Journey Girl has Sycamore Friends

There we are — the three of us — Dave, Sue, and John under the big old apple tree in our back yard at 628 Edward Street in Sycamore, Illinois. We had a lot of fun in that back yard. Ball games galore, kick the can, Red Rover, Red Rover.  Snow forts were built, ran through sprinklers in the summer.

We moved there from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, when I entered First Grade at St. Mary Catholic School in ’49-50 and I graduated 8th grade before we moved on to Lansing, Michigan, a move us kids thought was disastrous.

The Jensen’s lived right next door to us in a log cabin type home. Our parents became very good friends with them. Merrill owned a local Tool and Die business his father had started and is still family owned by his son, Dan today. Ruby and Mom set the standard for at-home “mom-ism” and the children of each family knew darn well, just how accountable we would be held for our antics, good or otherwise.

David was the eldest Jensen son; then Dan, then Ronnie, and beautiful Nancy. I began babysitting for them when I was in 7th grade and got the most wonderful summer of my young life, being resident “sitter” at their wonderful home on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I learned to waterski, palled around with the “big” high school kids. It was all a serendipitous time at my becoming a teen phase.

The lake-life really stayed in the family kids as grown-ups. I reunited with David through Facebook and came to know he resided in Fontana on the lake, serving law and order as a magistrate. I also came to enjoy his humor and rantings via Facebook. I am so sorry, he passed recently at too young an age, as did Ronnie, who had been away but returned to Sycamore with the sweetest white dog I ever saw. In one exchange we had on Facebook, he said he always liked that my dad gave him a special name, other than Ronnie. My dad did that for special kids.

I also got a glimpse into Dan’s life as busy business owner, but in love with his boat on the lake, his happy spot for sure, surrounded by his wife and children, and the parties they would have together. Ruby, the matriarch of the family, remains in their midst and gives them “the eye” when needed. Daughter Nancy, keeps good oversight on the going’s on and the health of her mother and also keeps me informed which I like.

Two other friend relationships that go all the way back to the ’50s I have also renewed through Facebook. While there are many hurtful communications that transmit these days via the Internet and Social Media, my gratitude for it is centered in the fact it keeps me in touch with friends and family.

Jean Virtue Ehman is one of those friends. She and her sister JoAnn were friends of mine just down the street a few homes. We played with dolls together, roller-skated on the rough sidewalks together, and colored on the front steps of our large front porch on many occasions. Her mother also made many of my 7th and 8th grade clothes, a fine seamstress from her own home front.

There’s the front steps that served me as “playhouse” many times. That’s my Grandma Heffron, who lived with my aunt and uncle in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but came for month long visits at a time. In Journey Girl, I talk about the special times we shared as grandmother-granddaughter.

So another Sycamore friend I reunited with was Jim Tomlinson, who I think saw this photo in one of my Napkinwriter posts, and connected with me about it. He was really my big brother, Dave’s best friend, and was around us a lot.  He remembered the player piano that sat on the far wall of the dining room just inside this door and all the fun they had pumping out music to the “oldies” and John Phillips Sousa marches. The “oldies” in the 1950s meant songs from the ’30s and ’40s.

When we met up again through Facebook, I was still living in Michigan, but Jim lived in Berea, Kentucky not far from Lexington where Tom and I lived the first 12 years of our marriage. So we had things of interest to chat about on-line. Even more interesting to me was he also was an author and his wife Gin Petty a renown artist. It came to be, that our oldest daughter made a professional switch in her Optometry practice and low and behold, we all ended up moving to Lexington once again.

My memoir, JOURNEY GIRL, is truly about several themes, but one of them is — connections. I find throughout my life how sacred, mysterious, and fun these are. And how connection is important to me. These connections that lead back to Sycamore, Illinois, for me and still pop up as meaningful in my life today, I feel are life-giving and grace-filled. I treasure these people.

