This is the post I wrote for my rosary group today, part 2 of 3:
Crown of Thorns Novena Day 36 , Thursday, 29 January 2026 Glorious Mysteries: Walking the Pathway of the Resurrection
On this pathway, we walk through the Garden of Resurrection, the Ascension (Enlightenment), the Coming of the Spirit, the Mother’s Assumption (Dormition), and the Coronation of the Queen of Heaven.
I love the word Somatic. It basically just means “of or relating to the body.” I extend it to mean embodiment. My heart’s desire prayers in recent novenas has been focused on embodiment issues, exploring how I live my feelings in my body, how I move and inhabit my body as I age into this next stage of menopause, how I build my strength, how I experience the world through my senses, how I learn to love and really treasure this body I am in. I am almost 60, about to start my Third Act, and I want to cooperate with and listen to my body as I step onto this stage. I want to keep her healthy as long as I can, and to (as Mary Oliver puts it), “Let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.”
Speaking of stages, I haven’t actually been on dramatic stages much at all since I was the rose seller in Oliver, and sister Berthe in The Sound of Music at Lancaster, PA’s Fulton Theater in my early twenties. But I remember some of the things that bloomed in me when we did warm-up exercises in theater classes. Walk like a giant. Walk like a cow. Walk like a toddler discovering the world. And suddenly, as I walked like a giant, in my five-foot human body, I was a giant, then a cow, then a toddler. For today’s “lesson,” we walk like someone completely unashamed.
After yesterday’s discussion of Shame in the Sorrowful Mysteries, I wonder if we could resurrect some of the certainty and belonging and confidence and courage that inhabits a body unencumbered by shame, simply by walking or standing (or sitting or lying) as someone without shame. What does it feel like in your body to stand without shame? To walk with confidence? To hold your head and shoulders as if what you are saying deserves to be heard?
Sometimes it helps to have an image to work with. I picture Eleanor Roosevelt’s calmly confident face, Harriet Tubman’s fierce belonging, Greta Thunberg’s truth-telling. I picture the Sun card from one of my tarot decks: a person standing, feet shoulder width apart, face and heart lifted to the sun, arms out to the sides in a receiving gesture.
Practice: Try this Somatic/Embodiment Exercise.
Stand with your feet shoulder width apart. (Or, if standing is not an option, you can do this to the best of your ability from a sitting or lying position. It’s about what you feel in your body, after all.) Settle. Breathe. Rest in the Mother’s Arms. Breathing, straighten your spine. Roll or shake your shoulders and let them drop slightly. Breathing, feel your feet on the earth (or the floor or the bed). Send roots down into the earth. Breathing, tilt your face toward the sun (even if it is a cloudy day and you have no windows). Breathing, lift your heart toward the sun. Breathing, open your arms wide, receiving the sun into your body. Feel comfort and courage and confidence fill you. Let belongingness fill you.
Breathe it in.
If you feel any of those shame-messages whispering in your head, turn each one into a raindrop, and let it drip from your fingers into the earth. How does confidence and courage and shamelessness feel within your body? What color is it? Does it have a shape or temperature? A voice? A name? Where in your body do you feel it most strongly? Now move—walk or shrug or dance or just feel it in your face—with shameless ease. You are worthy. You deserve to be here, to take up space, to speak your mind.
Here is my post for The Way of the Rose Novena today:
Crown of Thorns Novena Day 35 , Wednesday, 28 January 2026 Sorrowful Mysteries: You Do Not Have to Take the Shame They Hand You
Today we walk the rooms of the Sorrowful Mysteries: Agony of Anticipated Trauma, Pain of Scourging, Shameful Crown of Thorns, Carrying the Burden, and Death.
After the agony, after the pain, comes the public shaming, mocking, and humiliation of the Crown of Thorns, the shadowy reversals, the gaslighting. The propaganda. The victim-blaming. The outright lies.
Stripped naked, beaten, and put on trial, forced to listen to the Authorities build their narrative against you: This is who you said you were, but we know better. You thought you were so great. He said he was the King. They’re not protestors and protectors; they’re domestic terrorists and violent extremists. She tried to run him over. He brandished a gun. They deserved to be shot. She’s a witch: Burn her! He’s a heretic: Execute him! What was she wearing? He had it coming. You deserved it. You’re too fat, too thin. Too driven, too lazy. Not worthy.
It’s nothing new, this tendency of Empire and authority and patriarchy to twist its evils into shame poured on the victims. You can’t believe the evidence of your senses. Order is more important than empathy. How dare you question the established order of things?
