I Celebrate Love by Elise M. Edwards

Happy Valentine’s Day!  I know, I know… so many of us do not like this holiday.  It’s too commercialized, we say.  We don’t need card-makers or florists to tell us how or when to show affection.  Some of us don’t like Valentine’s Day because it reminds us of loves we have lost or never found.  I get it.  This day can seem shallow, overhyped, and falsely sentimental.  It can be lonely.  And yet, I won’t let today pass without celebrating and honoring love.  Love is too important to concede to commercial interests.

Love, in its many forms, keep us alive and able to endure. Love is powerful because it is expansive, growing in unexpected places and ways.  We tend to separate our celebrations of romantic love, friendship, familial love, self-love, and religious devotion.  We make distinctions between our valentines and “galentines.”  Rarely do we shout for joy in ecstatic worship while also celebrating the passionate longings of our innermost desires.  But occasionally, in my religious tradition, we let our disparate loves come together.  We unite them on holy feast days, enjoying the sensual pleasures of good food and company to mark spiritual occasions.  So that’s my inspiration.  Today, I’m celebrating love by reflecting on various forms of love merged together and sharing insight from poets and mystics about the power and beauty experienced in love.

Continue reading “I Celebrate Love by Elise M. Edwards”

Devotion by Molly Remer

There are things that ask
50237778_2257311164481093_3090053013251817472_oto be remembered
or, is it that I ask to remember?
The everyday enchantments
of our living
words forming slices of
memory.
A white squirrel watching
from a sycamore tree
the sounds of black
crows calling
from within the secret
passages
between oak tree
and neighborhood
footprints of a shy orange
coastal fox in the sand.
Rays of sunlight
forming individual white rainbows
stretching from cloud
to water.
I no longer feel like I have anything
to teach
I just want to tell you about the
shell I found today
the sandy pink color
of its wave-shaped spiral
the way the pine needles
form a canopy under
which orange monarchs dance
the surprising softness and bright
green hue of thin fingers of grass
the pretty purple pollen cones
of a longleaf pine.
The colors of a morning woven
into a tapestry of devotion.
That is the word for this feeling
in my chest.
Devotion
to noticing.

Devotion is not a word that I have previously felt particularly inspired by or connected to. Perhaps it is too heavy, too responsible, or even “too religious”—carrying connotations of dogma or roteness. However, in the last month or so, something has opened up for me to consider the word, and the process, in a different way. Continue reading “Devotion by Molly Remer”

Sometimes You Can Go Home Again. . . Because I Did by Elisabeth Schilling

I am tired and a bit emotionally exhausted, yet hopeful and in calm spirits as I have returned from my 8 months of traveling through Europe. I left in a rather dramatic impulsivity with little planning other than to leave the States for as long as I could and focus on writing poetry. I suppose I wanted to stay indefinitely, but now I realize that there are good and bad elements to everywhere.

In Basque Country, the beaches were beautiful but you might have to sunbathe in clouds of burning cigarette smoke because everyone seems to be lighting up everywhere you go. In Sicily, the history and fashion and food are intoxicating, but a lot of the buildings are crumbling and the landscape is parched in many places. In Ireland, it is green and lush, every corner a fairytale, but in the town centers, the air in winter is suffocating with the smoke of coal burning in houses as if it were London in the 1800s so much that I mostly refused to walk outside where I stayed. Continue reading “Sometimes You Can Go Home Again. . . Because I Did by Elisabeth Schilling”

Just When We Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse, It Did by Carol P. Christ

Like many of you I have been following discussions of the revelation that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam dressed in blackface or as a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he was a medical student. It was reported that Northam was earlier known as “coonman,” an epithet which suggests that he had blackened his face more than once. His later admission that he put only a little bit of black shoe polish on his face because it is hard to get off, when he dressed up as Michael Jackson, seems to confirm that blackface was something he had tried before. There was also the fact that students had been asked by the yearbook committee to submit photographs for their pages: Northam did not say if he submitted the photographs on his page.

Some commented that Northam’s was not a (possibly forgivable) youthful offense, but one committed by a twenty-six year-old adult. Others said that Northam’s failure to take full responsibility for his apparently repeated behavior and the hurt and harm his actions and actions like them had caused was the more serious offense. Perhaps he could still have governed if he had apologized fully, told the story of how he came to understand race relations on a deeper level, and immediately offered to meet with black leaders and restorative justice experts to discuss what he could to earn back the trust of the people who elected him.

Everyone seemed relieved that Northam would be replaced by a young progressive black man. It seemed like a happy ending to a very sad story.

And then the other shoe dropped. Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax was accused of forcible sexual assault by a black woman named Dr. Vanessa Tyson who had absolutely nothing to gain by telling her story. Continue reading “Just When We Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse, It Did by Carol P. Christ”

On Tetzaveh by Ivy Helman

29662350_10155723099993089_8391051315166448776_oThe Torah parshah for this week is Tetzaveh (Exodus 27:20 – 30:10).  Mostly it describes the priesthood, both of Aaron and his sons. It details how they should be consecrated, what they should wear, the difference between the garb of the high priest and the others, institutes the daily burnt offerings of rams, and provides instructions for the construction of an altar for locally-sourced incense.  

