Smuggling Grace

While driving in my car, I listened to an episode of the podcast Hidden Brain called You 2.0: Rebel With a Cause. The episode was about people who find themselves breaking rules that need to be broken. This includes people who live with a sense of openness. It allows for shifts in thinking and the cultivation of new possibilities in living and in problem solving. For a portion of the episode, they talked about the concept of Beginner’s Mind.

Beginner’s Mind, or Shoshin, comes from Zen Buddhism. The Zen monk and teacher Shunryu Suzuki says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” When we approach life with a sense of newness, we can learn, grow, and view more possibilities.

Last night, I experienced this in a small but refreshing way. I stepped outside of the house and walked outside around the block, something I’ve done more times than I can count. But this time, I walked the block counter-clockwise instead of my typical clockwise. It wasn’t the first time I had done so, but I hadn’t walked in this direction in a very long time.

And I noticed so many different details in the neighborhood!

My favorite previously unnoticed detail was an adorable, mini tableau camping scene outside of a neighbor’s house.

There’s a lot to notice. We just need to begin again. There are a lot of possibilities.

–Renee Roederer

I wrote this piece a couple years ago, pre-pandemic. I’m remembering it fondly again.

Last week, I spent some time in the waiting room for a doctor’s visit… like a lot of time. Waiting. Usually, it doesn’t take this long — something my doctor also confirmed once he was able to see me.

For a while, I just sat in silence. I brought a book, but I think I just needed a bit of time to decompress and think of very little. The truth is, I had had a lot on my mind over the last few days. All of that was still there, of course, so I sat there while silence accompanied my still emerging thoughts. That and daytime television.

Then a man approached my side of the room, and he sat directly to my left. He had a walker. I soon realized the walker was for his wife who came immediately behind him. She moved to sit directly to my right, so before she sat, I asked,

“Would you like this seat?” wondering if they’d rather sit directly next to each other.

“Oh no, honey, this is just fine.”

Suddenly, I was sandwiched between Bob and Sue, two older adults, who were much better at accompanying me than the silence. For the next twenty minutes, I honestly felt wonderfully grandparented, as they delighted in talking with me. Bob told me his creative strategy to get telemarketers to stop calling. Sue told me that she knows one of my neighbors. They both shared why they keep choosing this medical clinic. They inquired about me. I felt so enjoyed, and I enjoyed them too.

At one point, while flipping through magazines, Sue saw a picture of a cardinal and said, “Aren’t they so pretty?”

“Yes, I love them,” I said, thinking about the ones who fly into my yard and how they’re my university mascot as well.

“You know, I’ve never seen a baby cardinal. I wonder what they look like.”

“I’ll look it up,” I said, pulling out my phone.

They chuckled at the marvel of it, that we could look that up on a phone. “These young people know how to do it,” Bob said. I smiled, enjoying being relationally young, though I’m just a couple years shy of forty.

“Oh, here it is. Look at that!” I said. It turns out that baby cardinals are pretty cute. We passed my phone around to see.

A few minutes later, a medical assistant spoke their names, and Bob and Sue were called to the back before I was. When they stood up to shuffle to their visit, I felt different.

There are many ways that kindness and delight can show up, surprisingly, even in times of stress. We just have to show up to it. Or sometimes… let it just find us.

*I changed the names of this wonderful couple. I will remember them by their real names for a long time.

—Renee Roederer

I could make a parallel post to this week’s piece about having needs.

A great deal of cultural messaging says,

“Don’t speak up.”

“Keep that idea to yourself.” (or let me appropriate it…)

“Stay small.”

“Who are you to be in the room? Who are you to lead?”

These messages are sent especially to those with marginalized identities.

But shouldn’t we be suspicious? So frequently, aren’t the cultural forces and systems of greed, along with their benefactors, the loudest messengers in these directions?

Let’s take in this quote from Elaine Welteroth, shared by @bookedinsouthdakota:

“Sometimes just being yourself is the radical act. When you occupy space in systems that weren’t built for you, your authenticity is your activism.”

Image from @bookedinsouthdakota

Image Description: The quote above is typed on a white page in a book with black writing.

–Renee Roederer

At one point this weekend, I was talking with someone who seems to think that people’s pandemic precautions have been overblown. He had gotten vaccinated, but he felt as though people have been overreacting about all of this over the last year and a half

Yet right now, we are losing a 9-11 amount of people nearly every single day to this illness. Of course, each of those people have names and are loved.

A few days ago, I saw someone pointing this out on Twitter. Each year on this date, we rightfully pause and remember those who died on September 11, 2001. But we don’t always have the ability, and sometimes, the willingness, to have collective morning for those who are dying daily. How do we wrap our minds around this much loss? It’s hard to do.

And so I pause to remember those who died 20 years ago and to remember those who are dying today.

