Winter Solstice Thoughts

Winter Solstice and its message of reflection and renewal ended today. I posted each day for the 4 days…what follows is the collection of the 4 brief essays:

WINTER SOLSTICE: Day One

According to Forever Conscious, “The winter solstice celebrates the longest hours of darkness or the rebirth of the sun and is believed to hold powerful energy for regeneration, renewal, and self-reflection. In Pagan times the winter solstice was referred to as Yule and was a celebration of the Goddess (Moon) energy. It was believed that on this day, the moon would give birth to the sun.”

The winter solstice is a time of quiet energy, where you get the opportunity to look within yourself and focus on what you want and need. It’s a time to set goals and intentions for the coming year, to examine and let go of our past, and to make changes within ourselves. The solstice is essentially tied to personal awakening.

Thus the journey continues with this as the next step…and my moment of self-reflection tonight? My vulnerability is more than others realize, my resiliency is more than I realize…

WINTER SOLSTICE: Day Two

Reflection…the many layers of each of our lives and how they are constantly changing…as the saying, “you can’t be in the same river twice (for the water is constantly moving)”…what layers do we reveal to ourselves and what layers do we reveal to others…willingly or not? Are we daring to peel back the layers as they get more sensitive, more vulnerable, more scarily unknown? Do we put the outer layers back on for safety, for defense, for blissful ignorance?

And…are you open to asking, “what layers serve me well — even if the service is not of a positive nature, how am I being served? And does this layer makes sense to keep or is it time for gratitude followed by removal to the past lives/experience compost bin?

How does renewal come without shedding the layers that prevent the new skin from breathing air…what am I willing to leave behind in order to move forward?

WINTER SOLSTICE: Day Three

Looking forward — what do I see? Clarity? Vagueness? Are the images defined, a blur, or something in-between?

Looking forward — what do I feel? Fear? Excitement? Angst?

Can I follow my mantra of coming to the conversation curious? Can fear of the unknown be replaced by a wonderment for the unknown? YES. A resounding YES.

“Rejections will redirect you to more exciting roads. When you think your life is falling apart, it’s usually falling together in disguise. Your search will throw you on journeys you never would have dreamt of, in your mind and in the world.” -Charlotte Ericksson

WINTER SOLSTICE: Last Day

As the winter solstice ends, we are encouraged to seek renewal, experience birth/rebirth, move on with our thoughts, our revelations, our desires. What wisdom have you found in that deep vessel that is your inner being? What more are you wanting to explore? The barriers to your dreams, intentions, and goals are the ones you allow to enter your core.

Buddha says, “Three things cannot be hidden for long, the sun, the moon, and the truth.” What is your truth? How do you want to show up in the world?

“rise

said the moon

and the new day came” ― Rupi Kaur

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Photos Credit: Emily Scott

Not Temporary and Not Shelter

Photo Credit - Emily Scott

Last month, I traveled to El Paso (Texas) and Juarez (Mexico) to bear witness to the humanitarian crisis that continues to unfold and to volunteer with respite centers helping the migrants and asylum seekers.

When we hear of a child in a juvenile detention center, we wonder what was their crime — what did he/she do to be placed in detention? Right now, there are nearly 14,000 children in detention centers and shelters throughout this nation for crimes they did not commit. Either the children came to the United States with their parents who are legally seeking asylum and refuge from their homeland (which is not a crime) or were sent here for safety by loving and fearful parents. They did nothing wrong. Nor did their parents.

Photo Credit: Emily Scott

Not fake news. How I wish it was.

One of these facilities is in Tornillo Texas. Tornillo is in the middle of nowhere and far from residential or industrial areas so Americans don’t have to see it in their daily lives. As there is no public transport to Tornillo, unless you can afford your own car or a hired car, you cannot get (or leave) there.

On October 27th, we attended a peaceful protest rally outside the Tornillo confinements.

