I have hardly written since I canceled the Gathering in Dialogue (my attempt at a non-conference/conference).  I’m still having similar feelings as I had then about my ability to do the administrative sort of tasks that go along even with this one in Colorado where Ill be pretty regally hosted and very few of the details are up to me.

In fact, I haven’t felt like communicating at all.  If you’ve noticed a lack of posts or response to email, I can only tell you that I’ve had some quiet and freedom from obligations for the first time in five years, (or maybe 45 years, but who’s counting), and that these feelings may be a continuation of one long, drawn out, time of giving up on obligations and accepting the freedom to do only what I feel like doing.

This has mainly involved a bunch of puttering.  I move about my day almost giggling at all the things that run through my mind as “shoulds” that I can now ignore.  I have been amazingly content with this state of affairs.  The pressure is off.  And I don’t want to turn it back on.  I am not striving for anything, and every time I begin to head down that path…well…it basically feels awful.

I’m so used to striving, especially striving to express myself, that this feels a little odd, and every once in a while there is a stirring of frustration that I can’t motivate myself to do one thing or another, but not much.  If I was in a mind to do so, I could turn this into quite an advanced spiritual state…like having finally arrived at “just being.”  Thank heavens it wouldn’t even occur to me until I come here, and I think that’s part of my avoidance of being on-line of late.  When I start to put things in “spiritual” language – not that I do it all that often – but when I do, I don’t feel lately as if I’m expressing something true as much as I feel that I’m trying to, by putting words on things, define them, place them in their little box, or see what sized box they fit in.  It’s all striking me as absurd.

Language itself has become a new passion of mine.  I’m starting to feel as though much of spiritual language is a hindrance more than a help, and so while, as a writer, that’s a tough place to be in, it is also for some reason…exciting…as if I’m on the cusp of something new.

You see…there…I did it again.  I gave a “name” to what I’m experiencing.  I’m “on the cusp.”  When I’m writing, such things just flow right out of me.  It’s as much a personal issue as anything else, but I have usually seen when I’m experiencing something personally, generally others are too.  This particular deal might be described as the inclination to give a name, or a direction, or a description that “sounds good” to that ever present idea of “where I am at.”  Good Lord, I feel so done with it, and yet, when I write, it keeps cropping back up.

Doesn’t that seem like a good reason to take a break?

Here’s the actual link you’ll need to visit if you’re interested in the Miracles in the Mountains conference.  I just visited it and heard a lot of sincere spiritual language that sounds pretty good even in the mood I’m in.  I have no idea where I’ll be with language or anything else by the time October comes around, and strangely enough I’m okay with that.

: http://www.miraclepromotions.com/miracles-in-the-mountains-a-conference-with-the-scribes/

In a certain sense I think I’m always a risky speaker.  I don’t do this kind of thing often and so I am not exactly prepared.  I’ve even had to do a little bit of pausing and regrouping so that doing a good presentation doesn’t become something I’m striving toward between now and then.

I’d love to be able to describe what it feels like to have this time feel like time that is “for me.” But something is telling me not to go there.

I may be back tomorrow.  I may not be back for a month.  Whatever the case turns out to be, except my heartfelt encouragement to accept what you’re feeling – whether those feelings are telling you to “go”, to stay, or are telling you not to go to certain habitual places in your mind, your practices, or your creativity.

In some ways feeling this inclination to halt my usual way of doing things feels so surprising that it’s unbalancing.  In other ways, the lack of balance feels so perfect it isn’t even funny.

Two notices

I will be speaking at the Miracles in the Mountains Conference with the Scribes October 12 – 14, 2012

The Abbey in Canon City, Canon City, CO.

See the Event page for details or visit www.miracles promotions.com

A new Course of Love Group is forming in Montrose, Colorado

As I considered this, I realized that I’m a pill to live with…and not for the first time. I am rarely at my leisure. Lately, I’ve been marching my way through “getting things done” in the household so I can go on to my personal or vocational “things to get done.”

I determined to be more leisurely.

After a shower I came out to the kitchen and sat down in my chair next to Donny’s. He was doing the crossword puzzle and I picked up the paper.  Then I thought I heard the phone ring and went looking for it and found a message from Angie with a change of plans for Henry’s morning that affected us. I returned to the table and told Donny about it. Before I knew it I was talking about tomorrow’s trip to visit a potential kindergarten, the advantages and disadvantages, and an alternative I’d like to consider. Soon he got up, got dressed for his day, and left.  I thought, belatedly, “That was hardly leisurely.” I stayed at the table with the paper as he went out the door.

