Mysticism and Spirituality Circle

I have been so incredibly blessed recently to have been inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa as we read her book, Borderlands La Frontera (recommended by my lovely daughter Nina!) in our Sufi Book Club.

She speaks and writes poetically of her place in the borderlands both physically and metaphorically as a Lesbian, Chicana, with indigenous and Mexican roots. And she defies the dominant culture by writing in both Spanish and English and even some indigenous languages unapologetically and without translating for all of us poor colonialized white folks who only know one language!

And then, after being introduced to her via a Spiritual Directors International conference, I am being deeply impressed and inspired by Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining) – a Dine (Navajo) elder and teacher from whom I am taking a class called, “Surrendering to Spirit.” For our homework this week, she asked us to do this practice:

Several times a day recite this prayer, setting it as an intention. The prayer goes like this: “Help me to set aside everything I know about surrender so that I can be open to new possibilities.”

As I sat in my sit spot this afternoon by a beautiful creek praying that prayer, the following poetry arose in my heart. I have put the English translation (as far as I can guess con mi poco espanol) in between verses and I hope that any native Spanish speakers will feel free to correct any mistakes I’ve made.

La Rendición (Surrender)

El arroyo no puede volver
No quiere volver
No necesita volver

The creek can’t go back
Doesn’t want to go back
Doesn’t need to go back

Sólo es
Fluye
Limpia

It only is
It flows
It cleans

Belleza casi dolorosa
Exquisito, profundo
Ahogando todos mis sentidos

Beauty nearly painful
Exquisite, profound
Drowning all my senses

Gratitude to Hamid Francis for posting this poetry:

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

Mark Nepo- Adrift

I love this practice and I do it every day. It is the anchor that grounds me (pun totally intended).

From Fr. Richard Rohr’s blog:

Contemplative Walking

Christine Valters Paintner describes the ancient and accessible contemplative practice of walking or moving slowly through the natural world as a way of connecting with God. This is clearly the “road not taken” by too many of us in the modern world, even though it shaped and sustained the faith of our ancestors for millennia. If you find it difficult to sustain a practice of seated meditation, I encourage you to begin by moving outdoors.

In [the contemplative] path we cultivate intimacy with Earth and her creatures, and we allow ourselves to fall in love with nature. It is one of my deepest beliefs that we will not be able to address the environmental crisis we currently face without this intimacy, without learning how to cherish nature, without love.

I encourage you to make time each day to be outside. One of the ways to do this is to go on a contemplative walk with an intentional and reverential heart.

There is something about getting our bodies out into the world, in close contact with trees, bushes, flowers, squirrels, pigeons, and crows, that can invigorate us and offer us new perspective on life. In the book of Jeremiah, God asks, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” (Jeremiah 23:24). These walks are times to really experience that truth.

Contemplative walking does not necessarily mean walking slowly, although at its heart it is not a rushed activity. When we walk contemplatively, we give ourselves over to the experience. This is not walking for fitness. It is walking to immerse ourselves in an encounter with whatever is calling us in the moment.

As you begin a contemplative walk, allow a few moments simply to breathe and connect to your heart. Set an intention for this time to be as present as you can to what is happening both within and without. Begin walking, but see if you can release any expectations or destination. As you walk, imagine that with each step your feet are both blessing the ground and being blessed by it. Let your breath be long and slow. Bring your awareness to the earth monastery all around you.

Notice what draws your attention. Look for what shimmers or what the Japanese poet Basho called “a glimpse of the underglimmer.” Listen for the sounds of life around you. Even if you are walking through a city, pay attention to the rustle of the breeze, the caw of crows, or any subtle elements of creation singing their song.

Pause regularly simply to receive this gift. Breathe it in. Let it have some space in your heart. Then continue on until something else causes you to stop.

This is the whole of the practice: simply [moving], listening, and pausing. We practice presence so that we might cultivate our ability to really hear the voice of nature speaking to us. This sounds simple, and yet we so rarely make the time to develop this skill.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Christine Valters Paintner, Earth, Our Original Monastery: Cultivating Wonder and Gratitude through Intimacy with Nature (Sorin Books: 2020), xvii, xiv–xv.

