Lindsay McLaughlin

November 2020 (Vol. XXXIII, No. 10)

Dear Friends ~ It is the season of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, when the creatures slow and burrow into the Earth. The plants allow their chlor ophyll to drain from their leaves and their sap to sink into the roots. Everything seems to be moving inward, releasing, and letting go. There is comfort in observing that quiet and sure return, a balm for us who are facing so much loss and death. The late autumn with its sense of cycles and transformation softens me to reacquaint myself with a dark angel, one whom I seldom have the heart to acknowledge. There is an ancient song that speaks of the intimacy of our formation in the dark cottage of our mother 's womb, of the deep connection with the Holy that is our birthright. We are cradled in an immense and personal belonging, in a loving communion that wheels and wheels.

When Death Comes

Mary Oliver VOL. 1, New and Selected Poems
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn...

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what will it be like, that cottage of darkness?...

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement...
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real...

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Abide with me

Carrie Newcomer & Parker Palmer A Permeable Life
Oh, abide with me, where it's breathless and it's empty
yes, abide with me and we'll pass the evening gently
stay awake with me and we'll listen more intently
to something wordless and remaining sure and every changing
in the quietness of now.
There are things I cannot prove, and still somehow I know.
It's like a message in a bottle that some unseen hand has thrown
you don't have to be afraid, you don't have to walk alone
I don't know but I suspect, that it will feel like home.

Turn your dying into a question

Stephen Jenkinson DIE WISE
What if your dying is an angel? And what if your dying job, should you choose to accept it, is to wrestle this angel of your dying instead of fighting it? ...Wrestling isn't what happens to you. It is what you do. And you will not be alone in it...Living your way of life wrestles the way life has of being itself: That is how meaning is made...That is what the news of your death could mean: It could mean the beginning, unadorned, common, and singular, of your one true life and its work...

Come to your death as an angel to wrestle instead of an executioner to fight or flee from and you turn your dying into a question instead of an edict: What shall my life mean? What shall my time of dying be for? What is it going be like, that cottage of darkness?

You are not going somewhere strange

John O'Donohue ANAM CARA: A BOOK OF CELTIC WISDOM

...May you know in your soul that there is no need to be afraid...You are not going somewhere strange. You are going back to the home you never left. May you have a wonderful urgency to live your life to the full...May your going be sheltered and your welcome assured. May your soul smile in the embrace of your anam cara.

Toward the opening awaiting me

Karen Paine-Gernee LIFE PRAYERS
So I turn my head and look towards death now. Feeling my way through the tunnel with the space of emptiness and quiet. That shimmering silence that awaits me...
A breath...A pause. I relax, and then float on toward the opening awaiting me...
This is my direction now; inward to the green pastures, to the great light of divine love, the great peace of All Knowing.

Love is revealed as the great currency

Martin Shaw A COUNSEL OF RESISTANCE AND DELIGHT IN THE FACE OF FEAR

What I've seen on my rounds is that if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to reflect at the end of a life, then love is revealed as the great currency. It's the thing. The treasury. It's what mattered...

How well did I love? whom did I love?, and how was love central to the life that I made for myself?

...When the lots are counted, when we are gathered in, we will find that it was love that mattered. Love expressed, given, received, fought for. So for those of us fighting right now, I say; keep going. As a culture, as an individual, believe in the full life that is your bequeathed inheritance, not the subterranean half-life that terror and impoverished minded bullies will try and spike your wine with. You are too good for that.

You formed my inward being

Nan Merrill Psalms for Praying
...You formed my inward being,
You knit me together in my mother's womb...
Your mysteries fill me with wonder!
More than I know myself do You know me;
my essence was not hidden from You,
When I was being formed in secret,
intricately fashioned from the elements of the earth...

Whisperings of release in the air

Alice James THE DIARY OF ALICE JAMES
It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life, and I count in the greatest good fortune to have these few months so full of interest and instruction in the knowledge of my approaching death. It is as simple as one's own person as any fact of nature, the fall of a leaf or the blooming of a rose, and I have a delicious consciousness, ever present, of wide spaces close at hand, and whisperings of release in the air.