In this mood I continued to read, coming across an intriguing photo at the bottom of the front page of the A & E Live section. In a black and white circle, more etching than photo, was the wizened face of Meridel LeSueur.

LeSueur was a feminist writer of poetry, essays and fiction. She died at 96 in 1996. Her last poem is the title of a book now being released: “This with my last breath.”

The final words of the poem, about how her body is changing, read … “my reality seems different…I am a stranger to myself.”

My heart started to open just then in that painful way it sometimes does.  I felt myself moved to a new mood instantly.  I couldn’t do the dishes or pick up the table.  I had to come and write. I needed to be with that feeling and that line, the short string of words that caused the feeling.

I look now at her chiseled face, the hook nose, the thrusting chin, the squiggly lines of wrinkles at the corner of her eyes, the heavy eyebrows over deep set eyes, the waves of hair brushed back from her temples and curling off her broad forehead. The look is dignified, almost masculine, no fragility evident. “A tough old bird” goes through my mind but I know how tender she is.

In all of my “I have to get this done” agitation of recent weeks, I’ve thought of little more than I have a truth I saw about myself back in 2006.  I was in Boston for a Course of Love presentation that had loomed large for months. I wasn’t feeling any of my usual nervousness but was shocked to find myself experiencing a stillness that bordered on nothing at all. It was so new, so  unexpected, so leaving me without anything to occupy me on my last night away from home, alone in a hotel room, that I ordered a room service dinner and began to read the paper, thinking as I did that I was doing something “normal.” The word leisurely might even have been in my thoughts.

And there I read about an artist who was having a showing and was asked about the meaning of his art. He said, “If you want meaning, read the Wall Street Journal. My art is a diary of my experience.”

His words fell over me like a sign from heaven and I thought, “That is all I have “to do.” That is what my life is about. Keeping a diary of my experience.” The words rang and resonated like a great truth.

Then the emptiness continued for a month or so…as if I had no experience to document…I could write only about the strange feeling it was to be so empty and my hope that it was a spiritual development of some kind.  But I was a little afraid for my life as a writer, for the sake of my diary of experience. What was there to write about?

Later I would see that having nothing to write “about” is part of sharing a diary of experience that has a chance to be more than a documentation about what is happening, what is being done, and what is being thought. It offers a last great place in which to write as Meridel LeSueur did, the kind of words that take your breath away because they so touch your heart with what is at the heart of the human experience.

I remember awaiting Henry’s birth and knowing that I wouldn’t be the kind of grandparent who would take him on all kinds of excursions. I could see our life together like a vision: we would hang out. He would be part of the texture and rhythm of my days. Today I just picked up his latest favorite toy from under the kitchen table. It is a large plastic hook his grandpa found for him when he requested one for his experiments. It is now attached to a string.

Henry and I putter around together and those are our intimate moments and my days of deep contentment. Being explorers, we hike and are planning to visit a cave this summer, but I haven’t deviated from what I knew before he was born. He likes the mall but knows I’m not a mall person. He has people to meet his various needs and interests. I don’t have to do it all.

These musings, even as I type them, are telling me something that’s been trying to get through to me as I’ve pushed myself to begin to organize the Gathering in Dialogue. As much as I felt the desire to bring people together to be in dialogue, I now feel a sense of force.

You could say that I have changed my mind or my mood, and that is true, but in a deeper sense what I’m feeling is a return to my truer vocation, an acceptance of my nature, and that I don’t have to do it all. I’d love to gather with people, but not enough to accept the “organizing,” not enough to structure it and make it into a “thing.” My feeling is certain. It’s either not “my thing to do” or perhaps in attempting to do it in the way I have, I’ve been going against the nature of dialogue itself.

I am a stranger to myself.

I am a stranger to myself as I try to think of the details, write about the gathering in an appealing way, and give in to the force of needing to do all that is involved in event planning. The Gathering, like all other effortful strivings, like all desires to accomplish, has been making me dissatisfied with my life, in one moment as if I need to be doing something bigger to have a bigger life, in another as if I have obligations I must fulfill.

Jesus told me once, and I’d guess it wasn’t long after the Boston experience, that A Course of Love itself was my last stumbling block to accepting and fulfilling my life.  It had become something akin to an “iron in the fire” … a poker … constantly stabbing me with the feeling of needing “to do something.”

