Giving thanks for this life

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
- Henry David Thoreau

To your tired eyes I bring a vision
Of a different world,
So new and clean and fresh
You will forget the pain and sorrow
that you saw before.
Yet this a vision is
Which you must share
With everyone you see,
For otherwise you will behold it not.
To give this gift is how you make it yours.
- A Course in Miracles

I don't know about you, but some days the world can just break my heart.

Yesterday was one of those days when I was reminded of how ridiculously blessed I am, and stunned again by what people endure, how much suffering there is in this world. Where do you find meaning, where do you find love, when life feels bleak, when you are on the streets, when nothing in life has mapped out as you planned? How do you keep going? How do you find grace?

Yesterday I met Joseph, in his 80s, white beard, red face, a jack-o-lantern smile with a handful of crooked teeth and open spaces in-between. Fashionably dressed in a white plastic apron, white paper hat, and clear plastic gloves, I poured red Kool-Aid into Joseph's paper cup at Glide (www.glide.org), where my friend Reema and her mom Nora and I were serving meals Thanksgiving day. Joseph was cheerful and a flirt and promised me that if I liked older men, he'd take good care of me.

As the crowd filed in and filled the long tables, Reema, Nora and I poured Kool-Aid and cleared away empty trays with the remnants of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, ice cream. We shared Thanksgiving greetings and flirted with the cute kitchen volunteers who were scraping the trays. And we flirted with the men and women at the tables, because who doesn't want to be noticed, appreciated?

Young and old, black, white, Latino, Asian, they poured in, an endless stream of men and women, some weathered and beaten by the street life, some dressed like any professional you might walk by on a busy city street. I am often surprised by just how many look like you and me, or our friends, or our parents. A man in a San Francisco Giants hat and black sweatshirt, salt and pepper hair and mustache, a broad smile, could have been my dad.

Why I am the one privileged to serve, rather than wait in line to eat, why I get to put on a name-tag and a paper hat and plastic gloves and hand out meals, why I am blessed to live in a spacious apartment with hillside views in San Francisco, enjoy a full day of meals and good times with friends versus lining up outside Glide, is a question for which there is no simple answer. Life is a complex equation.

I come from a loving middle class family, have been blessed with an outstanding education and have so many resources and friends - I am SO blessed! - that this need never be a reality for me. I have never truly known need, hunger, desperation. I have cried of course, had my heart broken, had my own moments of darkness when I didn't know what to do or where to turn next. But they always pass.

My refrigerator is full, my apartment is warm, my Blackberry is programmed with names of friends and family who love me. I know I am not alone in the world. Glide provides that sense of family, shelter, community for those who have none, and it is for this reason that I keep returning. Glide brings joy and hope into the lives of those who have lost hope, helps them hold on, rebuild their lives, start again.

Yesterday I met Donnie at the church service at Glide. Tall, handsome despite missing some teeth, wearing his bluetooth headset, and just about bursting with energy, Donnie whispered Glide gossip to me in between dancing to the rousing numbers of the gospel choir and jazz band.

An ex-convict who'd turned his life around, he'd worked at Glide for seven years, rescued from the streets by Reverend Cecil Williams and the Glide family. He knew the inside scoop on everyone and was happy to share the stories with me. Donnie called out to the speakers and the singers on stage: "Preach it! Sing it! Amen!" We got up and danced together, held hands during the prayers. "I was saved by grace," he told me. "I was saved by grace."

Later that day, I handed out meals with my friend Andoni as part of "Operation Turkey Day," organized by a caterer in Marin who prepares 500 turkey meals in biodegradable paper boxes with the help of 40 or so friends, and passes them out on the streets of downtown SF. Every box was hand-decorated in colorful marker with a Thanksgiving message, holiday greeting or positive words: Joy. Yes. A simple red heart. We passed out boxed lunches, juice boxes and clean white socks. In less than 20 minutes, 500 meals had been distributed. So many hungry people.

As an experiment yesterday, I skipped breakfast and lunch just to see what it felt like to be hungry. My stomach churned and I felt a little nauseous, but I knew I had Thanksgiving dinner coming up with friends at 4:30. No real hardship here.

At 2:30 I broke down and ducked into Sears Restaurant on Powell Street to order up a steaming plate of fish and chips, just because I could. I was craving fish, and had my wallet in my pocket, and there was nothing stopping me from ordering a big plate, pouring vinegar on my fried cod, dipping french fries into tartar sauce or ketchup.

