today marks the 52nd anniversary of  Kent State, a day when students all over were protesting the war, a day that turned tragic with four dead in Ohio, a day that would lead to a general strike four days later when four million of us gathered to wage peace…

 today, let us weave these threads together, the threads of coming home to the heart and re-membering all those who serve peace by sharing the sage wisdom of a woman named Mildred Norman Ryder who inspired this poetic peace pilgrimage and me along with hundreds of others… on a New Year’s Day many years ago, she left behind her home, her family and her name, to begin what would turn into a 28-year walk for a meaningful way of life. Peace Pilgrim’s fearlessness, love and simplicity continues to inspire people worldwide. Hear her words on the four relinquishments, or what we might call today surrenders or softenings, that powered her way of life…

“IF YOU REALIZED HOW POWERFUL YOUR THOUGHTS ARE, YOU WOULD NEVER THINK A NEGATIVE THOUGHT.”
~ PEACE PILGRIM ~

“Once you’ve made the first relinquishment, you have found inner peace because it’s the relinquishment of self-will. You can work on this by refraining from doing any not-good thing you may be motivated toward, but you never suppress it! If you are motivated to do or say a mean thing, you can always think of a good thing. You deliberately turn around and use that same energy to do or say a good thing instead. It works!

The second relinquishment is the relinquishment of the feeling of separateness. We begin feeling very separate and judging everything as it relates to us, as though we were the center of the universe. Even after we know better intellectually, we still judge things that way. In reality, of course, we are all cells in the body of humanity. We are not separate from our fellow humans. The whole thing is a totality. It’s only from that higher viewpoint that you can know what it is to love your neighbor as yourself. From that higher viewpoint there becomes just one realistic way to work, and that is for the good of the whole. As long as you work for your selfish little self, you’re just one cell against all those other cells, and you’re way out of harmony. But as soon as you begin working for the good of the whole, you find yourself in harmony with all of your fellow human beings. You see, it’s the easy, harmonious way to live.

Then there is the third relinquishment, and that is the relinquishment of all attachments. Material things must be put into their proper place. They are there for use. It’s all right to use them; that’s what they’re there for. But when they’ve outlived their usefulness, be ready to relinquish them and perhaps pass them on to someone who does need them. Anything that you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions. We are not free.

Now the last: the relinquishment of all negative feelings. I want to mention just one negative feeling which the nicest people still experience, and that negative feeling is worry. Worry is not concern which would motivate you to do everything possible in a situation. Worry is a useless mulling over of things we cannot change. Let me mention just one technique. Seldom do you worry about the present moment; it’s usually all right. If you worry, you agonize over the past which you should have forgotten long ago, or you’re apprehensive over the future which hasn’t even come yet. We tend to skim right over the present time. Since this is the only moment that one can live, if you don’t live it you never really get around to living at all. If you do live this present moment, you tend not to worry. For me, every moment is a new opportunity to be of service.”

may we all empty ourselves to create a vast spaciousness, a field out beyond for planting seeds of peace within and service dedicated for the benefit of all…

You were born with potential.
You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness.
You were born with wings.
You are not meant for crawling, so don’t.
You have wings.
Learn to use them and fly.

~ Rumi ~

welcome, well come to murmuration may, a moon of such potency so that as days ago i mused upon what this moon would be named, murmuration came across my consciousness and the more i comtemplated it, the more right on it seemed to be… this eclipse season, this bright fire moment offer such a portal for composting the unsustainable and imagining and regenerating a cosmos that works for all… today when i awoke, i heard the glad tidings that for the first time in 130 years, california condors were flying over the redwoods again and that seemed to be a lovely nudge from the multiverse to write in this moment of eternity of us as the starling beings we are, imaginal cells who love to cooperatively cluster together to change direction in such dazzling flowing fluid dances and who flock together in solidarity to meet the challenges of life…

and such challenges we face in this moment with the news of the probable overturning of women’s rights and today is the 80th anniversary of the internment of the Japanese in the usa and the unthinkable action of nuclear weapons being deployed again is actually being discussed while our living out of harmony continues to escalate…

so, let us take this moment to slow down and breathe and flutter our wings together in warm embrace re-membering who we truly are: dreamweaving starling beings of astonishing light shining luminously…

“Instead of resisting to changes, surrender. Let life be with you, not against you. If you think ‘My life will be upside down’ don’t worry. How do you know down is not better than upside?”

