Holding the Bowl of the Heart
Circle of Stones
You there
in the center of the circle
and all of us gathered around
Silence
within the weight of the moment
and stillness in the bowl of time
We breathe
waiting, holding you inside us
and watching for what yet may be
Gratitude List:
1. Blessing each other in our transitions
2. Living into the questions
3. Holding the paradoxes
4. Preparing for winter
5. Listening for the messages
May we walk in Beauty!
I spent last week quietly anticipating another walk of the Camp Hebron Labyrinth. On my Saturday morning walk own to the woods, I kept thinking how different the paths and the distances seemed in just a week. The thought appeared in my head: “It’s a different journey now.” Even though I am walking a similar path and toward a different destination, the journey keeps shifting and changing. Just moments after I had begun to ponder what I meant by thinking that, I arrived at the labyrinth to find that a tree had fallen across it.
I recently found this piece of paper on which I wrote, in the summer of 2015, a series of examen-type questions. I think I probably have already written these in the blog, but I am going to put them here again so that I can ponder them this week. I wouldn’t use more than five of them a day, probably, and for similar ones, like the first four, I would spread them out over days, to see how the different ways of asking almost the same question evokes different internal responses.
How did Mystery encounter you today?
How did you encounter Mystery today?
How were you found by Mystery?
How did God/dess seek you?
What awakened you?
What vision brought your spirit awake?
What nudged you? (Or nudged you forward?)
Where does your heart sit?
What gave you wings?
What do you take on your journey?
What do you tuck into the corners?
What quickened within you?
What brought your senses (or your heart, your spirit, your brain) alive?
What do you take deeper?
What do you take into prayer?
What is the weight that you carry?
And not that I am thinking about it again, I’ll add some more from today’s heart:
What itches? What makes you uncomfortable?
What feels unsettled?
What skin are you shedding?
What muscles are you stretching?
Gratitude List:
1. Bridges, and bridge-building language and actions
2. Gathered Community
3. Getting the work organized, making a plan
4. Treasuring each other
5. Waking up–I am struggling with the actual physical process this morning. How much more intense it can be to wake up in other ways. May we always be open to the pull to wake further, to bring our dreams into the wakeful spaces.
May we walk in Beauty!
By Monday, the gills have expanded and developed, the underside of the universe.
Working up a poem that I wrote a year ago:
Lay down your heart, sister
for one mist-laden moment
on the bank of the river
where your ancestors wandered.
It will not end the clamor
or stop the blood that spills
over rocks in the deserts.
It will not offer you answers
to the why of war
or end the stench of battles.
Still, the waters may offer you
questions instead, questions
that will create the riddles
to draw you onto the path again
despite the darkness
that surrounds you.
Gratitude List:
1. I have been given this day in which to do my work.
2. How emotion settles in the body. I know this can be unsettling, too. I read something yesterday by Darshana Avila, about sensing the way that happiness and sadness settle in the body, noticing where they are, what they do in the body, not judging them or their presence as “good” or “bad.” She noted that when we reflect on the way emotions are sensed in the body, happiness and sadness don’t always feel that different. Â They just are. Â It reminds me of Rumi welcoming all comers to the guesthouse.
3. New questions. I have to ask Anne Marie sometime to remind me of the entire list she offered in church on Sunday, a series of questions that comes from the peacebuilding work of the Great Lakes Initiative in eastern Africa. Â The ones that stick with me are, “What do you lament?” and “What does joy look like?” I like the way the questions are phrased, instead of simply asking what makes you sad or happy–which are equally valid questions.
4. This one feels a little petty because it’s so material, but it has wider implications for me: Yesterday I found some dresses at Columbia Re-Uzit, and then I drove past my friend’s farm stand, and she was also having a yard sale, and I bought some of her clothes. So now I feel like I have the outfitting necessary for the coming school season. It’s one more thing off my plate, accomplished with minimal effort and thought–that’s the piece I am grateful for. That, and the lovely colors and textures, and the thought that I will be wearing some things that my beautiful and gracious friend has worn. In that context, clothes are more than just clothes, you know?
