What if hope is as innocent as knowing you are the one meant to be the mother of a small village when you are still just a girl yourself?
What if hope is as brave as believing the worst kinds of tragedies cannot exempt you from the sweetest of joys?
What if hope is as simple as standing in a field and waking up for the first time to the truth—
that you are loved, a being of rare beauty on the earth?
What if hope is as radical as looking in the mirror and seeing with new eyes that “good enough” will have to give way to “something more”?
What if hope is as beautiful as bright brown eyes convincing you the best is yet to be?
What if…?
please vote for the picture hope dream assignment here. registration is required but very quick and worth it.
1. Hovering around the #20 position on Name Your Dream Assignment Contest. Woohoo! Big thanks to everyone who is making this happen.
2. Putting up a really great interview with a dancing mermaid today over at PBS. Please pretty please go leave a comment so PBS knows dancing mermaids matter.
3. Eating a soft-boiled egg with Mark next door, talking about heart-full things.
4. A really hilarious and insightful conversation with this soulsister and then this one.
5. Making plans to go to Los Angeles for a magical dinner at the end of April.
6. Watching my friends deepen and grow in their understanding of what it means to bring your true self to the world.
7. Knowing deep down that the Universe is pulling me into a more and more beautiful & powerful understanding of hope.
8. Lying in bed with Madeleine talking about nothing at all.
9. The way Carter says, “Bye, Mommy! See you in the afternoon!” as he bravely walks into school all by himself.
10. A big ole stack of packages to be walked down to the post office.
11. That mama bear of love and goodness Stacey Monk
12. A surprise visit from that sweet girl Rachael
13. Bike riding weather
14. My squishy mama belly that’s my living proof I’m getting older and wiser and softer, even more so on the inside than the outside
15. Crocuses in the garden
16. A wide open field where an amazing dream cracked open a heart and planted a wild seed that grows and grows and grows
17. Esteria’s voice on the phone
18. Being able to talk (even just baby sentences) in a lovely new language
19. Forgiveness
20. The belief that peace can grow in the most unlikely places with the most unconvinced people
What’s making you happy, dear friends?? I would be so happy to know.
A few weeks ago my dear friend Tracey Clark from Shutter Sisters called to ask me to consider submitting an idea to this contest. $50,000 from Microsoft/Lenovo to travel anywhere you want in the world to photograph your dream assignment, the winner determined by judges, after the internet selects the top twenty favorite ideas. “I don’t care what you come up with,” she told me. “It just has to have something to do with your work in Rwanda, it has to be something that involves the larger community and it has to support your ideas for hopefulworld.org.”
Hopefulworld.org is a little nest egg of an idea I’ve been holding for a long time now, ever since I met Maggie Doyne in New York City and she told me I needed to follow my heart and start a non-profit and start doing the work I’ve been put on this earth to do. Of course, anyone who knows Maggie knows she said it much more sweetly than that, but I got the point.
So many strange things happened in Rwanda–seismic shifts in my world view, a real cracking open of my soul, weird dreams and odd coincidences that made it feel like I was being set up by the Universe for a life very unlike the one I’d been living. The whole experience really shook me up, and I’ve been in a state of serious reflection ever since trying to put all the pieces together in one whole.
As a result, I’ve developed this uncomfortable relationship with my blog. I feel like that friend who always calls to tell you about the same problem over and over again or the one who you wonder might be a little off her rocker because she keeps reporting things are so, so hard and you can’t for the life of you figure out what is wrong with her. Get over it all ready! Move on! It’s almost impossible for me to write on this blog these days without invoking one of those demons.
It’s almost even more impossible to explain that things are not stuck at all and that I’m actually in a state of disbelief at how good things are and at all the ways the missing pieces are coming to me, without me having to do much of anything at all.
I wish I could say during this process that I’ve been a responsible community member or a faithful friend or an organized Etsy shop owner, but I have not. (Read: heaping mounds of shame on my head) So many things are changing so fast, I’m having trouble keeping up. The only thing that helps is when I step a little more firmly into my new life and into my power. Then things slow down to the just right speed where I know everything I could ever need to know in one moment. But it’s a practice. I don’t have the rhythm down yet. At all.
So when Tracey asked me to enter this contest and then ever so kindly called me everyday to confess her total confidence in me and my process, I thought this is really, really too much for me. She must have made a mistake. I called her back every day for a week to suggest someone else enter, someone else go, but she insisted it was meant for me. Shit. I’ve never felt more unworthy or more un-together to take on something in my life.
But then I started working on ideas. And I realized very quickly that if I was going to take on a project as big as this one, that I didn’t want the idea to come from my own creativity. I wanted to receive an idea, if that makes any sense. I wanted it to be about something more than what my limited mind could cook up. So I wrote a little note to the Universe which said something like this: If you had it in your collective consciousness (or whatever that thing is called) to send someone on a dream assignment, what would you want it to be? Because whatever that thing is, I really want to sign up. And then I twisted up the piece of paper, put it on my little altar, lit a candle and laid on the couch to wait for the answer.
Waiting for the answer turns out to be way more complicated than I first imagined. There are no lightning bolts, for example, which I could accept. But there weren’t any clear nudges either. So I went for a walk. Came home. Tried to sort out my Etsy disaster. Ate an apple. Drank a cup of tea. Sat down. Tried to write. At first, nothing happened, but then one day I sat down to write and I cried hard for an hour over everything I had written which I figured had to be a good sign. And then someone came over and said one little thing which turned out to be an important piece, and then the next day someone called who offered another. And it happened the same the next day. And the day after that.
