Today is December 17th, 2022 and I feel excited and a bit scared being so publicly vulnerable with matters so close to my heart. This first post is essentially the content of my “about tab” on my Substack just added it a couple of days ago, but I thought since many of you may not see it, it would be a good place to start. It’s longer than most of my future posts will be, but hopefully, over the holidays you can pour yourself a warm drink and join me in this brand-new Field of possibility.
This photo was taken this morning - it’s the view that I see on the old messy bulletin board above my desk every day… I shared this picture to point out the famous photo of the earth on top that some still call “The Blue Marble” which was taken by the NASA astronauts on Apollo on December 17th, 1972 when I was only two years old.
That particular day on their way to the moon, the astronauts were traveling on a new trajectory that made it possible for them to see and photograph the south polar ice cap and cloud cover from the Southern Hemisphere. It’s my favorite picture. I especially love how they described finding themselves so moved with unexpected and overwhelming emotions by its beauty. They were in a state of awe. They felt an increased connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. It caused a change in self-concept and even an inner shift in their values that was transformative in their lives. It’s now referred to as the “Overview Effect”. That concept has inspired all of my work and the idea of my Ministry.
The name of my Ministry is “Tree Line”. The idea is to help be a guide on the side for others above the dense trees of their day-to-day existence and up past the tree line so they can have a different view of things and look back on their own lives to have a first-hand experience and realization of the beautiful view for themselves.
You’re here for it! My very first published writing. I feel excited and a bit scared being vulnerable with matters so close to my heart. I think the word that Glennon Doyle Melton uses to describe it works best… “scited” (pron. sky-ted, scared + excited). That familiar feeling for all of us when we step out of our comfort zone.
Like when you’re standing at the start line of your first marathon wondering if you’ll make it to the finish line…. or the week before your due date with your first child and you have no idea what you’re in for. The potent mixture of dread and the best feeling of being alive ALL mixed into one!
To be honest, I have my doubts too. A part of me has been dragging my heels on creating this space. Can reading my words REALLY help shift others’ connection to something bigger that feels right to them? Will anyone feel better about their lives and the possibilities for Humanity? Can we even shift the trajectory we’re on?
This all started with a car chat with my son who recently graduated from Queen’s in our conversation about climate change and the environment he said… “Mom, we’re F#*Ked”. My heart sank because I think that’s how many of us are feeling. Overwhelmed with the global issues we’re facing collectively. They are affecting ALL of us in ways we can’t even imagine.
I think I can speak for many of us here, but we are all just trying our best.
To live well. To find fulfillment and happiness. To be good parents to our children, loving to our siblings, parents, and grandparents. To find our gifts, our purpose. To make a decent living and support our family.
Not to mention having to navigate an active minefield of universally shared suffering that seems to arrive on our doorsteps when we least expect it. A diagnosis, chronic pain, grief from the loss of someone we love, coping with mental illness, relapse, divorce, bankruptcy, or losing a job. If we live long enough it seems like life is filled with these challenges and they seem to come in a neverending stream.
So how do we navigate this landscape AND make the necessary changes to help our future generations when we are just trying to keep our own heads above water?
In a nutshell, that’s what this Substack is all about. So to be clear, it’s not that I’m so sure I can, and of course, I don’t have all of the answers, but that’s what becoming a Minister means to me.
Showing up in my own small way to serve the greater good.
**** To my fidgety friends.. feel free to stop reading here. That’s the punch, but if you’re interested to read on, here’s the rest of my why…
We’ve had so many incredible technological advancements in the last century. It’s hard to believe that when I went to University I didn’t even have a computer, internet, mobile phone, or email and that was in the early 1990s. We literally had to go knocking on doors to see who wanted to come down to dinner at the cafeteria in residence.
So much has changed.
And so have we.
We’ve also slowly adopted a cultural narrative that we’re separate from one another. That we need to figure things out ourselves. The predominant thinking in our Western culture seems to be driven by fear and lack and a denial of the divine, so it’s no wonder we consume self-help books like we’re living at a high altitude and they are pure oxygen.
But are we really helping ourselves? Do we feel better? Do we even have a sense that we are unconditionally loved, secure, and fulfilled?
