{"id":231,"date":"2012-03-28T14:50:57","date_gmt":"2012-03-28T18:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/insweetcompany\/?p=231"},"modified":"2012-03-28T14:50:57","modified_gmt":"2012-03-28T18:50:57","slug":"wisdom-keeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/2012\/03\/wisdom-keeper.html","title":{"rendered":"Wisdom Keeper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c… for me, spiritual practice is making the bed, defrosting dinner, and so on. It\u2019s not magical or removed; it\u2019s about how I discover and reveal myself as I do things that are ordinary.\u201d <\/em>— Miriam Polster, IN SWEET COMPANY: CONVERSATIONS WITH EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN ABOUT LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been several years since I interviewed Grandmother Twyla Hurd Nitsch for my last book, IN SWEET COMPANY: CONVERSATIONS WITH EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN ABOUT LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE, yet I find myself thinking a lot about her. Gram, as she liked to be called, was the Lineage Holder of Seneca wisdom and the leader of the Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge. http:\/\/www.wolfclanteachinglodge.org\/<\/a> Hers was an inherited position, one she was trained for as a child by her grandfather; one she, in turn, trained her son, Bob, and his wife, Lee, to carry on after her passing in 2007.<\/p>\n

Gram knew how to be a Wisdom Keeper not just in her role as a spiritual leader, but in how she moved through her life. It wasn\u2019t what she did, but who she was. Being smart, or wise or \u201cright\u201d was not important to her. She tried simply to be, as she said in our interview, \u201ca good example.\u201d She was so comfortable in her own skin, so at peace with how the Universe worked and her place in it, that her smile spoke volumes.<\/p>\n

Gram was not separate from the world. She did not lead an ivory tower life. She raised five kids, suffered tragic losses, had more than her share of hard times. But she used everything that happened to her as a stepping stone to bring her closer to Great Mystery. \u201cEverything that happened to me was just like going to school. Even [for a period] when I couldn\u2019t hear or see…I felt like I was being gifted because of what I was learning through the experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was a child, my elders taught me it was up to me to make myself happy, and when I go to bed each night I should thank Great Mystery for my happiness. Most people don\u2019t take responsibility for their own happiness\u2014it doesn\u2019t even enter their heads to do that! And at the end of the day, they\u2019re not grateful for the good things that happen to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Personal responsibility and gratitude are not intellectual or esoteric concepts known to a privileged few. Gram took these concepts, and all the teachings she so deeply believed in, and made them her own. She lived them in her daily life. It was beautiful to see. It taught me so much.<\/p>\n

Your thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c… for me, spiritual practice is making the bed, defrosting dinner, and so on. It\u2019s not magical or removed; it\u2019s about how I discover and reveal myself as I do things that are ordinary.\u201d — Miriam Polster, IN SWEET COMPANY: CONVERSATIONS WITH EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN ABOUT LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE It\u2019s been several years since I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":231,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[96,44,104],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gratitude","category-spiritual-journey","tag-grandmother-twylah-hurd-nitsch","tag-miriam-polster","tag-wolfclan-teaching-lodge"],"yoast_head":"\nWisdom Keeper - In Sweet Company<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/2012\/03\/wisdom-keeper.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wisdom Keeper - In Sweet Company\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201c… for me, spiritual practice is making the bed, defrosting dinner, and so on. 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She speaks and writes about things women care about: how to make our lives and our work be about what we value most; how to navigate challenge and change; how to live with integrity and grace, to look at error in ourselves and others in a forgiving way and view life as an invitation to transform ourselves into instruments for the Greater Good. \"I laughed, I cried, I was silent, I cheered. Most of all, I loved.\" Spoken by a woman at In Sweet Company Retreat, these words express what women experience when Margaret engages them in dynamic, soul-searching conversations about their lives. Margaret holds degrees in art therapy, psychosynthesis, and leadership and human behavior. Her work takes her to universities, to conferences and retreat settings, to living rooms and board rooms -- wherever women gather. 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You can too!","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/author\/mwolff"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/231"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}