Creating adult-adult relationships with your children

I received a very late b'day card ... Reasons I'm happy you were born, it read.  The sender is one of my children.  The 10 reasons written made me weep. I often receive other cards from my other child, post cards from travel destinations, thank you notes, etc. Both of these remarkable human beings treat me as a person separate and not simply their mother. They are 29 and 33 years old.I remember thinking when they were 17 and 21 that they might be two of the most interesting and fine humans I would ever meet (of course I am biased but it was also what I truly believed about them). I also thought I did not want to be stuck forever in the role of only "their mother" and never seen as a human who had passions beyond her children.  Full disclaimer:  that is exactly how I treated my parents, as if they existed only in the role of my mom and my dad. And I didn't want that relationship with my own children. I suspect my parents wanted more with me too.  I wish I had known or paid attention.  Where was my curiosity about the two remarkable humans who loved and raised me?  It was missing.But unlike my parents, I am more demanding. I knew I wanted adult-adult relationships with my children. So when they turned 21 and 17, I began a journey to make sure that was a possibility for us. That journey was treating them like they could teach me things. Of course, I still had things to teach or share with them, but I found I was profoundly interested in the world they inhabited (in spite of my fears about it) and more importantly I was interested in them and how they were navigating said world.Fast Forward: I have ended up creating a bit of a niche in coaching Millennials mid and high level executives.  I really do love them!  AND since they (millennials in general, my children in particular) were little I always had a hunch they knew things...were plugged into something different and I wanted in on that stuff.  Today, I would say this is probably always true. I used to think it was just true about that generation. I was wrong. I find it equally true about the one coming behind them. Those kiddos in Florida from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, I would love to talk to them. I am fascinated by a young woman, Emma Gonzales, still in high school, who held an entire audience on a large stage in Washington DC for 6+ minutes in silence while she simply witnessed her own suffering and that of her peers. Who are these people? I don't know but I want to...  and I hope you do too.  What if each generation that is born, along with it's particular challenges also comes with particular gifts, well suited to help society navigate a particular part of the evolutionary journey toward wholeness?But even if this is not true, what if the secret to experiencing a sense of belonging with anyone and everyone ...is recognizing that this person/generation in front of you has an experience you don't know or maybe you can't even understand BUT you might be able to  share. You could witness his or her story.  You can tell them you "see" them. They are real. Their experience is real.And that my friends is the difference.Those of you who know me, know that I don't miss a chance to "teach" to educate. BUT I also don't miss a chance to ask a "real question". My question, is born of my own genuine curiosity. All I have to remember is to not ask it aggressively so it reads as "justify yourself" but instead reads as real curiosity. So it reads as "wonder." My name is my reminder to Wonder … To Wonder what someone else knows, thinks, feels that I can't imagine.And therein lies the difference between a life of tedium and decline and a life filled with wonder and awe. 

Dialoguing with a Poem

Dear Readers, I am an apprentice to David Whyte’s Invitas: A Path to Conversational Leadership.  I have followed his work for nearly  25 years now.  I have learned to be in dialogue with any and everything , so too, with poems.  In fact listening to David recite and riff on a poem puts one in a dialogue with their own sweet soul as well as  their heart and mind.This morning I decided to do the dialogue on the page (blog)  in  honor of Valentine’s day and the celebration of love.  Hearing this poem almost 25 years ago with Leslie Lanes, ushered in my first experience of an ecstatic moment.  A moment where everything belonged, including me.  Just as it was.  Just as I was.   If that is not Love I am not sure what Love is.  To be able  "to gather all our flaws in celebration” is to truly unconditionally love all of ourselves, to love how we were made.  To love how the world is made.  In honor of Valentine's Day, I offer you this:The link for the poem without commentary can be found here.  I suggest you read it first and then come back to the blog and read my dialogue with it.  As you read it, note your own inner conversation.  There is no single way to dialogue with a poem.  There are as many ways as there are people.https://www.davidwhyte.com/where-many-rivers-meet/

