Author: admin

With gratitude to Janet Berketa who posted this in her blog today.

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who make the morning

and spread it over the fields

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even,

the miserable and crotchety-

best preacher that ever was, dear star,

that just happens to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light-

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

~ Mary Oliver

This meditation comes from Fr. Richard Rohr’s blog – this week centered on the communion of saints.

The Seven Homecomings

The Seven Homecomings, a practice taught by Tibetan Buddhist Lama Rod Owens, invite us to recognize and honor our own personal “circle of care.” These instructions are just a template; let this practice change to meet your needs. Pause briefly between each section.

• Begin contemplating the first homecoming of the guide. Reflect on any being who has been a guide, a teacher, a mentor, an adviser, or an elder for you. Reflect on the beings in your life whom you’ve gone to for guidance and support. . . . Invite them to gather around you in a circle and say welcome. Relax. Inhale. Exhale and come home to being held by your guides.
   
• The second homecoming is your wisdom texts. [Reflect] on any text that has helped you to deepen your wisdom. These texts can include any writing, books, teachings, sacred scriptures . . . that have helped you to experience clarity, openness, love, and compassion. . . . Say welcome to your texts. Relax. Inhale. Exhale and come home to being held by your wisdom texts.
   
• The third homecoming is community. Begin by reflecting about the communities, groups, and spaces where you experience love or the feeling of being accepted and supported in being happy. . . . Where do you feel safe to love? Where are you being loved? . . . Say welcome to your communities. Relax. Inhale. Exhale and come home to being held by your communities.
   
• The fourth homecoming is your ancestors. Begin by reflecting on those ancestors who have wanted the best for you, including wanting you to be happy and safe. You don’t need to know who those ancestors are. . . . Also reflect on the lineages you feel connected to, like the lineage of your spiritual tradition, or tradition of art or activism. . . . As you invite your ancestors, remember that you too are in the process of becoming an ancestor. . . . Say welcome to your ancestors and lineages. Relax. Inhale. Exhale and come home to being held by your ancestors and lineages.
   
• The fifth homecoming is the earth. Begin by reflecting on . . . how [the earth] sustains your life and the lives of countless beings. . . . Coming home to the earth means touching the earth, acknowledging the earth . . . and allowing it to hold you and, as it holds you, understanding that it is loving you as well. . . . Say welcome to the earth. Relax. Inhale. Exhale and come home to being held by the earth.
   
• The sixth homecoming is silence. Begin by reflecting on the generosity of silence as something that helps you to have the space to be with yourself. . . Reflect on how you can embrace silence as a friend and/or lover invested in your health and well-being. . . . Say welcome to the silence. Relax. Inhale. Exhale and come home to being held by the silence.
   
• Finally, the seventh homecoming is yourself. Begin by reflecting on your experiences of your mind and body. Consider how your experiences are valuable, important, and crucial. Invite all the parts of yourself into your awareness, including the parts of yourself that seem too ugly or overwhelming. . . . Say welcome to yourself. Relax. Inhale. Exhale and come home to yourself. . . .

Now imagine that your circle of benefactors begins to dissolve into white light, and gather that white light into your heart center. Rest your mind and relax.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger (North Atlantic Books: 2020), 87–91.

I have been listening to a profound and deeply impactful interview with Martin Prechtel, an author, mystic, indigenous practitioner, and teacher that a friend sent me.

I was struck especially by a quote where he says, “tumors are petrified sorrow.” His understanding and perspective from his time with Indigenous Guatemalan Shamans of grief as praise and his holding of death and life as one entity are simply beautiful and profound. He speaks of the way that in Guatemala when they plant seeds, they treat it as a funeral and pray to each seed to thank them for being willing to die to be reborn as nutrients for the people. And he said that when the first sprouts poke out of the ground, the children run in and excitedly say, “the seeds are saying their names!” – they are celebrating the rebirth.

Here is a link to the interview – it is long but worth every moment: https://newbooksnetwork.com/martin-prechtel-the-disobedience-of-the-daughter-of-the-sun-north-atlantic-books-2005

So much to learn from his teachings in this interview. After hearing the words about tumors as petrified sorrow, I went looking and found this article that I’ll share here as well:

A poem in honor of International Women’s Day:

The Marvelous Women
by Mohja Kahf

All women speak two languages:
the language of men
and the language of silent suffering.
Some women speak a third,
the language of queens.
They are marvelous
and they are my friends.

