Month: July 2023

Once again, gratitude to sister Amina who posted this on her blog, Love, Harmony & Beauty #134, this week.

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable,

like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?

Who has it, and who doesn’t?

I keep looking around me.

The face of the moose is as sad

as the face of Jesus.

The swan opens her white wings slowly.

In the fall, the black bear

carries leaves into the darkness.

One question leads to another.

Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children?

Why should I have it, and not the camel?

Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?

What about the blue iris?

What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?

What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

What about the grass?  

~  Mary Oliver

Gratitude to FR Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation. This meditation was posted in their most recent Daily Meditations blog.

Breathing in Enoughness

We share a guided meditation from Kaira Jewel Lingo, a former resident of Plum Village and student of Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022), to help readers settle into a moment of “just this” awareness. 

Let’s begin our practice by finding a comfortable position of dignity and ease.  

Let’s really take our seats, let’s really occupy this moment. If there are parts of ourselves somewhere else, in some other time, past or future, invite them all to come back. We’ll be here, we’ll be now. Settling into just being here. With all the tumult that may be in your life, still you can breathe in and out, with presence, recollecting yourself.  

Feel the contact between your body and the floor, whether through the soles of your feet or your legs, knowing that the Earth is supporting you in this moment.  

Allow the in-breath and the out-breath to flow naturally. Experience how the breath arrives, what happens as you breathe in. Feel how the out-breath just does what it does, quite naturally.  

Breathing in, aware of the body. Breathing out, allowing the body to rest, calming the body.  

Aware of the body with the in-breath. Calming, resting, with the out-breath.  

If you notice that your mind wanders into thinking, planning, worrying, acknowledge that it is happening, knowing you can return to focus on your thoughts later. For now, engage again with the exercise of attending to this moment.  

Inhale and open up to the awareness that this moment is enough, that what we need, it’s already here.  

As you exhale, practice to accept that life is as it is in this moment. Allow it to be here, just as it is. Inhaling the sense of enoughness, of contentment, that actually things are okay right here and right now, we don’t need anything more. Exhaling acceptance of how things are.  

Breathing in enoughness, breathing out acceptance. 

Kaira Jewel Lingo, We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons on Moving through Change, Loss, and Disruption (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2021), 34–35.

I’m a conditional atheist

God does not exist for me on
the tip of a sharpened sword

or on the lips of a sermonizing
hate-evangelist who is foaming at the mouth

or in the licking flames of a torch held
by a marching bigot

or in any dogma that have been soaked in the ancient poison of guilt and self-shame 

the divine doesn’t
exist for me anywhere
where wounds are being
caused in its name

I don’t know about
how any of this works
but I’ve never found
much of God in the towering
hierarchy of unchecked power

the Great Mystery isn’t a cracking whip
or a flag or an internet manifesto
or a pointed finger or a political party
or a dividing line or a box of ammo
or a corvette driven by a tv preacher
or a specific gender or a book bonfire

Creation is more of a florist
than she is a fundamentalist

the Weaver of Life is more interested
in stitching us together into a quilt
than how to separate us into metal bins

to come into relationship
with Unending Love shouldn’t
require us to loathe ourselves

~ it should be the exact opposite

to know ourselves
is to know God

to love ourselves
is to love God

my love,

I believe that the divine
is just about everywhere

~ except in the slow-poison
sands of fear and control
where so many have built temples
for us to worship inside

~ in those places
I am an atheist

but everywhere else

there is so much
fertile soil

where we can let the sunflowers
of empathy grow wildly in
the spaces between us

and I’ve heard
that if we remain still

and listen so very closely
these evangelizing sunflowers
will whisper to each of us
a secret we once knew while we
were cooking in the cosmic womb:

“We are all loved equally.”

~ john roedel

Sometimes a poem just stops me in my tracks and makes me say, “wow”! This poem did so today and I wanted to share it.

Flight One 

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen
This is your Captain speaking.

We are flying at an unknown altitude
And an incalculable speed.
The temperature outside is beyond words.

If you look out the window you will see
Many ruined cities and enduring seas
But if you wish to sleep please close the blinds.

My navigator has been ill for many years
And we are on Automatic Pilot; regrettably
I cannot foresee our ultimate destination.

Have a pleasant trip.
You may smoke, you may drink, you may dance
You may die.
We may even land oneday.

~ Gwendolyn Margaret MacEwen (1941–1987)