The Faces at Braga   by David Whyte

Commentary by Nancy C. WondersIn monastery darkness by the light of one flashlightthe old shrine room waits in silence. While above the doorwe see the terrible figure,fierce eyes demanding. “Will you step through?”  Will I step through the glories of youth and a well-functioning body and quick intelligence into this new territory?  The territory that holds decline, disease and disappearance?  Will I?  Good God this is hard.  My mind knows I cannot choose anything else.  I do not want my face to be the face of an old woman chasing a time that is decades gone.  If that is what is behind door #1, it is not for me.  It is humiliating.  It is shame.  I had so much of that in my youth at the mouths of my mother and the nuns.  No, I cannot go that way. I cannot return to those youthful days when I barely appreciated the beauty of my form, the brilliance of my quick mind nor the grace of a body I did not have to pay attention to because it ran just fine!  That is gone.  But door #2?  What waits there? And the old monk leads us,bent back nudging blackness,prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lampsand bow, eyes blinking in thepungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation,a hundred faces carved above,eye lines wrinkled in the hand-held light.  That’s true!  So many more wrinkled faces than mine.  So many more who went before me could I see them as … Such love in solid wood!Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence,they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.  Engulfed by the pastthey have been neglected, but throughsmoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growingthrough the dust of eroded slopes,their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.  So I too must turn my face toward the mountain of age, even with my youthful spirit, my body is asking other things of me now.  It demands me love it, touch it, stretch it, move it.Carved in devotiontheir eyes have softened through age …oh please let me soften…please do not let me harden…and their mouths curve through delight of the carver’s hand. Delight?  There could be delight in this paring back?  This essentialism.   BUT my life mantra has been DO NOT MAKE ME CHOOSE and it would seem this aging stuff is all about choosing.  AND I have a lousy picker (chooser).  It does not want to choose. It wants everything and mostly all at once.  Sheesh…how can I possibly walk this road?  I truly know virtually nothing about this way of being. If only our own faceswould allow the invisible carver’s handto bring the deep grain of love to the surface.  Shoot, I knew it, what is going to have to go is my ability to skim along, to flit from flower to flower.  instead I am going to have to pay deep attention to what I want above all else moment by moment.  To choose and abide within my current limits.I do not have time to read the NY Times or the Atlantic Magazine from cover to cover.   I can no longer follow all my lovely random curiosities.  Well actually I can, but I must accept that this means something else will need to be sacrificed.  It takes me more time to do what I did on almost everything.  "If only my own face would allow the carver’s hand (aging) to bring the deep grain of love to the surface."If only we knewas the carver knew, how the flawsin the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, my flaw:  my mind that does not live within limits…how?we would smile tooand not need faces immobilizedby fear and the weight of things undone.  It is true, I worry about this more and more, “what am I forgetting?” The constant backlog of work or home responsibilities not tended to yet? When we fight with our failing.  This was the first of David’s poems that I fell hard for.  I had a transcendent moment and it began on this line.  I (and others I might add) have fought with how I am made as long as I can remember.  And…we ignore the entrance to the shrine itselfand wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fightour eyes our hooded with griefand our mouths are dry with pain.  So much unnecessary suffering from this all my life…even still.  But there is slowly emerging a small voice that talks back a bit to that fierce figure…there is not yet an Archbishop Desmond TuTu (Made for Goodness) residing within me that is FOR me on a consistent basis, but there is something that says:  "Don't talk to my friend Nancy that way, it doesn't help her."  And that is everything. If only we could give ourselvesto the blows of the carvers hands, I wonder, what is it I refuse to give myself over too?   What if it is a kind of faith/trust in these very things I am struggling with?the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers feeding the seawhere voices meet, praising the featuresof the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away my face of productivity, of “earning,” of “the need to be deserving,” of competence…maybe if I could finally trust that as I am made, I am enough for my life…I could indeed grow youngeruntil we, growing younger toward deathevery day, would gather all our flaws in celebration  to merge with them perfectly,impossibly, wedded to our essence,full of silence from the carver’s hands. May it be so." src="blob://www.nancywonders.com/1b966a48-e3cd-4ff8-8fd1-890eda11c993" alt="image001.png" class="Apple-web-attachment Singleton" style="opacity: 1;">

