Beautiful

I’m still loving the beautiful bunch of tulips I picked up late last week. They are wide open now but still incredibly

Beautiful

There’s something about wide open tulips that makes me think of the word blowsy. I wrote about it in my blog a while back HERE.

And I’m still feeling a bit insulted by the dictionary’s definition of the word blowsy using the image of an unkempt, coarse, overweight woman to illustrate the meaning of the word.

It’s interesting how even word definitions illustrate many prejudices and unexamined beliefs we have about people. Whether it be about gender, age, color, ethnicity, or behavior, we all have hidden prejudices in our thoughts and language. 

It is a normal part of being human. But we don’t have to let these hidden prejudices remain hidden. We can examine our thoughts, fears, language, and learn how to open our minds and embrace ideas, cultures, and people who are different from us.

Wide Open Hearts

Just as the tulips I am photographing today are wide open and beautiful, we can live with wide open hearts, being curious about people and the world around us and holding generous assumptions about about others.

It helps me when I practice presence, so that I can notice when I get caught up in thoughts about others or hidden prejudices. Here’s an example of one prejudice that I carry from childhood.

When I was a child my dad was always strongly judgmental about anyone whom he thought was lazy. He would call a neighbor, lazy because he had not fed his animals early enough in the morning according to my dad’s standards of how work should be done on a farm.

And he judged other farmers by how neat the buildings and fields on their farms were and how hard they worked (in his opinion).

Unconscious Lies We Tell Ourselves

The Kookaburras 

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to stride out of a cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, pressed against the edge of their cage,
asked me to open the door.
Years later I remember how I didn’t do it,
how instead I walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

   — Mary Oliver, House of Light

I carried my dad’s definition of lazy in my head and applied it to myself for much of my adult life. For years I would tell myself not to be lazy, carrying so many judgments I had heard from my father growing up.

It has taken a lifetime to unwind the word “lazy.” Often I catch myself thinking, “I shouldn’t be so lazy,” when in reality I’m not doing things because I’m not feeling well. The word still carries a sting for me despite all of the work I’ve done in becoming present and aware.

The unconscious meanings we attach to words can hurt ourselves or others. What words do you need to examine in your mind?

Remember, life is beautiful! Wishing you a beautiful week and a wide open heart my friends.

May you walk in beauty.