The silent heart ...

The silent heart is a blessing heart Because it sees the Divine in all things The silent heart is a listening heart Because it seeks always to be increased The silent heart is a peaceful heart Because it has mastered the art of forgiveness The silent heart is a restful heart Because it has learned to be at home with itself The silent heart is a selfless heart Because it knows how to be truly grateful The silent heart is a timeless heart Because it lives in the moment,

ever in touch with the eternal The silent heart is a trusting heart Because it recognizes its sustenance as Providence The silent heart is a silent heart Because it has experienced the grace of contemplation

The Beginning of a Spirituality ~ Part III

The Lilac Sanctuary

The walk to school every morning was purposeful and timed. If I left the house on time and walked without delay I could arrive with breath to spare and time to visit with my classmates, an integral exercise in what continues to be the most attended class of the newly blossomed adolescent years - socialization. But the walk home was different. Instead of a preoccupation of what was to come, which often filled my thoughts along the morning trek, my mind assumed a memory mode as it soared through the past events of the day. It was almost an effortless thinking, an effortless being. It just was and it mattered not what time I left school, for I was going home and need not worry about arriving before the bell.

On the way home I took a different path ~ a path that would take me past the huge brick house on the corner. It was not the house I liked, it was the bushes. The bushes filled with luscious green leaves that stroked my bare arms and legs like gentle kisses as I walked through their midst. The bushes filled with aromatic blooms of lilac, white and pink that towered well above my head and made me feel as if I had entered another space in time entirely. Each day I ventured in and through and out feeling full and filled, and for reasons I did not care that I did not understand, I emerged whole and fulfilled. I loved those bushes and their space and how they made me feel.

Once I grew and moved away from my place of origin, each visit home I would venture past those bushes – just to be sure. But one summer afternoon as I arrived in the city, something seemed odd and I began to feel an almost nauseating pain in the pit of my stomach. I thought it was the hot weather and the length of time I had traveled in an un-airconditioned car. But as I approached the huge brick house, I quickly forgot about the heat. The bushes were gone! My temple had been destroyed. And even though it has been gone several years now, I cannot help but venture past where it once stood each time I return home – just to be sure.

The Beginning of a Spirituality ~ Part II

Under Kelly’s Front Porch

I was 10 years old and loved gumball machines. At that time you could put in a penny and out would come 2 gumballs and, depending on the machine, a tiny trinket would accompany the colorful spheres. The tiny plastic object was no bigger than a thumbprint and usually possessed a ring at one end so as to be strung like a charm from a necklace or bracelet. For me, those trinkets were treasures, my most prized possessions. Perhaps because they were cute and colorful; perhaps because they were mine. They all meant something to me and I loved them for it. I kept them in a box my grandmother had given me and in it they were transported back and forth from my hideout. Actually, it was our hideout, Kelly’s and mine. Kelly was my friend and we used to take my trinkets underneath her front porch and set them up here and there. That’s all we did – we took them out and set them up, one by one, and then sat there looking at them and being with them – often in silence. If someone had asked I doubt we could have explained why; we just did and it was good and that was enough.

And then one day Kelly stopped coming to the hideout and so it became my hideout. I continued to enter the place, box in hand, alone from then on. Soon the summer ended and Kelly went back to her school and I went back to mine. The weather turned colder and I visited my little temple less and less.