Every couple days I’d have a total and complete freak out, feeling the full limitation of my brain power and my total ineptitude when it comes to knowing how to listen for the deeper story, and after awhile the only way I could describe it to my friends was to say it felt like balancing a refrigerator on your head. Which sounds silly to me now, since I set it up to not have to have any of the answers in the first place, but still, knowing how to listen carefully to every stray thread that wanted to be gathered up and included in this project was truly one of the most challenging experiences of my life.
It’s funny to me, too, how ashamed I am to admit how much I wanted to get it right and how hard I struggled over an idea which you’ll see isn’t really so complicated after all. But that’s the part where I need the love to get in. I still don’t know there’s a special kind of kindness for not knowing.
Anyway, in the end, I didn’t need to finish it by myself after all because the Universe sent Stephanie Roberts and Tracey to really weave and knit everything together with me into a seamless whole. There’s no bonding like the kind that happens when you’re literally on the phone all night long with two amazing women in two different states, pouring your love into something much much bigger than you could have imagined in the beginning.
We decided at the very last minute that the best way to introduce this project is to create a video. I have hesitated to even post it on this blog (ridiculous, I know) because I’m suffering from a strange kind of hasn’t-the-blogworld-given-you-so-much-already guilt, but Tracey (again) like a true soulsister busted out of her usual zen total-chill space and offered these sage words of advice: “Do I have to come through the phone and strangle you???!! This is not about you, Jen, it’s so much bigger than that. It’s for all of us and you and I are just one small part. So please let the ego out of it, get out of the way and let it happen. Please?” Isn’t it magic when you have friends who will talk to you like that? I was right as rain in two minutes.
Here it is. Picture Hope. You can register here. And vote here. I present it to you with so much love and all the hope I have in my heart. The refrigerator is off of my head. Now all I have to do is to get out these packages.
i’m not sick of your struggles
i’m not tired of your grief
i’m not wearied by your doubts
or anywhere near finished with the broken places in your wide open heart
instead i’m still hungry
to know your truth
to hear your pain
to see the cracked places where the light gets in
and where everything good inside you finally has a chance to come out
i still believe in magic
yours most especially
and also the path that twists and winds before you
leading through dark valleys
but always always back into the light
of a kind and silvery moon
be strong, my friend
be brave.
tell me what’s inside of you
and know i carry all your pieces
with so much tenderness
and even more respect
for who you are right now
and who you will become.
I have the sweetest neighbors ever.
My kids still like to snuggle, even though they are 7 and 10.
There’s an unopened bag of chocolate chips in my pantry with my name written all over it.
I have friends who are helping me to let love in.
I got to write the lucky notes that are flying all over SxSW right now.
I get to make a difference in a faraway place.
I got to write the copy for the video below.
I’ve a dear friend in Stacey Monk, the founder of Epic Change and Tweetluck, who has amazing ideas about what it means to truly be a friend in the developing world.
Little by little, after a long struggle, I think I’m starting to find my way.
I cannot resist posting this video today. I love the regular-ness and how honest it is and how every single person in it desperately needs a haircut. Me, too! Me, too!
I’m living the part of The Alchemist where the boy has to turn himself into wind, so I’m right there with this we crawl, we live, we’re small business. Feel free to light candles, laugh out loud or say prayers. All of it will help just fine. I’m almost there. Almost.
Myriam is going to start talking about Lessons from the Couch (see below). And I have NO idea what she’s going to tell you. All I can say is it’ll be good, ‘cuz that girl knows the truth when she sees it and my soul is in fine shape because of it.
Here’s to a fabulous Friday and that magical Natala who sent me the video in the first place.
“Our goal in love is to love like queens, showing up not as girls but as women, with faith and clarity and purity of heart. Love is very serious business. It takes a powerful heart to invoke it clearly and prepare for its coming.”~ Marianne Williamson
On a recent trip to the Motherland, (to visit Jemen, Odetta, Patience and Madeline), I was inducted into Love. A magical place that welcomes the best and the brightest.
in the space between
the hurt and the healing
the question and the answer
the disease and the cure
we search for a kind of calm to get us through
a kind of happiness that defies logic
a kind of peace that cancels out despair
a kind of joy that overrides circumstances
a kind of courage that commands attention
and demands a shift in focus
all this waits
in the space between
here
hope is not mere sentiment
or wishful thinking
but a treasure map to follow
all the way through the darkest night
to the still quiet place
where your heart is a ship
that can carry you through a storm
across a wide glassy sea
to a new land
where you are not afraid
to know what you know
where you are not afraid
to be.
these are my rough thoughts on hope tonight. i’d love your feedback, your questions, your ideas about how hope works in the space between the now and the not yet.
i do it for the joy it brings
because i’m a joyful girl
because the world owes me nothing
and we owe each other the world
i do it because it’s the least i can do
i do it because i learned it from you
i do it just because i want to
because I want to
This is the anthem of my heart these days as I push through resistance to the breakthrough–that magical place where you understand what your work is and you take it on with humility and grace. To offer your gifts with open hands; to receive what you need with quietness and love–is there any other way to enter joy?
Here’s hoping you are a joyful girl, this morning, and that everything you give with an open heart, creates space for your soul to know true rest.
My name is Jen Lemen. I'm messy, hopeful,
enthusiastic and helplessly in love with the idea
that stories can change you and me forever.