Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims, Easter blessings my friends! We are in the midst of extraordinarily difficult and cruel times and it is essential we do not bypass the profound sacred grief and holy rage we feel. Easter is not about denying these realities. Easter also celebrates how in the midst of our struggles and losses, sometimes life has a way of breaking us open to something new. It calls us to hold fast to life in the midst of so much death.  Easter invites us to cling tightly to kindness and empathy in the midst of cruelty, to inhabit

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims, Today we begin Holy Week and observe the transformative journey toward Easter and Resurrection. Before we jump to Resurrection it is important to sit with the landscape of grief and holy pause. On Friday, April 18th, Wisdom Council Member, psychospiritual therapist, and interfaith spiritual companion Melissa Layer will lead us in the mini-retreat Ripened (S)aging: A Good Friday Invitation for Exploration of Grief, Loss & Mortality in Our Wisdom Years. Good Friday’s potent themes of death and resurrection are compelling portals holding symbolic metaphors that offer an expanded opportunity for wisdom in our eldering years. Melissa offers us this reflection.

Easter Blessing* God of rising, you bring new life to all the places death inhabits. Bless our own dying dreams with your greening breath, make our dry bones dance, inspire us to sing, revive our bodies so we might become more vibrant, hopeful witnesses to the life’s persistence. We call on Christ’s wisdom to bless and sustain us in the practice of resurrection, of honoring our bodies and being agents of generous abundance. May all the nets we draw up from the water be overflowing with fish, may our wounds still visible be a sign of healing grace, and may

Holy Week Blessing* Godde of Paradox, you call us to sit these coming days in the heart of betrayal, abandonment, mockery, violence, to not avert our eyes but see ourselves in the story. Travel with us into the border spaces of unknowing holding death and life, the liminal realm of in-between. As we feel the suffering and loss of Jesus, let us not rush to resurrection just yet, but linger a while in mystery. In this temple of grief, strip us of our attachments, the identities we cling to, the securities we believe in, disorient us so we might walk