[pic of teenager lying; look for cartoons of teens for ideas]
No, I’m not going to talk about lying to myself about my sexuality. Or my gender expression.
I’ve covered those before.
This lie has to do with something much Bigger.
Though, at the time, I thought I was the biggest thing around.
My family rarely went to church, so it was easy to sidestep the whole God thing. I was pretty sure that God was just a made-up fairy tale meant to keep people in line. And I was more than pretty sure that God had nothing to do with me.
The lie didn’t change that. At least, not at the time.
So what did I lie about?
One day, my parents came to me with a magazine. It was the Smith College Alumni Quarterly.
Smith College is where my mother went to school, and the magazine was a quarterly journal sent to all the graduates of Smith College.
Apparently, I had doodled over the title of the magazine. I vaguely remembered doing this. I was a committed doodler at the time.
After all, I was a teenager. What else was I going to do?
When I had doodled over the title of this particular magazine, I hadn’t given it any thought. That’s what doodling is all about, right? You just let your hand move and your mind wander. You go to the Doodle Zone.
But my parents thought otherwise. They thought I had purposely doodled over the title of the magazine to make the title say something else.
And let me just say: I wasn’t in trouble. In fact, they thought I was brilliant.
The cover of the magazine was a photo of a Smith student sitting by herself on the floor of the library. She was sitting in an aisle with rows of bookshelves on either side of her.
Apparently, my doodling over the magazine title turned what used to be Smith Alumni Quarterly into Sit Alone Artery.
As in, the artery that was the aisle that the Smith student was sitting alone in.
Clever, right?
Except I didn’t do it on purpose.
And I didn’t have the heart to tell my parents that I hadn’t done it on purpose because here they were, magazine in hand, beaming at how smart I was.
I mean, I was a self-absorbed teenager, so I often felt like the smartest thing around. But this? This was not my doing.
And it couldn’t help but get my attention.
What were the odds that my hand, on its own accord, would create such a clever doodle? I knew it wasn’t random, but I also had no idea what, exactly, was behind “my” creation.
So I claimed it as mine and moved on.
Looking back on this now, my doodle escapade is a great reminder.
I can say I no longer deny the Source of my inspiration.
But sometimes I do. Sometimes I forget that I have 24/7 access to an Infinite Intelligence that is soooooooo much smarter than my little human self.
And while I don’t deny it or lie about it as I did when I was a teenager, I sometimes credit myself a little too generously. Like I did in the Doodle Incident.
The Incident is a great reminder in another way as well.
“My” brilliant creation was a result of going to the Doodle Zone. That place where I shut off my mind and let Creation work through me.
The Incident reminds me to do that more often. Let myself daydream. Space out. Do nothing.
And while my human self is doing “nothing,” my Divine self can come to the fore and come up with some groovy stuff. Inspired stuff. Surprising stuff.
Like a teenager in Ohio in the 1970’s, doodling over a magazine of a student sitting alone in a library, creating something way more clever than they ever would have imagined.
I lied about it then. But I don’t lie about it anymore.
At least, I try not to.
How about you? What’s your experience with forgetting and remembering the Source of creation? Share your comments below!
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