“For all that is past Thank You; For all that is to come, Yes."

The whole thing was concocted over a burrito and a beer. The word that brought us together was intentional. The idea was to gather other liked minded women.

The event was conceived as a springtime women’s retreat. Ten said, “Yes!” to participating. It seemed like a propitious beginning.

Fast forward to late April, the morning of the Intentional Women’s Retreat. Eighteen inches of fresh snow covered nearly a foot of the same from the previous week. Texts began to hit my IPhone at 6:00 a.m.

“Has your street been plowed?”

“No”

“Would we be able to get up the narrow road leading to the cabin?”

“Don’t know.”

“Is the retreat a go?”     

“YES, absolutely!” I responded.  “We intentionally live in the Northland. We intentionally set this time aside to come together. See you there!”

The gathering was a powerhouse of career choices that makes any community function well: business finance, housing, education, human services, the arts, etc. We were mothers, wives, partners, divorced, single, straight, gay, believers, and agnostics. An amalgam that included one solidifying element: Intention.

As spiritual director of the retreat, I strove for a foundation from which I could somehow speak to the wisdom and experience of those seated before me. Using the words of Dag Hammarskjold, I began:  ““For all that is past Thank You; For all that is to come, Yes.”

Intention requires saying YES to love—love of self, love of existence, love of purpose, love of life itself.  Saying YES is the beginning of intentional living.

Saying YES is responding to something greater than yourself that is calling you out, forward, and beyond any fears you have.

Saying YES to love creates the possibility of being wide open to whatever comes and becoming willing to be fully in cooperation with it.

Saying YES to love is intentionally opening yourself up to be hurt, to be criticized, to be accused of being a non-team player…and YES, even to have your heart broken…open. 

Being intentional in one’s life is not about changing one’s career, or moving to a far off land, or ending a relationship…though it might be. You might need to say NO loudly and intentionally in order to say YES with all your heart and soul and mind. Again Dag Hammarskjold:

“I don't know Who, or what, put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something, and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.” *

This intentional gathering of women included amazing loaves of fresh bread, homemade soup, music, and laughter and tears, snowshoe walks, fireside talks...all the ingredients beginner minds need to purposefully answer the question, “How do I want to live more intentionally in my first, second, or third act of life?”  

How do you?

Peacebeinall, Jane  

*Markings by Dag Hammarskjold

Second Secretary General - United Nations

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Posthumously 

Where Beauty Blooms in the Desert

After my eldest daughter hiked the Sonoran desert, she phoned and said, “Mom, everything in the desert wants to kill you…even the plants!” 

Since she was raised near the blue waters of a Great Lake and a deep green, northern forest, it certainly must have seemed so to her.  Her observation made sense to me.

Once, I was a child of the prairie. It was a fairly benevolent place where vistas of jade colored cornfields stretched for miles. My greatest danger dealt with a possible fall down the barn's hayloft hole or lodging thistle hairs in my hand while pulling weeds in the soybean field. With a little forethought, both of these were preventable dangers. 

My imagination, however, never let me perceive the desert terrain as anything but hostile. True, I heard southwest-dwellers wax poetic about the beauty/splendor/loveliness of their arid surrounding; yet whenever I hiked their desert trails, the only thoughts coming to my mind seemed to be desolation/danger/loneliness.
  
During the past few years, the physical geography of a desert experience seemed to closely match an inner desert experience occurring in my own life. Everywhere I navigated, there seemed to be jumping Chollas that latched onto me with the same veracity as the living species itself. Just like the deceptive teddy bear cacti’s microscopic spines, these life events—once embedded—seemed near impossible to dislodge. 

Recently, however, my hike through the Sonoran was a completely different experience. Late winter moisture had watered the desert. Though I had hiked the region before, this time verdant green undergrowth covered the formerly dry, brown landscape. Miniscule, comb burr plants with flowers only 2 – 3 millimeters in dimension carpeted the desert floor in green. 

To my color-starved, northern eyes this was a feast! Mexican poppies shouted, “YELLOW!” from a rocky outcrop. Ocotillo sticks waved their emerald arms daring one to notice they were no longer shriveled or appearing like the living dead. The chubby, barrel cacti looked plump and full of life. 

Moving along the path with my hiking companions, I suddenly was aware of something bubbling up inside me.  I stopped for a moment, focusing on what was filling my head and flowing toward my heart.  Darned if it wasn’t joy!  A full, cup-running-over feeling of unadulterated joy watering my inner desert.

I began to laugh, and then…I began to run. I raced down a wash and up the next hillside. Holding my walking stick horizontally like a balancing pole, I hopscotched across some chunky crushed rock in a dry creek bed. Soon, I was Forrest Gump-ing it through the most beautiful Sonoran desert of my life, and it felt great!  

Around the next bend, I averted my steps away from the ever-grasping Chollas. "Ha," I thought,"You'll have to look for a new victim to vex!" 

There is much in this world that may lead individuals into their own, personal desert experience.  Each of us seems to have a tailor-made drought or two that threatens to squeeze the very life out of our souls. 

Many of the great religions of the world use this time of year to mark and remind us that desert experiences happen to all: Jews await Passover, Christians perdure through Lent, and every human being in our northern hemisphere awaits the return of more light at the Spring Vernal equinox.

How we come out of our desert seems to be not so much learning as much as it is unlearning our attitudes toward it. It is letting go of shoulds, musts, and ought-tos and refusing to judge others, or ourselves...especially ourselves...harshly. And, mostly, it is learning to look and see the possibility of beauty wherever or however it may show itself.

Of this I am certain: the rain will come; the spring will arrive. The desert will bloom again. Even if all around appears desiccated and void of life, it...joy...will come.

Peacebeinall, Jane