Posts Tagged ‘celebration’

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Blurring the Sacred and Secular

Written by Jennifer on 1st June 2010

Humans seem to love categories. We evaluate, assess and assign people and things to different, appropriate categories. We especially do this when it comes to all things that fall into the sacred/secular camps:

  • This for my spirit; that for my body
  • This for God; that for humankind
  • This for the Church; that for the world
  • This for the Eternal; that for the temporal

We even capitalize the really important categories.

This tendency of humans to divvy up the sacred and secular made my experience at a dear friend’s wedding this weekend particularly meaningful. At first glance, the traditional categories were in play. They had a religious ceremony, held in a church, complete with a Reverend. Yes, the religious ceremony included no proselytizing. Yes, the church is liberal, LGBT-friendly and active in social justice issues. Yes, the Reverend is a woman. But I stopped slicing and dicing along all of those particular lines so long ago that, by my account, the ceremony fell into the traditional, sacred category.

(The rehearsal; (c) Scott Gleeson Blue)

Which begs the question: what, then, blurred the sacred and the secular?

It was the reception that did it.

Instead of moving the party to another location – or another part of the church building even – the chairs used for the ceremony were moved to tables to the immediate left and right, leaving a dance floor in the middle. Together, we ate and drank and danced and laughed where moments before there had been prayer and communion and marriage vows.

(Dancing at the wedding; (c) Emre Edev)

Most people I know are longing for a richer experience of life. Are seeking out people and experiences that bring them a taste of their own powerful, creative existence (and that of the eternal). In this way, categorization along sacred and secular lines seems to get in the way. It cuts us off from the holy experience of daily living or the spiritually nurturing nature of watching someone do the robot in the middle of a circle of tipsy wedding guests.

To be fully alive, I have discovered that I need to allow that what is for my body is also for my spirit; what is for my fellow humans is also for God; what is for the world, is also for the Church; and what is for the temporal is also for the Eternal.  The line between the sacred and the secular must get muddy and blur such that dancing to James Brown’s Try Me and eating roast pork also became holy acts.

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A Marrakech Birthday

Written by Jennifer on 18th March 2010

Today is my 30th birthday and at the moment, I am in an Internet cafe in the Medina of Marrakech.

This morning I awoke at 5am to the traditional Islamic call to prayer emminating from several nearby mosques. I navigated tiny streets teeming with mopeds and petit txis and donkey carts and seas of people. I have had no fewer than 10 men smile and call out to me while giving me the once over. I have ordered lunch en francois and shooed away roughly 15 shoeshine guys and 20 beggars.

(Coutesy of guardian.co.uk)

Even in a city where tourism is booming and that from the 1920s to the 1950s was colonized by France, I am, without a doubt, a stranger in a strange land. Which, of course, was part of the plan.

This trip was designed to be an intentional way of honoring the passing of time, in general, and in my life, specifically. My 30th birthday blog countdown was also designed to honor this passing of time and to celebrate the life I have had the good fortune to live thus far.

The payoff has been significant.

Because I am on vacation and typing on a foreign keyboard – read: AZERTY, not QWERTY – with dial-up speeds I will save the full reflections for later. Just two thoughts for now.

First of all, I cannot thank the many of you who have shared in this blog experiment with me enough. Not only have I valued your feedback and encouragement, but I have deeply appreciated your own stories and celebrations that you have shared.

And secondly, I would like to say that this experiment has been an invaluable re-authoring, if you will, of my life. More on that later…

For now, I will return to convincing myself that yes, birthdays exist even when you are utterly disoriented from a cultural perspective. I will simultaneously be pretending that I know which direction I am headed in through the winding Medina streets. That technique got me through the last several decades; surely, the thirties cannot be that different!

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Posted in celebration, travel | 2 Comments »

Day 30: Community (30th Birthday Countdown)

Written by Jennifer on 17th March 2010

As a countdown to my 30th birthday on March 18, I’ve committed to offering 30 people, things and experiences I want to celebrate from the last 30 years. Grab a piece of cake and enjoy reading!


“Let there be no purpose in friendship

save the deepening of the spirit.”

~ Kahlil Gibran

Tomorrow is the big day and I find myself here with one last opportunity to highlight something from the first 30 years I want to celebrate. The choice has become obvious because as I look back at all of the experiences I have celebrated this last month, I am keenly aware that not a single one of them occurred in isolation. They are centered in community.

One of the difficult tasks of this exercise turned out to be that there were too many things I wanted to include. There were certainly too many people. I cannot tell you how happy that makes me!

My world is filled with individuals and groups of people who have generated so much meaning in my life. There are my best girlfriends, spread around the country; my in-laws, who are among the most welcoming people I have ever met; friends from nursery school through college; my amazing and tremendous coaching colleagues; my neighbors and the strangers who smile on the subway; the family members I didn’t mention and friends whose names did not take the spotlight; and there is you.

I will post tomorrow – on my birthday – from Marrakech, but as I wrap up this series formally, it is with a heart full of gratitude for the fact that every single day of my life has been touched and gifted by my ever-evolving, always organic community.

I have been graced with 30 years of love and it is that – more than anything else – that propels me with eagerness and and an open heart into the next chapter of my life.

