Anonymous

 Anonymous means helping others and not worrying about getting praise or being known for my good deeds.  God, my Higher Power knows and that is good enough for me.  My imagination and fantasy is anything but anonymous.  But they are delusions.  Reality is that I am important but not publicly known for it.  I am important enough to take care of myself in all areas, physical, mental and spiritual.  Then I might be able assist someone else who needs help that I could give.  Being anonymous is not the same as feeling like you are nobody.  I prefer anonymous.  Never go wrong with humility.  So I try to be helpful, be of service.  

Giving Joy

 So someone says to me, "I get nothing out of my prayers.  Bored. No joy."  Oh.  Well maybe prayer is not all about you getting something.  I get bored sometimes and don't get what I want sometimes.  So what. Isn't prayer between me and someone not me, like God, Higher Power, The One?  Instead of focusing on what I am getting, I try to remember that God might be getting joy out of my praying.  Life is not all about me.  I probably would do a lot less helping of others if "my joy" was the focus.  Prayer is relationship.  What I feel is not all there is to it.  

Being Like

 To relate well and even to love someone, their must be some likeness, some compatibility.  Opposites may attract, but to grow together you take on something of the other person.  So it is with prayer and the God, the Power, the One to whom I relate.  We start out as opposites, unlikeness.  God is unknown, no thing, unseen.  I come to the relationship exhausted from trying to be known, seen, become something, ego driven to be recognized with accomplishments.  I bring my thoughts, delusions, wants, ego focus.  God is not going to change.  I must change.  In the silence and solitude I begin to forget about my preoccupations to be special and unique and important.  I gradually become no one, being nowhere, going nowhere in the mediation.  I forget the old separate self.  I become for a moment,  One with and not two separate.  Intimacy.  I then bring this to my everyday encounters with others and other situations.  

Basics

 Do you ever find yourself saying that you are going to get back to something that you used to do, but then ceased doing for no particular reason?  No one or event forced you to stop?  I don’t want to be in that situation anymore.  I don’t want to say, “I am going to get back to meditation. Spiritual reading.  Contact with friends.  Exercise. Balanced eating.”  No one stopped me.  I just stopped.  Complacent? Bored? Too busy with something less important than whatever good habit I dropped?  I hear people in Recovery programs say, “I am going to get back to basics.”  Why did you stop in the first place.  I don’t have to go back to basics if I never leave them in the first place.  Painfully, what drives me back to a good habit is a life gone unmanageable.  

The Heart

 When you look across a room and see someone who attracts you, or hear their voice, and words, and are drawn to be with them, you are seeing with the eyes of your heart and the ears of your heart.  You are falling in love.  To see only with the eyes in your head or hear only with the ears on either side of your head will not make this sudden and seemingly deep connection.  You will see and hear “another” but not “the other.”  Another, that person will not be part of you, in any deep, unitive fashion, to make you a better self.  “The Other” will.  I cannot read or meditate on spiritual books, pictures, images, architecture, unless I can be inside me, with the eyes and ears of the heart.  You can talk about a Power greater than yourself, but unless it is heard by another as a language within their heart, they won’t be much moved.  

The World

 What does it mean to “leave the world?”  One hears this in monasteries for instance.  Are monks running away from life, real world problems?  No.  “Place” does not avoid life or problems.  To leave the world does not mean getting away from the everyday, but from a life that is exclusively for yourself.  Then what?  Begin to live for others, be of service, especially service that does not look for rewards or good feeling, but rather serves for the sake of the other.  It is to become more selfless and less selfish.  You can begin this kind of life focus without going anywhere geographically.  It is an interior job of the spiritual path.  

Grow

 We have flowers growing in their pots in our monastery cloisters, halls.  The plants make no sounds.  They grow in silence.  Over the course of a week they get a little attention, but are mostly left to be themselves.  They flower beautifully in their time.  They get some sun through the window, some water, and a bit of pruning.  I can learn from the flowers.  I need silence to grow, and some attention, but mostly solitude, like the plants.  When I talk a lot, make a lot of commotion so I won' be ignored, I don't really grow much.  If I walk into a room and no one pays any attention to me, I can be like the plants, and grow in the silence and solitude.  I can look watch and see in the room.   Maybe the plants are watching me.  Maybe they grow best when we are kindred spirits as I walk by in the cloister, silent and in solitude.