My friends give me poetry.
If it were not for them
I’d be a seamstress out of work.
They send me their dresses
and I sew together poems,
enormous sails for ocean journeys.

My marvelous friends, these women
who are elegant and fix engines,
who teach gynecology and literacy,
and work in jails and sing and sculpt
and paint the ninety-nine names,
who keep each other’s secrets
and pass on each other’s spirits
like small packets of leavening,

it is from you I fashion poetry.
I scoop up, in handfuls, glittering
sequins that fall from your bodies
as you fall in love, marry, divorce,
get custody, get cats, enter
supreme courts of justice,
argue with God.

You rescuers on galloping steeds
of the weak and the wounded–
Creatures of beauty and passion,
powerful workers in love–
you are the poems.
I am only your stenographer.
I am the hungry transcriber
of the conjuring recipes you hoard
in the chests of your great-grandmothers.

My marvelous friends–the women
of brilliance in my life,
who levitate my daughters,
you are a coat of many colors
in silk tie-dye so gossamer
it can be crumpled in one hand.
You houris, you mermaids, swimmers
in dangerous waters, defiers of sharks–

My marvelous friends,
thirsty Hagars and laughing Sarahs,
you eloquent radio Aishas,
Marys drinking the secret
milkshakes of heaven,
slinky Zuleikas of desire,
gay Walladas, Harriets
parting the sea, Esthers in the palace,
Penelopes of patient scheming,

you are the last hope of the shrinking women.
You are the last hand to the fallen knights
You are the only epics left in the world

Come with me, come with poetry
Jump on this wild chariot, hurry–

MAP

by Linda Hogan

To honor and celebrate this wonderful musician and teacher here is a beautiful musical tribute: https://youtu.be/h4JRbRHz9t8

A beautiful teaching from the wisdom of 🐬 dolphins!

Being Here

The natural world has so much to teach us about God, ourselves, and our connection to one another. Scholar and artist Alexis Pauline Gumbs shares wisdom from dolphins:  

Here we are, where presence meets offering, looking to Indus river dolphins who live by constantly using sound to mark where they are. . . . What could it mean to be present with each other across time and space and difference? Presence is interpersonal and interspecies and intergalactic, in some ways eternal. How can we rethink our presence on the planet and its precarity by paying attention to how the Indus dolphins have brought themselves back from the brink of extinction? Could we learn to love the humpback whale beyond its marketable mythology and love ourselves beyond what capitalism tells us is valuable about being us? Marine mammal mentorship offers us the chance for presence as celebration, as survival and its excess, as more than we even know how to love about ourselves and each other.

Most cetaceans have a crystalline lens over their eyes so they can see underwater. The South Asian river dolphins do not. Also the water moves so quickly, and is so full and turbid that not much would be visible if they were looking with their eyes. So they look instead with their voices.

The Indus and Ganges river dolphins live in sound. They make sound constantly, echolocating day and night. In a quickly moving environment they ask where, again where, again where.

The poem of the Indus river dolphin is the ongoing sound of here, a sonic consciousness of what surrounds them, a form of reflective presence. Here.

The home of the Indus river dolphin has gone through many manmade changes. . . . . Through all of it, the Indus river dolphin, who clicks all day and night, has been saying, here. Here. Here. Here. In a language I want to learn. . .

In the language I was raised in, “here” means “this place where we are,” and it also means “here” as in “I give this to you.” Could I learn from the Indus river dolphin a language of continuous presence and offering? A language that brings a species back from the brink, a life-giving language? Could I learn that? Could we learn that? We who click a different way, on linked computers day and night? . . .

What I want to say to you . . . requires me to reshape my forehead, my lungs. It requires me to redistribute my dependence on visual information. So I will close my eyes and say it: Here. Here I am. Here I am with you. Here is all of me. And here we are. Here. Inside this blinding presence. Here. A constant call in a moving world. Here. All of it. Here. Here. Humbly listening towards home. And here. And here. Right here. My poem for you. My offered presence. This turbid life. Yes. Here you go.

How might we offer to be “here” for ourselves, someone else, or the world around us today?

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press: 2020), 67‒69.

A friend sent this link to a new compilation of love stories to plants and trees that I just love! In this time of winter redux (last week I was posting budding trees, this week we’re buried under snow!) – it is a wonderful reminder of our beloved nature family and the many ways they show up for us.