Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy… they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us…

~ Harper Lee ~

welcome, well come to day 20 of a season of peace and the Hindu holiday of Maha Shivaratri, when millions within India and around the world devote themselves to the purifying and transformative power of Shiva within, a time for self-reflection, introspection, leaving behind whatever hinders as we take moments in stillness, connecting with pure space, pure consciousness and create an intention for yourself of purification, a release of what does not serve and a manifest of what serves the good of the whole within yourself and your life with the sun shining on the energy of  freedom…

i awaken today with a strange dream lingering and re-member seven years ago on this day through the invisible web connecting us all, death was foreshadowed with a cold wind blowing through, a day like today when i could not get warm much like a day almost twelve years ago when i coded with septic shock feeling my blood turn to ice… as the cold wind of death blows through once again today, i re-member the foreshadowing of death was for Harper Lee, who died unexpectedly the next day, i want to pay tribute to her and her archetypal story of justice, innocence, love and purity, a story that i read at eight years old, a story that resonates so deeply in me sixty-three years later…

reading this book at eight years old, i am Scout, my father is Atticus, my neighbor is Boo… i, too, live in a small southern backwater town in a family devoted to social justice and i feel the pure innocence and love of a mockingbird named Boo, a wounded bird traumatized much like the peoples’ journeys i have shared for four plus decades in the vocation that called me from the moment of meeting Boo and before and after… i have also loved mockingbirds from that moment and desire to live simply and wholeheartedly as innocence, as spirit, as mockingbird…

so, in this moment, i am mockingbird re-joy-singer visiting the divine inner child, the wise one who knows she’s here to sing, to sing her soul song of joy in a field of peace seeded with justice and guided by love and re-membering this is also the anniversary of the birth of two more iconic bird whisperers – Audre Lourde and Toni Morrison…

may we all feel the pure innocence and love of  mockingbird in this moment and live as simply and wholeheartedly as freespirit, as mockingbird singing, Om Namah Shivaya bringing to all who sing and listen peace, joy, love and strength…