I was at my youngest granddaughter’s dedication a few weeks back. A real treat for me and a real symbolic intent by her parents and the church, but I ask what? I ask what does this earth or the church have to add to this gift?
I dare mention, we might remind the earth and the church where this life started and stay in “awe”.
Carry on
The first green beans of the season are special, they can talk. They ” sermonize ” the garden by saying, “that’s right we are here, get us while you can, summer is soon, winter a little later-we are a sign for the coming and we are as real as it will get”.
Amen
Not all that many days ago, Dr. Eugene Gendlin died. I never met him, but i have been counseled, taught, and mentored by some of his students. He was ninety, so many of his students are getting along in years now. I won’t try to do Dr. Gendlin justice in a blog post, but I do want to take my hat off the man who left our human race the concept of “Focusing” and his students that promote and practice this human phenomenon.
I doubt seriously if I have any devout Buddhist in my readers, but Dr. Gendlin’s focusing was warmly received by Western Buddhism. His way of being with the body that evidenced the ability of the human body to sense what it need to be with -to have “felt sense”, a way of innate shifting in oneself that is forward processing.
If I have any readers still on the spiritual path of the Christ, I highly recommend you researching “BioSpirituality”. Before you write this off as a “new age” camp idea. Review what a couple Jesuits came up with out of and with Eugene’s Focusing. If my grandchildren and the Christian path have a chance in the next century, it will involve somehow living out of our body’s wisdom. The wisdom of the body is an innate slow method of coming to know or sense compared to our usual methods of rational “being”. But oh so subtle, and deep with such original resources we just have to sit with it and “see what is”.
The new puppy and the old barn cat (with a brain issue,circles to the right for hours) have come to relate. They are the oddest bed fellows around the place with the best example of getting along with what you got. They have capitalized on their differences, the cat follows the puppy to water and feed more often than not. The cat lets the puppy maul it while whipping all the other farm dogs.
Afflicted or not, no one messes with the “odd cat”, except the puppy-Erasmus!
The interphase, the edge waters, the buffer zone-places where new things can come, even ones never expected. This place where two eco-systems converge is usually unpredictable and may not look like much, but it’s the richest place in life.
Without this “mixing it up”, stagnation is the rule. This small pond by the main barn looks rather “funky”, but the warm temperatures have it busting at the seams growing slimy things, weedy floaters, deep bottom algae-the water meets the land and something beyond them both comes about.
Welcome turbulence at the “edge water”.
This is my mothers “cotton hoe”. I asked my dad for it before he died-it’s my best inheritance piece, it’s worn out by use, not existence time.If I had a garden full of social media platforms, I would weed some out-the first being Facebook. Yes ou can’t truly communicate deep issues like friendship without a “body”. If more is communicated via “presence”, stands to reason language alone ,via the channel this is on, is anemic.
“Let the weeds grow up with the wheat, and when it’s time-you can separate.”
Happy chopping!
“There is place beyond right and wrong, I’ll meet you there”.
There is a Process in play, we came into it by no work of our own and we will leave by no work of our own. One is an inhale and the next natural act is to exhale.Wouldn’t they both be considered sacred? My primary work seems to be awake between breaths-there I find It, meaning.
There are many methods of Process Avoiding, underneath all of them, there is something desiring understanding and compassion. Once judgment is left behind you are left with Now, Process, Kingdom within, the “no longer I that live”.
Maybe it is time to take a stand in the least likely of places. In this country we promote groups, herds in some cases, but every now and then, a stand is needed in a “stand up” way. Maybe, the call comes from inside not from “out there”-the call to intent.
The very idea, the call for a brief stay in a harsh land. Oh my, what if a difference is not made in this brief time? Who are we to judge? Break up the landscape, pull out into boredom where your daily coordinates are to be found, learn you aren’t unique, there have been those before, and there are those are on the way. To exist is hard to preach, but is at the core of the Life Process-change will be evidenced. The outcome of process can’t be pre-determined, but here is the incubator of hope, a necessary and innate ingregient in the mix.
There is no ordinary in the everyday, but there is radical evidence for “something” going on here that request our Presence. If I can be where I am, with who I am, I can recognize my gift of moments-one at a time.
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
Confucius
Thanks be.
Not Just Relief(going to the woods):
Sometimes one needs to go to the deep woods for a prolonged period just to learn, nothing to accomplish, and bringing as little as necessary. Then find a way to be there, be it 4 or 40 days. seems this can be done in your backyard or the ends of the earth, all required is to get in ones body and out of ideas about getting back to your body.
Some of us come from a place really close to the dirt because of the time and place we were born, just our lot in life. 
Maybe it’s time for us who can sleep on it, the dirt and like it, to treat it like our grand babies depended on it.
There has been a long lapse in notes on this site since I came back from the PCT the second time. It has taken a while to heal my body and my head. The body was straight forward-sit let the displaced toes, blisters, and giardiasis heal-they did. The head was a different item. I want to know what I saw there for the first time in my 64 years was as real as i thought? I’ll get back on that-seems it was.
Whether we are there are not, there is a flow forward about life. Like birthdays, we can welcome them as leading to something bigger, or we can fight them, either way-we are in it.
Spiritual Formation 