The infinite variety of spring weather has reminded me how quickly change arrives, establishes itself, and moves us along to new perspectives.
We’ve enjoyed peaceful canoe trips down the sun-sparkling river, hiked in snowfalls at the park and along the trail, and sighed through rainy days from cozy indoor sofas and cushions. (But we are utterly thankful for every drop of moisture we receive, and relishing each cool day and night, knowing drought and heat may visit soon.)
And the spring blossoms continue erupting in their joyful rising, no matter how the weather pleases or torments them, and because of this, they are my current teachers of choice.
Our news is besieged by dark and threatening politics, once again, and I’ve renewed my commitment to the practices that anchor my hope and peace most reliably: meditation, exercise, writing, listening, noticing, reading books and viewing programs that nourish my spirit, and staying in touch with my beloved and profound friends, who continually replenish the love I experience and am able to share. And laughing, a lot.
Phillip and I have been seeking new hiking adventures every week, and celebrating our sweet life with the four-leggeds as simply and deeply as our gratitude deserves. This week, we had a merry party on Easter, and again on Phillip’s birthday, and every day begins with our Morning Party for the pups. (Well, actually, morning begins with Murphy-time, when we lavish love on our dear boy and let him know he’s precious and remarkable. It’s hard to believe he may be our last cat, after decades with many fine felines enriching and sharing our lives.)
Such light-filled acts remind us that we can reject the stories telling us how horrible and hopeless the world and its people are; we can choose to see and join the heroes and heroines among us, the people creating positive changes, the fighters and helpers who know good change can come from good trouble. Life isn’t easy at all, but beauty, love, and hope are always ours for the taking and sharing, while we protect our own vision of the world we’re creating.
Like the spring blossoms, our right to live in loving contentment and be the hopeful, joyful people we are by nature, will not be dampened by the storms of those so damaged by life that they can only seek to spread their pain and ignorance, threatening to overwhelm us with their lies, darkness, and frankly, boring visions. As with winter’s snow storms, the time of hate and its depressing adherents is passing, and a season of color and change is coming. It needs our focus, awareness, and continual support to be realized.
Spring blooms may appear fragile, but their ability to weather ice, snow, rain, and freezing sleet belies that appearance. Let us be the buds withstanding the cold and misery to rise, resilient and brilliant in our necessary rainbow of blossoming, as strong as steel, as life-giving as hope, and as enduring as democracy.
Our sweet Fiona, the little black cat I always wanted, had a challenging night and morning; we’ve been noticing her decline for months but this morning was distressing for her. So we held her close to our hearts until we could see the vet.
I told Fiona her story again, and thanked her for all the blessings she’s given to our lives. She was 14, so there were many adventures to recount.
I think the best stories invite our transformation into the people we imagine ourselves to be, the lovers of life we’re called to be, because we’re here with gifts to share and the world needs them.
My 4-legged companions have nudged me into becoming a far better person than I’d have been without their light and deep acceptance of what is. They have patiently reminded me, over and over, that action and contemplation are equal partners in a deeply-lived life.
And Fiona was my contemplative Mother Superior and guide all her life, but especially in these past few years of her failing health. We seemed to need each other during those pre-dawn hours of sleeplessness. We sat together in the candlelit kitchen, gently rocking through those hours leading to the new day, and she offered me her master lessons in letting go, listening, and sharing peace.
Love is the boat we craft to sail together through life’s mystery, joy, and sorrow.
We make choices that distract and impede the flow of our goodness, and the best stories call us back to living more earnestly and bravely from our hearts. The words and imagery of such stories migrate to our spirit, sow their seeds, and yield awakenings throughout our lives, if we look for them.
Fiona’s story invited me to come home to myself, to sift through the clutter and noise of the world and allow my spirit to focus only on this: the unique blessing of love in our lives, the pain of losing those who offer it to us, and the healing invitation to use our grief to integrate our beloveds’ stories into our being and choices.
We dishonor love that doesn’t lead to greater love.
