Port in a Storm

In which pain, a floating couch, and a true adventure lead to teachings of spirit

     I've been living with a lot of pain recently, as well as some pretty vivid dreams. Maybe they're connected, maybe not. It's all been a mystery, including the source of the pain, although "they" are working on that. I've been learning a lot, walking beside pain. It has taught me about living within what the day is offering me - the morning, this very moment. Feel how warm the deck has become, radiating sun-heat into my back when I lie on it. Look at the oriole on the orange – isn't she dark for a female? Smell the grape Kool-aid scent of my purple irises. Hear the sounds of Bob in the garage, using his bandsaw to rough out a project.

     And when the pain's usual ache rises in intensity like the tide, I move swiftly to take more Tylenol, and if laying on the floor with my feet on a chair doesn't help, I wind up on my bed, curled up, living only in each hellish moment, enduring, knowing it will subside eventually.

     Bob somehow knows to come check on me. He lays down beside me and holds me as I curl into him. I'm safe, even as I'm overcome.

     The last time this happened, he left me gently after the pain tide had gone back out, and I fell into a deep sleep. The dream I had involved a floating sofa, paddling it to shore, strangers offering free tomatoes and lentils – you know, the stuff of dreams. Except I recognized it as a direct allegory of an event I had lived through, and it wanted to show me something. 

     When I was in my late teens or possibly early twenties (my sister Pam and I can't quite place it), the two of us set out for  a three day/two-night canoe trip on the Diamond-Wakimika-Obabika circuit, a somewhat famous and well-traveled route through beautiful deepwater lakes on the rugged pine-encrusted bedrock of the Canadian north. Convenient to our family's remote island cabins on Lake Temagami, it was an obvious choice. Pam and I both knew the route from attending a canoe tripping camp nearby. We were experienced. The only drawback is that we were just one canoe; there would be no help if we capsized. But there was no whitewater, and we knew when conditions on a lake were too dangerous to go out in. We'd be ok.

     And we were. We paddled and portaged, a naturally slow form of travel. It's always a relief when you leave a lake busy with motor boats and with effort carry your transportation, food and shelter over an ancient rocky path to a quiet lake, pristine and fresh to your eyes. The water is so clean, cool and deep it's drinkable. We had tin cups tied on long strings to the gunwales. I can't remember if we fished. We likely found handfuls of little blueberry flavor bombs.

     On our third and last day, we crossed the easy portage from Obabika Lake back into Temagami. We had to paddle east across Devil's Bay and follow the long steep-cliffed curve of the shore as it bent north into the main channel. Once heading fully north, it was an easy eleven miles to our island. The wind was increasing out of the south. Crossing Devil's Bay would be a bouncy slog broadside to the waves. We had to stay away from the cliffs because in this wind, the waves would hit the cliffs and bounce back, creating dangerous conditions for a small boat.

     Weight distribution in a canoe is key. A load needs to be balanced, neither bow nor stern heavy. The paddlers need to sit high enough to reach, power and pivot the boat. In conditions like Pam and I were in, we needed to lower our weight so the boat was less tippy; we dropped onto our knees, leaning against the seats.

     It took skill, strength and luck, and we had all three. We made the crossing, got past the cliffs, and in our last and trickiest maneuver, paddled our canoe around the end of Devil's Bay, fighting wind-driven waves that were pushing against our stern trying to hold us broadside.

     Northbound at last, it was a straight shot home and would not take much more than a couple of easy hours with the wind finally supporting us. When the view to the north opened up, however, we saw a darkening sky way up there. Dang. With continuous effort, we might make it back before a storm. Or maybe it would continue to move east and miss us altogether. Or not. No lunch or pee break. We dug our paddles into the water and pushed.

     The raindrops hit when we were about halfway there. Thunder growled. It was moving in fast and we needed to get off the water. This part of Lake Temagami has beautiful steep shorelines topped with elegant tall red pines. It is grand and ancient, and had captured my soul when I first traveled past it in our 1960s motor boat at age seven. In this situation though, the steepness made it difficult to get ashore. We finally spied a rocky nose that angled down to water level with a few trees for shelter, and aimed for that.

