The Lies of Scarcity

When most of us talk about scarcity, we're not being honest.  Or at the very least, we are misnaming things.  Think about your friends, co-workers, yourself.  How often do you hear things like:

--I really want to but I just don't have time for ...

--I can't...

--There isn't enough ....

--I wish I had more...

-- We need....

--Not until...

The list goes on, but you know what I'm talking about.  It all sounds like we're pretty empty and exhausted.  But I don't think we are.  I don't think things are as bad as we make them sound.  So where's the disconnect? 

 My theory is kind of two-fold.  Before we get into that, a few disclaimers: I know that there are exceptions to everything I am going to say.  I also know that sometimes, realistically, the language of scarcity is also the language of truth.  But what's actually true and what we sometimes tell ourselves don't always match.  First, those phrases of scarcity sound an awful lot like excuses.  Most of the time, if you want something, you will make it happen.  You will stop wasting time, start shifting things around, and make it happen.  If you're not, it's probably because you don't really want it.  When we tell ourselves we can't do something because we don't have time/money/energy to do it, we're usually not being totally honest.  The truth is that usually we are choosing to spend that time/money/energy on something else.  We have a remarkable amount of control over those three things and when we're honest with ourselves, what we'll probably see is that it's not that we don't or can't, it's that we are choosing not to.  The truth is that we do have enough of everything, but we are not always comfortable with our choices about how we are spending what we have.  So what's the big deal?  It's that we create a false sense of scarcity when we blame the fact that we aren't prioritizing well on the illusion that we don't have enough.  

Scarcity makes us feel empty and anxious.  "We never have enough."  "We need more."  "If only, if only, if only."  It's a language of barriers, and barriers make us feel trapped.  So if you're feeling empty, you have to ask yourself what's filling your time.  Where are you pouring your energy?  When there's an imbalance, the problem isn't that you don't have enough-- God gave us all that we need-- the problem is that you're spending it wrong or talking about it wrong.  If you're pouring and spending on things that don't replenish you, of course you'll feel a sense of scarcity.  If you tell yourself you don't have enough rather than telling yourself that you have choices, of course you'll feel trapped! 

The answer is to decide how you are going to spend your minutes and dollars and kilowatts of soulfire and then OWN IT.  If you can't own the decisions you're making, maybe that means you're making the wrong ones.   If, instead of owning your decisions, you are saying you don't have enough for what you want, you need to take a critical look at yourself.  Why aren't you being honest with yourself about what you're choosing to do?  And if you don't like what you're choosing, what are you going to do to change your choices?

If you're feeling empty, do something that will fill you up.  Not sure what will fill you up?  I bet if Christ is at the center of it, you'll feel better.  If you can't walk away from something you just spent your time on and say "Yeah!" then it's time to evaluate whether you should choose to sink your time that way again.  A good question I like to post near my desk or work space is: "Is this what you really want to be doing?"  It helps me avoid some of those glazed-eye web-content-binges or foolish e-windows-shopping-sprees.  

I'm tired right now, so I don't think I'm giving these ideas the quality of thought they deserve.  I do have grading to do and one last essay to write.  But those will take longer and be less fulfilling if I work on them in the state that I am in.  I can try them in the  morning when I'm refreshed because I have time, plenty of time, if I don't waste it.  I need to be careful myself and watch how I talk about time and energy.  It's not about how much I have, but how and where I spend it.  Granted there are times where we relinquish some of our control to our children.  No one chooses to lose sleep over crying kids and then be unable to think clearly the next day.... but generally, we are in control.  We are blessed beyond measure to have the time and money and energy that we need.  God has given us the grace for this day and He will fill us with the goodness and love that make all things possible.   All we have to do is choose them.

Beauty Routine

According to one blogger, this should be THE BEGINNING your beauty routine:

I propose an alternative:

1. Cleanser

2. Sunscreen


3. Confidence

Analog, baby.

I saw this on Pintrest and I don't know what 30% of these even are.

I think I'm
a)old
b)crossing over into "veteran teacher" land
c) a late adopter
d)all of the above.

You can take this quiz on a scantron.  No grading cameras.  No on line assessments.

=)

Seasons

The trees in the valley are green, but man, I can see them quivering as they try to contain the burst of color that's underneath. 

Starbucks

Breezewood, Pennsylvania.

Starbucks.

August 2nd.

And in this crossroads of highways, tucked between mountain passes, an unlikely man is my barista.

In this town, homely, strangely made up, and pleasant people who drive down shale hillsides to come to work to wait on travelers passing through East to West, West to East.  They look like sensible, patient, mountain people. 

Plucked from the middle of a copse of American larch trees, this man aimed for stars and landed in Starbucks in Breezewood.  His California smile and manicured hands didn't fit  with the generations of coal-caked men who were his forebears.  No slow rocky drawl, his voice was pep and verve.  His eye contact more sincere, his gestures deliberate and graceful.  The careful wrap of waxed paper around a cherry bar, the regal posture as he wrote "latte w/ honey" on my paper cup.  He didn't belong in Breezewod.  But he did find sincere joy in each interaction.  Eyes the color of the evening mountain hazes and a voice smooth-ish like the underside of pitch pine bark.  His well-anchored and contented eye contact helped anchor me that evening.  I have thought of him often since we passed through and his memory reminds me to try to be as stately and sincerely content wherever I am.  Even as I say this, I am fully aware that "stately" is probably never a word that will describe me, but it's something to shoot for anyway, right?

