for this sacred moment of eternity’s astonishing light of being, we also get to celebrate an important day in herstory/history as it’s the day in 1920 of the certification of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting American women the right to vote—a right known as woman suffrage…

it’s a perfect day to celebrate all women of peace, all people of peace making herstory/ourstory with being peace…

yes, today is a lovely moment to honor and celebrate the inspiration, the mother of this journey, someone being this peace pilgrimage every moment…

peace pilgrim, in her late forties, committed to walking the planet being peace and in so doing, she planted and spread peace across the world demonstrating that a life lived trusting in a world of lovingkindness reaps an abundant harvest… never once did she lack for a ride or a meal or a place to sleep finding abundant generosity always surrounding her every step, her every breath…

thank you for joining in the peace pilgrimage and making her story, our story, history…

thank you for the astonishing light of your being, a beacon shining so brightly and helping to guide all of us home…

may we place our hands on our heart sending love to our suffering relations…

~

“We need to be angels for each other, to give each other strength and consolation. Because only when we fully realize that the cup of life is not only a cup of sorrow but also a cup of joy will we be able to drink it.”

~ Henri Nouwen ~

this sacred moment of eternity goes on infinitely on this day of stopping the world, spending this moment in soulitude and seeing inside as i saunter (walk on holy ground) along the rainbow trail, the path with heart, the pilgrimage of the soul, the pathless path for this is not only the 107th birthday of the usa’s national parks; it is also the third year anniversary of my latest close encounter with death…

still i hear the words, as i was coming back to life, of the ICU doctor standing at the threshold of the room they put me in to pass over saying to the nurse it was a miracle she was alive… at first i wondered who they were talking about and then it came back to me that i had been at a gathering with Ram Dass who had died physically 8 months earlier and he asked me if I’d like him to walk me home… i was so excited to get to spend time with this being who’s been so impactful on my life for half a century and told him that i’d gather my things and meet him right back here but when i returned a moment later he had walked on and i understood that i was to come back here to the middle world… it was not the easiest thing to find my way back meandering through vast labyrinthian canyon lands of the other world but here i was hearing this man in white coat talking of someone who’d miraculously come back to life after dying…

so, dear co-hearts of our one heart, still in the glow of the astonishing light of our being and so in awe of grandmother spider and the web of life she weaves, i now want to share this heartfelt message fra angelico sent to his co-hearts 500 years ago which expresses what i say today and everyday and hear all our relatives singing the same tune…

“I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.

There is nothing I can give you which you have not already, but there is much, very much, which though I cannot give it, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today.

Take heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this precious little instant.

Take peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and courage in the darkness could we but see; and to see, we have only to look.

Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their coverings, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, and wisdom, and power. Welcome it, greet it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it.

Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing Presence.

Our joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.

Courage, then, to claim it, that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims wending through unknown country our way home.”

~

Dear Angels, Take Heaven! Take Peace! Take Joy! Take Love! Take Wisdom! Take Courage!

We Are The Eternal Radiance of Loving Presence…

~

each beautiful thing, each new day awakens in our soul the memory of whom we are, luminous beings, the shining ones… i am re-membering some words on beauty and wonder from Thay that help me to hear the voice of the soul:

“Dear Mother Earth,

Each morning when I wake up you offer me twenty-four brand new hours to cherish and enjoy your beauty. You gave birth to every miraculous form of life. Your children include the clear lake, the green pine, the pink cloud, the snowcapped mountain top, the fragrant forest, the white crane, the golden deer, the extraordinary caterpillar, and every brilliant mathematician, skilled artisan, and gifted architect. You are the greatest mathematician, the most accomplished artisan, and the most talented architect of all. The simple branch of cherry blossoms, the shell of a snail, and the wing of a bat all bear witness to this amazing truth. My deep wish is to live in such a way that I am awake to each of your wonders and nourished by your beauty. I cherish your precious creativity and I smile to this gift of life.

We humans have talented artists, but how can our paintings compare to your masterpiece of the four seasons? How could we ever paint such a compelling dawn or create a more radiant dusk? We have great composers, but how can our music compare to your celestial harmony with the sun and planets—or to the sound of the rising tide? We have great heroes and heroines who have endured wars, hardship, and dangerous voyages, but how can their bravery compare to your great forbearance and patience along your hazardous journey of eons? We have many great love stories, but who among us has love as immense as your own, embracing all beings without discrimination?

Dear Mother, you have given birth to countless buddhas, saints, and enlightened beings. Shakyamuni Buddha is a child of yours. Jesus Christ is the son of God, and yet he is also the son of Man, a child of the Earth, your child. Mother Mary is also a daughter of the Earth. The Prophet Mohammed is also your child. Moses is your child. So too are all the bodhisattvas. You are also mother to eminent thinkers and scientists who have made great discoveries, investigating and understanding not only our own solar system and Milky Way, but even the most distant galaxies. It’s through these talented children that you are deepening your communication with the cosmos. Knowing that you have given birth to so many great beings, I know that you aren’t mere inert matter, but living spirit. It’s because you’re endowed with the capacity of awakening that all your children are too. Each one of us carries within ourself the seed of awakening, the ability to live in harmony with our deepest wisdom—the wisdom of interbeing.

