A site to share inspirational poetry, readings, and practices to support our sangha of spiritual seekers on their paths.
As people of faith, in whatever one looks to for inspiration – we feel the suffering and despair and we choose to rise again each day with a prayer for guidance toward ways we can lift up the humans and more than humans around us.
This beautiful video/song is inspiration for us all:
In my life these days, I am feeling a call to pause. To acknowledge change. To grieve loss. To celebrate new blossoms. To appreciate beauty.
From the micro level of my own body, through the spiritual and activist communities I participate with, to the macro level of the planet and all its beings, human and more than human – I am sensing a deep need to pause, breathe, reflect, and emerge refreshed.
These quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation blog say it well –
“We will normally do anything to keep the old thing from falling apart, yet this is when we need patience and guidance, and the freedom to let go instead of tightening our controls and certitudes.” —Richard Rohr
“Perhaps you can look at this world in transition and dare to echo God in Genesis: behold, it is good … it is very good. Perhaps you can see transition as an essential part of that goodness that is better than perfection.” —Brian McLaren
“Liminality is a form of holding the tension between one space and another. It is in these transitional moments of our lives that authentic transformation can happen. Otherwise, it is just business as usual and an eternally boring, status quo existence.” —Richard Rohr
“Transitions can only take place if we are willing to let go of what we have known, the worlds we have created, and our assumptions about “how things are.” To let go is the precursor to being reborn.” —Barbara A. Holmes
They then offer the following practice which is one I try to do often and recommend.
Artist and retreat leader Christine Valters Paintner suggests the ancient monastic practice of statio as a way to remind ourselves of the holiness of transitions:
In the monastic tradition, statio is the practice of stopping one thing before beginning another. It is the acknowledgment that in the space of transition and threshold is a sacred dimension, a holy pause full of possibility. This place between is a place of stillness, where we let go of what came before and prepare ourselves to enter fully into what comes next.
When we pause between activities or spaces or moments in our days, we open ourselves to the possibility of discovering a new kind of presence to the darkness of in-between times. When we rush from one thing to another, we skim over the surface of life, losing the sacred attentiveness that brings forth revelations in the most ordinary of moments.
Statio calls us to a sense of reverence for slowness, for mindfulness, and for the fertile dark spaces between our goals where we can pause and center ourselves, and listen. We can open up a space within for God to work. We can become fully conscious of what we are about to do rather than mindlessly completing another task.
Paintner reminds us that thresholds, physical places of transition, are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and that we can use them for our spiritual practice:
In the days ahead, become aware of all the times you cross a threshold. This might be moving from one space to another—entering through a doorway, transitioning from one activity to the next, or tending the thresholds of the day, especially at dawn and dusk. Pause at each and offer a short blessing, simply becoming aware of the possibilities alive in the moment. See if the threshold helps call forth the thinness of this moment, making the voice of the divine more accessible.
Christine Valters Paintner, The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2018), 9, 8.
As promised, a poem arose from time spent in the middle of a clear-cut forest and I wanted to share it with you.
The Bone Tree
El árbol de hueso
Our greed
Nuestra codicia
Our need, for more, for more, for more
Nuestra necesidad, de más, de más, de más
Our numb blindness
Nuestra ceguera entumecida
This devastation
Esta devastación
This empty shattered forest
Este bosque destrozado vacío
This lone swallow lamenting
Esta golondrina solitaria lamentándose
These ghost stumps rotting
Estos tocones fantasma se pudren
These alien bushes thriving
Estos arbustos alienígenas prosperan
These bare bone-white snags reminding
Estos enganches desnudos de hueso blanco que recuerdan
Still the rainbow
Todavía el arco iris
Still beckons at the edge of the
Todavía hace señas en el borde de la
Still live returning forest. Amen
Todavía vive el bosque que regresa. Amén
~ Wakil David Matthews – April 2023
It’s been awhile beloved friends. It seems that much of what I’m called to now is spending time with loss and lamentation.
In today’s post I’ll share these moving and profound thoughts from Fr Richard Rohr’s most recent blog. Soon, I’ll follow that up with a poem that arose during a silent meditation retreat in the nearby forest.
“When we go to the place of tears, it’s an inner attitude where when I can’t fix it, when I can’t explain it, when I can’t control it, when I can’t even understand it, I can only forgive it. Let go of it, weep over it. It’s a different mode of being.”
—Richard Rohr
We invite readers to listen and lament with the song Weep for the World, written and performed by Brian McLaren to express our human desire to both grieve and heal from the harm we have caused.
Let us weep for the world
being broken apart
by humans,
foolish humans.
