Yesterday I had the extreme honor of hosting a virtual retirement party for my friend, colleague, and mentor Pat Vivan. Hearing the impact she has made in the lives of her clients, friends, family, colleagues, and mentees will stay with me forever. Her values literally ooze out of all her interactions—justice, equity, honesty, pragmatism, love. She has always understood that her legacy isn’t about accomplishments, but about relationships. The people celebrating her weren’t wistful about their work with her—they felt permanently empowered because of it!
I read a quote from Parker Palmer’s book On the Brink of Everything. He quotes the psychologist Florida Scout Maxwell— “You only need claim the events of your life to make your life yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality.”
And then Parker says,
“Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. The sooner we understand this, the better. It’s a truth that can set us free to live well, to love well, and in the end, to die well.
I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in the world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up there as my true self, as best I knew how, about to engage life freely and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality.”
We are able to engage life freely and lovingly when we recognize that the Divine comes to us as our own lives. There isn’t another curriculum. There isn’t a hidden secret, an exclusive subscription. There isn’t a different path to enlightenment than the path right in front of us at this very moment.
Becoming fierce with reality means we avoid the poles of pessimism and toxic positivity. We see how beautiful the blooming dogwood trees are. We see that water comes out of the faucet and that first-graders have put their poems up on the grocery store windows. And we also see the extreme suffering in Gaza and Ukraine, the suffering in our downtowns, the sadness of neighbors growing old alone. The curriculum includes it all. When we are able to hold that, we are really living. We aren’t trying to camp out in joy OR suffering, but meeting the world as it is. I wrote a poem recently whose last lines are:
This life is too much,
and we don’t want any less.
And we don’t need to this live paradox alone! I’m grateful for Pat and so many others in my life who have shown me the way. I am not interested, and indeed I CANNOT, do this alone, and I reject any myth that says otherwise. Thank you for being here with me—may the reality of your own life, however hard, lead you home.