Photo Credit: Emily Scott

Our government calls it a tent city or a camp. I went to summer camp. This is not a camp. This is a prison for innocent children. Tornillo was deemed a temporary shelter for only 30 days for a few hundred children. That is a lie. It has been operational for far longer and it has grown five-fold in size, now able to hold thousands of children indefinitely. Which it does.

How do the children get here? Those in the know, those who have not blindly turned this page of our history and who have borne witness have described the trucks of children coming in the night. From where do they come?

Photo Credit: Emily Scott

Ashley (a self-proclaimed Radical Social Worker) writes, “Children are taken in the middle of the night from licensed facilities and foster homes with operational and child welfare guidelines including education and adequate access to legal assistance, and moved to the tent city in Tornillo, with very little oversight, and little to no access to education and legal assistance. We have a situation where what was intended to be a shelter for a few hundred unaccompanied children to be operational for 30 days, is now a child prison, with little oversight and indefinite sentences.”

When we arrive, we are told that we cannot visit inside the facility. We are told that ICE is being “protective of their privacy.” That is fake news. How easy it is to dismiss nameless and faceless children. How easy to move on to the next topic of the day. Not so easy when you see sobbing children with fear in their eyes. Our tears shed as we thought of the children. Although we could not see them behind the stone and barbed wire walls, we knew the loneliness and despair and thus, the anguish and cruelty they were experiencing as we rallied to reunite and free their families.

Photo Credit: Emily Scott

The same language and the same tactics were used by the Nazis. Moving people in the middle of the night. Mothers being told that their children were being taken to get showers. Building their factories for human obliteration far from the public eye. Calling these buildings simply “camps.” The list goes on. My father’s family in Czechoslovakia never thought it could happen to them. Yet it did. We know it did. This is not fake news. How I wish it was.

If I am not reaching your heart with this destruction of humanity in the making, then perhaps I can reach your wallet. Tornillo costs the taxpayers/government approximately $100 million a month to run. Certainly, a significant portion of the cost is for personnel. Other costs include water trucks brought in repeatedly during the day to provide clean water and take the dirty water out. Electricity is insufficiently provided by generators. The great businessman that Agent Orange is (now that’s fake news) advocates that this is a scalable model for immigrant detention. $100 million monthly for 1 single, make-shift “temporary” facility.

The current administration created this humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied, entirely vulnerable migrant children through unlawful and forced family separation. There are confirmed abuses and even more allegations. We are talking about innocent children…the scars — emotional, mental, physical — are unfathomable and yet they must be owned by all of us who allow this to happen.

It is happening yet again. I was brought up with the mantra, “Never forget, never let it happen again.” This I was told as I learned about the murders of my paternal family at Nazi concentration camps. As I said in the Congo, as I said in Lesvos, Greece, as I said when I bore witness and volunteered in other parts of the world, it is happening again. So why the silence? And it is happening not on other continents, not in other countries; it is happening right here on American soil, in our own country.

How many times has this happened in the short time our country has been in existence? We have discriminated against people of color since our nation’s beginning. As other examples, we attacked the Native Americans (completely decimating their way of life), the Catholics, the Irish, the Italians, the Japanese (forcing hundreds of thousands living in the U.S. into internment camps), then the Jews, then the Muslims, and now people of the Americas from the south seeking asylum here.

Who is next? Your group? Will you then scream into the wind, “This is not fake news?”

Photo Credit: Emily Scott

How you can help

Photo Credit: Emily Scott

Money Mindset: Did You or Did You Not Contribute to His Success?

Photo Credit: Emily Scott

Among the many things that occur for me between the year-end and the year-beginning is the review of what I call my financial recipe.  The ingredients of this recipe include my budget (actual and planned), my philanthropic contributions (actual and planned), the income forecast for the coming year, tax preparation, and an examination of the alignment of my values with my money.  As with any recipe, the ingredients are all mixed up and baked together: the past year with the new year, the personal expenses with the professional expenses, the expected budget with the actual balance sheet, and the intellectual with the emotional.  It is the latter – the realistic versus the irrational – that always catches me by surprise.

