Throughout human history, what has created community and provided the structures that build into friendship and intimacy is shared work.  We have lost sight of this fact in our highly technological and automated world, and it is rare that we find ourselves at work with people of all ages, side by side moving gravel or tilling fields.  Our Positive Change Memorial Courtyard is offering us this opportunity to work and build community and it continues to surprise me by how much I receive from the experience of giving.

Earlier this week, Gregg,  one of the student government students messaged me that his class needed a work project and asked if they could participate ours planned for Memorial Day.  One of my maxims is to never turn away willing workers. Plus, being together in our own Memorial courtyard project seemed natural and right  today.  I sent out several texts and emails asking for more help, but I am never really sure who will come or what we will be able to accomplish.  It doesn’t work for my expectations to lead.  The courtyard project is teaching me over and over again that it is all about being open to whatever comes and leading with gratitude for any and every effort.

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For all my positivity talk and changing my thinking patterns,  there is nothing like the 3D efforts of working to change the world we live in to bring a reality check. We spent the weekend clearing out most of the grass for the new courtyard design.  Ideas are where things start; but truly,  moving dirt and rocks, digging out stubborn clumps of sod out of hard clay soil is the real work of making the world a better place.  Like a pendulum, I swung between grumbling about giving up my entire weekend to the efforts to basking in the sweet and surprising balm of  building community in the process.

Yesterday, the community was only two heroic dads and I, who gave up their Saturday to a stubborn and inconsistent sod cutter. First off,  a sod cutter is some seriously hard working machinery… I did my share of pulling the shaking machine through the tall grass (note to self- cut the grass) and when my spirits were flagging because of the weight of the work ahead,  Alan, one of the father’s laughingly reminded me:  “This ain’t hard work.  Think of all the other places in the world where life is really hard. This is a walk in the park.” He then revved up the sod cutter engine for another go.  He stepped in to help after another dad, Jim had accidentally broken a rib earlier in the week.  Even so, Jim was there the whole time tirelessly  moving cut sod, fixing, shifting gears, cutting burning grass from the gears.

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“Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.”  Leonardo DaVinci

I had never understood the virtue of patience as a curative for the things that make you angry.  I never learned how this most evolved form of patience, is actually a form of emotional austerity, which keeps you from getting hooked by our instinctual angry responses. I recently listened to Pema Chodron explain how the virtue of patience keeps you from “biting the hook” that life throws your way.  Instead of letting anger and resentment be the first response, the practice of patience trains you to hold the frustration, anger and pain of the wrong doing before jumping to make things worse.  It requires courage to not hurt back and an inner quiet, which allows you to hang onto yourself  at the same time.

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Its all fun and games until someone gets hurt.”  Anon

I am so bummed that my bee love affair has lost its fairy tale luster and all it took was a few moments of bad planning.  After successfully feeding the bees twice by myself,  I thought I knew how to do it.   Time is of the essence when working with bees and I discovered that a 10 a.m. warm morning is not the same for bees as a 7:30 p.m. cool evening.   I do not need to smoke the bees in the morning, but now I know for sure that I do in the evening!

Beekeeping lessons are marked with painful recognition.   Somehow a bee got into my full body coveralls and hood, and another one stung me through the net.   As the event unrolled, I tried to remain calm and heard myself say out loud,  its okay , walk slowly away from the hive.   Stay calm.   Then the buzzing near my face, ears and head drown out my attempts at calm.

Fear,  is a powerful response to override.  Our most primal instinct for our own survival is much louder than my voice to keep calm. I have a whole new respect for people who are able to hold onto themselves in the face of their fears.  Courage,  is one of the highest forms of self love because you have to train in it.  Maybe that is what I will learn from the bees.  As sad as I feel about the hot, stinging, itching lump on my jaw line , I am equally sad for the bees that died because of my poor planning.  I don’t want to be afraid of honey bees.  At least I have compassion for the little bees who were lost.

