BeautyDialogues

A Blessing

photo by Digital Blasphemy

Looking for "inspiration" - a juicy tidbit to post this morning - I came across this blessing from someone who has inspired me deeply for many years, someone I (like so many others) hold dear to my heart; the late great John O'Donohue.

Here's John's blessing, taken from Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong:

May you listen to your longing to be free.

May the frames of your belonging be large enough for the dreams of your soul.

May you arise each day with a voice of blessing

whispering in your heart that something good is going to happen to you.

May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.

May the mansion of your soul never become a haunted place.

May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.

May you never place walls between the light and yourself.

May your angel free you from the prisons of guilt, fear, disappointment, and despair.

May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.

May it be so, and to John's beautiful blessing I add the collective prayer that we all "arise each day with a voice of blessing", and recognize each other and all that lives as part of our sacred circle of belonging.

Good Medicine

My dear friend Lightning Dove, aka Sue Blondell, is an amazing artist and gifted "seer" who creates beautiful artwork and "medicine" tools that have the power to connect us to our deepest selves. I am blessed to own many pieces of her art, including an extraordinary "essence" painting of my husband and I and a magnificent full-sized painted gourd which is one my most precious "things".

Lightning Dove is having a rare public showing of her spirit-full work, called "Hush ... be still ... Listen", from Saturday, September 7th through November 6th at Spirit House in Woodside. Dove will be there in person for the opening from 11am to 4pm on the 7th, but if you can't make it then, be sure to come by while the show is up. You won't be sorry.

If you don't live in the area or can't make it, check out the galleries of her work on LightningDove.com, where you can commission some of her special magic for yourself or a loved one.

Here are some medicine tools she made for me recently:

 

(back left to front: small tobacco gourd, gourd rattle, owl wing smudger)

 

Great Spirit

A beautiful video by the award-winning young Hawaiian filmaker Dominic Walczuk, about dance and Nahko's music and the great spirit that breathes us all:

 

 

Jim Carey introduces Ekhart Tolle

Someone sent me this video of Jim Carey introducing Tolle for his Ekhart Tolle TV, and I was intrigued by Jim Carey's ablility to be so funny and at the same time so sincere about the profundity of spiritual experience.

Solstice: Two

Another reason the Solstice celebration was special for me this year was because this is the year my friend Gisela Wendling, who lives in Australia, brought the painting she has been working on for me since we launched her blog/site Liminal Songlines just before the last Solstice.

The name of this painting is "Businesswomen Doing Women's Business", and it reflects our collaborative efforts to support each other's work in the world. I had asked Gisela for something that would inspire me on a deep level, and to do that she drew on her experiences in ceremony with indigenous women in the deserts of Australia, powerful spiritual practice specifically described as "women's work".

While Gisela makes it clear that what she does is NOT Aboriginal painting, she uses some of the same iconography, which in Aborginal art is very literal, figurative and descriptive rather than abstract patterns as they may appear to a Western eye.

The two figures in middle of the central circle of my painting are Gisela and I, and we are surrounded by other circles of women sitting in ceremony. The circle in the top right is of men, also sitting in ceremony, and the circle in the lower right without people is what's "on the edge", or horizon. The flowing colored lines that frame the top and bottom are reminiscent of the snake that plays such a central role in Aboriginal creation stories, while the flowing lines in the background are the shifting sands of life at this time on earth as we come together in a sacred way while everything in our external world is changing.

Gisela and I were able to sit together for a few hours after the Solstice, reflecting on this beautiful painting and how it came into being. She was asking how what we did by supporting each other - me by helping her articulate her work through a web presence and her by creating a place of inspiration for me - reflects a way of being together as women that could inspire similar forms of relationship and mutual generosity in others. Unwilling to separate the sacred and the secular, together we recognized and affirmed that our work is sacred and that's the place we want to stand in the world.

Remarking on the central figures in the painting, Gisela said "In a way it's about us, but even more it's about what we are sitting for."

I am blessed to wake up to this vibrant call to life every morning. Thank you, dear Gisela.

Sacred Ground

“Perhaps the wisdom lies not in the constant struggle to bring the sacred into our daily lives, but in the recognition that life is committed and whole and, despite appearances, we are always on sacred ground.” 
~ Rachel Naomi Remen, MD

 

Kay

My friend Kay died last night at 7:02pm.

Regular readers may recall that I've written about Kay before in these pages - five years ago when she was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and just last year when she married Jeff in one of the most beautiful and heartful weddings ever.

I've been part of Kay's live-in caretaking circle for the best part of the last two weeks, my life simplified down to the minutia and routine of end-of-life care. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most painful forms of the disease and much of our time was spent trying to keep her comfortable. Thank goodness we were mostly successful.

Now that I'm back home I feel as if I've been floating in a state of grace. There was a one-pointedness to our days, a unified clarity and focus that brought us intact through some pretty difficult hours. Now that it's all over, I'm a bit disoriented and not sure how to shift back to the very different demands of "real life". But perhaps most of all I'm left with the sense of having been blessed - it was an honor to have been able to be there and to have shared an experience so profound and so intimate. It is such a gift (thank you to my patient husband and flexible clients too), to be able to respond when it really matters.

And Kay really mattered. To me, and to a lot of people. She perfected the art of deep friendship and had so many friends, so many people who loved her. A shining example of what a human being can be, when faced with a diagnosis that would knock most people to the ground, she responded with elegance and grace, compassion, strength and fortitude. She was grateful for every single day she was given. She lived a beautiful life and died an extraordinary death, surrounded by love and the tender devotion of family and friends.

May that be so for each of us.

My sister Karen

My sister Karen died this week. She went into the hospital on Monday night and was gone by Wednesday a little after noon. She'd been feverish and feeling bad for a few days before Christmas, but she didn't have insurance and felt she couldn't spend the money to go to the doctor and see what was wrong. By the time the pain was so bad she finally relented, it was too late. 

Summer, 2010

She was 48. The youngest of my siblings, you could say Karen was the heart of the family - everybody's favorite sister, aunt, daughter, friend. She made friends wherever she went and had that something special that made us all want to be around her. Maybe it's because she was so much fun. Full of high spirits and ready laughter, she was always the life and soul of the party and she made wherever she was the party. 

She was also stubborn and brave and an incredibly hard worker. Succesfull in her chosen vocation, Karen won national awards for her dedication and skill. Deeply loyal, she loved her family and was fiercely protective of her boys, providing a home for them on a single wage. She brought our mother to live with them in Hawaii when she was transfered there and spoiled her with special trips & vacations.

My sister Karen was good and kind and one of the strongest people I've ever known. I guess some part of me thought she could never die.

I was wrong.

Winter, 2010

Anything I can say about her or how it feels to lose her seem trite and meaningless; the words burdened with an impossible task.

In the end there are no words at all, so I hold her in the silence of my broken-open heart and know her light will always be alive there.

Maui, Summer 2009

Being Alone

The always relevant Tim Merry shared a link on the Art of Hosting list-serve to a delightful insightful music video on the joys of being alone. It was written and performed by poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis and filmed by Andrea Dorfman. For those of you not on that list, it's too good to miss (check out the clever digital imaging by Sam MacDonald):

Wise Words from Thomas Merton on a Monday morning....

"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

More than that, it is cooperation with violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys her own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

~ Thomas Merton