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Digging God Out Again

There’s a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then (God) must be dug out again. -Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life Lent is often associated with the desert, for good reason. The desert figures prominently in the scriptures as a place of testing and refining. Lent is a time when we consciously let go of those things or habits that take our attention away from the sacred presence that is always among us. Some people focus more energy

February 22, 2007

Emerging

I spent most of the weekend curled up in bed nursing my migraines. They began Friday morning when we had our Monthly Gathering, a wonderful morning of walking the labyrinth together except that I was in a bit of a haze from pain killers. That afternoon I was able to get my infusion two weeks early because of my recent achiness, but it always makes me tired. I came home that afternoon and slept for hours and continued like that through the weekend. My beloved husband, knowing that light really bothers me when I get these headaches, closed every last blind

February 12, 2007

I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic

I am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall. The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field, each a station in a pilgrimage–silent, pondering. Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation. I will examine their leaves as pages in a text and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter. I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia. I shall begin

February 9, 2007

Groundhog Day

Celebrate this unlikely oracle, this ball of fat and fur, whom we so mysteriously endow with the power to predict spring. Let’s hear it for the improbable heroes who, frightened at their own shadows, nonetheless unwittingly work miracles. Why shouldn’t we believe this peculiar rodent holds power over sun and seasons in his stubby paw? Who says that God is all grandeur and glory? Unnoticed in the earth, worms are busily, brainlessly, tilling the soil. Field mice, all unthinking, have scattered seeds that will take root and grow. Grape hyacinths, against all reason, have been holding up green shoots beneath

February 2, 2007

Quickening

Listen. Can you hear it? Can you hear the gentle quickening beneath the earth? Tomorrow on February 2nd is the feast of Imbolc, Candlemas, the feast of St. Bridget, and Groundhog Day. It is a cross-quarter day meaning it is the midway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox. The sun marks the four Quarter Days of the year (the Solstices and Equinoxes) and the midpoints are the cross-quarter days. In some cultures this is the official beginning of spring. As the days slowly lengthen and the sun makes her way higher in the sky, the ground beneath our

February 1, 2007

Rise Up Rooted

Book of Hours II, 16 How surely gravity’s law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the strongest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world. Each thing – each stone, blossom, child – is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we belong to for some empty freedom. If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things, because they

January 29, 2007

Bare Branches

Top two photos taken at Greenlake in Seattle, bottom four on Granville Island in Vancouver I find winter trees achingly beautiful, even more so this winter than any previous one I can remember. I see the black branches spread across the darkening sky and my heart swells with longing, as though there is something in the meeting of essence and horizon that speaks to a part of me that has gone unnamed thus far. Only questions rise up asking me to live into them: What is my essence? When everything is stripped away, who am I beneath all the roles

January 22, 2007

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