Grace-

A name present in at least three generations on the maternal side of my family.
A period of time to pay late bills before being penalized.

A short prayer many offer before eating. 

A way of moving, or being, with seamless elegance.

The 'no strings attached' love and favor that God has for each one of us. 

I don't know.

This last week of integrating 'gracefullness' into my life has been a challenge. By character I am not an overly graceful individual; and on Friday of last week I was, along with the rest of the world-wide Baha'i community, thrown back into a hectic and consuming post-Fast life. Since I have started this intense weekly focus on virtues it has been a challenge and a learning experience yes, but while fasting I also had a certain focus and commitment. Whenever my stomach would knot up in hunger pains, or I would go to grab a drink without thinking, I would remember that I am not eating or drinking, and then I would remember why, and then I would think of God, and then- just to have something a little more tangible and concrete to focus on- I would call to mind compassion, or acceptance. I found that I thought of grace only a few times this week, usually in the morning when I would read the page in my 'Sacred Moments' book, or sometimes when lying in bed at night, but rarely when I was in a situation where acting, thinking, or just being, with grace would have been appropriate. 

So what I am trying to get at in typically lengthy and evasive way is that I had little success with scratching the surface of what it really means to live with grace, and that I need to come up with tricks that will help me remember that I am first and foremost a spiritual being who needs desperately to focus more on the attributes of the soul so that I can be of some small benefit to humanity while in this world, and be a little more prepared for the next world. 

This virtue I moved on to yesterday is responsibility. Uh - oh. Maybe by figuring out how to really learn from these virtues and not just think about them I can claim that I am taking responsibility for my own spiritual self? We'll see. 

The Graceful Ones. 

                              

foot acceptance

So, after a week of feeling like the most difficult thing in my life to accept was the recent, yet noticeably permanent, residence of a big beach ball in my bathroom, God was able to hit me with at least one or two that really forced me to learn to accept with humour and grace- and just get over it. 

For the first three quarters of this week I actually felt like there was nothing that I had to accept that I couldn't. Not that I am the most accepting person out there, but just I guess, that I have a pretty easy and normal life. I have also never had any big problems with accepting myself. Sometimes I am not the most proud of myself etc., however accepting who I am has never been an issue for me. So, since I was finding that acceptance (on whatever level) was not a virtue that I really was having any growth with I actually had thoughts along the lines of 'One day my acceptance will really be tested because it has not yet. Perhaps God, you should begin to test my acceptance because I want to work on it, and I can't if I don't even have anything come up that it is a test for me to accept...' 

So la-di-da I carry on with my days. And then I decided to, finally, call my doctor and make an appointment to get my foot looked at- refer back to my post on december fifteenth, that broken toe- the toe has continued to ache since I originally hurt it in India. My doctor is out of town (are they allowed to go away?) so I went to the walk-in. All that I wanted was an x-ray requisition (most difficult thing to say out loud. Try it. x-ray requisition) so I could go and find out what was up with the achey foot. But instead, this balls-y walk-in doctor takes a look at both of my feet, pokes at them for a bit, asks me to stand and look down at my toes, and then asked me if my big toe has always looked like that, and I say, no, and then he starts throwing out all kinds of medical terms, and states that I have early hallux valgas, a.k.a. bunions. So yeah, bunions, that word just makes you cringe right? Well you should try walking with bunion-y toes. Oi. Something new I learned, bunions are just an inflamation or excessive growth of the bone and joint between your big toe and foot, and it is caused by everyday wear and tear. There is, apparently, nothing you can do about it, nothing that will make it better aside from surgery that will be needed within the next ten years once the pain is so bearable that I just can hardly walk. Yeah. 

So no kidding, I swear, I only had a gimpy foot from India, and then I was walking to the clinic thinking about how my acceptance has never been tested, and God was all, 'Okay then, let me give you something that I know will be hard for you to accept. I know, because I am the All-Knowing, that you walk everywhere, that you love running and dancing and hiking and wearing cute shoes and sandals, and I know that you stand all day for work so, let me give you bunions. Because you want to learn acceptance.' And poof he messed up my feet. No joke. 

On a less bitter note, my favorite quote this week from the book is about accepting others: 'In Buddhism, the word "suchness" is used to mean "the essence or particular characteristics of a thing or person, its true nature." Each person has his or her suchness. If we want to live in peace and happiness with a person, we have to see the suchness of that person. Once we see it, we understand him or her, and there will be no trouble. We can live peacefully and happily together."

I have found this week, that I have a much easier time accepting other people with all their strengths and weaknesses, than I have accepting things being 'wrong' with myself- as Linda Kaveling Popov says in her book 'Sacred Moments'- with humour and grace. The humour part is easy, but I think using humour is my way of not really accepting it. Evidently I need to find the balance of grace for a more complete acceptance; a great segue into this weeks virtue, grace.

compassion and conundrum

My week of compassion is over.