Thankful for Wonder and Wonders

As you know I am a Wonders.  Daughter of Robert John Wonders, Mary Skotze Wonders, niece of Helen Wonders Chandler, Marion Wonders Wollum, Louise Wonders McKinnon, Lucy Wonders Doney, Virginia Wonders Rahoi, Joseph Wonders, and Harry Wonders.  And Granddaughter of Claire Lemieux  Wonders to whom I owe my middle name and my beloved Harry Wonders.  He was only in my life for my first six years but I simply adored him and I am not sure I will ever know why.  Why does a six year old love one human to the moon and back and not others?  I do not know but I do know it isn't because her smart brain took a tally, or came to value assessment or built a spread sheet to point her in the right direction.She simply loved who she loved for reasons unknown to her.  And that is what I want to write about today:The reasons unknown.  Why do we love this one and not that one?  Why do we get triggered by this one and not that one?  But this isn't just about humans.  Look through out your day.  You have clear preferences for all kinds of things, from your favorite kind of pasta, to your preferred coffee house, (today mine is Champion on Nassau Ave in Greenpoint (Brooklyn), a block from my daughter's apartment),  your route to the grocery store, etc.  What is your favorite time of day?  Mine: sunrise or sunset.  My favorite day of the week is Saturday, and I am not even Jewish.  My favorite season Autumn edges out spring, summer and winter by which also delights.  But when fall arrives, I am done.   I am at home.  Leaves turning, the transition between the uber fullness of summer and the quiet barren landscape of winter, the transformation of green leaves into the bare branches of the season is the one I savor most.  And luckily, living in Dallas TX, our autumn cycle is a slow circuitous path to the shortest of days.Do you ever wonder why you prefer one thing and not another, one man over all others, one woman?  A season?  A book?  A movie? Anything?  What is the preference making vehicle we all come factory loaded with?I wonder this a lot.  And not just for myself,  but for all of us.  I think our preferences, desires, longing, affiliations and affections are glimpses of our individual souls, if you believe in such.  If you don't then they are a peek into our essential self.  It is the nest of our distinctness, like a cuckoo clock popping out on the hour, we too reveal ourselves to ourselves and to each other through our affections.Isn't that the loveliest of thoughts?  Don't know who you are?  Wonder who you came here to be?  Just look to your affections and in due time all will be revealed.Yes, our preferences could also arise from longstanding, unconscious habits but even so, they were born out of either random chance or our particular resonance (the cuckoo popping out) to that particular thing.  And if our habits began out of a random choice, a preference, an affinity for that choice set in early and thus it became a habit.Why is that?  I think because our soul wants to be revealed, first and foremost to us, so we can follow it's code.  But also it wants to be let out to dance in the world.  I believe we each come with an "inner chooser" with dislikes and likes.  Affections and repulsions.  Longings and aversions.And why does this matter?  Because the inner chooser, (I will name her, Joy) is also our inner compass who can help us find our way home.  And by home I mean, to becoming our essential self, the person we came here to be, or who God made us to be.And why does that matter?  Because that my dear friends, is the miracle of life.  It is the wonder of life.So as we enter the season of wonder and awe that is initiated in Thanksgiving and ends in the positive resolve of a fresh new year, my favorite essayist comes to mind:  Anne Lamott.   I wish for us all a moment where "We start to get a hint of the power and sweetness and absurdity of life and to see it not as all fragile and harsh but as real, the really real.  We get buoyancy and, God knows, sometimes even effervescence.  Perspective doesn't reduce the gravitas, it increases reverence."Let's all raise our glasses and toast to wonder, reverence and effervescence.      

May I not become trapped ...

