Month: September 2024

“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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.