I am…today…giving up the poker and the hosting of any formal gatherings.

I am a tender old bird too and do not want to turn myself into a tough one, even briefly.

I am here.  Anyone can still come be in dialogue with me. All I need is a little notice.

I’ll be a guest at the Miracles in the Mountains conference (where no organizing is involved) so you can join me in a group experience there (in October). http://www.miraclepromotions.com/Miracle_Promotions/Home.html

In the meantime I will Be Here Now and wish the same for you~

Mari

I’m sitting in my sun room office now with the heater on.  Because of all the windows, it’s only 67 degrees in here (according to its readout) but I’m feeling snug and toasty.

There’s been something so drab about the exterior world lately.  The only snow that’s been on the ground for weeks sits on lawns. The path to my cabin is the most dangerous spot I traverse for all the footprints that melted, refroze, and left the ground treacherous to the ankles. Streets and sidewalks are bare, but ground everywhere is like my cabin path. What snow is left is half ice and mottled with circles and spirals of brown grass and leaves showing through.  There is something quiet about it. No intensity. No vibrance.  It’s like a waiting time.

It’s matched my mood the past month but I’m ready for the snow today and for those changes you don’t go looking for.

A couple of months ago I was invited to join a Conference with the Scribes, an event taking place later this year in Colorado. The invitation isn’t new but when I received the flyer about it, it felt new, and like one of those things I didn’t go looking for. It also felt like a sign of change.

With the Gathering in Dialogue coming up in May and the Conference with the Scribes in October, there are suddenly new views on the horizon: Two opportunities to meet people in person and be in relationship.  This was the overriding feeling I had after the two deaths that affected me this past month: that nothing mattered as much as being in relationship.  I wrote a post about it but never put it up because it felt so sappy!

It is so clear when people dear to you die. Each relationship is like no other. Each relationship is unique, person-to-person, one of a kind, even while the connection that runs true and deep is the same. I was telling Kathy Scott Perry, the organizer of the Conference with the Scribes all this, and she said something that really made me look forward to the event. She said “Everyone involved has been talking about relationship.”

Maybe this extraordinary 2012 year will be the year of relationship.

(I’ll post on both events soon.)

This has been a time of getting out of the loop.

What’s been happening falls in that category of “It’s just life.”  There’s been death, illness, weather, household adjustments and Henry turning five.  That happened just days ago.  I was about ready for his after school birthday party with his Montessori chums when a trip to the emergency room for a kidney stone (Donny’s) became necessary.  “That’s life” as the saying goes.  There isn’t a plan that can be counted on. It’s a good reminder once in a while. A dozen reminders in a month get it under your skin.

I’ve spent this time feeling the feelings associated with life, doing my best to sit with them and to be aware of the wayward thoughts that defy the desire for reflection and tend toward wanting things to be different or to fix them.  Yet what I knew as the year began has been so undoubtably true. I knew life was going to be different.  Before the year began the state of the world figured largely in my thoughts of this difference. The close and immediate cause was not that, but the failing health of my dear mother-in-law. When she died a mere week into the new year the change was immediate. Life would never be the same. “Never the same” moments kept coming. These are the times when reflection feels particularly needed.  There are graces that come of it, but risks too.  There are instant changes you know to expect and those that are a surprise.

One of my surprises was an instantaneous and total disinterest in the state of the world.  I had been flirting with being an activist in a new way.  The word I kept using for this turn in attention was that it was “interesting.” It was necessary, urgent, new, heartfelt, but also different. I was exploring a side of myself that seemed to have been waiting in the wings to emerge.  After some slight involvement with Occupy St. Paul I became enamored by the idea of telling people’s stories.  I thought I was ready to go out into the community and collect them.  I wanted to come to voice on the inequality so poignantly being heard from in the 99% and I wanted to bring others to voice.

And then the urge died.  Simply left me.

Now, re-entering my vocational life, I realize that the urge that surrounded my “new” ideas is the same as that which fueled my desire to have a gathering in dialogue. I wanted to come to voice and to bring others to voice. The impetus behind the gathering was to hear the stories of people affected by A Course of Love. I wanted to share them face to face, to listen, to hear, and to respond. I wanted to be in dialogue. (See the Event page. Updates will be coming.)

