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Reflections

Category: Cycles and Seasons

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Full Moon Blessings

About a month ago I shared a dream I had about renting an art studio space with wide windows onto the sea.  My spiritual director said my psyche was insisting on more space for my art.  I wasn’t sure how to respond.  I love making art out of my home and as I did a cursory search of art studio spaces in Seattle I knew that didn’t feel like the spacious response my soul was longing for.  Then somehow I came across a listing for a beach cottage near Poulsbo, about an hour away, in part by ferry, right on the Hood Canal.  The

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Equinox Blessings

Tess’ Sunday Collection is all about autumn, so head on over to read a number of wonderful links! Bette has blessed me this day with the kindest and most gracious words.  Bette has been reading my blog since almost the beginning and has become a wonderful online friend who has inspired me in many ways, not the least of which was getting me to begin carving my own rubber stamp images! I posted some reflections on autumn last week and several of you added your own suggestions and resources.  Last year’s autumnal equinox I posted one of my favorite fall

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Preparing for Autumn

The equinox is in a week, one of the two dates when the sun hovers above the equator and day and night are equal. In the solar calendar it is also the beginning of autumn.  Here in Seattle we are starting to get hints of autumn’s arrival — cooler days that are getting noticeably shorter from their wide expanse of summer, plants and leaves just beginning their process of decay and letting go in preparation for winter.  If I walk slowly and look closely I see the signs all around me. Autumn is a season of change, reminding us that

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Delight Under a Cloudy Sky

“O shy moon don’t give in to the pushy clouds you are above them” -one of the Haiku read aloud at the end of the evening written by a fellow moon-gazer (I apologize for not catching the name) We attended the Moon Viewing event at the Japanese Garden last night and I was entranced the whole evening despite the fact that the moon never fully appeared from behind the cloud cover.   This is an annual event to celebrate the autumn moon (which will be full on Tuesday).  There was beautiful music (I am now entranced by the koto), dancing, singing, launching

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Endings and Beginnings

Yesterday my sweet husband started back to work.  It was faculty meeting day and today he gets to meet all of his students.  I am always a bit sad at the end of summer–we get to spend so much time together and he truly is my best friend so we have a lot of fun, a lot of time to play and be.  This summer felt especially rich with treasures to explore together.  He really enjoys his work, the school where he teaches, his students, his co-workers, but it is hard to transition back to waking at six a.m. while I roll over

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Another thought on time. . .

  One other thought that occurred to me about clocks and time is the shift we have had to use of digital clocks.  Pretty much every clock in my home is digital, reading out those numbers in their glowing faces. What we lose with the shift away from analog clocks is a sense of the circular nature of time, the cycles and rhythms we participate in, and the relationship of the time of day to the rest of the day as a whole. I think I am going to buy myself an analog clock to put in my prayer corner and

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Summer

Tomorrow is the feast of Beltane, the first day of summer according to the Celtic calendar.  Like its sister feast of Samhain on November 1st, it is a time when the boundary between this world and the Other world is believed to be especially thin.  It is also a time of lighting bonfires for rituals of purification and bringing livestock out to summer pastures.  I find the Celtic dates for marking seasons make more sense to me, by the Solstice we have already reached the longest day and then we begin the slow turn back to darkness.  I realize some of you are just

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