Category: Main blog

This is such a sweet and needed meditation practice in these times.

From the article:

“In my hermitage, I have planted beautiful trees. When I do walking meditation, I often stop and hug one of the trees, breathing in and out. It’s very nourishing. The tree gives me strength, and it always seems to me that the tree responds to my hugging and breathing.”

“Hugging meditation is a chance to practice our awareness of impermanence. Each time we hug, we know it may be the last time. Our deep awareness of the impermanent nature of things inspires us to be very mindful, and we naturally hug each other in a deep, authentic way, appreciating each other completely.”

At the end of the article, he outlines the steps for his hugging meditation practice. Absolutely worth finding a time and place to try it out. Next time I see you, let’s give it a try!

After the last week of horror and continuing despair, I am feeling the importance of remembering joy. I hope you will find this “On Being” episode as refreshing as I have.

“There is a question floating around the world right now: “How can we be joyful in a moment like this?” To which writer Ross Gay responds: “How can we not be joyful, especially in a moment like this?” He says joy has nothing to do with ease and “everything to do with the fact that we’re all going to die.” The ephemeral nature of our being allows him to find delight in all sorts of places (especially his community garden). To be with Ross Gay is to train your gaze to see the wonderful alongside the terrible, to attend to and meditate on what you love, even in the work of justice.“

Click on the link below to hear the podcast:

Tending Joy and Practicing Delight with Ross Gay

One of the greatest influences on Starr King School for Ministry which I am attending has been Dr. Ibrahim Farajaje Baba who acted as provost for nearly 20 years. He was a uniquely gifted orator, teacher, lover, and champion of intersectional awareness. I feel so blessed to bask in the legacy he has left us.

This video is of a lecture he gave for a Faculty Summit in 2010. The whole thing is worth listening to, but please at least skip forward to the beautiful spoken word poetry that starts at around 26:20.

NOTE: I will be at Northwest Sufi Camp next week and then in Berkeley for school the rest of August – so there may be less of these blog posts (although I expect to be able to do some during that time).

As we all know, one of the best cures for despair and overwhelm is to get into the forests and wild places and allow them to heal you. The trees and the animals and the mycelium and the dirt, as well as the ancestors whose bones you walk upon, are all there eagerly awaiting your open heart to join them and feel their genuine and never-ending love, compassion, affection, and healing, connected energy.

So, get into nature as often and for as long as possible. But for those in-between times, here is a quick reminder and dose of beauty. Have a good sound system or earphones and let yourself sink into this experience.

From the site:
“In a short and strikingly beautiful cinematic journey to wild places we are asked to think about how we are leaving the natural world for generations to come. What if our children’s children could never lay eyes on wild country because it is already destroyed? Spending time in the wild is not a past-time, the narrator tells us, rather it is a biological necessity like water, air and food. The video ends on a hopeful note, pointing out that thousands of people are spending their time working to leave their areas better than when they arrived.”

Click on the link below to experience this video journey:

Time For the Wild

Dear friends,
I will be traveling for the next couple of weeks so there may be no postings or at least fewer.

This is a truly wonderful and moving article by one of our wise Sufi Sheiks (Click on the title/link to go to the full article).

Living the Moment of Love, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Some excerpts:

“Spiritual practices—meditation, mindfulness—can help give us access to these moments [of blissful connection to the All]. But is it enough just to live them in their innocence, or do we need to bring an awareness of the changing story that surrounds them, a story of the Earth abused and exploited, species depleted, waters made toxic? And how can we reconcile the wonder of the moment with our responsibility and love for the Earth that gives us these moments? What does it really mean to live in the now?”

“Passing from innocence to experience, awareness of the moment has many ingredients. If we listen carefully it carries the stories of the present time, of what is being destroyed, abandoned, desecrated. As much as we respond to the joy of a newborn baby, it is important that we are also aware of the colors that are beginning to fade, of an interior music that is becoming fainter and fainter. We are here to hear the stories of the Earth, of the life that is around us—not as children without responsibility, but bearing part of the burden for what is happening. Each in our own way we recognize and respond to what is changing.”

