When you walk into the rooms
where Mystery waits with an indigo hum,
listen for the thrumming
of hummingbird, feel the brush
of moth wings across your cheek,
watch for the scoop and swish
of a small brown bat
through the rooms
of your heart.
Unless you seek her,
you will not find her,
and the rooms where you wander
will appear empty
and devoid of beauty.
–Beth Weaver-Kreider
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“Drop your maps and listen to your lostness like a sacred calling into presence. Here, where the old ways are crumbling and you may be tempted to burn down your own house. Ask instead for an introduction to that which endures. This place without a foothold is the province of grace. It is the questing field, most responsive to magic and fluent in myth. Here, where there is nothing left to lose, sing out of necessity that your ragged heart be heard. Send out your holy signal and listen for the echo back.” ―Toko-pa Turner
*
“A child needs the same things a tree needs: Earth. Water. Sun. Air.” ―unknown
*
“What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.” ―Wendell Berry
*
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
―Barry Lopez
*
“There’s a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every frog that croaks. There’s magic in the trees & the hills & the river & the rocks, in the sea & the stars & the wind, a deep, wild magic that’s as old as the world itself. It’s in you too, my darling girl, and in me, and in every living creature, be it ever so small. Even the dirt I’m sweeping up now is stardust. In fact, all of us are made from the stuff of stars.” ―Kate Forsyth
Gratitude List:
1. Waking up in the night to the sound of rain. Some of my best memories of childhood are of the sound of a morning rain on the tin roof of our house that overlooked Lake Victoria.
2. Time to organize and prepare. My parents have given me a couple child-free days in which to work.
3. Breath. How deepening my breathing shifts me into a calmer and less reactive space.
4. Weaving stories together. I know I offer this one rather often, but it appears in so many places in my life: in gatherings of friends and family, in the story-telling mornings at church, in the back-and-forth sharing on Facebook, sometimes in spontaneous moments with strangers. One person begins to string the warp of a tale, then hands the thread to someone else, who maybe extends the story already begun, or adds a new texture and color of her own. Others join, adding contrasting strands of weft. Sometimes someone seems to cut the strands altogether, and we wait, and watch, and then a new pattern begins to emerge, and as startling as it is, it’s often just the right element at the moment. Real and vulnerable sharing allows us to weave our lives together in powerful ways. It’s one of the Mysteries, I think.
5. The blank space. The empty page. The moment of nothing. Note to self: You don’t have to fill up everything.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 