“Gratitude is the heart’s memory.”  French proverb

I have generally not been a sports fan in life, but living with my husband for over 20 years and raising two sons has trained me in the importance of “the game”.  Tonight we shared a real loss as we watched the dreams of our star quarterback slip away with an injury to the knee. He stood on the sidelines watching his team lose their chance at a national championship.  This is the game of life we watched play out- the winning and the losing that defines our lives. I always tell my boys, especially after they lose, that you can’t ever win if you can’t risk losing.  The losing is what makes the winning real.

We can never imagine the full range of possibilities that can befall us in the games we play or the relationships that we live in. By default our imagination is limited by our experience and we shape the future pictures of our lives by what we hope will happen, rather than what could likely happen.   It is often the thing that you couldn’t imagine, that you often don’t see coming- even when it is barreling down on you like a linebacker, that ends up to be the defining moment.   Not being able to accurately predict our future and the outcome of the game, is what makes life so exciting and risky.

Recovering from loss takes great courage- especially when it happens on ESPN.  The young men on the team will come home today and figure out how to try again.  They will have to be willing to take the risk again.  Losing in private, with no one else is watching is not a lot easier.  Finding the courage to try again in the game of relationships, careers or athletic endeavors depends on our ability to access our heart’s memory.

It is through our heart’s memory, the place where we remember gratitude, that we find that what we have is enough and that we are enough even when we fail.  When we experience gratitude for both our own efforts and the efforts of the people around us, we can come back from our losses with courage.  This grace is the energy that is able to turn denial into acceptance, chaos into order and confusion into clarity.  Using the heart’s memory is what champions do after defeat and I think the only sustainable path to live a life that gives as much as it takes.  We realize that having the chance to play in the game is enough, even when we are left with less than the golden win.

This is the week we set aside to be thankful for the gifts of life and well being that is so easy to take for granted. This year consider being thankful for your heart’s memory- the inner store of loving thoughts and connections that has given you the courage to keep going.   Communicating your love is the essence of gratitude.  And gratitude is the essence of turning a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a day into a celebration of thanks.

I have many friends who not only rarely sleep with their husbands, they can’t even talk about it. I would go even further and suggest that most of their conversations probably move them further away from intimacy than towards it. Connecting with our verbal language has it’s limits- especially since men and women, don’t just speak differently, we also hear differently. This is why I urge all of my closest friends to explore an entirely different dialog, one where the spoken word is left outside the door, and the conversation is lead and answered with what some would argue is our true intelligence- the body.

Our bodies do have a profound intelligence that we rarely give them credit for . Emotions are not actually thoughts running around your brain, although this is how we often describe them. Actually emotions are visceral experiences that live in one’s body, as true as chills on a windy night or burning skin in a late spring sun.

A conversation without words is often times the only answer in a conjugal life. It took me a very long time to learn this. The countless ways that I would rephrase my frustration with my husband’s silences and perceived lack of interest was continuously lost on deaf ears. I’m not sure the messages ever even reached his ears, my expression and body language was loud enough for him to get my negativity toward him with out needing to hear a word.

Contrary to popular belief, these wordless conversations of the body, have nothing to do with being “in the mood” . In fact, if you haven’t been physically intimate in a while, then the mood concept is a moot point. A physical conversation requires a willingness to be vulnerable enough to be touched. To allow your body to truly feel someone with you, has nothing to do with sexual arousal, and yet with out this permission, sexual arousal is impossible.

Listening and asking questions with the body are skills we mastered as children. Some of these conversations will culminate in sexual pleasure, some may provide a physical reflection of the borders that keep you separate- in either case, the journey of opening up to your own body will change the conversation. I guarantee that by taking the conversation to the body you will hear something that words could not communicate. Physical conversations can only help to make the subsequent verbal conversations kinder and more meaningful.

When I teach about the Ecology of Love and talk about the water that lives between people I often use the term “showing up” to describe the flow that happens in relationships. In relationships, like the ocean, there is an ebb and tide to how we are present for each other, but if the water in the relationship is always out, then both people feel alone more often than they feel like there is someone at their back. Many people go through years in partnerships where the experience of loneliness is profound. It is something that I struggle with in my own marriage, each of us having a different sense of what togetherness means and how much of it we need.

Showing up for someone doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with long and deep conversations, in fact usually it is about the small details of life where showing up makes the most difference. The day I got a flat tire and my husband came and changed it in his nice work clothes, or the time when he needed a shirt washed and ironed, or the zillions of times when the kid juggling doesn’t quite work and he is willing to stop what he is doing to pick up. It communicates volumes of love when you are able to give up your own agenda to show up for someone else’s needs. It is at the heart of what it means to feel safe and loved in a relationship.