5. What shall I pull out for this last one? I do not yet have a Thing of Beauty on the list, other than my lovely new dresses. Oh, here it is: the bouquet of lisianthus blossoms my mother brought to me yesterday to have on the table today as I am working on my class preparations. Deep purple-violet and vibrant red-violet. (My parents brought me flowers, AND they are caring for my children for a couple days so that I can focus solely on the preparations for school.)
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. (What do you notice?) That wren calling, tiredness in my bones, a sense of being past the most overwhelming parts of the end-of-semester skid
2. (What do you hunger for?) Solitude, quiet, sustenance, sustainedness, time to write and edit, time to ponder, decluttering
3. (Who has been helpful?) Those 12-year-olds in church yesterday–how they are growing!, the ones who create rites of passage and rituals to mark changes, the many names of God
4. (What are the themes?) The table: Alain’s sermon, Neruda’s poem (“For now, I ask no more than the justice of eating”), Joy Harjo’s “Perhaps the World Ends Here”)
5. (What draws you forward?) The rest that is coming, the rising sun–the way light filters in to the hollow, the calling of birds, the good Work to be done
May we walk in Beauty!
I have been refining my questions today, and thinking about this process. Â I have been reading about education in the last few weeks–about educating the intellect and the spirit and the emotions. Â I realize that when I phrase questions like, “What do you feel? Â What do you sense? Â What do you think?” Â I understand the surface meaning, but there’s a boxy feel to it. Â I feel like those questions will trap my words, somehow. Â I want to ask myself those questions, but they need to have a more fluid grace, an ability to slide and flow into many boxes. Â These might work better. Â I’m still connecting a bit to some of St. Ignatius’ questions, but sliding sideways into my own.
How have you been met by Mystery today?
Walking into the room of myself.
Exploring names for God.
What awakens you?
A golden finch flying across my path and upward into blue.
What sits in your heart?
The satisfaction and anxiety of holding vigil for people I love. Â Being a watcher.
Hope.
Reverence.
Frustration at the work it took to complete an assignment today–that can build in me compassion for my students in the coming year.
What nudges you forward?
Plans, projects, art.
How will you step into tomorrow?
I will write my goals for the rest of the summer, and include play and art on the list.
May we walk in Beauty!
Sometimes a new thing catches me on fire, and I just have to let it burn through me, so I can see the trail it leaves, follow the glowing embers. Â This poem by Mary Oliver–“Gratitude“–has taken hold of me. Â First, I had to copy it, using her questions, and then I had to create my own, while still adding my own regular 5-point gratitude list at the end. Â Tonight, more of my own questions.
And I am lifting my nose to sniff the air–there’s an aroma there of something lodged in my memory. Â Here it is: I have been feeling compelled to call this emerging process an Examen. Â I have been looking it up, and I think that perhaps it isn’t so far from the Examen of St. Ignatius. Â His process, according to the Loyola Press website, is to:
1. Become aware of the presence of God. Â (I like to call God the Mystery, or Love, or the Source, or Mama.)
2. Review the day with gratitude. Â (That’s the part I have been working on for the past three or four years. Â It has been transformative in ways I could not have predicted.)
3. Pay attention to your emotions. Â (Sometimes I stop at the second step. Â This is a good reminder. Â Also, I think I would add, Check in with your energy, because that is part of my practice, too.)
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it. Â (For me, the noticing is prayer, the gratitude is prayer. Â Still, I get what this is about: take one thing deeper. Â Oh, I do like that.)
5. Look toward tomorrow. Â (Bring the past and the present and the future together in this moment. Â How does the past [the work of #2] inform the present [#1, #3, #4]? Â And how can the past-imbued present inform the future [#5]?)
How is the Mystery present to you?
In silence. Â In the space between my breaths. Â In the night sounds of crickets and peepers.
What visions brought your spirit awake?
Three crows flying above the fields into morning.
A white heron flying over the city in the afternoon heat.
The hard work of preparing an essay.
What words awakened you?
“Prophetic listening,” transformation, kairos, dialectical hermeneutics
What awakened your senses?
Rice and peas, garlic, squash, long thin green beans, broccoli, and fat slices of pink tomato with coarse salt.
What does your heart say?
