Scale Magic, Scale Madness

We promised to weigh ourselves on the first day of the month. That first day came upon us suddenly last Thursday. It was the First of July.

OMG. We laughed so hard we cried.

First, we had to get naked. Because God knows we can’t weigh ourselves wearing so much as a thread.

“Shall we take off our jewelry?” one of us asked. Giggling.

One took the scale out from under the radiator in the loo. She set it on the wood floor—not on the bathmat! She adjusted it up five pounds to match the Weight Watcher’s scale she used years ago. (Don’t ask.)

She jumped on it to make sure it was really set where she wanted it. Then she jumped off.

Then, she weighed herself. Lost a pound.

“Oh well, I was wearing my underwear the last time I got on the scale.” Then, “One pound doesn’t really count.” Beat. “Two pounds count.”

I stared at her.

Subtext: Have you gone round the twist? Are you mad?

I picked up the scale, put it on the bathmat, adjusted the five pounds down back to zero and got on the scale. I’d still gained the five pounds I’d gained a month ago. Due to medication. In fact, I’m supposed to gain 25 and it’s slow going!

We stared at one another and laughed and laughed at how crazy the scale makes us.

The moral of the story: a small metal box with three numbers has no power unless we give it power.

We got off the scale, back into our jammies, and went in the kitchen to have breakfast.

Another scale, another day.

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?

Wow!

Seeds XII, 27

Seed: Wow!

Rabbi Marc Gellman of Temple Beth Torah in Long Island sounds like a real character to me. He’s part of the God Squad team on cable television. Over the next four weeks, we are going to explore his four kinds of prayers.

Gellman was quoted, “There is no prayer harder than suburban Jewish prayer,” he said. “Evangelical Christians, Pentecostals, they go to church to pray. Why else would they be there? But Jews are different. People come to temple to identify with other Jews, or socialize. The writer Harry Golden once asked his father, who was an atheist, why he went to services every Saturday. The old man told him, ‘My friend Garfinkle goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Garfinkle.’ There’s a lot of that.”

I’d heard that before, but what I hadn’t heard was this: “Really, when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers.” One of them is “Wow!”

Gellman calls these prayers of praise and wonder at the whole of creation. I know, I know, we are sometimes stopped by wonder. Pink clouds at dusk. A mournful birdsong. The slink of a puma. But what about the everyday parts of creation?

Wow! The sun’s up. Wow! I woke up before the alarm. Wow! I found my toothbrush. Wow! There’s toothpaste too. Wow! Running water. Wow! A clean towel! Wow! Morning. Wow! Tea. Wow! Coffee. Wow! Breakfast. Wow! My car started on the first go. I know you take my point.

Wow! I’m alive. Wow! So are you. Praise the Wow, and pass the butter please.

Be passion,

Susan Corso

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

Check out the Seeds Archive for past messages of inspiration.

If  you would like to be added to the Seeds e-mail list, visit the sign-up page..

For spiritual nourishment, please visit my website www.susancorso.com, and my blogs

Seeds for Sanctuary, Ode Magazine, and The Huffington Post

and

join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter: @PeaceCorso.

Saturday Morning

The sequence of events:

I got up and my blood sugar crashed hard.

Then it was humid.

Then I had a hot flash.

So shaky, sweaty and disoriented from the sugar crash, the humidity sent me round the twist, and a hot flash at that moment is what I would consider adding insult to injury. In fact, I think hot flashes should be illegal between Memorial Day and Labor Day, but no one asked me.

Anyway, the events continued:

The painters arrived unexpectedly at 8 AM.

The proper Capricorn full moon was at 7:30 AM.

Add: one partial lunar eclipse.

What did I do?

I sweated. I barked. I apologized. I demanded that the windows be closed and the house cooled down. I wrote a snarky email to the painters. And then,

I laughed.

The confluence of events was overwhelming and, more to the point, hilarious. Come on, if you saw the newly-slim Valerie Bertinelli in a made-for-television movie go through that exact same sequence of events, you wouldn’t believe it could happen that way. So,

I laughed.

