God was friendly today as usual

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being yourself, change, control, dog, dreams coming true, express feelings, fear, friends, friendship, goals, God, higher power, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, love, pup, security, teacher, trust, words

I grew up isolated and in the woods so I am always looking to nature for signs of communication. You know, a breeze or a thunderbolt or a special crash of a wave in answer to my question, whether posed aloud or in my heart. And so today is no different, as I have found my whole life, it is good to discuss my problems with the earth. I do not know why, but no one else as far as I can see up and down the beach, wanted to walk along the sand at seven in the morning in February except my pup, who heartily agreed when I asked her. So there I was again, under my own personal sky. I looked out to God and said, “I have stood on these shores countless times in my life, and I have looked out at your grandeur and your beauty over and over. You are always here no matter how many years go by. No matter how many times I look to you to show me the way, no matter how many times I look to you to hear me and see me and know me, and no matter what, you are still out there being solid and present and beautiful. Nothing much seems to change with you, gorgeous sunrise above the earth, but boy, my world sure has changed.”

That’s when I saw the sun, shrouded by gray stormy clouds, peaking out a bit in answer. Oh, yes, I thought to myself, that is how it is, my earth always responds. I can always trust that. Well what about all the troubles I feel, the pains about getting out of my isolation, and trusting that the world can take the frightened person that hides in me? How perfect is it that I feel ready to share myself more, at last, and not let fears rule my life? How perfect is it that you have been standing ready for me to say these words, because you have been sharing yourself and your perfect glory for eons already, so you know what it is. I walked along some more feeding treats to my pup every time she came back from a dig at a crab hole to let me know she is still my friend for life. The clouds shifted and a few tears flew into the wind. I stopped, and as is common for me, I addressed the world directly, after all I could not feel safer than when entirely completely all alone, and I said thank you. Thank you for still being out there for me even though so many people and ideas and hopes and dreams have come and gone. I know I can do this. I know I can carry on and be myself out in the world despite the confusion I feel.

That’s when the sun glided bright suddenly forcing clouds aside to say directly to me in a broad and winning smile, “Yes.”

And that’s when I laughed out loud, because I am sure that one footstep washed away by the sand at a time, I am getting to precisely where I have always been going.

Doing your child’s homework for him

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being brave, control, education, fear, goals, higher power, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, relationship, security, taking risks, teacher, trust

I think it starts when kids are young. There must be some trickery involved, telling ourselves that we are actually modeling, demonstrating how to get homework done, but not actually doing the homework. There must be some degree of denial happening wherein we believe this is actually good for our child. Or is there some fear under this ‘helping’? Otherwise, why would a loving, caring parent steal from their child like that? You know, taking away precious opportunities to learn and grow and mature.

It may not look like it but it is the very same thing as being too afraid to let our children try out for the choir, school play, sports team, or talent show. These are the parent’s fear, not the child’s. In fact, if we listen carefully to kids they show us that they are marvelously fearless. They have not been through the trials of life yet and so still have the joy of possibility in their spirits.

When my kids tell me they want to do something outrageous I say, yeah, show me how. Show me how to have a free heart that can see the possibilities in life and show me how to be free of the chains that hold me back. Show me how to live. As soon as we decide our kids should not do something, all because it might (fill in the blank with your personal fear), we have just passed on the limitations we ourselves live by. Isn’t it a great thought that our children can be bigger than us and better than us and ultimately pave the way for us to be free of our inhibitions?

If you know you are too involved in your child’s homework, literally doing it, you would be smart to hire someone else, like a tutor, to take your role. Someone who can keep the student’s actual best interests in mind. Maybe that way you can still feel in control but not sabotage your child’s education. And if you find yourself discouraging your children from trying for their dreams because of your fears, think again about the power of your role as parent and whether you like the idea of controlling everything they do.

Being brave and taking risks isn’t for everyone.

A child from the trenches

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being yourself, dreams coming true, express feelings, goals, higher power, inspire, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, love, mother, parents, relationship, security, words

I get so passionate saying the things that I do sometimes because I care so much about passing on the knowledge I’ve gained the hard way, that is, being a parent in the trenches, but more importantly, being a child in the trenches. My own childhood has greatly informed me as a parent, and so I reached parenthood determined to be as conscious and deliberate in my actions as possible.

For me, one of the goals of parenting is to help my child be himself and love himself so he can go out into the world and share his abilities and joys with others, thereby making the world better. I told this very thing to a group of young mothers today, gathered to hear me talk about seizing the moment and making the most of our toughest parenting challenges. I talk about being a generous parent, able to understand that my child’s needs are frequently more urgent than my own. I just love the notion that we as adults are more mature than our children and therefore can be conscious of our needs, able to defer them to a later time. I am talking about using our cell phones, being on Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest and anything else that distracts us from being with our children in the moment. And since I do have needs of my own, I manage this by setting aside time for my children when they ask for it, especially when they are little.

