riverwrites

A Personal Mission Statement

As a result of a writing assignment I am doing for a client, I am thinking about a personal mission statement.

I created one a few years ago and carried it around on a business card that I kept in my day timer. I haven’t looked at it for a few years, but it would be interesting to see if my life has evolved in accordance with its qualities since I penned it. I wonder where it is now? It would be difficult to locate it now with my personal possessions in such a disarray and in so many different places. If I included personal order in that mission statement, I can say that at this moment in time, I am way off course!

I do know however, that my personal mission statement spoke to the desire and commitment to be involved in my community making a positive contribution toward quality of life issues. When I first married John, I joined the Art Association, the Downtown Revitalization Committee and a new church, all actions that supported my mission statement. We stared a recycling business and my creative juices were drenching me with ideas, energy, and productive action. This too, fell in line with my personal mission. There was a purpose and order to the days of my life.

Then things fell apart. My own quality of life dropped dramatically. The experience of that marriage was like being dropped from an airplane into a jungle maze with no compass.

Ah, but I did have a compass – my mission statement and my foundation on faith.

The drop caught me by surprise. I had no parachute prepared. My support of family and friends had no idea I was in a jungle. I didn’t even know it myself at first. It was only after starvation and thirst began to cripple me that I opened my eyes and saw that I was alone in wild, untamed territory. Darkness fell and monsters emerged from the shadows. My internal compass wriggled and strained to point me north. My foundation on faith became the soft, mossy carpet of the forest floor. It absorbed my weight, invited me to rest, encouraged me to take another step.

Quality of living is not always defined or identified by tangibles. When I was in the jungle dodging monsters and meeting dead ends, quality of living appeared as beams of light through dense forest branches offering me stamina, integrity, reason. Quality of living was fueled by my faith and given to me as recognition of my own gypsy feet that were designed to keep moving and venture down new, unforged paths.

For awhile, quality of living was simply survival and the conscious choice to keep on living.

That mission statement I wrote once upon a time was the needle on the compass that I didn’t even know I was carrying. And that mission statement was designed by the concepts of my faith.

Yes, I am thinking about a personal mission statement. We all have one somewhere deep inside where psyche meets spirit, but the act of forming it into words that fit the earth life experience may not be something many of us have ever done. I strongly recommend it though, because the deliberate thinking of your personal mission and writing it down somewhere is immeasurable valuable. Some day, we all come to a crossroads where things fall apart. When you least expect it, your personal mission statement will rise out of the debris and point you northward, the only way home.

I am Living the Dream

Prompt: who do you think is living the dream and why?

I am living the dream – I am living the dream not dreamt up by myself, but the dream that forms just before dawn when the air is most cold and the psyche most deep in its slumber.

The dream I created is now in shambles, the broken shards pierce my bare feet as I trod the barren earth. The dream I created has unraveled and trailed off into non-existence, into surreal questioning.

The dream I created evaporated in the trailing smoke of un-stoked cinders.

But I rise. I breathe. I live, nonetheless.

I am living the dream of the dreamer, the dream of the dream-giver. I go on and this fact alone qualifies me for the title of living the dream.

The dream has blood and breath and bones and they are mine. And I am alive.

The dream is colorful and vivid one moment, foggy and unclear the next. Still, I am alive and I go on. I go on in the colors and I go on in the fog.

The dream is loud with clanging clutter and noise; it swallows me then spits me out in deafening silence. I squeal, but can not be heard. I see myself, through the eyes of a distant dreamer and I realize that it is I who am both here and there; I am the living and I am the observer. I realize that it is I who am living this dream that belongs to me and only me. I am the creator who shapes the dream and I am the destructor who shatters it.

But I am not the original dreamer, and I am not the dream-giver. I am simply the one living the dream.

Flies are Good for Bullfrogs

^{_{Prompt: What have you recently discovered that makes you a believer?}}

 

Flies are good for the world because bullfrogs eat them.

 

I discovered this last week, not as a new bit of information, but through the eyes of a curious 4 year old who wants to understand this world where he now resides.

 

There were too many pesky flies in the car. We rolled down the windows to shoo them out. Some escaped, others entered. As we cursed the irritating flies under our breath and recited a rampage of nasty names and labels including filthy, disease-carrying irritants, Isaac sat watching the commotion and voiced his own belief that everything is good and everything has a purpose.

 

He was unaffected by the hissing of adults, our dissatisfaction, our stubborn, insistence that our space be fly-free. He was unaffected because he knew that flies were good for something. He watched us frantically flailing our arms about, then asked his sister, “What are flies good for?”

 

The innocent tone of voice alone brought me back to belief in the order of the world. Sissy did not disappoint: “flies are good for bullfrogs,” she said enthusiastically. “Flies are their food.”

 

“Oh, yeah!” he said, pleased and content with the order of the world.

 

Somehow our shooing seemed to fit the order of the day. Shooing is good for exercise, I thought to myself. And dissatisfaction is good for initiating change that inspires hope. The ugly, dirty things are indeed good for something. And those pesky irritants in life are good for something, too. They feed the bullfrogs. And what is nature’s music without the overlapping ripples and echoes of the bullfrog bass?

 

I recently discovered that flies are good for us because they feed the bullfrogs. And this makes me a believer in the security of the order of the world and the inherent good in all that is in our lives, even the ugly, dirty irritants.

 

This discovery gives me a deep, profound peace. And this feeling of peace confirms for me that I am a believer.

 

Disappointment and cynicism become nothing more than a pesky fly, no longer a crevice in my landscape. I can raise my heart rate as I shoo them away and look forward to the chorus of plump, healthy bullfrogs in my evening.

 

Yes, flies are good for us and I am a believer!