Healing Prayer

              

Choose healing for yourself and for your nation.

Choose wellness. Choose peace.

 

Deep within your heart, you have all the healing

Potential that you need at this time.

 

As you choose healing, as you breathe it in,

Go into your heart – focus there.

A vast well of healing is available to you.

 

This changes everything, this move to heal.

 

Healing hurt and wrong means letting go of the pain of it.

It means forgiveness. It means release.

 

This is profoundly transforming.

It makes the impossible, possible.

It rights centuries of wrongs and liberates

You and your loved ones from suffering.

For, of course, those who love you and care for you suffer

As you suffer.

 

This call to release, to forgive, to accept the healing

Energies that well up from the very ground under your feet

Is sounding in Nature now.

 

Go into your heart.

Turn to Nature,

Even a city park or tree will give you this

Healing potential now.

 

This transforms our world. This remakes us – if we allow it,

If we can let go of the pain we feel, the fear, the guilt, the anger.

 

Choose peace. You shall have it.

 

You will feel better.

 

You will heal yourself and your world.

I Find

This morning, reading online,

I find

Inspiring speeches

intelligence

wisdom

and soaring rhetoric

coming not from some well-known politician

or member of the cultural elite

but from the mother and sister of a man

shot

in the back

by police officers.

More and more now,

this is what I find:

That we lead ourselves

are not led,

are sovereign

able

aligned.

"America, your reality is not real. We will not pretend. We will not be your docile slave. We will not be a footstool to oppression... You must fight, but not with violence and chaos - with self-love... Black men, stand up. Stand up, Black men, and educate yourselves." Letetra Widman, sister of Jacob Blake

"As I have prayed for my son's healing, physically, emotionally and spiritually, I also have been praying, even before this, for the healing of our country... We are the United States. Have we been united? Do you understand what's going to happen when we fall? Because a house that is against each other cannot stand. To all of the police officers, I'm praying for you and your families. To all of the citizens, my Black and brown sisters and brothers, I'm praying for you. I believe that you are an intelligent being just like the rest of us. Everybody, let's use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other. America is great when we behave greatly." Julia Jackson, mother of Jacob Blake

Strange and ...

 

I saw a scorpion this morning.

 

Improbably, on the pipeline path in the low light of dawn,

I saw a shape that looked like a scorpion and

Wondered and took a stem of grass

Growing there and poked

At the shape and

Watched it move,

Rear up,

Hold that position as a palpably living thing,

As a brave and tested warrior takes up a stance to strike.

 

I breathed.

 

I wondered.

 

I carefully stepped over the threat of something strange and dangerous.

 

I moved on.

 

As Breath

 

I was forced to slow this morning

and was aided in this by the hermit thrush and its

solemn studied song.

 

I was forced to slow by the exigencies of berry picking amid the brambles,

By the tangle of wild clematis and the fierce

Blockade of blackberry

Canes almost an inch thick and deeply, dangerously armed with thorns.

 

I was forced to slow by the steep and treacherous loose rock path up the pipeline. I slowed

For the careful search for black and red raspberries.

 

As a consequence

Of all of this,

I am now

 

Slow

Almost to stillness and

 

Quiet

 

Unto silence.

 

 

May's Emergence

 

I’ve been

intensely focused

on the beauty of the season,

on the gardens, the plants, the soil, leaves, old stems, emerging tenderness

what needs to be done

what can’t wait.

 

In all of this, I have neglected my interior.   (I love

 

the echoes of allusion and

 

I feel

the deep love for me inherent in them.)

 

In neglecting my interior,

I neglected to call forth from within me

 

the higher vibrational being that I am –

 

pure love incarnate,

 

which,

 

even as I sit here saying it,

writing it,

thinking it,

 

comes forth on little cat feet.

 

 

 

Expanded Now

Out at dawn in April snow,

Feet sliding on the hill

Legs, lungs and beating heart

Become aware of a larger beating rhythmic step

In sync,

With a season,

A process,

A weather system’s sweep;

The vast wrap-around Newfoundland and then back down to where I stand

Still.

This is where I find myself much larger than first thought.

Clouds and snow moving in service to a greater imperative

Than my step by step impatient climb –

That we are as big as continents

In our containment of large mysteries,

That we reflect the wheel and spin of star systems,

That stepping stones can be the size of decades;

You can open yourself up

To this

In the movement of your

Mind’s eye.

What You Thought

What you thought was solid

ground

is not solid ground,

you feel a sickening slide of subsidence

where you expected strength enough to hold

Firm under you.

It seems that there is something

Unseen underneath

Maybe snakes or rodents that you didn’t know about.

You didn’t know

Snakes maybe or rodents, living furtive sneak-thief,

Right under your feet.

Snakes

Or rodents maybe, sly-snouted, danger-eyed

Hearts beating baleful

God’s creatures every one

God’s creatures