Shaming is meant to make you feel small. Powerless. Helpless. Unable and unworthy to stand up to power. Shaming makes you question your truth at the deepest levels. Makes you doubt yourself.
The truth is, if I accept the shame they offer me, then I have handed the narrative to others to take power over me. I’ve given away my agency, abdicated my responsibility for my own life. I’ll spend my days cringing, worrying that someone will see my true shameful self, instead of living into my own blossoming, into my power to create goodness in the world around me.
Practice:
Settle. Breathe. Rest in the Mother’s arms.
Can you bear to list (in your head or on paper) the messages you have been told (by the culture, by others, by yourself) about why you should feel shame? If you can, write them or remember them in your quiet space in the presence of the Mother.
[Here are some of mine, for full disclosure, and probably over-sharing. Note that not all of them are true, or shameful. They’re just what I’ve been handed. I’m messy, chaotic, lazy, a hoarder. I’m too fat, too distractable, too loud, too emotional. I make decisions too fast, and I work too slow. I have hurt people’s feelings, ignored people who needed my attention, and made a fool of myself trying to be the center of attention. More and more and more. . .]
Stop.
Feel her tender gaze upon you. At some of these items on your list, can you see her shake her head, hear her tell you how very worthy you are? At others, you can hear her chuckle: “Darling One, you try so very hard. Rest now.” Or, “This is not you at all, only what others try to make you believe about yourself.” And maybe after one or two: “Let’s work on that one together, you and I.” Remind yourself that she loves you no matter what, that she will always love you, that you do not have to DO anything or perform anything to be worthy of her love. If you wrote a list of things you have been told to be ashamed of: burn it, or flush it, or put it under a rock.
(Note: I would like to say also that I don’t think shaming is always inappropriate. For instance, right now I want to say, “Shame on the leaders who are authorizing and encouraging kidnapping, terror, and death. Shame on the ones who hurt our children! Shame on the ones who execute people in the street, on the ones who break into people’s houses, on the ones who kidnap children and use them as bait, on the ones who refuse to see all people as our neighbors.”)
My online Rosary Group, The Way of the Rose, is currently contemplating the Sorrowful Mystery of the Scourging, which I call The House of Pain, for our 54-day novena, which will take us to Solstice. Today was my turn to meditate on the Joyful Mysteries in this context:
The rosary unsettles me, jars me, and shakes me up. Even as it provides a thread to follow, consistently, carefully, into the narrative of my life, like Ariadne’s Red Thread that guides the seeker through the labyrinth, step by step, bead by bead, it leads me into Rooms of Mystery where I am not always sure I am prepared to go. I balk in the doorways.
Joyful Mysteries? How can I dare to enter those rooms when children are still dying in Gaza, when innocent, hard-working people are being abducted from our streets by masked men, when a friend dies of cancer? And yet I walk into the room of the Garden of Yes, and then I Visit the House of my Beloved, and on into the following rooms, and I learn something about joy, how joy is woven into the cloth of my rages and sorrows and fears, how choosing joy is truly an act of resistance in the face of death-dealing and war-mongering, greed and tyranny.
And Sorrow? How can I enter those rooms again, feel the dread of a dead-weight in the pit of my stomach, to relive the traumas I hold in my bones? Yet each time I walk through the caverns of sorrow, I am healed yet again, brought through to the rooms of Glory, the resurrecting, the re-awakening, the re-imagining of life on the other side.
And here, in these days, we have the extra layer of unease, discomfiture and disorientation, walking through the rooms of the Joyous Mysteries even as we meditate on the Scourging, on the pain. It can feel like a cracking and dissolving of the psyche, stepping into two rooms at once, yet the work of Joy as Resistance, the holding of Sorrow even as I allow Joy to infuse my spirit, is not a brokenness and a fracturing, but a healing of the disparate pieces of my psyche, allowing me to be more fully human. There is teaching in this paradox, a chance to learn to live in the liminal spaces, in the betweens, where the possibilities merge and mingle.
In this novena, we sit in the House of Pain (my phrase for the mystery of the Scourging), yet even in this place is a joyful Garden of Yes, a House of my Beloved, a village of my Birth, a place of Blessing by the elders, and a Finding my feet on the temple floor. Finding joy in moments of pain is not toxic positivity, a refusal to experience the pain. Instead, it’s an acknowledgement of the complexity of life, not just that we go through cycles of joy and pain and resurrection, but that these cycles are overlaid upon each other, that our humanity equips us to live with such complexity.