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Posted in celebration, change, gratitude, sustainability | No Comments »

Day 29: Get There From Here (30th Birthday Countdown)

Written by Jennifer on 16th March 2010

As a countdown to my 30th birthday on March 18, I’ve committed to offering 30 people, things and experiences I want to celebrate from the last 30 years. Grab a piece of cake and enjoy reading!

Like most 20-somethings, I’ve spent a lot of this last decade figuring out what the heck I’m good at, what interests me and what I find to be meaningful. Also like most 20-somethings, I’ve done a lot of that exploration in the realm of career. I couldn’t be happier with where this exploration has led me.

Get There From Here – the name of my business (which I hope you’ve noticed, ahem) -is comprised of two integrated realms: coaching and entrepreneurship. I want to celebrate them separately in this post.

Coaching

In 2006 – days before I was scheduled to depart for Toronto to begin my coach training – I shot my own coach an email:

“Patt – Even if I decide I do not want to set up my own coaching practice after I get through the training, you really think the training itself will be worth it?”

Here answer was an unequivocal YES and she was right.

Not only did I not encounter a bunch of flaky, new-aged, very not-funny people, but I embarked on a process that has redefined the way I experience the world. Being a coach has enabled me to drop the judgment; I am attuned to what is said and unsaid; I know how to take good care of myself; I ask for what I want.

Then, of course, there are my clients. These days, with a flourishing coaching practice, I am particularly aware of the tremendous gift it is to partner with individuals to fulfill creative endeavors, identify new careers, enhance their effectiveness as leaders or build their own ventures. Some evenings after a long day of calls I will sit and stare at the wall, my eyes welling up, as I wonder how it has come to pass that I am possibly this fortunate to help others craft their own powerful life stories.

(My class at Coach University.)

Entrepreneurship

And then there is the business.

I became convinced in my early 20s that I must not like to work. What other reason could possibly explain my extreme dissatisfaction with every job I held? Turns out, there were myriad reasons, not the least of which was that I had a really hard time working hard for someone else on what it was they thought I should to in order that they might be successful. I didn’t like being a cog in a business I didn’t care about.

So after years of job hopping, I discovered coaching and decided to hang my shingle.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone. It is however, one of the shortest of short-cuts to personal and spiritual development that I have yet to experience or witness. Seriously. Like marriage (and like parenting, I imagine), it’s like this constant mirror hanging in front of my face affirming what is whole and highlighting what is broken. It’s painfully uncanny in it’s constant need to truth-tell.

Then there is just the fun part: The fact that this is something I created. That I can take my work in whatever direction suits me. That I don’t have to call a boss when I am sick.

At the end of the day, I am working harder than I ever have in ways that bring tremendous amounts of meaning to my life and apparent good to the world. Get There From Here provides an perfect umbrella under which I get to experience these amazing, amazing gifts!

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Posted in celebration, change, story | 1 Comment »

Day 28: Yeehaw! (30th Birthday Countdown)

Written by Jennifer on 15th March 2010

As a countdown to my 30th birthday on March 18, I’ve committed to offering 30 people, things and experiences I want to celebrate from the last 30 years. Grab a piece of cake and enjoy reading!

I was always a good kid. Not entirely a goodie two shoes, but almost. I was definitely what you’d call a fine, upstanding lass.

So you might imagine the horror, the utter sense of failure I felt as an 11 year old when I got detention for the first time. This wasn’t a sit-on-the-bench-for-20-minutes-during-gym-class kind of detention, either. This was the kind where you had to bring a slip home for your parent to sign. More painfully, it came with this lecture from my teacher:

“I might have expected some of the boys in the class to behave this way. But not you.”

I was totally ashamed. I remember walking home from school as slowly as I could that day, dreading the reaction my dad would have when I presented him with the slip, knowing he’d lecture me and express his disappointment. Once I got in the door, however, I just wanted to rip the bandaid off as quickly as possible, so I spilled the beans.

“Dad, you need to sign this slip. I got detention.”

“What for?” he asked, looking up from the newspaper.

“Well, we were in music class and singing some song and it sounded kinda country to me and so at the end I said, really quietly, ‘Yeehaw!’ I thought only Canice could hear and she would find it funny, but it turns out Mr. Draper did and now I have to go to detention. And he told me I was acting like the boys.”

I’m convinced that parents have no choice but to commit various crimes in the lives of their children. More often than not, however, parents tend to provide amazing moments of salvation. My dad raised his eyebrows, chortled, signed the paper and said:

“Well, that’s ridiculous. You got detention for that?!?”

And once I realized he wasn’t calling my behavior ridiculous, together we laughed about it and made fun of Mr. Draper for being so uptight and gendered about the whole thing.

These days, I will occasionally get myself in trouble intentionally. I’ll have that momentary awareness that I can back off and be “good” or I can move forward and behave just a little bit badly. You know, like the boys. Because I received that permission nearly 20 years ago, the cost of behaving badly doesn’t seem so high these days (if you know me well, you’re aware that this is particularly true when being funny is on the table).

In a world that still rewards people in general – and women in particular – for not stepping out of line, I must celebrate my 11 year old self who took the risk to make her friend laugh in music class. And Mr. Draper, for allowing me the opportunity to feel woefully imperfect. And my father, for teaching me that it was good for me, too, to be a boy.

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Posted in celebration, change, fear | No Comments »

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