Reading about the talented 40-year-old DJ Stephen ‘tWitch’ this week on social media felt heartbreaking. Suicide has sadly become the number one cause of death for our youth. I can’t even imagine the pain and grief that is felt by the family trying to find an explanation or living with a mind haunting them with thoughts about what they could have done differently.
Many of us get caught up in the web of addiction. Not just with the social giants like drugs and alcohol, but as humans, we ALL seem to find ourselves compulsively repeating patterns of behaviors, thinking, lifestyles, or relationships that are subtly harming us. The struggles are silent and persistent and they not only wipe out our inner light, but they have the power if left unchecked to harm our families, our life savings, our dignity, and our hopes, and even take our life.
It’s not surprising in our secular culture that many of us struggle to get sober when the first three steps to the 12 steps in AA is to basically surrender to a Higher Power of our own understanding and admit we’re powerless, and well, of course, our egos won’t have it. We are quick to point our fingers and say it doesn’t work. Maybe we can bring ourselves to admit we have a problem, or that our lives have become unmanageable, but before long it might be that the Big Book, you know, it’s just not for us. We never really even allow ourselves to consider that it’s us that is the problem.
We do it in our Christian household too. The ancient Christian teachings of loving our neighbors, not being judgemental, forgiving, and dropping our stones have been so twisted with our human egos and fear that we’ve nominated and denominated ourselves more than 23,000 times according to Google. We think we are right when all we are is addicted to our way of thinking as Father Richard Rohr likes to say. That OUR church and ideas are the right ones. We’re so convinced we’ll pick those stones right back up and forget or ignore the bigger picture of the incredible sense of what Jesus was trying to help us see. We like to do things OUR way but that ego parade leads our beloved traditional faiths to atrocities like the devastating residential schools here in Canada. We’ll even rationalize that we’re doing it for God. We’re intelligent beings, how on earth has our level of consciousness dropped so low?
It’s like we don’t realize that we are one tree and our branches are fighting one another. We feel conflicted, even within ourselves. We’re struggling and harming one another. It’s a sense of Powerlessness that is being deeply felt on so many levels.
We also don’t like to talk about it, so for our own good reasons we don’t.
Some of our egos are so triggered by the word God, that we need to use other words to describe this higher power or make it our own to even feel palatable. That’s how I have felt for many years. I think words like Source, the Universe, Consciousness, Natural Intelligence, or even just Nature can help us. I once heard Carolyn Myss say that if we don’t use the word God, we’re just chickens. I think she’s right because I’ve been living in a spiritual closet most of my life. Just trying as any open-minded skeptic could make better sense of things for herself and is mostly unsure but driven to seek a deeper truth to satisfy a deeper knowing that things aren’t what they seem to be.
We’ve collectively turned to science for explanations, but it seems that as advanced as we think we are, dealing with the indescribable and unmeasurable or what can’t be named doesn’t work very well with our current methods. It seems that we can only measure what already is with our methodology. Matter.
The fact that we now somehow know there are two trillion galaxies like ours and that we’re on a blue spinning globe flying through space at 72,000 miles per hour is more than most of us can grasp. We also know with our advancements in quantum physics that nothing comes into form in this world without first being imagined. That not only is everything energy including us, but that energy can be expressed as either a wave or a particle, but only becomes a particle when there’s an intelligent observer. So what Einstein said is true. That time and space ARE an illusion of our consciousness.
What on earth?
So how do we reconcile this with our faith? How do our church leaders adapt? By denying it? Book burning, calling things heresy, and sticking our Christian heads in the sand? I have so much respect for the incredible ministers, pastors, and priests standing on the front lines of congregations around the world and praising God in community, and in NO way is this meant to criticize that. We’re all on the same team here as earthlings, but it feels like there is a diaspora of us that can’t reconcile the choices that have been made by our churches that have fallen somewhere outside the realm of organized religion.
Instead of dealing with our deeper questions, it seems as though we’ve cut our losses and we’ve made a run for it. We’ve left churches in droves and pews are sitting empty. Most of us are just busy trying our best to live with integrity and do the right thing. To be a good person. We’ve given up on any kind of spiritual practices, or prayers.