"May I not become trapped, caught or entangled in false inner networks of negativity, resentment or destruction toward myself. May I treat myself as the nest of God...."  John O'DonohueMay I treat myself as the nest of God!  What would that look like?  The first thing that pops to my mind is the humility it would require.  The ultimate "don't know" mindset.   When I get really quiet and look at the Pride of Barbados flowers just outside my window, there arises in me an awareness of my being the nest of God.  Just for a moment.  Just a glimpse.  I don't really know how to describe this.  I have a hard time staying with it.  It is wondrous and frightening too.  My monkey mind slips into the experience by whispering something like "...danger, danger...move away, back slowly out of this room ... it isn't meant for you.  You will get hurt."  Or it says  "Who has time for this?"  Or "You can do this later, you better do X,Y or Z now"But who will I become if I am not a nest of God?  And in these times, these difficult and fearsome times, when the news features children separated from parents at the hands of the US Government;  I realize how much work there is for me to make of myself a nest of the divine.  I must look into and be with my fears and my immense grief.  How can I be a sturdy warm protection from the energies of hate, fear and shame that swirl around us all?  For I do not want to cradle the Divine with the fear I often find in my heart these days. What is to be done with it?  Surely this is what the Holy Spirit of my Catholic girlhood was for, to help me create a heart that is beyond the geography of fear and worry.  Just that thought brings a measure of piece.  I will seek to grow a heart that is a nest for God, a heart so open, so wonder-filled, so safe and warm that the Divine could indeed nest here.  Is just the wanting this enough?"When the Guest is being looked for, it is the longing that does all the work."  KabirI will nurture my imagination for that is what humans can do AND I will double down on my longing for a heart that is beyond fear and all constriction.  A heart that could be the nest of God.    

