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| www.adytumsanctuary.com in Mossyrock, WA on the road to Mt. Rainier |
Adytum Sanctuary (.com) is where I live and work. Having several other jobs as clinic administrator at our two optometry practices and working at the National Health Federation plus having familial obligations (okay…pleasures) means that time is really something to be managed carefully.
My first guest, five years ago this August 2015, said something during his stay that has stuck with me to this day. Phillip Folsom, owner of Fulcrum Adventures, told me, “Katherine, be determined to be limited in your affinities.” He was an ex-Marine running team-building high rope courses and stayed at Adytum Sanctuary as he taught skills to our local high school in 2010. He taught me a skill that serves me still.
So many things interest us. So many things tug at our time, energy, and passions. As I tugged at buttercups today, the spreading “weed” with adorable yellow flowers, I realized something. The buttercups, which sprout up everywhere in my Pacific Northwest garden like dandelions (we use no chemicals, herbicides, or pesticides here on this sacred land) were competing in this draught season for water with productive blueberries and must go. Sacrifices must be made during good times and bad if we are to find the fruit which we are clearly here to bear, being compared in Holy Scripture to a grapevine. Any of you who has a vine or a whole vineyard knows that branches bearing nothing are cut away to nurture those who actually bear. And bear they do. I have no idea what we will do with all these grapes coming this year….
But when there are limited resources to be spread around over several focal concerns our lives, we must be more careful than ever to be “limited in our affinities.” Phillip also gave me the wise observance, “Katherine, you tend to dilute your focus.” How’s that for a first guest? He saw right through the “Gemini” in me. Yet he spoke the pure truth to me on all counts and I loved him for it; few would dare. And it’s stayed with me all these years.
So how to define our focus? For these buttercups invading the productive, life-giving, health-enhancing blueberry bushes I planted as a memorial to my sister Jacqueline Leeba’s death August 8th of 2014, they competed. They threatened to choke out the life I was wishing to nurture to recall our happy times picking blueberries together when my kids were small, Sarah Brightman’s Phantom of the Opera playing in the car on the drive home while we ate all we picked. The buttercups speak now that anything that competes with our focus must go, or be shelved until the proper time.
To every thing there is a purpose and a time for everything under heaven.- King Solomon
Had Jackie known she was to die in her 60th year after enduring five hellish years of traditional cancer treatment making doctors and drug companies rich and she more diminished in every way, would she really have hunkered down and kept her nose in her books to attain her doctorate in Depth Psychology? Only she can answer that question. But my personal benchmark is this: our lives are not our own. We are here to serve others. We are here also to make our God happy and fulfilled in our very being, living in close union and intimacy with Him as a lover, a best friend, a husband of the heart, and our Maker.
I recently saw a sign in the Home Gift Section of Nordstrom’s. “If you have the power to make someone happy, do it. The World needs more of that.” In my life, it’s not just people but animals and the Planet…and God whom become the focus of my “happiness spreading and service mission.”
It is important, at some point in your life, to ask what your destiny calling is. I asked in my 20s and a long “wilderness” period ensued while my gifts were being honed and even built upon like stepping stones. Don’t think that during this time, I felt unheard. In fact, during this time in my 40s I felt “put out to pasture” when all of what I had to give and bring to the World seemed absolutely invisible. But I put the question out there, “God, reveal to me my destiny and my purpose on this Earth.” It is always devastating to witness the lives of others who carry on with no knowledge of the need to ask this crucial, defining query. It will make or break time here. Make it meaningful and satisfying on a soul level or make it just a trivial pursuit of achieving, acquiring, and maintaining.
One vacation in Zihuatenajo, Mexico years ago in a lazy fishing village with nothing to do but read, swim, rest, think, and then write about it all yielded up a goldmine in a rather “channeled” article called The Matrix. You can find it here: http://katsmeditations.blogspot.com/search?q=matrix
This “Matrix” – it became the benchmark, the gold-standard by which the activities of my life would be measured. We need something, even if it changes as we change and grow or accomplish things in life, to guide our path so that if age 60- or God forbid before- deals us a death card, we can leave knowing we accomplished what we came to do.
As I recently shared with an Adytum Sanctuary guest who had the traumatic and stressful experience of escaping Iran last year, this Matrix blog article gave a glimmer of hope to a highly successful athlete and businessman, only 45 years of age, who had a very unexpected stroke. Mark lost his wife, his home, his children, and his job because even though his body worked just fine, he was suddenly reduced by brain damage in his words, to kindergarten level in speech and writing and processing speed.
That first connecting email he sent, three sentences, took hours to write. Mark clung to the words penned in Zihuatenajo, “If each of those things (identities) were stripped away, I could still create a life of deep value and meaning by appreciating God and living in ways that brought pleasure to Him and consequently increasing unity with Him by living in those ways that make Him happy.” Our great accomplishment was publishing a book review Mark did, reading a book on stroke and commenting from a personal perspective. Later Mark went on to buy a home again, to get a job, and to get his children back. The “Matrix” was the defining strength, the “strong tower” in which he decided life could be lived again.
When we strip away the excess and competing things, like buttercups, starving out resources of time, energy, and passion which are indeed limited resources, we find our Matrix and our true calling and destiny. We find that we really need to be determined to be limited in our affinities so that we can live an intense life well. “It is always later than you think.” This found on a garden wall and wise words to those of us awake and aware and caring to craft our lives with precision.
We will leave a legacy that way and not just a lot of scattered, unfocused or wasted activity. This is how I wish to live my life: investing in the happiness and evolution of others –family, friends, and guests alike (and my own “self”), protecting the Planet, our food supply, and being in intimacy with my Father, my God.
In an old, influential book called Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd Douglas, he states that the more we give, the more we expand. Lloyd notes inside of this novel that it is best to give and invest secretly not sharing it about to pad our ego, then it will come back to us in ways that enlarge and expand our personality. We keep ascending the mountain to attain “our highest and best” purpose on this Earth. I have seen this to be true in my own life and also in the principle taught in another old book, read in my youth, called Try Giving Yourself Away.
This outward focus, the path of service, and the life of a servant, has created a 5-star retreat Inn serving over 2000 people from all over the World from virgin forest land. It has created a happy life for me, albeit an extremely busy one, far more so than I’d ever thought possible to actually lead. Perhaps that is another story for another time for there is some inherent magic in this lifestyle – some supernatural strength given to accomplish 3-4 times what many others are.
But for now, as I weed out the buttercups choking the potential of the productive blueberries, I will weed out negative, contentious people, activities, and thoughts which dilute my focus and my potential. My own motto has been, “If it doesn’t flow, it goes.” But Phillip Folsom, you spoke a good word to me in August of 2010 when you noted my tendency to dilute my focus and demanded, “Be determined to be limited in your affinities.” Concentrate and focus 100% on our loves, our passion, our gifts and talents, and 100% too on what we can change and 0% on what we cannot. Then our lives will be distilled, like a fine essential oil both sensual and healing, into an essence which of great value to ourselves, mankind, the Planet, and our Creator.
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