About the Book

Journey Girl is a story about motherhood and a memoir about secrets– more specifically, it is about breaking them. First-time author Hajec unfolds her journey of becoming a courageous family secret breaker and defeats her fears that she will pay a price to do so. Her quest is to disintegrate the generational silences that surround the death of her mother shortly after her own birth and explore the mysterious childhood memories that still linger as she reaches adulthood. As the author unwinds a tightly-held but harmful family silence, she also introduces to the reader simple, ordinary, and helpful types of silences they can use in their everyday life to bring them peace and balance, not harm and mystery. These are the Islands of Silence that begin each chapter before continuing her own story.

The book is available at http://www.amazon.com and http://www.balboapress.com

About the Author

Susan Heffron Hajec finds her happy place in everything that has to do with words. With an early start of faithful letter writing to her grandparents, she began to play with themes and stories on paper and loved all English, writing, and theater scripts throughout her school years. After her college graduation, marriage, and motherhood, her personal life followed a natural path to quiet ways of life, contemplative prayer, holistic health, soul writing, and the arts. She then served these interests well in her professional and business life which included: being regional newspaper correspondent, becoming founding editor of a religious newspaper; being an international video spirituality producer; owning A Way with Words consulting and workshop production company. She accomplished extended training and practice with the Masters in SoulCollage®, Labyrinth facilitation, Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina, and Reiki healing arts. With a newfound passion for watercolor art, she states her purpose in life as being faithful to the small things and giving glory to God for the largeness of the gift of life. And most of this is centered in her loving life with family and friends.

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Birdwatching

Reflection

Are You My Mother?

You are being held in a wider embrace, one more ancient than your own understanding.

Celeste Snowber

In 1957, P.D. Eastman wrote Are You My Mother? which was—and still is—a popular children’s book. Parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all liked to pick up this book and read about the antics of these magical and fun animals and people featured in the stories and read with a lyrical rhythm.

In this story, a baby bird is born while his mother is on the ground just below the tree branch where her nest sits, hunting for food. He begins to look for his mother. He looks up and down and all around. Not finding her, he steps out of his nest and plunks on the ground after a long fall. He could walk but not fly, so he decided he would now go and find his mother.

He begins his quest not knowing what his mother looks like. He doesn’t even know what he looks like. I read the story to my children often and to myself, alone, many times. I knew I was on the same quest, having so many unanswered questions about my own birth mother in the early 1970s. On a page in the book I saw an illustration of an eager baby bird on a search for his mother where he was often sad and alone, or afraid and brave at the same time.

The newborn bird is puzzled. He must find his mother and he does not know that he walked right by her at the bottom of the tree when he first began his search. He does not see her behind the rock pulling up a worm to feed him and he doesn’t realize she is close by all the time.

Asking a kitten, a hen, and a dog if they are his mother, he becomes somewhat discouraged because, of course, they are not his mother. He begins to question if he really does have a mother, but he is sure he must have one and is more determined than ever to find her. He begins to find mechanical things like a bulldozer, a boat, and a plane.

“Here I am, Mother,” he called out. But each thing goes on its own way, with no response. Except the bulldozer which makes a loud “snort” and picks the baby bird up in its shovel basket. The bulldozer lifts him up in the air and returns the frightened baby bird back to the nest from which he came. Just then, mother bird returns with the worm to feed her adventurous, hungry infant.

“Do you know who I am?” she asks baby bird.

And baby bird did know because she was not a kitten, or a hen, or a dog, or a cow, or a boat, or a plane. She was a bird.

“You are my mother!”

The pages of the story of this baby bird summarize the same quest I had been on for many years. I felt the uncertainty and the search of the small bird was like my own. I realized in small bits that it was all right for me to search—even necessary—to make me whole with my mother.

I felt the loneliness within the search that I needed to identify, wrangle with, acknowledge, hurt with, and eventually come to accept and make peace with. It did not pit one mother against the other. They each had their own space within me.

I had a mother, different from the one I called Mom. I was a daughter who became a mother. I would bring my mother, now a grandmother, back into our family-fold.

 

 Bird Watching

She lays

Hidden for the most part

Waiting and watching

With her beating heart

Her feathered body spread

Wide in the nest, an act

Of full creation.