And then I laughed some more.

Sometimes, a painter just forgets to call, the full moon happens, and hot flashes? Well, they have a method and a madness all their own.

Lighten up, dear one.

As John Bucchino, that brilliant songwriter, so eloquently sings, “It’s Only Life.”

Or, more soberly, but nonetheless a truth, remember the wisdom of Solomon’s Ring:

This Too Shall Pass.

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?

Seedless in Summer

As of last Friday, I have no more Seeds written. Oh, I have the next 26 planned. Made up each file, put them on the Seeds Inventory list, all ready to go, but I have not written them.

Why?

Because it’s good to be empty.

My usual pattern is to write Seeds twice a year. It’s a mind-set of sorts. Like writing jokes almost. I have to be in the right space. The spaces I make for Seeds are the weeks between Christmas and New Years Day, and the weekend of Fourth of July.

Now I could have written these next 26 Seeds over the past month since I planned them, and even though I opened the file for Seeds 27 several times, I did not write them.

It’s good to be empty.

Very good.

I grew up with a mother born at the tail end of the Great Depression. Empty meant hungry to her. There was always enough food in our house for a week’s meals even when she thought there was nothing to eat. Empty wasn’t safe. But that’s not so for me.

It’s good to be empty.

There are writers who don’t feel this way. Certainly in my novel-writing, I never finish one that I don’t start the next one immediately. That way I’m always in the middle of the next one. (At this moment, number eight!) But not with Seeds.

I like the idea of pouring out my creative heart till it’s empty of Seed ideas for that part of the year. I’m not afraid of empty because I recognize the Source of my creativity. I’d call that God, but other words work as well: Source, Intelligence, The One, The All, Mother.

Seeds themselves are a special kind of writing. I like to write them in two or three days and have that be all I am doing. A holiday weekend is perfect. It almost never takes long before I’m in the groove, and soon enough I’m done.

The secret of empty is the belief that I will be filled. Empty here on planet Earth means filled is on its way. Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum. So does creativity.

Are you stuck in a creative project?

Good. Get empty.

It’s good to be empty.

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?

Global Balance

Seeds XII, 26

Seed: Global Balance

I know, I know, a lot of folks are burned out on the subject of global warming, but despite our wishful thinking, that won’t make it go away. I am particularly interested in its name change to climate change because the larger truth is that we are undergoing global warming and global cooling.

It’s the dead of winter as I write this Seed. In two days, it’s supposed to be 48* in Boston in January! Like so many, I am glad for the mildness of the winter, but I worry about what that mildness connotes. I feel sometimes like Scarlett O’Hara, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

Well, tomorrow turns into today with the regularity of a clock, dear one. So here’s my proposal for planetary balance. Let’s make a prayer pact. This doesn’t mean stop recycling or stop looking for and creating alternative energy sources. This means, in addition to all the things we are doing for the planet, that we all agree to pray for Earth.

What to pray? May our Earth attain a global balance, global health, global well-being. Amen.

If enough of us pray this, things will change.

Be passion,

Susan Corso

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

Check out the Seeds Archive for past messages of inspiration.

When you have friends you would like added to the Seeds e-mail list, send their addresses to me at susan@susancorso.com.

For spiritual nourishment, please visit my website www.susancorso.com

and my blogs Seeds for Sanctuary, Ode Magazine, and The Huffington Post

and

join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter: @PeaceCorso.

Equal Opportunity Confusion

I laughed at myself this week when I wrote my blog post for Equinox and not Solstice, and then decided to publish it anyway. It’s rare for me to confuse these holy-days, but I did. I wondered why.

I think it’s because the redefinition of equality is everywhere. I was delighted and appalled at the federal court determination that domestic violence laws apply to same-sex couples. Good, of course good, because of its implicit couple-ness recognition. Bad, if you will, because those who choose to marry other than those of their gender opposite aren’t married according to Uncle Sam.