     By the time the storm crashed its full force on us, we were up on the nose, unloaded, and had the canoe turned over with our gear stowed beneath. Thunder, lightning and pelting rain engulfed us. We had on our cheap but formerly sufficient raingear. Pam and I huddled by the canoe; we might even have crawled under it. The storm was taking its bloody sweet time. But finally the wind subsided, the thunder faded off in the distance, and the water drew calm. Dead calm. We were soaked, but with the passing of the storm and renewal of our paddling, we would warm up. Our island was just an hour away.

     A riffle picked up on the water, from the north now. The wind had switched 180-degrees. Oh well, maybe it would take an hour-and-a-half – two hours at the most – to get back. But as the riffle turned to waves, and the waves developed into whitecaps, Pam and I began to feel alarmed – not just because of the wind, but because the temperature was also dropping fast. The sun had not yet shown itself; in fact it was still drizzling. We did not know how long this would last: twenty more minutes, two hours, or all night.

     The rocky nose we were on was no campsite. It was narrow, sloped and small. There was no soil to pitch a tent. There was no access to the forest above. We considered starting a fire but the limited supply of twigs and branches were soaked. We were stuck and in danger of becoming hypothermic.

     Impending emergency created an urgent clarity. Pam and I discussed what to do. Wait and see? We'd likely get colder. Pull out our sleeping bags and get in them under the canoe? But there was no soil, water was still flowing over the rock, and it would be difficult for us both to fit and keep our bags dry. The final option was the one we chose. It was risky, but there was no option that wasn't. We bet on our skills.

     We carried our boat down to the waterline trying to keep it in whatever lee there was. One held it while trying not to slip on that wet sloped rock, while the other dragged the two heavy Duluth packs down and rolled them into the bottom of the canoe, mid-thwarts. We put on our life jackets. Pam got in the bow and as agreed, sat on the very bottom of the canoe. I climbed in the stern, did the same, and pushed us off.

     To the south of our rocky nose was a large island we had passed on our furious sprint north just two hours before. It was owned by “family friends”: my grandparents had introduced another couple from Ohio to this paradise decades before, and they soon acquired their own island. I didn't really know them except from grown-up cocktails, but I did know that their boat dock was in a little cove at the north end. All Pam and I had to do was drift with the wind and fierce waves back south, and with a little steering from the stern, edge our canoe over and into that sheltered haven. Whether they were there or not didn't matter. We could go ashore safely, find shelter, and plan our next step.

     It worked, and Pam and I are both alive to tell the story. Fortuitously the Grieses were there and quite surprised to see us at their cabin door. An hour later, dried by the fire and warm from hot chocolate, we were bundled into their motor boat and returned north under brisk clearing skies to our own island and anxious parents.

     This memory returned to me via the floating sofa dream as an echo. I had found safe harbor from my pain in the warm and comforting arms of my husband, my closest and most intimate refuge. He is my life companion. And I had found safe harbor decades before from the threat of real danger... where? Literally in a safe harbor. But as I considered the vividness of my dream and its originating memory, I thought there was more to it . When we are threatened or in danger, where do we turn? How do we make our way to refuge? Who do I look to for safety? Prompted by my dream, I looked at the canoe trip story and my current cancer story, as different as they are, for answers. These four stepped forward from the haze of unexamined memory and primal instinct into a conscious comprehension – a gift.

     Sources of safety:

1. My companions, like my sister on that trip, and my women's circles today.
2. The kindness of almost-strangers, like the Grieses who took us in and took us home, and the prayer blankets I receive from people who I don't even know but are connected to my family.
3. The steady support from people who love me, like my younger but capable sister in the bow of the canoe, Bob, and family and friends who in these past months have given us food, continuous gentle texts, calls, driveway visits, healing circles, and held us in their daily prayers and meditations.

There's one last source of strength and refuge in a storm:

4. My self, my inner spirit, my knowing. We are born with it. It is nurtured by the people who love us. It grows from the events and possibilities in our lives and how we meet them. Spirit is not confined to a body; it flows like water feeding our identity and intuition, and also flows between us as love and as understanding. Shapeless but powerful like the wind, it flows into us from the earth, sky and all living things. We are never alone, never sufficient unto ourselves, and must never yield our selves/souls/spirit to others. We are interconnected, and we are whole.

     On the lake that day I drew from all those sources; I looked to the compass of my intuition, trusted my companion, sought help from strangers, and made it home. We worked with wind and water, and they carried us to safety.

To see the maps in a larger view, click on the image.