There is anxiety here for friends who are suffering.
Contentment, which is sometimes better than wild joy.
I am tired.
Anticipation.
New ideas flitting through the rooms of my brain excite and exhaust me.
What goes deeper?
I am one spider on this humming web,
surveying the movement from strand to strand.
We all weave and spin together,
no longer simply waiting for the Morai
to measure and cut, but being ourselves the spiders,
tending the web, minding the movement.
Where does this go tomorrow?
Tomorrow is a clearing day–
get things accomplished.
May we walk in Beauty!
You say you don’t believe the stories the moon was telling
last night as she rose among the sparkling stars
over the rim of your feather pillow?
You say you’ve forgotten the song she sang,
the way her voice wrapped your heart
in a blanket made of spider silk?
You say you never find yourself lost and alone
and deliriously satisfied in the meadows of a dream?
Surely you have heard the singing when the rainbow arcs the sky?
Surely you have seen the pattern of the swallows’ dance above you?
Surely you can’t have missed the feel of the moon’s fingers
as she caresses your forehead on a summer night?
Friends, I am on the cusp of a big change, standing at the very edge of the cliff now, remembering that I have wings, but not sure that I am ready to fly. Oh, I know the wind will catch me, and I know all will be well, but it is right and proper, I suppose, for butterflies to fill the belly in the moments before the leap.
Today is my last Friday of farm harvest for the summer. While I will continue to fill in the cracks as I am able, Tuesday will essentially be the day I take off the farmer’s hat and put on the teacher’s hat.
I am going to try to continue to be present here on the blog through the changes, to continue to write gratitude lists, and hopefully poems, too. But the space may get a little dusty and cobwebby from time to time as I work to figure out how my new morning schedule works, and where I can carve out writing time in my new world.
Gratitude List:
1. The morning’s rosy sky
2. Creative community: currently, this postcard project, and how one word or phrase or idea on a postcard I receive becomes the thread I grab for the next two or three poems.
3. Wings. The fierce feeling of the wind in the eyes in the moments before leaping.
4. Last night the hamster cage was left open. I am grateful that Jon found Afil before Fred the Cat did.
5. Shuffling. How the pieces can fit together in many different ways. Sometimes I get afraid to shift things around for fear I’ll set the whole thing crumbling, but new patterns begin to emerge instead, new ways of making it all work.
May we walk in Beauty!
“Is the wind at your back?” asked my friend Saheeb when I saw him today. Â “Are you dancing?”
What a marvelous greeting!
How is the universe conspiring to show you your truest self? Â
Is the sun shining on your face?
Have you answered the invitation to heal the world?
What does the rhythm of the cosmos tell you?
Is the wind at your back?
Are you finding the keys to your desires?
Are you dancing?
Gratitude List:
1. Â Helpful questions from a compassionate heart
2. Â Reminders that sometimes it’s okay to stall, to rest, to wait, to pause: this is different from paralysis or stagnation, though it’s hard for me sometimes to tell the difference.
3. Â Playing with the stones at the shop. Â I named one large piece of iron ore The Stone of the Waking Dragon
4. Â Staying attuned and awake. Â This is a blessing and also painful, but still I am grateful to be awake and awakening, to be part of it all.Â
5. Â Two five-egg days in a row!
May we walk in Beauty.
This is Saturday’s poem. It is so easy for me sometimes to let myself feel caught or bound by the whims of fate, or by other people’s expectations. I often forget the principle that when I feel stuck, it’s usually my doing. Here’s a poem about that feeling.
The fingers, the wickets, the Bandaids, the rut,
Raspberry jam on a three-year-old’s face,
It’s where I am in the middle with you,
Between that rock and hard place.
I’m rubber, Baby, you’re glue.
You know what happens when that stuff
bounces off me toward you.
You have me cornered in this muddle, this muck,
Wheels spinning in the mud,
Won’t you get me unstuck?
Prompt for Sunday
I’m going to leave the prompt open-ended today and see what finds me. Join me?
Gratitude List:
1. Sparkly greens
2. Kale burritos
3. Hard questions to consider
4. Always something more to learn
5. That singing purr of a warm cat on my lap.
May we walk in beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 