One Mother

Bird, two eggs

Pulsing new life

Of wing-tipped grace

Into the world

And their own special place.

Procreation and expansion

As the fragile shell

Gives way

To life seeking life.

The rhythm of life

And love goes on,

     goes on

          goes on.

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Right Now Normal is Abnormal

 

Today is a special day in Spirituality. No matter what I’ve claimed and left behind in the traditions of Catholicism today IS Palm Sunday. I am in a dress with makeup on and I will bake something special. I am playing old CDs with the musical doxology and other songs of a spirritual nature and I will create here at home and the nearby outdoors for I am grateful for the gifts of faith and family freely given to me.

Today also begins what the scientists and CDC is also the beginning of two of the hardest weeks of sickness and death due to the pandemic virus COVID-19 attacking the world, and has been focused on the United States of America for the past four weeks, having arrived here earlier than that.

Healthcare in NYC, the epicenter, of the disease in America, is scrambling to provide adequate hospital space and the necessary PPE Personal Protection Equipment to the growing need. Healthcare professionals are coming in from other states to help the overburdened system. Ventilators are in such high demand and number needed so high, they are in a race to get one before a patient dies from the respiratory virus that shuts down the lungs.

And I know I shall rise and persist upon my own path of life. They say we have an unknown future. But we have always had an unknown future as those so fully know when an instant tragedy bested them. What we have is now and our actions and thoughts in this day.

I don’t know. And becoming friends with “I don’t know” is grace, itself. This is the second set of words that confirm me today. The first was another writer/artist speaking and she brought a quote in that said, “You can’t make the abnormal, normal. It is NOT normal.” I think therein, I give up the fight. I do not try to trick myself by doing “what is normal” to do. What I do is what rings true for me within this abnormal time. My interior world feels fairly normal. But as my gaze and my hearing focuses in on the outside world-wide — it is anything but normal. And that is what it is.

I do not know the future, but then I never have. A normal future is palatable. An unknown future leaves so many questions in its wake. Most of us try for the most normal we can manage for this abnormal time of Covid–19. We are plagued with the big question— how long? Someone tell us please when we can return to normal

With a return to normal, will survivors (because that is what we all are now) go back to the jobs they had? Will they, once again, work from an office rather than home? Will small businesses be there for the employees to return to? Will the economic structure hold for ourselves and our families? Will we bring the good, bad, and ugly back with us in our ways of life, or has this forced “time-out” reshape us in ways that we want to continue with and shed other stuff we would see as of no value?

This all remains to be seen. But for today, Palm Sunday, I am raised up, in the spirit of Resurrection, because others have reached through “social distancing” and touched me with their normal thoughts and actions. And for me, today, that is enough. It is normal.

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Secrets and An Essential Wound

The Essential Wound

“This book is about having an essential wound,
and having it at the beginning of my life.” Hal Zina Bennett, author and writing instructor

Hal Zina Bennett and I have three things in common. One: We both love to write from our heart center. Two: We both had an essential wound. Three: We both had that wound from the beginning of our lives. I am striving to have a fourth thing in common with Zina Bennett: We both have published books. My writing below was intended to be the Preface of my memoir, Journey Girl, Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary, but I have restructured the beginning of my book and I am striking it, so I give it to Napkinwriter to share with you.

In his example of the student remembering how he was when he witnessed the unbelievable (at that time) happening of the Kent State National Guard’s shooting of four students on campus, who were peacefully protesting the Viet Nam War. I remember it as well. It was exceptional and unbelievable at that time, but not shocking anymore in our time now.

In his book, Write from the Heart, author Hal Zina Bennett describes giving his class a short writing assignment about having an essential wound. One student tells him he will write it but he is not sure he can read it to the class. Yet the very next day, this student is the first one to pop out of his seat for the readings.

He describes a scene of a young woman on campus holding her friend’s bloody head and limp body. She is hysterically shouting at the National Guard soldiers nearby. That exact historical and iconic scene played out on television and in newspapers across the nation, during a particularly troubled time in 1970. It was the May 4th shooting that took place on the Kent State college campus during the Vietnam War Protest era.

