The Importance of Being You, Honoring Difference

The beauty of nature, repeating itself and each time never being the same.

I think I may be getting boring. Friends would say that is impossible. Maybe redundant, saying the same thing too many times! Yet, obviously the mind I live with continues to stay with one thought until I get it. And sometimes I am sooo slow!

This morning's meditation brought me to thinking about the importance of being your self, the SOV teaches that only when you stand upright in who you are can you hook up others. And who really wants to be alone? Even in the Torah it is written that it is not good for human to be alone. And as coach of leaders, I know that collaboration is essential to making the world a better place. We are in desperate need of partnerships, of courageous followers who will speak up and over and down to all they work with.

So I have been playing with the thought that Abraham, through Esther Hicks, teaches when they spoke to a gay man. That being different and being out encourages people to deal with their own angst about difference. Jonathan Sachs in Dignity of Difference writes that we all come from the same source and evolve into our own unique holy selves. Holy, from Hebrew Wisdom, means separate, unique, discrete. Kahil Gilbran wrote about the coming together of two souls for love, that 'may the winds of heaven dance between the oak and the willow'. I hear in his words the importance of being your unique self and dancing together with the Divine's blessings.

And yet the mind loves to compare and judge those different from us. And we either come up short or better than the other.

If the Torah had only be written in the positive what it said in the negative maybe people would learn not to covet your neighbor but to honor your own gifts. Appreciative Inquiry teaches that what you give attention to will grow! Do not covet, means we are already doing it. So what can we do that would put the energy into making relationships work. Hedy and Yumi teach about building bridges to the holy sacred space where the past remains in the past and the present offers opportunities to listen and to hear, to mend the hearts that yearn for connectedness, to let down the wall a bit, to welcome the stranger as your self. To learn and know her or him and yourself within that moment.

I say let us give attention to how we can learn how to connect, not separate ourselves from each other by building walls around us, by comparing and contrasting. Let us learn how to have a mindset of growth, what do I want to learn, I can I be in the now?

enough rambling!!

We cannot hide who we are, that only encourages others to not have to face our own differences.

As a Jew, I am not going to hide, G!D made sure of that, circumcision for one thing. Different way of praying, different Sabbath day, different holiday schedule from the majority Christian community. The Nazis would also say big noses, and so do our Middle Eastern neighbors!
So I wear my Jewish Star earrings with pride, yet always telling the story how I got them. They are a gift from my Christian friends who found them in India.

As a lesbian, who is not in relationship, I can pass. My Black friends or other people of color, cannot pass. So how can I be out?

Then there is dialect and pronunciation that will expose one, like the people from South Carolina I met on the beach yesterday.. Pass as what I say to myself? as one of them, not to make waves and not to stand out.

As a woman, I felt I had to be careful of what I wore, so my breasts would not distract from what I was saying. I am over it! I am on the cusp of 70, so just be me! wild woman!

We are such funny people! I can only laugh at loud at me!