I rework my Hail Marys each novena to reflect my heart’s desire prayer, each decade a slightly different version of the prayer. During this novena, one of my prayers is to Persephone: “Holy Persephone, help me to reclaim and heal and integrate the pieces of myself within your cycles of transformation.”
May we reclaim, heal, and integrate our lamenting and our celebrating selves, our longing and our satisfied selves, our despairing and our hopeful selves, as we walk through these caverns and rooms into the Solstice.
Practice: Sit quietly and settle into your breath. Feel your roots anchoring you to Mother Earth. In your mind’s eye, follow the torch-bearer through the twisting underground passages to a wooden doorway. You know this door. You have entered it before, the door to the House of Pain. Take a good deep breath, knowing that when you enter, you will only need to face the pain you are ready to face, knowing that you carry within you the mysteries of joy. Picture Joy as a shining stone you carry in your hand. Feel its weight and its heft. The torch-bearer hands you the keys and you open the door. Keep breathing deeply as you enter, and straighten your shoulders. Speak to yourself: I am resilient and strong. I have the tools within me to face the pain. Find rest within yourself here. Listen for the messages the pain has to tell you, even as you hold fiercely to joy. Stay only as long as you feel able. Breathe. Square your shoulders. Walk into the new day.
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.
This is the second of three pieces of writing on the rosary, which I am doing this week for The Way of the Rose Dark Mysteries Novena. Today is the Joyful Mysteries.
Mysteries of the Darkness Novena Day 40. Joyful Mysteries:
Everything seems to begin in a garden.
In the traditional narrative of the Mysteries, both Sorrow and Glory begin in gardens. I imagine the Garden of Sorrows to be an arboretum of sorts, with lined pathways and small groves of trees covering the hillside. And in my imagination the Garden of Resurrection—perhaps its my childhood experience of Easter and its daffodils and amaryllis and sprays of flowering tree branches—is filled with flowers. And I have chosen to place the first step in the Joyful Mysteries, the moment of contact between maiden and angel, in a garden, a Garden of Yes, a place where I, the one about to embark on the journey, get to choose whether I will accept the tasks ahead of me. Because to do inner work, to make my spiritual practices live beyond the mere rote doing and saying of them, is to consent to the constant journey of transformation.
A garden is a space somewhere between wilderness and domesticity, with even the most carefully pruned and shaped garden remaining ungovernable at some level. I like the wilder looking ones, where there is evidence of human interaction with the wild, but the plants also seem to be offering their opinion on how the space should be.
My heart, too, is a garden, a space between the wildlands and the tame, where emotions and dreams grow not entirely wild. I tend them, shape them, and honor their presence, but I do not bully them or subjugate them, at least when I am at my most open-hearted. And they have a say in what my garden becomes.
And these myths and stories of Mystery which we use to anchor the decades of our daily practice are also gardens. As we individually take up the care of them, each one’s garden will look different. Each telling is transformed a little, as when the light hits in just a certain way in a mostly shaded corner of a garden.
In the Joyful Mysteries, whether you call it the Annunciation or Yes or The Budding, we begin again, fresh in the knowledge that while we cannot choose the circumstances of our lives, we do get to consent to the tasks we take upon us for the journey.
I enter the garden. There is a shining light, or a purple shadow against the grass, or a little bird, or a sound of bells, and a Question: Will you take this journey? Will you let it transform you, knowing there will be wonders ahead and discoveries to make, sorrows aplenty, and enlightenment on the other side?
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
Today it was my turn to write the reflection for the Novena Page at The Way of the Rose Facebook Group. Our theme for this Novena is Liminal Space, and today’s part of the three-day cycle is the Glorious Mysteries. I began with a poem, so that will double as my poem for the day. Here is what I wrote:
The Liminal Space Glorious Mysteries, Day 21
Standing here in this moment between the past and the future this liminal space this threshold this doorway between what was and what will be between what we bring and what we take between the breath of a moment ago and the breath of a moment to come we PAUSE.
Open this window in time and rest here. Feel its elasticity, let it spread out, breathe into the bubble of now.
Mindfulness practices are, I think, about the liminal space of this moment, when we are always standing on the doorstep, feeling the memory that tugs us from behind, and the awareness of a future that draws us forward, and then releasing those insistent calls in order to stand: Right here. Right now.
