Today begins another 54-day novena–the Circles and Cycles novena–with the online rosary group I follow, The Way of the Rose. During one of the novenas in the past year, I tacked on an extra petition with my heart’s desire request: That I would somehow find a way to return to the town where I spent my early childhood. During this past novena, the plans began to fall into place for that to happen, and during this coming novena, in February, I will travel with my brother and sister-in-law to Shirati, Tanzania. I can hardly believe it. I am living in a constant state of anticipatory tingles.
As I prepare to return to my childhood home, I’ve been thinking a lot about our current home. I love this old house, built in the last decades of the 1800s, perched on a hillside in a hollow, with snakes in the attic and basement, spiders in the corners, wavy window glass. I also find it frustrating: the weird plumbing, the scary wiring, the crumbling basement plaster, the tight spaces for a family of four, the accumulated stuff of almost twenty years of living here. We have begun to consider selling the farm in three or four years to move to a smaller, more manageable property with a slightly more modern house. I love that, too.
Meanwhile, we will be living here, and I want to make this time a time of nurture and delight in the place where we live. I want to Refresh the Nest–that will be my heart’s desire prayer for the coming novena, that we’ll have the inner resources (and find the financial resources) to do the sorting and arranging and renovating and re-nesting necessary to make this a satisfying period of our lives, especially as the kids begin to look to making their own lives separate from ours.
On each daily round of the rosary, there are five sets of Mary prayers (Hail Marys–I call them Hello Marys) book-ended by what I call The Love Prayer (traditionally Our Fathers) and Glorias. The rosary forms a pentagon, and each corner of the pentagon represents a mystery in the sacred journey. There are fifteen mysteries, three sets of five, so during a novena, every three days you cycle through the five stages of each set: the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries.
For decades before I came to praying the rosary, I have meditated on various pentacles, following the paths of the star and circle, using five words to guide my meditation. Birth, youth, maturity, old age, death. Birth, initiation, Ripening, Reflection, Death. Grace, Initiation, Desire, Beauty, Self-Knowledge. You can make up your own–follow a trail of your own personal development through five stages and give it words to anchor your reflection. I used a couple different oracle and tarot decks this morning to help me choose five words/phrases to anchor my meditations during the coming novena when my petition is about refreshing the nest. In a delightful experience of synchronicity, all the cards either have a name beginning with S, or are described by the deck’s creator with words beginning in S:
1. Silent One (from the Forest Fae Deck): watch and observe
2. Staff (from The Mystic Shaman Oracle): right action, authority, the middle way, balance
3. Shadowdiver (from the Archeo deck): seeking the source of the problem within myself, being a hunter, a miner, an archeologist, for the pains and traumas and experiences which keep me from living fully
4. Starclimber (also from Archeo): seeking the mystical pathway, meditating, gazing into the depths
5. Sacred Siblinghood (from the Light Seer’s Tarot): the 3 of Cups, communing deeply with my beloveds, support networks, Presence
Gratitude List:
1. A safe journey yesterday to see a beloved friend, and many fresh and lucid moments, smiles, jokes, delight, wakefulness, recovery
2. Pho: Delicious, nutritious, and filling for most of the day
3. This week of Time Out of Time
4. Nesting
5. The whole family under one roof
May we walk in Beauty!
Watching with those who celebrate Kwanzaa. Today’s word is Ujima. Collective work and responsibility.
“Beauty is not a luxury but a strategy for survival.” —Terry Tempest Williams
“Your suffering needs to be respected. Don’t try to ignore the hurt, because it is real. Just let the hurt soften you instead of hardening you. Let the hurt open you instead of closing you. Let the hurt send you looking for those who will accept you instead of hiding from those who reject you.” —Bryant McGill
“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.” —bell hooks
“I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.” —Louise Bourgeois
“When you have an ancient heart and childlike spirit you must feel deeply, but go lightly. To trace and learn the language of waves. How all the seas carry secrets, yet still move freely. I am still learning how to be water.” —Victoria Erickson
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —Viktor E. Frankl
“We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful… and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.” —Desmond Tutu
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“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” ―Anaïs Nin
Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is Money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.
―Wendell Berry
“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So like children, we begin again…
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
Martha Beck: “The important thing is to tell yourself a life story in which you, the hero, are primarily a problem solver rather than a helpless victim. This is well within your power, whatever fate might have dealt you.”
“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
It seems that we Christians have been worshiping Jesus’ journey instead of doing his journey. The worshiping feels very religious; the latter just feels human and ordinary. We are not human beings on a journey toward Spirit, we are already spiritual beings on a journey toward becoming fully human, which for some reason seems harder precisely because it is so ordinary.” ―Richard Rohr
“What if nostalgia is not a fruitless dwelling on those irretrievable moments of the past, as we are taught, but an attempt by sweetness to reach you again?
What if nostalgia is really located in the present, like a scent or ambience which is gathering around you should you avail yourself to it.
As anyone who has been heartbroken knows, there comes a time when, long after loss has been well-lived with, a small melody of love always returns. And to your surprise, you may recognise the tone of that love as the very same love you believed you lost.
It’s then that you know that your love was always your love. And if you let yourself be unguarded to it, nostalgia may find its way back into the generosity of your presence.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.” —bell hooks
Mockingbird Chronicles 