True self

     It is so easy to live separated from spirit, or as some say from our “true self”. What does this mean, our true self? It feels like one of those code phrases that people who know what it means nod sagely about. The rest of us either nod sagely with no idea what it means but wishing we did, or dismiss it. 

     Here's my take on what the true self means, and why it's worth pursuing.

     From the vantage point of where I now stand with a cancer diagnosis, all of my “self” that is my physical presence in this world is under threat. Already surgery has removed invasive tumors and my reproductive organs with them. I am not who I was. Chemo will continue to change me physically, a price for the hope of blockading further activity of the primary tumor making itself at home in my body.

I may not look the same if I lose some hair; I may lose feeling to a lesser or greater extent in my fingers and toes; my energy may decrease; I may lose other parts of my anatomy to surgery, or scar them from radiation; or the cancer may take my body altogether. Or not; I may survive all this and remain a physical being walking on the earth beside my beloved husband and family. The point is my physical self is not an assured thing. The body is finite. And so if that is what defines us, if we think of our body as our “true” self, then we spend our energies trying to preserve it and we measure our success against other bodies we encounter in our daily lives.

     Logically, this attachment to our physical self extends to our hopes for what our bodies will be doing and living in the future. Plans to travel, change jobs, publish a book, or get old beside a beloved and watch grandchildren take their first steps are all dependent on the successful persistence of the body. I have these hopes. My body is the vehicle for my spirit to be able to do these things. This sense of self is a hybrid of physical and spiritual, the full package we are born with.

It allows us to experience creativity, sensory wonder, intimacy with other creatures, emotions, thought, failure and achievement, service to others, and hope. There are many more aspects of being human, of being a physical entity animated and differentiated by a unique life-force-energy, that are only possible because of this merger. I'm thinking that most of us understand our true selves this way: a unique blend of genes and personality.

     So how important is our spirit or soul, our life-force-energy, to the sense of self? I have read about people who have lost the use of some or almost all of their body – Stephen Hawking for example, or Charles Krauthammer. If the true self is a hybrid of body and spirit, have they lost their true selves? I think that in fact nearly all they have is their true selves, and they are - or were - vitally alive. It is the force of their spirit that comes shining through regardless of physical manifestation, regardless of the loss of many of their first dreams, their control over their appearance, their strength, and their ability to walk on this beautiful earth.

     I still have my incredible body. What is gone is my assumption that it will function and age the way most people's bodies do. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But I feel more alive, more my true self now than I ever have. The little snarky judge that sat on my shoulder monitoring everything from my performance at the gym to the clothes I put on to my worthiness as a Reiki teacher or children's book author or, for crying out loud, as a mother – that little beast is gone, dismissed, seen for the purveyor of false self that it was.

And I've discovered my true self is no stranger; it is the quintessential me that was a seed at the beginning and grew along with those other layers of self I added through childhood, adolescence, college, relationships, career, parenting. All along there was this me, sometimes guiding, sometimes ignored, sometimes sending tendrils of longing forward to my more conscious mind. As I began to acknowledge the longing and reach in to my soul bit by bit, feeding it with readings and retreats, letting it out to play in its wildness when no one was looking, practicing some of the teachings of wisdom traditions that rang in the same key as the song of my spirit, I began to peel away those other layers of self to at least glimpse my true self. Practice would have brought me closer and closer, like peeling away the layers of an onion towards the center. It's just that cancer shucked the remaining layers off all at once.

     If my snarky little judge was still on my shoulder right now, it would say “you must feel naked and vulnerable, exposed for everyone to see.” The amazing thing is that I feel just the opposite. I am clear. I know what I know. I know who I am. I am content with being exposed because I am at home in my self. I don't care one whit what the snarky little guy says that other people might think about me.

     I understand that love is a powerful energy, one of the foundational sources of life. It is profoundly more than I ever understood it to be. Love is so simple and easy to give and accept when there are no layers of onion trying to filter, analyze or apportion it according to worth. Residing in my true self I am not vulnerable – I am powerful. It is the soft, deep, grounded power that rises through me. It is love. I cannot push or force from this power. I can only give.

     We naturally protect ourselves from living as spiritual beings in a world that overwhelmingly values physicality, products, achievement, gain. Snarky judges and the pain they inflict abound, and it seems easier to follow the cultural rules. I think that is why we stay separated: to begin to peel those rules away and simultaneously seek and nurture your true self can be unsettling at first, with a foot in the body-world and a foot in the soulful-world.