Past and future are not irrelevant, but they fade. We know we must tend to them both, but not now. Not just right at this moment. And this liminal consciousness is not procrastination, not avoidance of the Real Work of remembering and doing and making and creating and healing. It’s a gathering, a building up, like the gathering of a wave, like the potent silence between orchestral movements, like the hush before the first bird sings into the dawn.
Every day of a novena is a liminal moment, a standing on a threshold between two points in our journey. Today is the Glorious Mysteries, a space of becoming in between yesterday’s sorrows and tomorrow’s joys. Yesterday, we stood between joy and glory, contemplating the weight of the challenge in the place of Sorrows. Tomorrow, we hold the birthing and growing self, knowing we’ve passed through a rich stage of becoming, that the coming day will hold sorrows aplenty. And each day, we set aside the mysteries of past and future for just a moment as we enter the labyrinth of the day’s mysteries.
Some exercises for holding the space of the moment: Take three deep breaths. After each in-breath, hold the breath inside you for a couple beats. After each out-breath, wait a couple beats before taking a new, full breath. Feel what it feels like to be filled with (in-spired) with the breath of life. Feel what it feels like to be an empty vessel, empty of air.
Stand in a doorway, or find a portal in a woods, a space between two trees or where a branch leans down around you, or a shining shaft of sunlight on a trail. Stand in that space, perfectly still. Feel the past behind you tugging at your memory. Feel the future ahead of you, pulling you forward. Then let those feelings fall around you like a carpet of autumn leaves and stand in the moment. Do a sensory check. What do you smell? What do you hear? What colors and textures do you see? What is the taste on your tongue? What do you feel on your skin?
Do a three-card tarot reading, and keep all three cards face down. The one to your left is the past and memory. The one to your right is the future. Turn over the one in the center. Without looking at a booklet to tell you the meaning, just sit with the image before you. Ask: “Who am I, right now?” Not “What do I bring?” or “What will I take with me from this moment?” Just “Who am I, in this exact moment?” When you’re done, put all three cards back in the deck without looking at the other two.
Gratitude List: 1. This moment 2. and this one 3. and this one 4. now this one 5. and this one, too. May we walk in Beauty!
“The ability to sit with mystery and explore the dark but fertile realms of infinite possibility is crucial to the work of inhabiting a meaningful life. We have to learn to stay rooted in the midst of chaotic obscurity, in the shadow-haunted wild places of the psyche. We need these rootings more than ever during the bone-deep metamorphosis that is menopause.” —Sharon Blackie
“To see where you are going, look behind you. The clues are there. Mistakes you have made, patterns you have followed, breakthroughs you have had, ideas that did not turn out as planned: your experience is your guide. It tells you what you may expect on the road ahead. The key is in how much you have learned from the past and how those learnings shape your decisions for the future. Look before you leap: look back to see what may come.” —Steven Charleston
“Revolution means reinventing culture.” —Grace Lee Boggs
“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” —Nelson Mandela
For a day, just for one day, Talk about that which disturbs no one And bring some peace into your beautiful eyes. —Hafiz
“Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.” —proverb
“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.” —Rumi
The magic of autumn has seized the countryside; now that the sun isn’t ripening anything it shines for the sake of the golden age; for the sake of Eden; to please the moon for all I know. —Elizabeth Coatsworth
“Revolution means reinventing culture.” –Grace Lee Boggs
Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. It has been another marvelous month. I have felt like the Muse was active more days this month than not, for which I am grateful. I never know when I begin these things whether I am going to hit a wall by day ten and have to slog through to the end. I’m grateful that there was so much to find and follow this month.
I have four more weeks of school, and then I’ll hopefully have time to do some editing. I really want to commit to going through my work and pulling together another book. But I have said that several times in the past few years, so I need to find the Key in order to make it happen.
The rosary prayers go in a cycle of three sets: The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. There is a fourth set that was added by Pope John Paul II, but I haven’t studied those. As I have been praying the rosary since August, I have been meditating on the mysteries as a Path of Initiation to Enlightenment. I believe we are repeating this cycle over and over again in our lives, and the three-day cycle of repetition in the rosary cycle offers a way to meditate on one’s current cycle of transformation.
