Pivot to Essence 2023

Sunset over the San Luis Valley — Solstice 2022

Let's sense into Essence

Into the Essence of Essence

Each Essence a consciousness all of its own,

A quality, a wavelength, a wisdom, a tone, 

A unique vibration, an exclusive sensation,

A pulsating partner in all of Creation.​

​~ Shelley Ostroff, from "IS"

 As I began to update what has become Muse and my annual ‘Auld Lang Syne’ post, the online countdown clock indicated that it’s 4 days, 11 hours, 58 minutes, 34 seconds until the new year is rung in here in the Colorado Rockies. ‘Who’s counting?’ wonders Muse.

 As was the case at the end of 2021, many – perhaps most – await the turning of the clock to 2023 with bated breath, wishing to bid adieu to another tumultuous year. We want to turn the page. We long to dive deeply into the fresh start that began with the Solstice promise of our personal newness and culminates as we replace our 2022 calendars with new pages of promise and possibility that the coming year has the potential to bring forth.

 It is, as always, up to us – individually and collectively – to bring promise, possibility, and potential to fruition. This year let us bring our Essence, the intrinsic nature and indispensable quality of ourselves fully into Life. How might our world be if we enter the new with that as our intention?

 As sure as the Sun’s light is returning day by day here in the northern hemisphere, we will have opportunities to do just that in the hours, days, weeks, and months ahead. What if we trusted the opportunities to come forth at just the right divine time rather than pushing to ‘make’ them happen?

 While 2022 held much tragedy and darkness, lights of love continued to be shined in dark corners needing our attention and care.  May the light of our Essence shine the light of love in all the days ahead. May we tap into the countless sources of light available beyond the chaos of the mainstream and its ways. May we receive whatever light we need as we add our unique rays to loving constellations of light and life.

 Although the onset of a new year signals the end of the holiday season in our culture, Winter has only just begun. The dark, the cold invites me inward (more snow would help the cause!). Muse smiles a happy, knowing smile. The season that began a mere seven days ago has a 12-week run before giving way to Spring. Yet our cultural habit of a new year is to make plans and spring into action with goals and commitments to DO more.

 What if we took more time for rest and renewal as Nature does in the season of cold? What if we put our attention on nurturing the deep, true Essence that is you? And me? What if we followed Nature’s lead and snuggle into ourselves to commune with the sacred and to gather all that is necessary to burst forth in Spring. While certainly there is life and livelihood to maintain, jobs to go to, businesses to tend, political action to be voiced, stories to be told, I wonder how the world might be if we began the calendar year in greater alignment with Nature? Our Nature?

 As I reflect on saying ‘Goodbye’ to this time gone by, my year end reflections include bundles of gratitude for what I’ve learned and discovered, how I’ve grown and changed. Muse called forth other questions for exploration:  

• What do I want to cultivate in the year ahead?

• What essence do I want to bring to the world? To relationships? To my care for self and other beings?

• What do I want to be able to say with conviction when 2023 is done?

 What do you bring to your year-end reflections?

 As 2022 ends, many will breathe a sigh of relief that it is finally over along with a breath of hope for better days in the year ahead.  The world we live in is chaotic and uncertain. It IS! Those who put attention on that world forgetting that it is the world we live IN, NOT the world we are OF may look ahead with dread or fear.

 That need not be.

 Within each of us is a seed of understanding who we truly are, our Essence. Nurturing that seed grows our faith in our capacity to be resilient in the face of the world’s chaos. This seed of faith is within us all. It is not faith in anything outside of us. Rather it is faith in who we are, each as an individual, integral part of an intelligent Universe. It is a reminder that life is so much more than we experience and observe in our daily routines. In this year ahead, may we each tap into our Essence, our spiritual strength, anew.

 As you ring in 2023, I invite you to join me in nourishing your Essence in each of the 365 days ahead, remembering how important your presence and your ray of light is at this moment on the planet.