In a moment life can, and does, change irrevocably. The person we were in the morning feels radically different than the person we are in the evening. One moment you’re preparing for a birthday party, the next you’re on your way to the emergency room. It happens to everyone. We adjust, draw on our whole variety of strengths, look our vulnerability in the face. We rise to meet occasions, and fall afterwards into natural states of reflection, melancholy, reverie, or even gloom. Just as the weather changes the scene outside our windows, inner seasons are lived out, sometimes fading with a bang and at other times with a whimper.

It’s a new season.

And yet as the face of the season changes there comes the realization that the changes are other than you thought they were. Down deep, the ground still remains the ground whether it’s covered in snow or leafs or grass. “Interests” may appear to change in radical ways while the underlying focus, the cause of the interest, remains the same.

What draws me is the heart of the matter.

Life speaks to us and we respond. Then we get quiet and listen to our hearts.

This is from a Christmas card Richard sent me a few years ago

A Course of Love, as I reminded my grieving friend Terry, is about our humanity as well as our divinity.  Terry is grieving for our mutual friend Richard, who died on the 9^th. His services are today.

Since I was in the midst of Katie’s services as I heard of Richard’s death, my attention was not with him right away. By the time it was, and I learned that his services are today, I felt that I could not make the trip and yet that I was neglecting something deeply meaningful and that I was failing to respond to Richard’s loss as I would like.

This morning I dedicated my meditation to him and heard, “I am with friends.”

I am with friends. That is how I felt when I met Richard and when through his friendship and love of A Course of Love, I was invited to Florida and was embraced by not only Richard, but Terry, Lee, and Carol.

But let me back up.

I first met Richard just after A Course of Love came out.  He had ACOL and the Treatises but was seeking a copy of The Dialogues and writing me via email. Soon he decided to come to Minnesota to visit me. This was a significant first for me, the first time that I saw that A Course of Love would have such impact and that someone would associate that impact with me and want to meet me.

Later, when I met Terry, Lee, and Carol, they laughed and laughed with me over that visit…finding it hilarious that Donny had to come home from work to check out this man who “could be a kook for all we know”, and that Richard wanted to meditate in my cream-colored formal living room, where no one ever sat at the time, and that I wasn’t a meditator then, and that I was so incapable of resistance, so overpowered to have this man come into my home and just make himself at home and lead me by the hand into my own too formal to bother sitting in room.  It was so “Richard.” That is why it was so funny, my new friends imagining me not knowing Richard as they did and encountering him in this way.

As sweet and funny as that visit was, and as meaningful as it was to me to have my first visitor of this kind, it was more of an impact in other ways that came of Richard’s nature. For one thing, I was a mess at the time. I can’t remember exactly what was going on now but I know I was in conflict with my co-presenter for one reason or another and that I told Richard all about it, and that I felt free to say the f word in his presence and that he might have come expecting some serene and wise person but if he did he never showed it. He accepted me exactly as I was and did not take my discombobulated state as evidence that I had nothing to offer.  No, he invited me to come speak at his Unity Church a while later – the trip on which I met the others.

It was one of the most magical trips of my life, occasion of my first more formal dialogues, first time learning how to walk on the beach and falling in love with the ocean. The sequence of events has left me, but I know I visited Richard’s home, met his son Isaiah, his beloved dog (s) and was in every way that could happen in a short time “let in” to his life, and I suppose that was as true of me too when he came to see me, was in my home, met Donny, the cats and dog, came to the coffee shop where he likely would have met one or both of my daughters.  At any rate it happened. That was it. We were “inside” each other’s lives.

He sat and talked to me in my hotel room as I ironed my clothes, which for some reason is one of my most intimate memories; took me to a bar where he told everyone about A Course of Love, fed me a dish I’d never had (crabs?), treated me to wine and even got me up to dance.

He didn’t have a pious bone in his body or have a bit of a problem “being real.”  He didn’t know any other way and had no division between his work and his surfing and his spirituality.  He was a guy’s guy in so many ways – ex Navy Seal, robust, full of life. He didn’t negate anything that I could see – being a family man, a tender man, a generous friend or a guy’s guy. He was totally willing to proclaim his loves – whatever they were – and A Course of Love was one of them and that was no problem in his energy field, being on the same level as everything else and yet somehow elevated too.  It was all sublime.

Not that he was perfect or never had a problem. He called with a problem on occasion and counseled me through some. He even called once when he’d had too much to drink!  We were that kind of friends. One bit of advice I always remember is him telling me to get out and walk.  He could tell when I was stuck in my head and needed movement, but never, ever, did any amount of stuckness lessen me in his eyes.  He’s one of the few people I ever met with whom I didn’t doubt myself in that way of feeling bad for saying the wrong thing, being in the wrong place, or just being myself.

