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Category: Sacred Time

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Winter Solstice Wisdom and Offerings ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Of Price and Worth Let the ordinary be in your hand; hold it open and imagine a bird landing, offering all it possesses in trust to come to you. Learn to look for the little things that weigh nothing at all, but fill the heart with such light they can never be measured. -Kenneth Steven, Seeing the Light Dear monks, artists, and pilgrims,  We are delighted to be offering two programs this week to help you slow down and savor the gifts of this time of year as we wait for the tipping point of darkness to light in the

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Lughnasa Blessing

I know some of you are enduring terrible heat right now, but here in Ireland the turning toward Lughnasa brings a shift in light and air that hints at autumn’s coming which I love. July is the hardest month for me because of both too much light and heat – although this year it was the rainiest month and cooler than usual thankfully – so I celebrate this feast as it brings my favorite seasons ahead when I feel more creativity and aliveness.  Wherever you are in the northern hemisphere, you might honor this threshold of turning toward harvest. And

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Sacred Time Webinar with Christine Valters Paintner and Veriditas

Hosted by Veriditas Monday, May 23, 2022 10-11am Pacific | 1-2pm EST | 3-4pm Ireland I am delighted to join Veriditas founder the Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress to engage with sacred time in your life and with the labyrinth. I will discuss how by becoming in tune with the rhythms of the natural world, we can live more intentionally and experience a conversion toward a more expansive way of being.  In my recent book, Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life, I invite readers to embrace a world that urges us toward rest, reflection, and growth.  In this webinar

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Easter Blessings + An Elemental Journey ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

A Glimpse of the Underglimmer by Christine Valters Paintner from Abbey of the Arts on Vimeo. “A Glimpse of the Underglimmer” (after Basho) You can see it sometimes in October when the sun’s low angle slides gold over the field, effervescence of light, or you stand in a forest of cedars and March rain pads hundreds of tiny feet across the emerald canopy, or the fireflies of July form new constellations, then vanish into summer’s night leaving only trails of light in your memory, or you stand in a May meadow, a fox crosses quietly, you hold still as possible,

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Spring (or Autumn) Equinox and Sacred Time ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks and artists, As the wheel of the year turns to the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere (and autumn equinox in the southern hemisphere) I invite you to deepen your relationship to the sacred rhythms of nature and the cosmos with its blossoming, fruitfulness, release, and rest. To become fully present to these moments of turning is to give ourselves over to Kairos time rather than chronos time. To help us understand this further, I want to share with you another excerpt from my new book Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life. The Greek myths may

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Sacred Time and Slowing Down ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks and artists, I am so excited that my book Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life is published! This book is the fruit of about ten years reflection on our relationship to time and how we can shift our perspectives by embracing more intentional and cyclical rhythms. The book invites you to consider the moment of breath, the Hours of the day, Sabbath rhythms of the week, lunar cycles, seasons of the year, seasons of a lifetime, ancestral time, and cosmic time. From the breath to the cosmos we find this pattern of inhale and exhale, of

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Sacred Time (new book coming from Christine) ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks and artists, I am really thrilled to announce that I have another book coming out on February 19th! Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life is being published by Ave Maria Press (see the end of this love note for a special discount code for those of you in the U.S.) and has been in the process of writing for some time now. Some of you may even have read early versions of it many years ago in a couple of online retreats about the seasons of the soul. The book begins with the moment of each

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