I am heading off for a few days of retreat this week.  The idea began with an art class I wanted to take down in Portland over the weekend, knowing it meant I could also have a chance to see an old and dear friend from my doctoral program who teaches down there now.  Then I […]

Posted in Grief, Nature | 5 Comments »

Michelle has left a comment under my previous post of her Litany for the Wounded with ways to help support the work she is doing, so please click here to go read! (scroll all the way down)She is doing such meaningful work and Michelle is a woman with a passion for justice and being present to […]

Posted in Creativity, Links & Resources, Grief | 10 Comments »

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do […]

Posted in Poetry, Grief, Nature | 3 Comments »

The woman who sat in the chair opposite me looked understandably frightened.  It was her first day there, what would become part of her routine over the next several weeks.  Her husband sat beside her holding her hand, stroking her skin gently, reassuringly, as if to say, I am here with you in this and through this.  The […]

Posted in Grief | 18 Comments »

I suppose in some ways there will always be a part of me that is a New Yorker.  I was born in New York City hospital and grew up in midtown Manhattan, about nine blocks from the United Nations where my father worked as chief of television and radio.  He had grown up in Vienna and when […]

Posted in Grief | 2 Comments »

Not as much time to write as I had hoped this week, with our first Monthly Gathering tomorrow (with 22 RSVP’s!), then my spiritual direction peer supervision group and women’s group in the afternoon and evening to recharge my soul.  Then Saturday I lead a workshop down at the Priory and stay overnight for our first Oblate […]

Posted in Links & Resources, Grief | 10 Comments »

There is irony to be sure, in the fact that yesterday I wrote a post about how helpful walking is for me as a spiritual practice in general, but especially as a part of grieving.  Then last night I pulled a flattened box out from beside the fridge and out popped a strip of wood […]

Posted in Grief | 6 Comments »

When my mother died I felt let down by my church.  It wasn’t even so much my particular parish—we had only been in Seattle a couple of months—as it was the lack of rituals for grieving in the Christian tradition as a whole.  Certainly the funeral was comforting.  Even the month of the dead, which […]

Posted in Grief | 4 Comments »

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe
will never know the source from which we drink
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for
something else
–David Whyte

Posted in Poetry, Grief | No Comments »

Grief resides deep in the body.  My sense of loss is palpable. At times my heart literally aches, I breathe deeply letting out heavy sighs for relief, I long for my dog’s warm solid body to hold.  Now it is simply a pile of ashes.
When my mother ended up in the ICU unconscious, with pneumonia […]

Posted in Grief | 13 Comments »