I want to tell as many people as will listen that when children are small is the time to teach them that we have respect for who they are, that we are actively listening for clues about them and the direction they may want to take in life, and that we are willing to put in the time to be with them. These three things send a message loud and clear that we value our children and this in turns creates the self-esteem we all hope for.

I love spreading this message and today I say a grateful thank you to the moms at Fairview Village Church who welcomed me this morning and invited me to expound on these hard-learned lessons.

Sing to your babies and they’ll sing to you

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being yourself, dreams coming true, express feelings, higher power, I have no idea what these tags mean, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, love, mother, natural talent, parents, relationship, Rock Me Mama, security, singers, teacher, trust, Wagon Wheel, words

Your singing, and the blended voice of song, thrill me
What is this magic that moves me so?
I hear you there

Sing to your kids when they are little and someday they’ll sing back to you.

I used to belt out the Christmas music to my crying babies in mid-July because those were the songs whose lyrics I could remember, and therefore could keep going long enough to capture attention. Oh hark, the herald angels, I would tell my little babes. You’d better not cry, I’m telling you why, sleep, baby, sleep. I’d rock and dance around the nursery with an overtired child stringing together the magic held in songs. I faked like it sounded good because kids are wildly forgiving and unjudgmental, and somehow they hear the beauty hidden between the squawks. My heartfelt intentions cloaked in verse and rhythm and tone could move at least a two year old. And that’s all I needed at the time. The magic carpet of song carried my deep love, my deep concern, my deep desire to help teach how to be in this world, to my children, despite myself. Sleep, baby, sleep.

And what I have learned about singing to your kids when they are little, is that they grow up to think that singing is a way to express. A way to soothe. A way to share. A way to be. And if you are lucky they will sing back to you. Only maybe even better. And so, we’ll be charmed.

Hungry son eats his words

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Amazon jungle, being yourself, dreams coming true, evacuated from the Amazon jungle, fear, higher power, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, parents, piranhas, pirhanas, relationship, trust, weather

Are you tired of hearing about my risk-taking son? His latest news is that he had to be evacuated from a remote lodge in the Amazon jungle. It was for acute food poisoning that had nothing to do with the Amazon lodge and everything to do with the food vendor at the airport in the last civilized city he’d visited. Because he became so dehydrated he could not walk, and therefore had to be transported during a rainforest deluge by everything from a strong man able to carry a 190-pound vomiting ‘boy’, to a luggage wagon, a canoe, a wheelbarrow, and a motorized boat. That was after the local medical expert failed to improve his condition by whacking him across the face repeatedly with banana leaves. A shack of a house in the village they arrived at 2 1/2 hours later held the happy surprise of a medical professional with an antibiotic. Our boy recovered and returned, and the next day was able to join the group to swim with the piranhas. You can hear all about this on his blog.

This is all just preamble to what I really want to say. That is that it has happened in a rather brief period of time that my son has changed from a boy to a man. I judge this by the heck of a time we had with him when he was in high school heading down a path we did not appreciate, just three years ago, to today. Three years ago he challenged us as parents and as people to the point that we took drastic action and held an intervention of sorts to halt him in his risk-taking tracks. To make a long story short we removed all his electronic devices from him for six months, grounded him for a while, told him about our hopes and dreams and love for him, and yanked him over to a path we did like. He has referred to this as the ‘worst days of my life’ more than once. It was not too fun for us either.

Funny thing, just last week during a phone call, he mentioned rather casually how good that all turned out to be in the long run. How it had been the right thing after all, and that we were smart to have done it for him. Yikes! How do we save such moments in life?

I am going to venture to say that his own words were easier to eat than whatever they were serving down there on his way to the jungle last week.

Drive away little girl

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being yourself, change, control, dreams coming true, driving at fifteen, express feelings, Father's Day card, fear, goals, higher power, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, love, parents, relationship, security, softball practice, trust

Apparently my husband suggested to our fifteen year old daughter yesterday that she try driving the car. Apparently she said yes and apparently they didn’t kill anybody since they both came home to tell about it. She and my husband had headed out Sunday afternoon for an indoor softball practice a half hour away and discovered when they got there that they were a week too early and had a vast empty parking lot staring back at them. I feel really grateful for my husband when he does things like this.

When the kids were small I had them start a little bound notebook full of birthday and Father’s Day wishes for their father that they would write in instead of buying him cards. (I only wished I’d had them start one for me!) But the pages are filled with drawings and stickers and scrawlings, and eventually block printing and then script handwriting, espousing his virtues. More than once between the pages of that book are references to things Dad would let kids do that Mom would not. Not that I wouldn’t allow driving at a young age, having grown up on a farm I am sure I inspired that idea in my husband. But the truth is, he has been the more lenient parent in some ways, and the kids have noticed.

