Mysticism and Spirituality Circle

A group I have been working with for some time is called Third Act. It is the creation of Bill McKibben who was also the founder of 350.org. His mission forever, has been to do all we can to arrest the tragedy of climate change.

As he got older, he says he noticed that, though young people were doing excellent work and continued to be on the front lines, there were people of his age (60 and older) who were still passionate about social justice and saving our dear planet.

He created Third Act as an organization where all of us in those later years could work together and use our resources to make a difference. They say that their simple goals are to save the planet and save our democracy!

I am part of a sub-group called Third Act Faith, specifically for people of any faith tradition. We have hosted several sessions for folks to find solace and grounding in the days leading up to this incredibly important and frightening election. I encourage anyone who is interested to check out their calendar of events (there will be plenty more after the election no matter the outcome).

I recommend this video of Bill McKibben speaking at a Unitarian church about Third Act and its goals and vision. Take the 20 minutes to be inspired and to find out if there is something there that calls you to action – https://youtu.be/JJ3pvVsSpag?si=AiPyHKlSenin6mUO

Especially now with the wild flows of energy, life, fear, despair, joy, love, compassion, and beauty rocking us and spinning us around, the idea of a Cosmic Dance makes a lot of sense to me.

I was recently referred to Joyce Rupp, a writer who has written an excellent book about this dance. When I looked her up, I found this wonderful piece from another of my favorite sources, the Center for Action and Contemplation. I copied and shared it here in full, as it says it all so well.

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Spiritual writer Joyce Rupp understands all of creation as part of a “cosmic dance”:

No one person has been able to fully communicate this amazing dance of life to me, but Thomas Merton comes close with his description in New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton’s use of the phrase “cosmic dance” set my heart singing. When I read it, I felt my early childhood experience [in nature] of the inner dance being echoed and affirmed:

“When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.” [1]

Rupp continues:

The soul of the world and our own souls intertwine and influence one another. There is one Great Being who enlivens the dance of our beautiful planet and everything that exists. The darkness of outer space, the greenness of our land and the blue of our seas, the breath of every human and creature, all are intimately united in a cosmic dance of oneness with the Creator’s breath of love. [2]

Rupp celebrates the restoration that takes place by her conscious participation in the dance:

There is such power in the cosmic dance. Each time I resonate with this energy I sink into my soul and find a wide and wondrous connection with each part of my life. I come home to myself, feeling welcomed and restored to kinship with the vast treasures of Earth and Universe. I am re-balanced between hope and despair, slowed down in my greedy eagerness to accomplish and produce no matter the cost to my soul, beckoned to sip of the flavors of creation in order to nourish my depths….

Whenever and however I join with the cosmic dance, it jogs my memory and gives me a kind of “second sight,” a glimpse of the harmony and unity that is much deeper and stronger than the forces of any warring nation or individual. My trust that good shall endure is deepened. My joy of experiencing beauty is strengthened. My resolve to continually reach out beyond my own small walls is renewed. The energy that leaps and twirls in each part of existence commands my attention and draws me into a cosmic embrace. I sense again the limitless love that connects us all. I come home to that part of myself that savors kinship, births compassion, and welcomes tenderness. I re-discover that I am never alone. Always the dance joins me to what “is.” [3]

References:
[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Books, 1961), 296–297.

[2] Joyce Rupp, introduction to The Cosmic Dance: An Invitation to Experience Our Oneness (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 10, 11.

[3] Rupp, Cosmic Dance, 17, 19.

We have a prayer in my Sufi community in which we invoke the love, harmony, and beauty of the Only Being who is united with all illuminated souls forming the embodiment of…

And here, in the prayer as taught us by the great Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Kahn, the next word is “Master” – the embodiment of the master.

When he gave us this invocation, I feel certain he wasn’t considering that word the way it feels in our current world. From all I have read and know of his work, I expect he was referring to the mastery of our ego and the ability to be present with skill and practice.

Yet, that word holds unpleasant resonances for many today. So, our community often changes the word ‘master’ to another word—usually beginning in ‘M’.

I have heard people use ‘mother’, ‘mystery’, ‘message’, etc. All of which have a sweetness and their own resonance.

But my favorite, as I strive to remember and remind us of our connection to the all in all, is “Mycelia”.

The Only Being, united with all the illuminated cells that form the embodiment of the mycelia!

For me, the most resonant embodiment is that of the network of energy, love, harmony, and light that connects us to everything on this earth and indeed the universe. The recently understood mycelial networks of fungal systems seem to me to be the best possible metaphor and, in fact, the best physical representation of those connections.