I’d like to create a safe place to ask some bigger questions so we can sort out for ourselves what feels true with our thinking caps still on. We’ll definitely be taking them off as well to grasp some new research and metaphysical concepts that are so mind-blowing that it explains the pushback or the threatened loss of tenure to properly research things like consciousness that has permeated academia. I’m so glad this is finally changing so that we can publish papers that may even challenge or threaten our worldview without putting our professional or public reputations or lives at risk. But this is a safe place so let’s push the metaphysical envelope here with the latest science and research.
It seems like when we see ourselves as separate beings, and not a part of the larger interconnected “noosphere” that Pierre Teilhard the Chardin described, we feel stuck. Our best thinking has gotten us to this point and yet still, our egos are so driven to be right that we have created oppositions so polarized that it seems like the only way forward is to annihilate anyone that doesn’t think or believe what we do or looks like us.
Let’s talk about that too.
Research at the Fetzer institute has revealed that many of us describe ourselves as spiritual but not religious. Some of us have turned to the East. To Yoga. To Buddhism. To the Tao. To Sufism. Or we run, we bike, we fish. We just want to feel better. But most days, even when we do something still feels a bit off.
We can watch a spectacular sunrise or a sunset and we have a deep sense that there is more to us than meets the eye, we’re just not sure exactly what that is.
I recently read Maya Angelou’s forward in an Eric Butterfield book where she said: “be very careful not to leave this world without doing something wonderful for Humanity”. I felt her words. I’m not exactly sure what that could be as far as my own contribution is concerned, but this idea came to me because of my own experiences.
I wish I had someone to ask about how I was feeling that wasn’t towing a line, selling something, or trying to get me to see things their way. To have someone support me to trust my own deeper innate natural intelligence. That I didn’t need to search outside of myself, that I would be guided once I stopped thinking I had all of the answers.
Now that I’m coming around the bend of my own life, I can see that if it feels difficult to share or express, that’s probably a good place to start. And maybe Carolyn Myss is right, I am a chicken, and to be honest, like so many others, a part of me would rather stick a fork in my eye socket than be so vulnerable about my spiritual experiences.
But if it helps one reader feel something more true about their own life experience then I’d like to try. And while you may well enjoy attending a church in your community as I have, you don’t need to go to church to understand what I’ll be sharing here.
My spiritual life has driven me back to the core of my being.
Things are making so much more sense now.
I can look back and see how the brilliant gospels and ancient ecumenical teachings are pointing to something so brilliant that even so many of us that go to church our entire lives have not fully grasped it experientially.
I’ll try to unpack it with you in future posts because maybe you’ll have a similar experience that will be as game-changing for you as it was for me. I’ve come to feel a deep sense of connection with all of life. I feel guided. It’s almost indescribable. I have the most incredibly deep sense of inner peace despite what is going on in my life.
We have used our faith historically to inspire great shifts. To plant potent seeds that have moved what seemed at the time like unsurmountable mountains. The most incredible peaceful revolutions were born from the same ideas that I’ll be sharing with you here. The abolition of slavery. The civil rights movement. Decolonization. The women’s suffragette movement and the women’s right to vote. These did not come from the two major political parties in power in any one country. They were born in faith. In spirit first, then were manifested into the world through us. Different denominations and spiritual grassroots movements around the world. There’s a saying I love in A Course in Miracles that “God can do for us, what he can do through us”. I love that. We’re here for a reason but we need to be willing to allow ourselves to see it and claim it for ourselves.
What Einstein shared feels more true to me now than ever. That we can’t solve our problems from the same level of consciousness that created them.
Please keep all of your sacred beliefs close to your heart, this is not about changing or challenging them. I’m also not interested in getting you to believe what I do, or what others tell you to, this is about YOUR experience of who and what you know yourself to be.
Once we can see what’s possible for us in our own way and time, we can create what Charles Eisenstein calls “the more beautiful world we all know is possible”. Thomas Berry also wrote something I loved along the lines of that if we imagined this world into being, we can certainly imagine a better one.