Thirty-plus years later my temple is housed in a sacred corner of my bedroom and continues to contain trinkets which represent my life, my love, my connections. Reminiscent of the altarcitos of Hispanic popular religion (small places common in many homes where Holy images and objects of meaning are placed), a simple mission style bookcase serves as my altar’s base upon which currently rest the following items: a small weaving from the altiplano or high mountainous regions of Peru; a candle; prayer cards and service programs containing small photographs and prayers of eternal rest for two dear friends; a miniature earthenware container filled with pinches of dirt from 12 countries in which the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas minister and reside; a petite bottle of holy water from the shrine in Mexico decorated with a colorful image of Our Lady of Guadalupe; a little clay vessel given to me 26 years ago at my entrance ceremony; a piece of stone etched with the words Be still and know that I am God; the crude clay bird hand-fashioned during a retreat; a piece of weathered driftwood from the lake at Stillpoint; coral from the shores of Belize; and my drawing journal displaying a mandala I created for Mary. I try to visit my mestiza temple daily and sit in silent reflection amidst the visual fronteras of my soul.* Some people call it meditation, others call it contemplation. I learned a long time ago to call it prayer, even when it does not feel like it.

*With experiences and devotions in two distinct worlds and not comfortably fitting completely into either, my spirituality embraces mixed traditions; lives in the borderlands. From the poem “To live in the Borderlands means you” by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

The Beginning of a Spirituality ~ Part I

WAY UP HIGH, SERAPHIM ...

As a small child of no more than four, the Mass was mostly in Latin and very little made sense to my young ears. Except for one word - one word spoken one time within that hour of babble when I knew that I was being named specially among the crowd and recognized - the word was seraphim. And even though it was not Sarah, I knew it meant Sarah because after all, it wasn’t English anyway and that was just the other language’s way of saying Sarah.

A few years later the babble turned familiar and my curiosity waned until one Sunday I noticed what had been there always, hanging high above the altar. It was way up high, so high that if you sat too far up in the body of the church, you could not see what I oftentimes saw and oftentimes did not. It was rectangular in shape from the angle just below it, a box which hung by four chains made of what looked like wood and decorated on the bottom with colors of turquoise and cream and something of a darker hue from the perspective further back. There seemed to be no light attached to it and nothing hung from it to identify its purpose and so I would look at it and wonder “Why is this here?” and “What is that for?” And sometimes, because the box hung from chains and there was a rather large space between it and the ceiling, I saw it. It was a cross, but not a real cross, more like a shadow cross sitting between the box and the ceiling. But there was no real cross making the shadow cross so maybe it was some other kind of cross. Sometimes I would see it and look around at the other faces in the community gathered and wonder if they too could see it. Other times it was nowhere to be found and I would still look around at the other faces and wonder if they too could not see it. And even though I could not see it every time, I was sure of it; I knew it was still there even if I was the only one who knew about it. Somehow I think I was.

... heart of my heart ...

can i tell you where i’ve been? what i’ve done and failed to do? can i tell you whom i have loved? the risks involved … the costs which have been paid … the shame and the ecstasy? can you sit with me awhile? can you hold me ‘til I can feel you? can you love me as I have loved another? can you teach me how to love you? can you rock me in your arms? can you satiate my desires? can you remind me who I have been? who I am and will become? can you take my hand in yours? guide me to a brand new day? tell me that you love me now more than yesterday? just as I am? no matter where I have been? because … right now … i cannot.

It's coming ... a new school year ...

and along with that ... fire drills!

fire drills

i hate them so

we have to line-up

in a row ...

it is so loud

it hurts my ears

please, don't let anyone

see my tears ...

they say it is fake

but i think it's real

and James Jerome

always steps on my heel ...

but that's o.k.

cuz then i can cry

and nobody ever

has to know why.

This is my grandneice ~ a future kindergardener!

Thinking outside of the box ...

“My Picture”

I drew myself a picture.
My teacher told me to.
But when I showed it to her,
she said it wouldn’t do!

“Ever seen black squash?” she asked.
“A purple kangaroo?”
Know what I asked my teacher?
“How come your hands are blue?”

She said her pen exploded
When she gave it a little click
“Well,” I said, “my kangaroo
just needs another bic!”