Fiona’s life was a treasure from beginning to this day’s ending. She offered our lives both gentleness and strength in admirable balance, practicing stillness and peace and offering these in abundance. She was a shy being with a core of steel. She made her needs known and offered her extremely loving gratitude when they were met.
Today, she asked us to allow her little body to rest and her spirit to be free. And so we loved her through this parting.
But we’ll keep her story and all the ways it delighted and changed us, and the ways it made our story so beautiful for a time, and now, forever.
I welcome your loving energy; as you know, these partings pare away and minimize the shiny lies and constructs we create to hide the truth that life is far harder and infinitely more simple than we accept. We are raw. We hurt. We need to pay attention to and nurture our healing. And each other’s.
May we be mindful of the story we are writing with our lives and the ways it feeds or deprives others of their fullness, joy, and peace. May we be kind. Like Fiona, may we faithfully tend our peace, and offer it in abundance.
I stand on the back deck, cradling my vigilant puppy. This is our morning ritual— looking down to the winter-buried gardens, then across the river, and over the snow-begowned hills, searching for deer, eagles, turkeys, squirrels, the lumbering possums or leaping rabbits who live beneath the lower deck.
Yesterday, the red-tailed hawk fired itself into the huddle of tender, slender-tailed mourning doves gathered at the feeder, coos and cries and feathers exploding as one of their own was carried off, transforming from guest to meal, from dove to hawk, in an instant.
Life turns and turns through such mysteries, and we too may be so suddenly forced to change roles, to die to another’s need, to explode like a star, or feathers, into something unconsidered yet life-giving, our old self an offering, not to death, but given as the price of passage to strange new beginnings, startling connections and transmutations springing from our seeming end.
Stardust and doves, hawks and beloveds, boulders and roses and oceans— consuming, consumed: there is no death but only, always, merging transformation, and here we are, flowering in different gardens, flying in unfamiliar skies.
This morning, the doves swept away at our first steps, a hushed fluttering of linear flight to their favorite mulberry tree, stringing themselves like prayer beads across the bare branches, backlit by sunrise colors…
And I wondered what their prayer or mine would be: To avoid transformation, feed on our fears and the safety of sameness, withholding the life we’re designed to offer?
Or to willingly meet our devouring hawk, surrender to the wild pain of translation and, reconfigured, flow to the next mystery beyond, the infinite surprise of who we are and are becoming?
At Full Moon Cottage, this final week before Christmas feels temperate and calm. I think our willingness to listen, pay attention, and be present to ourselves and each other has greatly improved our enjoyment of this wonderful season over our years together. We’ve slowed down, honoring our choices regarding how we’ll use our time and energy.
Not that it hasn’t taken decades to ingrain these practices, but to look back and see we’ve evolved beyond our younger, more frenetic holiday rhythms is gratifying.
Time’s pace speeds up as we age; the long anticipation of events that childhood seemed to prolong vanishes, and the past accrues the bulk of our lives in the blink of an eye. The velocity of passing days may reduce our ability to distinguish one from the next. The future—all those attractive enticements, important goals, and necessary appointments planned out on our calendars—stampedes toward us with maniacal haste, rushing headlong over our present days to join our growing memories, which themselves begin to feel unsorted and nondescript. Life can flatten a bit, and we yearn for the magical sparks that shot through the days of our childhood, making each shine with its specific enchantments.
I am a creature of routine. Organizing my hours and days and marshaling them to reach goals, accomplish tasks, create and cross jobs off lists, and establish a known and reliable rhythm to keep my existence humming the tune I’d composed for it, seemed a key part of my life’s essence from a very early age.
The discipline and intellectual challenges of Catholic schooling may have elicited this military approach to my relationship with the time given me, or perhaps my tight scheduling of how I could “best” use my energy fed familial, or my own original addictions to control, to please, to gain recognition, to be loved.
But I remember my parents gently trying to curb my pursuit of busy perfection and rigid routine, so I suspect these tendencies came nestled in my being at birth, integral to my own my original blessings, thorns, and teachers. We arrive, it seems, with our own lessons in hand, and then spend a lifetime growing or diminishing our spirits according to the choices we make to live from our particular shadows or light.