I’d like to position myself here not as any kind of authority, but just as a fellow human being making some metaphysical observations, mostly from personal experience but also as a student. A student of life. And yes, I’m a white woman of privilege, educated and influenced by both our Western Christian lineages and in a secular society in a public school system. From my time spent around the world, and a deeper knowing, I can only really come at this through that lens and with an intellectual and religious humility that will be inclusive of all the great wisdom literature from every tradition and corner of the world.
This is less about what I believe to be true or my own perceptions than it is about seeking a higher truth. For something to be claimed true in this particular Field, it needs to be universal.
True for all of us. All the time.
There is a great local river nearby called the Beaver River. One fun thing locals like to do is to hop onto a tire tube and float down the river on warm summer days. It’s a slow pace, you can even bring a cooler and snacks and have a laugh. That’s what I envision this to be. A great lazy river runs along this Field between ideas of “rightdoing and wrongdoing”. We’re just a few friends meeting in a neutral field to drop all of our concepts and burdens for a short while and float with the cool current to see the sights. I’ll point out some noteworthy things on the river banks and you can hold them loosely and come to your own conclusions. Most importantly, let’s have some fun and a laugh while we do.
Let’s not take ourselves too seriously. If I start to soapbox, please knock me down a notch. As you probably can already tell, I’m not a writer by trade. Most of my experience writing comes from journals or personal letters that have been handwritten or frantically folded and passed under desks in middle school.
On that note, and for that reason there is no paywall separating the accessibility of my posts from those of you that support me or pay for my work and those that don’t. You are welcome to stay as long as you’re finding it helpful and there are no strings attached.
I think one of the most beautiful things about our Human species is that we’re capacious. We all have this innate higher intelligence and GIANT capacity to transcend our egos and hold different ideas, even conflicting ones all at once.
We can become aware of our thinking or of any set of constructed beliefs or even historical events and keep them along with being open to learning and evolving and connecting to the essential part of us that is ever expanding, creative, and experiencing itself.
Peace on earth is not only possible, it’s present.
In my experience, it’s our highest human purpose.
We all have this knowledge in us, it’s just covered up with our man-made fears. We’re all being called to it in every moment. We feel this pull to self-actualize. I’ve always adored Aristotle’s word “entelechy”. It’s the entelechy of the acorn to become an oak tree. The entelechy of the embryo to become a baby.
The natural process of becoming what we were intended to be. The evolution to our highest human potential is not something to strive for, it’s innate in us. We’ve confused matters thinking it’s about serving our separate egos and getting what we want on a personal level and we’re suffering because of it.
It’s an exciting time to be alive, there is a shift happening now that mainstream science is finally supporting what our ancient saints and sages have known for thousands of years.
Again, to be clear it’s not my intention in this Field to have any kind of theological or scientific debates nor to change a single hair on your beautiful head or any belief system you hold. In fact, on some level, I think we all realize that our incredible life is made possible because of our infinite diversity.
It’s our love, forgiveness, and acceptance of ourselves and one another that makes our lives run more smoothly.
I feel filled with optimism and have a sense that this is my teensy contribution to Humanity to help others experience this incredible “Overview Effect” that the astronauts felt in 1972 for themselves so that one day maybe our children and their children will feel it too.
So we can serve and actualize our highest Human potential together. Whether or not you think it’s a good thing, is entirely up to you.
Looking forward to seeing you in the Field of possibility next week!
Peace and love.
Warm regards,
Rev Nona
If what I’m sharing is helpful, please contribute so that I can keep the lights on and remain add and sponsor-free. I appreciate all of you for being here, but I’ll DOUBLE-FUDGE-SUNDAE appreciate you if you kindly donate $9 (Canadian) a month. If money is tight at the moment, but you like what you’re reading, then please share it in any way you like.
Stay up-to-date
You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
Connection
All are welcome. Feel free to comment beneath my field notes, connect with me directly, and please send me your questions, and once a month I will respond by posting a video.
This field is inclusive and welcomes readers from all religions and no religions.
This is about our shared Human experience.
I’ve always loved these Celtic words side by side.. “Anam Cara”. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and Cara is the word for friend.
That’s what we’ll be…
Soul friends.
Nona this is so eloquently you. Thank you for being brave and opening your brilliance to people like me ❤️
Wow wow wow. Every word.