Barry, the writing student, had witnessed the horror, terror, confusion, and disbelief of violence thrust upon the students by military might. It resulted in four college students lying sprawled on the ground in their spot of instant death. Once the students in proximity to the shooting recovered partially from their shellshock and temporary paralysis, Barry and most of the other frantic students scrambled for pay telephone booths to call home (cell phone technology and social media were not products and methods of communication in student hands in 1970).

The phone booth lines were long and when he finally gained access, Barry called straight to his father’s office. He told the secretary to interrupt his father, who was in a meeting.
“This is important,” he insisted, in a begging tone of voice.

Barry’s father, a veteran of the Korean War, of which he never spoke, responded rapidly as he picked up the receiver. “Make it fast because I am in a crucial meeting.” The father’s staccato directive exploded upon his anxious, terrorized, and stunned son.

Then Barry’s father listened to the fast, rambling crescendo of his son’s recounting of what became known as the Kent State Massacre without saying a word or interrupting. When the son finished, he paused, letting the rest of his energy flow onto the floor of the phone booth, his legs weak and wobbly. There was only silence on the telephone line for what seemed like a long time to the dazed student.

“Dad, did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you,” his father replied, detached and distant. “Are you okay? You’re safe?”
His son replied he thought he was. “I haven’t been shot or anything.” And that was it. As Barry stood cramped and crouched in the restrictive phone booth, his father matter-of-factly informed him, “Good, then. I have to get back to my meeting.”

Hal Zina Bennett contends that being present to the horror of the campus shootings would be enough to last as an essential wound for any one of us. But Barry, the student writer, went on with his story about how he carried the essential wound around inside of him for many years to follow. He never felt safe anymore.

The memory of that day haunted his dreams over and over again. He was still upset for not being able to get over it. He realized many thousands of people saw these kinds of horrible things and seem to have lived with it. He blamed himself for continuing to suffer. That is why he was not sure he could read it to the class.

A usually quiet, older woman student, perhaps somewhat past the age of seventy, whom the instructor knew to be a keen listener, spoke from her desk in the back of the room, breaking a hushed silence and the palatable feeling of respect floating in the air.
“Your father dropped the ball,” she said. “That’s your essential wound and I think you know what I mean by that.”

Barry kept his eyes down and nodded slowly, tears freely flowing. Because Barry had noted on paper the history of his father being in the Korean War but never speaking about it to his own family or anyone else that he knew of, the woman went on to describe it as his father’s essential wound. It was something that his father could not face or release. She continued to say the same had happened to Barry regarding the Kent State shootings.

“But you have broken the chain today and escaped from your own history by having the courage to tell us this story.” She offered him thanks, for this story healed her as well. “You didn’t drop the ball.”

Bennett, the instructor, admitted to not knowing exactly what all went on in the classroom that day, but he remained convinced that the essential wounds we all carry are powerful within us. What had just happened in the classroom among the students was more than a lesson in writing.

This incident made Bennett think about the phenomenon of the essential wound. From his vantage point as a writing instructor, where students trusted their personal stories with him, he saw these wounds expressed in the majority of his classes. Surely, most people don’t get through life without an essential wound. The youth of his students most likely meant these types of wounds still lay ahead in life for many of them also.

This was a whole new way of looking at his students and their writing. What was there to be said for recovering from an essential wound after they gained the courage to talk about it? What were the protections offered for these wounds, which could still burst open and cause so much pain? How choices were made in whom to speak to about certain wounds, for it was a trust that could be so betrayed and produce ongoing regrets in the future life of the wounded.

Many people who begin studying their genealogy find stories, all too quickly, of “misplaced people” on their family tree; a surprising “crazy uncle” who was never talked about, perhaps even a rich heiress that disappeared from the family. All of this new news could probably be traced back in time to an essential wound that would not be talked about in generations going forward. Most of us know that sense of not quite being able, even though willing, to support another in deep emotional grief and turmoil. Past history, over which we have no control, plays a large part in our inability to “be there” for another at some time in our lives.
Bennett writes in his book, “it is our perceptions of the world, the inner vision of what we think life is about that is challenged in every essential wound.”