Tangent: My Bag Lady Syndrome (I have mentioned this in other blogs), which, by the way, affects nearly 50% of women in the United States (according to a 2014 study by Allianz Insurance), is about as emotional vs. intellectual as you can get. 

Two things happened in the last 12 months that caught me by surprise – me, someone who has been very conscious of the emotional side of money for decades.  The first: my father died in April at 96, and my mother turned 92 in June.  I realized that my genetics coupled with my relatively healthy lifestyle could potentially push my age far longer than I anticipated.

 I went back to my life’s financial plan (not to be confused with my yearly plan) to adjust for my longevity.  The domino effect is obvious to me; my wealth needs to be spread out over more time, which means I have to re-evaluate not just my annual budget but my investment strategy as well.  While this is all fabulously practical, the emotional side of the equation made me gulp as I realized that my funds and my spending must be altered by the 30% increase in my life span.  “Mama needs a new pair shoes,” quickly disappeared from my dialogue.

The second: I heard the echo of my ex-husband’s comments about our financial picture when we were separated and going to marriage counseling; that he would have been just as successful with or without me. (Why the echo now, I’ll explain in just a bit.) I wasn’t surprised by his ownership of the money as it is common for the breadwinner to have this perspective.  I was hurt, and then indignant, by his belief that I did nothing to contribute to his success, especially since he’d always claimed otherwise. 

The debater in me wanted to point to all the ‘evidence’ that proved otherwise.  And I have lots of it; including emails from the very man himself extolling my virtues and help.  Here’s the deal – our marriage ended over 4 years ago, so this is an absolutely moot point. 

The rub, the punch in the gut, of being told I was not a contributing member of the partnership goes to the core of how I viewed my identity for 20 years. His words infiltrated my self-worth. It took serious work on my part to get the missing links back in line.  Included in those absent pieces was reconnecting with what I do well, appreciating and recognizing my own skills and talents. For the most part, the effort was worth it.  My metaphor for the healing process: I went from an amputated arm, to a broken arm, to a broken wrist, to a broken finger, to, at present, a hangnail.  You know, that ‘something’ that just seems to catch on ‘something’ that causes you to say “ouch.”

So why now – why did this echo rebound years later? Over the last year, this sentiment, this fear, this wound has come up for many of my clients during our discussions. I am astounded by the number of divorced (or divorcing) women wading through this question of identity and worth. What did they add to the equation for all those years? That’s what they’re asking themselves, and me. I am not alone in this vortex. 

I discussed this phenomenon with a woman I respect immensely, Joan DiFuria, founding partner, of Money, Meaning, and Choices; on how one moves forward.  The minute she used the word, “reframe,” I sat up and took notice, as this is one of my favorite tools, personally and professionally. 

Reframing: Our thought process often gets in our own way and if we can redirect the thought – reframe – we then have an opportunity to add new information into the equation. 

Joan said, “What are the actions you take to reframe?  You acknowledge that if you don’t get recognized, it doesn’t mean you need to devalue your contribution. Fair is not the objective.”  In other words, you need to come to terms with your needs and your worth, on your own or with professional help. Trust yourself for you deserve it. Joan added, “What we can’t recognize, we can’t change.”

I spend a lot of time with my clients, interviewing them to learn their story, their narrative.  Together, we combine what they think their narrative is with what others think their narrative is. The epiphany occurs when we parse out the conjectures of others within the portrayal of ourselves.  As they say, everyone is entitled to their perspective.  That’s the entitlement – it’s their perspective, not the universal truth.

Interestingly, one of my recent female clients is the breadwinner of the family.  We’ve talked about the balance of financial power, the respect needed on both sides for each partner’s contribution to the family.  It’s not binary, it’s multi-complex.  Cultural and societal norms, familial backgrounds, how we value money, how we assess the power of money, how we define work and partnership, and how we incorporate our own experiences are just part of a long list of questions to explore. These are the ingredients that make up our approach to finances, our personal sense of worth.