Using one’s skills to accomplish goals, to serve, to bring order to one’s life and greater communities is a gift, of course, in many ways. Aimlessness is not a fruitful or recommended path in life. My own inclinations to organize, control, and achieve, however, weren’t always or even primarily driven by self-love or equanimity, but by a panicked sense of deficit and the poison of unearned guilt. Mostly, I think I was driven by fear.
I moved and changed schools 5 times by the end of 6th grade, which made me quite adept at burying myself until I figured out who people wanted me to be, afraid of rejection, afraid of being the smart girl, of beating boys in races, of making mistakes, of being excluded and friendless.
Fear of being judged, or receiving a poor review, of being shamed for a failure to exceed expectations…these don’t create a path to healthy self-acceptance or an embracing tolerance of one’s very human limitations. Instead, they create stress and illness.
And chaining our energy to relentless doing, especially fueled by fear, makes a life pass quickly, constantly chasing the vanishing future, missing the once-in-a-lifetime miracles of now, this moment, its music, light, shadow, and invitations to notice and deepen. We lose the wonder of childhood, that vital magical aspect of ourselves we must retain for times like these, when new questions must be asked and authoritarians challenged. Someone brave as a child has to point out the Emperor has no clothes.
Gradually, life lessons, losses, conscious choices and earnest self-reflection taught me how to pursue the sacred practices of balance, of gentleness, of letting go, of listening, of lightness, of an openness to life as it will come, without my need to corral my days into productivity and list-elimination. I am still learning.
My partner in reclaiming life’s delight, in rediscovering each day’s specific enchantments and allowing them time and space to shine, in loosening or tightening life’s rhythm in service to our healing and wholeness, has made all the difference in my life’s trajectory. I’m deeply grateful for the gift of his presence in my life, and that of the 4-leggeds and other beloveds, human and winged, rooted, and finned, teachers all, and each a Messenger who has brought me invitations to grow in ways I hadn’t imagined, and brought vivid sparks back to my days.
How do we fuel peace in our hearts, especially during this holy season of breathing out what needs release from the past year and breathing in the questions, peace, and sacred stamina for the next? In a world so noisy with hatred, greed, and fear, how do we rest in winter’s shelter and grow our joyful energy for a new round of seasons? How do we set down our fears, judgements, feelings of scarcity and unworthiness to live in the abundance of possibility each moment offers?
I’ve been thinking about the role and power we give to Yes and No throughout our lives, about unexpected Messengers with life-changing invitations, and how those can lead to world-changing results. If more people gave weight to their discernment of issues requiring their Yes or No, would the world be facing the troubles it is?
What a gift in these dark days, to have the celebration of Christmas, to dance again with the startling metaphor of Yes, the life-changing, world-changing assent offered by a young woman—a girl, really—confronted by a strange, frightening Messenger, who brought an invitation so unexpected and astonishing that logic and fear would lead most of us to reject it outright, turn from it, refocus on the safe drudgery of sameness, do our repeated tasks and cross them off the list leading us to our death (in every sense the word).
Nothing about the Christmas story makes sense; all of it is a mystery that holds great joy and deep love, resilience, and the persistence to endure the darkness, birthing our inborn light and capacity to love more than we hate. We are all poor and unmoored together; we need each other for safe harbor, for sustenance, for the wealth and magic created by our combined gifts, for celebrations to happen and matter under stars blazing brighter than anyone’s power to make us fearful.
What a gift to hang lights, sing beautiful music, offer and receive presents, celebrate the birth of a Jewish babe born to a family living in what we call Palestine, to recognize again the essential human act of moving across false barriers to form relationship, to renew our belief that the greatest gift of life is that it allows us to change, to evolve, and to love: across all impediments, through our flaws, around our differences, over our fears, and straight into light.
May we say No to those who tell us to give up on the world and each other, to our own fears’ repetition of our failures, imperfections, and unworthiness.
