ride she talked about her life, her children, and why she was so happy to be at the retreat.  Her joy was contagious.  I looked around and saw that other folks were drawn in and were feeling at ease.

When we arrived at the retreat, she said goodbye and lifted her children from the van.  She started down the sidewalk, but suddenly stopped and came back to the van.  Looking me in the eye, she said, “I’m so glad you’re here.”  She smiled and was off.

I began to cry.  Hers was the heart full of grace.  Hers was the true service, and her kindness brought me back to the reason I was driving that van in the first darn place.  To serve.

The task doesn’t matter.  It can be driving, performing, painting a school wall, mowing a lawn, or reading to an elderly person in a nursing home.  Tasks are endless.  What matters is how I serve.  True service is a matter of the heart.  True service leaves love behind when the server herself has left the scene.

This world is full of pie (as opposed to what some other folks would say the world is full of, and it’s not a pleasant word).  The world is saturated with a dizzying rainbow of crusty confections with meat, nuts, vegetables, and fruit. Who could turn down a slice of color in the form of cherry, blueberry, lemon meringue, or lime pie with a dollop of rich vanilla ice cream on top?  Admit it.  You love pie.

There have been moments when I allow myself the fantasy of peace through people taking time out of their busy days to join a friend and make a pie.  What a lovely thought.  I imagine a world where people settle conflicts by getting together to bake pies.  How can a person fire a weapon when her hands are covered with dough, his face is dripping with peach juice, and there are peach pits in the middle of their tongues?  Peace In Eating.  Pie.

As a young girl, I learned to bake good pies after discovering that I was horrible at baking cakes.  Those three-layered or square-shaped dough concoctions were too unpredictable; like people, you couldn’t control them.  It didn’t matter if they were pound or angel or chocolate layered, my cakes inevitably fell in the middle or broke in half as I iced them.  Worse yet, I would go to read a book and smell burned cake, a pitiful result because the cake would be inedible and Mom would be furious.  My cakes and biscuits met the same fate.  The biscuits were embarrassingly hard little pieces of rock that could kill a chicken with one throw. It was sad.  After all, I was born to a legacy of cooks who could probably make rock soup taste like a five-star menu item.

But pie was different.  I don’t know if it was the concentration and rhythm of fluting the crust, the sensuality of juicy fruit in my hands, or the smell of cinnamon, nutmeg and other haunting spices.  There was some mystery about pie that calmed me down, made me feel, um, competent.  Maybe it was because in learning to bake pie, I learned focus and patience.  I learned how to follow directions.  I learned to measure, to take my time.  Of course, I haven’t always fallen back on the things I learned.  My life might be very different if I had.

Mom was specific about measurements.  Too much flour?  Put it back.  Too much shortening?  Take it out.  Work with the dough until the flour and shortening looked like uniform grains of sand.  Add water.

“No, not that much!”

Take it out quickly before you have to throw the whole lot away.  Learn how to salvage the good, to manage mistakes before they become disasters (relationships).  The ingredients (like relationships) were as precious as gold. Nothing could be wasted.  But taking the patience to add water, drop by drop, until the dough was ready to knead was another lesson. It takes time to do something really well.  Of course, I haven’t always use this lesson either.  I’ve wanted things to be resolved, fixed, changed, or transformed NOW.  Remembering patience, moment to moment, is a skill that must be practiced again and again–like baking pie.

Depending on the fruit–pears, apples, or peaches–I would peel the skins slowly, watching the skins form those little Shirley Temple ringlets that became the main ingredient for homemade jelly.  Peach pie was my favorite.  With the juice flowing between my fingers, I used precious moments to suck on the pits. Making a pie was focused work.  Sucking on peach pits was my reward.

Today, I still love to bake pies and, somewhere along the years, I have learned to bake decent cakes.  Cakes require the same focus and patience.  I’ve added a variation to my baking.  I have learned to bake vegan, and I do not add dairy or eggs to my cakes.  I no longer use shortening in my pies, and I’ve added fruits that we didn’t use when I was growing up.  Mango gives me larger and juicier seeds to suck on.  But the lessons remain.  There is still a mystery in baking. Time stands still.  I can live in the moment.  I can learn patience.

The other day a friend and I got into a fight.  I was very upset.  I felt like I wasn’t being heard, and my friend felt attacked.  It was ugly.  After spreading fury through my apartment, I asked myself the usual question.  What could I have done differently?  I talked to a couple of close friends and my sister.  After all the guidance (and evidence of my impatience) was gathered, I sat down to write about it.  I came up with the understanding that I was wrong.  I apologized.

Now, I am on my way to the kitchen to bake a vegetable pot pie.  Have a marvelous week.  Words, like pies, have delicious color.