The Divine

...tell me about how you perceive the Divine.  Is there a Divine?

I know people who truly FEEL God in their hearts and in their lives. And I believe they really do. For them, God is as real as my cat is to me...And truth be told, I envy their faith. To be so certain, convinced there is a guiding and loving entity who formed this amazing world and everything in it, is a wonderful gift I wasn't given (not to worry, though, I know I've been blessed with other amazing gifts...I bake a MEAN snickerdoodle for starters!). This is one of the reasons I love the movie "Contact" so much...Palmer believes in Ellie's travels and testimony at the end. He's undergone a similarly transformational experience with God. Each are equally unprovable as they are powerful. He doesn't dismiss her experience because it's never something that has happened to him, he embraces it because he can relate to it so well on another level.

My lack of belief in God, however, doesn't mean I don't feel there are forces much more powerful than me around at all times. I often refer to it as the Universe...but I think that's more just to give it an easy name. And I can tap into this energy if I pay attention, focus and not let myself become sidelined with comfortable trivialities. It's rarely an easy task and I often look back and think I could have handled a given situation better if I'd trusted myself and the forces at work. These lyrics from the Indigo Girls song "World Falls" seem to describe my difficult relationship with the Universe:

this world falls on me
hopes of immortality
everywhere i turn
all the beauty just keeps shaking me

now i woke up in the middle of a dream
scared the world was too much for me...

Even now, I'm struggling against the momentum of those forces...there's directions I'm supposed to go and lessons I'm supposed to learn, but it's hard to quell the fear the uncertainties bring. I need to be still, focus and let the opportunities present themselves in their own time. And that is probably the first lesson.

If Money Were No Object

This morning, the following question was posed to me...

Tell me about what you'd do with your energies if money were no object.  If you could put your life on a path that was driven by passion with no concerns for money or survival what would you spend your time doing?

A great question and one I revisit every so often as I undergo periodic existential crises. It also seems to be a theme lately as well. A Facebook friend just posted something similar and my friend L. asked me the same question a couple of weeks ago.

Currently I don't consider my job to be terribly secure. I've felt that way since November of 2008 when the budget woes came home to roost amongst state agencies. As I've pondered potential unemployment, I've been thinking about exactly what I would do when/if it happens. During an earlier consideration of the possibility (December, 2008), I wrote the following in my Facebook blog:

The future at work looks very uncertain....it appears the budgets for fiscal year 2010 (beginning July 1, 2009) may need to be slashed by around 20%! 20% translates to about $4.4 million! The result is, I face the very real possibility of my project being eliminated and losing my job.

So in that event, what do I do with myself? Sounds like the dilemna I face before every long quarter, only bigger. Sudden unemployment could leave me with the opportunity to take an extended amount of time off for myself. I've been working for over 20 years...maybe a sabbatical is in order. It would probably mean selling my place and downsizing my life considerably. But couldn't that be somewhat freeing? Sell the condo, sell the Jeep, sell the scooter (and buy a larger one ;-) ) ! Spend a year taking trips, possibly taking classes in other states...something like Elderhostel perhaps. I will admit to finding this possibility somewhat appealing.

Recently the potential for unemployment became even closer to being certain. I'm pretty sure the powers that be are planning to either close my project or morph it into something I'm not qualified for.

So when L. recently asked me what I would do if money were no object, I replied without hesitation, "I would go back to school!" Which is not so far off from my response a year ago.

The thing is, I don't know what I would go back to school FOR...and thus the crux of your question and the quandary it holds for me. I really have trouble pinning myself down to a "passion". So much so, I often end up feeling like I'm less than ideal because of it. Because I don't think I have one driving force within me. I am interested in many things. I currently keep little cards with "possibilities" taped to my bathroom mirror. UWT has an Urban Studies program I'm interested in, I would love to study Materials Science, I'm really interested in Nanotechnology, I'm fascinated by the idea of exploring renewable energy, I love teaching, I love science fiction literature, I love photography, I love exercise and the science of it, I'm intrigued by higher level math, I'm curious about computer programming...and this list goes on and on. The bottom line is, I love variety. How do I whittle the list down to just one thing? And am I limited to one thing for the rest of my life?