But there are times when we have not done so well. There are times when we have not loved you enough; times when we have forgotten your true nature; and times when we have discriminated and treated you as something other than ourself. There have even been times when, through ignorance and unskillfulness, we have underestimated, exploited, wounded, and polluted you. That is why I make the deep vow today, with gratitude and love in my heart, to cherish and protect your beauty, and to embody your wondrous consciousness in my own life. I vow to follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before me, to live with awakening and compassion, and so be worthy of calling myself your child.”

acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a wondrous way to walk in beauty…

~

what more is there to say?

may we all take these words to heart…

boundless love…

~

“He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self.”

~ Bhagavad Gita ~

~

“Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth…”

~ John O’Donohue ~

~

Welcome Home!

relatives, we are lovingly invited

to spend this moment, this beautiful moment

at home with Beloved…

simply being presence of essence…

come as you are, your radiant Self,

for this moment of

wonder, awe, bliss, compassion, flow, grace, joy, kindness

to drink in the gamma rays flooding the cosmos with a divine transfusion of transfiguring love…

~

i am having a dreamy time as i write these words as they bring back so many memories because the image and the welcome home words posted here today are what i posted three years ago and after that posting it would be a full moon before i would post again,.. a moon spent in the icu as i returned slowly from the jaws of death… in hindsight, it’s astonishing to see i was writing of the dream of the cosmos as i was about to enter the void and live the dream, a dream of being in a field where the Beloved Communion dwells and hearing that our mission is to sing and listen for that song of the soul that knows the geography and map of our destiny and takes us there in unimaginable ways… now the dream returns saying it is the moment of eternity to be about this business of singing in the wake of the ever quickening transformational initiation we are all undergoing…

today, i want to riff a little more on that singing field of the beloved community where the sea of love energy flows through all the molecules of our one cosmic body… as i merge more deeply with this dream, i heart that we are one interbeing reverberating, resounding, frequencing the lost chords of harmony as we more and more profoundly tune into great mystery on our walk of infinity which is undeniably intended to be the dream of the ever-expanding cosmos manifested by our being a world of peace built on justice guided by love and sung in joy…

are you hearing beloved singing you? listen a little deeper for the cosmic hum as you suspend noise and distraction in this moment, this beautiful moment… are you hearing the whispers of the ancestors flowing through our oceanic body? ah yes, let’s pause here in the stillpoint and align with the rhythm of our one heart… may earth’s song reach into our deepest and wildest sacred spaces… may we hear the melodic voices of all our relations… may our inhalations inspire re-joy-sing and our exhalations re-sound and re-verberate harmony throughout the watery womb of our one heart…

we are the caravan of re-joy-sing being dreamed and weaved and breathed and walked and sung to the tune of thank you, thank you, thank you… and so it is… blessed bee…

~

* written on the total soular eclipse 8/21/17…

groovin’ on the grass

poetic peace pilgrim puppy embraces

the path of totality…

“indeed i am – embracing the path of totality… jo is letting me, nia, aka ms radiance, little ms firecracker, write the post today… i’m just returning from my first overnight pilgrimage with the fam – what an adventure! we traveled to the land of the ufo festival to gather with a bunch of two leggeds to watch the total eclipse of the sun… the relatives of the human variety got all excited as the big ball of gas in the sky got more and more eclipsed by the moon… we all had to wear these special contraptions on our eyes, they tasted a lot better than they helped me see… my favorite part was licking the dew off the grass and bounding across the field like a jumping bean… the two leggeds loved it when for a split second everything went totally dark… howlelujah! they sounded like my ancestors, the woof clan, who teach that an eclipse on the new moon, as this one was, amplifies the new world’s birth… howlelujah!!”

thank you, nia, for re-membering that day and so glad we got to celebrate it again today in a very special way with a convergence of beings interested in flying objects like the one in the astonishing light image for today – woo hoo! the fifth anniversary of the total soular eclipse we experienced here and for all of us who shared this primal event, we remain transfixed and transformed forever by that magical mystical moment… that moment which initiated such a momentous turn around the sun with each moment pulling us deeper and deeper into the tunnel of light…

let’s celebrate totality now and the astonishing light of our interbeing in this sacred moment of eternity by centering together… and so we get comfortable and begin to breathe together, to conspire so we can go deeper and more expansive at the speed of light…

imagine a filament of light lifting us up from the crown chakra and another filament of light grounding us from our root chakra… feel ourselves as a bridge of light uniting heaven and earth…

now, imagine a great star radiating brilliant light over the whole cosmos and pouring this light like a waterfall onto us replenishing our chi and washing away all expended energy into earth for composting…

