The art teacher at my school worked with a group of her students to come up with a word for each of the twenty-five days leading up to Christmas. Members of the school community are then asked to post a photo that represents the idea of that word.
Today’s words are “Living Blamelessly.” I felt like I wanted to create a pathway, a set of stepping stones toward whole and mindful and blameless living.
Gratitude List: 1. Picture rocks in a river, each rock covered by dozens of white dots. The gulls are migrating, and an enormous flock was resting today on the rocks of the Susquehanna. So satisfying. 2. Good exercise 3. Having someone to do the NYT Crossword Puzzles with. I can usually do the Monday and Tuesday ones by myself. Sometimes the Wednesday ones, too. But definitely by the time Friday and the weekend roll around, I would always give up were I doing them on my own. Usually one of us begins one, and then gets stumped and leaves it for the other. Now the boys are joining in, too. 4. Stauffer’s Christmas Stars chocolate-covered cookies. 5. The oyster mushrooms that ring my magical stump. May we walk in Beauty!
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” —Mary Oliver
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” —Barry Lopez
“With every action, comment, conversation, we have the choice to invite Heaven or Hell to Earth.” —Rob Bell
“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” ―Albert Einstein
The art teacher at my school worked with a group of her students to come up with a word for each of the twenty-five days leading up to Christmas. Members of the school community are then asked to post a photo that represents the idea of that word.
Today’s word is Truth. How do you come up with a visual representation for Truth? I walked outside on my break to try to get an image of a tree without leaves, thinking that Truth is what remains after all is laid bare. But on the way to the woods, I passed this patch of cold-blasted hosta. I love the colors and textures of the curled and skeletized leaves. And here’s a truth: Everything moves toward dissolution and decay, and then moves ’round again to birth and regeneration. But there’s beauty and grace in ALL the stages. The withering reveals patterns and structures that are perhaps less visible when the leaves are full and green.
But I couldn’t stop there, and searched my albums for past photos that might fit the brief:
Gratitude List: 1. Latkes for supper! Thank you, Sonya! 2. The crows are back. I love the massive flocks of crows, dotting the trees, filling the sky, sprinkling the tawny corn stubble. 3. Stories. 4. The inspiring life of Rosa Parks. Today is the 66th anniversary of her decision to stay seated on a bus, disrupting injustice and creating space for change. With what actions shall we commemorate her holy act? 5. The dreamtime of winter. May we walk in Beauty!
“I had given up my seat before, but this day, I was especially tired. Tired from my work as a seamstress, and tired from the ache in my heart.” ―Rosa Parks
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” ―Bryan Stevenson
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” ―Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Without vision, people perish, and without courage and inspiration dreams die.” ―Rosa Parks
“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.” ―Ijeoma Oluo
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” ―Audre Lorde
“Nah.” ―Rosa Parks said this when asked to give her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery
Accidental selfie among some things that bring me joy.
Gratitude:
Pholiota limonella, the brilliant orange mushrooms that grow on my stump in late fall. And the oysters that join them.
The holy angle of autumn sun
Sycamore and maple
Reminders to Love
That mortifying and stressful situation was only a dream. I could wake up and it isn’t real.
How when one person offers/allows tears, it’s a communion all can share.
May we walk in Justice, in Mercy, in Humility, in Beauty!
The verdict. Like so many before. Rage. Sadness. Weariness. Resignation. Some thoughts:
If Black and Brown folks say it is about race, then the rest of us need to shut up and listen instead of arguing.
I think a boy who carries a gun into a crowd, and then shoots people, whether he was out to kill or whether he thought he was shooting in self-defense, ought to be held accountable.
And so should his parents.
And so should the self-styled militia he thought he was joining.
And so should the culture that seems to think it is acceptable for a boy to carry an AR-15 into a crowd.
Police officers are trained in the use of guns and they make mistakes, as we so often see, so why would anyone think an untrained angry 17-year-old should be in that place with a gun?
If I’m directing my rage at this boy, I think it’s displaced. This is the result of a culture enamored of guns. And a system rigged in favor of white people, a system which tries to camouflage white male rage as protection, as self-defense.
I realize that stress has caught up to me again, and I am struggling to be resilient. Here’s how I know: The sound kicked out on my computer-to-projector during class this week, and I got furious. Furious and whiny. Not with a human, but with my computer. There was no space between the realization and the rage.
My car broke down, and immediately I began to catalog all the terrible things that had been happening to me. Like an anti-gratitude list. And it took me until I was halfway through the day to stop and think about the fact that we broke down almost at my friend’s house, and he was working from home that day and could lend me his car for the carpool. How miraculous was that!?!