So, I asked, how can domestic violence laws apply to gay couples and income tax laws not apply? Is it only I who see the cognitive dissonance here? Am I mad? Dreaming? What? George Bernard Shaw came to mind: Some people are more equal than others.

Equality is in our faces in a big way actually.

Who’s more equal …?

BP or the oceans?

Gay people or straight people? (And what about the undecideds?)

Church or state?

Republican or Democrat?

This Earth is a reality based on polarity. We have a longest day/shortest night and a shortest day/longest night as well as two days that have equal days and nights.

Could it be that our reality is shifting from polarity to some other basis? And what might that be?

Let’s just take light and shadow.

It sure seems like we’re mired in shadow at this point. We’re exploring the underbelly of our addiction to oil. We’re looking at the sexual shadow of the Catholic Church. We’re smack dab in the middle of the dark side of marriage. But if polarity rules, then it’s only a matter of time before we return to light. It’s not really a choice. Polarity means that shadow turns to light and light to shadow.

What to do?

Celebrate the shadow. Celebrate the light. Know that both contain the other. Live in faith. Faith that we will face and traverse shadow. Faith that shadow is meant for our ultimate good. Faith that the light will resurge.

Solstice is actually the day when the light begins to lessen, when the sun considers the onset of winter. Strange, isn’t it, that the longest day of the year is the beginning of the waning of the sun. What an orderly universe. There’s no rush, no pressure, just a slow waning of the light till we get to the Equinox in the Autumn and the Solstice of the shortest day in winter. No mistakes. On the shortest day is when the light begins to wax. Go figure.

We don’t doubt the sun’s path. Why should we doubt our own?

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?

Summer Solstice

So, here’s funny {read: odd.} I wrote this post as though it is the Equinox and signed it Happy Solstice not realizing till I got into bed what I’d done. I decided to leave it as is, except to say that today is the longest day and shortest night of the year.

Equality Time

The Summer Solstice is 7:28 AM EDT today. It is a day of equal day and equal night. I see the whole world undergoing the “equality” lesson these days.

Consider these …

The oil spill in the Gulf is prompting the U. S. Government to give equality time to Energy Policy.

The Proposition 8 lawsuit in California is causing the entire nation to consider marriage equality.

The devastating stories of violence and rape in Congo are asking the whole world to care for its women and girls equally.

The ongoing war in Afghanistan is making We the People look equally at the benefits of peace for all people.

The failed war on drugs is demanding a compassionate, equal answer to drug use and its fallout.

Equality is one of the major issues of our age.

How can you make your life more equal today?

Happy Solstice!

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?

Neti Neti

Seeds XII, 25

Seed: Neti Neti

I read this expression in a column by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, a wonderfully naughty Zen sort of rabbi who writes in Spirituality & Health. He was writing on bumper sticker faith.

Citing the Upanishads, Rabbi Rami suggested “Neti Neti” for his choice for a characterization of his faith. It means: “Not this. Not that.” I loved this!

What’s your faith about?

What a hard question to answer. Well, it’s definitely this for me: the Divine Feminine. And it’s definitely not that: the Patriarchal Religions. The more I tried to walk down this path, the more I realized that it’s a whole lot easier to talk about what faith isn’t than what it is.

How’s this? Faith is what sustains me when I am not fully awake in myself.

Define yours.

Be passion,

Susan Corso

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

Check out the Seeds Archive for past messages of inspiration.

When you have friends you would like added to the Seeds e-mail list, send their addresses to me at susan@susancorso.com.

For spiritual nourishment, please visit my website www.susancorso.com

and my blogs Seeds for Sanctuary, Ode Magazine, and The Huffington Post

and

join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter: @PeaceCorso.

The Tony Award PUSH

As most of you know, I worked on Broadway for some years in my youth and I watch the Tony Awards faithfully as a result. I understand completely that this is the singular annual occasion for Broadway to establish itself in the rest of the country as a brand worth coveting.

Broadway is really a marketer’s nightmare. Most of the time, it can’t go to the consumer. Instead, the consumer has to come to it. Mountain to Mohammed time. I do get it. (I know there are National and Bus-and-Truck Tours, but it’s not Broadway itself. Only Broadway is Broadway.)

