Wellspring: inspiration and guidance for a spiritual journey

A Blessing as We Part

Blessed be your journey

along the stony path only your soul knows

Let longing crack your world open

so that belonging

and joy

are companions to your howling dog heart

 

May you hold the friendship of your soul

steadfast as the cardinal upon her eggs

Treasure its shyness

protect and guard

its secrets

listen for its whispers echoes and sighs

 

Blessed be your work in the world

in your family and community

May your gifts shine

and flow

and burst and bubble

from the wellspring of your living heart

 

May you be in right relation

with all of life's messy creation

That which frightens

those who repel and attract

are messengers

from the great beyond and the holy within

 

As you sit in silence

or walk or run or sing

May you feel the presence

of your fellow travelers

meeting your heart

in the wild garden of pulsing sacred space.

 

 

 

                    Kim Palma

                    5-16-08

Gold Star Mothers, by Tina Simson

So it was Mother’s day and the newspaper in my town did a story about the Gold Star Mothers, the women who have lost children to war. I read the article, as far as I could, until the tears blurred my vision and rage pierced my heart. I agree that these women have experienced an unimaginable loss, but their loss is not a noble sacrifice, or the ultimate patriotic deed. That’s part of the myth they tell us to make the loss seem bearable.

Women lose children everyday, to disease, addiction, depression, accidents. It is no more gallant a loss when a flag drapes the coffin. In fact it is the ultimate failure. We fail our children when war is the solution to any problem. We fail as a society and as humankind. When we choose war, we squander the dedication, commitment and devotion of our children who serve in the Armed Forces. We call them peacekeepers and then send them to fight. What a dissonant concept. And when we lose sight of a war because our own lives are complicated by more immediate concerns like the price of gas or food, we fail them again.

There is an indelible image in my mind. It’s 2005 and while staying at a hotel in the Midwest, I wander into a parking lot filled with buses of new soldiers. They are dressed in desert fatigues and filing into the hotel. Their faces are fresh, so young and so eager. My car is blocked, so I wait patiently while they stand in lines talking about the hot breakfast and the cozy bed that awaits them. We talk… “Where are you from?”
“Alabama, Vermont, Texas, Washington”, “Where are you going?”
“Iraq”

I realize then that my role is to stand witness to these beautiful children, to be there on behalf of their mothers who will follow every moment of this journey in their mind’s eye. I affirm their beauty, their innocence and potential, and the love they freely express for those left behind. I plead with all that is holy to wrap protective arms around these men and women. We chat, and I learn about families, children and plans for “when they return.”
Then I see a small ragged Elmo doll, stuffed into the pants pocket of a big strapping young man. Elmo’s head peaks out.
“I see you have a friend in your pocket?”
“Yep” he says, “Elmo has been with me my whole life. I thought he should come to Iraq too.”
I am at a loss… “I hope he keeps you safe,” I say.

“That’s what I’m counting on.”

Isn’t it time we all stand witness and choose to keep our children safe?

Gold Star Families for Peace
Military Families for Peace
Military Families Speak Out

Posting Comments to the Blog, by Tina Simson

Hi there all you Wellspring Blog readers. I wanted to take a moment and talk about how to publicly comment on a blog entry. Recently I’ve been getting e-mails from people who have read a blog entry and felt moved to let us know just how great or inspiring it is. The e-mails come only to me, (I’m the keeper of the e-mail account) so unless I pass them on to the author, she doesn’t know you’ve written. A more direct way to comment is to click on the text “comment” at the bottom of each entry, follow the prompts and enter your remarks onto the blog itself. This allows the author to see your feedback and encourages a public conversation about the entry. This creates a great dialogue and makes our work personal and relevant for our readers. We always love to hear from you and appreciate your opinions. If you have personal requests or concerns please feel free to e-mail us, but if you like us, please let others know by making your comments publicly.

The Heron Is Back, by Libby Moore

This is the real sign that spring is here – not the robins nesting in the upturned canoe on the side of the garage, not the hyacinths bursting with color and drooping with the weight of their blossoms, not the fierce pink of the cherry blossoms or the sweet smell of lilac blossoms. No, the surest sign of spring is that the heron is back in our pond.

We have a small pond in our back yard – an arm of the nearby creek, actually – which is inhabited mainly by ducks, who quack and flap and chase each other around during mating season. They're amusing and silly and we love watching the puffy brown babies when they emerge from their well-camouflaged nesting place, trailing their mother down into the water. There's a kingfisher who waits on a high branch, swoops down into the water to catch some elusive fish, then rises back to the branch to eat its dinner. There are robins and cardinals and mourning doves, goldfinches and nuthatches and the ever-present crows, cawing and dominating the food supply. All this life inhabits the yard and the pond, making itself known with noise and flutter and flashes of color.

