Prayer for Evening
The image is my view from the hermitage over the Hood Canal toward the Olympic mountains. -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
October 29, 2007
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The image is my view from the hermitage over the Hood Canal toward the Olympic mountains. -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
***Make sure you visit this week’s Poetry Party either by scrolling down past this post or by clicking here — as usual it is an amazing array of sacred words that keeps growing*** “Hear blessings / dropping their blossoms / around you. ” -Rumi -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts (photos of the dahlias at Volunteer Park in Seattle)
Welcome to our 6th Poetry Party. These are posted every other Monday. 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 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!) Feel free to post the poem along with my image below on your blog with a link back to this post. Please invite your readers to come join the party too! I’ve
“We seldom go freely into the belly of the beast. Unless we face a major disaster like the death of a friend or spouse or loss of a marriage or job, we usually will not go there. As a culture, we have to be taught the language of descent. That is the great language of religion. It teaches us to enter willingly, trustingly into the dark periods of life. These dark periods are good teachers. Religious energy is in the dark questions, seldom in the answers. Answers are the way out, but that is not what we are here for.
“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. / I would like to see you living / In better conditions.” -Hafiz “Move from within. / Don’t move the way that fear wants you to. / Begin a foolish project. / Noah did.” -Rumi I smiled yesterday when lucy commented about my journey of fearlessness because this subject of fear and freedom has been on my heart a lot lately. There is something very liberating about living into the freedom I am being invited to and not letting fear dictate the choices I make. Most of the time I am
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back into the earth; for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas. -Rainer Maria Rilke, from In Praise of Mortality My dreams lately have been inviting me to enter into dark and uncomfortable places. We have such a fear of darkness in our culture — a denial of death and a resistance to the work of grief , as well as resisting the gifts darkness offers to us. I am slowly realizing that this is in part what my time at this cottage by the sea is about — moving into the literal growing darkness of the
Welcome to our Poetry Party No. 5. These are posted every other Monday. 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 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!) Feel free to post the poem along with my image below on your blog with a link back to this post. Invite your readers to come join the party too. Community poetry is