And let us say Yes to our beloved Messengers (and be one to others); may we always be open to those who push us to be ourselves, to slow down, to take holy risks, to let each moment shine with its specific enchantments. Let us say Yes to those surprising invitations that startle our hearts and imaginations, trusting that life-changing, world-changing miracles can unfold when we walk into darkness and allow our love to spark fires that blaze as bright as stars.
Say Yes.
Be not afraid.
The first gift I received this season was a box FULL of beautiful colored bottles from my faraway friend, Snowbird. It was like receiving a box of brilliant light. 💕
Joy to your gatherings and moments of solitude this lovely time of year. Give time and blessing to your endings, and dreams, and tender, wild beginnings.
A blessed Thanksgiving to all celebrating, gathering with beloveds, lifting hearts in gratitude, turning towards joy, healing, and peace. May we hold in love those who are denied all these good things by their own or others’ choices. May our thoughts and actions have their genesis in mercy, and may wisdom shape our silence and words. May we not hate, but work—always—for deeper love and justice, within, without.
By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined the sacred as distant and inaccessible, when in fact, we are steeped in its burning layers. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Happy new morning, blessed new week. May we use more of our time on this beautiful planet to make art, make music, make joy, make love, make connections, make time for listening, and especially, to make peace: in our spirits, our families, our communities, our world.
This dark autumn day, steel-rippled skies above a world shot with the colors of farewell, you could walk into the shadowed ambit of loss we create from the worn palette of hate and travel forever through the season of dying dreams falling like leaves
peace may grow where we bury them
but for now the body turns from crescendos of pain into the silence of falling dreams, stunned by the ways we fail
over and over choosing exile.
Beyond the falling, somewhere in the rising twilight within the mystery of rising itself the voice calling
Exciting news from Full Moon Cottage and all my friends at Tra Publishing:
My new book, Oliver and the Night Giants, will be available Tuesday, October 24, at online sites and in bookstores everywhere.
That night, I’ll be debuting Oliver with a virtual reading/pajama party, courtesy of Miami Dade County Library. Given the world’s time zones, it could also be a midnight snack party, a breakfast party, brunch, tea, or dinner party…but please consider registering here and joining us from wherever you are in the world:
Gracie is ready for any pajama party involving stories and snacks!
Oliver’s nighttime adventure teaches him how he can nurture and protect the fragile seeds of his artistic vision and develop the strength to follow and stay true to his dreams. I would love for children to be encouraged by Oliver to name their gifts, discover their unique art, and explore ways they can grow, tend, and share these with the world.
And I would love for all of us to be empowered by our own creative gifts to continue to mend the world. Never has she needed our love-in-action more.
Here’s to the healing power and love we receive from our inner (and outer) Night Giants, if we listen for their call!
Hope you and your beloveds will have a chance to read and enjoy Oliver’s story. I’ll look forward to hearing readers’ feedback. And if you can leave a positive review on Amazon, that monster arbiter of book sales, I’d be very grateful.
The Earth around us has suffered profoundly this summer from heat, smoke, drought, and the diminishment of pollinators and water life. At times we have felt more like hospice caregivers than gardeners.
Sustaining hope transmuted, as it does with dying, into a kind of dedicated openness to silence, listening, presence, and choosing compassionate actions over those that artificially keep life ticking when it wants to depart beyond struggle.
But if these are our Earth’s agonal breaths, then like all the dying I’ve been graced to witness, tend, and travel beside until the final release, she continues to amaze us with her beauty, her mystery, and her secrets about living that only the dying can send percolating through our bones, our hearts, and possibly our actions.
If we listen and contemplate, we may yet midwife wisdom. Her final gifts. She continues to amaze.
a mustard yellow vase filled with dried lavender would look like peace in this window with this view I thought it would remind me of the autumn we met and knew in the first shared glance and breath and brush of skin how it would be if we simply turned and set out together taking the thousands of steps to now I have not often been wise in this life impetuous choices sudden reaching precipitous consents have rarely led to anything like certain knowing or goodness maybe in the end it doesn’t matter if we fail a million times as long as we’re grateful for the one time we didn’t I know all these many years and steps and blossoms later I found my only way through life in you in your deep well of grace that autumn we met and knew at once how it would lead to this home this window this mustard yellow vase filled with dried lavender and peace
Sometimes I travel so deep within winter’s quiet counsel that I lose my language. My mind detaches and lifts and I float through days and weeks, perhaps the month of February, sensing rhythms beyond and traveling a path towards the secret place of winter wisdom not yet enfleshed by words.