 With that intention top of mind and heart, I’ll be participating in a global event 7 Days of Rest and Return to Essence during the first week of the new year. As they did at year end 2021, the event’s introductory words drew me in with their reminder of the power of intention and clarity and the potent possibility that alignment and collective action call forth:

7 Days of Rest, January 1-7, is an annual, open co-creative event dedicated to the healing and replenishment of the planet and all its inhabitants. All are invited to enjoy the rich array of offerings, including wisdom teachings, meditations, music, inspirations and more, that are generously offered by the global community.

 The theme for the event is 7 Days of Rest & Return to Essence. Together we will seed the intention and experience of relearning the language of essence and bringing our energy and resources to that which is most nourishing and vitalizing to all of Life.

 The website - https://www.7days-of-rest.org/ - is chock full of nourishing offerings each day. I’m looking forward to an encounter with each of the daily themes. I hope that you’ll join me in whatever way best fits your Essence, your schedule, your life, and your intentions for the year ahead.

Blessed Essence and Happy NEW Year!

Thank you Kelly Sikkema - Unsplash

Blessed Solstice!

In the quiet darkness of this Solstice time may you experience

A sense of deepening.

A sense of knowing.

A sense of deep satisfaction.

Your Wisdom.

May you know Peace.

Peace within.

Peace without.

Peace with ALL.

May you be Peace.

Easing into Solstice

Solstice Light

All of heaven and all of earth coordinate at the Winter Solstice. Gregge Tiffen (Winter Solstice: The Christmas Story)

 What I would exhort you to, what I would give as a gift to you, what I would lay down a soul for, would be for your awareness to recognize that this is a personal event for your life. It is the time that has been set up on this planet for you and Heaven to be with each other without interference. Gregge Tiffen (The Winter Solstice: Giving To Yourself – December, 2007)

 How far we’ve drifted in our understanding of this season. …the time … for you and Heaven to be with each other without interference. Breathe that in for just a moment. Breathe a breath of gratitude for the gift.

 As I enter this Solstice time, I’m so very blessed to not be engaged in most of the busyness that has come to define this holiday season. This cold morning with a warming fire in the woodstove I look to the woods out back through the eyes of a heart that knows no separation from my tree relatives, from the rock beings, the winged ones, or from the four-legged creatures of all sizes that dwell or pass through this sacred place. My heart knows this as surely as it knows my oneness with the unseen Life that thrives here.

 Although I have year-end tasks and projects to wrap up, I feel in tune with the sacredness of this time. I’m tuned into the station of Nature’s beauty and to the bubbling of old and new deep inside.  At the same time, I observe so much and so many in the world that are not.

Divisiveness and angst have intensified exponentially in recent years. So too have the opportunities for personal growth and evolution, individually and collectively. It is on those opportunities that I want to focus my attention this Solstice time.

One of many sources I turn to at Solstice is Gregge Tiffen’s writings about this sacred time. I find this particular message a gentle reminder of the choices I can make moment to moment in all the days of winter solitude ahead and beyond this winter into the spring:

Prelude (Winter Solstice: The Christmas Story)

There is nothing I can give you which you have not got; but there is much, very much, that while I cannot give it, you can take.

No Heaven can come to us, unless our hearts find rest in today.

Take Heaven

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.

Take Peace

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see, and to see, we have only to look, I beseech you,

Look!

In the quiet there is tranquility. May your life move and radiate in that unity and your heart sing the hymn of peace to all mankind.

And so, at this time, I greet you not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with prayer that for now and forever the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.

In the Christmas Story, we are told that the inn was full. And, yet a receptive place for the birth was found. And so it is for each of us.

 We too need to empty and make ourselves receptive to the new.  Solstice is a time to declare one cycle complete, making way for another to begin. It is a time to embrace the realm of spirit and turn our backs on the material world, if only for a brief time. It is a time to bless and release all who have crossed your path in this cycle, knowing that those who are meant to return will be there in the new one.

 And, perhaps most important of all, it is time to let go of who we were in the cycle that is completing.  The ‘you’ of that cycle is complete as well. And a new you of your design and making awaits.

We need not wait for the day of Solstice to take Heaven, to take Peace, and to Look at the radiance in the darkness within and without. Let us take them now and allow the potency of this time to fill us. This is our time to empty. This is our time to embrace seeds of the new; to be receptive.