But the heron, the heron is silent, still and totally attentive, watching the calm early morning water. It balances its huge gray body on long spindly legs, the narrow neck undulating as it observes the surface of the pond. When it changes position, its movements are slow and sinuous, creating no waves, calling no notice to itself. It reaches the unseen target, stands immobile for a moment, then jabs its long bill into the water and grabs a small fish. It whips its head up into the air to swallow, and then it's still again.

Watching the heron before my morning meditation reminds me to be still. If I move too suddenly, even in the upstairs window, it notices the disturbance and takes off, leaving the scene of the disturbance for a quieter spot. Its huge wings spread out and carry it flapping through the trees toward the creek and away.

It's the heron's stillness that I admire, the quiet mindfulness, the total presence in the moment. Elusive flashes of grace come with such stillness. I am more like the feisty goldfinches, prone to flap and flutter, create waves and air currents around me, stir the silence with the noise of my mind chattering away at itself. But when I can focus on my breath, still my mind, be in the present moment and allow the unexpected into my life, that's when joy happens. When I stop trying to be in control, I can relish the beauty of the world and of the people around me. With stillness and mindfulness, grace can happen. I am working on it.

Ben & Jerry & Joy, by Joy Collins

April 29th was pouring rain on Cape Cod. And only 46 degrees. And every single person walking out that door had a huge grin on his or her face. A “moment of joy.” The door was the exit from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Shop in Eastham. And as all ice cream aficionados know, that’s Free Cone Day at most Ben and Jerry’s around the country. Sometimes the line extended out the door, with hoods and umbrellas up. We saw teenagers with pink hair, workers with stained overalls, elderly folks with canes, a couple in a pickup truck sharing their cones with their black lab. We aren’t sure what brought us more joy – savoring our own “Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz”, or watching, through windshield wipers, all those smiles.

How is it, all these people were free at 2 pm on a Tuesday afternoon? The only reason we were free, and willing to drive 30 minutes each way, was that we were on vacation. In my “real” life, I would never have made time for this. Life is jammed full of “important” stuff. Work, food shopping, home repair, meal preparation, church committees, dog walking, vacuuming, eldercare. Oh yes, and time for my spouse! So, I ask again, how is it, these other folks had free time for a “moment of joy”?

Through Wellspring, I don’t so much learn new ideas, as much as move the ideas from intellectual realization to experiential. And this year, one of my aha moments came in our new session on the “Theology of Joy.” I saw how easily I let productivity kill the spiritual sustenance of “Joy Moments.” If I’m frantically trying to jam more into my day, or worrying about all I need to get to, I miss the “moments of joy” that arise every minute. There is a false underlying belief I carry, that life will be wonderful once I get it all done. It’s my lifelong struggle to move beyond this belief. In a book we are considering for our following on course, “Wellspring 2”, Philip Simmons writes in Learning to Fall, “in our desire always to be elsewhere than here, we can lose what measure of heaven may be ours on earth…the present is the unfinished house in which we dwell.” All those people who went to Ben & Jerry’s for a free cone on Tuesday reminded me to let go of needing to “finish the house” before I savor a rainy day scoop of ice cream.

Things I learned from an old dog, by Tina Simson

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post for our blog. To say that I’ve been busy doesn’t do justice to my life. I have a job. I’m on the Board of Trustees at church, a member of two very active committees, and I’m in seminary. In the next few weeks I’ll have oral exams, write a 10-page paper on my spiritual journey (which I think I can do justice to in a paragraph), attend a weeklong intensive for which I have 70 questions due on the World's religions and my son leaves for his second duty in Iraq. This trumps everything.

So this morning, faced with these struggles, all I want is to go for a walk with my very old dog, Marty. He is my spiritual guide, extraordinaire so I thought I’d share some of his early morning lessons with you.

Walking the same path can be full of excitement. Everyday is a new journey.

If you get tired on this journey all you need to do is sit down and the neighbors will come over to see how you’re doing.

Going slow and steady is an honorable pace.

Walking right through the mud makes the whole trip worthwhile.

If you get too excited and your bottom-half falls out from under you, you don’t have to stop wagging your tail.

There are always enough crows to complain about and surprisingly they don’t care.

There’s no need for instant messaging, texting or e-mail…when you get out and about you see real people.

When you get home there’s no need to apologize for taking a morning nap, or an afternoon nap or napping all day long.

When you nap, your dreams remind you of all the other glorious walks you’ve ever taken.

After your nap, there’s enough time to figure out how to open the ‘lazy Susan’ pull out the confectioner’s sugar, rip it open and drag it around the house for a while before your people come home.

If you’re too tired at night, to climb the stairs to your comfortable chair in the bedroom, all you need to do is whine just a little bit. Someone will pick you up and carry you.

