novena

Annunciation

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today was my day to write for the Way of the Rose Annunciation Novena:
THE ANNUNCIATION NOVENA
Day 5, Sorrowful Mysteries

There’s something so inexorable about living.
One thing happens, and then the next,
chain reaction following chain reaction,
and one domino topples, so the whole damn line
just cascades, one thing after another,
until it’s all a pile of rubble on the floor.

You hear the rumble of thunder,
lightning strikes the tower,
and before you can think what to do,
it’s all just tumbling down around you,
crumbling to dust and ashes.
Sometimes it just feels as if all life does
is happen TO you, you know?

And yet, sometimes right there in the pile of debris,
among the wreck and the ruins,
in the quiet moment when the dust
is settling through shafts of light
falling all around you,
or sometimes it happens in the dew-bright garden
when every possibility seems to be in bud,
or in the roar of traffic when you are on your way
from hither to yon, just trying to keep up:
sometimes you can hear the Angel’s voice, asking

“Will you carry the light?
Will you carry and share
the mystery of seed and egg and birthing star?
Will you be the hands and feet of something
beyond your current kenning?
Will you use your heart, your strength, your cunning,
help to make the new thing within you,
in the service of Love?”

I keep forgetting that I get to choose,
that even between the crazy race and the cascade,
even in the dawn garden, even in the rubble,
I can choose when and how I participate,
how I collaborate with life to co-create
a destiny beyond my imagining.
No longer is it simply that I am made for this moment,
but I make myself for this moment,
and for the next, and for the next.

“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

“Love will find you, wherever you are. It will seek you out in the most hidden places of your heart. It will search the crowded cities and walk the empty hours after midnight. It will overcome any obstacle placed before it, even those you create for yourself, to find you and to bring you its gift. No matter how far from love you feel you have drifted, it will never give up on you. Love is the Spirit, watchful and persistent, enduring and forgiving, the steady presence of a reassurance that will keep you safe whatever chance may bring you. If you are a believer, then believe this: love will always find you.” —Steven Charleston

“I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside.” ―Rumi

“How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings – to foraging black bears and twisted old cypresses – that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world.

Small wonder that rivers and forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we talk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives.
Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us – and if they still try, we will not likely hear them.”
―David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

In the Sufi way of seeing it, longing is a divine inclination, drawing us towards the Beloved. Just as lover and beloved long to be in each other’s arms, so too is it between us and the life which is meant for us. Like a plant growing towards the sun, longing is nature inclining us towards the light we need in order to be fruitful. But also, as Rumi writes, “that which you seek is seeking you.” So longing is not only the quality of seeking reunion, but the sound of something in search of us: the calling homeward.” —Toko-pa Turner

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.” —Kahlil Gibran

“I believe dignity emerges in the way you finally carry your own story. Through your painstaking reframes to write yourself as the heroine of your own life, your losses cease to consume you. They are not forgotten or made invisible, but rather aggrandised in your telling, eventually passed down through the line of mothers and daughters as the mythical ‘obstacles to flight’ that they were. But dignity also lives in one’s willingness to step wholly into a new life of love, even as its first strands are being woven together to create a shape that will warm you.” ―Toko-pa Turner

Sunday Morning Prayer

hope
like a seed
buried deep within the earth; hidden
covered by layers, disappointment, struggle, pain;
buried yet stretching,
growing and becoming.
hope
like a seed
becoming new life.

—Katherine Hawker

Heart’s Desire

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

I’ve had a very productive day doing things other than poetry writing! So my poem today is my heart’s desire prayer for the new novena that begins tomorrow with Way of the Rose.

Gratitude List:

  1. Bringing the kid home from college for the weekend!
  2. How things sometimes fall together instead of apart. I lost the cap to my air stem when I went to top off my leaky tire, so I drove to our garage to but a new one, and they offered to just go ahead and fix the leak, too! Now I don’t have to fuss with an appointment.
  3. Fall leaves
  4. Peppermint brownies. Haven’t eaten then yet. The mix is there waiting in the cupboard for us to make this evening!
  5. A good car book to listen to on a long trip. Weyward by Emilia Hart is the current one.

May we walk in beauty!

