“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

Warsan Shire

Imagine A Woman

Imagine a woman who believes it is right and good she is a woman.
A woman who honors her experience and tells her stories.
Who refuses to carry the sins of others within her body and life.

Imagine a woman who trusts and respects herself.
A woman who listens to her needs and desires.
Who meets them with tenderness and grace.

Imagine a woman who acknowledges the past's influence on the present.
A woman who has walked through her past.
Who has healed into the present.

Imagine a woman who authors her own life.
A woman who exerts, initiates, and moves on her own behalf.
Who refuses to surrender except to her truest self and wisest voice.

Imagine a woman who names her own gods.
A woman who imagines the divine in her image and likeness.
Who designs a personal spirituality to inform her daily life.

Imagine a woman in love with her own body.
A woman who believes her body is enough, just as it is.
Who celebrates its rhythms and cycles as an exquisite resource.

Imagine a woman who honors the body of the Goddess in her changing body.
A woman who celebrates the accumulation of her years and her wisdom.
Who refuses to use her life-energy disguising the changes in her body and life.

Imagine a woman who values the women in her life.
A woman who sits in circles of women.
Who is reminded of the truth about herself when she forgets.

Imagine yourself as this woman.
- Patricia Lynn Reilly

Now Is The Time

Now is the time to know



That all that you do is sacred.



Now, why not consider



A lasting truce with yourself and God.



Now is the time to understand



That all your ideas of right and wrong



Were just a child’s training wheels



To be laid aside



When you can finally live



With veracity



And Love.



Hafiz is a divine envoy



Whom the Beloved



Has written a holy message upon.



My dear, please tell me,



Why do you still



Throw sticks at your heart



and Soul?



What is it in that sweet voice inside



That incites you to fear?



Now is the time for the world to know



That every thought and action is sacred.



This is the time



For you to deeply compute the impossibility



That there is anything but Grace.



Now is the season to know



That everything you do is sacred.

Love After Love

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.

Perhaps

"Perhaps we wouldn't eat so much or smoke, or drink so much, if we were paying attention to ourselves.   Perhaps we wouldn't talk so much if we were paying attention to each other.   All of these oral activities are trying to meet a need, and perhaps the greatest need is to be seen and heard."  Christina Baldwin

Women's Friendships

"Women who love God as Father, those who love God as Mother and others who couldn't give a hoot about God's theoretical gender or existence, find themselves sisters on the journey.   Beyond religion or lack thereof, beyond warm fuzzies or cold scars that ideas about God have planted in our minds, the unmistakable perfume of divine belonging envelopes us as we come together as friends."   Joan Borysenko

Prayer

"At it's deepest, prayer is a statement about causality.   Turning toward prayer is a release from the arrogance and vulnerability of an isolated and individual causality.   When we pray; we stop trying to control life and remember that we belong to life.   It is an opportunity to experience humility and recognize grace."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Object or Subject

"A woman who identifies with being the object of desire is not the source of her own inspiration; she does not feel as though her life belongs to her.   Her vitality and imagination, her efforts and plans, are directed toward the desires of others.   To be the object of desire means to have no core self, no clear autonomy and self-determination that are under your command.  Being the subject of your own desires does not preclude having an attractive appearance, or a pleasant manner.   But appearance, manner, niceness, self-sacrifice are never central motivators for the woman who is the subject.   She speaks confidently and clearly even in the face of challenge, conflict and her own anxiety.   Because she wants to be known for who she is, instead of how she appears, she is straight-forward and direct."   Polly Young-Eisendrath

Home

"To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul."  John O' Donahue

Love

"You are sent here to learn to love and to receive love.   The greatest gift of new love brings is the awakening to the hidden love within.   This makes you independent.   You are now able to come close to the other, not out of need or with the weary apparatus of projection, but out of genuine intimacy, affinity and belonging.   It is a freedom.   Love should make you free.   You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect and significance for yourself from things and people outside yourself."  John O' Donahue

God's Image

"We have done terrible damage to the image of God.   We have caricatured Gad as a moral accountant and done what should never have done: We have frozen the feeling of God and separated the mind of God into war with our own nature.   God has not done that, our thinking has.  This has closed the door on any possibility of entering into our true belonging.   We are victims of longing and we cannot come home."  John O' Donahue

Fundamentalism

"Fundamentalism does not converse or explore.   It presents truth.   It is essentially non-cognitive.   This false certainty can only endure through the belief that everyone else is wrong.  It desires power in order to implement its vision and force the others to do as prescribed.   There is neither acceptance nor generosity in its differences with the world.   It presumes to know the truth that everyone should follow.   Blind loyalty replaces critical belonging.   The creative and mystical individuals within an institution become caricatured as the enemy; they become marginalized or driven out.   The price is handing over the individual mind.  The counter-questions are neither invited or allowed.   The cult manages to hold you prisoner while making you feel and believe you are free.   You can even feel pity and worry for those outside the cult, the lost ones who have not yet seen your light.   They are attractive because they seem to present a way of belonging that offers consolation, certainty and purpose, even though they do not actually deliver any of these possibilities in any real sense."  John O' Donahue

Loss

"Loss qualifies our whole desire to have and to possess.  It is startling that you cannot really hold on to anything.   Despite its intensity, the word 'mine' can only have a temporary and partial reference.   Holding on desperately cannot in any way guarantee belonging.   The belonging has trust and ease; it is not driven by desperation...or the fear that you will lose it."   John O' Donahue

Your Place

"It takes so long to learn to take your place in your own life."   Ineborg Bachman

Suffering

"The flame of suffering burns away our certainties; it also burn out the falsity within us.  Each of us lives with a certain set of illusions that are very dear to us.   We use these illusions as consoling lenses through which we view the world.  An illusion is always a false lens; it can never show us the truth or reality of a situation.   Suffering cleanses us of falsities that have accumulated in our hearts.  This liberates us from the emptiness of false belonging and allows us to belong in a real and truthful way in our lives again."   John O' Donahue

Shame

"Shame is a force intended to put one outside all belonging.   The one who does the forbidden thing becomes the force for all the anger of those who would love to have done it too, but are afraid of the exclusion and shame.   Now your every move draws negative attention.   All the natural support around your presence is taken from you.   All the natural imagination with which others have considered the different aspects of your presence stops.   Everything about you is telescoped into a single view of this one thing.   A kind of psychological murdering is done.   The mystery of your life is reduced to that one thing."   John O' Donahue

Freedom

"In the inner landscape of the soul is a nourishing and melodious voice of freedom always calling you.    It encourages you to enlarge your frames of belonging - not settle for a false shelter that does not serve your potential.   There is no cage for the human soul."    John O' Donahue

Aloneness

"Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false longing, with which you will become empty and weary.    When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen.  Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging.   This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality...this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life.    As soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outward to the world.   No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative.   You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself."    John O' Donahue

Belonging

"Your persona, beliefs and role are in reality a technique or strategy for getting through the daily routine.   When you are on your own, or when you wake up in the middle of the night, the real knowing within you can surface.   You come to feel the secret equilibrium of your soul.   Ironically, your trust in your inner belonging radically alters your outer belonging.   Unless you find belonging in your solitude, your external longing will remain needy and driven."   John O' Donahue