The Joyful Mysteries are about hearing and accepting the call to transformation: 1. The Annunciation: Hearing the call, meeting the beloved angel being, saying Yes, consenting to the process 2. The Visit with Elizabeth: Mentoring, wise confidante, comfort and counsel 3. The Birth: Stepping onto the path, hatching, the seed bursts forth, the initiation 4. The Elder Blessing: Blessing and commissioning by the priest/priestess, they say: “I have waited my whole life for this!” 5. The Finding in the Temple: Finding the purpose, defining the vision of the initiation story
The Sorrowful Mysteries are about meeting the challenges of the enlightenment journey: 1. The Agony in the Garden: Facing betrayal and abandonment, anxiety about what is to come 2. The Flogging in the Temple: Pain, the reality of betrayal, enduring the torture 3. The Crown of Thorns: Being shamed and mocked, standing shameless in the face of taunting 4. The Bearing of the Cross: Picking up the work that must happen even in the midst of trauma and anguish 5. Death: Death, loss, symbolic death, end of old life and way of being
The Glorious Mysteries are about stepping into the truth of the new way: 1. Resurrection: Symbolic rebirth, restoration, revivifying, re-energizing, re-awakening 2. Ascension into Heaven: Stepping back onto the path with Enlightenment in sight 3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit: Tongues of fire, new language, deep connection to Spirit, recollection of “This is my Beloved Child in whom I am well pleased.” 4. The Assumption of the Virgin: Taking up the priestessing role, putting on the mantle 5. The Coronation of the Virgin: The Summoning to the coronation of the Queen, living in the glory of the Mystery
This past summer, when I felt caught in cycles of unrelenting Sorrowful Mysteries, it was a comfort to meditate every three days on the process of meeting the challenges and then to remind myself that the Glorious Mysteries follow. And of course, while this is a linear telling, there’s also a layering quality, a sense in which we live all the stages at once.
Gratitude List: 1. Denise Levertov’s poetry 2. Writing practice. I long to have a writer’s life, but in the meantime, I can carve out time for a consistent writing practice 3. Circles of beloved community 4. The quiet misty green of the grove in the morning 5. Always new things to learn May we walk in Beauty!
“Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are world of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” —Richard Rohr
“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” —Georgia O’Keeffe
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit
“The child’s hand Folding these wings Wins no wars and ends them all. “ ―Thomas Merton
“I never sanction violence. Never. But I wonder how we got to the point when destruction of property deserves greater coverage and a greater portion of our attention than the destruction of human life. Since when do shattered windows matter more than shattered spines, shattered voice boxes, and shattered dreams? When did we become a people who mourn the destruction of things over the destruction of lives?” —Omid Safi
Today’s prompt is to write an ekphrastic poem, to take a piece of art, and to write a poem about it. All month, I have been writing a poem, and then creating a piece of AI art to go with it. As I began to create a piece of AI art to use for this prompt, the poem approached. Before I managed to create a piece of art, the poem had found its way to my notes, and so I created the art to go with the poem that went with a piece of artwork that I had imagined. And so it goes: Which comes first?
Which came first: the image or the word, the sound or the sense, the egg or the bird?
Did it happen with BANG or “Begin,” with the seed or the dream, with poem or picture, with to say, or to seem?
A project, a poem, a world comes to be in the nodes where the lines of word and image cross, the woven fibers of vision and voice interlocking, and in the silence and darkness between, meaning–like water– trickles into the spaces, into the interstices, of the living, breathing tapestry.
Becoming becomes, word takes shape and image speaks, and something new comes into being.
Gratitude List: 1. Every day right now: November Roses! 2. People telling their stories 3. The buck who whuffed at me in the grove 4. Cardinal singing in the cherry tree 5. Words and images May we walk in Beauty!
“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.” ―Gandalf
Let the rain come and wash away the ancient grudges, the bitter hatreds held and nurtured over generations. Let the rain wash away the memory of the hurt, the neglect. Then let the sun come out and fill the sky with rainbows. Let the warmth of the sun heal us wherever we are broken. Let it burn away the fog so that we can see each other clearly. So that we can see beyond labels, beyond accents, gender or skin color. Let the warmth and brightness of the sun melt our selfishness. So that we can share the joys and feel the sorrows of our neighbors. And let the light of the sun be so strong that we will see all people as our neighbors. Let the earth, nourished by rain, bring forth flowers to surround us with beauty. And let the mountains teach our hearts to reach upward to heaven.
Amen. ―Rabbi Harold Kushner
I place in the hands of Time these stones: the story of this day, the people I have been near to, the songs the Fates have whispered in my ears, the colors that haunt me.
See how they turn to mist, how they glow for a moment– red, then golden, then blue– then dissipate like ash blown by a wind before I can register that they have lost their substance.
