Mysticism and Spirituality Circle

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.

Plant Love Stories

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I am forever filled with joy by these first brave harbingers of the coming spring.

The amazing sacred manuscript of Nature once again splendidly manifests its potency, resilience, and persistent life energies.

This sacred manuscript of Nature again blesses us with the reminder that we too can rise again, we too can blossom in spectacular creativity, even after the dark and cold have encouraged us into hibernation and needed rest in the healing soil of the mother.

The cycle of life coaxes us back into the sun and we remember our own potency and resilience in these trying times.

We are truly blessed.

I have been blessed last week with an opportunity to rest in deep silence in the mountains and forests around Lake Coeur de Alene in Idaho.

We call this silent meditation, “khilvat” in our Sufi tradition, and I was held by my dear teacher Saladin and in the container of 13 other beloveds for a full week of deepening.

Resting in that beauty I found myself reminded of the cycle of distress, fear, and anger that is so often elicited by the workings of our world as it slides and stumbles through this painful dark night and birth canal which is our current reality.

I was gifted with practices that allowed me to move from that state of pain to acceptance of the Divine One as the only compassionate, omniscient, all-knowing power that has the true ability to re-balance, and to access the flow of that balancing energy, as it surrounded me in natural beauty.

I also had a wonderful and shocking wake-up call from the full moon early Thursday morning, which elicited the following poem.

Rude Moon

Well before dawn
Spotlight moon rudely
Kicked my ass
Out of bed.

Cowering beneath her glare
Shivering in the frozen night
The interrogation began…

“Just who do you think you are?”
She inquired.
“What makes you think it’s ok to sleep
Through my magnificent glory!”
“And where were you at 5:30 am
On January 28th, 2021! Hmm!?”

I mumbled
I stammered
I might have whined
And moaned a bit…

But then I lifted my eyes
(After checking my watch)
And boldly spoke
into her blaze…

“Why,
I am here,
now,
just this,
only me,
with you,
beloved,
terrible,
most venerable
One.”

I heard a light chuckle
Then
She laughed!
At once joyful
And full of
Mysterious meaning.

And more gently spoke,
“Of course you are
Little one.
Of course you are.”

So,
Slowly, cautiously
I ducked my head
Beneath the sill,
Onto my pillow
Where She couldn’t
See me or
Hold me
In her brilliance.

And drifted back
Into
Lunatic
Dreams.

Once again the amazing and inspiring Youth Poet Laureate of our country rocks my world with this poetry she performed in 2018 –
“For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core, 
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for.”

With deep thanks to Katherine Amina who sent this out recently and reminded me of the amazing and powerful Valerie Kaur – a force for change and revolutionary love. So needed in these times.

TED

With gratitude to sister Janet who sent these earlier. The first by Saint Mary Oliver that reminds of the all important life lessons taught to us by the trees, ponds, and cattails, and the second a reminder to be engaged not only in hope and intention but in actual work done each day, each moment, with each breath.

May it be so…

In Blackwater Woods – Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its name is, is
nameless now.

Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this:
the fires and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:

To love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones
knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

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What Have We Done Today? – Nixon Waterman

We shall do much in the years to come,

But what have we done today?

We shall give out gold in a princely sum,

                                     But what did we give today?

We shall lift the heart and dry the tear,

We shall plant hope in the place of fear,

We shall speak the words of love and cheer,

                                     But what did we speak today?

II

We shall be so kind in the after while,

But what have we been today?

We shall bring to each lonely life a smile,

                                    But what have we brought today?

We shall give to truth a grander birth,

And to steadfast faith a deeper worth,

We shall feed the hungering souls of earth,

                                    But whom have we fed today?

III

We shall reap such joys in the by and by,

                                    But what have we sown today?

We shall build us mansions in the sky,

                                    But what have we built today?

“Tis sweet in the idle dreams to bask;

But here and now, do we our task:

Yet, this is the thing our souls must ask,

                                    What have we done today?