This is a favorite of mine. It reminds that we are always on a journey if we open to the signs all around us.

The Journey

Above the mountains
    the geese turn into
        the light again

painting their black silhouettes
        on an open sky.

Sometimes everything has to be
        inscribed across
            the heavens

so you can find
    the one line
        already written
            inside you.

Sometimes it takes    a great sky
        to find that

first, bright
    and indescribable
        wedge of freedom
            in your own heart.

Sometimes with
    the bones of the black
        sticks left when the fire
            has gone out

someone has written
    something new
        in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving.
    Even as the light fades quickly now,
        you are arriving.

-David Whyte
In David Whyte: Essentials and The House of Belonging

As always his prose and poetry rise up and envelope with presence and meaning. He speaks to our need for solitude which truly resonates. I just attended a wonderful webinar on wilderness witnessing and retreat and all the many ways we can experience the wild within and without in our spiritual practice.

Here’s David Whyte:

One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand how much we need to be left to ourselves, and how much, in a way, we need to leave ourselves alone. Aloneness begins with puzzlement at our own reflection, transits through awkwardness and even ugliness at what we see, and culminates, one appointed hour or day, in a beautiful, unlooked-for surprise, at the new complexion beginning to form, the slow knitting together of an inner life, now exposed to air and light. -David Whyte

The Well But the miracle had come simply from allowing yourself to know that this time you had found it, that some stranger appearing from far inside you, had decided not to walk past it anymore;  the miracle had come in the kneeling to drink and the prayer you said, and the first tears you shed and the memories you held and the realization that in this silence you no longer had to keep your eyes and ears averted from the place that could save you, and that you had the strength at last to let go of that thirsty, unhappy, dust laden pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking with her bent back, her bowed head and her careful explanations. No, the miracle had already happened before you stood up, shook off the dust and walked along the road beyond the well, out of the desert and on, toward the mountain, as if home again, as if you deserved everything you had loved all along, as if just remembering the taste of that clear cool spring could lift up your face to the morning light and set you free. -David Whyte Revised from ‘The Well’ inPilgrim

With gratitude to dear sister and friend, Nur Mariam who sent this out today.

Prayer of Love and Healing for Earth

O God of All Names and Beyond All Names,
I pray in great gratitude this holy day for Love.
Love raises the sun and greets me
in each drop of water I drink,
in each crumb of bread I taste,
in each smile and tear I touch,
in each child I meet.
In a mantle of awe I stand enwrapped.
My feet rest upon Earth and my head meets the moon.
O Holy One, our times are fraught with challenge.
Our Earth suffers climatic chaos,
Men, women and children suffer from wounds of conflict,
droughts, floods and crumbling economic systems.
All manner of suffering and questions press into my soul.
My small beating heart does not seem large enough…
yet daily it keeps expanding beyond body boundaries into Compassion.
Each morning Love rises beyond a known horizon in the unknown day.
Each morning Hope beckons me into my stardust destiny.
Each noontime Grace feeds me with Love.
Each evening an invisible Breath enfolds me in a shawl of mercy.
O Holy one Who Is Love, Hope, Grace and Breath
transform our sadness and doubt into songs for Life.
We pray for our beloved planet and all brothers and sisters.
May healing waters bathe the rivers and oceans.
May small, deliberate actions grow seeds of Earth justice.
May one prophetic note of the smallest birdsong courageously sung
on a busy street at dawn inspire leaders to free their voices to speak
for the Common Good and future generations.
O God of All Names and Beyond All Names, Whose Face is Love
May I and we collectively
Be the face of Transforming Love
In this moment, In this day, In these times. Amen.

From “Full Circle” by Howard Shapiro

With gratitude to dear sister Amina Janet from whose blog I am copying this.