When spring arrives I begin to float closer to the ground, and walk into the world with clearing perception, gradual, mute, till I meet (I always do) a certain April morning and sense the movement of stones rolled away. An opening. Still reaching for language (my eloquent summer speech a distant possibility), I know I’m about to be born into words again.
It happens like this: I’m walking down the trail at dawn and everything changes in a moment– the haze of winter dissipates; winter’s chrysalis shatters, sunlight flashes, strobing through branches, signaling epiphanies, colors inbreak, sounds pulse: birdsong, peepers, buzzes and hums; the early breeze teases forth perfumes of lilacs, cherry blossoms, the soil’s geosmin, that seize and ride my inbreath, shaking loose the memory of language amidst eruptions of buds and blooms, and suddenly the scarlet streak of cardinals, followed by a rise of bluest jays, and brilliant planets of dandelions spangling at my feet; I stop, paused in the roaring river of spring to balance, to breathe, to exit my dreams and merge with all this life.
Questions chirp through my waking mind. “And that?” I ask, “What is that?” “That is green.” “And that?” “That is light.” “And that?” “That is the song of a bird, of life, coming back to itself again.”
I listen to the music of spring; it calls: “Here-now, here-now, here-now.”
I find my words. And out to the garden I go, with newborn sounds, the language of butterflies, to speak of my winter journey, among the robins and daffodils.
Of late, our old cat, Fiona, is waking and calling in the night. We quickly learned that she is best soothed and comforted ro calmness by our companionship, a welcoming lap, loving pats, and a small, handheld dish of water she can sip from contentedly.
The vet has ruled out all physical ailments, but she is 14, and early dementia or vision problems may be involved. So, we take turns getting up at about 3:00 A.M. to sit with her.
Retirement is grand for this, at least for me, because the parameters of time so easily and increasingly fall away. Sleep time, waking time, doing and resting time require no schedule, clocks, or rigid assignment, but only the need to attend to what’s before us as we wish or are called.
I’ve always been an early to bed and an early-rising soul, but 3 AM is a new and magical time for me to breathe awake with the world. Pondering takes different paths, and there’s a deep candlelit quality of peace absent in other hours; it’s softened and spiritually liminal.
Fiona and I sit together in a muted stillness of mutual prayer, and gently allow the time of darkness to flow into the new morning’s light. And then, ever so gradually, we are bathed in a blessing of sunrise.
And, if I feel some weariness as the pups bark their way into the day, and Fiona flees to her lower level queendom, I also feel incredibly grateful for those quiet hours of holy solitude we’ve shared together and the deep lessons Fiona is teaching me about surrender, the wisdom communicated through silence, witnessing the beauty of the Earth’s rhythms, and the profound gifts of sustained and gentle presence.
Gentle Peace.
A sweet guest enjoying some spring blooms!Some blooms our guests did not consume.
A reminder from my publisher that I humbly share: I am sooooo grateful for the kindness of my dear ones and sweet strangers who have purchased my books. And I know many people do not purchase from Amazon for many reasons, and completely understand. I prefer local booksellers, but I also have a Kindle.
But preferences aside, Amazon wields unbelievable power regarding book sales to foreign publishers, book sales to stores, and whether a book sinks or swims at all in its availability to the public.
Beautiful books that could change lives and keep a child’s imagination full of magic die in remainder bins every week, and it breaks my heart to think of all the effort and gift that went into creating them. Authors and publishers are beholden to anyone who can leave a short positive review on Amazon and Goodreads. Truly.
I’m proud of the many creatives who contributed their gifts to “And The People Stayed Home,” and “The Rare, Tiny Flower.” Good reviews help keep us all employed producing the kinds of books we feel are important in the world, so if you purchased one from Amazon and are able to leave a review, thank you so very much.