The little things were starting to get to me. I didn’t (don’t?) have the reserves of grace to weather the bumps. Like an old car that rattles across a pothole and gives up the ghost, my soul hasn’t had the bounce, the shock absorbers, to carry on. At least not without a growling sound coming from the engine.
Here’s the happy bit, however: Simply admitting it has helped. The bounce is returning, with the simple acknowledgement that it was missing. Instead of cataloguing my griefs and woes and troubles, I’m back to cataloguing gratitudes. And it helps. I’m bouncing again.
“Oh to meet, however briefly, the greatness that lives under our surface. To summon enough bravery to be without armour and strategy, for the chance at meeting that irreducible power. Oh to make of our terrified hearts a prayer of surrender to the God of Love; that we remain safe in our quivering ache to be near that Otherness, even for a moment. To touch that ancient life who will never relinquish its wilderness, who lets instinct make its choices, whose knowing lives in bones and whose song is a wayfinder.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.” ―Parker J. Palmer
“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” ―Emily Dickinson
“One of my favourite teachings by Martín Prechtel is that ‘violence is an inability with grief.’ In other words, it takes skillfulness to grieve well, to grieve wholeheartedly. It requires us to bravely, nakedly come to face all that is lost, keeping our hearts open to loving just as fully again. “When we make war, lashing out in rage and revenge, it is because we are unwilling to make this full encounter with grief. It is easy to enact the same violence which has taken so much from us―including towards ourselves―but the greater work is to let that which is missing enlarge your life; to make beauty from your brokenness. “Whatever you hold in the cauldron of your intention is your offering to the divine. The quality of assistance you can generate and receive from the Holy is governed by the quality of your inner offering. When you indulge in fear and doubt, you are flooding the arena where love is attempting to work.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“An Awake Heart is like a Sky that Pours Light.” ―Hafiz
“Gather the dawn and wind. Breathe in sun and frost and song. Hold for a moment. Breathe out birds and words and joy. Breathe out moss and stones and hope.” ―Beth Weaver-Kreider
“. . .fairies’ gold, they say, is like love or knowledge–or a good story. It’s most valuable when it’s shared.” Heather Forest, The Woman Who Flummoxed the Fairies.
For a day, just for one day, Talk about that which disturbs no one And bring some peace into your beautiful eyes. ―Hafiz
This fall is a full semester. A very full load of preps. Lots of student recommendations to write. Even as I begin to consider my next sentence, I feel as though I’m drawing up my list of complaints, my explanation for why my life is so hard right now. Do you ever find yourself doing that? Justifying your exhaustion? Explaining away your sad mood?
That’s why I need to get back to gratitude lists. Not to ignore all the difficult things, but to balance them. The other stuff is there, and it will still be there, and I need to process it all and get to work on it, but brooding on it, obsessing about it, only causes insomnia and agitation to add to the list of woes. If my mind had to jump to enumerating lists, let it be my reasons for not, for contentment, for satisfaction.
Gratitude List:
1. I slept the whole way through the night last night.
2. My good, good colleagues.
3. Good books. My favorite escape.
4. Today is a light day, lots of breathing spaces in it.
5. Falling asleep to the sound of the rain.
May we walk in Beauty.
“Look! Look! Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.” ~ Albert Einstein * “The only trap I must beware not to fall into, is to think that each day is the same as the next. In fact, each morning brings with it a hidden miracle, and we must pay attention to this miracle.” ~ Paulo Coelho * “In the end, so much of the conflict we feel in our hearts is because we’ve split ourselves off from the very life we are living. We partition ourselves from the things with which we are at odds, treating them as unbelonging even as we live them. We vaguely imagine some other place, some better job, some other lover – but the irony is that so much of what makes us unhappy is our own rejection of the life we have made. Eventually we must take our life into our arms and call it our own. We must look at it squarely with all its unbecoming qualities and find a way to love it anyway. Only from that complete embrace can a life begin to grow into what it is meant to become.” –Toko-pa Turner * “There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true.” –Mary Oliver * “Love is the strongest force the world possesses and yet it is the humblest imaginable.” –Mahatma Gandhi * “People who talk only to communicate are different from people who talk for pleasure. People who talk for pleasure, as opposed to people who talk to communicate, become wonderful talkers over the years. They have eloquence.” —Wendell Berry * “You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.” –Henry David Thoreau * “Be curious, not judgmental.” –Walt Whitman * Out in the dawn, a misty sea in walnut tree a silent crow will dream of snow
will ruffle feathers in the chill will wait until the first bright ray begins the day
then with a final shake will rise from branch to skies and this will be a memory –Beth Weaver-Kreider
I posted this on my Facebook page last year. Reading it again this morning, it feels like something I want to put out there again. It’s dated, with its references to the 2020 election, but 2024 is looming, and the same forces are pushing for attention again. I know it’s kind of intense, but so is the soul-rejection so many people experience because of terrible theology:
I know I post this and sentiments like it quite often. I have received third-hand feedback that some well-meaning Christian folks get deeply offended by some of the things that I post. You must know that it is because I follow the way of Jesus that I post these things, because I was raised to believe in his essential messages of Love and Welcome for ALL.