Instructions on Not Giving Up  
by Ada Limòn

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree,
more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs
shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms
to the slate sky of Spring rain, it is the greening of trees that really gets to me.
When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets,
leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,the leaves come
Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us,
a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us,
the hurt, the empty. Fine then. I’ll take it, the tree seems to say.
A slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm.
I’ll take it all.

As the earth blooms and reminds us that the flow of life continues, I find I am inspired to surrender into acceptance of that tidal flow with its beauty and pain. And to the knowledge that the Divine guides me in each moment toward the service that is mine.

As we learn in the Dance of Universal Peace inspired by Ram Dass, “Why have you come to earth? Do you remember? Why have you taken birth? Why have you come? To love, serve, and remember.”

I just received this excellent essay that speaks so perfectly to the difference between service, helping, and fixing.

Helping, Fixing, Serving by Dr Rachel Naomi Remen

Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.

Service rests on the premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.

Serving is different from helping. Helping is not a relationship between equals. A helper may see others as weaker than they are, needier than they are, and people often feel this inequality. The danger in helping is that we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity or even wholeness.

Our limitations serve; our wounds serve; even our darkness can serve.

When we help, we become aware of our own strength. But when we serve, we don’t serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves, and we draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve; our wounds serve; even our darkness can serve. My pain is the source of my compassion; my woundedness is the key to my empathy.

Serving makes us aware of our wholeness and its power. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in me. Service is a relationship between equals: our service strengthens us as well as others. Fixing and helping are draining, and over time we may burn out, but service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will renew us. In helping we may find a sense of satisfaction; in serving we find a sense of gratitude.

This is a sweet reminder to hold love beginning with ourselves and then expanding out to all things. I received this from last week’s summary of Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation.

Loving-Kindness Meditation

Buddhist loving-kindness (or metta) practice counteracts the sense of powerlessness that contributes to the anxiety of not experiencing that “all will be well.” Metta practice also awakens compassion and reminds us of our interdependence. It can be an antidote to the usual selfish sense of happiness which prioritizes our wellbeing and ignores or denies responsibility for the wellbeing of others. I offer this version of loving-kindness practice adapted from meditation teacher Steven Smith.

We begin with loving ourselves, for unless we have a measure of this unconditional love and acceptance for ourselves, it is difficult to extend it to others. Then we include others who are special to us, and ultimately, all living things. Gradually, both the visualization and the meditation phrases blend into the actual experience, the feeling of loving kindness. . . .

Take a very comfortable posture. . . . Begin to focus around . . . your “heart center,” breathing in and out from that area. Next, evoke a kind feeling toward yourself. Drop beneath [any areas of self-judgment or self-hatred] to the place where we care for ourselves, where we want strength and health and safety for ourselves.

Continuing to breathe in and out, use either these traditional phrases or ones you choose yourself. Say or think them several times.  

May I be free from inner and outer harm and danger. May I be safe and protected.

May I be free of mental suffering or distress.

May I be happy.

May I be free of physical pain and suffering.

May I be healthy and strong.

May I be able to live in this world happily, peacefully, joyfully, with ease.

Next, move to a person who most invites a feeling of loving kindness in you, and repeat the phrases for this person:

“May she/he be free from inner and outer harm and danger. . . . ”

Now move to a neutral person, someone for whom you feel neither strong like nor dislike. As you repeat the phrases, allow yourself to feel tenderness, loving care for their welfare.

Now, repeat the phrases for someone you have difficulty with—hostile feelings, resentments. . . . If you have difficulty doing this, you can say before the phrases, “To the best of my ability I wish that you be. . . . ” If you begin to feel ill will toward this person, return to the benefactor and let loving kindness arise again. Then return to this person. . . .

Finally, extend loving kindness out to all beings, using phrases such as these:

May all beings be safe, happy, healthy, live joyously.

May all living beings be healed and whole, content and fulfilled.

May all individuals have whatever they need.

May all beings in existence have safety, happiness, health, joy, and peace.

Abide in silence for a few more breaths, then journal about your experience, if you like.

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Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Adapted from Steven Smith, Loving-Kindness Meditation, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.