But it's worth it. Keep going. Be who you sense you really are. You won't lose yourself, or your hopes; they will become clearer. Your path to get to them will become increasingly unimpeded by that snarky little judge. Your life-force-energy will swim in the companionship of what you find beautiful and your gratitude for that. The depth of your well to give happiness to others will become bottomless. You will be you. 

     That is my experience, and it is my deep sense that it is possible for anyone. There are many paths to help peel the layers back, most residing in the world's religious and wisdom traditions. I am deeply and humbly grateful that I know this – I am this – now. I would have preferred another means besides cancer to teach me, but since I have no control over that, I can only accept what I have now: me.

Dawn Prayer II

This was written during a visit to family in southern Arizona, far from my home habitat in Maine. 

     Morning in the Sonoran Desert brings different qualities to my senses. In the dimness preceding a November dawn, I've heard an owl hooting, coyotes yipping, but mostly silence - until the insistent questioning of a Curve-billed Thrasher begins. The air is chilly, the sky huge and empty. In my morning practice yesterday, I reached down to touch the earth, choosing a smooth rock embedded in the stony and hard-packed ground to put my hands on so I didn't inadvertently get a little spine in my skin. 

I reached down through the rock in gratitude and said, 

"Thank you Mother." 

She pulled me down deeper and said,  

"These are my children, all these rocks, across the surface here and across this desert that you see, and those mountains there before you. These are all my children, these rocks." 

It was as if she pulled me in and let me see through her eyes.

And I said,  

"I see them now. I have not always seen them. I connect more with the living things, but I see the rocks now, how they are your children, how they've been raised up high in the mountains, how they're deep, deep in the earth, how some are shiny and sleek and others are rough, and how they all slowly, slowly give of themselves to become soil, how some are in streams and rivers with water flowing over them, how some are open to the wind, polished by sand blowing over them. I see them now." 

I closed my eyes and could feel the energy of the many -- the many rocks and stones that are the foundation and the offspring of the earth. 

With a stone in my pocket I carry this teaching with me, gratitude for a gift received in my dawn prayer.
 

Living in color

     There is a phrase I've heard often enough that it is at risk of becoming an eye-roller, but actually it smacks of truth to me: "We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience." Certainly the first part of my life was about the physical: growing up, falling in love, experiencing sexuality, having babies, nurturing life in our own children. 
An awakening to my spiritual self wove through all that, beginning I think with my longest canoe trip when I was 16, thirty-five days deep in the North Woods. I became adept at reading the inclinations of the water and sky, and the repetitive physical motion of paddling long lakes was a gateway to a contemplative mind, as I drifted in both self-awareness and selfless-awareness.
     Perhaps this is why the water-sky horizon is a magnet for my soul. Not the actual horizon - the line where my eye tells me the two meet - but the times when they merge. I find the merging profoundly beautiful and mysterious.

     My eye wants to find a boundary and interpret it as finite, even as I know a horizon is never a finite thing. But to not have the comfort of this trompe l'oeil - the line of separation - delights me because it whisks the rug out from under my mind and jumps me into the perceptivity of my soul. This is how I get closest to the experience of beauty. 
     For me, when I'm in the presence of profound beauty there is a longing to merge. It's like my body is the perceived horizon, the line between, the boundary of separation. My eyes are both the pathway towards beauty and the guard at the door: "look at that view!", "have you ever seen such colors!" - approach, admire, but don't enter. I remember standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time. It was sunrise. It took my breath away. It was truly overwhelming, too much for my eyes to take in, beyond comprehension. I almost had to turn away. My mind wanted to file it under "disbelief". And echoing in these words - comprehension, disbelief - is the nugget: for me, my eyes lead a well-trod path to the mind, not the soul. So I need to either trick my mind or close my eyes if I want to get beyond the horizon. 
     I could just stay on this side and appreciate beauty, be a physical being having a soulful experience. But that doesn't seem to be the fabric I'm cut from. Some of my deepest moments of joy have been when I've closed my eyes and let my other physical senses do the experiencing. It cuts out the middleman of my mind. I don't just appreciate beauty, I swim with it.

Horizon photos from an old National Geographic.

