2/1/2020 0 Comments The snakes became talismans...Jewels of memory sacred encounters marking my path. The brilliant banded coral waiting for me as I return home on my bike, a warning spiral of color, at the foot of the cement ramp leading to our front door. The elegant palm viper draped on the school gate her flickering tongue reaching out her eyes meeting melding with mine. The fat bushmaster sunning on the white gravel path to school. The rainbow boa I catch in our backyard and hold for a few hours in a cardboard box before she slips away. In our summers in our pink house in Richfield outside of Minneapolis, I would search our tiny backyard for garter snakes elegant living treasures catch them hold them peer into their silky eyes and feel powerful silent and beautiful. As I grow older the snakes come to me in my dreams. Signs of creative spiritual power coiled and waiting to pour through my life. I become a snake handler. In the smoky rooms of my imagination the snakes coil around my legs spiral my arms crown my head slip down the length of my spine. Prophetic words pour from my mouth on the flickering forked tongues of serpents. In Atlanta, in graduate school, I walk through Candler Park. I call them and there they appear again sunning in my path, slipping along the forest floor, sliding silently into the pond. Every time I see a snake, I bow in its presence, aware of a profound sacred blessing. Our encounters are brief. Every time they slip through my grasp, I mourn them.
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6/14/2019 0 Comments Drink in Beauty2/19/2019 1 Comment The Cicada's ShrineIn the Galapagos, at dinner, somehow I mention my novel. Someone ask what happened to it. I laugh and say that it was buried deep in the ground in larval form and would one day rise up to the world and sing with the cicadas.
I post an article on bees to FB and my college writing profesor writes that she remembers the insects in my early stories. That afternoon I find a cicada in my bedroom. How did it get here? I have never seen a cicada before in Quito though they were constant companions when I lived as a child in the Amazon. Do they even live this high up? Still alive, I set it out on the ledge of our apartment window. 5/29/2018 0 Comments Here I AmI am facing the most extraordinary of times--a moment of extremes--marked by both extreme limitations and scarcity AND extraordinary open doors and abundance. This morning I was thinking about how this moment challenges me; how it requires me to push myself and walk forward in confidence and faith in the face of difficulty. This is the very nature of life.
I thought of the work I do with students and how, in the first phase of my counseling where through a series of workshops and reflective exercises, I help students address the question "Who am I?" This is our primary question that compels us every day of our lives and it leads to the question that Mary Oliver eloquently asks, "What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?" Who. Am. I. ? Which led me to the story of Samuel, where G-d calls his name in the middle of the night and he thinks it is Eli and runs to Eli to help him. This happens several times in the night until finally, Eli tells him, "Samuel, G-d is calling your name." And Samuel asks, "What shall I say to him?" And Eli tells him, the next time G-d calls your name, say "Here I am." And I thought about those words--HERE. I. AM.--how that is all we can say to our Creator who has made us, AS WE ARE, and placed us into a specific place on this planet at this time (HERE). And we must respond and live accordingly, creatively, respectfully, productively, joyfully, fruitfully--living into the act of the AM. That is all we can do. All we are meant to do. Which then made me think about what G-d says to Moses--I AM the GREAT I AM. The Being that exponentially full fills his/her/their being--who fully expresses the I AM in part through the creation of the universe. All to say that I want to fully live into "HERE I AM" I want to help others fully live into "HERE I AM." I want to open the garden gate. Especially in the face of limitations, fear, scarcity, and locked doors. |
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