The Value of Mindfulness

                                                                                                                                                                            Photo Credit: Emily Scott

The tagline of my business is “Your values, vision, and money,” which makes the first question I ask my clients natural and obvious: “What are your values?”  Ah, you say, what do you mean by values? Values are the fundamental beliefs a person holds, which can serve as a guiding force in one’s life. I’m with the many gurus and philosophers who believe that knowing your values and acting in concert with them is key to happiness and success.

A key piece of the work we do together, my clients and I, is to evaluate whether their values and priorities are reflected in their legacy planning, philanthropy, and spending.  For instance, if they claim to value the environment, are they donating to nonprofits specifically focused on any of the environmental issues such as land use, water, forestry, or global warming? Simply put, is their inner life brought forth in their outer life; that’s the question. This alignment is what we curate and as their thought partner, I strive to help them achieve this objective. Here’s the big take home point:  We create mental conflict for ourselves when our values and our actions are in opposition.

Recently, someone asked the same question of me. It’s all well and good that I spend my days exploring values, but what are mine?

Ten years ago, I wrote out my values list. Curious, I went back to see if my values had remained the same and indeed they had.  I believe that values can change over time as we grow, gain experience, and learn.    That being said, I continue to work on the alignment between my values and my daily life. I think that job is never really done. I thought I might share what I rediscovered on that long-forgotten list.

The first value I wrote is mindfulness.

I chuckle at the memory. When I wrote this list, which I did in conjunction with my husband (now ex), he’d written in that very slot, “Strive for perfection, go for the gusto, be the best you can be.”   

When we compared our lists, this glaring difference seemed to explain a source of conflict. We approached decision making very differently, and because of this, we often butted heads.  At the time, we came to appreciate that, by combining these different values and perspectives, we were capable of making much better decisions. That is, if we were willing to be patient with each other’s approach.  I remember thinking, “Well, that’s mindfulness at work right there!”

Mindfulness also played a role in how I thought (and still think) about spending.  While my ex-husband’s normal response was “We can afford it,” I would say, “Is this how we want to spend our money?” We were fortunate in that our disposable income allowed for luxuries, the kind that far too many couldn’t even consider.  Yet, I grew up with a depression-era mother who instilled in me the value of being mindful about spending.  She helped me understand the tradeoffs and choices, for example, whether to save money for a special occasion or spend my allowance on something that would give me immediate satisfaction.  

How is mindfulness reflected in my daily life now? In some ways, it’s a subtle undercurrent, and in other ways, overt.  The subtle ways I would call part of my personality; I’m in my head a lot and think longer about an issue, a situation, a plan, a friend, a blog than probably anyone should.  It is with conscious mindfulness (the more overt variety) that I keep track of and acknowledge my friends’ important events, for I want them to know their importance to me.

Between subtle and overt is the “in general” course of action. Often, my approach to a problem is to reflect, think of different scenarios, ask others for their perspective, and to gather data.  Mindful, to me, is the opposite of impetuous, reactive.  It’s much more about going in, exploring how an idea sits with me, what it requires of me, and others. Of course, there are times when my gut instinct has the easy and obvious answer.  And, unfortunately, there are still too many instances where my knee jerk reaction is what I act on; rarely is that outcome good.  

My observation – which perhaps you share as well – is that rash action is the antithesis of mindfulness.    Those rash actions, those are the ones that get us into trouble, that derail us, that get us thrown completely off course. One day we wake up, and we don’t know how we got where we are.

The very conscious, or overt, acts of mindfulness are the best parts of me.  Taking this value and acting on it in my daily life has proven, time and time again, to bring me joy.  

I often talk about “coming to the conversation curious,” the idea being that when you approach something with an open mind, the amount of information, understanding, and enlightenment you are rewarded with is off the charts.  When you come to the conversation curious, that’s when you truly connect. I will say that when I practice what I preach, the outcome is full abundance. Still a work in progress, I make it a point—I’m married to the concept--of coming to the conversation mindful, curious; open to the possibilities, the choices. When I betray this value, nothing good comes of it. I find myself dissatisfied.