Lately I have been witnessing the demise of several relationships with close personal friends. Affairs and divorces always catch you off guard, even when you can see the breakdown of showing up for years before. It is easy to confuse co-existing and showing up- they can almost look the same when we grow accustomed to not allowing ourselves to need and be needed. Co-existing doesn’t have the stickiness factor that showing up for someone does, because it happens as a matter of course- not choice.

Showing up or not translates into all the dynamics of a relationship including how and what you communicate and whether you share a passionate physical love. It isn’t possible to really open yourself up with either the spoken language or one’s body if you don’t feel safe. And so little by little, we say less and less of what we really need to say and in our most intimate times we cover ourselves through distancing and not really being present.

Real passion in intimacy is the product of people who can take risks. It is very different than relying on and replicating how we did it before and it is the biggest way to show up for someone you love. Human sexuality is a mystery of epic proportions- there is no other single act which can so deeply fuse and connect two people so as to transform them and how they relate so completely. Which is why, whether my husband realizes it or not, every time he puts down his evening newspaper to join me in the daily grind of putting another dinner on the table he is scoring big in my ability to show up later that night.

Two other important points on showing up- don’t keep score. It doesn’t equal out like other human equations might and only serves to cut at the backbone of the relationship that you are trying to build. The point here is that each person shows up as they can and that both people know when it happens. And last, be grateful for however it happens and whenever it does, you are one of the lucky ones.

The sun was shining on me all weekend, maybe I was just short on Vitamin D, but I can’t put into words just how healing the hours on a warm sunny beach was to my soul. This is a small miracle on the Oregon coast. You never know what you will get in the little micro climate we call beach, but when it is glorious- windfree, sunny days- you take it as a blessing.

That and slowing down the pace enough to actually find the moment and suddenly the burden of family and growing children was a gift, the entire lens shifted and I could see through grateful eyes. That is the prayer answered, the moments when we can see our lives as the gift that they are. I would like to believe that I could have come to that place had the overcast skies never broken, but I know myself. It would have been too easy to keep wishing for what I didn’t have, lamenting how life wasn’t exactly how I wanted it.

You’d think we/I would grow out of that useless behavior by now. I have read enough meditation texts that I know deeply the waste of time my energy fuels with the discontented longing for life to be some other way. It is just a short trip from there to a tiny thought fueling a fast spiral into some familiar resentment. I have spent way too much of the last few months battling back to eventide.

So thank you to the sun, to the ocean roaring in and going out, to the warm soft sand under my feet. Thank you to a world which was just as I had wished it, so that I can remember how beautiful life really is- all the time, whether it is to my specifications or not.

I was reading about the recently disclosed letters of Mother Teresa during this coming to the light of mine and tried to imagine a woman who brought light and hope to millions of people during her lifetime, and who all the while agonized about her own personal connection to God. Was it a mask as she claimed in her darker moments, the smile and comfort that touched so many lives, or did she just not get that each of those connections was her being loved by God.

They referred to her 50 some years of searching as a crisis in faith, but I am not sure if I would agree, it might have actually been her triumph of faith that allowed her to make her ministry one of the great forces of love in history. It feels like a deep lesson to me, the girl who is always touting the power to sustain love- you don’t have to feel connected to do the work of connecting. Love is love whether we feel it or not. Believing in it, acting for it even when we most long for it- might be all we get- and every now and again- the sun is shining on us.

“Today, online groceries are legitimate businesses fulfilling about 1 percent of the nation’s $570 billion grocery bill. That may sound like a drop in the bucket, but business is expected to triple by 2008, according to Jupiter Research. Meanwhile, a report from the Food Marketing Institute reports that 5 percent of consumers — 3.7 million people — shopped online for groceries in the last year, up from 3 percent the year before.”

Shopping on-line for groceries was something that I had heard of but never tried so when www.wellnessgrocer.com came looking for volunteers at the GGG staff I happily offered myself up. I was curious to see if all the convenience that this promised would pan out and wondered if the shipping expense and materials would balance out the drive to and from the store.

As I perused the digital aisles, I remembered the years that I lived in a small and remote town with no access to organic foods and healthy snacks. Back then, I would drive for two hours to stock up on groceries for a month at a time – It would have dramatically changed my life to have on-line access to the foods I wanted to feed my family then. See this article – ‘Attention! Onlince grocery shopping is back’.

I am spoiled now. It isn’t just the abundance of organic vegetables and fruits that grow in the Willamette Valley and are available at open stands most days of the week but also the community of Natural Food stores that have made Eugene the place it is. For me, now food shopping is how I see my neighbors and slow down my day to think of sustenance.

There are conveniences and nice features of on-line shopping that I could see myself easily getting used to though- When you become a registered shopper, the site keeps track of your preferences. A nice way not to impulse shop and actually buy just what you need. Also there are great specials on the site if you are willing to stock up a bit.