 As our planet celebrates her birthday, my prayer is that I align with all my relations such that my comfort, my safety, my Life is not at their expense. This is my prayer for Solistice, for the year ahead, for Gaia, for Life. May this be our song of Joy to the World with ALL of Nature singing in harmony with one another and with the Heavens. Hallelujah!

 Let us honor Mother Earth by taking time to reflect the gifts of the time when heaven and nature sing as one. May we each sing along in our own unique and harmonious way.

Nature’s Table

Remembering What the Current Paradigm Wants Us to Forget

Moon Over the Sangres

May we look up at that night sky. May we let joy in. For we will be someone’s ancestors one day. If we do this right, they will inherit not our fear but bravery born of joy. Valarie Kaur

Muse is patient with me today. Present and ready to engage when I settle in signaling it is time. A new pattern, perhaps one of winter, seems to be emerging in this weekly engagement. This morning my early morning journalling where The Pivot usually flows found me answering anew an age-old question: Who Am I?

Uncharacteristically I checked email before settling in to write. Curiosity about Georgia’s Senatorial election results got the better of my attention. Eyes quickly landing on a subject line that satisfied curiosity, I moved to close the computer but first, they landed on another: ‘Soul Medicine’. Being from a source whose focus on health and healing I’ve come to trust, aligned as it is with my beliefs about alternatives to the so-called ‘health care’ system, I felt guided to take a look.

Muse reminds that it’s no surprise that my attention landed here since I’ve been considering whether to engage with that system around a current health experience and, if yes, how to do so without abdicating my power.

The short video (you can see it here, but heads up – it is a teaser for a promotional piece) offered the powerful reminder that we are not who the world defines us as – our names, our roles, our accomplishments, etc. It ended with an invitation to write for five minutes in answer to that question: Who Am I? And so, I did.

Muse says I should let you know that I didn’t stop at five minutes and suggests that among several insights and avenues for further exploration, this is the one to share: I am a powerful being who does not consistently tap into my power, allowing the darkness of fear to creep in when I forget.

Our current chaotic and crumbling paradigm is chock full of abundant prompts to illicit our fear. For when we are in fear, we are vulnerable to the control of those whose game is power over. Our very sovereignty is at risk when we lose touch with who we are.

To maintain our personal sovereignty requires a force more powerful than the intelligence of our rational minds. It demands the intelligence of our hearts, the organ of this amazing body that holds the capacity to tap into the infinite wisdom of the Universe.

As I consider this and look to apply it more readily to my current experience, I’m reminded of my friend, author/activist Rivera Sun’s words in her powerful, telling novel, The Dandelion Insurrection: When fear is used to control us, love is how we rebel. (Find Rivera’s work here)

While I’m present to my own forgetfulness about using the power of my heart to discern, to sooth, to settle, to express my care, I’m keenly aware that the power of hearts collectively tuned in to the Universal station of connection, cooperation, care, and yes, love is what the current paradigm hopes we will forget.

So may we remember this power, OUR power, and find ways to tap into it more fully. If we begin to travel the path of amnesia, forgetting our power, may we open to a gentle tap on the shoulder to guide us home.

December Sunset over the San Luis Valley

Soul Stirring of Winter

Beauty Abundant

The geography of your destiny is always clearer to the eye of your soul than to the intentions and the needs of your surface mind. John O’Donohue (Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing in Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong)

As winter weather continues to settle in and we move closer to the Winter Solstice, I find myself more pulled within. Much of what I read stirs something in this soul. I feel a choice point coming, a gestation of something that as of now has no words, no form, no clarity. Certainly, no certainty. I wonder how ‘it’ will emerge or even whether ‘it’ is an ‘it’ at all.

Muse gently reminds me to embrace the stirring and all that isn’t known, then guides me back to an experience that seems to point toward some shift on the horizon.

As I was putting away an abundance of leftovers a few days after my Thanksgiving feast with friends, I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer reading her essay The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance in an Emergence Magazine podcast (find it here -- https://emergencemagazine.org/podcast/). She was speaking a topic near and dear to this heart while picking serviceberries: an economy based not on scarcity as it is now but on abundance, reciprocity, flow, a gift economy.

