Gratitude List:
1. A delta of snow geese flying above the River last night.
2. The sunset: first a tangerine glow that seemed to shimmer around us, then magenta, and finally crimson.
3. Dandelion tips growing in my brother’s flower beds. Persephone rises.
4. Teaching myself to go back to sleep. (Knock on wood) Not only have I not had midnight insomnia for ages, I have been sleeping until 6:30 lately.
5. Dreams that remind me I’m okay.
May we walk in Beauty.
Blessing. Benediction. Benison. In Old Irish, beannacht. In Swahili, baraka.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the act of blessing, of passing on the blessing, of sharing benediction with each other. Such churchy words, eh? Don’t let that distract from their universal power.
This evening I watched my incredible niece give her senior presentation at her school, a somewhat daunting rite of passage that requires each student to give a 20-minute presentation on herself (or himself), her goals and ideals, her personal story. My niece focused a great deal of her presentation on her family and her community, and it was clear that this is a young person who is grounded in her connections to others, who finds meaning in relationship and conversation and interaction. I am a very proud auntie.
While the senior presentation is a rite of passage designed to challenge the students to express who they are, where they have come from, and where they are headed, it was clear that a vital role of the whole process was to have a moment to bless each student individually. This was a ritual of benediction. The students, in telling their stories, receive from their teachers and gathered family and friends a sense of the importance and vitality of their own stories. They are now empowered with the sacred duty to fulfill their destinies, to find meaning in their lives.
I know people who do this in their everyday story, effortlessly and “unshowily,” humbly: constantly passing blessings on to those around them, to the people they meet. Un-self-consciously offering to others that sense of purpose and connection to something bigger than themselves. The way these people treasure the stories they are offered makes the story-teller feel validated and blessed, as thought they, too, now have a sacred task before them.
Gratitude List:
1. My marvelous niece Lara. And all my incredible nieces and nephews.
2. Blessings
3. Earthshine
4. Spirals
5. Winter aconite
May we walk in Beauty!
My sister says that there is a building somewhere in Virginia which was designed to confuse the sense of direction, to force people to stop each other in the halls to ask, “Do you know the way to Conference Room C? Or even how to get to the third floor from here?”
The labyrinth of halls and underground passages and stairs and places that seem to go nowhere is designed to force the wandering souls to interact, to find their way together. I find the idea intriguing, and something in my waking self steps forward with excitement at the challenge, at the genius of creating a space which intentionally unmoors people in order to force them to depend on each other.
But on the other hand, this is the landscape of my most deeply frustrating dreams. I am always wandering down hallways, running up flights of stairs, only to find that I’ve arrived at the wrong end of the building, my appointment was set for an hour ago, I’m late for class, and I haven’t studied for the test. The year is nearly over and I forgot to go to class all year, and if I could just find my way through the halls to the office, I could set everything straight.
Perhaps those dreams lie at the heart of my own anxieties, social and otherwise. There’s a structure there that everyone else seems to get, to understand. I seem to be the only one in the dreams (and sometimes in life) who can’t find my way, who can’t figure out how it’s supposed to be laid out, who has forgotten where to go and even why I was there in the first place.
Next time I find myself lost in the labyrinth of an institution in my dreams, perhaps I’ll stop and ask someone for help, see if I can inject a new way of interacting with the space of the dream. Perhaps that will in turn inform something in my waking life, give me a new perspective on my own ability to wake up more fully to my own story.
Gratitude List:
1. Simple Musings, a new booklet written by a whole group of friends–reflections on the season of Lent
2. Snow Geese: a large flock (hundreds?) circling a corn field north of Columbia
3. This image: Just a few fields down from the geese sits a farm that is bisected by an old railroad siding. The siding is raised on a little bank to keep it level, and a fringe of trees grows along it and in front of a farmhouse. This afternoon an old long-horned bull was standing on the siding as we passed.
4. Storm downgrade
5. Benediction, blessing.
May we walk in Beauty!
I know I have felt this panic before.
February has finally ambled its pokey self
right out the door and we sit on the cusp
of March which should mean spring,
but doesn’t. What it is, is:
it’s the last month of pregnancy.
When you know and your body knows
that the next thing should be upon you
but something in the universe conspires
to keep you in the grip of what has been
just a little longer, but you know
that this one could go long.
Just like the last one did, and how will you,
how will you ever bear it? Not one
more month, not another week, even.
Oh please, Timekeeper of the Universe,
if you know what is in me, get this child,
get this everlasting winter, get it out of me,
get it over with. I’m ready for transition.
Gratitude List:
1. Game night. All generations. Dutch Blitz tournament. Letting our hair down.
2. Mallard couples flirting on the pond
3. Dusting off the tschotschkes
4. Altar-building (which may be a repetition of #3)
5. Rhythm of the in-breath, out-breath, pause.
May we walk in Beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 