The restaurant was about half-full on Thanksgiving day, with couples scattered around eating plates of turkey and all the fixings, most of them in silence. Companionable silence? or lonely silence? I find it striking sometimes how many of us seem alone or lonely even in a room full of people. At most of the tables, with a few happy exceptions, there seemed to be an absence of laughter, of joy. Even with so much, people are lonely.

And here I sat alone dipping my french fries in ketchup and taking in the scene. Perhaps to stave off my own loneliness, I called my family who were gathered for a meal in New Jersey, across the country. I talked to those I love who are far away, as the phone got passed from my mom and dad to brother and sister, Grandmom, aunts and uncles, cousins. They missed me. They love me. They can't wait to see me at Christmastime.

I ate half my meal, boxed the rest, and offered it to the first man I saw sitting on the street. His face and hands were raw from the sun and street living. He was probably younger than me, but missing most of his teeth, ragged, looking bereft. He nearly broke down when I offered him the meal, red eyes shining. "But I'm not allowed to ask women for nothing!" he protested.

I felt the heartache of a man holding onto a promise he had made to someone, words that still held meaning for him, even when he had nothing else left. "But I gave it you," I said. "You didn't ask."

"Thank you ma'am, thank you ma'am, thank you ma'am!" he shouted.

Two hours later I headed to the home of Betty and Ernie, friends of mine in their 80s who are my "adopted grandparents" in SF. I wrote an article about Ernie, a retired sign-maker who hand-crafts carnival games, for a local paper and we became fast friends. They told me to consider them "like family." When I decided to stay in SF for Thanksgiving this year, versus flying home to be with family as I usually do, they invited me to their home to share the holiday meal.

I poured miniature marshmallows on top of the bubbling sweet potatoes for Betty before she popped them and the wheat rolls in the oven. I whisked instant mashed potato mix into a boiling pot of water, milk and butter until it was thick and creamy. Ernie set the table and poured us glasses of white wine.

Four of us ate dinner together - Ernie, Betty, me and their son Bob, who is an alcoholic in his 40s who still lives at home. "I'm an isolationist," he told me. He holes up in a little cluttered room in the back of the house. During dinner, he got up often to refill his beer glass.

"This is the first time I've had dinner with my parents in about two years," he told me, when Ernie and Betty got up to get the pie and clear the plates. "I have nothing to say."

Yet he kept up a steady stream of conversation, as we sat and talked for four and half hours, the whole family, about politics and spiritual practice and the general state of the world. Bob is widely read, but lives in his own world. His body has been ravaged by the alcohol abuse, nose red and pocked, teeth brown, legs skinny in ragged jeans.

He still has dreams. Don't we all have dreams? After dinner, he offered me a shot of tequila from a bottle that he said he'd found on the streets of Mexico years ago. He told me about his dream - to be a war correspondent in Iraq. He'd served in the army years ago and traveled, and felt he'd have a unique perspective to offer. "How do you think I could get there?" he asked.

I told him my journalistic work was much more local, stateside, and that I didn't know the path to get there. What can you say? He drank himself silly, taking a slug directly from the bottle. "I shouldn't be drinking this," he said.

"I guess you don't know much about my profession now," he said. "I work in commodities." He recycles bottles, scavenges on the streets, picks up an occasional odd job - gardening or painting - to buy his bottles of beer. This is his "career."

We all have dreams. We all have stories about ourselves and our lives and how we've ended up where we are, and when it's too hard to face the reality, some turn to booze, or sex, or money, or food, to try to fill the hole inside. We all feel lost sometimes and we all have our own ways of coping.

Some of us are blessed with better coping mechanisms, intact family structures, good work that pays the bills and then some. We have so much, some of us, that we can afford to take fancy vacations to far-off places, buy gifts for our friends and family, take a day at the spa, sit at home and make art.

I am one of these. I go away on yoga retreats. I’m going to Argentina to visit my sister for Christmas. I am privileged beyond belief to be able to sit here in a warm home, keys clicking as I type this, hot cup of tea beside me, a closet full of clothes, shelves full of books, walls hung with art collected from my travels around the world. I do not take any of this for granted.

I have been blessed with joy and abundance in my life, with peace of mind, and I do my best to give that back. Some days I feel like there is so little I can do to make an impact, with so much suffering in the world.