     Those of us with beloved partners know this.
     And then there is music.
      What can I say: I love jam bands. When music is predictable, repeatable, it certainly can be beautiful and beloved in the way a familiar recipe or hiking trail can be enjoyed over and over. But it's the improvisational journey into unknown territory that certain musicians can lead me through that runs right over the horizon line of appreciating a piece of music and takes me to a place beyond where I can merge with it. These are extraordinary - "extra-ordinary" - experiences, and I'm so grateful that I've had them. They've taught me that there is something on the other side of the horizon. They've taught me that my physical being can support my spiritual joy. The whirling dervishes of the Sufi mystics know this; the Tibetan Buddhist monks chanting "om" for hours know this; whenever we get in a "flow state", as they call it, we glimpse this. Paddling for hours on a northern lake began to show me this.
     When I go to hear certain bands with gifted lead guitarists who plunge into improvisational jams all the time, I'm in heaven (which begs the question what is heaven? but that is another conversation). I close my eyes and turn my body over to listening and moving. In this way I entwine with the music like a lover. I can "see" the shape of the music; it has colors; it arcs and travels and rises and falls. My hands involuntarily follow the shapes like a bird soaring on air currents. My body moves in motion to the rhythm, the earth to the music's flight. It is as close to merging with beauty as I can get. It is glorious.

Walter Baxter / A murmuration of starlings at Gretna / CC BY-SA 2.0

     And so as I travel the cancer path, I somehow feel the separation between me and beauty - and love - is a thinner boundary. I weave back and forth across it all the time. Sunrise happens every day, and I'm usually there. An embrace, a kiss, a clear view of the Milky Way, the heartbreaking beauty of Jerry Garcia's jams on the Europe '72 "Morning Dew", a Mary Oliver poem read aloud before drifting off to sleep at night - these are all a hand extended and an invitation to merge, to not just be physical beings, to live in color.

The Impulse of Love

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey."

     The other night, I attended a large function that privately I was calling "my coming out party". It was Maine Conservation Voters' "Evening for the Environment" which is always jam-packed with the people who tirelessly and with some inexplicably bottomless optimism keep trying to protect Maine's natural resources and fend off climate change. These are my people. I know and value a lot of them. A lot. And I had not yet emerged into a public venue since my cancer diagnosis became widely known.

    This is not about the tremendous love I got -- and gave -- there, though in some way it does all tie in. This is about a story that the speaker, Richard Louv, told us. Richard Louv is a hero. His 2005 book Last Child in the Woods named an insidious fear many of us sensed was rising in young people alongside the ascending infatuation with "smart" technology: a disconnection with the natural world he called "nature deficit disorder". He had data. He tied it to physical and mental illnesses. By naming this, he created a cultural pivot point and started a movement getting children back outside.  
I will bet that everyone in that room could point to a time or place where they had a transformational experience in nature, whether standing in the dawn light at the top of a building in Manhattan, floating in a lake at Girl Scout Camp, or watching whales rise on a whale watching boat tour. Connection with the profound otherness of the wild is like a turbo-boost of life-force energy. Now doctors are literally prescribing time in nature for their young patients. We gathered to listen to what else Richard Louv had to say*.
     He told this story: One morning a young mother walked into her dining room where her six-year old was lying on the carpet alongside their family dog, Jack. He was stroking the dog's fur. It was a peaceful scene. Then the boy spoke. "Mommy, I don't have a heart anymore". The mother was startled. Then he said, "My heart is in Jack". 
     The impulse to love is native in us.
     With my cancer diagnosis has come great clarity. There is no reason to be shy or protective about loving. And there is no reason to deflect love when it comes to you.
     I am a great lover. I was blessed to be raised with safe love, and with constant access to nature. And I married the most amazing man who not only loved me but let me love him with the full energy of my love. That second part is huge: the impulse to love needs outlet. We all need to give love, open the faucet, not hold back.
     Now I am on the receiving end of that. Love is flowing in to me in voluminous quantity. It's astounding, humbling, and invigorating. I do not want to be in the cancer seat, but now that I am here I must say out loud that the impulses of love coming from everyone is a real, felt thing.
     It's like I'm at the center of a wheel, and all these spokes of energy coming from every direction are literally holding me and filling me with unbounded joy. How can this be? -- I have cancer! My answer: I don't know. Perhaps it is that I am not my body, I am my spirit. The love coming in generates joy, delight -- and gratitude. Gratitude, I've learned, is entwined with the impulse to love.
     I stood in the predawn dark/light again this morning, awed at the sharp silhouettes of the pines against the glow on the horizon - rose-cantaloupe is my name for that color. One step further from the house and the crescent moon slid from behind the roofline. I gasped at its unexpectedness. Bob came out. "Look. Look!" I said. We stood together in silence. And then I blurted "How can anyone not be in love when you see this?"
     The impulse of love. It doesn't have to be manifest as a gift, a hug, a dinner, a card, flowers, a wedding vow. The energy of love itself is real. I feel it strongly now, coming in. I feel it flowing out of me as joy. It is connection. It is gratitude. It most certainly is beautiful. It is natural, native to us. It is life-force energy. It is who we are. It is little. It is big. It is between a boy and a dog; it flows through a room of five hundred people on an October evening.
     I am grateful. I accept. And I give you my love.