I listened, aware of the irony, the juxtaposition throughout: I’m packing and storing as I listen to a wise woman’s words about giving, sharing, and flow. Beyond the leftovers, I’m reminded of the abundance of pinon nuts that I harvested in the woods. Except for those shelled by a friend and enjoyed with our Thanksgiving feast, they sit on the pantry shelf waiting…

Abundance, flow, reciprocity, using, gifting … These ideas are not new. They resonate deep within as the truth of who we are, who I am. They point to possibilities some of which are emerging worldwide.

This, I think, is foundational to a level of consciousness needed to grapple with the issues of our time. Perhaps a part of Einstein’s admonition that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.

Then I wonder ‘what needs to shift in my thinking, my being, and my habits of doing?’ so that I more fully align with what I say I believe? What habits of choice do I hold and follow that are of the systems of scarcity? As I pose these questions to self, I do so in hopes that only remnants remail. Yet I know our systems have imbedded their ways, their thinking in us, in me to keep the lie of scarcity alive: ‘there isn’t enough, hang on to what you have’.

And so, I pack and store, having on some level bought into the lie of scarcity. Yet I hold a knowing that this is one of the ways of the past that is in hospice, moving toward laying to rest so that new ways can emerge, be nurtured. How that will look in this life I’ve created and in the world beyond is ours to determine, ours to co-create. May we do so in harmony with one another and with dear Gaia, Mother Nature, our home.

Mossy Love in the Woods Out Back

My Prayer of Thanks 2022

Morning Dance of the Fire Faeries

The power of giving thanks gives life its vitality! The power of giving thanks comes through your awareness that you are always in a position to receive all the elements the Universe has to offer. Everything is available to you.  Gregge Tiffen (The Power of Giving Thanks, November 2007)

 I’m thankful for the muse that visits at least weekly with some message that seems to want to be expressed. My weekly practice for over nine years now is one of the highlights of my week, in part because I rarely know what’s going to show up, until the words hit the page. It’s also been my practice to rest the muse on occasion and revisit/reprise a prior post. And, so it is this Thanksgiving (here in the U.S.) eve, as I reflect with a grateful heart on all this year has offered.

Last week in sharing the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, Greetings to the Natural World, I shared my belief that, while it is good to have a special day to give thanks, the irony of Thanksgiving’s origins in this country deserves a pause for thoughtful consideration. As you give thanks, I’ll leave that consideration to your heart and soul. I’m grateful that as a society we are beginning to acknowledge, understand, and hopefully, move beyond the dark choices that haunt our past.

 Despite the disgust and sadness I feel for the atrocities we force upon one another and on our dear planet, I’m grateful for this life and for the opportunities to learn and grow that are ever present.  Despite the irony of the holiday’s origins, I celebrate, grateful for my conviction that, despite history and the current chaos and cruelty worldwide, justice and light will prevail.

 Several years back, sitting quietly by the fire on a cold morning, I began to write in my journal. The words that came surprised me and took me to an unexpected place: gratitude for being me.  As I ease into Thanksgiving Day, I remember all that I’m grateful for and my words then inspire my prayer of thanks for 2022

 I’m grateful for the challenges and changes this year has thrust upon me personally and on all of us as a community of humans. I’m grateful for my friends and friends of my cousin who surrounded me with love and support in the wake of her sudden, unexpected death two years ago. I’m grateful that she entrusted me with the sacred task of handling the affairs she left behind and rewarded me for doing so. I’m grateful for the abundance that I’m able to share in my community and beyond.

 I’m grateful for how I live my life, the choices I make, the insight and curiosity I experience, my love of quiet and of Nature’s beauty. I’m grateful that I take reasonably good care of myself. I’m grateful that I take time to ease into the day and enjoy the morning quiet. I’m grateful for introspection and for how I see the world unfolding perfectly in this human experiment despite events that are horrific beyond my understanding. I’m grateful for this year’s events and for those individuals whose actions continue to challenge me to hold this light.

 I’m grateful for all the beings who are holding light in the midst of darkness.