Let us grieve the desecration
of forest and stream,
of glacier and ocean and humans,
like us.
Let us be mindful of the children,
being born today,
in a world torn apart
by humans.
Let us show our children
a more excellent way
to walk on the earth and be human,
truly human.
Let us love this world
we’ve been breaking apart
and let our love bring wholeness.
And let us love one another
with a compassionate heart
for it is love that makes us human, human.
Let us weep for the world
We are breaking apart,
so we can love it back
to wholeness.
Let our hearts be stretched
by great sorrow and love,
so they will never contract
to being less than human.
Brian McLaren, Weep for the World.
As always, I am inspired by the insight and wisdom of Father Richard Rohr in this week’s “Daily Meditations.”
As I cultivate the annihilation of my small self ego identities, the “not that, not that” practice, I find the truth in the lesson that when you can fall courageously and willingly into not knowing and nothingness, everything is imbued and radiant with awe and beauty.
FR Rohr speaks to this beautifully…
“Jesus says the only people who can recognize and be ready for what he’s talking about are the ones who come with the mind and heart of a child. It’s the same reality as the beginner’s mind.
“Beginner’s mind is a readiness to always be in awe, to always be excited. Beginner’s mind is one’s mind before the hurts of life have made us cautious and self-protective. We can still be excited, we can still be in awe, we can still expect tomorrow to be different than today.”
—Richard Rohr
This young author and philosopher is a new favorite. I highly recommend everything that she writes and speaks about. Sophie Strand – Sophie Strand
“I said recently that I’m much more interested in ensoilment than ensoulment. I want to have actual roots. I want my spirituality to have fur, pheromones, funk. I want it to live in a specific place. And I want it to teach me intimately how to be dynamically present and useful to my ecosystem. And I want to tell people that healing isn’t about completion. And it isn’t about lightness. It’s about the mixing bowl where nothing is exiled, everything is included. In order to grow a garden, you need manure. You need compost. In order to heal the soil, you don’t clean it, you add to it: fungi, ferment, bacteria, woodchips.
Researching Rabbi Jesus/Yeshua for my ecological reimagining of the gospels I realized the folk magician’s real teaching was not purification. He ultimately even rejects John the Baptist’s water immersions. In a time period when people were traumatized by Roman imperialism, diseased, and obsessed with purity rituals, he offered something radical. His offering was to brush the question off “Who cares? Come and eat with me. Come and share a meal.” He purified not by cleaning, but by including. Everyone was invited. No one was exiled.”
~ Sophie Strand
This profound and difficult-to-hear spoken word poetry from Stephen Jenkinsen & Gregory Hopkins just rocked me this morning.
This struck a chord today, especially as I am enjoying the brand-new hopeful and anticipatory buds reminding me in the depths of winter that the potency of spring is always with us.
Welcoming 2023, I send love and hope to all and offer this thoughtful poem that was posted in Fr. Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations blog.
The poem “I Am” is by poet Dedan Gills (1945–2015), and read by his wife Belvie Rooks on CAC’s The Cosmic We podcast:
I Am
I am old and wise as the night. I am as beautiful as a bird in flight.
I am the moon and the sea. I am the robin and the bee. I am the soil and I am the tree.
I’m the lion and the gazelle. I am heaven and I am hell. I am the ring and I am the bell.
I am the joy and I am the tear. I am the brave and I am the fear.
I am the blistering desert. I’m the freezing snow.
I’m the cringing coward and the gentle hero.
I’m the aged and I am the young. I am the weak and I am the strong.
I am the smile and I am the frown. I am the pauper and I am the crown.
I am the wrong and I am the right. I am the day and I am the night.
I am now and I am never. I am yesterday and I am forever.
I am the bitter and I am the sweet. I live on the hill and I live on the street.
I am the top and I am the bottom. I am Martin, Hitler, Gandhi, and Saddam.
I am red, black, yellow, brown, and white. I love, hate, laugh, cry, and fight.
All the universe is reflected in me. I am all that ever was and ever will be.
When I lose, it’s the lesson that I win. Judging others is my sin.
Once again, gratitude to sister Amina who posted this on her blog, Love, Harmony & Beauty #111, this week.
When I am smiling and laughing and saying Amen all at the same time, I know it’s a uniquely wonderful offering of written creativity and communication. Enjoy!
I Feel Sorry for Jesus
By Naomi Shihab Nye
People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
But I bet some days He regrets it.
Cozily they tell you what he wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember “Telephone,” that pass-it-on game
where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.
They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.
He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers
and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.
I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.
And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.