Life, too, is probably round

Fenton Johnson THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART
I am done with talk of death except as it is a part of life, one side of a sphere whose roundness would otherwise be incomplete. In a letter van Gogh wrote, "The earth had thought to be flat... science has proved that the world is round... they persist nowadays in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life, too, is probably round."

For Death

John O'Donohue To Bless the Space Between Us
...when destiny draws you
into these spaces of poverty,
and your heart stays generous
until some door opens into the light,
you are quietly befriending your death;
so that you will have no need to fear
when your time comes to turn and leave,
that the silent presence of your death
would call your life to attention...
to the urgency to become free
and equal to the call of your destiny.

May 2020 (Vol. XXXIII, No. 5)

Dear Friends ~ The willow stump, cracked and gray, has sprouted fresh fronds. They wave brightly above the old tree's broken trunk like a vibrant pennant. Meanwhile, the long-unpruned pear tree is grandly and boldly attired in abundant white blossoms. Brilliant yellow finches and glossy cowbirds adorn the feeder once again. Such heralds of Earth's faithful renewal, of the cycles that are always ending and beginning again, cry out profound and essential news. In this time of climate crisis, cultural turmoil, and now the coronavirus, hope takes on a deeper, more intense hue. I wonder if it is the moment now to dig in soul ground, in the bowels of what we know. Ancient wisdom from every spiritual tradition beckons us to kneel down into the mystery of that dark hummus and dig with open hands. Who knows what we may find? A tap root, an anchor, a wellspring, a seed that one day will grow? ~ Lindsay

Hope is an embrace

Rebecca Solnit Hope in the Dark

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act...Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.

Psalm 137

Nan Merrill Psalms for Praying

Hide not from Love, O friends,
sink not into the sea of despair,
the mire of hatred.
Awaken, O my heart, that I drown not
in fear!
Too long have I sailed where'ere
the winds have blown!
Drop anchor!

Hope for the future

Nelson Mandela
Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

The hope that truth may be of use

Simone Beauvoir ALL SAID AND DONE
It is because I reject lies and running away that I am accused of pessimism; but this rejection implies hope—the hope that truth may be of use.

A future not our own

John Cardinal Dearden

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision...This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, know that they hold future promise...We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities...We are prophets of a future not our own.

Active hope

Joanna Macy Active Hope
Active hope is a practice...It is something we do rather than have. Since active hope doesn't require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express.

Hope and Love

Jane Hirshfield The Lives of the Heart

Hope is the hardest love we carry.

To reject false hope

Paul Kingsnorth DARK ECOLOGY Orion Magazine
Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?...if you don't feel despair, in times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair, too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road....I am going to pick up [my scythe] and go and find some grass to mow. I am going to cut great swaths of it...I am going to walk ahead, following the ground... I am going to breathe the still-clean air and listen to the still-singing birds and reflect on the fact that the earth is older and harder than the machine that is eating it—that it is indeed more resilient than fragile—and that change comes quickly when it comes, and that knowledge is not the same as wisdom.

I am left only with hope

Gerald May The Dark Night of the Soul
So in the end I am left only with hope.
I hope the nights are transformative.
I hope every dawn brings deeper love,
for each of us individually and for
the world as a whole. I hope that
John of the Cross was right when
he said the intellect is transformed
into faith, and the will into love
and the memory into – hope.

Hope is what sits by a window

Joan Chittister TRANSFORMED BY HOPE, SCARRED BY STRUGGLE
Hope is what sits by a window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there is not one ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possibly come.

This deeper level of hope

Michael Meade LIVING MYTH podcast
...If we can stay in touch with ourselves, if we can find the connection to our deeper selves, we can find this deeper level of hope that truly should be called imagination...in the depths of each person there is a greater self and a core imagination that is truly the source of one's life.

A hope that can never be taken away

Cynthia Bourgeault Love Is Stronger Than Death
In the practice of conscious love you begin to discover...a hope that is related not to outcome but to a wellspring... a source of strength that wells up from deep within you independent of all outcomes... It is a hope that can never be taken away from you because it is love itself working in you, conferring the strength to stay present...

