Society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or of mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one’s own reality and of one’s ability to give himself to society…..Thomas Merton

withdrawal and obedience and meaning……integrity and knowing and holy…..being and humility and illumination…..awakening and tender and reintegration….may you know your ways…..

Being socially transcendent does not mean living in isolation. Their detachment becomes activated the moment they are aware of having a distinct self, a self whose reality flows from a sacred ground of being, not the society in which they live. this clarity ultimately provides them with the distance needed from their ongoing communion with the higher Self- a communion that then stimulates and supports their growth into wholeness. As the individual’s whole-seeing and whole-thinking develop- as he or she begins to separate from the self’s ‘little’ perceptions, ego-interests and preoccupations- there opens up a truthful relationship with others, a relationship based on a life that itself is becoming more authentic. As people discover their true identities, they are also more able to give the gift of themselves, because there is a real self to give…….Marsha Sinetar

these solitary shoes are winsome, heavy & true…

There is a wind so strong

it blows song lyrics

composed in New Orleans

up the valleys to the

Blue Ridge. Trees sway

like women singing the

blues, like grandmothers

rocking sick children,

like the center of the

universe is rhythm, not

a fixed point. There is

wind so fierce it clears

out anything that doesn’t

belong here and leaves me

clean as newly written

notes played for the first

time on a silver flute. The

melody tickles my feet

until I dance like the trees,

and gulp great gusts of air.

I stop to rest only after I’m

spent, drunk on the energy

of the evening, hair so

tangled with wind knots

that I play the part of the

wild woman, empress of

the sky, a gypsy sent to

tell the world’s fortune and

weave magic into dreams.

The wind blows straight to

the heart of the unknown,

and without a pause,

I follow it home.

Danna Faulds