 I remain grateful for nine years with Cool Hand Luke Skywalker and for all that he taught me about patience, forgiveness, rest, play, listening and so much more. His ongoing presence reminds me that life is a continuum not a finite event. I’m grateful for Zadie Byrd carrying the torch of being my canine companion. Her sweet presence in my life is a constant blessing that grows each year.

 I’m grateful for how I’ve faced the challenges in my life, even those where in hindsight I saw a different way for me to be. Each offered a gift and I did my best to accept it.

 This year I’m especially grateful that I enjoy my own company as well as the company of others. Both are so very important, yet we humans so very often shun being alone for fear of being lonely, forgetting that in our aloneness we hear Your voice and feel Your presence.

 Thank You for always being with me/in me. Thank YOU for allowing and guiding me to be me. I feel so close You, God, in these quiet moments and I am so very grateful.

 When we give thanks for being who we are, we tap into the vitality of life. Wherever this week finds you, may you feel a depth of gratitude that goes deeper and further than any you have felt in your past. May this special Thanksgiving prayer from Gregge Tiffen contribute to transporting you to that place.

Icy Cottonwood Creek Winds Through the Woods

Irony and a Thanksgiving Prayer

The Haudenosaunee Flag (image from Naraya Cultural Preservation Council website)

Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people. Now our minds are one. Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address – Greetings to the Natural World

So continues the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. It begins in this way

Words Before All Else: Greetings to the Natural World

As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S., it is ironic that for some the way to end Covid and prevent future pandemics is to impose vaccines on everyone yet our ancestors brought disease from Europe to these shores as colonizers centuries ago.

Muse startled me awake with that thought this ‘blog’ morning, one day after I’d both read a news clip about the possibility of renewed interest in mandating Covid vaccines for all, and I’d retrieved the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address – Greetings to the Natural World – with the intention to read it aloud each morning before Thanksgiving and perhaps beyond. If you’ve been with me for a while, you may remember last year’s post about this sacred, indigenous gift (find it here).

There are of course many ironies around this holiday that we Americans have morphed from a time of giving thanks for all that is and for what we have to a time of plugging into the consumer culture of getting more. Muse and I will leave such ironies for another time (or not).

Honoring the awareness that what my attention feeds is what grows, I put aside thoughts about vaccines and events of the past, and focus on the Thanksgiving Address, a beautiful prayer encompassing ALL life, reading each verse aloud.

Tears fell as I recited the prayer, touching that place of knowing that all too often in the ‘doing’ of life, I forget the interconnectedness and interdependence that makes life possible. Tears fell too for the treatment of indigenous peoples from the time our ancestors landed on these shores to today, for the agreements/promises made and to this day not kept. Tears for all who experience injustice in its many forms.

I’m grateful for the awareness Muse’s thought brought me and even for the sadness evoked. I’m grateful for how the ironies seemed to both broaden and deepen in me as I read each verse and opened to that sadness. Sadness for our culture’s lost connection with the Natural World of which we are but a tiny part. Sadness that we continue our colonizing ways, not just of lands and peoples, but of the very gifts of Mother Earth, Gaia herself. Sadness for cultural ways that try to colonize us each day of our lives.

The sadness lifts giving way to wonder as Zadie Byrd and I embark on our ritual morning walk this cold morning. The sky is bright blue, and the air, crisp and still. All is quiet except the occasional squawk of a Clark’s Nutcracker. Zadie picks up a scent of interest and we zigzag across the road and then off road into a grassy meadow.

As I often do, I wonder first how I might deepen my awareness of ‘all my relations’ and honor that in the daily choices I make. And I wonder how might our world be if everyone could connect with the beauty of place in a deeper way?

The Naraya Cultural Preservation Council says of the Thanksgiving Address:

When one recites the Thanksgiving Address the Natural World is thanked, and in thanking each life-sustaining force, one becomes spiritually tied to each of the forces of the Natural and Spiritual World.  The Thanksgiving Address teaches mutual respect, conservation, love, generosity, and the responsibility to understand that what is done to one part of the Web of Life, we do to ourselves.

I intend to recite it as part of my morning practice each day until I feel it more deeply in these bones. I invite you to join me.