Speaking to the well-meaning Christians who might be thinking of voting for the president because of a pro-life stance alone, I say to you that to welcome everyone to the table is a deeply pro-life stance. To exclude and shame any member of the human community is anti-life, is death-dealing. The number of LGBTQ+ people who die or nearly die by suicide each year is staggering, and it is, in many (most?) cases, a DIRECT result of religious people who marginalize and exclude and shame LGBTQ+ folks, a direct result of a theology that labels people sinners because of who they are. I need you to hear this. I need you to understand theological consequences.
Insisting that LGBTQ+ people are sinful by nature is anti-life. If you want a deeper conversation about the very few Biblical passages that your church refers to in order to shame and exclude (yes, “love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin” is shameful and exclusionary) God’s own children, I can find you articles and dialogue with you. I only ask that you come to the table willing to listen.
{Note: If you feel hurt that you may be part of a group that has driven people to suicide, please try to imagine the hurt and despair of those who’ve been cast out and excluded. Pick yourself up and do better. If deep down you agree that this is a death-dealing theology, but it feels really risky to to to speak up in support of LGBTQ+ folks, imagine the intense feelings of risk felt by someone who comes out of the closet. Pick yourself up and do better. I’ve got your back.}
Gratitude List: 1. Last Weekend: swans, storytelling, deepening friendships, swallows, fox, windy beaches, delicious shared food. What DOES the fox say? 2. Tenderness and connection amidst shared grief. I’m not grateful for this terrible grief (one of the young ones in our school/church/family circles has died), but grateful for the way the circles flow together and interconnect. 3. The foresight of my school’s administration: We reached a threshold of active cases and students quarantining because of exposures, and so we went virtual for the week. I feel like the administration cares about my health and the health of my family and my students and their families. 4. This little break. I can assign reading and analysis tasks for the week, do some Zooms, and catch up on grading. Yesterday was a crash day for me. I think the aggregate burden of work overwhelm and grief and not enough time for the introverted self and light insomnia all came to a head for me, but I had the freedom to take a long and deep nap, and I came out the other side refreshed and ready to attack the tasks ahead of me. 5. The kitchen floor. It’s been a LONG time since we sanded and stained, and Jon did that this week, and I am obsessed with it. Pine takes a real beating, but it cleans up so beautifully.
May we do justice, love, mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty! So much love to you.
“Although the post-industrial period may well be remembered as one of the most irresponsible in history, nonetheless there is reason to hope that humanity at the dawn of the twenty-first century will be remembered for having generously shouldered its grave responsibilities.The warming of the planet is a symptom of a greater problem: the developed world’s indifference to the destruction of the planet as they pursue short-term economic gains. This has resulted in a “throwaway culture” in which unwanted items and unwanted people, such as the unborn, the elderly, and the poor, are discarded as waste.” –Pope Francis * Praise, my dear one. Let us disappear into praising. Nothing belongs to us. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke * “Listen: Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?” –Mary Oliver * “This might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the e-mail and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window.” –Marie Howe, poet
Yesterday was a long day, beginning with Faculty Meetings, continuing on to the last minute work sessions of the afternoon, and into an evening of New Student Orientation. The energy in the building last night was zizzly. The students who came into my room, both the student tour leaders and the new students, were sweetly earnest and polite. So many were clearly excited. I couldn’t help but ride onto that wave of lovely energy, despite the fact that I don’t quite feel ready.
I am ready, of course. My plans are in place–I just haven’t dithered over them as I often do. Today is a day for leaping into it, trusting the process, believing that my plans are sufficient to carry me. And I have the delightful energy of last night’s eager students to help me fly.
