Oh, Holy Night

Sonoma County: Arts and Ecology Center Barn in Occidental, CA

What a gorgeous night, right here where I get to live! The brilliance of the moon, the safety we abide in, the beauty of lights reminding us that even in the darkest moments, the light always returns, in cycles.

Peace to you and yours. May our efforts shed light in whatever tiny corner of creation we occupy.

The Way In

The Way In

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.

Sometimes the way in is a song.

But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,

and beauty.

To enter stone, be water.

To rise through hard earth, be plant

desiring sunlight, believing in water.

To enter fire, be dry.

To enter life, be food.

- Linda Hogan

I love this small poem. I love the acknowledgment that" wounding " is as much a  way into the center as beauty . What has wounded and betrayed me most in recent years has also become my greatest teacher and gift. How do we let our lives be food, then? There is a saying that a life well lived is food for the gods. What food do we offer on a daily basis to these invisible mysterious forces?

How do we BE the very element that is needed to take us further into the fire of our lives and be spent, be used well by our lives?

Big questions, and I always love how the poets give voice to creative answers for the unanswerable!

Wild and Precious

 This came my way, from John Chilkotowsky of the Wilderness Awareness School:

"….To really LIVE in this one wild and precious life,

you need at least one person in your life (and

probably many along the way) that are able to

shake up your "snow globe" with a kind, merciless

hand.  You need to be de-ranged - moved out of the

current arrangement that is stuck, and then

allowed to re-arrange into a configuration that

can be alive in what life is now.

Survival equals your/our ability to adapt,

improvise, and change.

Of course, we don't generally seek out things to

test our ability to change. Sooner or later, they

always find us. For me it's a question of how much

living we do with the time we are here. How much

of that time are we stuck, and how much are we

really ALIVE?…."

I love his take on "de-ranged"!Sometimes people "de-range" us with our permission: teachers, therapists, guides of many kinds. But sometimes what I have learned the most from, and grown the most has come from being de-ranged by surprise, the situation at first unwanted and unforeseen. Who has de-ranged YOU lately and how are you more alive from the encounter?? How have you been RE-ARRANGED?

The Kindness of Strangers

I am spending this week in San Francisco, due to the fact that my husband needed some surgery. Yesterday, I took a break and walked up the street to Starbucks. While there, I noticed a woman come in and buy two sandwiches, a dessert, coffee...quite a pile of food, so I held the door for her as we exited together. Right outside the door,she handed the food to a very tall, beautiful but bedraggled black man who seemed, perhaps, homeless. He appeared to be waiting for her. "Here you go! Enjoy" she said, handing off the food and turning and walking on her way.
I felt like weeping. So much fear, so much pain, so much anger and hurt in the world that we (I) can do not very much at all about. But in that moment, one woman addressed one other human being, in the way she could. Both no doubt benefitted. I know I did.

If we begin to get in touch with whatever we feel with some kind of kindness, our protective shells will melt, and we'll find that more areas of our lives are workable.

Pema Chödrön

When Things Fall Apart

Joanna Macy, Wise Woman Elder

Here is a quote that recently came my way from Joanna Macy, age 82; an activist and scholar and wise, fierce woman:

"Gratitude is a politically subversive act. The industrial growth society is constantly telling us that we need more: more clothes, more technology, more money, more power. This attitude breeds dissatisfaction. To express gratitude, therefore, is to counter the prevailing trend."

In HeartMath, one of the tools to help the heart come into a more coherent state is gratitude. I think it is no accident that gratitude is a spiritual practice, across time and cultures! Can we help one another foster this more, without it slipping into fake happiness or without denying the shadowy feelings as well? To have gratitude for the truth of our being, rather than constantly trying to improve and fix ourselves would be a major start.

A Radical Idea

Take more time, cover less ground.

Thomas Merton

This quote from Thomas Merton strikes right at the heart of the stress so many of us feel these days. It's so simple, so direct, so "un-American" in the sense of go-go-go. Perhaps there is some way you could cover less ground in the coming days and risk the perceived fallout, the self-criticism of not getting enough done. It's a radical idea and my heart is drawn to the truth of it; the spaciousness!