An orientation of the spirit

Vaclav Havel Share International #3
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

November 2016 (Vol. XXIX, No. 10)

Quiet greetings, dear friends,

In silence and solitude
you will come to meet the Beloved of your heart.
For Silence is power,
the power of the Divine Lover blessing and transforming you.
Seek always the Eternal Flame
ever shining in your heart,
and let yourself be nourished
and refreshed in the Silence.
~ Nan Merrill

Come away from the din

Jerome K. Jerome

Come away from the din. Come away to the quiet fields, over which the great sky stretches, and where, between us and the stars, there lies but silence; and there, in the stillness let us listen to the voice that is speaking within us.

Silence of our heart

The Ghagavad Gita

Teach us that even as the wonder of the stars in the heavens only reveals itself in the silence of the night, so the wonder of life reveals itself in the silence of the heart. In the silence of our heart we may see the scattered leaves of all the universe bound by love.

Create silence

Soren Keirkegaard

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and my advice asked, I should reply, "Create silence. Bring people to silence. The word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. Therefore, create silence."

Silence gives us a new perspective

Mother Teresa

The trees, the flowers, the plants grow in silence. The stars, the sun, the moon move in silence. Silence gives us a new perspective.

The ancient weave of silence

Frank MacEowen

Mirroring the creation of the universe, all great things have come from the ancient weave of silence. It is a part of us that we must welcome home.

An oasis of silence

Max Picard

We need to recover an oasis of silence within the rhyme and reason of our active life, for it is in silence that we meet God face to face.

May you grow still enough to hear

Brother David Steindl-Rast

May you grow still enough to hear the small noises earth makes in preparing for the long sleep of winter, so that you yourself may grow calm and grounded deep with-in. May you grow still enough to hear the trickling of water seeping into the ground, so that your soul may be softened and healed, and guided in its flow. May you grow still enough to hear the splintering of starlight in the winter sky and the roar at earth’s fiery core. May you grow still enough to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air, so that your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.

Intelligent silence

St. John Clemacius The Ladder of Divine Ascent

Intelligent silence is the mother of prayer, freedom from bondage, custodian of zeal, a guard on our thoughts, a watch on our fears, a friend of tears, a recollection of death, a concern without judgment, a foe of license, a companion of stillness, the opponent of dogmatism, a growth of knowledge, a hand to shape contemplation, hidden progress, the secret journey toward the Light. The lover of silence draws closer to God (by whatever Names).

Perhaps a huge silence might interrupt the sadness

Pablo Neruda

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt the sadness of never understanding ourselves.

I gather this garment of silence about me

Kent Ira Groff Knitting into the Mystery

I gather this garment
Of silence about me,
Stillness that used to be
Threatening, its needles
Of fear lurking,
Probing wounds of my past scars to my psyche.
Now in the hands of Love
These needles have knitted
A silence so beautiful
That nothing
Can hurt. I draw skeins
Of silence with this healing garment about me,
As its stitches permeate
The crevices of my soul
Whispering, Peace.
Be still—and know:
Now all that would harm you
Is knitted to warm you.

Carve out a day every week

St. John of the Cross

Carve out a day every week, or an hour a day, or a moment each hour, and abide in loving silence with the Friend. Feel the frenetic concerns of life in the world fall away, like the last leaves of autumn being lifted from the tree in the arms of a zephyr. Be the bare tree.

The more we live with people in a community

Dorothy Day

The more we live with people in a community, the more we must look to ourselves and regard the beam in our own eyes. The more we live with a babbling crowd, the more we must practice silence. "For every idle word we speak, we will be judged."

Silence isn't an emptiness

Cynthia Bourgeault

It is becoming more and more clear to me that silence isn’t an emptiness. It isn’t so much an IT as a THOU. Let’s see if we can deepen our own life of prayer by moving beyond thinking that silence is an emptiness, a backdrop or a condition, into thinking and actually experiencing silence as a mode of relationship with the infinitely present Beloved.

It is strange how much we resist the inherent peace

Catherine Ingram Passionate Presence

It is strange how much we resist the inherent peace and quiet that is always possible. Perhaps this is because resting in simple presence is so foreign to a lifelong habit of mental complication, and we may have confused complication with a sense of aliveness. We may assume that having no particular mental project would result in boredom. Or we may be overwhelmed by how vast and free life suddenly feels when our minds are not on the hunt.

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