Winter Greeting: 2017

Winter Greeting: 2017Winter has long been the season of reflection so, get cozy, pour yourself a cup of something and let’s chat.This year for the first time I started my decorating, shopping and gifting early. Ask my siblings; I am notoriously a last minute girl. Myers Briggs P through and through. But this year, I think I needed her more.  Her? She is Light, Hope and Mercy.  Mostly Mercy. “Her” is Grandma Anna, the grandmother of the universe as well as the grandmother of Jesus, and mother of his mother Mary in the Christian faith. She is the part of the universe that is infinite love and mercy. Mostly Mercy.To my mind, Christendom’s celebration of the birth of Jesus is also a celebration of the triumph of light, hope and mercy over all that stands against their expression.   (Mostly Mercy.) Did you know that around the world there is some sort of celebration of light at this time of the year? Whether it is the birth of Jesus, the light of the world, or the Jewish Hanukkah, or Kwanza or Denali…worldwide there are celebrations of light returning. Increasing hours of daylight means the promise of new beginnings, of redemption, and for me in particular, the triumph of mercy and empathy over fear and constriction.There are a number of seasonal firsts this year for the Wonders Dearings. In addition to getting an early start on the season we are taking a trip and hosting our first open house. After years of promising that one year we would not do Christmas gifts etc. but would instead take a trip, the Wonders Dearings finally did it. The 24th found us on the road to the Gage Hotel in Marathon Texas and exploring Big Bend National Park. The 27th we discovered the magic of Marfa, Texas, home to artists and spiritual seekers.   We renewed and re-discovered the magic of our connections, of our shared passions and learned to be a bit more elegant in navigating our divergent temperaments. It is no small thing to put three solo adults, all more leaders than followers together for a large amount of time and in close quarters.   We did that.  It brought us closer together as these kinds of conversations do.  We had and made time for them.  We are better for them.  Each of us.Another first: No true Christmas tree with all the ornaments our memories can conjure, but instead something I have long wanted; decorating with nature and light. An abundance of greens, flowers, candles. I have thoroughly enjoyed the change, maybe even more so because it was so long in coming.And … and … and yet, I feel this melancholy. Even in this long desired reinvention of how we do this season, (and my heart flutters at the thought of any kind of reinvention), yet this unshakable melancholy persists. Why?Even in our togetherness there were poignant moments of time passing too quickly or where-has-it-all gone. Even in the best of experiences, the extraordinary drive through Big Bend replete with hiking the Santa Elena Canyon, the vastness of the Chinati museum, and time unbounded a bit, it persists. This curious combination of deep thankfulness mixed with some unnamable loss. Like the vast beauty of the desert that also holds all manner of prickly cacti and fierce critters.Maybe this is aging and the nostalgia that comes with it? Maybe the desert sky renders this feeling larger? Or maybe it is realizing that more Solstice celebrations of the return of light are behind than ahead of me?  Or the dawning (and unbearable) awareness that I will not accompany my children (physically) through all the pivotal moments of their lives.I remember my sweet and humble academic father, who never saw his grandson graduate from MIT, now studying at Harvard Law School. Papa missed this all and how it would have thrilled him.  Zachary Robert Dearing, you can't possibly know what this would have meant to your grandfather. He would not have even dreamed this as a possibility, it was outside of his rural and humble beginnings to hope or dream for these institutions. But please trust he would have been both humbled and proud by your remarkable achievements, especially in the face of your dyslexia. And my mother would have been beyond wowed at her granddaughter Katharine Lillie Dearing’s culinary talents and the culture shifting work she is creating in the world. Even though it might confront her political and worldviews, she adored her Katie and would have not been able to easily dismiss her series, Woman of a Certain Age, and it’s Tribeca acknowledgement. There are so many things my parents are missing. As we too miss sharing these moments with them.  A granddaughter married and their first great grandson. Another granddaughter is engaged and planning her wedding while making a new life for herself in fashion in New York.My life holds so many gifts and blessings...and always has ...but as I play the Leslie Odom, Jr.’s Simply Christmas CD (the new) alongside Barbara Streisand’s Christmas album and so many other old favorites, I wonder: Is this the magic ...(albeit bittersweet) of Christmas? Is this annual seasonal celebration a direct line to everything that came before and everything that will yet come to pass?  A direct line,  AND all at once!  How do we sweet tender human hearts hold that kind of complexity? How do we grow hearts large enough to continue to rise up with a full throated “YES!” to each day, ever more aware of time moving on? This daunting challenge is more and more my daily companion. In small and large ways, I am reminded I must apprentice myself to the beauty of impermanence.Recently, I have sensed, just a hint or a glimmer, that there is a singular and stunning ~ heart stopping ~ beauty in this part of life’s trajectory. For this very young-at-heart woman, this woman whose life has been firmly planted in innovation, emergence, and possibility, how will I find those beginnings in my decline and death?  I love, adore maybe even worship the expansiveness in beginnings. Can I uncover a different expansiveness in loss? Is that even a thing?I am sure it is beyond words, it is unspeakable.   Yet, I feel compelled to attempt to incarnate my new sensibility of this time.  I continue to sense that there is an abiding but different security and comfort in impermanence. Please don’t ask me to explain it. I also can’t explain why I simultaneously cry and feel a deep abiding peace driving in the desert. Something about the soul piercing starkness of this beauty. Is this the face of God?  Is this wonder and awe?Isn’t it interesting that in the bible when the angels come to visit a human their first words are “Be not afraid.” Indeed, this impermanence is of the divine and I/we humans initially respond in fear. “Be not afraid my soul whispers, but my mind resists.”   Is this the blessing of life? Succumbing, surrendering to the Unfathomable but not in fear rather in love? AND with that surrender, do we glimpse the beauty beyond all naming? A beauty as majestic as the Marfa, TX desert sky. Impermanence is not what we think we want. But we aren’t always the best judges of what will truly make us happy. I know from my own life that what I thought would make me happy, often failed me miserably and paradoxically what I was sure I didn’t want, often fulfilled me in ways beyond my wildest imagination.  I no longer think I am the best judge of what will make me happy. And that makes it easier to welcome and embrace what is, even when it falls very short of my desires.As we move into 2018 in the era of Donald Trump, with abundant natural disasters and nuclear threats, it might be more important than ever to love what is. That includes each of us loving our own flawed and imperfect selves. Enough self-improvement! Instead a full-on embrace of how we are made; the good, the bad and especially the ugly. And then onto our equally imperfect family, friends and neighbors. Maybe there is something inside of each of us that is truly inviolate, wise and as vastly loving as the West Texas sky. Touching that sweet spot with far more regularity might be the gift that never disappoints.So, in the spirit of the Beauty and the Joy of Impermanence I wish each and everyone one of us  a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, a Sweet Solstice, and Happy New Year.