Gratitudes: This work, exhausting and overwhelming as it has often been. Spending time with colleagues and teenagers. Hopeful smiles. New things to learn together
May we do Justice, love Mercy, and walk Humbly! In Beauty!
“Every word you utter to another human being has an effect, but you don’t know it. If people began to understand that change comes about as a result of millions of tiny acts that seem totally insignificant, well then, they wouldn’t hesitate to take those tiny acts.” – Howard Zinn
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” –Leonard Bernstein
“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living In better conditions.” ~ Hafiz
“When your world moves too fast and you lose yourself in the chaos, introduce yourself to each color of the sunset. Reacquaint yourself with the earth beneath your feet. Thank the air that surrounds you with every breath you take. Find yourself in the appreciation of life.” ~ Christy Ann Martine
“Let us stand in the moment shoulder to shoulder like the deer on the verge we caught in our headlights, and listen for the distant unrolling of words.” –Beth Weaver-Kreider
Saturday’s Stories: ‘When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power. We shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.’ ―D.H.Lawrence
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” ―Rabindranath Tagore
“Every day look at a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, listen to some beautiful music, and if possible, say some reasonable thing.” ―Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not become fire?” ―Christine Valters Paintner
“Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we shall harness for God energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world we will have discovered fire.” ―Teilhard de Chardin
“We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.” ―Hildegard of Bingen
“Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.” ―Hildegard of Bingen
Was it only two days ago I wrote about how The Stump has become dormant except for little flowerings of two or three types of shy mushrooms around the faerie door? But I forgot about the August rains. Yesterday, I went out and a new stage of frilly white oysters have burst from the northern arc. Something else, shy and yellow, was already melting toward a golden ooze on the southern exposure. Life returns in The Stump’s own season. The first photo is the entire group of oysters, and the others are individual portraits, and the golden ooze from the southern side.
And I too, observe my seasons, shifting and changing, sometimes going dormant for long periods in one or another of my realms of existence. Lately, I have been working with great intention at healing and feeding my solar plexus chakra. You can tell me (as one of my beloved scientific-minded children does) that it is all in my mind, and I will respond, “Of course it is!” That’s where so much of magick resides, in the changing of consciousness at will. I have needed to change my consciousness regarding my ability to get things done. Slowly and steadily, I am seeing changes, more will and energy to do the things that must be done. Step by slow step, I realize that when I want to call up energy to do something, I find a reserve there, small and patient, waiting for me to call it forth.
Like the energy of the stump, my own energies have been, for a long time, hidden beneath the surface, seemingly unavailable. But now, with careful tending, and a little August sun and rain, I feel the bloom.
May your day be bright with sparks of new-found energy in places where you least expect it.
Gratitude List: 1. Reminders to Be in the Body. 2. Things that wake me up. 3. This school. This classroom. These colleagues. The sense of students soon to populate this space. 4. Augusts rains. September sun. 5. Seasons.
May we walk in Beauty! In mercy, justly, humbly.
“There is another world, but it is in this one.” —W.B. Yeats
“There is a deeper world than this That you don’t understand There is a deeper world that this Tugging at your hand. . . There is a deeper wave than this Rising in the land There is a deeper wave than this Nothing will withstand I say love is the seventh wave.” —Sting (I think I am going to listen carefully to this song in the coming days as I make last minute preps for school)
“I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and your laughter ’til they bloom, ’til you yourself burst into bloom.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Why did you do all this for me?” he asked. “I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.” “You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die… By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heavens knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.” —Charlotte the spider
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” —Doris Lessing
“A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything.” —Irish proverb
“We can’t know where we’re going if we don’t know from what we originate. The loss of purpose that so many of us feel is greater than the trajectory of our careers and personal lives, it is a cultural ailment which arises out of forgetting. Our lives are like the fruit of a heritage seed: Each of the generations that has preceded us has contributed to our life’s survival. There is an ancestral momentum to which we are beholden, and which carries us forward when we are in step with it. To hear this momentum, we must turn towards the soul. There, in our dreams, are the clues to what we love and what our lives long for.” —Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced.” —Parker Palmer, from Abba Felix tradition
“As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.” —David Abram
“Establish the sacred space of the classroom so that the inner and outer spaces of the students are respected.” (I don’t know the source. Tell me if you know.)
Be ready for truth to find you. —gleaned from Parker J. Palmer
Time and seasons flow differently in the realm of Faerie.
You might be walking in the woods on a warm summer day, and find yourself suddenly in a clearing with autumn leaves drifting around you, or patches of snow in the blue shadows. You may find a ripe red apple, or full round rose hips, during a winter walk. This is how you know you’ve crossed their boundaries.