A new favorite author and teacher, Sophie Strand, is hosting a workshop that I highly recommend and encourage you to consider – Myths as Maps Workshop

This excerpt she recently posted is so inspiring and germane to this week’s blog, that I share it here:

“Fungal systems are constituted by thread like mycelial networks below ground. With no predetermined body plan, they become maps of relationship wherever they grow. They branch and fork and fuse to constellate the connective network of other species and beings. I like to say that just as when you pour fungi into an ecosystem it becomes a map of relationships, so should your myths pour themselves into your web of kinship, becoming a map of your ecology of relationships. Fungi are maps of ecosystems, so should myths represent webs of relatedness rather than a single species of narrative perspective. Just like fungi taught plants how to root into the soil, so do myths teach us how to root into relations with our actual homes.” ~ Sophie Strand

May we all re-discover the mythologies that remind us of our mycelial connection to everything, everywhere. From that place of remembrance of the love, harmony, and beauty of the Only Being, it is impossible not to do all we can to sustain, support, and preserve the health and thriving of all that is.

May it be so.

Every day the news seems more fraught and frightening. Children and innocents both human and more than human are dying in wars, disasters, droughts, and other climate-related changes to our beloved home, Mother Gaia.

A looming election threatens to carry us into autocracy, violence, or both.

And each of us with any level of empathy can feel all that pain, suffering, and chaos if we allow ourselves to do so.

We have choices.

Some of us might choose to retreat into spiritual bypass. It is beyond our ability to change, so we’ll leave it to God.

Or maybe we harden our hearts with cynicism or other emotional armor, and simply pretend we don’t see it.

I don’t fault or judge anyone for the choices they make to protect themselves, but I want to share a practice that I have found to help me stay grounded and present in that chaos without ignoring it or pretending it’s not there.

After all, I believe that we are all an intrinsic part of a large mycelial network, connecting us spiritually, emotionally, and even physically to all beings and to the earth and universe. If that is true, then ignoring the suffering is choosing to ignore a part of myself.

I can’t do that.

So, I offer this practice.

It is a Sufi-influenced version of a Buddhist Tonglen practice by Joanna Macy that she calls “Breathing Through”

Settle into a comfortable position, feet on the floor, imagining and truly feeling your connection to that mycelial network. Hold that in gratitude and allow yourself to experience that connection as much as possible.

Place your hands on your heart and feel the warmth and vibration of that network rising up inside of you.

Allow your arms to reach out as wings of your heart. The heart and wings is a Sufi symbol.

With your arms held as wings, allow yourself to deeply feel the suffering, pain, and trauma of all of our beloved siblings, human and more than human. Truly feel and hold those feelings in your left wing.

At the same time, deeply imagine and feel and remember the incredibe beauty all around you in nature, that amazing sunset, those incredible Autumn leaves, those children’s faces, and hold that and compassion, love, caring, and forgiveness in the right wing.

Allow yourself to deeply feel both wings and feel the constant flow that is happening between each of those wings. You are riding the currents of all that is, both good and bad, dark and light, uplifting and distressing. Feel it all, and allow it to flow and be balanced on your wings.

After you feel you have held it long enough (it need not be long), smoothly and with deep love and compassion, fold the wings of your heart back by placing your hands back on your heart.

Breath through all of this that your heart is now holding. Breath love, compassion, caring, patience, and presence into your heart.

Now, drop your hands toward the earth, and let it all go with a final long sigh.

Give it all to the Mother. She can hold it and she will heal it.

Imagine all that you have held flowing back into the earth to be alchemized and broken down into the enriching soil of our collective being.

You can do this once, or repeat it as you feel called.

For me, this practice reminds me that we are held, and that I have some agency and power to at least imagine healing for all of the suffering. It reminds me that we are always capable of noticing and staying in balance and groundedness and presence, even if we are not able to physically change or help those who are suffering. It acknowleges our connection to all and honors it.

May it bring you blessings and rest.

See you in the mycelia!

For our Jewish siblings it is the time of the high holy days. Rosh Hashanah marks the New Year and asks us to look deep within to see what might need to be cleaned up.

I think of the all important need to forgive ourselves and others, accept forgiveness and grace, and to grant and receive reconciliation.

Especially as we approach the Day of the Dead and remember that all of us are mortal, and since we don’t know when our time will end, we truly can’t afford to leave any “I love you’s” and ‘I’m sorry’s” unsaid.

Consider deeply anyone you need to reconcile with and don’t wait.

Rosh Hashanah reminds us of the importance of this introspection. But it need not wait for a special time of year.

I received this beautiful poem in an email post from Keah Calluccie (she/her), Multifaith Program Manager for Earth Ministry.

I share it here as a Rosh Hashanah blessing.

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The Offering: A Tashlikh Prayer

by Rabbi Jill Hammer

I cast this gift to the water.

