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Happy Anniversary My Love

*  When you appear all the rivers sound in my body, bells shake the sky, and a hymn fills the world. -Pablo Neruda * Fourteen years of marriage my beloved.  Sixteen years since we first met.  My love spreads wider each day.  Marriage is much harder work than I ever expected, and far more rewarding than I ever could have anticipated.  Our marriage has been a crucible of healing and transformation. We have had many struggles, but you are my closest friend, my lover, the one who supports me in all of my longings, who knows my most unflattering secrets,

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September 3, 2008

The Vulnerable Body

One of the most amazing places we visited during our summer journeying was the bone chapel in Hallstatt, Austria.  The link to the article provides some more information, but essentially in this beautiful little village tucked between mountain and lake, bones from the cemetery used to be removed to make room for the newly dead.  The skulls were bleached in the sun and then lovingly hand-painted by family members with names, dates, and decorations.  I had read about this place before our trip but standing in the room with 600 skulls was an transcendent experience.  I was brushing against my own

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September 2, 2008

Already in our Blood

“I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, is already in our

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August 31, 2008

Welcoming Sabbath

Sunset Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you, one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth, leaving you, not really belonging to either, not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent, not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing that turns to a star each night and climbs – leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads) your own life, timid and standing high and growing, so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching

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August 29, 2008

Packing Lightly

  Instructions Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God. Find god in rhododendrons and rocks, passers-by, your cat. Pare your beliefs, your absolutes. Make it simple; make it clean. No carry-on luggage allowed. Examine all you have with a loving and critical eye, then throw away some more. Repeat. Repeat. Keep this and only this:    what your heart beats loudly for    what feels heavy and full in your gut. There will only be one or two things you will keep, and they will fit lightly in your pocket. -Sheri Hostetler, A Cappella: Mennonite Voices

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August 28, 2008

Visual Meditation: A Father’s Birthday

The words are coming slowly for me this week so time for me to rest in some visual expression.  These photos were taken in Jurmala on the coast of Latvia, a beautiful place where the thick forest meets the Baltic sea, and the land where my father was born.  He died twelve years ago and today would have been his 76th birthday.  Happy birthday Daddy, may you find yourself dancing among trees and swimming in a vast sea of love.  May you encounter a healing from the dark and difficult wounds of your earthly life and now be dazzled into a vision beyond all of

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August 27, 2008

Invitation to Poetry: “There will be music despite everything”

Poetry Party No. 22!  I select an image and suggest a title and invite you to respond with your poems, words, reflections, quotes, song lyrics, etc. Leave them in the comments or email me and I’ll add them to the body of the post as they come in along with a link back to your blog if you have one (not required to participate!) I’ll add your contributions all week and then I will draw a name at random on Friday morning from everyone who participates and will send the winner a copy of my most recent zine Season by the Sea: A Contemporary Book

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August 25, 2008

Live in the Layers

The Layers I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be

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August 21, 2008

Complexity and Layers

In this family systems work I am doing every time I make a new discovery it leads me down a whole new trail of inquiry.  Every question leads to a dozen more.  Each thread I follow leads to a whole new landscape for exploration.  It is exciting work and speaks to me of the complexity of who we are as human beings. Layer upon layer reveals an inexhaustible depth to our stories if we consider them rooted in the spiral of stories I spoke of the other day. My father was born in Riga, Latvia, the city of his father’s ancestors. When

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August 20, 2008

Visual Meditation: To Feel the Weight

It’s great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity only to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existance. … Instead of forever hovering above I’d like to feel there’s some weight to me To have a fever, to have blackened fingers from the newspaper to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal by the curve of a neck by an ear. -words spoken by the angel Damiel in the film Wings of Desire (images of angels from churches in Vienna) (c) Christine

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August 19, 2008