But I do what I can, where I am, with what I have. I shine my light because I feel that it is my duty and responsibility in this world to give back, and it is my joy. I give because it replenishes me. I shine, because I can.

And I choose to focus in my own life on all the JOY - my family, my friends, my writing, my dancing, the beautiful city where I live, all the blessings of every day. What we focus on increases. The Buddha teaches that in this life there will be pain - sickness, old age (if we are lucky enough to live a long life!), death. We can't escape from the reality of life in this body.

And yet, he also teaches that suffering is optional. It is possible to find freedom in our own lives from the suffering created by our own thoughts, and to share that sense of freedom with others. That is my practice and my path, and I do my best to walk it every day.

I send my love to all of you today, who are the true blessings in my life, and ask that we all just remember on this holiday how very blessed we are, and that we reach out with compassion to others in the world who are suffering and broken, when we can. That we shine our light and share our joy, those of us who have so much.

That we do what we can to make others feel less alone in this world.

May you have a blessed holiday season, and always know that you are loved.

Lisa Powell Graham, November 2007

Journey inward: six days of silence in the Santa Barbara mountains!

"Life unfolds chaotically and magically."
~ Dina Amsterdam, yogini and spiritual teacher

"All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt."
~ Charles M. Schulz

I spear a piece of fruit, and lift it to my mouth. Papaya. Another bite. I name it: Blackberry. Slowly I chew and swallow. The California sunshine warms the air and my bare skin. I am up above the cloudline, and I gaze out over the Pacific Ocean at the foot of the cliffs below me. More slow, delicious bites.

I name them: Pineapple. Nectarine. Green apple. Raspberry. I have drizzled whole milk yogurt and coconut on top of the fruit. I have sprinkled California raisins on top. How can there be so much sweetness and flavor in one bowl? Each bite is a small burst of pure pleasure in my mouth.
What could be more sensuous ~ and sensual ~ than a silent yoga and meditation retreat?

Six days of silence, yoga and meditation has a way of awakening the senses that have been dulled by busy-ness, the buzz of too much thinking, too much living in the mind. Re-immersion, my friend Will called it. Re-immersing yourself in the true life, the world beyond the confines of our thinking mind.

There is something about practicing zazen (sitting meditation) and yoga for six hours a day that shakes you out of your thinking mind so that you re-arrive, expectant and overly sensitized, in your physical body. Everything tastes better. Your nerve endings come alive. Frankly, being on retreat is sexy. At least, this is how it works for me.

It seems paradoxical because the Buddhist path also teaches that overindulging in sensory pleasures is one of the ways we can distract ourselves from our true purpose, one of the ways we bury our feelings and "escape."

Yet feeling truly present in the body and the moment makes every moment beautiful, the pleasures of simply being alive intensified. I truly feel and experience the world around me. I am not anasthetized to its pleasures. Hallelujah, Amen!

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the grounds where we are practicing on this retreat are rolling, green, flourishing. We are perched on the cliffs above Santa Barbara, California, with panoramic views over the city and the Pacific Ocean.

Jane Fonda once owned this land, years ago, and the current owner graciously makes the land available for retreats like this one, providing the opportunity for people to reconnect with silence, peace, themselves - their own sense of inner stillness and expansiveness.

We are practicing on sprawling acres of green land, laced with flowers, trees, breathtaking cliffside sunset views. There is a pool near the edge of the cliffs, and a hot tub perched right on the edge where you can contemplate the cosmos at night while soaking in bubbles, muscles massaged by firm hot jets of water.

There is a pond on the edge of the grounds where you can lie on a raft (clothing optional!), letting the sun warm and dry your bare skin, and where you can swim right up to a patch of lotus flowers and drink in their sweet fragrance. I plucked one to decorate the altar in the meditation room, adding my own perfumed offering symbolizing the Buddha, to the collection of flowers, rocks, and scraps of papers scrawled with handwritten notes that were already there.

Here on this lush land, 30 of us circle each other in silence every day, on the same grounds, sharing the same yoga practice room and teacher, but each locked in our own inner world. Some happily, some not so much so! We all ride waves of bliss and a spectrum of other emotions here, from sadness to numbness to anxiety to fear. Our teacher, Dina, talks us through the periods of daily yoga and meditation to guide us, but we remain in silence for a full four of the six days we are here, dipping into it again briefly on the last day.

