Dear Friends ~ My young children replay variations on the same stories over and over. They are learning and growing through recurrent dramas of goodness, love, and bravery. In truth, I do the same: playing with the idea of myself.

[Scene 1: The Garden] This playground represents my teetertotter approach to existence, one moment trying to control it and when that breaks me, at first humbly and then jubilantly, marveling at that which is larger and more clever than I. I learn to simply follow the beauty, adding my own weavings, whittlings, and winding foot paths; my own song and silence.

[Scene 2: Lake Erie] The lake turned over last month. The cold water below rises to the surface, stirring what has stagnated. Air from the surface sinks, breathing dreamy life into the lakebed. The shores are covered with rotting fish in this necessary but turbulent process. I swing high into the elation of the lake's fresh start and then fall back in sorrow and loss for each glassy eyed fish.

[Scene 3: A Conversation] An urban farmer slowly built a system of Pay What You Can markets, school gardening programs, and community food workshops, suddenly defunded. "I still have the same work. I just don't get the same pay checks." It opens my imagination to the rich possibilities of "in come," and our unshakability when rooted in what cannot be defunded: relationships. She is practiced in silence, a place from which the beauty of who she is and the meaning of her actions can pulse through the city and into soil and souls.

Concepts of work and play, wild and cultivated, life and loss, spiritual and earthly, scarcity and abundance are stories. We play with them daily, trying to find ourselves in the narrative.

Here is the story I am telling today: I believe your beauty blesses every garden you enter. I hope this newsletter stands with you on the shore with the turning of lakes. I trust we will find in ourselves, in the silence, the will and way to weave our wonders into this world. ~ Katie

Help us continue to honor the Silence and send this Letter freely to all who ask. Please click the donate button to make a gift. With gratitude, Katie, Lindsay, Joy, Bob, Todd and Kate

The best advice I can give

It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.
~ Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley stories

I Meant to Do My Work Today

I thought I'd live a louder life
I'd learn a lot and get it right
I'd rent a loft I'd drink all night
I'd be a living archetype
And in a blinding flash of light
I'd see that one great insight
But silence called me deeper still
Like nothing else ever will
~ Carrie Newcomer from her song, "I Meant to Do My Work Today"
Carrie Newcomer stories

Ash Wednesday

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
~ T.S. Eliot from "Ash Wednesday" in T. S. ELIOT: COLLECTED POEMS
T.S. Eliot T. S. ELIOT: COLLECTED POEMS stories

Please Call Me By My True Names

Don't say that I will depart tomorrow—
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive...

...Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart
could be left open,
the door of compassion.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh from "Please Call Me By My True Names" in CALL ME BY MY TRUE NAMES
Thich Nhat Hanh Call Me By My True Names stories

This distant image of our tiny world

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena ... It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
~ Carl Sagan in THE PALE BLUE DOT
Carl Sagan THE PALE BLUE DOT stories

The truths we tell will make the song

People do meditation to find psychic alignment. That's why people do psychotherapy and analysis. That's why people analyze their dreams and make art. That is why some contemplate tarot cards, cast I Ching, dance, drum, make theater, pry out the poem, and fire up their prayers. That's why we do all the things we do. It is the work of gathering all the bones together. Then we must sit at the fire and think about which song we will use to sing over the bones, which creation hymn, which re-creation hymn. And the truths we tell will make the song.
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés in WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES
Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run With The Wolves stories