“Never laugh at live dragons.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
*****
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” —Aristotle
*****
“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” —Mark Twain
*****
“The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.” ―John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
*****
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” —Aristotle
*****
“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” —Anais Nin
*****
“Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best thing to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.” —Michelle Obama
*****
“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” —Amelia Earhart
*****
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —Lucille Ball
*****
“Learn how to take criticism seriously but not personally.” —Hillary Clinton
*****
“Like a great starving beast, my body is quivering, fixed on the scent of light.” —Hafiz
*****
“Identity is a story carried in the body.” —Sophia Samatar
*****
“Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …”
—W.B. Yeats
****
“The heart is your student, for love is the only way we learn.”
—Rumi
*****
Poet Joy Harjo, from 2012:
“Visited with my cousin George Coser, Jr yesterday at the kitchen table. He’s a gift. Always something profound among the stories. The sacred lies at the root of the mundane. And every word is a power element. Each word or sound, whether thought, written or spoken grows our path, the path of our generation, the children, grandchildren, the Earth. . . . We become the ancestors. A sense of play gives a lightness of being. So get out there and play—and be kind while you’re at it. To yourself, too.”
*****
Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.

Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You.
—The Prayer of St. Brendan (attributed to Brendan)
*****
The Wild Geese
by Wendell Berry

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Mysteries of the Dark

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is the last of my three days of posting reflections on the Mysteries of the Dark Novena for Way of the Rose. Here are my thoughts:

Mysteries of the Darkness Novena

Day 41. Sorrowful Mysteries:

Walking in the Dark.

I have always felt compelled towards shadow work, looking deeply within, trying to understand my impulses and compulsions, my vices and my rages, the way desire flows and obsession grows.

Mystery, mysticism, paradox, counterpoint, magic, surrealism—that which is beyond the ken of daylight sight. Like the way you have to look to the side of the Pleiades to see them clearly.

When I was a teenager, if I was the last person downstairs at night, I used to hate those seconds after I had turned off the light before I got to the top of the stairs. The darkness behind me was too overwhelming. But today, when I get up in the night, I like to find my way through the dark house by feel, sensing where I am in the room, honing my dark-sight.

Even so, I struggle with the encroaching darkness of the last few weeks before the Winter Solstice. I just can’t make my peace. My energy flags with the dying day, and my brain gets dull and fuzzy. In a season when grades need to be updated for students and Thanksgiving plans made, and then Christmas and Yule, I want to emulate the bears, go underground, feel the quiet rhythms, be still and silent. And so instead I groan when the day dies early, when the light has left like the wild geese for the south.

I need to keep giving myself pockets of intentional retreat, hours here and there where I step out of the bustle to write and reflect, to say the rosary slowly—savoring every word instead of the daily push to make sure it gets done in the schedule, walk or bike on the woods trail, stand under the stars. It’s a form of self-care—spiritual self-care. Not down-time for down-time’s sake (though that is absolutely essential to my mental health), but unlike other forms of self-care in which the intent is to disconnect, the intent here is to re-connect to something beyond myself. Dark-time self-care is about keeping an intentional inner focus amid the outer distractions.

How do you do spiritual self-care in tumultuous times?

The Heart’s Desire Prayer I have been praying during this novena is:

Oh Antlered One who calls me home to live within the garden of myself,
help me to find the still point in the maelstrom of my anxious fears,
to follow where the sacred tug of grief and rages
will guide me to the wisdom I will write upon the pages
of these my croning years.

Two dreams and a Prayer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
I drew this sketch of a dream ten years ago, 25 November 2014.

Last night’s dream, 2 October 2024:
I’m on a farm, in a yard near the farmhouse, when a woman in a car comes racing down the lane, around a sharp curve between stone walls, spewing gravel in the wake of her tires. She spins the car around and backs it up beside a big barn and the rear end of the car gets caught on the low stone wall. She leaves the car running, tires spinning, gets out of the car, and starts to walk across the yard toward the farmhouse. Her sunglasses are askew, and she looks confused. I walk toward her. To comfort her? To help her regulate? To tell her to turn off her car, or scold her? The alarm goes off and it is morning.

Who is this woman? Is she a version of me? Is she the women of America? Is she the goddess herself? She didn’t seem particularly angry or anxious. Just impatient and confused. I think I need to find this out during the coming season.

