Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.
When I was a kid, there were these funny little toys called Weebles. Shaped like an egg and about the same size, they had a weight in the bottom so that when you nudged them, they wouldn’t tip over.
They were painted with funny faces, and you could create a collection large enough to include multi-generational families with both white and brown faces.
My sister and I thought they were both cute and funny. I think we mostly enjoyed the alliteration of the ad jingle: “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.”
And yet, there was a truth buried beneath these little Weeble families.
They were strong. No matter what befell them, they could not be toppled.
Lately, I’ve heard so many stories of people who are struggling with all kinds of challenges. Some are physically frail, some elderly, some feeling lonely, some simply wondering what is happening in this world of ours that seems to reel from chaos to chaos.
And yet, what I also hear is resilience. And this is where faith really shines.
Resilience usually shows up as a version of: this is so, and as this is so, then what?
What I love about this question is that it puts us into that awareness that our choices begin first in consciousness.
Sometimes we think we can’t do anything. But not-doing can be as powerful as doing. It’s taken me decades to learn that one. We do what is ours, and when we do what is ours, we give others room to do what is theirs. In other words – we are each at choice about how we want to walk through life.
My Danish grandfather was a fan of Shakespeare, most especially Hamlet. One of the classic lines from that tragedy is “there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” His quandary was struggling with being in prison, coping with the fact that he was imprisoned by his father, and yet realizing the bigger prison still for him to get past, was the prison of his own mind.
This is the faith point. Like any hiker knows, there is a crux in every climb – and it is up to us how we choose to move past that crux to find the greater vista that is waiting us.
When we are in alignment with the deepest truth of who we are, there really is no thinking. We are simply living our truth, one day at a time. When we have to stop and think, we fall into the well of judgment and begin to label one thing as good, and another as bad.
This creates the wobble, and when we are wobbling, the world wobbles with us.
When we are in our power, our strength, we can wobble but not fall down.
Then what we do is demonstrate our willow nature – the ability to move with the wind, as life flows in through and around us.
No longer in a state of denial about our experience, we simply respond in accordance with what is in front of us. While we may appear to be wobbling, truly we are then waving, weaving, willowing our way through the world.
This is the experience of flow in our lives.
Peace and blessings,
Rev. Karin
If you missed yesterday’s Sunday celebration titled Inquiring Minds Want to Flow, you can watch the replay and other past services on the CSLK YouTube channel.
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