Turning to Another Source

On Spirituality and Love

...we have to replace the battle for power with the battle to
create space for the spirit.

Love is an act of forgiving in which evil is converted to good and destruction into creating.

This is the way to spiritual maturity: to receive love as a pure, free gift.

On Writing

To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust.
We have to say to ourselves: "I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write." Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes that one has, trusting that they will multiply in the giving.

All quotes from Henri Nouwen, Seeds of Hope

Today's most interesting discovery so far has been a genuine rattlesnake's rattle on a necklace, found among Gabe and Amanda's things which they left in our dining room when they moved out a month ago. It seems like the sort of thing true Deadheads would possess.

I'm thinking today about forgiveness. I've been quoted on the radio; "a psychiatric patient I know said the following about forgiveness," said my friend Paul on his early morning radio show.
He had asked permission to use my name, but he refused to simply say, "My friend Harriet said;" he wanted the listeners to know that this quote came from a psychiatric patient. So I told him, if you must mention that part, then don't use my name.

What I said about forgiveness then was what a three-year-old might say: "You have to forgive so you can love." How lame, because if a person feels offended by another, that person really doesn't care about loving the other person, right??? That person wants to take time out of the
life of the spirit to feel as many negative feelings as possible toward the other person. That person wants revenge, and the feeling of love would screw it up. You wouldn't want to put a potato in the tailpipe of someone you loved, would you??? Obviously, radical Muslims aren't going to "forgive Americans so they can love them."

I like the quote about "love is an act of forgiving" for this reason. It doesn't go any further, maybe, in the direction of sowing love where there is hatred, or should I say, of course we can't force anyone to love us, and nothing we say is going to change someone's heart. I mean, it might, but we don't have control of that. Bonnie Raitt has a song about it, I can't make you love me if you don't...

As far as the quotes about writing go, well, it may be clear that I have very high expectations of what writing can do. Most of the time, writing doesn't do what I hope it will. I'm always thinking, maybe if I slowly and carefully explain myself, people will understand exactly what I mean.
In some ways poetry works better than these blogs. Maybe it's because people understand that all poetry, to an extent, is persona poetry, even "confessional" poetry, but when a person writes
these "confessional" essays, well that's their heart they're wearing on their sleeve. Yeah, I thought may I'd receive some reassurance that announcing that I'm Bipolar would not alienate the whole world. However, there's a new tone of voice even in the e-mail I have received from one person who has read these blogs.

The thing is, none of us are going to be forgiven by the whole world, not even always by the circle of people close to us. It's hard to forgive if you don't feel forgiven, Nouwen says. But the fact remains that we can easily be forgiven by God: If I return to God with a repentant heart after I have sinned, God is always there to embrace me and let me start afresh.

Am I sounding like a JW tract, or something??? I promise this is not an ad for some particular church.

The fact is, we can feel forgiven without receiving forgiveness from each and every human in our lives; as for those humans that don't forgive us, we can still forgive them. And you know what, if I sound pious here, so be it. I am not a secular person, I am a believer, though the term "believer" doesn't do justice to what I am. God has had everything to do with my experience of reality since I was 17. Don't ask how long ago that was. That was 25 years ago.

It's not to say I haven't been a skeptic and a blasphemer plenty of times, or a hypocrite, or a heretic. But I've always "come home," as they say.

It's not as important for me to be heard, for my confessional blogs to be read and responded to lovingly, as it is for me to know my own truth and be true to it. The writing helps take me in that direction. I'm not trying to "win friends and influence people," or whatever that book was called, I'm just trying to do what only I can do, which is manifest spirit that is specific to my being.

I do have enough acceptance in my life because I don't ultimately look to humans. If I take this "looking beyond humans" too far it can make me very sick. So I am grateful for my circle, for those who do love and forgive.

---Harriet.