“How we live this destiny depends upon how we live the intersection of change and the changeless, the eternal and the transitory. This is where the two seas meet, where the Divine and human intersect. It is here that the destiny of the soul is fully realized, and here where we are also awake to the world soul, the anima mundi, and its sacred nature. Here our hearts can hear the real need of the time, and open to the story of love that is life’s greatest secret. Science may tell us that our world is made of atoms, particles, and electrons, but there is a deeper wisdom that knows that the world is created out of love. As human beings we have the capacity to fully live this mystery of love, and so participate in the healing and transformation of the Earth.”

“With an open heart we can see and sense the sacred nature of all of life. We can return reverence to the multiplicity of creation, and to its “interbeing.” Love and the sacred nature of creation belong together: they are crucial to life’s well-being. And in each moment we can live this power of love; with all our senses we can be awake to what is sacred. Here we step into the arena of real service, service to life and love, with our hands and hearts. Life will speak to us as it spoke to our ancestors, and if we listen attentively it will tell us how to help in its time of need. This is when the moment becomes fully alive and prayer and action are bonded together.”

Fr. Richard Rohr also speaks of this energy which is in all of us and in everything in his wonderful book: “The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe“

In this short daily meditation from Matthew Fox, he speaks of the energy of the Cosmic Christ as the wave of light that infuses everything and he walks through the spiral dance that is embodied in the Cosmic Mass which I hope we can bring to our Salish Sea community someday soon.

This is a beautiful practice for which you will need to take a device into the forest with you – or do as I did, and simply listen to it at home, then take the essence with you into your own quiet practice in a forest near you!

A Forest Walk
by Kimberly Ruffin

This guided practice by Kimberly Ruffin offers ways to connect to the living world through a walk in the forest.

Some of us were blessed and graced with a retreat in BC a couple weeks ago. Afterward Hayra and Murad Phil and Helen stopped in the Methow valley on the way home. Hayra sent this beautiful poem to me.

From sister Hayra:

Dear Community,
Returning from our annual Dance Retreat at Johnson’s Landing, BC, we always are blessed with a loving and gentle re-entry in the rolling nearly-naked contours of the Methow.

Here is a new poem that one of our hosts read to us, last week.

Rhoda used to live in Seattle and now lives outside of Winthrop. This poem is just one of the expressions of her deep Elderhood Wisdom. She can be reached at <rhodaw@methownet.com>

The Snag Speaks

By Rhoda Walter, June 2019

Look at me.
Don’t look away.
I have shed my skin.
My branches are bare.
My arms are akimbo.
No needles grace me.
I no longer give off a divine scent on a hot summer day.

Look at me now, as I am, not as I was when I was a Ponderosa queen.
Take me as I am – naked, open.
I am being fully who I am, no more, no less.
No hint of shame at my current condition or my current role.
I’m just here, giving.
A perch for birds, a meal of beetles, a home for woodpeckers.
A sentinel, a witness, a source of inspiration for you.

I know I am officially dead
But I still live, just in a different way. 
I am surrendered to my stage in life.

One day I will lose another arm, and then another.
Someday, I will no longer be able to stand.
I will tumble down the hill and no longer grace the skyline.
Who will fall first?  You or me?  Does it matter?
I will be who I am, accepting my destruction, the rot, the invasions, the stripping away.
No worries, I will be me through all the phases to come.
Will you?

 The Seven Of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock. 

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. 

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us 
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs. 

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes. 

~ Marge Piercy ~  

(In Praise of Fertile Land, edited by Claudia Mauro)

This is an important reminder that when we celebrate our freedom with weapons and reenactments of war and death we ignore and deny the suffering and trauma of so many of our marginalized humans and more than humans.

From dear brother Theo:

I don’t hear freedom tonight.

I hear gunshots punctuating the dark like sightless stars,
ravening thunder of war machines,
each crack the impact of whips on black flesh like twisted spines,
each flash slicing open the skin of the sky.

I see immigrant women drinking water from toilet bowls
in 2019, sewage swirled like galaxies you could drown a nation in,
if it were still breathing.

I see the dream of Democracy fallen to the earth,
ashen as a stillborn child, I see handprints of blood staining

America the Beautiful from sea to burning sea.

There is no freedom here,

only the screech of stolen innocence from infants throats, tiny
hands reaching through barbed wire. “Help me”
is the same in every language

and it smells like smoke and it sounds like cataclysm,
for America does not die quietly.
She is too proud for that. She’ll set the whole sky on fire

before admitting she was wrong.