Weaving Wholeness into Life

There may be bumps and shadows in the road ahead …

… we seed the New Year with a global field of intention and healing, honoring our collective calling to wholeness. Each day we journey through primordial portals of remembrance, guiding our dreaming and becoming. (7 Days of Rest & Reweaving Wholeness - click here from info)

 As the clock ticks away the final 4 days, 12 hours, 50 minutes, 19 seconds of 2023 I find myself looking more forward than back. What will I weave into the fabric of this new cycle?

 I think of the elements in my Solstice prayer.

 – Oneness, discernment, compassion, deep listening, maturity, child-like wonder, peace – with curiosity and commitment to weave each into how I want through life in this cycle.

 As was the case at the end of 2022, many – perhaps most – await the turning of the clock to 2024 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 2023 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. What will we weave into life this year? How will we bring the diverse threads of 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?

 Although like 2022, this year held much tragedy and darkness, lights of love continued to shine in dark corners needing our attention and care.  May lights of love shine brightly on our weaving 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 and weave wholeness into the fabric of our lives – individually and collectively.

 While 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!). The season that began a mere seven days ago has a 12-week run before giving way to Spring. Yet our cultural habit is to greet the new year with our plans and to spring into action with goals and commitments to DO more as soon as the new year dawns.

 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 our deep, true essence? What if we followed Nature’s lead, snuggling 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? Mother Nature? Our Nature?

 In some way, I feel as if the new has already begun, with my curiosity and reflections focused forward not back to what is done. As I reflect on saying ‘Goodbye’ to the time gone by, my year end reflections include bundles of gratitude for what I’ve learned and discovered, how I’ve grown and changed. I experience these as subtle and internal shifts that have generated more smiles, more friendliness, more contentment and joy.

 What do you bring to your year-end reflections?

 As 2023 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. 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 and weave it into the fabric of life.

 As you ring in 2024, I invite you to remember how important your presence and your ray of light is at this moment on the planet and to nourish your capacity to weave in each of the 365 days ahead by joining the global, online gathering 7 Days of Rest and Reweaving Wholeness, January 1-7.

 As they did at year end 2021 and 2022, the event’s introductory words draw 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. … we seed the New Year with a global field of intention and healing, honoring our collective calling to wholeness. Each day we journey through primordial portals of remembrance, guiding our dreaming and becoming. As we commune with these essences of Life, we remember our ancestral roots, our original untamed nature, and the ancient knowing of ourselves as infinitely diverse expressions of One Source. Together, we reweave our unique threads of light in integrity and harmony with the fabric of our living universe.

 The website is chock full of nourishing offerings each day. I’m looking forward to deep exploration of 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.

 To Weaving Wholeness and Happiness in the New Year! 

Beauty Ahead!

Reverence Unbound Informs and Inspires

Blanca Peak and the Great Sand Dunes provide background for Orisons Flying Rain Sandhill Crane sculptures.

I wanted to collaborate with all the living beings who were living there or passing through. The land is the artwork, and I wanted to celebrate it and every being on it, as well as reconnect it and all its inhabitants with their presents, pasts, and futures. Marguerite Humeau, Artist, Orisons (www.orisons.art)

Imagine for a moment (or linger longer) the possibilities that would emerge if each of us took such a reverential approach to co-creating our life experiences. How might we be informed and even inspired if we held each of our multiple environs reverently and collaborated with them? Our homes and the lands they occupy. Our places of work, of worship, of play. What if we celebrated all that is, all that has been, and all that is to be?

In the wake of attending the opening of the vast earthworks installation, Orisons, and hearing the artist and curator speak about their three-year collaboration to opening day, such questions have risen in me from a deeper place than I’ve experienced before. The questions feel both informed and inspired by the artist, Marguerite Humeau, and her deep reverence for the land – its present, its past, its future. I witnessed that reverence in the care and thoughtfulness of the 160-acre installation itself and in Humeau’s presentation to the opening day audience along with curator, Cortney Stell.

Humeau is a French artist who lives and has her studio in London. Her understanding of and reverence for land 4,700 miles from home is inspiring. Cortney Stell, Executive Director of the Denver-based Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum which commissioned the work, curated the installation.

My own reverence for the land, for the vast San Luis Valley, for Gaia and her beings continues to be fed by my Orisons experience, by possibilities rising, by questions that continue to emerge, by the very nature of reverence itself. Reverence, Muse gently reminds me, kindles curiosity.

