Newsletters

AUTUMN AWAKENING
Reflections on a "yes" mindset / remembering the magic

i.
Dear Friends ~ The chill of autumn rouses something in me that begins to doze in the comfortable consistency of late summer warmth. The sun sets sooner and the air cools considerably. Each nerve on my arm becomes acutely aware of the change; chill bumps peak up as if to say, "What's this now?", "Oh, Hello, Old Friend!", "I am alive, conscious and present on this spinning Earth for the start of another season".

Dear friends ~ Sometimes when he is feverish and sick, my son wakes crying because he feels "too big for everything." He'll tell us his arms are heavy and huge, and his body has ballooned beyond the edges of his bed. So we pull him into a hug and whisper reminders that he is actually quite small: Feel how you fit into our arms? You wouldn't even reach the ceiling on your tiptoes. And see how high the trees outside tower above the house? As his sense of self shrinks back into proportion, my son's breath slows and his body relaxes. His smallness, it turns out, comforts him.

Dear Friends ~ Surrender. A simple and bewildering word. My childhood brain still carries the image of the wicked witch scrawling "Surrender Dorothy" across the sky while cackling triumphantly. My young heart soared when Dorothy refused to give in. In a world awash in forces that require resistance, entertaining the thought that a certain kind of surrender could open the gate of power and possibility seems outrageous, and worse, dangerous. Yet, confoundingly, this is the way grace and the Holy seem to work. Saints, sages, and poets know this and bear witness to the Mystery.

Dear Friends ~ Rainbows may seem a rather glib focus for a March newsletter, but stick with me. Overplayed as they are in early Spring, I have the compounding factor of rainbow-enthusiast housemates; children pushing me to the next level of septacolored semicircles, selecting every story rendering a rainbow. As my spiritual directors, my children implore me to read and reread favorite picture books ad nauseum; a Lectio Devina of a bedtime reading ritual.

Dear Friends ~ Purportedly the beginning of something new, a whole breathless yet-to-be-lived year, January is moored in bleak mid-winter. The wonder of Solstice, of Christmas, have faded in the rearview; the promise of Equinox and Easter are far off. January is stuck trying to be something spirited in the gray-sky, sodden-snow middle, the dark borderland between one thing and another.

Dear Friends ~ Right now, as you are reading these words, take a breath. Let yourself arrive where you are.

The contemplative path begins in presence—rooted in the body, open in the heart, quiet in the mind. These three movements form one inner work: to awaken fully to the moment we are living. Silence and solitude are not escapes from life. They are deep forms of participation. They allow the soul to breathe, to respond rather than react, and to discover that prayer and love mature slowly through fidelity and surrender.

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.

Dear Friends ~ I want to speak now about the grace of community. Nan Merrill's interpretation of Psalm 133 says that this unity "is like a shimmering rainbow, breaking through a summer rain..." As children of the Divine Mother/Father, communion is our birthright, the yearning for community is our DNA. Particularly when fragments and shards of what once seemed coherent lie scattered around us, we need the experience of authentic connection and relationship to give us courage and the possibility of joy.

Dear Friends ~ The kids and I stare out the window, watching birds. The juncos are my favorite, presenting in sooty suits, bowing often in a jaunty jig of seed seeking. My son enjoys the sparrows, who descend in numbers that send our feeders reeling. My daughter likes the showy birds—right red cardinals and silence shattering jays.

Dear Friends ~ This afternoon while slicing onions and tossing them into a pan, the realization washed over me that in four decades I've eaten more than (at this point I pulled up the phone calculator, allowing the onions a few slow minutes to soften in the oil) 14,000 evening meals. While I do my fair share of cooking these days, it's safe to say that I've personally prepared only a small fraction of those many, many dinners. If I haven't cooked all that food that sustained and satiated me, I wondered, who has?

Dear Friends ~ These are some of the passages that have given me hope during this cold winter. ~ Bob

Dear Friends ~ I wish to speak about joy. In this season there is plenty to be joyful about: crisp mornings, mist rising from the river, trees bright with autumn glory, the faces of children sticky with caramel apples. Yet even as the scent of cinnamon lingers in the air, and grandchildren snuggle in for a fireside story on a gently darkening evening, we know that all is not well in our world. The trouble we are in as an Earth community is severe and seemingly inexorable.

Dear friends~ It is early summer, and nearly nine o'clock until dusk finally pulls down the shades on the warm, humid day. It's well past bedtime for a Benedictine monk who will rise at two in the morning, then gather to pray at three-thirty. Yet he stands in the doorway to his dwelling, gently calling for the nameless stray cat he befriended as a kitten five years before. He hears her soft mewing nearby and finally notices where she's perched on a low wall not far off. "It's time for bed," he whispers into the dark.

Dear friends~ Here is how you play "Hippo Toss", a game designed for two players: