A Perfect Sunday

 

What seems like a lifetime ago, when we lived in Georgia, Laurel and I had shirts made that said “The Perfect Sunday”.  It included three lines with checked boxes, “Church”, “Yoga”, “Beer”.

Most Sundays that would be our routine, we’d go to church at Shallowford Presbyterian Church, we’d go to Ebb & Flow Yoga in the afternoon and finish the perfect Sunday with a beer at Slow Pour Brewery. 

Fast forward, life has changed dramatically.  As many conversations go these days, “…and then COVID happened”, we moved from Georgia to Ohio, we left the church, we went from a “home” yoga studio to yoga franchises, and we haven’t found a brewery quite like Slow Pour.  Not sure about Laurel, but I was kind of feeling like Dorothy and not being in Kansas, or Georgia, anymore. 

As I often do, let me divert for just a minute.  The other day, Laurel and I were getting haircuts, we’ve found a very nice young lady, and she does both of our hair, and we were there back-to-back.  As I was getting my hair cut, we were talking to Jesy, OK, Jesy was talking to us, and as is normal, Jesy was sharing way too much about her life.  Jesy is a wonderful young lady, but my God, she has a shit life.  The amount of drama she deals with in her family, and shares with us, is overwhelming.  But the amazing thing is, Jesy is always so upbeat and positive.  I have no idea how.  Then she said those magic words, when she was discussing her relationship with her uncle, who had just died, compared to her relationship with her father:

“Appreciation, not Expectation”

As I sat in the chair, I had this urge to tell Laurel, “Quick, write that down for me!”, but I didn’t, so I wouldn’t embarrass Jesy.  Thankfully, it wasn’t that hard to remember, even for me, and I thought a lot about what she said.  I know, I took you on a detour, but I really believe it helps to gain the context of the story.

“A Perfect Sunday”

Last Sunday, we got to experience a perfect Sunday.  I’ll do my best to capture it for you, but I’m sure I won’t ever be able to fully express how perfect it was.

We have hit summer of course, and one of the great benefits to me of summer is outdoor yoga.  As many of you know, I love yoga, and what I love more than yoga is outdoor yoga.  There’s just something about it, yoga is such a spiritual journey, but taking a spiritual journey out in nature?  That is at the top of my list.  Yoga and nature combined, two of my favorite things in life, how could it be better?  Well, it could.

Anne Weidinger is a yoga teacher that Laurel and I have come to know in the past year or so.  As many of you know, while I love yoga, I’m still a relative novice, and I’m really a novice when it comes to teaching yoga.  I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for anyone who teaches yoga, it’s not that easy, and I have found that all the teachers I’ve ever had bring something special to a class.  There are some though that are on a much higher plain, and Anne is one of them.  I’ve never had anything but an incredible class from Anne.

Anne arranged for a yoga class at Mitchell’s Berries, a small farm about a half hour away from us.  The entire week before, the weather was sweltering, just unbelievably hot and dry.  Probably not ideal weather for outdoor yoga, but I would take anything.

That morning, we got our first rain in quite a while, and Anne delayed the start for an hour, to fit the class in between raindrops.  As we drove out to Plain City, the skies looked threatening still, and we wondered if we’d be doing yoga in the rain or doing yoga at all.  We got to the farm, and as we headed toward the field, the clouds were still heavy, there was a gentle breeze, and after 90-degree weather for a week or so, it was a bit chilly.

As we started doing yoga, there was a bit of a menagerie of weather going on.  Gentle breezes, stronger breezes, huge puffy clouds, large dark clouds, and moments of blinding sun, when it was no longer chilly, but really hot.  The only thing missing was some form of precipitation, but it felt so good to feel so much weather on my skin.

The sounds were incredible, all sorts of different birds throughout the fields and trees.  The wind rustling through the trees and the plants created such a feeling of peace.  The smell of the country, particularly after a nice rain, was so refreshing. 

The yoga was of course amazing, it always is with Anne, and as I said, doing yoga in nature is just such a beautiful gift.  One of the few benefits of COVID that I learned, since we had to do yoga outdoors a lot, is that balancing on an uneven surface is much easier for me than balancing on a hard floor, which I know, seems counterintuitive.  And the opportunities to find a Drishti in nature are numerous, a tree, a bush, a clover, a bird (no, that won’t work, but still fun to watch!).  The other fun thing about these outdoor events is the people that come to them, there are some that we know well, some we barely know, and some we’ve never met before.  These events attract a wide array of people, and it’s really fun to share that experience with some familiar and some not so familiar faces.

It didn’t end there though.  Part of our package was the opportunity to pick raspberries and black raspberries.  While I grew up in the middle of cornfields when I was younger, I don’t think I have ever picked berries in my life.  This was a brand-new experience for me.  I ended up with the black raspberries’ assignment, and my instructions were the blacker the better, and if they don’t come off the vine easily, they’re not ready.  As I wandered around, I’d find a black one, and go to pick it, and then, wait, that one is blacker, wait, that one is blacker, how can there be so many shades of black?  So, I reverted more toward, do they come off the vine easily?  It was going fine until I investigated my pint basket and saw after 15-20 minutes, I had maybe 10 berries in the very bottom of the basket.  This could take days to complete.  But do you know what?  So what.  I’m out in the middle of farm country, on a beautiful day, picking berries.  So what if it takes all day.

The best part of course is that I got to share all of this with Laurel.  She is the one who introduced me to yoga, and I’m forever thankful for that.  I love going to yoga with her, when I lose my way, I always look to her for guidance to figure out what the hell I’m doing wrong.  We go for walks every day in nature, it’s so much fun to look at the ducks, bunnies, birds, frogs, various trees and plants, whatever nature has for us that day, and point out something new to each other that day.

I’ll go back to what Jesy said, “appreciation not expectation”.  Maybe it was the change in the weather, maybe it was no idea what to expect because of the weather, maybe it was the group of people that show up for outdoor yoga, maybe it was picking berries for the first time in my life, maybe it was Laurel finding not one, but two, four-leaf clovers, but I really had no real or strong expectation.  I was just able to appreciate every aspect of the experience, doing something I love, out in nature, which I love, with the person I love more than anything.  Yes, it was a perfect Sunday.

Making a Difference

 Have you ever read those stories on the internet or Facebook that are just beautiful and wonderful moments of serendipity?  A young person was having a really hard time at school, and someone, out of the blue, came up and gave them a bouquet of flowers.  An old, homeless man was sitting on a park bench, no money, no food, and a kind stranger came up, cleaned him up, fed him, made him feel like a human being again?  Someone planned to end it all and commit suicide that day, and out of nowhere someone did something kind for them, made them feel special, and they chose a different path.  When you read those stories, did you ever just want to call bullshit and say this is just a ploy from some creative person providing us a fictional account just to try to make us feel good?  I know I’d get sucked in for a moment, but then I’d say, nah, bullshit, this is too perfect.

OK, my story isn’t perfect, but my story is real, and because it’s real and happened to me, I find it incredibly beautiful.  So here is how it goes:

As some of you know, I’ve been on a journey with depression most of my adult life.  It ebbs and flows, sometimes I rise up, sometimes I plummet.  The reality I’ve come to know is that there’s no cure, there are coping mechanisms, but no cure.  Recently, I plummeted.  Not unusual, but what really troubled me this time is that I was thinking about killing myself.  Now, before anyone gets too excited, I really don’t believe I’d ever go through with it, I subscribe to the “It’s a Wonderful Life” philosophy where if you knew the impact you had on the world, you’d never kill yourself.  As much as I don’t see it, I believe that if I got to play Jimmy Stewart and see my life and the impact I had on people, I would see I made a positive impact in many cases.  

Also, I got to see the devastation my brother Billy’s suicide created for all of us, I can’t imagine Billy would have ever done it if he would have known what his act did to all of us, but I also understand where he was at.  In the immortal words of my brother when someone asked him how he knows so much about suicide, he said:

“I think about it every God damn day”

And that had become my reality, I started thinking about it every God damn day, and I was even coming up with how I would do it.  Each method I came up with had some flaws to it, which again, made me think or realize, I probably wasn’t that serious, but the fact that I was thinking about it daily, made me take it seriously.

But enough about me, this story really isn’t about me, this story is about Ava.  Let me tell you about Ava, and what Ava did:

Ava is one of my students at Ohio Dominican University.  As I say about my children and my dogs, none of them are my favorites, all of them are my favorites.  Ava is one of those.  She’s a very good student, and also a very nice young lady.

We started Yoga Club on campus this year, and it’s been mostly a wonderful experience for me, I love teaching the students yoga, and they are just an incredibly fun group.  Ava comes to virtually every Yoga Club event, and we oftentimes get a chance to talk before or after class.

