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When your health is on a vacation a whole new appreciation for it awakens. Now I remember, every day is glorious when you wake up relatively well. What an amazing thing to get out of bed, to sip a cup of coffee and walk in the garden. To see Charlie's smile and kitty's playfulness unfurl with each creature that appears on our front deck. It's magical, the morning and the ability to breath with ease. To watch the light illuminate the land and the birds arrive (along with foxes lately.) Each moment served on a plate of health. What could be wrong with that menu? 

The trick is to remember it everyday. To remember it is worth being grateful for. To celebrate it.

Boy is my hunger surfacing.

Mary

What I Believe

I believe in One – eternal Source,
unmanifest Consciousness,
Who CONCEIVES of all things, made & unmade,
Who I name the Father so that I might speak of Him

And I believe in She who Manifests and Is the Manifestation of All,
the Material Matter,
the Mother from Whom and in Whom all exists.
CREATING as joyful expression of her Love for and oneness with the Father,
She gives Birth, Life, Death, Afterlife and Rebirth to all Beings

And I believe in the Holy Child,
Human Being,
incarnated as the child of both Consciousness & Matter,
capable of the Highest Manifestation of Both in this world,
Exemplified by Teachers, Saints and Avatars of All Peoples,
Who, with Free Will, CHOOSE in the Holy Moment to go beyond habitual patterns
To shine forth with the Light of Divine Consciousness,
while enjoying the Gifts and Challenges of the Flesh.

- Terra Rafael

Chimes twinkle,
birds chirp,
a dog barks
in the distance,
the trees sway
their towering canopies,
and remind me
how small I am
in the scheme of things.

Jyoti

Faraway Food

“Chocolate” she would whisper into the night.“Just one small tiny square of Hersery’s Chocolate, that’s all, nothing more.”

It puzzled me… there wasn’t a bar of chocolate to be had within a hundred miles… why would she be wanting chocolate when she couldn’t have it? It didn’t occured to me to want chocolate. I just didn’t think about it. Obviously my taste buds had not yet blossomed. She was from New York, I was a Midwestern farm girl. What did I know?

Our daily fare consisted of a white sort of corn meal called, ‘mealy meal.’ I didn’t know what it was and never bothered to find out. We had it for most of our meals. I can’t remember eating greens or vegetables. But there were bananas, lots of bananas and plantains, and sour mangos. Once I was given a stick of sugar cane with tea boiled in a tin can under a tree in the back of beyond. Lovely and sweet it cleaned my teeth as I chewed and sucked the pithy fiber better than any toothbrush.

Once in a while there would be a goat haunch brought to our village but I would have been happier eating grass. Another time someone brought us two live chickens, walking many miles through the bush to see the strange Americans working with their hands; offering the chickens as a gift. We kept the chickens as pets until we had to go. Then we invited the whole compound in for a feast of Two-Chicken-Stew and mealy meal. I won’t go into the details of how Ruben and I rung their necks, pulled the feathers and singed them, or what we put into the stew.

No, this part of the world was not a culinary hot spot. It wasn’t a place where there were gardens, or markets, or shops to buy chocolate bars. It was the bush country in the dry season. Dry and sparse.

But night after night under the East African moon Maria would croon her chocolate mantra while I drifted off to sleep dreaming of the smell of chocolate and the sweet softness melting on my tongue...Funny enough, that was the year I learned to love chocolate.

Jesse

Our Life

Often its in the carrying of so called ‘burdens’
we grow the most
stretching ourselves into spaces
we hadn’t imagined
being changed by the ‘thing’
we wanted to rid ourselves of
in the working of its weight
we meet each day
finding a way around its ‘inconvenience’
and inconceivable presence

often we are being ‘sculpted’
as hands push and prod
parts and past what we thought
we thought we needed
removed by unseen hands
a vision of eyes
we might only glimpse
to trust that
if its here… it is serving
if its here…it is perfect
in its heaviness

what it requires
is our presence
our release of thoughts
about what it is
embracing ourselves
and all of ourselves
being kind
and seeing with new eyes
the beauty in this
our life

Mary

Rainy Day


Its been a long time since we’ve had a rainy day

I took advantage

Being very tired from chemo

No caffeine today, in and out

Of sleep all day

Total and complete rest, deep rest.

Time to embrace myself,

Time to let the rain wash my senses.
Patricia
9/22/09

Journey to Letting Go

It’s an overcast day. The edge of my skin tightens where the cool fall air touches it. I’m walking on a path I’ve walked before, not far from where I live. It is called Gregory Canyon by white people. This is where I first came to know the poison hemlock plant. There is a creek here, barely trickling in this season. The dry crackling of branches and grasses rattles with my footsteps as I follow the path deeper into the woods. A brown bear is eating berries. She looks at me, knows that I am one of her own, and goes back to the berries, letting me pass unmolested. As I approach the village it is unusually quiet.

I come to a woman and ask her where I can find the Great Midwife. She looks at me and says, ”YOU are the Great Midwife now. It is YOU who are to help women give birth, care for the sick and help the dying on their journey to the other side.”

I am shocked. What can she mean? I follow her to a hut and stoop to enter the short doorway. A woman elder is lying on her sleeping mat, covered with a mound of blankets and furs. Her face is luminous, though her physical skin is darkened.

“Great Midwife, I am here to ask you about love.”
She slowly shakes her head, silently saying, “No”.
Then she speaks. “You must speak of death now. It is time. The seed of death is born when we begin to live in our mother’s womb. Mine has grown slowly and is now bearing fruit, like the bushes full of choke cherries.”
She stops to breathe for awhile, tired by the efforts of her words.
“You must eat of my berries now so that you will be strong with what I have grown to become. You must care for my people. You are the one that can hear what to do.”

She nods at the woman attending to her and the woman reaches over to her, removes the bear claw necklace from around her neck and places it over my head, to hang now on my chest. Its heaviness would bear down on me, if not for the uplifting of my heart by this sacred gift.
I kneel down beside her. “Grandmother, I am not ready. I cannot take your place.”
“You must. It is time.” She closes her eyes, her irregular breathing now the only sound.
When I reach into my bag for my gift to her, a thorn from the sprig of rose pricks my finger. I place the sprig on her chest, the one last blood red bloom from my garden. “May the spirit of the rose assist with this blessing.”

I quietly slip out of the hut to ponder my letting go, to pray for her Spirit to have a swift & peaceful journey to the Eternal Summer, and what this all means. As I walk away, I hear the keening begin.

--Terra Rafael

(Although I intended to find out about love on this journey, the stars had a different purpose for me. This was the astrology of 15 September 2009 when it was written-
Today is the final pass of the Saturn/Uranus opposition. It began last Sept. 08, then again in Feb. 09, and today it is completed.
At 6:50 AM (MDT), and all day, we are working with letting go of the old and receiving the new. Look at old patterns of thinking and behaving. Be really willing to let those ways dissolve and flow out of you, keeping your base of what works.
Then be open to the new and innovative ways of being that are ready to serve you and bring you into a more authentic way of being.
From astrologer and writer Jyoti Wind)