Abbey of the Arts

Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts

  • Welcome
    • Prayer Cycle
      • Introduction to the Earth Monastery Prayer Cycle
      • Day 1 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Cathedral
      • Day 2 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Scriptures
      • Day 3 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Saints
      • Day 4 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Spiritual Directors
      • Day 5 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Icon
      • Day 6 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Sacrament
      • Day 7 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Liturgy
      • Prayer Cycle Leader Resources
    • About the Abbey
    • About Christine Valters Paintner
    • About John Valters Paintner
    • About the Wisdom Council
    • Monk Manifesto
    • Join the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks
    • Subscribe to Our Love Notes
    • Website privacy notice
  • Books
    • Sacred Time:
      Embracing an Intentional Way of Life
    • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: Poems
    • Earth, Our Original Monastery:
      Cultivating Wonder and Gratitude through Intimacy with Nature
    • Dreaming of Stones: Poems
    • The Soul's Slow Ripening:
      12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred
    • The Wisdom of the Body:
      A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women
    • Illuminating the Way:
      Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics
    • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
      Eight Practices for the Journey Within
    • Eyes of the Heart:
      Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice
    • The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom
    • Desert Mothers and Fathers: Early Christian Wisdom Sayings Annotated & Explained
    • Lectio Divina–The Sacred Art: Transforming Words and Images into Heart-Centered Prayer
    • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire: The Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements
    • Awakening the Creative Spirit:
      Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction
    • Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening & Awareness
  • Poetry | Art | Music
    • Music + DVD
    • Poetry by Christine Valters Paintner
    • Poetry Videos
    • Dancing Monk Icons
    • Other Art Collaborations
      • Monk in the World art series by Kristin Noelle
      • Saints & Animals art series by David Hollington
      • Sacred Time art series by Alexi Francis
      • Mary block print art series by Kreg Yingst
  • Programs
    • Live Programs: Pilgrimage & Retreats
      • Monk in the World (Ireland)
      • Writing on the Wild Edges (Ireland)
      • Vienna Monk in the World (Austria)
      • Hildegard of Bingen (Germany)
      • Awakening the Creative Spirit: Experiential Education for Spiritual Directors in the Expressive Arts (Northwest)
    • Community Online Retreats
      • Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color
      • The Way of the Hermit:
        A Spiritual Survival Guide for Dark Times
        with Kayleen Asbo, PhD
      • The Spiral Way:
        Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination
      • Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers (Lent 2021)
      • Dancing with Fear in Troubled Times
      • Novena for Times of Unraveling
      • The Two HT’s-Harriet Tubman and Howard Thurman-on Being Free
      • Writing Into Bloom
        with Christine Valters Paintner
      • Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life (Spring 2021)
      • Poetry and the Sacred Garden of the World:
        An Online Writing Retreat
    • Self-Study Online Spiritual Retreats
      • Creative Flourishing in the Heart of the Desert:
        An Online Retreat with St. Hildegard of Bingen
      • Dreaming of the Sea:
        A women’s discernment journey through the story of the Selkie
      • Earth, Our Original Monastery
        A Companion Retreat to the Book (SELF-STUDY)
      • Exile and Coming Home:
        An Archetypal Journey through the Scriptures
      • Eyes of the Heart:
        Photography as Contemplative Practice
        (Companion retreat to the book)
      • Honoring Saints and Ancestors:
        Online Retreat for the Season of Remembrance
      • Lectio Divina:
        The Sacred Art of Reading the World
      • A Midwinter God:
        Making a Conscious Underworld Journey
      • Sacred Rhythms of Sky, Sun, Sea & Stone:
        A Creative Retreat with the Elements (SELF-STUDY)
      • Sacred Seasons:
        A Yearlong Journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year
      • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
        Eight Practices for the Journey Within
        (a companion retreat to the book)
      • The Soul's Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seekers of the Sacred (a companion retreat to the book)
      • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire
      • Watershed Moments
        in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
      • Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist:
        A 12-Week Companion Retreat to The Artist's Rule
      • The Wisdom of the Body:
        A 10-Week Online Companion Retreat to the Book
      • The Wisdom of Mary and the Sacred Feminine
  • Calendar
  • Reflections
  • Contact

Family Systems, Pilgrimage

The Great Migration

It is the time of the great migrations; wild winged ones fly in ragged formations away from the summer fields of plenty, down from the tundra, up from the tropics, ordinary hearts beating against the winds, resisting the updrafts, into the storms, through the autumnal fogs that hide the hunters and the seductions of rest; wild finned ones turn against the familiar ocean currents to slip through narrow stony channels, leaping against the steepness of the grade, following an ancient invocation of leave and return. Fin and feather, flesh, blood and bone: the earth calls its creatures to leave the familiar, turn again into the unknown; to move steadily and continuously and at great risk toward an invisible goal, expending great energy with the possibility of failure; to live on migratory pathways into the future; the primal logic of survival and regeneration, an ancient summons, nature’s pull against the grain, against all odds, against the reasonable and the safe; reconstituting the world.

