Beginning to Re-Story Wisdom as She Beckons...

  I am back at Holy Wisdom Monastery, at least until the morning. I was blessed to speak to the prioress for a short while after lunch, just the two of us. A meeting I had requested though I knew I wasn’t sure what all I wanted to say, needed to say. She was gracious. It was delightful to hear the many strands of seeding and nourishing unfolding here in the community. I felt the unbidden tears rise, grateful for the many ways in which this place has nourished me from afar. Just knowing this community/monastery is here , alive, in the world today, keeps some part of me vibrant, hopeful. I don’t get to be physically present in the community much yet, but if way opens, Brian and I will, some day. I spent a week here in 2023, drawn by Annie Thorisdottir’s plausible final live competition at the CrossFit Games. I wanted to see my favorite CrossFit athlete perform in person. It was the last time the Games were in Madison. I remembered belatedly that Holy Wisdom Monastery was in Madison, ...

So my right ankle gave out on me, on a rather straightforward gravel road, leading back to the Trillium Cottage Brian and I have rented for a couple days of birthday-getaway time here in the Hocking Hills..  We were walking along with Nala on her blue leash, talking after dinner about whatever we were talking about, and BAM! I found myself falling down, skinned left knee, slightly grazed right knee, punctured palms from catching myself, and a twisted right ankle. My body went into a bit of shock, deciding to remain on the ground for a time. Brian took the leash with Nala and began peppering me with questions to determine extent of injury. I was dazed and confused, sitting on the ground, feeling the pains of my fall but not much immediately aware beyond that.  This post is to mark the experience and name what I remember, close to the happenstance of it all. I am much more unnerved by it than I expected.  The physical experience of shock is something I want to honor, rememb...

Home again, am I, from a 5-day whirlwind into a place and people who were my world 35 years ago. I had not been back for any college reunion until this one, and what drew me to this one is a longer story than these words need. Suffice to say, a 3-day wilderness fast in a 10-day circle of women led me to return en route to the deeper wholeness I knew on the Sacred Mountain. This past week before I left for Northfield, I realized one of the reasons I was returning was to reclaim some parts of my soul that I had left there, unknowingly. I wanted those parts of me back. They are back now, which is incredibly grace-filled for me. Deep belly praise. A bit disorienting too, as I don’t quite know how to name ‘the parts.’ Saturday morning, I took my little package of tobacco to various spots around the campus–Olin Hall lecture rooms, Leighton Hall, Laird Hall, Gould Library–welcoming the scared, shamed, insecure parts of me back into my energies, now expansive and strong enough to embrace the...

Today may not be the best day for being a reliable narrator of your own experience. Something about this feels accurate for me today, on the cusp of leaving for a college reunion and newly shaped by a ritual-release-fire I engaged yesterday. I feel tender-hearted and a bit fearful, feeling old-stories playing in my fears. Not enough. Ought to feel ashamed. Accused by those I have loved. Not a reliable narrator, to be sure. The interpretation arose from the card I just pulled and its companion-text. My heart did expand upon seeing the Page of Swords card from this new tarot deck I’m exploring– Tarot for the Wild Soul by Lindsay Mack, illustrations by Chelsea Granger. It’s probably the first tarot deck that I feel safe enough pulling just one card a day. The MotherPeace deck with which my introduction to tarot began has a much more wounded expression to it, meaning you can pick one card and feel the trauma of wounded women searing your fingers. I got into the habit of always pulling t...

Living within a new-older story is coming. I can feel it.  Trouble (for my mind) is that I cannot quite see or hear it in ways I’m accustomed to trusting. I have lived within a story of separation and abandonment for most of my life, sometimes unknowing, sometimes exquisitely aware of it. I inherited compelling religious language for this, at least for the time, but these last decades have been about breaking some of that open, seeing the wounding shadows as well as the assuring light. How do I live into the new-older story that beckons when I'm prone to distrust now, to sense only the abandonment I now know amidst previous stories of divine promises never to be broken? [i.e. Ps 145:13, even as it seems to me that this God has broken his promises to women for generations, confirmed in the dehumanization of women in 'holy' scripture. All true, even as I know God/de as a Force and Flow that has never let me go, always seeking my best S/self in overwhelming abundance and Love....

What if connection is all around us, within us, but we’ve just not known how to enter in, participate? What if the human body is the portal for this incarnate connection, regardless of gender or orientation, but our dissociation(s) pull us further and further away from what is , whatever is right here for us? For us all? These are some of the questions arising for me as I finally enter into the Ancestral Medicine work of Daniel Foor and his community of practice. I have had his book (published in 2017) for years, but felt an obstacle in entering in until recently, for whatever reason. An elder-friend of mine has some aversion to him, his work, so to honor her, I too kept him and his work at a distance. Another spirit-friend has worked within this community for a long while now. Her language is inviting, and a particular short-course to begin in August caught my own sacred work: After the Rage was the tagline for a course on Tending the Wound of Eros . An invitation into the foundati...