So, I think I’ll be napping today, dreaming of rain for my garden. I’ll call my son to see how he’s doing and wait for my friends to pick me up and carry me.

Love to you all.

Spring, finally, by Libby Moore

 

It has felt like a long, hard winter in Rochester. Not dreadful, no massive blizzards, no crippling ice storms, just cold and never-ending. The delicate touches of spring we're finally seeing are even that much more welcome because it's taken so long for them to arrive. The robins got here a little early and had to scrabble in the snow for a while, but now they're looking for nesting places and pecking around on the grass for worms. The hyacinths near the warm front wall of the house have been poking up for more than a week now, and we've found the few scattered crocuses that the voles didn't eat. The snowdrops back in the woods are a mass of drooping white bells, and the forsythia are in that delicious state of impending bloom – hints of yellow along the long, willowy branches. One or two more warm days and the world will be awash with color.

Spring's arrival was a big part of our last Wellspring session, which was about the theology of joy. We added this new topic to complement the more difficult subjects of how we UU's deal with crisis and evil, but I don't think we'd intentionally planned to have the discussion just as people were starting to feel the joys of emerging warmer weather. It's so much easier to feel joy when the sky is blue and we can shed some of the layers of sweaters and boots that have encased us over the winter.

For the discussion on joy, we asked participants to read the introduction to Roger Housden's collection of poems called Dancing with Joy. He helps us think about why we often feel that our spiritual lives are fed by pain and sadness but feel guilty about giving in to the transforming power of joy. Another part of the assignment was bringing poems that expressed joy for us. I loved the variety of writings that my group offered, as individual as the members themselves – about the sea, and nature, and Hafiz, and fig trees, and connection. The very act of hearing one another read our favorites made for a joyful session.

It was hard for me to choose just one poem for my contribution, since there are so many that bring me joy. After some thought, I read one that I've loved for years, an e.e. cummings poem about spring:

 

in Just-

spring       when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

 

whistles       far       and wee

 

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

 

when the world is puddle-wonderful

 

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far       and       wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

 

 from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

 

it's

spring

and

     the

 

             goat-footed

 

balloonMan       whistles

far

and

wee

 

May spring fill our souls with joy and wonder.

Make a Joyful Noise, by Libby Moore

Saturday was one of those days when all my good intentions were getting steam-rollered by my tendency to procrastinate and feel sorry for my overburdened self. We were having friends over to celebrate St. Patrick's Day that evening and I still hadn't washed the kitchen floor or finished setting the table, and I had to write a meditation for Sunday morning, and my dear husband was hogging the computer and then decided we should run to the hardware store on our way to a special choir rehearsal in the middle of the day. That kind of a day.

But we got to church on time for rehearsal, even with the hardware store glitch. The choir milled about for a while as people arrived and settled in. And then we started to sing. First two amazing pieces that we had been rehearsing – "E Oru O," an African welcoming song with drums and gorgeous rhythms and melodies, and "Sing for Peace," with bells and children's choir and a crescendo to a glorious finale of PEACE. We practiced with the drums and the children and the early and late choirs together for the first time, producing such rich and beautiful sounds together. And then, to top it all off, our guest musician Matt Meyer led us in singing without hymnals – but with gusto, in harmony, in beauty.

It transformed my whole day, this making music together. By the time we got home, washing the floor seemed easy. Having our friends break bread with us was a pleasure. And to top it all, we got to do it again during Sunday morning worship, when the singing at both services was even more remarkable with Matt leading hundreds of people in singing together.

In my Wellspring group, we're preparing for the session called "The Theology of Joy" by keeping a joy journal for two weeks. One of the questions we ask is whether joy has the power to transform us. This weekend it certainly did. The joy of singing together in community – when every part contributed to the beauty of the whole, when the whole couldn't be the same without all the parts – transformed me from being self-focused and slightly resentful to being full of love and peace – and rhythm. Singing, our hearts beat time with the drums, our hands clapped, our feet stomped, and we shared a common expression of joy.

There are always shadows, of course. We sang of peace because our country marks the fifth anniversary of a disastrous war. Poverty threatens the wellbeing of families and children everywhere. But making joyful music with other people raises up the hope that we can make a difference. It gives comfort in knowing that we are together in this struggle. It strengthens my will to stay the course. May we all have joyful moments that sustain us.

God as verb, by Joy Collins

Previously I wrote about the gift of my 81 year old mother. Today I write about the unlikely teaching of my elderly dad.

I was raised Catholic during the 1960s and totally bought into “God the Father” as the white bearded guy with a staff, and “God the Son” being Jesus of the Sacred Heart. My teenage religious rebellion turned me toward the God of Rationality. Later, in my mid-30s I enthusiastically embraced the God of Psychotherapy. I will admit, I am an unabashed fan of therapy, having had many years of it. It truly awakened my emotional and compassionate side.