Perhaps this struggle of merging my inner life with my outer life is why I admire people who have found alignment between the two.  I think of Dr. Denis Mukwege in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a man I call my Ghandi.  His deep value of holding precious the human life has had him working tirelessly for over 20 years, mending thousands of women and girls who’ve been brutally raped and tortured.  His eyes are bloodshot, his body shows signs of fatigue, his heart and soul are scarred by what he has witnessed. He has survived death threats and attacks and he is now unable to come and go as he pleases.  Yet, even with the many sacrifices, he has found deep satisfaction and joy because he has never wavered from his values.

When we think of someone who has his/her act together or seems so grounded, is he/she displaying the alignment of values and behaviors?  Is that what resonates with us? When we think of our heroes, of the people we deeply respect and want to emulate, is part of that the ideal that they “walk their talk?” Is that what we’re after?  For me, I would say yes.  

You don’t get there without carefully considering your values and living by them.

The Relevancy of being a Passionholic

In June of 2013, I did a TEDx talk about the combination of principles and passion in one’s philanthropy. It was titled “The Evolution of a Passionholic.” The word “workaholic” didn’t seem to be the best description of someone who is fully engaged, so I coined the word “passionholic.”

Is being a passionholic still relevant? Does passion drive tenacity, patience, determination, persistence, and pursuit of one’s goals?  

When asked, business leaders such as Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and Pat Mitchell have answered, to paraphrase, “Absolutely yes.”  Politicians and global leaders have had a similar response.  In the world of nonprofits, having passion for the cause is especially vital.  The opportunity to match head and heart, to use your skill set for a cause in which you believe, and to be part of a team whose culture shares that mission speaks to the need of having passion for what you do. I have yet to meet anyone in the nonprofit world who works in that sector for the paycheck.

For most nonprofit leaders, the idea of doing something else is unimaginable.  Passion for the cause is so deep that it seems to be in their DNA. Geoffrey Canada, the tireless and passionate leader of The Harlem Children’s Zonereferred to his work as a “love affair.” Eve Ensler created a global movement to end violence against women and girls, V-Day, after listening to hundreds of women who waited at the stage door after each performance of “The Vagina Monologues” to tell her their personal stories as survivors of sexual violence.  Many nonprofits began with the seeds of passion, purpose, and vision.  Without the manna of passion and purpose, it would be hard to maintain the resilience needed as the work is tireless, often heartbreaking, and results can be slow in coming.

What if the question is not how you spend your day but how you spend your philanthropic dollars?  Do you still need passion?  I would still answer “yes” and add, “if you want to feel aligned with your giving.” In interviews with philanthropists, many speak of passion as their strong feeling for an issue, sector, organization, and cause.  This motivation advances your interest andcompels you to contribute in a meaningful way.

I call it your personal Venn diagram for your philanthropic pursuits. 
 

The intersection of your passion, your values and principles, and your knowledge and learning is your sweet spot for meaningful engagement.

Take the opportunity to ask yourself the following: 

• What are my core values and principles?

• What areas (cause, sector, organization, issue) do I have passion for and how do they match with my core values and principles?

• How much time, treasure, and talent do I want to devote to my philanthropic interests?

• What knowledge/beliefs do I have internally and what data and information do I need to find to help me make an informed decision?

This exercise brings forth information that is uniquely yours.  And the beauty is that there is no right or wrong answer; the answer is your answer.  

Peter Karoff, founder of The Philanthropic Initiative writes, “The alignment of one’s passion to one’s giving is often elusive, but worth the search. “The reward is that your gift giving becomes the best possible articulation of your core values and belief systems and at the same time becomes a direct link to those issues within community and society that you deem to be of greatest significance. The payoff is in the immense personal satisfaction that comes when your generosity is grounded in what you feel is the most important.”