It is my past: blessing and regret.
It is my present: reflection and listening.
It is my future: intention and mystery.

It is what I did
and did not;
it is yes and no and silence.

It is what was done
and what arose from what was done
and what arises in this body remembering.

I let it all go. I own
neither the sting nor the sweetness.
I hold on to nothing.

The river has no past.
Each moment of rushing water
Is a new beginning.

Harm that has been:
heal in the rush of love and truth and time.
We who are lost:
let the current take us homeward.

May these waters churn what is broken
into what is whole.
May each separate droplet
reach the ocean that is becoming.

The journey awaits.
I have no power to refrain from it;
only to steer it when I can.

May the One who is
the great Crossroad
guide my turning.

Three times I declare:
It is finished.
It is born.
It is unending.

Three times I listen:
It is love.
It is the river.
It is before me.

May my offering go where it is meant to go
and may the one who offers it
find the way.

Amen.

“Patience
comes to the bones
before it takes root in the heart”
~ Mary Oliver

I’ve been thinking about patience this week.

In my younger years, I tended to be very impatient with God. I figured there was no reason I shouldn’t just be enlightened because I wanted to be! What’s all this practice stuff?

Maybe it’s part of eldering to finally notice that where you are is where you need to be. The beauty of each moment, each prayer, each exchange with our human and more than human beloveds, and indeed each breath is a gift and is enough.

In this beautiful season of change, I am reminded by the leaves turning to gold and red, to treasure each gift of each day before I fall into that final dance back to the earth.

One of the 99 names or aspects of the Divine in the Sufi/Islamic tradition is Muqaddim. It reminds us that everything is happening in its own time and in perfect sequence. Using that as a mantra has helped to inculcate the sense that I can let go of the feeling that anything needs to be pushed. Like the old gestalt book reminded us, “Don’t Push the River.”

Sitting beside the creek at my sit spot, and praying that mantra, I physically notice myself letting go and remembering patience, with myself, with God, and with others.

St Mary Oliver (of course) has a beautiful poem to help us feel this even more:

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What is the good life now? Why,
look here, consider
the moon’s white crescent

rounding, slowly, over
the half month to still another
perfect circle–

the shining eye
that lightens the hills,
that lays down the shadows

of the branches of the trees,
that summons the flowers
to open their sleepy faces and look up

into the heavens.
I used to hurry everywhere,
and leaped over the running creeks.

There wasn’t
time enough for all the wonderful things
I could think of to do

in a single day. Patience
comes to the bones
before it takes root in the heart

as another good idea.
I say this
as I stand in the woods

and study the patterns
of the moon shadows,
or stroll down into the waters

that now, late summer, have also
caught the fever, and hardly move
from one eternity to another.

~Patience by Mary Oliver .

This is an auspicious time in many ways. We just had a full harvest moon and a partial eclipse, and even some northern lights. Of course, as is often the case here on the Salish Sea, the view looked a lot like grey clouds… their own beauty of course!

This is a month when my daughter, my father, my mother-in-law, and my ex-wife all have birthdays. And it is very shortly after the birthdays of another daughter and my mother in late August. All but the daughters have passed the veil but it brings them all to mind in these days of transition.

As the cool winds begin to pick leaves from the maples and alder, and the flowers droop and fall away, I am reminded and celebrate the time of elderhood and letting go. The poems below give a wonderful sense of this season.

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September by Helen Hunt Jackson

The golden-rod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.

The gentian’s bluest fringes
Are curling in the sun;
In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun.

The sedges flaunt their harvest,
In every meadow nook;
And asters by the brook-side
Make asters in the brook.

From dewy lanes at morning
the grapes’ sweet odors rise;
At noon the roads all flutter
With yellow butterflies.

By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer’s best of weather,
And autumn’s best of cheer.

But none of all this beauty
Which floods the earth and air
Is unto me the secret
Which makes September fair.

‘T is a thing which I remember;
To name it thrills me yet:
One day of one September
I never can forget.

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A Continual Autumn, by Jalal Al-din Muhammad Rumi

Inside each of us there’s
a continual autumn.

Our leaves fall and are
blown out over the water,

a crow sits in the blackened limbs and
talks about what’s gone.

There’s a necessary dying, and
then we are reborn breathing again.
Very little grows on jagged rock.

Be ground.
Be crumbled
so wildflowers will come up where you are.

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Song for Autumn
by Mary Oliver

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for

the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

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Winter Apple by David Whyte

Let the apple ripen
on the branch
beyond your need
to take it down

Let the coolness
of autumn
and the breathing,
blowing wind
test its adherence
to endurance,
let the others fall.

Wait longer
than you would,
go against yourself,
find the pale nobility
of quiet that ripening
demands…

Isn’t it wonderful and profound how the Universe and the Ancestors circle around and bring us exactly what is needed? And then remind us again and again!