“You still don’t understand but I’ll try and help you to”…

Having spent two years in the middle 1990s living and working with the Sisters and people of the barrios of Argentina, I returned to the states with a yearning to continue the profoundly Spirit-filled relationship with which I had been gifted among the Latin American community; not to mention an additional desire to maintain the language I had so painstakingly acquired. Hence, I found myself once more settling into the barrio, this time in the southwest of the United States, where I would spend the next four years discovering and enlightening others about the heart matters of living in a multicultural world. And in the process, like with any endeavor toward further learning and hopefully growth, I had once more discovered that the more enlightened I became, the more I learned how unenlightened I actually was. One warm, spring day (which in south Texas is most difficult to identify from “any other” day of the year!), having recently completed a full day’s presentation on the perceptions of power and their affects on styles of communication, I decided to get a bit of fresh air with my co-presenter whom also had become a good friend. She needed to run an errand and I agreed to go along for the ride. We arrived at a major computer retail store where my friend was returning a pricey laptop she had purchased the week before. While she bargained with the salesclerk who was refusing to give her a cash refund because he claimed the store did not have that kind of cash on hand, I looked around at the numerous innovative technological inventions. After some 20 minutes or so, I returned to the counter where my friend had finally convinced the manager that she was not leaving the store without the deserved cash in hand. When the manager appeared from the back and saw me talking with his customer, he went to a nearby register and returned with a plethora of twenty-dollar bills and promptly placed them in my possession. As he apologized for the misunderstanding, I thanked him and meticulously counted the amount to be sure that all was accounted for. I asked if he might have an envelope with which to contain the tall stack of bills and when he produced one from behind the counter, I placed the money inside, handed the envelope to my friend, and turned to depart from the same door through which we had entered. “So, you want to get something to eat?” I asked my friend once we arrived at the car. I was pleased she was able to complete her errand and we still had more than an hour before our next presentation. She looked at me with a compassionately concerned expression - that half-grin-half-frown look that says “you still don’t understand but I’ll try and help you to” - and then she replied, “Do you know what just happened back there?” In all my educated ignorance I had to admit, I had not the slightest clue. And in the process of our conversation, like with any endeavor toward further learning and hopefully growth, I had once more discovered that the more enlightened I became, the more I learned how unenlightened I actually was. My friend was a dark-skinned Mexican-American female; the year was 2001; the city, an overwhelmingly Hispanic-populated San Antonio, Texas. Questions for reflection: · When might you have been involved in the blatant discrimination of another/others and been too ignorant to have recognized it? · Has anyone ever pointed out your involvement in a situation of discrimination, prejudice, or racism and, because you did not experience the situation as such, you denied it? · If you say something that offends another person but you do not mean it to be offensive, is it your responsibility to apologize or the other person’s responsibility to get beyond it? from A question and a cutie for your Friday Nothing is more loving than God and more hateful than the devil. Nothing is what the rich always want and the poor always have. Abuse nothing and you shall live; consume nothing and you shall die.

one of those kind of days ...

The skies are dark and dreary this morning ...

threatening to tear but not quite ready to let loose ...

Even the birds are quiet around the feeder ...

I am sequestered to write yet another correction to my dissertation proposal ...

but I think it is going to be one of those kind of days ...

[Thanks for the illustration, Mijo!]

AM I LIVING THE LIFE THAT WANTS TO LIVE IN ME?

AM I LIVING THE LIFE THAT WANTS TO LIVE IN ME? Am I? Maybe, but that’s much too strong an answer. I’m not even sure I know what that life is. Loving. It contains a lot of love - Visceral love, Intuitive love, Not the kind you think about or question. Gut-love, Thou love. Happiness, too. Elation perhaps. Laughter and tears In equal increments. Feelings deep, but not yet Eternal, or stagnant. Truth-seeking, Honest, Altruistic - The kind of integrity Which transforms lives, And never relinquishes to Navel-gazing. Thoughtful. Compassionate. Simple and certainly Tolerant. Open to Life and not Intimidated to be Vulnerable - Emotionally and Intellectually. Never forgetting that Only Mercy is Enough. ?