So it is with The Stump. Last fall, when everything around us was dying, the stump began to put forth fruit. The wood ear mushrooms on the top surface expanded their territory. The bark on the sides was gradually obscured by shelves and racks of pearly oysters. Around the base, every few days it seemed, was a new bloom of one of at least three or four other varieties of mushroom. And in the very center of The Stump’s table were the glorious pair of caramel-colored mushrooms I called Meadow and The Chief.
Yes, mushrooms do tend to come out in the fall, when the damp and rot are conducive to their growth. The strange thing was the way they lived into the winter, how even in the snow, the oysters looked as plump and luscious as ever, new shelves appearing even in dark January. It was only as February’s cold turned brutal that the oysters began to show the frost-bite along their edges, turning brown and hardening. In spring, as the crocus and windflowers began popping up into the greening lawn, the stump went quiet. The oysters, heavy with their hardening, pulled off the outer layer of bark as they began to fall away. Even in the spring rains, the wood ears stayed still and grey as lichen, and Meadow and The Chief, the first to shrivel in the early winter, went to black hard nubs.
Eventually, by late spring I helped the process, pulling away the dead and hardened pieces and tossing them in the woods, leaving The Stump naked and stark, sere and wintry, as the world around it grew to summer’s ripeness and fullness. Gill on the grass grew up around, then died back, and arms of Virginia creeper have begun to reach around the sides.
Here and there, on occasion, a group of those gray faerie mushrooms–thin discs atop impossibly thread-like stalks–would rise for a morning around the base, and dry to powder by afternoon, like manna.
The piece of bark I had set up at the base to delineate a faerie door at the beginning of this magickal cycle has begun to look the worse for wear, and I have been searching for the perfect thing to replace it. But yesterday when I looked, the door and little dooryard were covered by a suddenly-appearing crowd of the little brown mushrooms with downward-curving caps. The Faerie realm of The Stump seems to be preparing for its next season of growth. I doubt the oysters will come back, now that the outer bark is gone. One small living patch of wood ear remains on the northern side, next to the faerie door. Perhaps it will thrive again along the surfaces. I have been seeing rings of the large white horse mushrooms popping up in other people’s lawns, and am putting out my own silent welcome that some might again show up in our grassy patches. Mostly, although I know that it was perhaps a once in a lifetime experience for a singular stump, I long for some caramel-colored stalks to emerge from the center of the table. I think it was late September or early October last year when they appeared, so I will be patient, just in case they come again.
You may say there is no such thing as a Faerie realm. You can tell me that the season of fungi is out of sync with the seasons of green things. You may say it’s dangerous to welcome the fae ones to live in close proximity to my home. You can tell me I’m strange or playing with fire for talking to the fae folk I meet in my dreams, for speaking their names.
What I know is that during the deadest, most anxious winter of my life, something lived and thrived in my yard, something offered me daily visions of what can grow in harsh conditions. And I will welcome whatever magick appears again as summer turns once more to fall, and we cover our faces, and the shadows spread.
Perhaps within the shadows, something hopeful, something holy, something wildly alive, will appear.
Gratitude List: 1. How life continues, even in harsh conditions. 2. Rainy summer mornings. Breathe in. Breathe out. 3. Looking forward to being in the classroom again. Tomorrow and Monday are Professional Development Days, and students come back on Tuesday. I’m not ready, but I’m ready, if you know what I mean. 4. Fungi, especially those white mushrooms popping up in faerie rings all over the place. 5. Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue.
May we walk in Beauty!
“Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants.” —Deuteronomy 32:2
“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” —Thomas Merton (Oh, but I am going to try, Thomas Merton. I am going to try.)
Deep breath. Straighten the spine. Scan the wide vista before you. Feel the morning breeze as the sun rises over the far horizon. Another deep breath. Spread your wings. Leap. —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.” —Alvin Toffler
“What comes, will go. What is found, will be lost again. But what you are is beyond coming and going and beyond description. You are It.” —Rumi
“Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” —Sarah Williams, about Galileo
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” —from The Talmud
“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” —George Santayana
My year has turned again to my starting day. Here I am, marking the end of year 54 and the beginning of year 55.
I always like to do the numerology assessment of my birthday. Like my dreamwork at the turning of the year from December to January, looking at the meanings in my numbers gives me something to contemplate and focus on in my inner work for the coming season.