My lovely daughter called it the “new car syndrome” where you start noticing all the cars that look just like the one you just bought. 😉

Maybe so, or perhaps this is just the most important message for us all right now.

I would tend toward the latter, as that has been my experience – the lessons I need most tend to show up and keep sending reminders.

Thus, this week’s post comes from one of my favorites, Father Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, which not surprisingly had the theme this week of forgiveness and mercy!

Enjoy – and let me know your thoughts.

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When we forgive, we choose the goodness of others over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own goodness in a way that surprises us.  
—Richard Rohr 

Grace re-creates all things; nothing new happens without forgiveness. We just keep repeating the same old patterns, illusions, and half-truths.  
—Richard Rohr  

I once saw God’s mercy as patient, benevolent tolerance, a kind of grudging forgiveness, but now mercy has become for me God’s very self-understanding. Mercy is a way to describe the mystery of forgiveness. More than a description of something God does now and then, it is who God is. 
—Richard Rohr 

Practice – Praying to Forgive

Brian McLaren identifies how prayers of petition help us to experience forgiveness:   

Since being wounded or sinned against is a terribly common experience, I suspect we need to pay more attention to it. In fact, being wronged is directly linked in the Lord’s Prayer to the reality of doing wrong; we pray, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”  

Father Richard Rohr says it well: Pain that isn’t processed is passed on. Pain that isn’t transformed is transmitted. So we need to process our woundedness with God, and that processing begins by naming the pain and holding it … in God’s presence: 

Betrayed. Insulted. Taken advantage of. Lied to. Forgotten. Used. Abused. Belittled. Passed over. Cheated. Mocked. Snubbed. Robbed. Vandalized. Misunderstood. Misinterpreted. Excluded. Disrespected. Ripped off. Confused. Misled.  

It’s important not to rush this process. We need to feel our feelings, to let the pain actually catch up with us…. I’ve found that it takes less energy to feel and process my pain than it does to suppress it or run away from it. So, just as through confession we name our own wrongs and feel regret, through petition we name and feel the pain that results from the wrongs of others…. We translate our pain into requests:  

Comfort. Encouragement. Reassurance. Companionship. Vindication. Appreciation. Boundaries. Acknowledgement.  

It’s important to note that we are not naming what we need the person who wronged us to do for us. If we focus on what we wish the antagonist would do to make us feel better, we unintentionally arm the antagonist with still more power to hurt us. Instead, in this naming, we are turning from the antagonist to God, focusing on what we need God to do for us. We’re opening our soul to receive healing from God’s ever present, ever generous Spirit. 

I’ve been thinking about forgiveness a lot recently. It has come up in several conversations.

In fact on our ‘End of Life Conversations‘ podcast, my co-host, Annalouiza Armenderiz and I just recorded a video episode talking about the best ways to support people grieving any kind of loss. We spoke about what kind of things you can say that are helpful and comforting and appropriate. And we considered words that wouldn’t be appropriate.

A theme that kept coming up was forgiveness. You’re going to do it wrong sometimes despite your best intentions. And you’re going to witness others messing up as well.

It requires grace to remember forgiveness for yourself and others. The first verses (Suras) of most every part of the Quran begin with Bismallah A Rachman A Rahim (in the name of the Divine who is all compassion and mercy)

I received the following prayers that I share with permission from the Anohki Institute run by my friends Ted Falcon and Tovah Zev.

Please enjoy:

A Buddhist Prayer of Forgiveness

If I have harmed anyone in any way either knowingly or unknowingly through my own confusions I ask their forgiveness.

If anyone has harmed me in any way either knowingly or unknowingly through their own confusions I forgive them.

And if there is a situation I am not yet ready to forgive I forgive myself for that.

For all the ways that I harm myself, negate, doubt, belittle myself, judge or be unkind to myself through my own confusions I forgive myself.

RIBONO SHEL OLAM

Opening Beyond Forgiveness – An Evening Practice Ribono shel olam. . .

Source of all Being, I now seek to forgive all who have hurt me, all who have done me wrong, whether deliberately or by accident, whether by words, by deed, or by thought, whether against my pride, my person, or my property, in this incarnation or in any other.

May I release the desire for anyone to be punished on my account. May I be free from energies of anger, resentment, and guilt that keep me bound to the illusion of egoic identity.

And Source of all Being, Eternal One, my God and the God of my ancestors, may I no longer be bound by my own forgetting, when I have fallen into the illusion of separateness. May I remember always the One I AM and live into my interconnectedness to others and to all Life.

Let my words, my thoughts, my meditations, and my acts flow from the fullness of Your Being, Eternal One, Source of my being and my Redeemer.