The parshah works to establish differences between members of the Israelite community through consecration as well as in function and in dress by decreeing the institutionalized of the priesthood.  Priests undergo an elaborate consecration ceremony which includes the sacrifice of animals, the smearing of their blood, the waving of various animals parts into the air and the burning/cooking of the sacrificed animals’ flesh.  In addition to the blood smearing and animal sacrifices, the priests are also anointed with oil and offer oil and grain offerings to the divine. In terms of function, priests should offer daily sacrifices to the divine in the form of two rams (one in the morning and one in the evening).  Also, all priests have four items of similar clothing: tunic, girdle, turban and short pants. However, the high priest has four special items only he wears, like the breastplate and a golden forehead piece. His clothes are laden with gold, precious stones, and royal dyes.   Continue reading “On Tetzaveh by Ivy Helman”

Reclaiming Sacred Music by Mary Sharratt

Women Singing Earth by Mary Southard

Here is a hymn of praise, a beautiful and intimate piece meant to be sung. Reader, I invite you to guess the author of this text and the sacred figure to whom this work is addressed.

Hail, O greenest branch,
sprung forth on the breeze of prayers.

. . . . a beautiful flower sprang from you
which gave all parched perfumes
their aroma.
And they have flourished anew
in full abundance.

The heavens bestowed dew upon the meadows,
and the entire earth rejoiced,
because her flesh
brought forth grain,
and because the birds of heaven
built their nests in her.

Behold, a rich harvest for the people
and great rejoicing at the banquet.
O sweet Maiden,
no joy is lacking in you . . . .
Now again be praised in the highest.

Continue reading “Reclaiming Sacred Music by Mary Sharratt”

Past Transgressions by Esther Nelson

Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat in the state of Virginia, has many people calling for his resignation after a picture from a 1984 medical school yearbook surfaced showing what some people assert to be Northam wearing blackface or a KKK costume.  (Northam insists he is neither one of the people in the photograph and he, as I write this, vows to fulfill his term in office.) This is a link to the recent firestorm along with other people in the public eye who have been censored due to their racial insensitivity. 

Recently I posted an essay on this blog (FAR) titled, “All Are Welcome—Even Tom.”  One of the broad questions I raise in the piece dealing with sexual assault surrounds our shared human dignity.  “If we are all one (as many people assert), do we not hurt and diminish our own selves when we seek revenge or become embittered instead of practicing compassion towards both parties—the one who has inflicted an injury as well as the one who has been injured? [Here is the link]. Continue reading “Past Transgressions by Esther Nelson”

I Shall Make Prayer of It by Natalie Weaver


This is a poem I published almost ten years ago. It is as if I wrote it yesterday.  The image is more or less of the same sentiment as the poem.

I publish these again here in memory of my father.

 

~~~~

I am always cleaning
though not fast enough
to really organize
what I cannot put away.
It is messy in closets
that cover the appearance of order.
I am still sitting on wool carpet watching

The dusts dance in little beams of hope.
The same ones that lighted by wonder
in warmth and youth a beauty made
of windows and particles.
Probably the same ones that caused dirt and flu.
But what matter is it in the world that is merely
the simultaneity of being in which at once
the limos and the hearses depart for the church. Continue reading “I Shall Make Prayer of It by Natalie Weaver”

Generosity and Community: the Alternative Worldview of Women’s Ritual Dances, Part 2 by Laura Shannon

Dr. France LeJeune Milchberg taking her turn to lead the dance line, Lesvos 2007. Photo: Sheryl Ackerman

Starhawk describes the work of her Reclaiming collective as the creation of ‘spaces of refuge from a harsh and often hostile world, safe places where people can heal and regenerate, renew our energies and learn new skills.’[i] These words also apply to the women’s traditional dances. One participant on my courses expresses it thus: ‘In the circle no-one is left out, no-one is ignored, all are held and included, all have their place, all are connected.’[ii]

Crucially, women’s ritual dances empower everyone to develop leadership skills. Every woman must know how to lead the line at the appropriate time, and she must also know how to pass on the responsibility afterwards. Continue reading “Generosity and Community: the Alternative Worldview of Women’s Ritual Dances, Part 2 by Laura Shannon”

For Love of Trees by Sara Wright

Yesterday I dreamed that I discovered a bird’s nest that was hidden in the center of an evergreen tree. This little dream moved me deeply because this is the time of year I celebrate my love and gratitude for all trees, but especially evergreens, and the dream felt like an important message. For me in winter, the “Tree of Life”  is an evergreen.

Outdoors, I recently placed a glass star in the center of my newly adopted Juniper here in New Mexico, repeating a pattern that began in Maine years ago with my Guardian Juniper in whose center I also placed a star…Inside the house an open circle created out of a completely decayed tree trunk sits at the center of my Norfolk pine; around the room spruce, juniper and pinion boughs are twinkling with miniature lights. The tree has a festival of lights at her feet. The point of making these gestures is to keep me mindful that tree bodies are sacred in their wholeness and each tree explicates the immanence of divinity. Another way of saying this is to say that Natural Power lives in trees. This goddess is steadfast. Continue reading “For Love of Trees by Sara Wright”