Anyway, this year’s Tonys left me exhausted.

Every dance number was about athleticism or velocity or both. I saw nothing lyrical or restful to the eye or to the heart. It’s happening on television lately too. The advertisers are so hungry to have their seconds in the spotlight that when significant moments occur, the editors don’t let us (the audience) be with the moment, feel the moment, have the moment.

Oh, no, we’re on to the next thing.

That’s why the Tonys felt unbelievably pushed this year. Rah, rah, on to the next thing.

There were some lovely acceptance speeches. Arielle Tepper Madover comes to mind in her perfect red dress. Bebe Neuwith and Nathan Lane put paid to the Tony Voters in their set-up for awarding Best Actor and Best Actress in a Musical—for which neither were nominated. In fact, these were the most graceful moments in the evening.

Except. Except. Except for Marian Seldes, who simply did not give an acceptance speech for her Lifetime Achievement Award. I don’t know if it was a Senior Moment or if she was simply overwhelmed with the sound, the splash, the sophistry, but Marian put her hand over her heart, shrugged her shoulders eloquently and, swinging her cane, walked gracefully off the stage.

Don’t get me wrong, dear one. I love the theatre more than ever. My novels are all set in or around musical theatre performances. And I get what the Tony Awards are doing for the theatre all over this country and the world.

It’s just … well, for a few, lingering moments, I wanted the stillness, the hush, the silence, the wonder, the magic of live performance. Not pulled. Not pushed. Not, if you will, efforted, but here, now, present as genuine theatre wizardry can, and always will, be.

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?

Sustaining the Tension

What do you do when you have a big tangle in your life?

One instinct is to worry at the tangle till it’s clear. That’s not working for us. We keep raising the subject again and again—then we run away from it. It’s that big.

Human tangles come in all shapes and sizes just like humans. Ours took five years to create, and we didn’t even know we had created it till the IRS decided to audit me! It has legal and emotional aspects; it affects our past and our future.

I’m not saying it will take 5 years to untangle it. I’m saying it will take as long as it takes and we are (gratefully) committed to showing up for ourselves and one another till it’s worked out. Our goal for completion is our wedding anniversary, October 31^st.

What that means is that we’ll be working on this through the summer and into the fall. Months. Six months, to be exact. Is that possible? Of course. (But are we willing to be surprised and get it done early? You bet.)

This is a tender difficulty. It has all sorts of personal beliefs attached to it. It’s complicated by our beliefs about money, marriage, inheritance and death. Only those?

Yeah, only those. Is it any wonder we have no need to hurry? Not really. Instead, we’re taking a far wiser approach, the approach of mature humans. It takes time to make a tangles, and it will take time to clear it up.

How this plays out is that one or the other of us can get caught in rising tension—a lot of the time unbeknownst even to ourselves. What sustains us through the tense times?

Faith. Faith in ourselves as individuals. Faith in our marriage. Faith in the Order of the Universe. We like being together. We love each other. We’ve weathered storms before. No reason we can’t handle this one. Our past experience of ourselves and of each other sustains our faith.

Is it always comfortable? No, it isn’t. But so? Isn’t everything worthwhile in this world worth some tension?

Mutual respect for each other’s process goes a long way here.

So does not insisting that it be worked out instantly.

Faith, too. Not to mention a sense of humor.

One of our pre-nup agreements is: Show up.

The other two are: Pray through it, No lawyers.

Seven words. Seven words that created and recreate our marriage every day. We’re in a re-creation phase that’s awkward at the moment.

So?

So we’re adults. We’ll live through it. Our marriage will be stronger at the end of it.

What’s to hurry for? Nothing.

What’s to worry about? Nothing.

What’s to fear? Nothing.

Marriage is a mystery. Each couple in one makes it up as we go along. We’re on a bumpy patch of the path now. Been there, done that, in all sorts of other ways. There’s every reason to think that we’ll make it through this one—and that’s what keeps me going.

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?