This post is for Lily

A traditional Buddhist prayer:
For all the harm I have done to others
Knowingly or unknowingly
Through ignorance and confusion
I ask for forgiveness.

For all the harm others have done to me
Knowingly or unknowingly
Through ignorance and confusion
I offer forgiveness

For all the harm I have done to myself
Knowingly or unknowingly
Through ignorance and confusion
I heal these wounds with forgiveness.

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Like I said in our circle, I didn't realize how much I needed to be with you at this time so that we may transform our siblinghood into even deeper and richer dimensions. The last six weeks are almost miraculous in the way that I have been tested, reassured, loved, forgiven, nourished, and healed by your presence at this time.

I marvel at you:
    your light heart and bursts of laughter
    the seriousness of your intellect
    the color and splash of your wardrobe
    the intensity of your workout
    your compassion for others
    your courage and fighting spirit


For these gifts, I thank You. I love you.
  

This post is for Will who misses my posts

You are on my mind often even though the whispered moments of intimate story-sharing have been few. I say few only because I can never get enough of the stories and I keep longing to hear more. And yet I also feel as if we need not speak too many words to know what is below the surface of the stories. We read and love the same authors and that has been a comfort and a reassurance that we do not always need words to understand another.

You have been to places I've been hesitant (or afraid?) to enter and it makes me wonder why I am not as able to dive deep into the Mysteries. Although I'm drawn to those places intellectually, my feet haven't taken me those portals. A part of me is longing to do so and a part of me is satisfied in knowing that there are many paths we can take.

What is this path? After being on this path for so long, the question comes up again: what is this about really? The answer seems to be: It is still about coming Home and staying Home. They say Home is in the Heart; Home is the homeland; Home is the earth; Home is the cosmos. It is all of these, of course, but there are just too many memes and cliches (esp. on social media) that renders it bland and flat sometimes.

Maybe I'm just getting old and moving on and letting go. In letting go, I delight in young folks like you. You are wise beyond your years. Your journey from grief to love has been a gift to me.  There is a lot of grief in letting go but, like you, I am learning that it is not about Me at all. It is about the goddess trapped in the human body in need of liberation. What a gift it is to see someone thru that lens of the Sacred!

I am sitting under the apricot tree in the garden as I write this. The breeze is gentle and the cicadas are singing, the crows are cawing. Someone is hammering at a log in the distance. The frogs in the creek delight in the small pool of water after last night's little rain. An aphid just landed on this keyboard and before I could think twice, I had already wiped it off. Sorry.

This morning I walked barefoot as I cleared the autumn leaves in the garden. The Buddha sits under the dogwood tree watching over our house.The gardenia and sampaguita blossom that I placed on the Buddha's lap have dried up.  Another smaller Buddha sits atop our water reservoir by the front door cradled by dried twigs and leaves. Some say this is called earthing - the act of drawing in the energy of the earth thru the soles of our feet.  Whatever name it goes by, I just know it feels good and peaceful to appreciate this dwelling place.

The last time you were here you said something like this: "someday we will all live indigenously as the people who have lived in this valley have done before." This is why you like Ursula Guin's Always Coming Home because this is literally the valley she refers to in her fiction. I think this will be my new home work: to learn how to live as if that indigenous future is here already.

Robin Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), Potawatomi author, calls it the shkitagen that would kindle the seventh fire that might still save us if enough of us find this way of being today. You are one of those folks, Will, and I feel so grateful for knowing this about you.

So you see, I am glad that my heart skipped a beat and scared me. The heart is calling me to a place of quiet now so that I may learn to let go of what has worked (or hasn't) before and to learn how to live small and beautiful while the Stories we have shared take on a life of their own - like trickster stories perhaps, or as sagely ways of knowing.

This post is for you, Will.


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