For the last Yoga Club of the year, I was a bit frustrated, the announcement of the class day and time got mixed up, so I wasn’t completely sure if I’d have anyone in class.  Thankfully, it came together, and we did end up with a normal number of students for our last class of the year.  Still, I was a little frustrated because of the lack of clarity, I really wanted the last class to be special.  And it was.

After class, Ava gave me a card, and to just call it a card would be a horrible understatement and really a disservice to what she did.  There are many layers, but let me start at the beginning, the message on the outside of the card:

As I opened the card, I was stunned by two aspects.  One, she filled the entire inside of the card with a message for me.  Second, the writing was perfect, she had to have spent a considerable amount of time crafting the message for it to be this neat.  But then, the message itself.  It wouldn’t be fair to Ava to share the entire message, it was a personal card to me, and that’s where it needs to stay, but she weaved so much in about what yoga class meant to her, particularly the messages or stories I provided each class.

Each class I would begin with a story about various topics, such as, the Yama’s and Niyama’s, Being Kind, Our Journey is Our Gift, Did You See the Cypress Tree on the Way Here? and so on.  I would give them a card that represented that week’s message, a gift I learned from my wife, Laurel.  I wanted to teach my students yoga, not just asana, and I think many of the students embraced it, enjoyed it, but there is no doubt Ava did.  

She expressed her gratitude for my stories, my vulnerability, my compassion, and the cards that she would keep as inspiration.  I was swept away with emotion, I couldn’t believe all of the words of praise she had for me, and again, how much thought and effort she had to have put into this.  She had absolutely no obligation, no ulterior motive to put all of this effort into the card, there was no grade or bonus points to be earned, she did this purely as an act of kindness, of gratitude, of appreciation.  She did this for me, and for one of the few moments in my life, I felt like maybe I was making an impact.  Of course, I had that moment where I thought to myself, I don’t deserve this, if she only knew what was running through my mind every day, she wouldn’t have written this and thought this about me.  But maybe she did, and maybe she still would have, but who knows, because even I wouldn’t be that honest to tell Ava how much her card meant in my life and why it meant so much.

So why am I telling all of you?  I also subscribe to the philosophy of Mother Teresa:

I will admit, this one takes me to a whole new level, broadcasting to all of you my thoughts about killing myself is even out there for me.  But after much thought and consideration, I felt like I needed to share Ava’s story and what her card meant to me.

I believe everyone has a purpose in life, and maybe this is my purpose.  I would always say about my blog posts that if just one person reads my blog and gets something out of it, then I would consider it a success.  I’m hopeful that at least one of you reads this story, and becomes the next Ava.  It doesn’t have to be as grand and beautiful as what Ava did, but even a small act of kindness and appreciation can mean a lot to someone who desperately needs it.  Just like Ava, you may never know the huge impact you made, but just the thought of the possibility that you helped someone when they needed it the most, wouldn’t that feel great?  It may not end up being like one of those magical, beautiful internet stories, but it will be your story.  You can make such a difference with simple, small acts of kindness.  Believe me, I know, it made such a difference for me.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Elisha left Jericho to go to Bethel, and on the way some boys came out of a town and made fun of him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they shouted.

Elisha turned around, glared at them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys to pieces.

The passage above is from Second Kings 2:23-24, or for those who own the God Bless the USA Bible, you may be more familiar with it as Two Kings 2:23-24.

There are clearly some odd passages in the Bible, but I’ve often found this one to be potentially the most bizarre.  There are so many aspects to it: the boys calling Elisha baldy; Elisha cursing them in the name of the Lord; the specificity of two she-bears; the specificity of 42 of the boys being torn to pieces; and of course, the fact that they were killed for having the audacity to call Elisha baldy.  

I’ve had various people try to explain this passage to me, but quite frankly, I really don’t need nor want any explanation.  I know some believe that the Bible is the inerrant or infallible word of God, it was inspired by God, and to question it at all, is sacrilegious.  Call me sacrilegious, whether it’s this passage or various other passages in the Old Testament, I find many to be hard to accept as truly being inspired by God, or maybe to put it another way, if it is, I’m not so sure that’s the God I want to follow.