One way to look at the numbers is to take the current date and reduce it numerologically: 8+10+2021 = 14 = 5. It’s a pretty straightforward reduction: You add the digits in each number together, and then add them all together. This is a 14 year for me. In the tarot major arcana, the 14 is Temperance. I can get behind that as a contemplation for the coming year. How can I create balance in my life? How can I keep one foot on land (practical) and one in the water (emotional/spiritual)? How can I create and maintain healthy flow in my life?
The 14 reduces further to 5, which is my Life Number. This is the number of the Hierophant, the keeper/teacher of the mysteries. The hierophant passes on wisdom and knowledge. This feels doubly significant to me this year as I enter my 55th year. How am I passing on the knowledge and wisdom I have gained from my mentors and teachers? How can I be more deliberate about when to speak and when to keep silent? What is the body of wisdom that I have to share?
Affinity Numerology dot com tells me that “54 tends to follow whim. It has an urge to be adventurous, yet is pragmatic and tries to focus and be reliable. . .The essence of the number 54 is continually focused on making life better for people. It isn’t always effective, as it also has an inner urge to express its sense of personal freedom.”
It also tells me that “54 has little, if any, judgement of lifestyles, societal expectations, religious beliefs, and political practices — in fact, it revels in the first-hand experience of a wide variety of cultures.” Unfortunately I have failed in that realm this year. Ugh. I have become the judgiest version ever of myself. I blame Covid and its attendant rage. Sigh. Maybe I can incorporate some of that into year 55.
55, according to the same site, suggests I might extend the adventuresomeness of the 54, to deepen the adventures, to claim my independence. I like that vision. So I sit in the space between reliability and independence, with adventure as the thread that ties them together.
Whatever meaning I choose to take from my numbers, the fact is that I have reached the milestone of another year. My hair is definitely grayer. My aches and pains are cycling through with more intensity. I made it through a bout of Covid, through Jon’s job change, through masked teaching and Zoom/hybrid classes, through the long languish of the pandemic. A year ago, I was pretty certain that this birthday would see us out the other side of the pandemic, yet here we are. I’ll be masked again this fall to teach. The numbers in both my counties (Lancaster and York) continue to rise. I am, by turns: angry, tired, despairing, eye-rollingly-weary. I have a low tolerance for people who will neither get the vaccine nor mask up. I am experiencing a dearth of empathy for people who don’t see this the way I do–I consider this to be a moral failing on my part, but I don’t know if it’s something I can control. I am really anxious about the rising cases in children.
Still, it’s a new year for me, a chance for a reset, with a chance to be better at balance, at flow, and at choosing how to pass along what wisdom I have gained. It’s a season for adventure, in whatever way I can grasp hold of that.
And there’s this:
While I was gazing at this perfect double rainbow, a branching flash of lightning snaked across half the sky. Moments later, a hummingbird flitted out of the willow tree to the left, and began dancing between raindrops right in front of the rainbow.
Gratitude List: 1. Last night, we had friends over for a farewell party for some of our beloveds who are returning to East Africa after several weeks in the US. We sat at picnic tables in the lawn with a cool breeze blowing through the hollow, and walnut leaves like fairy leaves flashing golden as they drifted down around us. Bittersweet, to say goodbye and to be among people I treasure so deeply. 2. The house is pretty clean. I’m not going to go down the shame-vortex in order to get to this, but needless to say, things had not been very clean for some time. Now they are, and I feel my spirits lifted. We should have company once a month. 3. Also bittersweet, today was my last day at Radiance for the summer. It’s sad to leave, but I can’t be sad when I reflect on the gift of being able to work there, surrounded by good and shiny souls, good smells, and so much to learn. Grateful for the connection to Sarah and Laura, to Chris (and Natasha, although our paths didn’t cross this summer). Grateful for herbs and textures and scents and magic, for all that reconnects me to the Divine Feminine. 4. Sensible shoes. Comfortable, sensible shoes. When my feet feel good, my body feels good. 5. Rain. We just got a thunder-boomer in the holler. The air sparkles.
May we walk in Beauty!
Tuesday’s Quotes (long, but hey, it’s my birthday): “There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924
“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel
“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —Rumi
“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin
Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that — It lights the whole world. —Hafiz
“The Seven of Pentacles” by Marge Piercy Under a sky the color of pea soup she is looking at her work growing away there actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans as things grow in the real world, slowly enough. If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food, if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars, if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees, then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock. Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs. Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief. “While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty. “If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words. “Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner
Mockingbird Chronicles 