Now she wants to leave home for a year, like her brother, and see the world and try out her wings, and Dad is blanching white at the thought. I say why not, a true believer in the idea that if you love something you must let it go, waiting to see if it comes back to you.

All I can say is I am glad she has the both of us because we balance each other out.

Each person has the power to move us all

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Ace Ventura, being yourself, entertainment, express feelings, higher power, inspire, intuition, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, Jim Carrey, nature, relationship, Tom Shadyack, words

I gave a lot of people exactly the same gift for Christmas this year. It is the video, “I Am” made by the director of all those silly Jim Carrey movies like Liar, Liar, and Ace Ventura, Tom Shadyac. He is a wealthy Hollywood guy who was riding through the California hills on his bike one day, apparently a day that he wasn’t in his fancy private jet, and fell and hit his head. He came so close to death that when it turned out happily that he did not die he felt compelled to seek the answers to more serious questions than what new moneymaker can I crank out next.

Given his prominence he can easily access expert minds, so he interviews scholars and poets, scientists and philosophers, to ask the question, “What is wrong with society and how can we fix it?”. Being a director of funny movies he does this in an entertaining way so it doesn’t feel like the serious documentary that it is. He discovers a world of unspoken communications between people that we barely acknowledge. You know, intuition and hunches, and the creepy feelings you get that someone is in the dark watching you when they, in fact, actually are. He discovers that we know more than we let ourselves realize, and he gives me some context for the notion that what goes around comes around. You wonder how all those deer know when to turn and run at the very same moment, or how all those birds in the sky or fish in the sea know how to move en mass so beautifully. He convincingly shows us how powerful this ability to recognize ourselves as part of a collective whole is, and he identifies truths such as that the innate nature of man seems to be one of cooperation rather than competition, using experts who cite ancient cultures and modern day examples. He shows how animals cooperate rather than compete, after the barest necessities are met and concludes that we humans should do the same.

And in the end he decides that he is part of the problem of the world in that he takes, uses and wastes far more of its resources than he personally needs while others suffer for lack of these same things. He decides to sell his fancy lifestyle and adopt a more prudent one. He shows the viewer how we are all connected at an unspoken level that ultimately supports us all. He shows the power of the individual to make a difference in the world.

The folks at the bookstore where I bought the DVD told me that few people buy just one copy of this movie, that when they buy it they often buy multiples! I have to say, that is exactly how I felt, so I, too, bought many. I love the notion that we are all connected and that it matters what we do at an individual level every single day.

Mindlessly telling myself, ‘I believe I can do it’

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being yourself, believing in yourself, believing you can do something, change, charcoal drawing, drawing, dreams coming true, force of will, goals, high school art class, higher power, impressive powers, inspire, joy, mentors, self-denial