Which brings me in a convoluted way to the point of this post.  The more and more I hear from Christian Nationalists, I believe this is the God that they worship.   I’m beginning to wonder if they thought the Bible stopped at Malachi, and never went forward into Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, etc.  The New Testament introduced us to Jesus, the one God sent to save us all, but it seems that Christian Nationalists only want saving for a specific group of people – them.  They want the fires of Hell to swallow up anyone who doesn’t follow what they believe.  Ever since the gays came out of the closet, the people of color found a voice, immigrants stole their jobs or Fox “News” declared there was a war on Christmas, they’ve been disgruntled.  But now they have hope.

They now have a true savior, God has sent Donald Trump to save us all, to restore order to this country, to make America great again.  While I struggle with some of the writings of the Old Testament, I do firmly believe that God sent Jesus to provide us salvation.  And I believe that salvation applies to many, and I’m really not willing to predict who gets into Heaven and who doesn’t, but if there is some sort of test or if the key is through works, I’m afraid most of us would fail, and we wouldn’t get in.  I still firmly believe it’s through grace, and I’m very thankful for that.

Now this concept of God sending Donald Trump to save us kind of has me perplexed because I really don’t see many of the same qualities in Donald Trump as Jesus.  I can’t piece together the whole “God, Guns & Trump” with the Sermon on the Mount, something just doesn’t click.  I wonder if maybe, just maybe, if God did send Donald Trump, He may have sent him to destroy America?  If I were one of those who believed God sent Donald Trump, I would be concerned about that.  

Do I think it?  Oh, Heavens no!  I really don’t believe that’s how God operates, and besides, He has way too many more important things to worry about than the downfall of America.  Plus, He probably thinks we’re doing a pretty good job as it is.

Recently I saw some commentary from Glenn Beck about the Hamas attack on Israel.  He described how brutal they were, how evil, and “we do not serve the same God.”  Do we serve the same God as the Crusades?  Do we serve the same God as Nazi Germany, where they professed “God with us”.  Do we serve the same God as the Confederate States of America?  Do we serve the same God as the Ku Klux Klan?  Do we serve the same God as those who mercilessly murdered anyone who resembled a Muslim after 9/11?  It may feel good to believe we are better than those of other religions, but our history is also filled with many instances of cruelty and brutality.  I assume Mr. Beck forgot the words of Jesus, “he who is without sin, cast the first stone.”

While I may not agree with you in supporting Donald Trump (then again, I’m not really excited to support Joe Biden either), I have no issue with your right to do that, that’s politics.  But please, keep religion out of it, there is a reason we have a separation of religion and politics, and it should stay that way.  I wish when people tried to bring the two together, and create some sort of union between God and the United States, they’d look back at history and see how well it worked for Germany with Adolf Hitler.  

As far as the Christian Nationalists and God’s plan for this nation?  Again, I think they better hope that God didn’t send Donald Trump, I don’t believe that would be a positive thing for us.  But then again, they seem to want the God who would send 42 she-bears to tear apart little boys for a terrible insult to one of his prophets.  As for me, I’ll continue to follow, and be thankful for, the God who sent Jesus, whose words don’t seem to coincide with “God, Guns & Trump”.  By the way, this is from Matthew 5: 2-12, it’s in the New Testament for those who didn’t read that far:

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons[a] of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Really not a whole lot about “greatness”, whatever that really means.  If you’re hung up on making America great again, that’s great, but again, what Jesus talks about is poor, mourn, meek, hunger, thirst, etc.  Not many greatness descriptors, but again, Jesus was all about those that are lesser than.  He really didn’t seem to be hung up on greatness.

At the end of the day though, somehow, we all have to figure out how to come together and work together.  While I believe that Christian Nationalists are some of the most evil and hate-filled people in the world, they probably think awful thoughts about me too.  We have one country, one world, and we are really screwing it up.  Somehow, we have to figure out how to work together, whether we are Christian Nationalists, devoted followers of Jesus, Hamas, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Muslims, Hindus, Republicans, Democrats, it doesn’t matter, we are in this together.  

Yes, I’m probably completely delusional, we’ve been at war with each other since before Jesus walked the earth, nothing will probably change that, we will most likely destroy each other and our world.  But, I’ll reach way back to a poem by John Donne, which to me really hits home what this is all about:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”

If I succeed, and you fail, we all fail.  If you succeed, and I fail, we all fail.  We live and die together, it’s that simple really.  But then again, I’m just a nobody.  With a purpose.

Oh well, I should probably be prepared for some she-bears to come and tear me to pieces for insulting Christian Nationalists.