If you purchased a book and cannot leave a review, thank you so very much, too. And if you didn’t purchase a book, thank you for visiting my blog and supporting my writing.
I was walking the ice down the hill during its diminishment, much as it was walking me, I suppose, during mine. Bright flowers sang, and we spoke of many things: loneliness, mystery, endings, the unfairness and invitations inherent to melting, and we spoke of tangerines. We parted at the river, where the ice, now altered to liquid, and learning new language, trailed and trickled over the stones and the bank and into the flow, disappearing like one who merges with a crowd and is gone. I waved farewell, watching the vapor of our conversation fade, and then, gathering myself together, I walked back up the hill feeling changed, searching for tangerines and my new name.
I remember how the quiet felt, how the silence waved through the day in whispers, in music I could almost hum, how each new day opened, the space of it wide with mystery and hushed meals of questions, how we slouched tentatively towards the horizon, small and outside ourselves moving through a dreamtime, confined and limitless. Stories ended abruptly, pages stopped turning, I think the Earth did, too. And then we grew accustomed to the power of creating our lives from nothing. Benediction, choosing the sacred meaning of our own stories. How would we speak of this time? What would we make of it? Your story, what is your story? Mine is of hope: I chose to plant seeds I scraped the mud of my heart and planted seeds. Fear yields when its voice is sapped by joy stirring possibility with hidden life; you must see that even death dies in a garden. I still choose hope. Plant your seeds, bid them lean to the light and be astonished as your heart, the world, now, bursts into bloom.
Wanted to share this wonderful site with you: J.S. Jen and his daughter Penny clearly love books! Their books, blog, and posts on social media are full of book reviews, videos, parenting tips, giveaways, and wonderful resources for reinforcing gratitude and kindness. Just an excellent site for children and all their adults. 💕 I’m honored to be the featured author this month, and happy to see the spotlight on The Rare, Tiny Flower! https://jsjenbooks.com/feature-of-the-month
When we with the new sun blazed out in the bright world and returned as the days sighed their endings, I cannot say our married lives, still in their green and vertical velocity, at first bore the watermark of inseparability. Two plants in one garden; it always starts that way.
We spoke in the metaphors of marriage; we honored our bond, but filed it among the days’ lists and demands— You were you and I was I; we poured and emptied ourselves into other lives, earnest professions, consuming hours, moments flowing to years, indulging love’s needs when labor released us
to the peace of weekends holidays nightfall and dawn, the feeding times of love, tending the sacraments of presence and touch, the long task and blessing of transmuting twoness: words spoken and heard becoming one story, our roots so strongly interlaced, one day we noticed how we bloomed each other’s flowers.
Our seedlings rose: created, rescued, and saving graces; love’s unexpected physics revealing its expansion into every beloved form; cherished life grows life. Dogs, cats, winged visitors and their trees, our wildlife children, our happy bounty, our holy flowing progeny.
The season of shadowed years and rounded pain arrived; we two midwives, easing and failing to ease our fathers’ farewells, our mothers’ goodbyes, ushering their flights into spirit— our love became respite, harbor, scaffold: we could have fallen deeply darkly apart had our entwined souls not safely caught and held our hearts. Loss may feed or kill a garden. We leaned to the light and became new again, green and growing.
And now these days of dappled blossoms everywhere; I cannot turn but meet our love, the life that we have grown, the dazzling joy our time-tumbling years now yield as daily harvest. How long ago did I become we, did self dissolve, supplanted by this flowering us?
I know the way of gardens, how they ever-change; life rises, life descends. There will be a day when one will wake alone, seeking the known embrace, chilled roots reaching for roots not there. Turn then to the light we become, the music of the world that sings how love can make one of two: within, without, budding here and blooming beyond, in mystery and promise, forever married.
The Valentine People arrived last night. I wondered if it were too soon; the icy winds of winter still blow fiercely through the shadowed sky’s mysteries, and the introspective garden dreams deep beneath the dense and silent snow.
The old man said, “It is never too early to speak of spring, the resurrection of blossoms, or love.”
THE DAILY ROUND 
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