Making friends

Sundance: I wasn’t cheating.

Macon: You can die. For that matter, you both can die.

Sundance: If he invites us to stay, then we’ll go.

Butch: We gotta leave anyway.

Sundance: He’s got to invite us to stick around.

Butch: I’m over the hill, but it can happen to you.

Sundance: That’s just what I want to hear.

Butch: Every day you get older, now that’s a law.

Butch approaches Macon.

Butch: What would you think about maybe asking us to stick around?

Macon: What?

Butch: You don’t have to mean it or anything, just ask us to stick around, I promise you–

Macon shoves Butch aside. Butch turns to Sundance.

Butch: I can’t help you, Sundance.

Macon freezes. Sundance stands up.

Macon: I didn’t know you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheating. If I draw on you, you’ll kill me.

Sundance: There’s that possibility.

Butch: No, you’d be killing yourself. Why don’t you just invite us to stick around? You can do it. And easy. C’mon.

Macon: Why dontcha stick around?

Butch: Thanks, but we gotta get going.

– Sundance (Robert Redford), Butch (Paul Newman), Macon (Donnelly Rhodes), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), written by William Goldman

(with thanks to Scott Myers)

Recently and repeatedly I've encountered messages advising me to be on more agreeable terms with what vexes (torments) me.  In my daily emailed Note from the Universe, the question was, "Want to move a mountain?  Befriend it."  Yesterday the suggestion was longer.  

"If you can fall in love with just one thing about him, her, them, it, or you, Marylinn, just once a day, and speak it aloud, you'll be surprised at how quickly this will transform your entire life.

I love that look on your face when the coin drops -
    The Universe"

****(Okay, I have to report that I cannot get the fonts to change and match nor can I have this text in a stand-out color and no amount of love is going to make me happy about it, but there it is.)****

Over the past three days, I have tuned in to podcasts that share the application of such principles.  It reminded me of the scene from Butch Cassidy and how, maybe, we can make something leave by asking it to stick around.

To speak love, acceptance and welcome over aches, pains, tremors, unsure footing, life-long depression, fear, anxiety and every other presumed defect of body or character is unknown country.  I am not familiar with the customs here.  What I assume, though, is trying something so radically different cannot possibly make any of it worse.  To feel that I am no longer swimming against my own tide or that of the wider world would be so peaceful.  My arms are tired.  I find - I have found - it difficult to believe that our brief time here does not include larger portions of contentment, quiet mind, joy.  Having seen myself - and I know I am not alone in this, many of us have this in common - as a nearly-impossible fixer-upper into whom most of my energy needs to be poured to keep the roof from caving in or a portal to hell opening in the living room floor, has half-consumed and wearied me for years.  More than two decades.

The series of programs this week, about which I received notices that I chose to ignore, featured Panache Desai whose own descriptions of his history and work tell the story better than I can.   That the series was free made me less wary and that it was suggested by a friend whom I know to be much more fluent in this sort of transformation, who knows, too, what I seek, told me just to go ahead.

I am not sharing this because I have experienced the shift from an old, estranged self to the whole, radiant, authentic being the teachings assure is possible.  Instead I am sharing this part of the process, perhaps a new willingness simply to allow all that is me without my own ever-present stink eye given when I fall short of some artificial ideal.  I cannot even pretend that I know how to fall in love with my arthritis, with my fatigue, my too-often indifferent ways.  So I am going to walk around the table and come at all of this from a different direction.  "I'd really like you to stay around," I say, making new friends from old afflictions.  In unison, they answer, "Thanks, but we gotta get going."  I hope with hot and spangled passion there will be more to report. xo