Think about this as possibility: take a retreat for at least a couple of days where your only task is to listen to the rhythms of your own body. Notice when you are hungry, when you want to sleep, when you want to go for a walk, when you long for sitting in stillness. See if you can follow your instinct and intuition, and notice what you discover about yourself and your own rising and falling. At dusk offer a prayer for the time of transition from day to night, from light to dusk……..Christine Valters Paintner

to begin, we fill up with our dark questions, our hope-filled light….awakening, disappearing, awakening, on & on…..being in bloom means that dying is ok too…..the fiery beginnings and endings outshine the moon over sorrow….be in this power of discovery…

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire, that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames…Annie Dillard

the prayers of light & fasting…..

Where Life Begins…

Not in tidal pools but in the thermal vents

between Earth’s shifting places in the Ring of Fire….

The urges of Earth

are there:

in the hot, hidden

down-under places

between worlds

where surface meets

surface and melts

in the Opening.

This, then, is

the cosmic kiss

where all that

is hard touches

its own Other,

transforms

enticingly,

consummates

and makes

the Never-before.

Where no sun gives light,

no micron escapes

the Divine Fire

from Within, surging

and frothing to come forth

and secret clay

crystals merge

and marry

in such wet heat

of Meeting.

This is where

life Begins then:

neither here nor there,

but all ways Between.

…Alla Renee Bozarth