He says we must start trying out our perceptions, see what the wound mirrors in us, and seek out what we need to learn from the wound. Most importantly, we are to discover what we need to learn to embrace to take ourselves out of the role of victim. In other words, there is actually a blessing in these essential wounds. We need to have courage and ask for the grace to find it.

I had an essential wound at the beginning of my life also. But I didn’t have a name for what it was and I didn’t know what it was. I just knew it was there—for as long as I can remember. It was difficult, for me, to admit aloud that an essential wound of a lost and unknown mother, shrouded in mystery, lived within me.

But it wasn’t hard to recognize. William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And a time would come when I would begin to connect my past truthfully and freely and find the grace and gift within my wound.

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Soul Points and Islands of Silence

“Meaning does not come from what we do. It comes from what we are. If we are lovers of beauty, then beauty will fill us all our days. If we are committed to justice, then justice will drive us past all fatigue or failure. If we are devoted to building human community, then we will find meaning in the people whose lives we touch. It’s when we are driven by nothing other than our daily schedules that life becomes gray, listless, and dour.

Life happens quickly but the meaning of it comes into focus only slowly, slowly, slowly. The challenge is to keep on asking ourselves what it is.” These words are taken from author and Benedictine nun, Joan Chittister, in Songs of the heart, Reflections on THE PSALMS.

She offers a simple and profound book of poignant and challenging reflections on twenty five of the 150 songs of praise found in the psalms. Each of the twenty-five chosen reflections offer a spiritual oasis away from the stresses of a world that demands more than the human soul can sometimes bear and have rich meaning for people today.

In my memoir, Journey Girl, Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary, I too offer at the beginning of each chapter a brief pause for the reader that is like the spiritual oasis Joan Chittister speaks of. I call them Islands of Silence. They are easy and accessible to the at-home mother who needs a private pause from combined child-care, taxi driver, medical emergencies and unending upkeep of home responsibilities.

They are equally beneficial for the students of all ages (we are all students of life) and business and corporate ladder climbers who can find an instant cubby-hole within to take stock and quiet the busy and overworked mind.

The first Island of Silence I offer in Chapter One is…..

 

The Breath
The Easiest of All Practices of Consciousness
Wherever God lays his glance life starts clapping.
Hafiz

Your breath is an Island of Silence that is with you at all times. You cannot live without it. A baby’s first important work to do when he/she arrives and separates from the maternal umbilical cord is to… breathe.

There are many meditative practices that focus on different ways to engage with your breath for stress relief and relaxation, but taken down to its simplest level, one may just choose to watch one’s breath.

If you don’t want to go to a gym, if you are not ready to engage in Pilates or Yoga (where the attention is put on the breath), you are perfectly free to sit comfortably alone, turn your thoughts inward, seek the quiet and simply breathe… in… out… in… out.

You will see this Island of Silence will come to you and you will appreciate the restoration it gives. Beautiful scenery will not take your breath away. It will give you more breath.
If you don’t wish to sit, you may walk in one of your favorite landscapes, amidst flowers and trees, birds, and animals, still focusing on your breath coming in… going out… coming in… going out.

You may be stuck in traffic with things to do, but still… you are stuck in traffic and you can breathe in… breathe out… breathe in… breathe out.

Return to this Island of Silence many times during the day. It is perfectly fine to take short stay vacations of breathing tranquility. It is low cost, efficient, and brings rewards of renewed energy and purpose. Turn your attention to your breath daily and give this a try.

This is an Island of Silence that begins the first chapter of an at-risk emergency birth where the child is saved, yet the young twenty-nine year old mother dies. Life and death do, indeed, both happen quickly. I am the child who lived. The meaning of it and the grace held within the loss of my mother all happened very, very slowly

 

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Looking at Life

“There are only two ways to look at your life: one is though nothing is a miracle; the other as though everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein said that.

These are a few ways I live my life and I suppose my belief system is that indeed everything is a miracle. That is hard to see though.

The following are five door-openers for living life as the miracle that it is:

1. Be silent. Become silence. Minimize your personal impact on the moment.

2. Be curious. Do you feel a need to explain, interpret, tell or exclaim. Let all your thoughts begin and end with question marks.

3. Be accepting. Be discerning. Don’t stand in harm’s way, but for now suspend judgments. Let it be as it is.

4. Be open. Bask in the mystery. Are you attached to knowing? Learn to be comfortable with not knowing. Warm yourself in the shadows, instead of the sunlight. Be awed by the beauty of the thorn, not just the rose.

These words were a writing instructor’s words in his advice to writers. But they serve how one views life as well. There are plenty of opportunities one’s voice is needed. There are many other times where no words serves one well. Where silence, not noise serves the highest purpose. I have learned to recognize these times in my own life. Yet, sometimes, I don’t.

 

 

 

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We All Need a Loving Reminder

Watercolor Waterfall by Susan Heffron Hajec

I received this reminder to love today from my favorite reminder person, who has given us these reminders on a daily basis for a very long time now. Betty Lue — these words definitely help me today.

 

Betty Lue Lieber – Loving Reminders
Affirmations:
I love well and live well.
My life works well because I love!
I forgive myself for withholding love.
I easily and freely love all the Good I have.

August 14, 2019 Loving Reminders- Love Well and Live Well!

Love Well and Live Well!

How you love, you will be living.
It is by our consciousness of love that we choose to remember to love others.
It is with love for others that we begin to recognize how well love works.
It is with love for ourselves that we realize how fun, safe and easy to live well.
Take time to pause and enjoy your life right now and right here.
Say “thanks” to each one who comes to show you the way.
Some show you how to love and some show how not to love.
Everyone has a gift to give and receive.

When we are learning to love, we know we can do better.
We listen to what each person or child needs or wants to receive.
We watch what works and doesn’t work.
We can easily see the call for love with those who need to experience love from us.
Loving well requires that we have love for ourselves.
Loving well asks that we access the love within us.
Loving well invites us to choose to love no matter what.
Loving well shows us how to love with words, thoughts and behaviors.

When you lack in love, surround yourself with people that are loving.
When you need love and affirmation, join groups, read books and listen to music that inspires love.
When you forget to love, give yourself daily reminders of how to love yourself and others.
When you deny or withhold love, practice regular forgiveness of limiting love.

Life truly is a gift of love, when you are open and receptive.
Life teaches us to be love, when we are ready to learn the lessons;
Life is an experimental laboratory, we have not believed in love.
Life is a clear reflection of the effectiveness of loving and living well.

Enjoy the life you have and love it well.
Appreciate the love you have and live it well.
I love and appreciate YOU,
Betty Lue

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I Have Written a Book

 

It was once a fantasy. Then a dream. A puzzle, perhaps. How would I tell the story? A story of silences and secrets encased in a contemporary contemplative silence of support from which the story grew and took on a voice of it’s own.

It is a story that lived in my heart and needed many years to grow to tell me how it wanted to be told and how it was lived. My book is no longer a wish or an untold tale. I have written this book that tells of a mother lost and mothers found. Blessings and guidance along the way and the determination to speak it in my own voice, not hindered by judgment.

Along the way I have met teachers and mentors….all along the way over many years. I have been feature writer, photographer, columnist and founding editor writing stories of so many others. But one time just two short years ago, when I entered a room I was asked my name and the second question was, “Are you an author?”

The woman’s name was Angela and she and her daughter headed up the meeting and their intention was to inspire those of us “wanna-be-authors” to go ahead and BE ONE. When I left that meeting, where I briefly described the story I wanted to write, I knew the intention was deeply set within me that I would do everything possible to become an author.

It was not a false start this time. I reached back into the many inroads to my story that I had formed and then stalled out on and brought what was meaningful forward. I enrolled once again in Janet Conner’s Intersection for Writers on-line course. I indeed worked toward achieving her AIC award — ass in chair — because that is the way you become an author.

I carved out a writing schedule around which other things were second on the list. This was a mainstay of the day, every weekday. I had to settle for best-effort on other things like cleaning our living space, planning and preparing meals, scheduling medical appointments, and physical exercise at the Y. Writing no longer happened “when I had time.” It now happened all the time. I got in a groove and it felt right.

I’ve had two very important editing and publishing professionals with me from early on in the writing of this book. Both were invaluable and we are still connecting our work together because now that the book is written, the very tedious task of getting it published and to market lie ahead. It has taken 18 solid months to write. I now begin the second rung of the journey. I am in brand new territory now but as I navigate through these open waters, I set my new intention to doing well in this phase and seeing the successful publication of my book, at which time I will be able to answer that second question, “Why, yes, I am an author.”

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Living the Resurrection

Living the Days of Resurrection

 

Guest Blog from Christine Valters Paintner
Galway, Ireland

 

A love note from your online Abbess

Take My Hand

Please don’t plant me
neat rows of rosebushes
and tulips at attention,
no manicured gardens
or crystal vases of cut stems.

Instead, take my hand,
lead me onto
rain-softened grass
which undulates like a boat
on a summer lake,

lie down with me
in a quilt of sunlight and shadows
among yellow petals, violet trumpets,
a feast for hares and bees,
let’s linger and forget ourselves

until even the tiled sky above
is cracked open by stars
and all that is restless and wild
within us can roam the heavens
howling the moon aloft.

—Christine Valters Paintner

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

After the six weeks of Lent and our disciplines of letting go of distractions and listening more deeply to the sacred call in our daily lives we arrive to the Feast of Easter which initiates a 50-day season of practicing resurrection. I love this sense of invitation into what it means to live resurrection in the midst of the ordinary routines of life.

I wrote this poem a couple of years ago while up in Donegal on a writing weekend. It was being held at this lovely manor house with a large grassy area out front leading down to a lake. During one of the writing sessions, the instructor invited us to go outside for fifteen minutes and see what was inspired. I wandered out hungrily, so glad for time to move outside into the summer sun, sit under a broad tree offering shade.

For me it is a poem about the longing for wildness in my life. I am aware how having everything in order and well planned can be so seductive, but the divine presence is not a God of neat rows and lining everything up just so. Certainly the Easter story many of us celebrate today reveals a divine wildness which erupts into the world beyond our expectations. Practicing resurrection in part means opening to what happens when we release our ideas of how things should unfold.

There have been times in my life when I have embraced this sense of wildness with more vigor than others. Certainly selling everything we owned and leaving Seattle for an adventure living in Europe was one of those seasons. Now living in Galway for the last almost seven years, I have a lovely and sweet life that I adore and am grateful for each day. It involves certain sacred rhythms and times of silence to listen deeply. What is most nourishing to me is a wander down by the sea, to feel the roughness of wind, taste the salt on my skin, to shake loose all the things that have become too determined, too set in expectation.

I invite you to enter this poem as a form of lectio divina. Read it through slowly and notice what words or phrases are shimmering for you. Let those unfold in your heart and listen for the sense of invitation arising. Then watch the video below and see what new layers the visuals offer to you. It is a poem of direct address to someone – a loved one perhaps or a prayer to the sacred source. What is your prayer of resurrection as we enter into this season ahead?

……to shake loose all the things that have become too determined…

 

Art by Shh

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What am I Waiting For?

 

Life to Art. Art to Life. She slips through the Advent Portal in the Wildwood, her Divine Child is not adverse to the theme of the season — Waiting— Waiting when all the world seems in a rush, waiting when extra duty and even desires stack up upon her day, waiting for the smile and peace to adorn her body as she slips and slides the labyrinthian paths that lead to family and friends. Waiting to settle into her own breath, breathe into her own bones, ever watchful, faithfully waiting to hear again the familiar and sacred messages that come with this season. This is her favorite sacred season, that special time BEFORE Christmas, just as her second favorite season comes right AFTER the Resurrection, when the women find the grave empty. I have reason to pause…to wait…to accept darkness in the world, but know…always know that the light, the light within me, does not cave to the darkness. I do not have to wait for the light. It is within me. I only have to be awake and know.

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