Literacy

Kindergarten.  Week two.  She is putting her early literacy skills to work by making signs to keep her siblings out of their room.  I think I'm proud?

For the Love

For the love of quark-spin and chakras,
For the personality of each chemical element
(Antimony,Tin, Iridium, Colbalt, Gold)
For weather smells and well-lit clouds
For birds in formation
Dragging fall down from the North.
For soap on my skin
And a world without sin
For crickets and disobedient grass.
For pocked clouds and star haze,
Rebar and cement,
For aquaducts and high tension cables,
For cohesion and recoil.
For an infinity of leaves,
Electric arcs sparking
For poles and filaments,
Magnesium fires and helmets.
For chicken bones, for nitrogen, for the love.
I will.

A Day of Many Days

I'm sitting on the deck outside the upstairs bathroom right now.  I'm in my underpants and watching a gamboling humdinger of a lightning storm roll in.  Except for the glow of this here computer screen, it's great.  Ah the clouds just broke!

New scene: I'm lying on the floor beside Muffy's crib.  The window here faces a good part of sky and its proximity to leaves creates ocean sounds out of the wind.  You could be anywhere if you are here.  Sailing the high seas in your underpants, guided by glowy screens instead of a sextant.  Too poetical, maybe.  How about I'm just here.  A Helen in a rainstorm in the dark in her underpants and the front is passing through and my babes are all asleep.  And where I am is good.  It always is, if I make sure I'm fully there. <--That right there is a whole other topic for another post. Today is for writing about days of many days.

You have those days of many days, right?  So full of moments and conversations, adventures and tasks, that they seem like many days.  Today was one of those.  A week's worth of connections (some half made, maybe, to be picked up later), struggles, and just goodness and laughter, skin and the smell of children's hair on hot days, smiles from former students, oh and the disappointment in myself for forgetting one of my special one's names.  To be fair, he graduated two or three or four years ago, but I still should have remembered.  Even in the half light of the parking lot, I could see his disappointment. Poor kid.  He was a bright spot in my life that year, too.  Now he will think he was just forgettable, but he wasn't!  

The point is that I like the fullness of days like this.  I want to relive them sometimes, so I could space all the moments out and savor them a little longer.  Let the flavors roll around in my mouth before I swallow.  I listed some of them in my paper journal and more came and bells rang and a half list remains.

Last night, Chris and spent a few hours on the front porch after the kids were down.  In the course of our excellent, meandering conversation, we talked about how there are people in life we love but don't say it to.  Here's one of those times when I especially sympathize with men because our world makes it harder for them to verbally express love to friends.  But even as a woman, there are many relationships that ARE love, but the love isn't spoken.  It's too bad.

Remember those times when you were dating and you had that talk-- the one where you finally said you loved the person?  And your heart was beating in your throat somewhere and you weren't sure what they would say.  Part of you wanted to splash into a puddle on the floor and the rest just wanted to sing it out because it was real and it was love and you felt it.  Then you said it and you emptied and filled all in the same three syllables.  It really doesn't even matter how the other person responded because you said it.  You sat down and intentionally stated the words, eyeball to eyeball.  No casual "love ya."  The real thing.

I wonder why our friendships don't tend to give phrase "I love you" the place it deserves.  We might say it, eventually.  Your friend gets the flu and "Oh no!  Is there anything I can do?  Feel better!  Love you!"  or after a heart to heart you say goodbye and "Thanks for listening!  Love you so much! We need to get together more often!"  There's no denying that these are beautiful expressions, but I wonder what it would be like if we took the time to sit down with friends and confess our love.  I've had two friendships in which we did that.  One was a little more complicated of a relationship at the time, but that conversation solidified our friendship and gave it a foundation that has allowed it to last almost two decades.  The other was just a pure and simple long-time friend.  It felt so good to say the words in a serious way. I LOE you.  (That's an inside joke, not a typo).  And to hear them in a way that was intentional instead of in passing.  It made me love that friend even more just knowing that we took the time to say it in words.

There are a lot of people in my life who I do love.  I'd like to challenge myself to say it more.  To get over the fact that people just don't do that very often and get over the fact that it might be weird.  Frankly, if we all knew how loved we were, we'd probably go about life with more kindness, calm, and a generous humility that comes from feeling sure we are loved.  I challenge myself in this way knowing that I will still probably wuss out for a  while.  I mean, I love these people and the last thing I want to do is alienate them with declarations of love.  But then, who keeps their light under a bushel basket, right?  Can I get an AMEN?

Little pleasures

A rough past four or five weeks are blessings in some ways because,  in a need to stay afloat, I refocus on the many small beauties in every corner.  Looking at the beauty doesn't fix the big problems,  but it helps me calm down and be where I am.  And where I am is full of wonder, which is in every moment, floating above the worry,  the heartache,  the ummoored sense of being lost that chip away at my foundations.  Above it all is beauty.  I don't know if this is true,  but I think the more we look at the beauty, the deeper is roots go until eventually it penetrates even the depths of those negative feelings. I hope so anyway. 

These are the spike cream cones my kids and I made after school.  Truly sculptural. 

Flowers at a friend's home.  Garlic and mint. I love seeing artistic potential in the ordinary through other people's eyes.