Yet at some point, it too, became not enough. My therapist, a most transformative person in my life, encouraged me as I experimented in the mid-90s with Unitarian Universalism. But I still felt caught. It seemed I had only two options: reject God altogether, as our humanist-oriented minister at the time indirectly advocated, or embrace my childhood image of a conscious, directive potentate who saw fit to allow child abuse and starvation. Neither route was appealing.

Enter Process Theology in the guise of my dad. 8 years ago, at age 76, he showed early signs of dementia. As their executor and eldest local child, I needed to delicately get more involved in his and my mom’s finances. Managing their money had been the center of, not only his retirement years, but his entire adulthood. I began spending hours sitting with him in their spare bedroom as he and I would go over investments, gifting, and bill paying. He had a brilliant financial mind that gradually was slowing to a crawl. During those in between years I had many minutes where we sat, him struggling and usually eventually succeeding, in grasping the work and conveying his ideas. All I could heartbreakingly do was practice patience, breathing, compassion and the fine line between taking over and sitting back. In an odd way, these were beautiful moments.

During these months, I was also nearing the end of my time in therapy. Our sessions had moved from dissecting my childhood to more forward-looking spiritual concerns. In one session in particular, I remember bemoaning my lack of connection to a personal God, the one my conservative Christian sisters took such comfort in. Because a just and loving God would not slowly destroy the part of my dad he most treasured.

And my therapist, in one of those simple, yet brilliant remarks, said, “God is in those conversations with you dad.” I probably stared at her blankly. She continued, “God is not a separate being. God is created in you each time you choose compassion with your dad. God is the love you are showing by letting him do what he can, and gently, with face-saving respect, offering to do what he can’t. God is the loving interaction.”

In a flash, I got it. Ten years before I ever heard of process theology, I got the concept. Rev. Gary Kowalski talks of the world/god “as composed of verbs rather than nouns.” Rebecca Parker says “we make God, as much as God makes us.” While this is still intellectually difficult to understand or articulate, I totally get the experience of God as Process. It has liberated me into being as “godlike” as I can in all my interactions. Thanks, Dad, for providing such an unusual but life changing gift.

Stars on the carpet, by Tina Simson

Do you think it’s true that all people let go of things slowly? Does everyone struggle to release the good as well as the bad aspects of life? Well, I sure do. I think my son was twelve years old before I stopped telling people the extra pounds I was carrying were because I just had a baby! So letting go is hard, when things end or change we sometimes grip tighter to what we are losing. I sometimes think there’s profound spiritual learning in letting go; sometimes I think it just hurts.

I started changing my son’s room into a guest room about 18 months ago. I cleaned out the closet…in stages, putting all his stuffed animals in a bin to take to the basement. Well maybe not all, I left a few in case he needed them. He’s 24 and well, you never know.
I packed away Game Boys and martial arts belts, space ship models and Mickey Mouse pictures. Then I waited. I left the posters of Dave Matthews and Bob Marley. I left the Sushi Calendar, the UU Con pictures… and the stars.

You see this son was a space dreamer. He always had his feet on the ground and his heart in the stars. He dreamed of space adventures and even at three dressed up as a “space ship guy” for Halloween. When he was six or so we filled the walls with glow-in-the-dark star stickers. Invisible until the lights went out, this room expanded beyond all fantasy into a galaxy of wonder.

In the years since he left for college, I sleep in his room sometimes. When I’m restless or struggling with a cold or a snoring husband, I stumble into the waiting solitude. I turn on the light for a few moments, long enough to ignite the stars and then flip the switch to whimsy. I am surrounded by infinity and memory and that luscious combination helps me sleep.

But, after 18 years, this room needed painting. The scotch tape pulled off the drywall and the thumbtacks made holes. All our children are grown and we think about moving, so it makes sense to prepare, slowly. I hired a painter to do this chore, to patch the holes and remove the stars. I tried to pull them off myself, but I couldn’t. This painter has helped us before so I feel comfortable sharing my sadness and longing about the stars. I hear him scrape them off the walls and I see them fallen onto the edges of the carpet. I stand at the door and look back into my memories.

“Do you want me to pick them up?” he asks. “I can put them in a bag for you.”
“No,” I say bravely, “It’s time to let go.”

I hear the sound of the vacuum, so I take the dog for a walk.

The room is finished now, freshly painted and a bit bare. I haven’t slept in there yet, but I walk in often to touch the few knickknacks left from his childhood. And then I see them, two stars on the carpet. I pick them up tenderly and hold them under the lamp. I switch off the light and once again hold his universe in the palm of my hand.