I am glad to know that places like www.wellnessgrocer.com exist. They provide both great info for people learning about natural foods and access to organics to many places in the US that wouldn’t normally have them. This experience also made me realize how lucky we are when we have beautiful places to shop, to meet up with friends and to feel part of a community. Access to healthy organic food is not to be taken for granted.
See this Columns Campus News article about grocery shopping.

Sustainable love, the kind that we use as a compass to keep us connected to a vital, healthy and happy relationships are now being recognized as skills that might just save our species.

We finally have the scientific equipment to verify what we have always known: our drive to be social, to be connected to each other, is actually hardwired. Our need for connection and drive towards empathy is not a result of environmental influences but rather a function built into the brain itself. Daniel Goleman, PhD, a New York Times science writer and bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence, has taken his research to a whole new level and has published Social Intelligence.

Advances in neuroscience now allow us to observe brain activity while we are in the act of feeling. We can now witness that we are continuously forming brain to brain bridges- a two-way brain traffic system. In the same way that we can “catch” a cold from someone, we can “catch” their bad mood- or good mood. The significance of the relationship indicates how deeply we are affected and will stimulate actual physical consequences: hormonal response that magnifies stress (cortisol) or induces happiness (oxytocin).

Positive interactions and being surrounded by loving people actually works like a vitamin for your entire being. Negative relationships and interactions don’t just make us angry; they make us ill. As in other brain functions, this one also reflects our amazing neuro-plasticity. This is to say that our brains are continually building new connections- and no matter how young or old, anyone’s personality can be affected by other people. We literally heal each other through our social connections.

This news couldn’t come at a better time, as we continue to replace real interaction with techno-driven reality. Is it really dating when it is virtual? Are we connected to others when we only share words on a screen? More than any new technology, what we truly need is to develop a lifestyle which encourages deeper human connection. Overwhelmed with digital connectivity, it is easy to become oblivious to the people surrounding us. How often have you witnessed someone at a check out stand absorbed in some deep conversation on a cell phone and entirely oblivious to the person in front of them.

Real intimate connections don’t happen on the phone, in a text message or on IM: they require a real-life presence where we pay full attention to the people we live with. Empathy grows in our brain through eye contact, voice recognition, and touch–all of the time-intensive ways of knowing another person well enough that we can’t objectify them. Empathetic connections are the prime inhibitors of human cruelty. Scientists agree that the survival of our species depend on our ability to grow and develop this innate ability and a culture which encourages deep and true human connections.

So next time you’re feeling blue about the state of the world, turn off your electronic gadgetry and go for a walk, preferably holding hands with someone who loves you.

Ovid made this statement about the boldness of love thousands of years ago. I would say that it has never been more true or necessary. With Valentine’s Day just around the corner let me encourage that your celebration of love be a bold one, beginning with yourself. Start by feeling worthy of your own love. Give yourself a break and trust your instincts. Watch your favorite romantic comedy and laugh out loud or cry when the mood strikes you. Allowing our emotions to exist in the world is a profoundly loving act that opens life up to new possibilities.

If you’re lucky enough to be loving someone else this Valentine’s Day, celebrate your gratitude not just with store bought gifts, although a small measure of those is always nice. Take time to write a list of all of the remarkable qualities that your relationship brings to your life. Don’t expect that your partner should know. Even if they do, seeing it in your handwritten prose makes those thoughts real in a way that you can hold. Just so you know, money is not the issue here, a single rose or chocolate heart can speak volumes with a well written note.

If at all possible, pull out all the stops and actually invite someone into a candle-lit physical conversation. Change the sheets, rub each other with sweet smelling oils and feel the transformative gift of human touch soften the tension in your muscles as well as some of the hard edges that live between you. Breathe together and feel the weight of arms holding you, the warmth of bodies touching.

If you are living among the lucky few of us who have an arousal function in working order, be bold and try it out. Allow desire to course through you and wonder at the chemistry that exists, so often out of sight, but usually close enough that it can surprise us with both its sudden availability and intensity. The power of sharing sexual arousal and climax is unparalleled in this life. It heals our physical body, our emotional connections and transforms our deep sense of connectedness to both our loved one and life itself.

“I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” Vincent Van Gogh said this hundreds of years ago. Think of his bold acts of love, almost every painting a testimony to his witness of love in nature and among couples. How desperate was his love at the moment he cut off his own ear? We all share a little bit of that larger than life desperation about having a fulfilled love life. There is nothing more satisfying in life than feeling loved, nothing that makes us more courageous, more generous, more fully alive or able to express our deepest selves.

So be bold this Valentine’s Day and believe in the power of love.