[Commerical Break: This is a busy weekend for Ordinary Sparkling Moments. I'll be at Peach Tree Gallery in Mar Vista, CA this Saturday afternoon for the opening of their 3rd Annual Holiday Show and on Sunday I'll be at Mari Robeson Home in Arroyo Grande, CA from 3:00 - 8:00pm for a sparkling evening of fun. I hope to see you there!]
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"...'Yes' has the power. It is the acceptance of what is, even the bad, and it is the faith that what happens is just part of the process, part of your journey, leading you to your... well... destiny." -posted by Rowena
As my circle of friends knows, I am a card and stationery fanatic. And by fanatic I don’t mean I always send birthday cards on time (I don’t, I’m a usually a complete failure when it comes to birthdays), I mean I buy boxes and stacks of cards at a time and they all get sent to various parts of the world within days. In a culture that fills our mailboxes with heaps of retail catalogs and mass marketing mailers, I love the idea of giving those I adore a little smile when a colorful envelope falls out of their mailbox with their name in actual handwriting. It has become downright Old School, this sending of cards and letters, and it is an addiction I am more than happy to feed whenever the opportunity to do so arises.
In a nutshell, I say YES to stationery. I say yes to colorful, glittery cards and very silly postcards. I say yes to rolls of 100 stamps at a time and yes to taking the time to write thank you notes. This is one of my favorite ways of saying yes.
There are a few cards that I have purchased repeatedly and sent to different friends, one of which is a tall turquoise blue card with a big gold Buddha on the front. The Buddha’s arms are up above his head and he has a huge smile on his face. When you open the card, the greeting is bold and simple. It says: YES! I love this card - love its energy, its message, its joy. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve sent it.
The idea behind that card is to say yes to unbridled enthusiasm and joy, to shout from the rooftops YES to love! YES to hope! YES to fun! YES! YES! YES! But what of the quieter yeses - those affirmations that are not necessarily easy, exciting or fun? How can we channel the energy of that gold laughing YES! Buddha towards those moments in our lives where saying the word yes feels more like trying to squeeze through the center of an hourglass? How easily do we give such an enthusiastic yes to forgiveness, to letting go, to sadness? How much freedom and centeredness do we deny ourselves by resisting that resounding YES in some of our more challenging moments?
There is a story you may very well be familiar with that goes like this:
Amy Biehl, an idealistic white Californian college student, wins a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to South Africa to assist the anti apartheid movement; caught in a 1993 race riot, she is murdered by a black mob.
Following years of grief, Amy’s parents Linda and Peter gave up their fashionable upper middleclass Californian lifestyle and moved to South Africa to try and complete the work their daughter had started. The Biehls not only met two of the young men who killed Amy but, learning of the chaotic circumstances of the riot and the heartfelt remorse of the killers, gradually became friends with the men who helped murder their daughter.
The young men asked if they could atone for their crime by doing public service for a foundation the Biehls established in Amy’s name. For two years they worked with Amy’s parents daily, and eventually became close enough that they addressed Linda Biehl as "mom."
[For a more detailed version of the entire story, click here]
This is a story I think about fairly often, this along with a similar one I heard on NPR many years ago about families who befriended their loved ones’ convicted killers by visiting them in prison. In that program, I remember listening to one woman explain that she reached a point where she felt like she had no choice but to forgive because she had been living every moment of her life filled with seething rage. She said on the program, “Can you imagine what it might feel like to walk around with that every single day?” When she asked the reporter that question, I actually understood her motivation. It made perfect sense that she would reach a point of darkness to such an extreme as to need a seemingly outrageous solution, a course of action as outrageous as taking the time and energy to get to know your loved one’s killer.
These stories have stayed with me because they show me all that is possible, beautiful and divine in humanity. I am in awe of the courage, compassion and determination it must have taken to take a step away from what was the greatest loss of their life and towards the very person responsible for that loss. What does it feel like to say yes to that?
Despite their sad beginnings, these stories give me hope and encouragement to say YES in those moments where it would be much easier to say no – no to trusting, no to acceptance, no to believing the best story I can believe. It does not take any practice to say yes to a scoop of chocolate ice cream, but saying yes throughout our more challenging experiences is a skill that must be honed. I am not sure I have what it would take to follow in Linda and Peter Biehl’s footsteps, but they have still shown me all the light and freedom that exists when we say yes to compassion in every sense of the word.
Yes is powerful when we fill our lungs with air and howl it up to the moon, but it is also magnificent in its force when we say it quietly to someone who has wronged us, when we wonder if we can really trust our friends in a vulnerable moment, when we look in the mirror and ask ourselves if our wildest dreams are worth our time and energy. Yes sometimes comes in less than appealing forms, but sometimes all it takes is our willingness to embrace those yeses to transform them into something beautiful, comforting and sacred.