*Richard Louv's new book Our Wild Calling will be in book stores in November.

Making room

     We had a Nor'easter last week. I awoke at 4am to the sound of wind stampeding up from the fields like loose angry bulls, sometimes wrecking through the forest behind the house, sometimes slamming the house itself. Rain spattered across our metal roof. I lay in bed, a baby pillow pulled up to relieve pressure along my incision line of 28 staples, and listened to the outrage outside.
     We lost power for two-and-a-half days. At first it's quiet. The storm pulls away pretty suddenly, and there is no sound of a refrigerator humming, the furnace turning on, no radio or dishwasher. Just -- silence. It's a reminder of what living can be, at its truest core, what it sounds like when things stop and all that's left is the structure of the house over my husband, the dogs and me. 
     I learned something yesterday from the trees. I asked them about the violence of the storm. Most years we get these big blows in autumn that strip the leaves from the trees, or if it's early and the trees aren't ready yet, the wind shreds the leaves leaving parts hanging and parts in shards on the ground. I wanted to know about the energy of autumn. We call it "fall", and it has always seemed like a passive season to me. Words like "transition", "release", "yielding" describe what I've always thought of as the final stage in the loss of summer.

     But the trees told me something different. Fall is not about loss. Fall has power: "We don't yield our leaves; we push them off ". You can see it more clearly in the pines, firs and cedars: a layer of needles turns yellow while the ones closest to the light remain green. "We push off our needles and leaves to make room, to build capacity, to clean ourselves". Autumn is not about an ending or giving up. It is an active preparation for renewal.
     Wow. There is so much energy here: blazing trees, crashing storms, clearing out -- all to make room in the silent pause of winter for possibility to incubate. No longer will I perceive fall as meek. As I walk to the meadow's edge to greet the dawn this morning, knowing that storms are about to rampage through my own body to clear it of the cancer, I will ask for help from the trees. I may lose part of me. Will I be passive or active, release or push? What can happen in the silence after the storm?
     My favorite poem walks into my mind. I memorized it in high school.

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise-- 

~ Emily Dickinson

Dawn Prayer 1

     Every morning when I reach down to touch the earth and connect with her deep strength, some prayer comes spontaneously to my lips. The very act of squatting or bending over is humbling, and reminds me of kneeling in a church. Except this is not rote. There is no "should" here, no prescription - just desire for connection, desire for repeated contact, desire for a small ritual that opens me to something fuller*. Touching the earth every day is the beginning; what comes next is spontaneous. This dawn prayer is close to what I spoke yesterday morning. The sense I had of riding the spinning earth towards light stayed with me all day, and I try to recapture it here. The last two lines are often how I end.

Mother, somehow I feel you turn toward the sun.
Hold me, as I hold on to you,
As you hold all of us who ride on you.
In my roots I feel the nestling of earthworms, voles and acorns.
As I stand, I feel a brush of breeze on my cheek
And wish I could hold your touch there,
Just for a moment, loved.
Instead I press my hands into your wet meadow grass --
Good morning Goldfinch! Good morning Blue Jay! Good morning crickets! --
And wait
Together
Feeling the rise of gratitude 
With the oncoming light.
May the work I do in the world today be the work of spirit;
May the energy of the earth pass through me to all beings today.


*Maybe church liturgies did start this way; this is something to ponder.