feel that waterfall of bright, warm, loving light raining down onto our head and suffusing into our eyes which now see beauty everywhere and into our ears which now listen deeply understanding heartfully and now the light suffuses into our tongue and throat so our speech is uplifting and the waterfall flows into our hands imbuing them with healing touch and flows into our lungs cleansing and purifying so each breath is refreshing and revivifying and into our one heart revealing the divine light of our true nature, the inner light of our immortal soul which shines eternally…

savor this light coursing through us enlivening, inspiring, washing away  any blocks and experience the light within merging with the divine light of the waterfall forming a rainbow egg of light completely surrounding us, sheltering us, loving us, freeing us…

may all nourishing thoughts, words and deeds filter through this egg of light as blessings and afflictive ones bounce off the eggshell and be transmuted as blessings as well… yes, let’s go wild – wonder imaginatively in love and devocean… howlelujah!!!

let’s close our sacred ceremony for today with the dedicating of ourselves to living in the unity of our interbeing…

~

five years ago on this very day i awake with a deep sense of grief, cosmic grief and then i see a poignant image of  Tahlequah, the mourning mother who carried her dead calf  for seventeen days and it takes me to another image of years ago, this one of a mare gone wild searching all over for her colt who was stillborn and it brings me close to home… is there anything more painful than experiencing the loss of a child you have carried inside your heart?

as Tahlequah suffered through this momentous loss swimming over 1000 miles with her dead calf raised above her, she was never alone… her tribe was always close by giving her food, comfort and support… her six kindred sisters forming a seamless circle of love show us all what it means to hold space and compassionately offer support during those moments of heartbreak we all suffer, we all endure…

this circle of crones, these astonishing beings of light inspired me to learn that the elder sisters of the orcas are the ones who know where to find soul and physical nourishment and so are vital for the life of the tribe… once again, these wisdom keepers offer all relatives a loving way to be…

today, i am teleported back to the sacred space of Talequah and i feel so in awe of her actions many moons ago, actions still offering so much wisdom in this epic epoch of mutation when nature messages us over and over to radically change our ways, to root ourselves in a new/old way of walking home together in solidarity and support real-eye-sing we are onebody with all cells belonging to each other interdependent on each other…

may we, like our orca elders, our sisters, know where the feeding grounds of true self nourishment are and how to be with and guide others during these times of  heartbreak to the still waters of solace and the deep peace of the running wave… boundless gratitude to all the orca-like elders who have shared the journey so generously of diving deeper and deeper into the our one cosmic heart of unconditioned love…

ps: Talequah now swims joyfully with her latest offspring as the miraculous cycle of birth, death, rebirth turns eternally in the ocean of being…

~

“A MIND THAT HAS NO WALLS, THAT IS NOT BURDENED WITH ITS OWN ACQUISITIONS, ACCUMULATIONS, WITH ITS OWN KNOWLEDGE, A MIND THAT LIVES TIMELESSLY, INSECURELY – TO SUCH A MIND, LIFE IS AN EXTRAORDINARY THING. SUCH A MIND IS LIFE ITSELF…”
– JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI –

today is a day of contemplating and more sacredly reverencing, the hatching, the breaking open of shells that constrict to move into expanding into a more spacious home, an even more open heart… as with any birth, growth, transition, transformation, there is pain involved which underlines the importance of our nestling together and embracing each other’s journey in the chrysalis and through the birth canal into the river of awakening that flows into the ocean of love…

yes, these moments which seem so deathly to our protective selves are precisely the perfect ones to embrace what is, to befriend whatever comes our way with a loving mantra of thank yous… Rumi says it so beautifully:

“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. “

let’s close our sacred ceremony for today with dedicating ourselves to living in the unified field of our interbeing guesthouse where all in the caravan of re-joy-sing find true refuge…

~

today, amidst all the death and collapse as we live in the confusion of these in between times, we can also celebrate that 60 years ago, James Meredith became the first black man to graduate from the University of Mississippi and today also marks 103 years of women having the right to vote thanks to our feisty ancestors who took sister Harriet at her word and mustered the strength, patience and passion to reach for the stars and change our world with the ratification of the XIXth amendment on 8/18/1920… let’s tune in to a few of our sage ansisters’ words:

“I know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion” – Emmeline Pankhurst

“Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand besides us…” – Christabel Pankhurst (Emmaline’s daughter)

“Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied” – Millicent Fawcett

courage, heart does call to us and some days kindling the flame in the heart is more crucial than others, in these moments of eternity with the very air we breathe filled with so much grief and bewilderment, how vital it is to come to the center and breathe in the unconditional love we are re-membering how supported we are in every sacred moment by pachamama, our ancestors embodying so many forms: spirit guides, power animals, mountains, lakes, stars, essences, all our relatives as an ever expanding communion of care and support in service to the whole…

~