My Forever Echoes in the Dark

September has been...a tricky month. My heart has been sad, a lot. There's been a lot that has happened, especially in the last couple weeks, that has brought me to awful moments of tears and vulnerability, and I am just...exhausted.

There was lots of good in this month, weddings and birthdays and small joys like hockey games and packing boxes for my move and so on, but there's also been a lot of hard, sad stuff for me and for people I love very much.

It's hard, sometimes, to make room for hard sad awful feelings. It's so easy to just convince yourself that you can go and feel it later, that you have to shove it into a box and paste on a smile and keep going as if nothing is wrong and nothing hurts. After all, no one wants to sit with us in our sad, right?

One of the things I am really coming to value this week is the idea of just...sitting in the quiet with someone. Sometimes you don't need to have words. Sometimes, it's okay to not want to talk about things all the time, to just sit and know someone else is there, but that there's no expectations you *do* anything or solve anything or discuss anything.

'Abdu'l-Baha reminds us that "humanity is bowed down with trouble, sorrow and grief, no one escapes; the world is wet with tears; but, thank God, the remedy is at our doors. Let us turn our hearts away from the world of matter and live in the spiritual world! It alone can give us freedom! If we are hemmed in by difficulties we have only to call upon God, and by His great Mercy we shall be helped." (Paris Talks, pp. 109-110) So....maybe I can sit with God, quietly, and feel rested, too. 

A lot of this week, I've been trying to reframe my prayer and contemplative time (where I read the Writings, or other Baha'i related books, etc) as just...me sitting quietly with God and Baha'u'llah. I don't always have to say stuff, They know what's in my heart, and why I'm feeling the way I do, but it's quiet, and contemplative, and I can just exist, quietly, and breathe for a bit. I know the world will come back full force and require my attention again, but for those moments, it's okay that everything's not okay. 

My husband and I talk sometimes about how it's okay to just...need to be a lump in the blankets, to not be social so much and just want to cuddle quietly or just sit in the same room, doing our own things, knowing the other person is there if we need them. I've really come to value that, lately. It's not that we don't love each other enough that we're avoiding each other, it's that we love each other so much that we know that sometimes, we just need someone to sit with us, to let us be where we are and feel whatever we're feeling. 

So, dear friends, I ask the same of you. Check in with the people you love and care for. Ask them if they'd like to talk, or do something, or if they'd just like to sit with a cup of tea in the silence with you. Lean on each other. Love each other. One of my favorite illustrations from a Frog and Toad book sums this up nicely: 

Sometimes, that's all you need. 

Could I Rise Above the Flood

The world lately seems so angry and frustrated. Heck, I'm angry and frustrated too. It's hard not to be, not to feel powerless when there's things you need that seem to be constantly dancing just out of reach, when it feels like you try so hard and so long and nothing comes of it. It's hard not to feel like Charlie Brown and the football, a little. 

I've been working through one of the Junior Youth Empowerment Program (JYEP for short) books with a dear friend of mine lately - it's called Breezes of Confirmation, and it basically talks about the idea of putting in effort, and God confirming those efforts (framed mostly around growing up and figuring out what sort of career to follow, or what role you will play in your family and neighbourhood). It's aimed at 11-14 year olds, and honestly, I love it a lot. It takes this big scary idea of "how do I know I am on the right path", and makes it approachable.

So, in the midst of all this anger and frustration and not getting what you think you need, how do you sit with it? How do you stop from constantly feeling like every job rejection, every broken promise, every "we should hang out" that never actually results in seeing your friends, every time you try to do something nice and it falls flat, is like Lucy yanked that darn football away again?

Maybe you don't. Maybe you feel SUPER MAD about it for a bit, because, well, feelings are feelings, and it's okay to feel them. Maybe, if you're me, you ask your husband to go for a walk with you even though it's dark because you just want to get out of the house, out of the place that reminds you things aren't where you want them to be just yet. (We're moving in a few weeks, so things feel weirdly stuck and in-between right now.)

But then what? You have your anger squid moment, you get your ice cream, then what? How do you keep going? How do you know when God's saying "hey yo it's all good just wait a few" or "hey yes you are on the right path, it's just longer than you think" or "oh maybe you should turn left here at this stop sign"? 