I imagine that this was true for everyone – that once Richard loved you – you were “in” and he was totally with you and totally loyal.

I drove to Florida on my first visit, and as I left, I felt what I remember describing then as though I was attached to him and my other friends and the ocean and Florida, to that time and place and the connection we’d made, by a bunge cord.  As if, were I to take my foot off the gas my car would bounce right back there. If my hands hesitated on the wheel, the car would turn itself around.  I’d never felt anything like it.  I’ve lived in Minnesota all my life with not a desire ever to live elsewhere and I was shaken by my desire to stay and the imaginings I had of another life that could be had there.

Terry and I have been friends ever since. Lee and I talked on the phone once a month for a long time afterwards. And Richard was our connector.

I am taking the message that “I am with friends” not only as a confirmation that Richard is held in an even wider embrace of friendship and love, but as a message to carry forward in my life. “I am with friends.”  I can live everyday with that knowing, with that safe feeling, with all the enemies of the world (real or imagined, large or small) transformed into friends. I can let go any desire to see anything else, to feel slighted or undervalued or wronged or under attack. I can see that I am with friends everywhere, every day.

That is Richard’s gift to me and to many – a view of a friendly world – a universe where love is real, and where our humanity and our divinity are all of one piece and one peace.

His ashes will be spread today near the beach where we walked.

I had been going through my boxes of pictures to make a video of Katie’s life, and found this card from Richard before I heard of his death. I put it up on the top of my bookshelf without reading the inside. Today I did. I don’t think Richard would mind me sharing it. It says it all.

“I believe that Love is the Answer. Spread the word…I love you…”  Richard

Katie is my mother-in-law and friend. She died early Saturday morning, was waked on Monday and her funeral was today.  It might seem odd to some that I’m writing so soon after, but I feel the need to write.

Katie time is the kind of suspension of the everyday that you experience when a person you love dies.  It is mundane: I won’t worry about the recycling now. I can do that later. And it is foggy: I start out to do one thing and do another and then walk around in a circle.  Katie time has been gentle, sweet, sad, and busy in a totally non-ordinary way.

I don’t think I ate a sit-down meal from the time she went in the hospital on Wednesday until what is called, in our church, the “mercy meal.” I am told that 500 people were served.  That is not an ordinary number.

I called a couple of my friends who knew Katie.  One said outright, “Ohhh, that’s too bad. Katie liked me.”  The other didn’t say “Katie liked me” right out, but that’s what she said.  I decided that this was the key to Katie’s iconic stature in her church, neighborhood, and community.  She didn’t just like people. She made them feel liked.

At one point in the day a couple of her friends were talking to me and I was looking around for Donny, totally accepting that each of my conversations would be brief as I passed through the crowd and shadowed my husband.  Only later did I think of how Katie never did that.  She’d have 15 minute conversations here, and 15 minute conversations there. She didn’t look around.  We’d tease her that she’d hold up any line she was ever in.  If she didn’t know you, she’d get to know you.

She was very like my dad that way, and I’ve thought of him a lot in these weeks when it seemed so clear that Katie was failing, and as we waited for the doctor appointment that would confirm what we could see and sense.

I fell in love with grief during the “Dad time” of his preparation to die and his death. I fell in love with the suspension of ordinary time, with the feeling of intensity and meaning that hung about each day, and with the hidden nature of the dying that slowly revealed itself. I lingered a long time with grief after Dad died.

Tomorrow life is supposed to start getting back to normal. I will take out the recycling. I’ll start to clean up all the messes I’ve left in my stupor or my haste.  The ordinary conversations will start up again.  And then, just when life’s texture seems to be returning to normal, I know that Katie time will rear up again. There will be different Katie conversations and the “business” of death to attend to. The effort to follow her wishes.  All the transitions of the grieving, the adjustments to the change.

Katie has been my mother-in-law almost 25 years, and my elder care companion for the last two of those.  Her living has been part of the fabric of my days.  As my own mother talked of a recipe the other day, I found myself thinking, “Katie would like that.”

It was both a relief and a challenge to let her go into the hands of the medical professionals who assisted her last days. I’d grown accustomed to looking out for her.