Incidentally, many, many people who have known me over the years, who know that I am a Myers-Briggs ENFP (a big extrovert!) might wonder, and justly so, how I could possibly remain totally silent for four full days. Amazingly, to me as well, it is much simpler than I ever imagined, and more replenishing. It is peaceful and calming to be in such a quiet space, and to work on continually quieting the mind. It is wonderful to see what arises in such a space.

Sometimes I step outside myself briefly to watch all of us here, and imagine how odd we would look to someone just visiting - we walk around in silence, eat meals at round tables without making eye contact, circle around each other as we make our way to hike the trails or lie in the hammock, never greeting one another. No waves, no hellos, barely even the faintest of smiles dancing on someone's lips. We exchange no signals to indicate that we are in communication with one another.

Because we're not - for these six days, our job is not to relate to the world, as we incessantly do on the outside, but to relate to ourselves. To journey inward. I wish everyone could have the chance to experience this at least once in a lifetime.

It is not all fun and games here. When entering deeply into silence, we are often forced to force whatever unwelcome companions we've been locking away inside. What fear don't you want to face? What part of you feels most unloved? Chances are, it'll float right to the surface while you're sitting cross-legged on your meditation cushion, or upside-down in Downward Dog.

On this retreat, for me, that meant facing the fact that I tend to avoid emotional confrontations. Perhaps from some deep-seated desire to make everyone happy around me, to be liked, to have everything be "okay" all the time, I have had a tendency to procrastinate sometimes on dealing with issues that instead percolate underneath the surface, until they reach their eventual boiling point and spill out into the world.

Of course, when I avoid dealing with troublesome situations or emotions, I instead have to live with fear and anxiety in the interim of how things *could* turn out. Often, these "meantime emotions" are much worse than whatever happens once I actually face my fears, as I have seen borne out time and time again, when I confront things and what was a source of anxiety resolves itself, melts away.

Suddenly, facing myself in silence here at the retreat, avoidance just doesn't feel like any kind of solution anymore.

I also face the fact that I have not always been great at loving myself no matter what. I profess to want to practice unconditional love in this world, and the truth is that if I am to do that - it has to start with me. I have to love myself even when I'm tired, down, sad, angry, blue, worn out. I have to love myself when I'm performing at the top of my game, when everything is going my way, AND when it's not.

This means changing patterns of aspiring toward impossible standards of perfection, and then beating myself up when I (of course!) can't reach them, which has been a long-standing pattern of mine. Retreat brings me face-to-face with myself again and I see what I need to do. Love myself first. Love myself completely, no matter what.

It is clear that this is what I am to learn right now, what life needs me to learn in order to take the next steps in my life, and be transformed... Who knew it could be so hard to be truly tender and kind to yourself, when it comes so easily for many of us to love others?

It is like I am developing real intimacy with myself for perhaps the first time ever by being brutally honest with myself, but at the same time doing so with gentleness and kindness. I am looking at myself in the mirror with love, but am also able to say - this is how it is, this is who you are, accept yourself, love yourself!

I find myself wondering why it can be such a challenge for women in particular to love ourselves completely. Of course, we are bombarded with voices in society that would have us believe that we are not enough, we need to be skinnier, prettier, we don't look like this or that model or have the thighs of a sixteen year old anymore, and therefore are not truly beautiful, not enough.

The truth is the opposite -it is our unique qualities that truly make each of us beautiful. Why can't we all learn that sooner? Why so many years of suffering?

Retreat becomes a place where we are tested, where we learn to sit with our own uncomfortable edges, face our own fears. It can be difficult to sit with unpleasant emotions.

We are so accustomed, as a society, to fleeing from them by turning to television, alcohol, food, sex, or anything else that will numb us from truly feeling deeply whatever most hurts, whatever feels shameful. There is a sudden liberation in learning to accept the wide range of human emotions we all experience, and not only to accept, but to embrace this range.

First, we have to learn to sit still. "No fidgeting," says Dina, her voice floating disembodied from somewhere in the front of the room. "I am the fidgeting police."

I am still. My eyes are closed. My hands are resting gently, palms face down, one on each knee. I am sitting cross-legged on the edge of zafu, or meditation cushion, my coccyx bone raised about three inches off the ground to give my spine more length and elegance. My left ankle is positioned snugly in front of my right ankle, knees wide, in a sort of modified lotus position.