A lot of it comes down to trust. We are reminded to "[n]ever lose thy trust in God. Be thou ever hopeful, for the bounties of God never cease to flow upon man. If viewed from one perspective they seem to decrease, but from another they are full and complete. Man is under all conditions immersed in a sea of God’s blessings."(Abdu’l Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 205.) And sure, it's nice to know we're immersed in that sea, but sometimes those blessings are hard for us to see. It's hard to have trust, but isn't that what faith is all about?

We gotta start with putting in the effort. If we don't give God a place to start, He's got nothing to work with. It'd be nice if He just dropped things in our laps, but as Abdu'l-Baha reminds us, "Make thou an effort that thou mayest take thy place under the sun and receive an abundant share of its dazzling light." If we just sit at home in the dark with the blinds closed...God can shine all the light on us that He can possibly manage, but we'll never see it. It's like...God wants to rain good things down on us, but we've got to be ready. As a friend put it the other day, if we're just standing on our porch in a raincoat and boots with an umbrella up, the rain can come down forever, and we'll never feel it. We'll be dry, but trees don't really grow well in deserts.

Heck, Baha'u'llah himself reminds us of this, in one of the Hidden Words - "O SON OF BEING! Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee. Know this, O servant." So, we do our best. We live and love and try and wait and maybe sometimes we do have a temper tantrum or ice cream for dinner or whatever it is that we do when we are just our most vibrating anger squid full of feelings, but God sees us, He sees us trying, and one of these days, we'll kick that football so fast and so hard it'll bounce into the next neighbourhood. 

Hope You Laugh More than You Cry

Summer's over, it's turning into fall, and it feels like everything is changing. The leaves are going to lose their colour, I'm starting to pack to move into a new apartment, my husband is looking for work (he immigrated here at the end of June)...so much is going to be different by the time the year ends. I've kinda been...swamped under it all. Work is tricky right now and it is taking a lot of my patience, and there are so many details to figure out with my move, and there are SO MANY boxes to pack. Plus, we're managing on one income right now (but God willing, not for much longer!). So much going on, and very few moments to squish it all into, let alone to just breathe and...not think about any of it.

Change is hard. I've lived in the same apartment in the basement of a house for almost 7 years, I know my neighbourhood inside and out. I know when the buses come and go, I know where the good bread is found, and the best spot to get coffee. Admittedly, I'm only moving 3 kilometers away, but still. New neighbourhood, different sector of my Baha'i community, different apartment (but no more laundromat trips! We will have on-site laundry!). New patterns of life, new struggles, new challenges, new joys and delights.

I'm trying to just sit with all of this change, and trust that God's going to see us through, as he always has. I might be saying Remover of Difficulties ("Is there any Remover of difficulties save God?  Say: Praised be God!  He is God!  All are His servants, and all abide by His bidding!") over and over and over (it's a nice short prayer, and I find it helps even as just a mantra to keep me chill), but that's because I know He's got us, and is holding us and guiding us through this. Even if I am shaking in my boots most of the time and have cried from exhaustion and stress more than I want to admit.

There's a quote I found recently from Abdu'l-Baha that I really like - "Man must turn to the light and not think that the form of the lamp is essential, for the lamp may be changed; but he who longs for light welcomes it from whatever source it comes." (Divine Philosophy, p. 33). It reminds me that in the end, it doesn't much matter where I live or what's going on, as long as I know where to find my light. Maybe it's a flashlight and not a big fancy Tiffany lamp, or it's flickering firelight or a single leftover birthday candle - what matters is that I know where it is and I look to it. So I carry a bit of God's light with me in the prayers I know and the quotes from the Writings that float in my head, and I fill myself with light during my Ruhi circles or Nineteen Day Feast or reading all of the Baha'i books I can get my hands on. I spend time with my friends and my loved ones, I take time for myself when I need it, and I remind myself that even if I was the only Baha'i on an island somewhere, isolated and alone, I have God's love and Baha'u'llah's guidance written on my heart.

So I can face all this change. I'm not doing it alone, and maybe right now there's more tears than laughter, but I'm making my way.