Replacing a fear response with love is a deliberate practice.  It’s how you build courage. On some level, you  know you can sustain injury.   I knew when I was making those beehives that I might get stung, but I hoped that loving them would prevent it.

Magical thinking, I know, but it makes it easier to move towards what frightens us. So now, with an ice pack on my face, I am little by little learning the magical power of courage.

I see a new professional track developing for me. Although I have only taught lessons on positive thinking a dozen times,  I can imagine teaching these lessons a hundred more.  Kids of all ages were as surprised as I was to learn that 95% of the 50-60,000 thoughts humans have each day were exactly the same as the day before and that 80% of those thoughts are negative.  This is why it is so hard for children to flourish and thrive.  It might also be why we have been told that we only use  5% of our brain.

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“The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” -Theodore Hesburgh

Saturday marked the 28^th year of my marriage; we celebrated by going to pick up six pounds of honeybees. I have been building their hives for the last month and my husband has been studying bee books.  The balance of our talents and how our energy manifests was at one time a continuous source of conflict.  Now we each go into projects knowing what we can ask for and are almost always successful at meeting each other’s expectations.  It takes him more time to embrace what is so easy for me to start, but he is always the one who brings the staying power and has a wide knowledge base to fall back on when things go wrong; as they inevitably will.

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Years ago I memorized the fifty principles from the Course in Miracles. One that has  always stayed with me is how  miracles heal the past in the present and thus release the future.  Many of us don’t recognize how we hold our future hostage to the pain of our past.  We don’t understand that healing the past happens in the here and now.  In part this is because it is easy to turn the past into a static truth, a story we have re-told enough times that its reality is so deeply etched into who we have become that re-thinking our historic relationships becomes increasingly remote as we age.

Something startling, or tragic, is usually the impetus for us to look at our past with new eyes. For me it was the re-appearance of my brother after 25 years.  As I wrestled with my capacity to let go of my projections to see who was in front of me, I was also faced with witnessing my own  bad judgments as well as his.  One evening when I was sharing this process with my father, who  at almost 80 was struggling with his own entrenched demons, it brought to light an old injury between us that we had never discussed.

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I haven’t seen my brother for 25 years.  We were both in our 20s then; young enough to believe that aging was something that happened to other people. Our faces were unlined and our family wounds still fresh enough to be leading us around without our knowledge. Our family wounds went deep. Our parents’ divorce happened when stigma existed behind the word.  Their subsequent pain, the ways they dealt with it, and each other became the uneven foundation of our adolescence.  Everyone deals with their pain differently, but in the end, we all ran away as soon as we could.  Our family was not a shelter.

I knew I had abandoned my brother years ago. I didn’t have the courage to go back home. Instead I set out on a lifelong journey to learn how to make a home.  My brother’s destiny lead him to run away also. For more than a dozen years no one knew how to find him. What became of my brother was the mystery we would briefly wonder about in our infrequent visits.

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As I mentioned before, I have been taking positivity into the world. The volunteer project consuming most of  my time this year has been at my child’s high school.

I love kids. They are so awake and honest and their affections or disappointment is real and immediate.  Our group holds more than fifty kids, all of whom I adore.  Many have been close with my children for many years. Watching kids grow up is an epiphany.

At any rate, for more than 6 months now we have been planning, designing and fundraising to re-landscape an old  ratty courtyard,  last used in the 1950s, into a new Positive Change memorial courtyard.  Someday, it will include a fountain, a walking labyrinth and a glass block wisdom wall.

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It has become exceedingly clear that the only way I will ever make progress in turning my 500-plus pages of Positivity Quest blog into a book is to do it everyday, just like I wrote the blog. It must be like a new resolution that at least five days a week,  something is adjusted to fit into the new manuscript.

Unfortunately, when you are looking at a mountain of paper it is hard to know where to begin. It is kind of like when you tell your kid to clean his ridiculously messy room, and you come in an hour later to a child sitting in the middle of a mess. Cleaning up and organizing requires a structure.   Otherwise, you have no way to gauge where the beginning is.

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