—Marianne Worcester

I shared this quote with my Earth as Soul Care Matrix class and invited to participants to reflect on their own calls to migration. The natural world offers us so many symbols that speak to our inner life, creation is a map to the spiritual life. Everything outward is symbolic of an inner reality.

My husband and I put up the For Sale sign on our life as we know it last week. Our home has already sold, now we move through the process of closing. Something Holy is calling us East. It is an ancestral call, it is the call of the land itself, it is the call of our own unfolding longings. This time of preparation has many challenges and much grief and yet it is an essential part of the journey. This northwest landscape enlivens our souls, our friends are dear and beautiful, our neighborhood is thriving. This is a life we love, we are not running away from anything, but toward something invisible, yet shimmering with possibility. A new way of being, a simpler life, a slower life, a life with deep roots in ancestral stories, a life of more risk and adventure. A life full of things we can't even yet imagine.

We are feeling the call to move toward "an invisible goal, expending great energy with the possibility of failure; to live on migratory pathways into the future. . . an ancient summons. . . against the reasonable and safe."

What is it that calls the great beating hearts of wild geese and king salmon, humpback whales and monarch butterflies to the very long, and often arduous, journey from one place to another. They do not doubt this call, they do not spend time and energy telling themselves stories why they can't follow the patterns of thousands of generation before them. They obey the longing, and in witnessing to that kind of obedience, we as witnesses are taught something about being a monk in the world.

My husband and I are carried on this journey ahead by the ancient wisdom of monks:

Our obedience to a call, an invisible thread drawing us forward; our commitment to conversion and always being surprised by God, even the monastic call to stability – which usually refers to staying in one place for a lifetime – in our case means staying with our experience and all of its doubts, uncertainties, questions, and judgments, and not running away from the inner challenges of being alive.

We must embrace a radical kind of inner hospitality as we welcome in all of the strangeness that we feel in moving to a foreign culture. Navigating new worlds, learning new customs, deepening into a foreign language, are all ways of extending welcome to the stranger within ourselves.

A profound kind of humility is also being demanded of us, as we recognize that we do not know – we do not know what exactly will happen, we do not know how long we will be there, we do not know how we will be changed by this experience. We will surely stumble and fall. We will certainly act foolishly at times. We do not know the magnitude of this path.

Simplicity is also calling to us. We are selling things and home and car and will be moving into a much smaller apartment in Vienna where we will rely on foot and excellent public transit. My husband has let go of his secure income and so we will have to live simply to make our finances stretch further. And in this letting go I feel the lifting of many burdens.

What will ground us is a commitment to return to the center. To make space for silence and solitude so that we can integrate all that is happening and unfolding. So that we might listen. The monk in the world knows that these holy pauses are essential for discovering the meaning of our experiences. There is no map, only the dropping deep into our hearts to hear the next step.

To return for a moment to the metaphor of migration and nature as wise teacher, I am exploring what it means to live a wild life. A wild life is one that is not domesticated or tamed or confined into boxes of safety, convention, or expectation. It is a risky way of being, because in the wild there is always an encounter with fierce forces. But the alternative is to slowly suffocate on dreams that dissolve by never allowing the opening. Monks are not concern with maintaining the status quo. The first monks went out into the fierce desert, knowing that life on the edges was fertile and rich. Living from the wild heart means remembering that God, the source and sustainer of everything, can see horizons much wider than we ever can.

What is the invisible thread you are being called to follow?
What would living from the wild heart mean for you in this season?

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2 Comments May 1, 2012

Upcoming Programs

The Spiral Way:
Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination

Hosted by the Rowe Center
February 1-21, 2021
with Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers
Retreat for Lent 2021

February 17-April 1, 2021
with Christine & John Valters Paintner and Betsey Beckman

Recent Reflections

  • Hildy Tales 3: Ní heolas go haontíos ~ by John Valters Paintner
  • Humility + Join us today for live prayer! ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Hildy Tales 2: Tús maith leath na hoibre – by John Valters Paintner
  • New Book Club for 2021: Lift Every Voice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Hildy Tales One: Dia dhuit, is mise Hildy! by John Valters Paintner, Your Online Prior

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