The beauty of grief is the beauty of all of those things – like the weather – that are beyond effort, intention, or feeble attempts at control.  It is a visitation with surrender that does its best to become total.  Grief sweeps you up and deposits you on the other side of life’s door.

And you realize, once outside and beyond the threshold, that you can’t turn back.  You stand somewhere new.

In my desire for quietude I’d begun to question, as I do and must do from time to time, the direction my life is taking.  I was working on a blog posting for Occupy St. Paul, to which I’ve been contributing lately. I followed my initial idea for a post from link to link, gathering information like a journalist writing an article, feeling somewhat relieved of my “I’ve had too much” feelings by being engaged in the work and interested in what I was finding.  The words “interested” or “interesting” have spoken to me more recently than ever in my adult life, causing me even to question if I have been bored with my life and the way I spend my days. Such eagerness for the interesting! For engagement of mind!

And so the questioning – has my quest for the interesting come only by default? Due to something else being lacking?  Has my interest itself been pure or tainted by a seeking after something to relieve the common and every day, the small talk and the errands, the routine and the chaos?

I opened “The Intimate Merton” to a page I’d either marked to return to, or where I’d left off in my last reading, and read with soothing comfort Merton’s gratitude for his hermitage.

His journal, Feb 16, 1953

“It seems to me that St. Anne’s is what I have been waiting for and looking for all my life and now I have stumbled into it quite by accident. Now, for the first time, I am aware of what happens to a man who has really found his place in the scheme of things.

With tremendous relief I have discovered that I no longer need to pretend. Because when you have not found what you are looking for, you pretend in your eagerness to have found it. You act as if you had found it. You spend your time telling yourself what you have found and yet do not want.

I do not have to buy St. Anne’s. I do not have to sell myself to myself here. Everything that was ever real in me has come back to life in his doorway wide open to the sky! I no longer have to trample myself down, cut myself in half, throw part of me out the window, and keep pushing the rest of myself away.

In the silence of St. Anne’s everything has come together in unity, and the unity is not my unity but Yours, O Father of Peace. … The silence of it is making me well.”

Returning today I read of another side of Merton and this too comforted me. It is surprisingly timely (as all those universal truths tend to be – holding their truth across time and space):

From his journal of December 29, 1957

“In a world with a complicated economic structure like ours, it is no longer even a question of “my brother” being a citizen in the same country. From the moment the economy of another country is subservient to the business interests of my country, I am responsible to those of the other country who are “in need.” In what does this responsibility consist? To what does it obligate me? Who can answer? Is Marx right in saying that the Capitalist world does not and cannot seek an honest answer? I am bound to agree with him.

Hence the problem of cooperation with those who exploit. A frightfully difficult problem. What have moral theologians done so far to open up new horizons? Nothing as far as I know.

Hence my obligation is by no means in conflict with my “contemplative” vocation.

Until my “contemplation” is liberated from the sterilizing artificial limitations under which it has so far existed (and nearly been stifled out of existence), I cannot be a “man of God” because I cannot live in the Truth, which is the first essential for a man of God.

It is absolutely true that here in this monastery we are enabled to systematically evade our real and ultimate social responsibilities. In any time, social responsibility is the keystone of the Christian life.”

February 15, 1958

“This afternoon I suddenly saw the meaning of my American destiny – one of those moments when many unrelated pieces of one’s life and thought fall into place in a great unity toward which one has been growing.

My destiny is indeed to be an American – not just an American of the United States. We are only on the fringe of the true America. I can never be satisfied with this only partial reality which is almost nothing at all, which is so little that it is like a few words written in chalk on a blackboard, easily rubbed out.

I have never so keenly felt the impermanence of what is now regarded as America because it is North American, or the elements of stability and permanence, which are in South America. Deeper roots, Indian roots. The Spanish, Portugese, Negro roots also. The shallow English roots are not deep enough. The tree will fall.

To be an American of the Andes – containing in myself also Kentucky and New York. But New York is not, and never will be, really America. America is much bigger and deeper and more complex than that – America is still an undiscovered continent. …

My vocation is American – to see and to understand and to have in myself the life and the roots and the belief and the destiny and the orientation of the whole hemisphere – as an expression of something of God, of Christ, that the world has not yet found – something that is only now, after hundreds of years, coming to maturity!

To be able – possibly – to reach out and embrace all the extremes and have them in oneself without confusion – without eclecticism, without dilettantism, without false mysticism, without being torn apart.