There is a quieting, slowing that I experience when reverence rises. Noise and speed do not blend well with reverence. I wonder about the nature of reverence itself. I so want to say ‘herself’ as reverence feels very soft, feminine, much like Humeau and the strategically placed Orisons sculptures. This is in contrast to the outward, ruggedness of the land which the sculptures occupy.

Sandhill Crane Songs - One of 84 Orisons sculptures

I wonder how reverence can help us navigate life in this chaotic time when so much seems out of balance, out of sync with the wholeness that is life. What can I learn from visiting and contemplating this art? Might cultivating reverence inform us of how to live in greater alignment with one another and with our planetary home? How might reverence call forth the wholeness that is life?

What if we asked, as artist Humeau does, “How would it feel for us as humans to truly merge into the biosphere?” I taste, I sense a morsel of the answer when I saunter in the woods out back. I felt the possibility as I navigated prairie dog and kangaroo mouse burrows in the Orisons landscape on opening day. The land and its beings – present, past, future – have much to share. Will I learn to listen deeply enough to hear?

All too often we reserve reverence for that and those with whom we agree, those we love, things important to us – hardly reverence for ALL life. But what if we cultivated our capacity to feel reverence as deeply for the land we occupy, for Gaia herself, for ALL beings, ALL life as I experienced that Marguerite Humeau expresses in Orisons?

Indeed, what if …?

Horseweed Pendulum

Pivot to Sanity

Ziggurat and Spring Storm on the Horizon - 4-25-23

Till the cloud weeps, how should the garden

     smile?

The weeping of the cloud and the burning of

     the sun

are the pillars of this world: twist these two

     strands together.

Since the searing heat of the sun and the

    moisture of the clouds

keep the world fresh and sweet,

keep the sun of your intelligence burning bright

and your eye glistening with tears. Rumi - Intelligence and Tears

As I moved toward dreamtime last night, I opened a book of Rumi wisdom. The verse above is where my eyes landed. My heart followed. I felt the paradox that rises often with opposites: bitter and sweet, joy and sorrow. Each holding truth, sanity, yet not all the truth, nor all the sanity.

 Earlier in the evening I watched a Charles Eisenstein talk titled The Next Five Years. As I listened, I felt a deep resonance as he wove together a myriad of thoughts and possibilities about the years ahead. While much of what he sees is not rosy, I found it calming in a strange way. Accuracy. Recognition. Truth.

 In leaning into the darkness of possibilities that seem inevitable, I discovered the sanity that lives beyond denial. I was reminded that the future is in our hands, in the choices we make day to day, in the stories we embrace each time we choose, whether that choice is conscious or not. What does this choice say about me? What am I supporting when I take this action or when I react in certain, less than stellar, ways? How do I sustain and maintain my awareness and my sanity? What new stories do I/will I embrace to call forth a new world?

 Rumi’s wisdom speaks to me of the sanity necessary for navigating the crumbling complexities of our current world and for co-creating a new world. I’m not pointing to the ‘sanity’ of our legal system that judges whether someone is ‘competent’ or to sanity in our culture’s terms where we’ve come to dehumanize and render those who are different as ‘crazy’ (or worse).

 Rather I’m pointing to the sanity that is wholeness.

 In wholeness is our capacity to experience the depths of sorrow and despair, acknowledging the truth, the pain, the errors at the roots of this despair AND to embrace the pure joy of beauty, of Nature, of the miracles that are Life. Indeed, the beauty in that very sorrow and despair.

 In wholeness is our capacity to see the nuggets of truth in all points of view, as well as to recognize and navigate in the paradoxes that life and truth offer.

 In wholeness we find our knowing that we are One. One with our planet. One with Nature. One with one another, each and every One.

 In wholeness is our capacity to co-create new stories, new agreements, new systems and structures, new ways of allowing what Life knows to guide us when we don’t yet clearly see the path ahead or even the next step to take.

 In wholeness is the recognition that everything we create is based on story: family, community, country, systems, health, money, politics, art, business, home, EveryThing.

 In wholeness is our recognition that our old stories of separation no longer serve because they are not the truth of who we are.

 In wholeness is letting go of our old stories so that the new may rise.

 In wholeness is sanity, embracing the story of your heart even (perhaps especially) when that story runs counter to the cultural stories that you may find yourself still swimming in.

What a Difference a Day Makes! 4-26-23