Mother Nature (image from Naraya Cultural Preservation Council website)

Pivot to Wonderment

Fuzzy Mountain Moonrise

Wonder enlarges the heart. When you wonder, you are drawn out of yourself. The cage of the ego and the railtracks of purpose no longer hold you prisoner. Wonder creates a lyrical space where thought and feeling take leave of their repetitive patterns, to regain their original impulse of reverence before the mystery of what is. John O’Donohue (Wonder Awakens Us to the Magic of the World – essay in Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong).

Oh, what deep appreciation I have for the places O’Donohue explores, allowing us to join him through the legacy of his poetic, heart-felt words. Wonderment, that comforting (for me) state of awed admiration and respect, is what spending time with the writings of this man of the soul evokes. I’m reminded always to be present to whatever is in front of me. And, to wonder.

Wonderment seems to follow wonder. Not in a logical, sequential way, but rather as a doorway. Without wondering, without engaging my curious self, whether I’m looking out at the world or journeying within, the absence of wonder separates me from the sheer joy of wonderment, of life.

I’m reminded of yesterday’s conversation with a friend as we drove past a herd of yak on the Chok-u-rei Ranch here in the valley. My friend observes that some of these magnificent creatures stand close to one another as they graze. She wonders ‘what do they talk about in their closeness?’ I scan the herd looking for the youngsters and wonder at their playful romping, chasing one another before returning to their munching.

It is wonder that gifts us with the presence to notice the herd on this route we’ve each travelled hundreds of times over the years. The regenerative soil practicing ranch spans the only road from our community to the main highway, a 12-mile road through the flat valley floor that without a sense of wonder could be (and admittedly sometimes is) a blur.

Coming back from our journey we drive toward the mountains and quietly share our wonder at how their appearance shifts with various angles of light. Soon the moon, just past its fullness and being eclipsed by Mother Earth, will rise over the Sangres, offering another spectacle inviting wonderment of this place.

The wind blows strong and steady as I write this morning. I turn my wonder within as I aim to remember to do when weather is not to my liking. How might I embrace the wind as an element of the greater winds of change blowing all around in this cycle of time? Surely this element of air and its time of rapid movement has purpose in the ebb and flow of life. What might it be blowing out? What is the wind ushering in?

This seemingly simple flow of words eases the dread I was beginning to feel about the morning walk with Zadie Byrd. Embracing wind for what it is – a necessary element of Nature, unseen yet powerful – eases my need to ‘brace’ for stepping outside.

Muse nods with a smile, acknowledging my pivot, shifting from my early morning look at election returns to see if the unexpectedly tight race in my Congressional district has been called (it hasn’t – hope springs eternal!) to turning within to discover what wants to be shared in this weekly sacred space.

It occurs to me on this morning after midterm elections here in the U.S. that pivoting to wonderment offers a pathway for bridging the vast gaps that divide us. How might we shift from disdain, disagreement, ‘my way is the only way’ thinking and ways of being to genuine, heart-felt wonder about one another? How might we see that indeed there is no ‘other’, just the One. How might I?

I’m grateful for those engaged in the political, policy, and governance realms who are working towards bridging these divides. I’m grateful too for the wonder and beauty of Nature that surrounds and informs me in Her way. As the winds grow stronger this day, I’m reminded that wonderment is a path to embracing all of life even, perhaps especially, the wind.

Cottonwood Creek - Leaves Fallen, Ice to Come

Beauty and The Beasts

Mother Mary Statue - Mother Mary’s Garden, San Luis, Colorado

Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Rumi

I felt drawn to Rumi this morning and as I searched for his volume on the shelf another book caught my attention. Muse seemed less surprised than I when I opened Carolyn Baker’s Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse to a chapter that began with the above quote. Ahh, the magic of life.

The surprise continued as I read the first paragraph where Baker cites the John O’Donohue book I turn to often, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, quoting a line that I used here just a few weeks back:

When we walk the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.

My smile meets Muse’s knowing twinkle. THIS is the magic of how life flows. THIS is life that dances and wants to rise. THIS is who we are.

I felt as if I’d come home to discover surprise guests, gifts both comforting and unsettling. I felt comfort in the wise words, of being reminded of the power of beauty, and of beauty’s existence in so many forms. When we look for beauty, it is either present to be discovered or we encounter a space, a longing where beauty beckons us to create its essence. As O’Donohue suggests, beauty comes to trust us when we hold reverence for her and for all life.

At the same time, I was present to the unsettled nature of this time and to inhabiting my own unsettledness. It feels to me as if the cacophonies of chaos are raising their voices in every domain of life. The pace toward and of the collapse of the world we have known seems to have quickened. We are gifted with the challenge of navigating life in uncharted waters. Beauty offers to light the path.

Navigation is both a solo journey and one of community. We each have our own path of inner work to engage as well as engaging in maintaining our daily life on the physical plane in outmoded, crumbling systems. This is no different for communities large and small. Each must reckon with the past, create its identity in the present, and maintain life as it looks ahead to new futures rising.

It is a time of beasts, but it need not be a time deficient of beauty. At the heart of the collapse of systems built on the lie of separation are the emergence of systems and structures built on the truth of unity, our interconnectedness with one another and with ALL of life. Our dance encompasses both – the dying along with all that is gestating and being born.

While we hospice the disintegration of that which we once knew, let us midwife the birth of that which wants to rise not from the greed of separation but from the true nature of our loving hearts.

Sunset Moon Over the San Luis Valley

Inhabiting Loss

Feasting on the Abundance of Pine Nuts …

Pathos is especially present in grief. When someone you love has died, it takes a long time to learn the art of inhabiting the loss. John O’Donohue (Beauty: The Invisible Embrace)

These words from O’Donohue’s essay To Learn How to Inhabit Loss greeted me this morning as I opened a favorite O’Donohue book, wondering about today’s post and how Muse would engage.

The title drew me in. His words drew me deeper. After reading a bit more, I fell into a deep sleep. Waking an hour or so later I felt alone with their beauty and their depth.

Although curious about the relevance, no words rose in me as I picked up my pen and stared at a blank page. It seemed that Muse had stepped aside guiding me to be with the question: How do I inhabit loss?

It isn’t an unfamiliar question, having come up in recent conversations each of which recalled my own journeys in the wake of death – my father’s when I was a teen, mother’s 43 years ago followed by a close uncle two weeks later, beloved canine Cool Hand Luke three years ago, my cousin just two years ago, and of being present with friends as they have danced with loss of beloveds.

Looking back, I see that each taught me something about inhabiting loss, that I was somehow blessed that grief didn’t pull me down, and that I found good and the beauty in each loss. Not only for me but for the departed one. Sometimes I think we forget to consider their perspective. From knowing they are continuing their soul’s journey free of the constraints of the body, free of whatever physical suffering they may have experienced.

While O’Donohue writes about loss in terms of death of someone loved, I wondered about other loss as well. Loss of innocence that comes with facing myths and outright lies in our families and in the history of our countries. Loss of the sense of self as old beliefs, patterns, habits dissolve. The loss of feeling patriotic as I come to understand that our political boundaries are meaningless to our Gaian home. The loss of trust in institutions that once seemed to have our bests interests at their core and that seemed to care. The loss of species, biodiversity, soil health. The list seems infinite.

In this time when so much of the old is dissolving – inside and out, individually and collectively – it seems important to consider how to inhabit our world, acknowledging these losses without clinging to the past while attending to what is rising and that which wants to rise. Calling forth beauty, curiosity, and love to co-create our world anew, I leave you with a bit more O’Donohue wisdom:

Beauty shines with a light from beyond itself. Love is the name of that light. At the heart of beauty must be a huge care and affection for creation, for nowhere is beauty an accidental presence. Nor is beauty simply its own end. It is not self-absorbed but points beyond itself to an embrace of belonging that holds everything together. Yet not everything is beautiful and in a broken world occasions of beauty point to possibilities of providence that lie beneath the surface fragmentation. When we endeavor to view something through the lens of beauty, it is often surprising how much more we can see.

May we look at our world through the lens of beauty. May I!

Prayful Squirrel