In this season of ripening into darkness,
as worries whirl around me
like angry wasps,
I asked the Mother,
By what name shall I call you?
And I saw a the parade of Deerpeople
who wandered through the farm
on balmy summer mornings,
the shaman ancestor with her drum,
the dream I had of a woman
who was a deer
who was a tree
who was a shelter
to small animals and birds
in her branches and among her roots.

Oh Antlered One:
who calls me home to live
within the garden of myself:
Help me to find the still point
in this maelstrom of my anxious fears,
to follow where the sacred tug of griefs and rages
will guide me to the wisdom I will write upon the pages
of these my croning years.

Wishes and Intentions

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I know. No posts for weeks, and then two posts in two days.
Yesterday, I wrote in my gratitude list about how difficult January is. I should clarify that it’s not entirely spent in a burrito on the couch scrolling through my phone. There is definitely more of that than I wish for myself, but there are also small bursts of energy in the Tunnel of Tired, usually in the context of those strategies I listed. January is definitely not all bad. It’s just a slog.

But now to the point of the post. Here are two items from my journal in the past year:

This is a tarot reading I did for myself on 12/22/22. When you draw the 9 of Cups in a reading, you make a wish. I highlighted mine.
This was a month later, 1/23/23, as I was thinking through what would be my heart’s desire petition for the coming 54-day novena. This was one of four.

Usually my wishes and heart’s desires, when I write or speak them with intention, are fairly internal or safe things that I can be pretty sure that I can help create. Wishing to return to Tanzania in such an intentional way (it’s been my constant internal wish/heart’s desire since my last trip 36 years ago) has always felt risky because I didn’t want to deal with the disappointment of not having my wish granted. It was okay as long as it was basically unstated, or stated wistfully, and I knew that it was just a “wish.” Then the disappointment of it not happening would be less intense. But here I was, saying it out loud. Putting it out there. And the novena concluded, and the year began to wane, and I let myself forget my magically spoken wish. Making a trip to Tanzania hasn’t been something I could logistically or financially plan, hard as I looked at it, so I figured that it just still wasn’t time, or that it was unlikely ever to happen.

But last November, my brother and sister-in-law asked me if I might want to accompany them on a trip to Tanzania. They’d made the plans already. I’m getting some help in the financial area. Our tickets are bought. Shots in order. Willing and capable substitute procured for the classroom. In just three weeks, we’re making a dream trip back to the place where we spent our early childhood. My heart’s desire.

I’d forgotten that I had made these clear intentions in written form, and was looking through my journal a couple days ago when I stumbled across them. Feels like a miracle. At the very least, it’s a sparkling synchronicity.

I worded the heart’s desire as a “sacred journey.” This is a good reminder that I don’t go entirely as a tourist or as a home-goer (both of which have problematic edges, and which have been part of my uncertainty about returning), but as a vessel, to receive what is meant for me to receive, to give what is meant for me to give. To find the strands that are woven into this web. To keep my heart open, to allow the jittery excitement to give way to a quiet sense of purpose and intention, receptivity. To delight in everyone and everything.

Gratitude List:
1. Three-day weekend. Breathe in. Breathe out.
2. Anticipating seeing actual flamingos in a few weeks
3. Generosity, how it grows and expands as it is given
4. How the big birds–the hawks and vultures and eagles and crows–catch the wind and whirl above the ridge
5. Puzzles
May we walk in Beauty!

“I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.” —Audre Lorde

“Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on your head and wear it” —Maya Angelou

“If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.” —Maya Angelou

“History has never been kind to those who have sided with voter suppression over voters’ rights. And it will be even less kind for those who side with election subversion.” —Joe Biden

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” —Robert Frost

“I am always doing what I cannot do yet
in order to learn how to do it.” —Vincent van Gogh

“Have you been to jail for justice? Then you’re a friend of mine.” —Anne Feeney

“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.” —Naomi Shulman

“‎The desire to reach the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise and most possible.” —Maya Angelou

“Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life.” —Louise Erdrich

“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
Re-examine all you have been told
at school or church or in any book;
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
—Walt Whitman

“In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives.
“The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire.” —Adrienne Rich

“Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever.”—James Baldwin, in “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”

Refreshing the Nest

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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
*:
“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

Artemis at Midlife

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I have been doing magic to enhance my focus and intention in these flowing days of wibbly-wobbly summer time, in this larger season of my life which has lost its focus and drive, when I have left so many of my little (and big) dreams lying somewhere along the path. Every summer for the past nine years, I have told myself I would organize my poetry into another book, and September always slides in and I have nothing to show.