There is a small gnat buzzing around my head and I resist the urge to swat at it. This time is all about stillness. Turning inward. Not giving in to the sometimes intense desire to move, shift position, itch. The body sometimes sends out tiny red flags of urgency. Move now! Scratch me now! Here, our job is to not move. Not to fidget.

Of all the perils of meditation, perhaps the most treacherous is the foot-falling-asleep. When you sit for 45 minutes in cross-legged position, the foot can become a numb lump, something that feels heavily attached to the body, but not of the body. Pins and needles. A dull sort of tingling. It can overtake you so that you feel that you will not survive your foot falling asleep.

This is where you learn to conquer your mind, where you learn that sitting with discomfort actually will not kill you. We can endure discomfort. We can endure unpleasant emotions. We can face all of this with equanimity. (Who knew?) After all, it's temporary.

And we are not the emotions that surge and swell through our body, but something deeper, the container that holds them, the peace at the core. We are not even this body! It too is a vessel for the spirit that we are. That is what the great sages tell us, and it is what I believe, and it is what this practice ultimately teaches us.

Soon enough, Dina rings the bell to end the meditation session. The foot, with some shaking to restore blood flow, slowly wakes up again. And the rewards of sitting still and training the "monkey mind" to be still are so great.

For me, it is the way I return again and again to the center of peace inside me (we all have it!). It is how I train and remind myself to listen to my intuition, to feel what my body is telling me to do when making key decisions in my life, vs. just analyzing everything, turning possible solutions over and over anxiously, with my overworking, thinking mind.

In this place of spaciousness, in stillness, real love and beauty can arise. On this retreat, during our last meditation sit, just before Dina rings the bell to end our second of two 15-minute sits, this vow rises up inside me: "LIVE WITH MY HEART WIDE OPEN." It is what I take as my instructions from myself to live out in the world once I leave Laurel Springs Ranch and return to everyday life.

At the end of the meditation, I also visualize flowers blooming inside of me. It brings to mind the beautiful poem by Galway Kinnell that Dina often reads on her retreats which features the line: "Everything flowers from within of self-blessing."

I flower from within of self-blessing. I bow to honor the divine in me, and in all of us. Namaste. Shalom. Peace.

Pura Vida - back to the simple life in Costa Rica...

"Should we pick the bananas on the way home?" I ask. It is dark. We are walking the trails to the right of the catarata (waterfall) in the middle of the Monteverde Cloud Preserve in Costa Rica. We walk single file, my sister Carrie in front, her husband Pablo behind me.

Carrie and I wear the kind of headlamps that miners wear, illuminating 15 feet ahead of us on our path. We navigate carefully, slipping sometimes on large tropical leaves or patches of mud, picking our way over stone paths, holding on trees and sometimes each other.

All around us, night sounds: birds, crickets chirping, the sound of rushing water. Occasionally Pablo howls or whistles behind me in response to an animal call. "A little further to go," says Carrie, as we walk up and down muddy steps, across rocks, over more slippery yellow leaves. The canopy of trees overhead obscures the moon.

When darnkness fell, we had been sitting at the mouth of the waterfall, by the pool at the foot of a 100 foot cascade, but when the packs of bats came swooping down overhead, we scrambled back to the path and headed home.

We feel our way, the light spilling ahead of us on our path, up and down and around, across log bridges, rocky stairways and paths, forks in the road. I couldn't figure out how Carrie and Pablo knew the way home so well, but it is a path they had walked many times before. To me, it stretched on and on in the dark... until we finally reach a meadow that looks familiar to me.

We walk through it and then through the banana trees. At the end of the corridor of banana trees, Carrie picks six green bananas to fry for our dinner, passing up the plantains this time. Overhead the clouds slide across the star-pricked sky to reveal the moon.

Bananas in hand, we walk back toward the cabin, ducking underneath the barbed wire fence. "Home sweet home," Carrie says as we approach the small wooden cabin, painted aquamarine on the outside, with two travel hammocks swinging on the porch overlooking the mountain and valley views beyond.

In the mornings here, there are hummingbirds, butterflies, sometimes even a pack of white-faced monkeys flying through the trees next to the cabin. Sometimes they hang around outside long enough for us to catch a quick out-of-focus picture, but if you get too close, they vanish into the treetops. You hear the wish-wish-wish sound of leaves rustling at the tops of the trees, and suddenly the fast moving climbers are out of sight, gone.

The variety of the animal species residing here is amazing - from the resplendent quetzal to the basilisk or "Jesus lizard" that walks on water to the shimny honeycreeper (blue bird) to the famous large blue morpho butterflies, an otherworldly royal blue on one side and camouflage brown with a big fake eye on the underside (they are my favorites).

Inside the cabin there are hundreds of varieties of bugs it seems, crawling and flying around - the cabin is charming, rustic, but not airtight or bugproof. When I first arrive, my sister warns me about the scorpions. "Don't worry," she says. "They're not the lethal kind."

Once or twice a day, she takes a bucket and a kitchen spoon and scoops a scorpion off the wall or floor and carries the bucket outside to deposit it on the grass or near the compost heap.

I never thought I'd be so casual about scorpions, but somehow I don't give the bugs here a second thought, content to settle into a simplified life for a while. We spend a week together in this cabin, where there is no hot running water, and no refrigerator.

Preparing meals takes a while, and it's something Carrie and I do together to pass the time while we visit. Carrie and Pablo have greens and veggies delivered to the house twice a week, and we cook up root vegetables and rice, or curried lentils, or black beans with onion and hot sauce. The cooking supplies are limited of course since we can't have perishable items - dairy or meats - only veggies, beans, grains, dry goods.

Somehow this environment brings out the creative cook in me and I find myself making extravagantly delicious dishes with simple ingredients: spicy curried lentils with lemon rice and fried candied sweet potato slices. Pasta with fresh basil and tomatoes and garlic, salted just enough.

Somehow when we cook in the rainforest with simple ingredients on a two burner stove, and you're very hungry, the food is twice is delicious. Simple. Good. Pura vida.

This is the slogan for Costa Rica, the tourist-friendly motto - Pura vida - and it fits here. We wake up when we wake up, cook breakfast (oatmeal, or granola with powdered soy milk, or fresh fruit) then walk to the river to swim, bathe, lie on the rocks basking in the sunshine like the lizards that slither by.

We take longer walks sometimes to the EcoLodge in the center of San Luis, where we can check the Internet, interact with other visitors and the naturalists who travel here from around the world to work at the lodge, giving tours of the wildlife.

We walk up to the waterfall. We visit and talk for hours, and nap when we feel like it, and take sponge baths with hot water heated on the stove in the middle of the day sometimes. We read in the hammock. It's a leisurely, beautiful, simple life.

After a week in the cabin, we head to town to try out some of the organized rainforest activities: flying along the zipline 400+ feet up in the air, walking on suspension bridges over the canopy. I take a ride on 11 ziplines, including one on which you are zipping along at up to 40 miles per hour over the trees. It's exhilirating and not the least bit scary, as long as you don't let yourself think about the risk factor. (As with flying, which I do often, I choose to embrace as a miracle the fact that I'm shooting through the air at 600+ miles per hour in a metal tube, and landing safely, versus thinking about what could go wrong). I don't think about the risk involved, and therefore I have a blast.

By the end, Pablo and I are muddy and happy, splashed with mud and water from the trees when the rain kicked in after the first two ziplines. I recommend that everyone try flying over the rainforest, hooked into a harness, in the sun and rain.... Nothing quite like that sensation.

We then headed to Rincon de la Vieja, one of the volcanoes on the mainland, where we stayed in a picturesque cabin, surrounded by colorful gardens, the cabin walls spilling over with a luscious fuschia tumble of bougainvillea. We swam in the waterfall and soaked in hot sulfur springs.

I nearly passed out when we soaked and sniffed too close to the source of the sulfur fumes, hallucinating for a minute - strange people were talking to me in my head until I snapped out of it and entered the real world again after about 30 lost seconds. Be quite sure you're not allergic to sulfur (apparently, I am!) before trying this trick at home.

Then, we were off to spend the remainder of the last week in the cozy little Pacific beach town of Playa Samara. We stayed in a cabin right along the beach, right next door to the surfer school where cute young Tico (short for "Costa Rican") Rasta-styled, dreadlocked, surfer boys lounged and chatted all day long, occasionally interrupting their endless conversations to teach a lesson.

We drank strawberry margharitas at bars along the beach, including my favorite place, Shake Joe's, which featured comfy bed-style couches and hammocks to lounge in with friends while eyeing the other customers in the hazy evening light and sipping drinks with tropical fruit and little paper umbrellas.