~ Shams of Tabriz ~

in the days of Rumi, when you traveled, you traveled in a caravan and spent the night in a guesthouse, Rumi asks us to look at our own heart like a guesthouse graciously entertaining all emotions while not identifying with or attaching to them… Rumi would have us ask, “What is the state of your heart, what are you entertaining this moment of eternity?”

and so when joy comes to visit, we welcome joy warmly knowing joy will be moving on with the caravan, this beautiful guest will pass onward… when the next guest knocks at the door, can we welcome sadness as graciously, as an old companion who has visited many times re-membering that sadness like joy does not stay and does pass on as well…

are you able to be this magnanimous with your own heart? know you are a solid, rooted tree of life with arms outstretched to the heavens… we are made in the image of love and this is our work to be and become more and more radical love, rooted love grounded in the deep earth and reaching into the ever expanding vast skysea… my intention more emphatic than ever is to live like the river of life flows carried by the mystery of unfolding…

~

well come, welcome to the first day of may, to may day, to global love day, to international workers day, to this high holy day of  bealltainn (the gaelic spelling) which means bright fire…

in days long ago, the people would light bonfires and shepherd sheep and cows through the night to green pastures… halfway between equinox and solstice, this day has been celebrated as a time of fertility and abundance heralding the start of summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern…

what better way to start the merry merry moonth of may than by seeding our fertile, creative imaginations in the transformative field with three quest ions, three charged particles, sending us on a quest for the metaphorical holy grail, the sacred cup of the beloved overflowing with love…

what enlivens me wildly in this moment?

what is my soul longing deeply for now?

what’s wanting to flower?

as we dance around the maypole, the tree of abundant life, may we dance these quests and deepen our earth grounding with every breath until we arrive in the core of our being, sacred space of honoring all our relations…

here in the watery womb of divine mother earth, the stillpoint of creation, we saunter along the transformational pathway of changing consciousness, transmuting the microcosmic mystory into the ever-expanding macrocosmic mystery, source of all being…

may we be filled with more and more love and connection and union throughout this alchemical portal, this gateway of bright fire and may we be filled to overflowing throughout the merry, merry month of may and the magical mystery tour of life with divine love and light emanating from great mystery’s wellspring… the ever flowing river below the river of joy, ocean of peace, sea of love energy calls us to re-member we all come from the goddess and to her we shall re-turn…

deep bows and boundless gratitude for the beauty of the earth and for all the children of the earth dan-sing into sacred balance and union within the one heart…

blessed bee, beloveds…

what a potent day with so much happening… the new moon in taurus with partial soular eclipse, it’s walpurgis eve, a night to go wild before celebrating bealltaine tomorrow, the fire festival and so much more but what stands out for me having been on regeneration re-treat to initiate a new cycle is just that – this broken record sings of starting anew, embracing our inner knowing and putting the old consciousness to rest in service to the true reality of living from love grounded in balance with the soul animated by spirit guiding the way on this the day we bless the space between us as we close the circle on another moonth (and, what a chaotic/creative moonth!) of turning around the sun…

we began this moon with the sun shining on aries, the start of the zodiacal year, as the ultimate pilgrim, the holy fool, set off on a new adventure, of coming home ever more deeply to the present moment by contemplating what’s been quietly forming in the background, what’s emerging now…

for me, at the end of this moon, the pathless path continues to be more and more mysterious in proportion with letting go to flow… this living more and more in the now takes heart, courage, it is a defying of gravity and moving into levity… and more and more, this pivotal moment of transition, of planetary initiation feels like a pregnancy coming to full term when the body so swollen finds it harder and harder to feel comfortable and it is the heart and the imagination that encourage with feelings and images of the beautiful birth following the quickening…

so, more than ever, let us all take this moment, this beautiful moment to bless this space between us we share… this deep space of mutation and transformation as we collectively journey in the dark, into the unknown and uncertain to gestate in the core of being, the womb of earthmother and listen, listen listen for her heart song, el canto hondo, the deep soul song of the cosmos calling us to reflect as we midwife an old/new heart consciousness to meet the crises, the dangers and opportunities of this extraordinary moment of eternity…

as great mystery hums our soul song through us, may we echo it to each other… to return, return, return to love by opening our one heart to divine flow’s breathing us, dreaming us,  singing us, praying us, dancing us, comforting us, supporting us, freeing us, animating us, blessing us, consecrating us rather than falling back or staying stuck in a reality of dominance that no longer exists…

yes, we are in transition with the old world collapsed and the new still forming, the caterpillar dissolved and the butterfly wings still wet in the womb… i feel more and more inarticulate in this moment when our language of the past does not meet the present now moment… it is as if it’s on the tip of consciousness and why it’s such balm to gather in the deep space between us with imaginal cells attenuated to el canto hondo, the deep impeded soul song singing us…

let us, meet this moment of uncertainty, of not knowing wholeheartedly and take up the cosmic call to transform our defense system into a sacred immune system supporting, regenerating a world of PEACE where we…