Call it fear of failure, or of success.
Call it undiagnosed ADHD.
Call it setting aside my own needs for the needs of others.
Call it laziness and procrastination.
Call it addiction to distractions.
Call it the overwhelm of having TOO MANY poems to sort through.

Whatever it is, I have stood behind this wall of it for nearly a decade now, and I am ready to move on. This summer something shifted. Here I am in the vestibule of July, and I have two very messy collections of poetry that I am working on. Oh, they’re nothing like ready. I have arranging and editing and cutting to do, and maybe something to add here or there. But I have TWO actual pools of poems headed toward publication. I’m not entirely sure what brought about the change.

Call it the magic spells.
Call it the recent 54-day novena in which I told the Mother my heart’s desire was to finish another book.
Call it finally crawling out of the psycho-spiritual constraints of existing within a Mennonite institution.
Call it the new fire of midlife.

Whatever it is, I am grateful.

Today begins a new 54-day novena with The Way of the Rose, and I don’t mind making public my plea. I am asking for Focus. I have been imagining the Goddess Diana with her bow, focused laser-like on her object. This morning during my prayers I got an image in my head of Artemis at Midlife. I came down from the pear grove and wrote that poem:

Artemis at Midlife

One of her greatest attributes is vibrant youth,
like her bow, like her swarm of leggy hounds,
like her fierce protection of the wilds
and of her own wild autonomy.

She was never supposed to get old.
Her eyes have blurred and softened, so now
she relies upon her sense of her body in space,
her inner eyes, to find the target.

Her weight has settled and gathered
in her belly and her thighs, and so
she hides no longer in the slender saplings
but among the tumbled rocks.

The whip-quick Alani who swirled
like mist around her thighs, barking
and racing to confront the wayward hunter
in the green wood, rest now in grassy hollows

like sleepy bears in the moonlight,
raising their heads as the goddess
rises to cool herself in the stream
after one more inexorable hot flash.

There was a day when she ran fleetly
through the forest, leaping from rock
to log, and lightly across ravines. No more.
Her body has found its home in gravity,

and she wanders quietly, no longer
baying the wild stag with hounds,
but waiting, silent, under a great oak,
for the regal beast to come to her.

Gratitude List:
1. Finding Focus, though with softer vision
2. Breakthrough and Shift
3. The wide-open splendor of a summer’s day
4. Making friendship bracelets with kids
5. The way a poem helps to shape meaning
May we walk in Beauty!

“The doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door. If you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the Sky and water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.” —Aldo Leopold

“Recognize the invisible hands that guide you, the breath that breathes you, the walls and roof that keep cold from chilling you, the water that magically springs from your taps, the long line of ancestors whose every step made your incarnation possible. You belong to these holy helpers. You have undisputed membership. In your recognition of this wealth, your own life cannot help but become an offering back to that which feeds you.” —Toko-pa Turner

“The very form of our thinking has to be re-formed from “thinking about” to “thinking within,” and Silence is the teacher. . . . Silence is intelligence. . . . As we enter into Silence, we enter into Wisdom. We do not become wise but enter into the objective Wisdom of world processes. Judgment, as the primary mode of our thinking, ceases or is taken up only when needed for our practical life. As we enter into the Wisdom of Silence, we allow ourselves to be taught by the things of the world.” —Robert Sardello

“To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. The history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely.” —Gaston Bachelard

“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” ―Linda Hogan

“I didn’t mean to tell you,” Mrs Whatsit faltered. “I didn’t mean ever to let you know. But, oh, my dears, I did so love being a star!” —Marlene L’Engle

“Some black cats are witches in disguise. Some witches are black cats in disguise.” —Folklore of Wales

“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand…the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” —Alan Lightman

“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” —Adrienne Rich

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.” —Adrienne Rich

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.

[…]

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” —Adrienne Rich