My new word that undoes me, kindness

I’ve been really sitting with this word, KINDNESS.  This surprising word  popped up in a meditative moment when I asked myself the question that Oriah Mountain Dreamer puts out in her book, The Call. What is my word, what is suprisingly waiting for me to know and embody?  What brings healing to my almost hidden self struggles, my fight with life?  What I am here to teach?  Boom!  Kindness came in.  Unusually quick, immediate–like a flash. Straight from my soul. There was no mistaking this for ego talk.  My new word that undoes me.

What would my life look like if I truly KNEW and EMBODIED KINDNESS.  hmmmm.  I aim to find out.  It undoes me everytime I bring it forward. I feel strangely committed to exploring this word and its surprising manifestations.  This is not about “nice”. I already am “nice”.  Nope, completely different.  This is not “good”, I got that.  This is kindness.  This is an undoing.  A half step back.  This is breathing before speaking.  This is allowing my being to fully presence itself in everything I do, everything I think.  This is about standing simpler, with more ease, with a gentler hand.

This is the word I’ve been waiting for and i didn’t even know it.

What word comes up for you?  Anything?  You may want to check Oriah’s book out and read her section on this, it’s quite lovely.

Oriah puts it this way,”Living your word, embodying it in your life, in how you are with yourself and the world, is never about doing.  It is always about not-doing, about being with what is.  Your word is your key to stopping your war with reality…….What’s the thread of thoughts and feelings I need to stop following into doing, opting instead to simply be? …

….

I knew from the beginning that it could not be truth or beauty or love or peace.  These words are essence words, the words all of us are here to return to.  Our individual words are smaller words, are about the ways in which particular human beings learn to live and embody truth and beauty and love and peace.  ….”

 

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Painting as a way of listening

“I have heard it all my life, A voice calling a name I recognized as my own,  Sometimes it comes as a soft-bellied whisper.  Sometimes it holds an edge of urgency.  But always it says:  Wake up my love.  You are walking asleep.  There’s no safety in that!”
-Oriah Mountain Dreamer-

As I head into this weekend’s intuitive painting workshop, Painting Into the New Year, I feel the excitement building.  Five people gathering to explore the unknowable together, wood stove going.  As I prepare selected poems and inspirations, I’m struck again by how little I “know” about what’s going to show up this weekend but also–how interested, how plugged in my heart is.  I LOVE THIS.  It feels risky.  It feels new.  We gather.  We listen.  We paint.  We listen in particular for the voice calling out our name. We wake up.  Who knows what will happen!   What experiences help you listen to the call?

 

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Even a Monday can feel sacred

Since everything is sacred, staying close to what is sacred is a matter of presence and attention more than travel to some secret place Mark Nepo, …Today– I started the day knowing I had a list that would be five pages long, if I actually wrote one, of things that had to be done and [...]

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Notes from the creek at Solstice

Everything’s different after sitting at the creek. I become part of it, no longer SEPARATE, no longer owned by my ideas for the day, instead—sister to the trees, child of creation itself, like the grasses, the ice, the mud, the broken branches, the talking ravens. What a change of perspectives. My teacher. My ground. My [...]

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