Leave the dishes.

Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator

and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.

Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.

Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.

Don’t even sew on a button.

Let the wind have its way, then the earth

that invades as dust and then the dead

foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.

Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles

or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry

who uses whose toothbrush or if anything

matches, at all.

Except one word to another. Or a thought.

Pursue the authentic-decide first

what is authentic,

then go after it with all your heart.

Your heart, that place

you don’t even think of cleaning out.

That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth

or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner

again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,

or weep over anything at all that breaks.

Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons

in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life

and talk to the dead

who drift in through the screened windows, who collect

patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything

except what destroys

the insulation between yourself and your experience

or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters

this ruse you call necessity.

~Louise Erdrich

many moons of longing….

inquiry for today~ forgive the questions….

the gifts of reckoning…

We keep searching in the mind for a solution to a wound

that actually lives in the heart and the nervous system.

Which means, all the cleverness in the world won’t heal us.

Not another philosophy. Not another method.

Not another insight.

Not another peak experience. Not another retreat.

Not another awakening.

Because they’re all experiences. And no experience,

however beautiful, can become our home.

Our deepest longing was never for another experience.

It was for a home.

Sooner or later, life calls us out of the mind and into the body.

Into the feelings we buried years ago. Into the mud.

Into the raw truth of our existence. Into the pain, the grief, the bliss, the awe.

Everything we hated ends up healing us.

Everything we pushed away ends up pushing us deeper into grace.

Everything we thought was keeping us from God becomes the very way God reaches us.

– Jeff Foster