Where does memory go when it flows out with the tide, when it slips down the drain, when it is blown out with the morning fog?
I am still the child in the forest, walking blind through the swirling mists, under the shadows of the great trees. With each forward step on the trail, a little bird flutters from the pathway behind, a bread crumb in its beak. ―Beth Weaver-Kreider
“When I stopped trying to change you, you changed me.” ―Rachel Macy Stafford
I’m not Catholic, but I pray the rosary. I had been intending to learn the prayers and explore the process (very intellectualized, I know), and then my father got very sick. On the weekend that he was receiving a risky treatment simply to try to save his life, I picked up the rosary and my little booklet into which I had scribbled my versions of the rosary prayers, and I learned. In desperation and need of grounding and comfort, I began to say the Aves and the Love Prayer (the Our Father), holding desperately to the beads. When I had no words for the mix of terrible anxiety and holy presence I was feeling, I walked the path of the beads.
Perdita Finn and Clark Strand, in their book The Way of the Rose, speak about holding the beads as holding the hand of The Mother. Comfort and peace and tenderness upwelling in the midst of whatever life is bringing: crisis or joy, or the quotidian rhythms of the day.
Here is my version of the Our Father. It changes every once in a while, as praying it brings me new insights into what I mean when I say the words. I’ve gotten a little wordy on the sign-off, but that’s my own flourish. It feels right to me:
Oh Love, which imbues the cosmos, Holy is thy name. May thy realm come. May thy will be done, here on earth as it is in the heavens, and within the sacred circle. Grant unto us this day what we need to survive, and lead us ever into right relationship with you and with others and with the all. Keep us from walking in paths of destruction, and deliver us from evil. For thine is the Wisdom and the Vision and the Virtue, the Promise and the Presence and the Peace, the Glory and the Story and the Song, both now and forever. Amen.
Lately, when I say the line, “Draw us ever closer into right relationship,” I see in my mind’s eye several of the people who have hurt me. Of course, I mean them when I pray that line–still, they intrude upon my peaceful prayers. Today, when it began to happen, I invited them in. I had also been thinking about how this is the day of the Archangels, the Feast of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. And so, instead of simply holding the idea of being drawn into right relationship with them, I asked the archangels to invite their angels to witness my prayers.
It feels really weird to write that, but it felt so right in the moment, and continues to feel right. My rosary prayers also became more lively, more awake, more focused. I felt safe (who doesn’t feel safe when surrounded by angels and Mother Mary?). It feels like the line in the Psalm: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” I’ll admit, when I got to “Keep us from walking the paths of destruction,” I found myself talking very directly to their angels, and “Deliver us from evil” has a new sort of ring when you say it in presence of the angels of people who have harmed you.
I don’t know whether there will ever be reconciliations and restorations on this plane. I’ve walked away from that door. I won’t wait around for that to happen, and making it happen will take a great deal of work on someone else’s part at this point. But I might continue to invite their angels to the table of my prayers.
Gratitude List: 1. Angels 2. Art 3. The rosary 4. Always something new to learn, some new way to deepen 5. Celebrating thirty-two years with my soul-mate. Such a good, good man. May we be draw ever into right relationships.
“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who you are and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” —Maya Angelou
“Sometimes it seems as though the Wildest One (you might call her God, or the Universe, or Love) is actively meddling in the affairs of mortals, like I am given a thing to learn, and then immediately after am handed the situations necessary for practice and integration.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“You don’t need to attend every argument you are invited to.” —anonymous (possibly Zig Ziglar
“It’s hard to be mad at someone who misses you while you’re asleep.” —Calvin, of Hobbes (Bill Watterson)
i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings;and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any– lifted from the no of all nothing–human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened) ―e. e. cummings, read by Anne Marie at our wedding on this day in 1990
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” ―Joseph Chilton Pearce
“If music be the food of love, play on.” ―William Shakespeare
“At the still point, there the dance is.” ―T.S. Eliot
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.” ―Leonard Bernstein
“To speak about that location from which work emerges, I choose familiar politicized language, old codes, words like ‘struggle, marginality, resistance.’ I choose these words knowing that they are no longer popular or ‘cool’ – hold onto them and the political legacies they evoke and affirm, even as I work to change what they say, to give them renewed and different meaning. I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance – as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.” From the essay: ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness;’ From the Book: “Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics” (1989 ) by bell hooks
Mockingbird Chronicles 