pick up our thread of the unraveled tapestry and dance rainbow mystery devotedly

love unconditionally more than ever before for the well being of all/ the wellbeing of our one heart…

enact revolutionary change so that justice rolls down like waters in a mighty stream that sings for the benefit of all…

come home to true refuge dwelling in our one heart with every breath and every step…

on another day of celebrating and honoring the earth, happy next to last day of adventurous april, the day also celebrated as arbor day when we are re-joy-sing in the efforts of so many for so long to plant trees, amazing earth stewards of radical regeneration…

trees, our lungs of breath, teach us generosity as mothers of nourishment and fathers of support creating one vast network of trillions and trillions of roots intertwined as one, flooding the struggling with juice, receiving the dying standing talls’ marrow…

not i, only we, this network of generosity, this unfolding synarchy… let’s breathe in deeply filling ourselves with love and light with each inbreath and letting go/ surrendering/softening through our soles with each outbreath…

smiling, we sync deeper and deeper home with every breath being more and more relaxed and at ease and at home in the core of our bring, the wisdom center animating us…

  feeling our soles on the warm, mossy, forest floor, we sync into the soil below while our limbs are outstretched toward the sky… opening deeply to pure presence, we bathe in the stillness and dance in the forest grove…

let’s bow deeply to all our relations thanking each other for the sacred circle of life we are as we drop down a little deeper into the mystery of the great beyond on this night of the moon darkening, almost new closing with the words of Ranier Maria Rilke…

“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace…”

“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later.”

~ Richard Diebenkorn ~

~

“One doesn’t arrive… by necessarily knowing where one is going… In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know.”

~Ann Hamilton~

~

such an extraordinary moment we are in with our whole island home on pregnant pause,in the liminal space of a mutation cycle, a transformative collective initiation calling us into true reality where everything is uncertain and unknown and it’s still the moon of april, national poetry month, so i offer a posting so in sync with where we are now… some of the great Polish poet’s, Wislawa Szymborska, acceptance speech when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996…

~

“the poetics of not knowing

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

…I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize…”

~

yes, may we earthlings consciously choose to follow the sacred calling of this moment to enter the inner wilder-ness of transformative imagination, of not knowing, of wondering for it is the surrender to not knowing that seeds our co-creation of a sustainable universe where all relatives flourish… strength and courage, beloveds!

circle of color

water flowing home to source

reflecting beauty

~

on another day of celebrating the earth, i celebrate the earth people rising to stand for our first mother – water who is so in need of our changing our ways…

mni wiconi… mni wiconi… mni wiconi…

water is life… water is life… water is life…

calling us to stand in love for water

to awaken to the dream bubbling up from the river below

will you stand in praise and protection of water? will you awaken to the dream of our first mother available to all her children? will you join our dream of all our relations gathered in peace? will you join us? will you gather with us in peace to protect our sacred mother waters?

In Praise of Water

“Let us bless the grace of water:

The imagination of the primeval ocean
Where the first forms of life stirred
And emerged to dress the vacant earth
With warm quilts of color.

The well whose liquid root worked
Through the long night of clay,
Trusting ahead of itself openings
That would yet yield to its yearning
Until at last it arises in the desire of light
To discover the pure quiver of itself
Flowing crystal clear and free
Through delighted emptiness.

The courage of a river to continue belief
In the slow fall of ground,
Always falling farther
Toward the unseen ocean.

The river does what words would love,
Keeping its appearance
By insisting on disappearance;
Its only life surrendered
To the event of pilgrimage,
Carrying the origin to the end,

Seldom pushing or straining,
Keeping itself to itself
Everywhere all along its flow,
All at one with its sinuous mind,
An utter rhythm, never awkward,
It continues to swirl
Through all unlikeness,
With elegance:
A ceaseless traverse of presence
Soothing on each side
The stilled fields,
Sounding out its journey,
Raising up a buried music
Where the silence of time
Becomes almost audible.

Tides stirred by the eros of the moon
Draw from that permanent restlessness
Perfect waves that languidly rise
And pleat in gradual forms of aquamarine
To offer every last tear of delight
At the altar of stillness inland.

And the rain in the night, driven
By the loneliness of the wind
To perforate the darkness,
As though some air pocket might open
To release the perfume of the lost day
And salvage some memory
From its forsaken turbulence

And drop its weight of longing
Into the earth, and anchor.

Let us bless the humility of water,
Always willing to take the shape
Of whatever otherness holds it,

The buoyancy of water
Stronger than the deadening,
Downward drag of gravity,
The innocence of water,
Flowing forth, without thought
Of what awaits it,
The refreshment of water,
Dissolving the crystals of thirst.

Water: voice of grief,
Cry of love,
In the flowing tear.

Water: vehicle and idiom
Of all the inner voyaging
That keeps us alive.

