It rained every day since the weekend straddling April and May, when 16 women on retreat here had gathered around the two who were carrying little ones in their wombs and under their hearts. Humming softly to a gentle drumbeat in tune with the Earth's rhythms, we blessed the mothers and the children to be, while the rain whispered in misty droplets on the roof of the Meditation Shelter.

I am staring out the window at another day of clouded skies and fitful rain, the twelfth in a row. In the last days of April, we made a fire in the woodstove at the Meditation Shelter to warm us as we told stories, danced, and drummed together during a women’s retreat. It’s almost two weeks on from then, and I am still throwing on a jacket to walk in the gray mist.

Yet the forest glistens and glows; and when the sun shines, even for a fleeting afternoon, the trees are radiant. I had imagined that Mary Oliver’s poem, "When I Am Among the Trees" was written in autumn; but I see I was wrong:

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

Tomorrow begins the women's retreat, "Restorying the Heroine's Journey" here at Rolling Ridge. We who are participating are supposed to bring a story from our lives as women. In preparation, I've been pondering; mulling over what some have called "the Divine Feminine"...and trying to come up with a story, one which (as suggested) calls to me, that won't let go. But all I can think of is the azure blue indigo bunting at the feeder a couple days ago: iridescent, nearly glowing; and the red breasted grosbeak, striking and regal, who appeared at the very same place this afternoon. Mary Oliver's words come to mind: "Every day I see or I hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light."

The Force of Attention by William Segal
Parabola, Volume 15:2, pp. 332-333

Attention is the quintessential medium to reveal man's dormant energies to himself. Whenever one witnesses the state of the body, the interplay of thought and feeling, there is an intimation, however slight of another current of energy. Through the simple act of attending, one initiates a new alignment of forces.

Maintenance of a conscious attention is not easy. The movement, the obligations of day-to-day existence, completely distract. With no base of operations no home in one's organism, the attention serves random thoughts, feelings, and appetites that conflict and tyrannize each other.

Recently, Scot brought to my attention a poem by May Sarton called April in Maine:

The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.
But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.
There will be no going back.

Here it snowed on the tulips. The sky has been a kaleidoscope of purple, indigo, and cobalt clouds sliding in and out across the horizon. The pine trees just east of Niles Cabin hum and cough in a gusty wind. It's cold: a fierce April.

A few nights ago, as we walked east along the path between the garden and the sheep field, we looked into the indigo sky, where the nearly full moon was an immense and glowing disc just above the ridge. In the morning, after its night journey, the moon hovered, an orange ball, over the opposite horizon. Moments and sights like these herald a renewed recognition that we are in a thin time.

A sharing delivered by Cynthia Bourgeault on November 13, 2016 to a group of "Wisdom interns" preparing for the Wisdom School at the Kanuga Episcopal Conference Center in North Carolina.

Listen to this story from Kabir Helminki in Living Presence about the  transmission of wisdom:

A Sufi came to a remote village where he knew no one. After meeting some people he found that those of this village had an unusual hunger for spiritual knowledge. They invited him to share his knowledge at a gathering they would arrange. Although this Sufi was not yet fully confident that he could transmit spiritual knowledge, he accepted their invitation. Many people attended that gather and the Sufi found his audience to be extremely receptive to what he had to say, and most significantly, he found that he was able to express the teachings he had received with an eloquence he had never before experienced. He went to sleep that night feeling very pleased.

We are in an ephemeral time here at Rolling Ridge, an indefinable season between winter and spring. Our friend Cheryl is repairing her bluebird boxes while patches of crusty snow line the side of the gravel road. Days ago, a bitter wind chilled faces and bones. Yesterday the frogs sang their mating songs and danced in the pond by Deer Spring Creek. Leaves lie brown and crumpled on the forest floor while daffodils cluster greenly around the porch and by the compost bin. Josh and friends prune berry canes and bushes in the garden; a fresh batch of potting soil waits, while the utterly bare branches of the trees overhead remain tangled against the drifting clouds. At night, the stars are brilliant points of light in the still-sharp winter sky. The moon glistens behind high clouds.

Snow began falling Friday afternoon, lazily, drifting effortlessly from a soft gray sky. Within hours the mood had changed; it became swift and determined, tiny particles careening downward, as Mary Oliver says, "...irrepressibly" into a world "which is falling apart now, which is white and wild..." ("Walking Home from Oak-Head" in Thirst). After nightfall, outside, sweeping snow from the porch, steps, and path in a futile attempt to keep ahead of the storm, the flakes were shimmering, iridescent grains of light dancing in the beam of my headlamp.

It was a wind-whipped, changeable afternoon.  Clouds and rain gave way to sun, then swept in to shower some more and left again on another breath.  The swirling duet of rainfall and sunlight fit my mood as I looked over the winter-ready garden and the never-quite-occupied horse barn toward the forest.  I was thinking about the perpetuity of change, the ever-receding horizons of the land of transition, and trying to make my peace with it.  The lacework of cloud shifted, and gold light caressed the water droplets trembling on the paled leaves of the dogwood and the brown honeysuckle vines, making them shine like tiny crystals suspended in the current.  There is beauty in that, I thought.