For Joseph...on his commencement day. For all the graduates...

Joseph, my youngest child, graduated from Eckerd College yesterday - as we all watched the virtual celebration on our screens from Greenboro, St. Petersburg, Amelia Island.  (And my arms ached to hug him.) There are a billion ways my heart breaks open at this milestone, but for now....

For a New Beginning

by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

From John O’Donohue’s book
To Bless the Space Between Us

From shitty first drafts to digital gardens...BE FOUND

My brilliant and thoughtful f(F)riend and Quaker theologian Wess Daniels talked to me the other day on a walk in the woods with the ever dazzling Maia Dery about a place he's found between shitty first drafts and more fully formed thoughts.  He more eloquently put it this way on his wiki sight "Nurse Log notes" (can be found on his blog-link above - and what an incredible name for that wiki site eh? Look up Nurse Log):   "A digital garden is a place in-between your personal notes and final publications on blogs and articles.  It's a place where ideas get worked out, articulated and grow into something more useful later."  

I hope that I can tend to my garden here - it has really been neglected.  I've been afraid of fertilizing it, because maybe it just won't grow anything (or maybe it will).  I have always had hopes of this digital space being a community space - hence "a beautiful web" title.  Anyway, I'm not sure the words below fit into the "digital garden" space exactly yet - they may not be quite ready to move from shitty first draft to that space, but I'm tired of not starting.  And you have to be present to be found...

Be found..

Pausing long enough to accept the sun's morning light touching my cheek as it finds its way over and through the terrain of the backyard, through trees now embellished with leaves,  which backs up to parking lots, which backs up to streets and fields and neighborhoods and dumps and forests and creeks, and, and, and...

The leaves on the trees in this yard are playing with the sun's rays like a keyboard on my cheek.

I am being found - I am always being found.  Today I consent to it, embracing the disruption, dropping out of the noisy, bumpy, dangerous? roller coaster ride - pushed out, sought out--it doesn't matter (but it does).

Sounds are finding me.  I'm not alone.  I'm surrounded by birds (and so many others), but the birds are loud.  The many distinctive songs are finding my ears  - my body is available enough to hear the individual strains of their community chatter.  My voice can't ever compliment or harmonize or blend if my body isn't available to hear.

Being found - by my friends, the human ones too - is happening.  Quieting down, turning the volume down on the internal noise--really, letting it go.  Presence can meet presence then.  There is so much presence.

Things we say/I've "chanted"  for a long time without really knowing the truth of the words, now become clearer..."If I could only get out of my own way."  

Be found - I've (we've) been found all along.

Colors find me, plants find me, humidity, wind and breeze have waited patiently for me. How to express gratitude for having a body that's found?

Every leaf in the canopy of this little yard as far as I can see has a relationship with the sun.  So much is happening in the alchemy of their meeting.  Expanding, shimmering, fortifying their whole - our whole.  Isn't that amazing?  The sun is doing that with individual leaves.  There is so much more than leaves!

The fragrance from the Star Jasmine plant next to me on the patio takes me
time-traveling to other places, even other ways of being.  Without smashing my nose into the blooms (which I want to do as often as possible because of the time traveling ride that it takes me on) the fragrance finds its way, wafting across my face - to me, by me, finding me.  I catch the fragrance that finds me.  I can't hold it or keep it any longer than I can be available to it.  I can only ever so slightly hold it - like a song note - just suspended in my senses.  And then it's gone - but not really.