STOP
First, I wish you a heart-filled, wonder-filled holiday season. I will also be relishing the holiday, and completion of this year, both in solitude time and with family and friends. I will be back in touch with you next on January 8th. May the beginning of your year 2025 be filled with love.
I have been reflecting on what to write and what I want to say to you and, therefore, to myself in this last posting of 2024 before we turn the page into 2025.
It has been quite a year for me, a year of many endings and new beginnings, many letting-go opportunities and actions, and many first creations. I have also experienced many bold, courageous moments of stepping onto new ground—unfamiliar ground at that, which is always uncomfortable—and much listening to my lit fire within as I write my book, The Art of Sacred Listening: Having Your Relationships Work,
What about you? What are you letting go of? What delicious new journeys are you beginning? What beautiful horizons are starting to beckon you? Can you sense it? Sometimes, taking a moment of stillness during those chilly winter mornings is just what you need to hear that gentle call.
What is in my heart to say to you, my friend and fellow traveler? I hold you as precious and close to me. You are deeply valued. I am thankful, privileged, and blessed to have shared my life with you, to continue to do so, and, perhaps, to contribute to your aliveness as we walk this glorious path called Life.
I bring you with me on my inner and outer journeys through life, and I am blessed that insights, teachings, and breakthroughs from those travels may somehow find themselves in your life, too, as enlivening awakenings of the heart.
Every time I receive an email or comment from one of you that says, “You were right on time for me today,” “How did you know that was what I needed to hear?” or “Thank you for writing today; it means so much,” your appreciation fills me with joy.
Today, I want to share a very private experience with you. It was so private that I didn’t even tell my husband about it at the time.
You may remember if you read that blog, in October, my husband and I journeyed to the Mariposa Grove of giant Sequoias, being with those cinnamon-colored giants, all ancient beings, some of which were over 2000 years old.
Toward the end of our walk, I left the path and wrapped my arms around part of the trunk of one of the trees. I know there are jokes about “tree huggers,” and I must say, I was not embarrassed to be one.
I allowed my energy to merge with the tree's energy until I came into a Great Silence. In that Silence, without words, I asked the tree to speak to me, asked this stalwart giant of a Presence what it wanted me to know.
I was taken underneath the ground and shown the connections, the linking of the trees, the merging of their roots. I heard the words, “I am not one tree. We are family. We are profoundly connected. There is only one of us.”
Coming back to the surface of what is called “reality,” Don asked me what had occurred. At the time, I could not speak.
Now is the right time.
We are deeply connected. May we live out of that experience. Underneath it all, underneath the surface happenings of the world, we are family.
“We have one another,” as Brother David Steindl-Rast tells us in his Thanksgiving message. Let us be mindful as we move through our days. Let us “listen to ourselves, to one another, and to the world through the ear of our heart,” St. Benedict instructs us in his First Rule.
What is it “to Listen with the ear of our heart?” I call it Sacred Listening. It is to listen to the God in each other, to who the other person is, beneath their opinions or their fears or their judgments, or their plans, and beneath yours, as well. Heart to Heart Listening. We are one Heart. The Japanese have a phrase for that: “Kokorro to Kokorro” – Heart Listening to Heart.
“See God in each other,” Swami Muktananda tells us. “God dwells within you as you.”
Love yourself, “for you are a child of God,” Marianne Williams teaches us in her book, A Return to Love. “Your playing small does not serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.”
“We must love one another or die,” says W.H. Auden, in his poem, September 1, 1939.
“You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from,” said Werner Erhard in the est training I took in December of 1972.
I invite you to think upon my words. If one of the quotes touched your heart, stop. Pause. Or know when you are going to. Commit to it. Don’t just skim shallowly and move on to the next item on your to-do list. Have “stop” on your to-do list! One way or the other, grant yourself the direct experience of the highest.
May you grant yourself Stillness, real Rest, real Presence. Give yourself the gift of Being. Walk in nature, somewhere where the trees can speak to you and tell you that you are just like them. Listen to Beethoven, or Bach, if you prefer. Read Mary Oliver’s poetry. Write poetry yourself.
I know I did. During Thanksgiving weekend, we spent a Sabbath day in Olympic National Park on the Washington coast. We participated with the ocean as it gave birth to wave after wave, watching the life cycle of the wave all the way to the shore. The poem that I wrote later came out of this Stillness.
Bring gratefulness to your life. When you bring the spirit of gratefulness to your life, you come into reverence and love for yourself and others. You come into Awe, you come into Wonder, you come into the Blessing of Being Alive.
I invite you to treat yourself to The Miracle of Being Alive before turning the page into the next year.
Sea Cycle of Life
by Amba Gale
Each wave is born, formed by shape of water – wind. Restless rolling relentless toward the shore, white froth rises to the sky as wave breaks, shakes loose its form, rolls righteously. White energy shushing, shying away from former life as it sighs, dies upon the smooth silk sand, leaving sea scallops in its wake.
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Your post was a beautiful gift for my winter solstice celebration. I, too, am proud and moved by hugging the gentle giants in the majestic forests in our West Coast sanctuary. Sometimes, I place a small shred of bark into my mouth and let it slowly soften to take in some of its timeless DNA. I savor the wisdom you share the same way. You are a wise and true teacher in this time when the waves no longer behave like the waves I expect. But closely watching them come alive and vanish as you do gives me hope that WE will see the way forward. In gratitude, Rich.