Blessed be water,
Our first mother.“

~ John O’Donohue ~

may we rest deeply in the river of life, the womb of the mother as we traverse this cosmic initiation of mutation and hear her wisdom of how we are to be in harmony…

on this earth day in the portal of beltane in the northern hemisphere and samhain in the south when the veils are thin and fairies dance , will you join me in listening to an ancient story of opening our hearts to our true nature of wisdom, of radiance, an incandescence, a fire that always burns fiercely, magnificently at the core of being no matter how overwhelming things are for our little selves… notice where this story pulls you as we walk home together under the waning moon on the path of transformation…

once upon a time, a young woman was feeling abandoned and overwhelmed at the loss of love… fear clutched her, overwhelmed her and she went searching for a cure for love in the marketplaces, in the temples and nothing would open her heart… she heard tell of a sage who lived in a cave high up on a mountain that towered over her village and so she began the arduous journey to connect with the sage within the cave… she found him bent over a fire in the cave and asked if he had a cure for love and he asks her to return in three days for an answer and she sits in the unknowing of whether there’s a cure and returns as requested…

the sage tells her he has all the ingredients for a love cure save one – would she be willing to get this ingredient? of course she would, nothing was as important… the sage tells her she needed to bring him the whisker of a living tiger, a whisker from around his mouth close to his teeth… she protests that she is not up to such a dangerous assignment and he reminds her that she said she would gladly find the one missing ingredient and so she makes her way down the mountain and back to her hut where she continues to contemplate this overwhelming task while feeling more abandoned than ever… as she eats her dinner of rice, it comes to her that tigers have to eat as well and she fixes a bowl of rice for the man-eating tiger that lives on the other side of the mountain from the sage… she re-members that tigers aren’t vegetarian and adds some meat sauce for the tiger and takes off up the mountain to find the tiger… when she reaches a place where fear would not let her go any further, she left the bowl and made her way back to the hut…

night after night, she would venture back in search of the tiger, stepping over the empty bowl and going a little further and leaving another full bowl… one night as she was stepping over the previous night’s empty bowl, she saw the tiger coming towards her and she said that she meant him no harm and that she was on a mission for her soul… as he ate his nightly offering, she summoned her courage and plucked a whisker from his mouth and he pretended not to notice…

dancing down the mountain, the young woman couldn’t wait to return to the sage… the next morning, she made her way to the sage and handed him the whisker which he dropped into the fire and she watched the missing ingredient turn to ash… outraged, she asked why the sage did that and he asked her how she’d been able to accomplish such an impossible task… she recounted how each night she had faced her fear and made her way up the mountain to find the tiger… the sage then asked if the her heart was more dangerous than the heart of a tiger and she real-eyesed that in facing her fears, her heart opened… she now knew her heart, her fear, her soul… she journeyed to the wise center of being and to the fierce, magnificent radiance on the other side of the coin, so to speak…

facing the depths of the ocean of being is overwhelming… sitting in the timeless feelings of abandon and not abandoning ourselves, sitting in the fear and taking one more step is the eternal way of opening the heart ever more widely… fear is the thoroughfare of transformation… so when fear rises , know the true self is calling you into being more of the fullest expression of your true self…

breathe

take one more step

offer gratitude

celebrate!

“If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.”
 ~Thich Nhat Hanh~

 welcome, well come to this moment of eternity when again we celebrate the astonishing light of our being and our earthmother who weaves this world of beauty and i’m so delighted that this image that i’ve/we’ve been calling in for years showed up in just the right timing for this very special moment, a moment that’s been hard to get to tonight which has me re-membering it’s the impeded stream that sings, so, may this stream sing wildly el canto hondo, the deep soul song…

i will turn now to the creatrix and midwife of this painting, this image that moves me so deeply for us all to luxuriate in her offering:

~

“Beloved MothersKind -Weaver of Whirrleds”

“Clothed in Light,
Moon at Her feet
12 Stars in Her Crown
She weaves wondrous whirrleds into Being.

Love is her essence,
Gratitude her prayer,
Beauty the Way.

She,
One heART
B’earthing New Realities with every breath,
Co-Creating in Harmony with All that Is,
is
Centered
Present
Flowing
Dreaming Awake
Witnessing
Loving what arises.
Source force energy
– LOVE –
flows down to, thru, from and for Her
Spiraling into Mother Earth
Blooming to rise up and return hOMe
to the heART of Now,
Blessing One and All.
A Flow-er of Love, is She.

BeLoved MothersKind
remembers
We are Love always.
‘Thank you for everything’
is Her living prayer.
And so she flows.

Gratefully, so.
She is US
We are SHE
We are Love always.

~ Stacey Sophia Robyn~

~