Let there be roses and pens, cell phones and stones, let there be glasses of water and books about god...

It feels important to bless the world back together today

Photo by TheMIS Photography on Unsplash

Last night, I watched [yet another Trump-related news story] and this morning, I woke up craving blessing the way that I crave scrambled eggs in butter or cream cheese, eaten off a spoon. I need something rich - to refill the places in my heart and soul that empty out when I witness the craven and self-serving things of which human beings are capable.

I crave blessing because when I spend too long in consensus reality I forget who I am - and what this world is. I begin to believe that the images I am seeing on television are the only possible way. I forget they are just images, pictures of any number of ways - there are an infinite number of ways - the world can be.

When I forget, and things appear to be falling apart, blessing is the best way that I know to keep myself from being pulled into the shattering. Blessing gives me something to do when I am tempted to try to hold together things that are trying to collapse, which is never my job.

It’s my job to sit inside of the seeming collapse and bless it - all of it. The shattering world, the craven and self-serving people, the feeling of empty spaces in my own body. It’s my job to open a space of blessing inside of the collapse. It’s my job to remind the world what it is, to call the world back to itself, to reclaim the world for love.

At least I think that’s my job but even if it’s not, blessing is still the best response I have to the shattering. Why? Because it calms me. Because it changes the part of the world that I can change, my own mind and heart.

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This is how I do it, how I bless the world back to love

I walk around the house, the garden, the farm and I notice everything. As I notice each something or someone, I call it back into the real world. I do that by remembering its name, by honoring its presence. I do this by noticing everything I can.

I do this because I believe (no, I know) that it needs me to do it - and because I need to do it.

I need to touch this book, this roll of Scotch tape, this broken colored pencil. I need to touch my own face, my own feet - I need to encircle the back of my husband’s head with my hands and draw him close enough to look into his eyes and recognize him again - once I remember who he is, I remember what this world is.

He is good. This world is good. I am good.

Once I remember who I am - the space of blessing - I can do my work. I can name the world back to love.

Book about belonging, you are good. Cell phone that I am still paying off, I name you good. Beautiful books that I purchased online during quarantine and which, I have still never worn out of the house, you, too, are good.

I name everything that I see and, by this naming, I call it back into the world - the real world. Now of course these things already are in the real world and so am I. It's just that… a part of me, my mind, and that little piece of my heart that gets scared sometimes, has strayed, has wandered into the wilderness outside of blessing and the way back inside is by bringing everything and everyone with me.

When I need to come back to blessing - I bless everything else.

It’s me I need to call back.

After falling into the spells our culture spins of good vs. evil, right vs wrong, it’s important to remember who we are. We are love. We are the space of blessing. We are good.

So, today, I want to offer a few thoughts on blessing and tell you something new that I learned this week. First, though, I want to give you a poem

Because this day really needs a poem and because poetry is a portal to the in-between spaces of the world, which is where blessing (and God) flow into the world.

We are welcome in those spaces and the more we can navigate the in-between, the more easily we’ll be able to navigate consensus reality space (the so-called real world) right now.

Here is a photo of me, age 2 or 3, standing by my friend, the tree. And here is a portal, a poem which I received in Patti Digh’s lovely newsletter this morning.

In Blackwater Woods, by Mary Oliver.

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

–Mary Oliver

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We need to love everything with a full and open heart, knowing that too soon, we will have to let it go. Which is why it is so important that we understand to power of our own attentiveness, our own responsibility and ability to offer blessing.

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A few thoughts

This week, I took a Joy Ride with Peggy Rubin, a marvelous teacher who took us (via Zoom call) to Australia, where we visited the Darling River. There, I learned that the Aboriginal people, native to this land, say that everything in this world is dreaming together.

They say that the natural world wants to be in balanced relationship with us.
They say that when we turn toward anything (or anyone) and speak its name and honor it as a being, we bless it and make it real.

I don't claim to understand this, not fully. Yet when I heard this teaching it resonated down to my bones. I mean that my bones heard it and my bones responded.

There is a hunger in me and in many of my clients to reconnect with the dreaming. With the depth layers of the world - that piece of reality without which most of us in the Western world grew up.

A piece of the world is missing. I need to call it back now and reclaim it. I need to reclaim the rest of the world, which is living without this piece, back to love. My bones need it. So do yours.

We need to turn our attention (our dreaming) toward nature and mystery. We need to turn now, toward the thing that’s missing. We already know what it is. We’ve been chasing it all of our lives, crawling on our bellies through dark caves, hiking to the top of rocky mountains, standing in the shower and sobbing - all the while whispering the same chant: Where is it? What is it? I can’t live without it.

We need to turn our attention (our dreaming) toward the thing that’s missing now. We need to turn away from TV politics, endless expansion and the hungry ghost of capitalism and focus on the missing thing. The thing we can never seem to find.

Let me tell you what I’ve discovered (and only recently): we can’t find it because it’s NOT missing. It’s everywhere and so is the portal to access it.

The natural world is its portal. Music is its portal - so is dance, art, poetry. Tears are the portal - and so is joy. The portal is everywhere. It’s everywhen. Wherever you are, there’s a portal.

The portal is you.

I just realized this as I typed it. I laughed a wicked little girl sort of giggle. Haha! I’m the portal. Haha! You’re the portal. How do we open it? By … opening it. Sorry, I don’t mean to make riddles. It’s so simple that it seems like one.

We open the portal by including it in our dream of what’s real, what’s possible.

There’s a portal. Dream toward it. Now it’s there. Magic.

We open the portal to the world of love by dreaming toward it, as often as we can. We need to be dreaming all the time now. In fact, we ARE dreaming all the time - we made this world that we’re in together. We need to become aware of this now. Because the dream we are dreaming together isn’t the dream we would choose, if we knew we had a choice.

We do have a choice. So what world would you want to dream into being?

The Aboriginal people have managed to maintain the dreaming of the earth for 50,000 years. So have the Kogi, the wisdom keepers of the Andean mountains. So have the Moken people of the Andaman Sea. So have the shamans and medicine keepers of rain forests, deserts and plains. They are not the outliers - we are.

I have come to believe - no, I have remembered, that turning my attention toward nature/poetry/dreaming nourishes me. It expands me. What I have only recently understood is this: my attention also nourishes and expands nature. My attention feeds the world and calls into being whatever I focus upon.

When I focus upon all the things that are going wrong in the world, my attention feeds these things. When I focus upon nature, my attention feeds nature. My attention calls the living intelligences of the trees, plants, animals and stones back into this world. When these beautiful beings are back, I care about them. I feel called to tend them.

Now that I know that my attention is a blessing, I also know that I waste it at great peril. My attention toward nature honors and holds nature here - in the world where I am. When I turn my attention away from the natural world, it slips farther from reach.

It’s just like when I don’t call someone I love for a while. It’s harder to connect when we run into each other at a barbecue or wedding.

As the ground that we depend on is getting trembly - the forests are burning, the ice caps are melting, the waters are rising - It’s time to return the one who was cut away to the heart of the world.

It’s time to turn around and notice what and who is here with us. It’s time to stop pretending we don’t know where She is. Everywhere. In everything.

This is deep wisdom 101: Honor your mother. Call your father back from macho materialism. How do we do this? Simple: Bless everything.

That which we devote ourselves to, that’s our worship - that’s our god. I choose nature. I choose Love. This is my path of devotion.

When Peggy Rubin visited Australia with her friend and co-teacher Jean Houston, the Aboriginal people told them that, because they were there, the 'ghosts' of the land had ‘come out’— they were restless, the shaman said, because strangers had come.

When the ghosts come out of the land, they haunt us and, more important, they evacuate the land. When the spirits are no longer integrated into the land and infusing the plants and the soil and the animals (and us) with their light, the land begins to die.

In other words, when the spirits of the land are disturbed by the arrival of people who do not honor them. They come out.

My intuition tells me that when the spirits of the lands come out they are not trying to frighten or threaten us - they come out to invite us to see them, to recognize them, just as they, by coming out, are recognizing us.

Nature never gives up on us.

After Peggy and Jean participated in a ceremony of honoring, the spirits went back in. The ghosts returned to the land. They were not hungry any more. They had been fed with the attention and the honoring of the people.

This morning, as I walk, naming and honoring and blessing all that I see, I am remembering this. I am walking and naming the raspberries that are almost ready to pick, the broken branches, the red clover coming back (again) after being mowed every week to a half inch height.

All of this happens in the dreaming, the space between reality and reality. The clover returns. The ghosts invite us to celebrate. We walk, witnessing the reality of the world that we live in, keeping the world alive.

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Let there be…
Here’s a lighthearted experiment you can try.
Adapted from Peggy’s exercise.
I loved doing it. Perhaps you will enjoy doing it too.

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Look around the room where you are.
Notice every object - every potted plant and pair of slippers - and call it into being.

These are the steps:

Notice it. Name it to yourself.
Honor it inside of your self.
Then, write a single line of honoring.
One line per object.

Let there be a teacup, decorated with birds. Let there be a brass lamp on a white marble table. Let there be a sweater, purchased at Target, that is too warm to wear today. Let there be two sets of watercolor pencils placed atop a stack of black notebooks, some wide and some small.

Let there be this laptop where I compose these words. Let there be these fingers, poking them into the keys. Let there be a fan (rather loud) spinning as it moves cool air - let there be air - into the room.

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The Aboriginal wisdom keeper told Peggy that, “As we ‘let there be’ we bless the world into being.” He said, “As we bless the world, each one that we bless says, ‘I am’.”

As you bless everything that is around you this day, imagine each teacup, each old shoe, each pillow responding, I am.

Let this change you.

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Doing the work of blessing - including what we cannot see (the consciousness of a flower, for example, the suffering of a lake, the generosity of a stone) in our noticing, in our prayer, in our attention makes it real. It honors the invitation the stone or flower is offering by its presence.

It honors the is-ness of the other. Everything has its own "is Ness" whether we notice it or not. It’s not necessary to understand this in order to practice it. It’s enough to pretend that it’s real - in the spirit of play. The spirit of as if.

As if this red clover is inviting me into relationship. As if we mightcreate a world where we are present at the same time. A world where I say, I see you, I honor you and the clover says, I am.

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My Offerings

I’ve started a quiet secret stash of my memoir work over here.

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Photo by Adam Kontor on Unsplash

Let there be watermelon on your table, in all its sweet crunchy wetness. Let there be sunlight on the top of your head, the backs of your arms. Let there be joy in your heart, a settled mind, a body at peace.

Happy Summer
xxoo

Amy