G.R.A.T.I.T.U.D.E.

Graced

Relationship

And

Trusted

Integrity ~

Treasured ...

Unexpected ...

Divine ...

Esteemed.

This is what I am feeling today!

the good ... the bad ... and the ugly!

The GOOD:

Taking my little nephew,

Mijo,

to play in McDonald's Playland ...

watching him concentrate

on the computer screen in front of him

as he tries to figure out

why the bike he sits on

isn't actually moving.

The BAD:

Being told that my

grandson

is darling.

My GRANDSON?

The UGLY:

Doing the math

in my head

and realizing I really

COULD

BE

HIS GRANDMOTHER!!!

Yeah,

well ...

we're never going back

to THAT McDonalds

again.

what i've learned this year ...

2009 was filled with learnings for which I am both Graced and Grateful:

• Beginnings and endings are equally difficult. • Each risk ventured results in some amount of freedom. • The “freer” I feel, the more I am able to trust. • The more I am able to trust, the safer I feel. • The safer I feel, the more I am able to risk. • Sometimes you have to act as though you’ve accomplished your goal in order to see the reality of its possibility. • I can be open and faithful to a process, even when it is uncomfortable or I disagree with a component, as long as I am able to use my voice and feel I’ve been listened to. • I don’t know how to ask for what I want or need but I am learning and practicing. • I am very hard on myself, holding myself to a high level of expectation; when I hold others to that same expectation, I am more often than not left disappointed. • When all is said and done, I am ultimately accountable to myself, who is the harshest critic I know. • I need to embrace and accept where I am in the moment, with all of the pain and discomfort that may entail, instead of wishing the past away and the future already here. • Feelings are just feelings, not judgments, and they do not make me right or wrong, good or bad. • Being overly concerned with others’ feelings and reactions can sometimes paralyze me from making decisions that choose life. • Intention alone does not equal effort. Good or healthy intentions cannot be successfully realized without honest will and desire. • Recognition is the first hurdle of the relay toward wholeness. • Behaviors give messages and have a purpose. • I often find it difficult and uncomfortable to accept the giftedness others see in me. • ART and CREATING are self-soothing forms for me to get in touch with what I haven’t words to express: my Inner Self. • My safe place is in the arms of God, regardless of whether or not I am able to recognize that Presence. • Because of God’s Presence, I am never alone in this process we call Life, no matter where it takes me. • It is the time spent concentrating on my goodness that makes my goodness recognizable. • Recognizing the good inside is a means of recognizing God and honoring the Divine within. May 2010 be equally Graced...

one year later ...

it is difficult to believe it's been a year since last i wrote

and yet much has happened in the moments in between ...

what i am doing in this moment ...

making one of my family's FAVORITE holiday foods! we call it canasta mix and it would put Chex Mix out of commission.

putting something together for our family gift-swap on

Christmas eve ...

LOVING this little Jesus-Child ...

MISSING greatly the earthly presence of this dear angel ...

(8/1/1927 - 6/15/2009)

CHRISTmas Blessings ... and a pause

May the Song of the Season

warm your heart

and fill your soul with Love.

Christmas Blessings to

you and yours ...

I shall be away for a bit ~ a pause that refreshes ...

But please do have a comfortable cup of tea while I am gone.

Presenting this year's Baby Jesus ...

In my elementary teaching days, this time of year would be spent putting the final touches on the Christmas Play. Students from kindergarten through grade 8 would sing and tell and act out the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. When the time came for the baby to be born, Mary ~ played by an eighth grade girl ~ would be handed a real baby from behind. The role of Baby Jesus was sometimes played by a boy and sometimes played by a girl; it all depended on which student had the youngest brother or sister at the time!

I think Mijo would make a marvelous Baby Jesus this year:

waiting ...

"We live from peak event to peak event,

from brightness to brightness,

resisting the flat terrain of ordinary time ~

the in-between time.

Waiting is the in-between time.

It calls us to be in this moment ..."

from When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd

Advent 2008

Spirit of Illumination,

guide our path through this season of waiting ...

A Season of Thanks ...

Blessings to all in this week of Thanks ...

Another "Quilts" Giveaway!

OK, here's the deal! Dana over at Old Red Barn Co. is having a QUILT GIVEAWAY and it's free to enter! Just head over to her blog and leave a comment. She is one generous person from whom all of us could take a lesson.

Soulmaking ...

The art of soulmaking is taking our lives in our hands and – with all the love and discernment we can muster – gently whittling away the parts that don’t resemble the True Self. In spiritual whittling, though, we don’t discard the shavings. Transformation happens not by rejecting these parts of ourselves but by gathering them up and integrating them. Through this process we reach a new wholeness.

from When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd

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

Mijo

Here's what's decorating the screen

of my computer lately!

ch-ch-ch-changes ...

All changes,

even the most longed for,

have their melancholy;

for what we leave behind us

is a part of our selves;

we must die to one life

before we can enter another. ~anatole france

There is a time for departure

even when there's no certain place to go.

~tennessee williams

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.

dear ann,

i'm aided to my feet and proudly stand alone ... i read your wisdom admire your honesty relate to your feelings love your wordsmithing appreciate your theology enjoy your life-pictures follow your bliss while i cannot find my own ... and then i stop want no more ... i envy your insight resent your vulnerability desire your approach begrudge your creativity covet your faith spite your gratitude despise your bliss while i cannot find my own ... until i fall once more and cannot rise alone ...

ann, it seems i have a love/hate relationship with reading your blog ... more accurately, i suspect, it reflects my relationship with myself ... sometimes a prayer; sometimes a swear ... what i would not give to share a comfortable cup of tea with you one day. blessings, sarah

Thank you, Kim

Remember Kim of hues of nature ~ the wonderful artist who designed and crafted the darling pixies which make up Three Friends? She has decided to offer Mary's Fairy in her Etsy Shop to aid ovarian cancer awareness, and will donate $5.00 from each doll she sells to Gilda's Club of Detroit.

She then put together a Treasury at Etsy entitled A Tribute to Mary ~ check it out here. Thank you, Kim ... you have been an angel of comfort amidst the pain of our loss.

Namaste.

Can Mijo come out to play?

"Mijo, guess who's coming to get you tomorrow?"

"Your Aunt!"

"No, not that one ~ your FAVORITE one."

"Yeah, that one, Aunt Sarah!"