No one fragment can begin to be enough – not Spanish colonial Catholicism, not 19^th century republicanism, not agrarian radicalism, not the Indianism of Mexico – but all of it, everything. To be oneself a whole hemisphere and to help the hemisphere to realize its own destiny.”

Merton, Thomas. The Intimate Merton, His Life from His Journals. Edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo. HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., NY, NY, 1999 by the Merton Legacy Trust.

Pp 110-11, 120-22

When the program was over his mom asked “What was going on with your shirt?”

He said, “I was hot!”

Afterwards I took him to get a present for his mom just as the snow started to fall. When we got out of the car he stood trying to catch it in his hand and then as we ran from car to store he did this little skip and a hop and I joined in. It was just perfect.

There really are moments of perfection in this life.

Thank you so much for sharing some of them with me! I am honored that you do and that we’re living some of our moments together.

The human spirit is so vibrant at this time of year…it can be like lights in the dark of morning.

May your light shine brightly~

Mari

It was not nearly so nice before sunrise when we did take our walk. Who knew then that the sun would come out and the sky go as prettily blue as a summer sky.  There’s only been one winter-white day so far – only one day when the sky and ground and the very air were opaque.

Despite Sam’s look, I feel like I’m part of the day when I’m here…as close to outside as I can get and still have the benefits of electricity and a laptop. Here, I can write simply because I love to.

I’ve been wanting this whole December to write about the coming of A Course of Love in the season of Advent.  It’s been on my mind like something needing expression but the feeling of quietude I need to write has been largely missing, replaced by a new energy that is amazing for being peaceful. I’m doing more-or-less what I feel like doing and have spent two Sunday mornings now in a floor-length blue robe that I never wear. It was the last gift I received from my friend Sally before she died, so I couldn’t get rid of it, but it’s hung in my closet, shoved to the back so its bulk wouldn’t get in the way, since 2003.

And now I’ve worn the blue robe twice, last week until 10:30!

That’s got to sound like a restful activity, but all I can say is that the energy of this month has been different, and maybe that’s why I’ve kept thinking of the December, thirteen years ago, when A Course of Love first came to me.

Being raised a Catholic, I grew up going to Mass but never understanding the Mass.  I felt a sense of the sacred there, in the mystery, the ritual, the music, the architecture, the art, in the sights, sounds and smells in the combined experience…which I tell you only to explain that this was enough for me and that I never understood the Mass or its symbolism other than for in the very most minimal of ways.

So it was that when I was getting close to the coming of ACOL yet not knowing that it was coming, and attending daily Mass in hope of clues, I felt as if I got them in all kinds of ways.  One I don’t think I’ve ever talked about before was that in the week preceding ACOL’s reception, the priests kept talking about the week being the end of “ordinary time.”

You’ll see now why I had to explain my experience of Mass, because most Sunday’s of the year, if you’re looking, you’ll see something like “third Sunday in Ordinary Time” printed somewhere…but I’d never noticed it!

I have since looked up this bit of church lore and found that Ordinary Time is a season of the liturgical calendar. Ordinary Time comprises the two periods – one following Epiphany, the other following Pentecost – which do not fall into the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter.

I didn’t look it up at the time either. I was just bowled over by the change that took place, in sync with the reception of ACOL, from Ordinary Time to Advent…the time of the Coming of Christ.

Advent is meant to commemorate the First Coming while preparing for the second.  In church language the second coming is often associated with the end of days and the final judgment, but I wasn’t cognizant of any of that either.  As ACOL began to come and right off announced the second coming of Christ…in us…I simply felt it all to be held within the perfect timing of the sacred.

And so, now that it’s getting closer to Christmas and the perfect day has arrived and I’m in the mood, it feels good to share this and to invite you to…as has happened to me somewhat “accidentally” or synchronistically as the case may be… be with this ritual meaning of the season in this one faith tradition.

What a difference in feeling tone to imagine the second coming as an end of time associated with judgment and the return of Jesus, and an end of time associated with the birth, in us, of the Christ Self.  Having lived with this Course of Love all these years, the old idea of the second coming feels almost archaic.  I feel like…of course it will be us who will be newly birthed.

At the Institute for Sacred Activism I was able to witness Andrew Harvey’s tears as he told of  Fr. Bede Griffith’s death bed vision and words: Grow the living Christ, Grow the living Christ, Grow the living Christ.  Fr. Bede shared a similar vision to Jesus’ message of the second coming.

The second coming will not be he. It will be we.