I soaked in the sun, slathered head to toe in SPF 30 or higher of course, and swam in the warm Pacific aqua blue and clear Pacific waters. I got blonder by the day, my red hair picking up golden highlights in the sunshine.

We woke up when the sun or breeze or our internal clock woke us, fell asleep to the sound of the surf crashing at night, lounged about on the beach or in the hammock during the day, ate sumpuously full plates of tropical fruits every morning, and sometimes sipped fresh coconut milk. If this is not relaxing - what is???

When caught in the whirlwind of our normal busy, buzzing lives, few things are healthier I think than slowing down, taking a break, getting back to basics. The simple and pure life in Costa Rica was the perfect way to recharge my batteries.

Perhaps you are not as fortunate as I am to have a sister living in Costa Rica, as Carrie was for a while, and granted, that helped make this a possibility for me. But if not in Costa Rica, build some pura vida into your own life wherever you are, by taking some time just to slow down, relax, unplug the computer, turn off the Treo, to just enjoy some peace and quiet, to just enjoy the company of the people around you.

Luckily, as I have learned again and again, the world keeps spinning if I step out of my work routine for a while. My work is still waiting for me when I return home. But I am calmer, happier, more peaceful, more sane.

And that is a blessing, for me and everyone around me. So, with apologies to Paris and Nicole, whose show I will never watch, here's to living the simple life...

One love

It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
~Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It's Valentine's Day, and I'm single, and I'm a veteran of one marriage that, like most marriages, had some good in it, some sweetness and some happiness. Yet it didn't work, it fell apart, it ended. Ah, love...

The past year, when my ex- and I filed for divorce, was filled with a lot of grief and guilt, and a lot of blessings too, like my travels, the sale of my house, my friends around the world, my work. I have spent a lot of time exploring what went wrong in my marriage, and exploring concepts of love. What does it mean to me? What do I want from love? Or, the flip-side - how much love do I have to give?

A lot, a lot. Love, in its deepest form, is boundless. There is room enough in my heart for all six billion people on earth - although, of course, I can't marry all six billion, or even speed-date all six billion (or even the three billion with the y-chromosome). Now, putting this capacity for boundless love into practice is another question.

I do believe we all have an endless and divine capacity to love yet it's generally easier, and very normal and human, to constrict ourselves, to withhold the love we give, as if there wasn't enough to go around, as if we'd run out. When by giving it, it only grows...

This is hardly an original thought of course; ask the Dalai Lama, Buddha, Jesus, any old guru or prophet you meet on the street, and they will agree. It's just that this is the time in my life when I am more ready to finally live it, to at least try to put this into practice in my life...

For me, love has expanded this year well beyond the concept of romance, where it was stuck on pause and rewind for a while. Don't get me wrong: I, like most of us, still want the soul-mate, passionate lover, best friend, all rolled into one.

I want a partner on the spiritual path with whom to share the joys and lessons, with whom I can contribute to the world, make a difference and give back, and also (ahem) with whom I can enjoy a good roll in the sack. Maybe some of you have that today already and if you do, God bless! Celebrate it!

I'm still searching, but I live a life filled with love in so many ways. I'm reminded every Sunday of what it means to really put unconditional love into action when I walk into Glide Memorial Methodist Church, where the sign above the door as you enter from the meal hall reads, "To be spiritual is to love everybody."

Glide puts that into action... Everyone is welcomed at Glide, no matter your ethnicity, religion, sexual preference. As they say, transgendered, transexual, even trans-bay are all welcome (okay, non-Bay Area residents, this last one is an SF insiders' joke!).

At Glide, they serve more than one million meals a year to those in need, run recovery programs, clinics and shelters. You may have seen the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" featuring Will Smith that tells the true story of Chris Gardner, who went from being a homeless single father on the streets of SF to a millionaire Wall Street broker. He credits Glide for getting him back on his feet again.

Glide has a million more stories of redemption and grace, and I show up every Sunday to hear the stories, to be blessed by the spirit of joy in the church, to learn again and feel in my bones how very blessed I am to be healthy, alive, happy, to have a home and good food to eat and so many friends. I have so much more than so many on this planet... We are all so abundantly blessed, and it's easy to forget that sometimes.

Yet having a home and food and money and other external blessings don't guarantee a happy heart. "Loneliness and the experience of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty," said Mother Teresa, who knew something about poverty. Rev. Fitch shared this quote with us, and I watched one member of the choir weep, her eyes rimmed red, as the woman next to her wrapped her in her arms.

He challenged us all to reach out to someone who was lonely, someone who was hurting, to stop judging, to stop thinking only of ourselves, to help someone heal. There is no greater gift than unconditional love. As Reverend Fitch said, "When we judge people, we have no time to love them."

I do an exercise sometimes, inspired by a book by Wayne Dyer, while walking down the street. I try to simply send unconditional love to everyone who passes me. I was honestly surprised to find, when I focused my attention on it, that I pass so many quick judgments about people, that I can within seconds see someone and size them up, pass a judgment about whether or not this is someone I would want to talk to...

Judging by appearances is so easy to do, and we're so trained to do it by society, marketing campaigns, flashy billboards and glitzy advertisements. I think a lot of us at one point or another have had an idea in our head of what our mate is supposed to look like, or maybe we've fallen into step with certain friends because they look or dress like us (what teenager hasn't done that at some point, wanting to belong?) but it's so often a false construct. People so often surprise us.

Yet it's still a challenge, I find, to send love to everyone I see - but it's a challenge I want to continue to take on. Who doesn't benefit from some simple kindness, loving thoughts, a little attention? We all want to be noticed, appreciated.

That is not to say that we have to like everyone, or should even try - we all have different sensibilities, we all have different tastes. And there just isn't enough time to be friends with the whole planet, or to have all the inhabitants of your continent over for dinner. But to love everyone? In spirit, and in practice, when you are face to face with a stranger? In my mind at least that's a noble goal.

Luckily, I do like all of you who are reading this - my friends. Blessings to you. I honestly don't know what I'd do without having so many incredible friends around the world, who inspire me, make me laugh, boost me up when I'm feeling down and help me to know that I'm not crazy for feeling whatever I'm feeling, whatever wave I'm riding at the moment... Who are there to make my life really worth living.

My daily meditation practice also helps me to love myself and my life more deeply by reconnecting me with my breath, my body, and by helping me to clear some of the cobwebs out of my mind. I find myself a little bit less caught in stories and drama, every day, a little more able to live in the present moment fully, and to choose my response to the moment...

Which helps of course when it comes to men. As for the other part of the love relationship equation, what all my other relationships in my life can't give me, i.e. sex, physical love, well, this is a PG-13 blog read by many of my family members so we won't delve into that too deeply.

I'll let the funny, wonderful and wise author Elizabeth Gilbert speak for me on this one - I, too, want to devote myself to God, but also want worldly pleasures... Here is what she has to say on that topic, as she discusses it with the medicine man Ketut in Indonesia:

"I want to have a lasting experience of God," I told him. "Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God."

Ketut said he could answer my question with a picture. He showed me a sketch he'd drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart.

"To find the balance you want," Ketut spoke through his translator, "this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God."

"You must stop looking at the world through your head." Ah, yes. Easily said, not always so easily done - but that is what my journey is now, to follow a path with heart. When I'm living in the present moment, not obsessing about my past or fantasizing about the future, when I'm being led by love in my life, when I'm following my intuition and heart (and showing up, and doing the work this life calls for too) there is no "wrong" or "right," or rather, I'm always in the right place. The challenges and what seem to be failures in any given moment become lessons.

When I look at love and dating that way, I'm more willing to take risks, put myself out there, knowing that all experiences of human connection are worthwhile, and that if I am true to myself, my path will lead me where I need to go.

I'll end with this beautiful quote from Pujya Swamiji: "Love has no conditions. When we put conditions, when we put barriers and boundaries, then we lose love. Love is condition-less. Love is barrier-less. Look at the moon, sun, stars, trees... they are just on for everyone. When our love also flows for everyone, you become very natural."

Here's to being like the sun, moon, stars, which are "on for everyone." May I be a light in this world, as the Buddha urged his followers on his deathbed. May I not be afraid to shine. Because you never know when your light will illuminate the path for someone else, as so many other shining lights have illuminated mine.

Blessings to you all, to my friends around the world, for being lights in my life.

Now, go give someone a big smooch or hug. Go spread some love! Happy Valentine's Day.

"Ever since Love heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you...."
- Hafiz

Lisa Powell Graham © 2007