Would you help me reinvent myself? Right now? All you have to do is keep reading. Go ahead, believe I’m a writer. Besides this being a thrill for my husband who can pretend he’s having an affair with another woman, I’ll be a step closer to the miracle of finally being what I want to be when I grow up.
I’m thinking like this because of the charcoal sketch. The one I run into every five or so years when I’m inspired to sift through a dusty old trunk full of ‘saved stuff’. Since I am supposedly a left-brained scientist and therefore theoretically art-impaired, when I saw the charcoal sketch this time I saw it as an anomaly worth celebrating. Not that I wanted to do anything fancy but I did decide to hang it on the wall.
I went to the frame shop on my birthday to have my first ever published story framed, and figured I’d get a mat for the sketch at the same time. I was going to toss it into a frame I already had that was practically the right size. No need to put any money into the thing.
But when I told the lady behind the counter of my plans she said, “Oh, that’s too special to put in just any frame. I can make this thing look fantastic.” This was her job after all.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I stalled. It was just a little drawing, not real art for Pete’s sake, but it would be nice. She announced she could do it for $45, which was of course, way too much. Was I crazy? Forty-five dollars to frame a scrap of paper?
My husband said, “Why not, go ahead, you want to.”
So I did. I said okay to the lady.
In no time I was crying. This happens sometimes when I do things impulsively, casually granting myself some little perk. That’s when I discover that I actually have greatly wanted this experience without ever letting myself in on the whole struggle. As you can see, I have impressive powers of self-denial. It was like the time I purchased fifty dollars worth of arranged flowers, which we should not have been affording, for our four-month old baby girl. It wasn’t until I stepped out of the florist shop, order form in hand, that I realized celebrating the joy of her joining us with flowers was really a symbol for my intentions to celebrate her always, and I choked back happy tears at my effort. And I guess it was like finally framing a picture I’d held on to for thirty years. The meaning, in the juxtaposition on the counter, of my published story right next to my unlikely artwork, took me by surprise. I had tricked myself into believing the sketch was literally just a sketch, when apparently it symbolized much more.
My education has rarely included art classes but in 1976 to fulfill high school graduation requirements, I took ‘Fashion’, a drawing class. I was quite confident I couldn’t draw, but I was curious about the process. Connie Burkhart, the teacher, would not accept my claim that I wasn’t an artist, but insisted that I could draw if I tried.
She’d coach me, she said, and, “You’ll see, you can do it.”
I doubted seriously whether I could produce anything respectable, but I was there to learn, and I was young and gullible so I went along.
Her first instruction was to believe I could do it. Right. Flatly, obediently, I suggested to myself, I believe I can do it. Day after day in addition to this grandiose idea, I applied her technical direction as well. To get the ‘essence’ on paper, not the literal picture, ‘just get the suggestion’ of the fur coat she told me. We’ll fill in the details later. In this vein I tried to get the ‘essence’ of believing I could do it, ‘just the suggestion’ of believing. We would fill in the details later. I worked hard on my semester-long sketch, and slowly it came to life.
In fact, something absolutely magical happened. One day I noticed that the forces of nature had come together and some how, ideas met physical nature and the force of will, and the whole damn thing emerged as a real drawing that I had personally done. It appeared as if an artist’s hand had sketched the lithe uptown woman posing provocatively in her lavish fur coat, staring from the page in stark black and white shadings, as a direct copy of the newsprint. At least that’s what I saw.
In the end she showed me, she proved to me, she insisted to me that I could draw if I wanted to. More than that of course she was teaching me a life lesson. The point was that if you decided ahead that you couldn’t do it, you would need some serious coaching out of that place. But if you decided ahead you could do it, well with the right coaching, the right help, and with that idea of limitless possibilities, it could be done.
I haven’t done any artwork like my charcoal masterpiece since, but I have been creating other things. For a while now I have been fooling around with words, lining them up in different ways just for the fun of it. The truth is I probably saved my ancient artwork deep in a trunk of childhood papers and journals and reports cards and term papers so I would find it years later. So I’d find it when I needed it most, that is when I needed to be reminded of the lesson it supposedly had already taught me…that with anything in life you just have to believe you can do it and it can happen.
So, since I guess you’re still reading, I’ll say thanks.

Wild abandon should be encouraged

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being yourself, change, control, creative process, dreams coming true, express feelings, fear, goals, higher power, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, passion, Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, teacher, Tom Hanks, wild abandon

There was a time when I lusted after the kind of life Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have, you know, all that creative freedom to do whatever they want artistically. It seems to me that nothing holds them back. To me it looks like they make the kinds of movies they want whether they are silly or serious, and nothing keeps them from being able to dream up cool ideas to present to us. Steve Jobs was like this too. I used to think, wouldn’t that be great to be able to do that every day? Anything you wanted.

I have read biographies of Spielberg and Jobs so I am aware it is not really that easy. They both have had hurdles to jump over and challenges to face just like any of us. But the thing that struck me out of the blue one day, about this dream of mine, is that creative freedom is literally free. Steven Spielberg needs no one other than himself to grant permission to plow ahead with the crazy and exciting ideas he has. He gets to do it because he allows himself. Sure he has lots of support from folks who help him execute his ideas, but before he had all that he plowed ahead anyway.

Is there someone out there preventing me from being as creative as I want? To say what I want to say?

Well, just myself.

Turns out I have as much creative freedom as my idols. But it is up to me to be brave enough to share my creations with the world, and that’s what makes the difference.

I had a dream my life would be

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being yourself, change, dreams coming true, express feelings, goals, higher power, inspire, isolation, joy, Les Miserables, psychotherapy, relationship, spiritual discernment

The chapter in the book on spiritual discernment I am reading (figuring out what you really want to do with your life) suggested I put the book down and imagine for a moment some dream I have ever had and whether it came true.

Well, twenty minutes later I regained consciousness and wished I’d had a way of capturing the wonderful story I had just told myself. It was the story of how I once dreamed there would be people in my life who knew me and cared about me and deliberately came to my door just to see me! What a crazy dream it was. You see, I grew up in such isolation, both physical and emotional, that that was literally the dream, that someone might seek me out because I had somehow reached them and they remembered me.

Today it is indeed true. People have called me simply to see how I am, or what I am up to, not to mention show up at the door just to see me, and this is a phenomenon of once I only dreamed.

So the story I told myself was all about how I want to share that possibility of change with other people, and tell them how I did that. How I managed to figure out how to go from someone essentially afraid of other humans to one who embraces and loves others to the point that they share that back with me. It was and continues to be a long hard road of encouraging myself to take the tiny baby steps towards change that make real things come about. I really want to share that with folks and in part because of my spiritual discernment class which I have attended only once, I am already dreaming new dreams of what I will have come true next.