Thank goodness! Do you have any idea how hard it is to be nice during the fast? I mean yeah, sure, there are moments of profound spiritual insight, but I get cranky when I am hungry AND tired! Moments of profound irritability. Actually I am mostly joking. I quite enjoy fasting; I think that I jinxed myself the other day, I said that to a few people who I was talking to, and by about three o'clock I had the worst hunger cramps that I have ever gotten during the fast. It was like God had commissioned some one to curl up in my stomach and punch repeatedly just below my ribs for a couple of hours- just to say, 'Oh yeah, how much do you REALLY enjoy it?'. Don't worry, I survived, and continued to smile (grimace perhaps) at the world around me as I hunched over the counter at work.

And that was also the day that my little virtues book was talking about having compassion for oneself. Compassion is such a complex thing. It is a word that people throw around quite freely, but the more that I have tried to focus all my actions and thoughts into a compassionate nature, I have only become more aware of how unaware I am about the true meaning of this virtue. There have been a few instances in the last week where it has come to my attention that someone around me is crying quietly in need of some compassion- and no one seems to be noticing. But even tho I notice, I find myself unable to find the appropriate response.
One of the 'mantras' in the book this week was 'I take time to reach out to those who need help.' And my virtue building self is so young and immature that I am only able to recognize those who need help but reaching out to them to be there when they need to get over a wall in life is... hard! For me.

Something that I have done well tho is that I have not watched a single episode of the Real World since my last blog, but that is partly because it doesn't seem to be on when I am eating in the morning anymore. But also, let us say, that it is some self restraint. I have spent a lot more time reading, and I am almost done 'The World Order of Baha'u'llah' which is a fantastic book, but it has been making me realize how much I don't know- and how important- the recent histories of Islam and Christianity are. Perhaps until I am really studying something in school again, I will do some of my own studies on those topics. Perhaps.

Recently the thought of going back to school in the fall has been causing a lot of confusion in my life. I know that, God willing, I will be at UBC Vancouver in the fall, but I don't know what I will be studying. For the past couple of years I had been planning on doing a degree in Applied Mathematics and then become a highschool teacher. But then recently - for a few reasons - I have been pulled or encouraged into other departments. I have been contemplating doing a degree in Anthropology with a minor in Asian Language and Culture, primarily to learn some mandarin. But how do I decide? I can think of a huge list of pro's and con's for each side. This is exactly why I have applied to so many uni's over the past five years and gone to none. It is not that I can't think of anything to study, it's that I want to study everything and the pressure to choose and commit to that one topic for so many years is too much because I start thinking about all the other things that I won't be studying!

Conundrum.

Well the virtue of this week is acceptance. And I leave you with this thought (compliments of Linda Kavelin Popov) 'What test in my life have I accepted with grace and humour?'

disclosure and discovery

Since the Fast has begun I am finding myself awake- before the sun has made its way to my side of the world- and watching much too much television while I wait for the rest of the town to drink their first cup of coffee and catch up on the morning.
It is a little bit disconcerting that during this month of spiritual renewal, with the physical sacrifices of food and sleep that I am happily making, I find myself filling such a large part of my time with bad MTV reality television.
The time of fasting is a time to refocus our spiritual selves, and reconsecrate our physical and spiritual beings. So here I am writing, in an effort to harness my focus and draw myself away from the frighteningly addicting world of tasteless television- and because of a convincing post my friend recently made in his inspiring blog.
I have chosen two tools to help me thwart MTV and make my life my own again.
Tool one is blogging; tool two is a book called Sacred Moments by Linda Kavelin Popov.
This book has faithfully followed me-or been dragged along- to various countries and cities throughout the world; but in half the places I hardly open it. It is a book of virtues. It contains fifty-two virtues, one for each week of the year, so each day has a couple of inspiring quotes or insightful thoughts on a specific virtue.
So I am going to use the book to focus on a virtue and then blog about the way that it has affected me and then because I will feel obligated to blog about it I will actually do it and not just sit on this ridiculously soft and kooshy and comfortable sofa and watch channel 100 (yeah thats MTVcanada).
Todays virtue is compassion. And um, I guess that I don't really have anything to say about that yet because, all I have done today is eaten some food, done the dishes and watched a few episodes of the Real World- busted. Although I could without a doubt comment on the lack of compassion that the individuals in the Real World house have for each other. Is that backbiting?
Hm.
Well so instead of that, in striving to live my day with more compassion I will keep the following quote in mind:

"To "listen" another's soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being performs for another." - Douglas V. Steere