–Renee Roederer

A great deal of cultural messaging says to us,

“It’s wrong to need.”

“It’s shameful to need.”

“It’s selfish to have needs.”

“It’s embarrassing to need other people.”

But shouldn’t we be suspicious? So frequently, aren’t the cultural forces and systems of greed, along with their benefactors, the loudest messengers in these directions?

Let’s take in this quote from Allyson Dineen (@notesfromyourtherapist on Instagram):

“Growing up with the message that ‘you’re not supposed to need other people’ is going to require a ton of shame to maintain — since it’s going against millions of years of human evolution in a species with a nervous system built exactly FOR: safety, connection, and relationship.”

Image from @notesfromyourtherapist on Instagram.

Image Description: The quote above is written on a sheet of white paper with black writing.

–Renee Roederer

We need care.

We all need nourishment, rest, play, connection, love, relaxation, personal growth, and the meeting of daily needs. These take time and intention.

These days, we hear a lot about self-care, but we need community-care too. I follow the lead here of BIPOC and disability justice activists who remind us that our relationships are intended to be interdependent, and that we can practice care toward one another, meeting each other’s needs with love, consent, respect, and empowerment.

When it comes to cultivating care for ourselves, both in our practices toward ourselves and in our making requests from others… some of us were socialized to feel as though care for ourselves is somehow selfish… that it is self-centered or that the prioritizing of time for our care somehow ‘takes’ from others.

Of course, when we seek to live toward an interdependent vision for our relationships, care for ourselves creates more vitality, resilience, and energy for our loved ones and the community as a whole. It aids more than ourselves alone.

But still, even if we know that, and even if we believe that, that old socialization can run deep.

So here’s a question I find myself thinking about…

When we cultivate care for ourselves, in our practices toward ourselves and in our asking for needs to be met by others,

what if we also thought about it as “selves-care”?

Does this framing help?

After all,

Don’t we find that we are meeting needs of our younger selves?

Don’t we find that we are creating more vitality for our future selves?

Doesn’t care do that for ourselves? Reach backward and forward?

Selves-Care: Loving and aiding our past and future selves. Loving and aiding our relationships and wider community. Is this helpful?

—Renee Roederer

I looked up and watched several leaves float down from the sky. They were falling in real time from very tall trees.

“They’ve never been untethered before,” I thought with some sadness, because for some reason, I tend to anthropomorphize things. I watched them fall to the ground.

I kept walking and pondered how intertwined root systems existed underneath my feet, unseen as I walked along this pathway with trees on either side.

Sometimes, we’re more connected than we think we are.

—Renee Roederer

Our values should determine how we hold our elected leaders accountable — all leaders, every party —

how we speak out,
what we say and do,
how we say yes and no,
what we support and challenge,

instead of our values constantly shifting and morphing,

instead of what-we-will-tolerate constantly shifting and morphing,

to fit, support, and justify that we voted for someone or a party.

We can hold them all accountable — publicly.

We should.

Our values determine how we do that. These people and parties don’t get to determine our values.

–Renee Roederer

Today, I’d like to share two quotes from adrienne maree brown’s book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds:

1) “Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow. P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations: that the broken heart can cover more territory. that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands. that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life. that grief is gratitude. that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community. that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction. that death might be the only freedom. that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time. that your body will feel only as much as it is able to. that the ones you grieve may be grieving you. that the sacred comes from the limitations. that you are excellent at loving.”

2) “Do you already know that your existence–who and how you are–is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you? Not after or because you do some particular thing, but simply the miracle of your life. And that the people around you, and the place(s), have contributions as well? Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in?

“Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.”

If we’re feeling anxiety, let’s feel those feelings. And let’s invite others to show up with and for us.

If we’re feeling grief, let’s feel those feelings. And let’s invite others to show up with and for us.

If we’re feeling hope, let’s feel those feelings. And let’s invite others to show up with and for us.

If we’re feeling love, let’s feel those feelings. And let’s invite others to show up with and for us.

And let’s keep showing up with and for others too.

–Renee Roederer

“We teach who we are.”

This is something that a mentor’s mentor used to say. She may have meant a variety of things by that statement, but she certainly meant that we end up teaching, extending, and tending to others in ways that reflect the most deeply held lessons from our own experiences, the kinds that rest (at times, after a struggle) at the core of our being.

“We teach who we are.”

It reminds me again that the word ‘heal’ is both active and passive at the same time. We heal in receptive ways. Healing is something that we receive, even as we work to create the conditions that make it possible.

And when we receive and integrate healing into our own lives (and this is always a process rather than an arrival) we also begin to heal — that is, participate actively in healing of others.

“We teach who we are.”

We’ve all received; when people welcome us through their own agency, we can extend our healing and learning toward others.

–Renee Roederer