Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

small, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving
you are arriving.

—David Whyte

Hello beautiful monk and artist friends,

This is just a quick reminder that registration for the Soul of a Pilgrim Lenten season online art retreat closes TODAY – February 21st.  Lent begins tomorrow on Ash Wednesday with the call to "return to me with your whole heart." If the metaphor of pilgrimage and this journey of returning in a wholehearted way speaks to your heart, consider joining me. You don't have to travel very far outwards, but inwards you will be invited into a long and beautiful journey.  You might find that "one line already written inside you" or the "indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart."  Ultimately pilgrimage is about the journey back home, arriving at our true home.

You will be invited to engage this pilgrimage through the expressive arts which means visual expression, writing, and movement as invitations to become fully present to your own experience and make the journey toward healing and transformation.  You do not need to be an "artist" to participate (although you already are one, I promise).

Let me know if you have any questions.  I would love to travel these roads ahead with you!

Click here for more details and to register>>

The winner of the random drawing for a free registration spot in my upcoming online art retreat for the season of Lent – Soul of a Pilgrim (February 22-April 7, 2012) is Phebe Allen Gustafson.  Phebe, send me your email address and I can get you registered.  Thank you to everyone who participated.

If you want to join the online pilgrimage with an amazing gathering of over a hundred spirited and creative souls, sign up by Tuesday!

Sponsored by The Center at St. Andrew’s with help from the Little Sisters of St. Clare

Study with Iconographer Peter Pearson at An Icon Workshop

A Brush with God

April 26-29, 2012

The Round in Lake City

2212 NE 125^th, Seattle, WA 98125

(formerly St. George’s Episcopal Church)

Workshop-Studio     Schedule Thursday,     7:00-9:30pm Friday,     7:00-9:30pm Saturday,     9:30am-4:30pm Sunday,     12:30-4:30pm

Come learn the spirituality and practice of this ancient form from one with an infectious passion for the art as well as extensive education and experience. The workshop will focus on the technical skills involved in icon painting as well as the spirituality of creating an icon.

Each workshop participant will receive step-by-step instructions and materials to start and complete an icon.  Every session begins and ends with prayer. We will conclude with a blessing of the icons created during our time together. Expect to hear about the development of iconography, to explore the spirituality of creating an icon, hands-on time to create an icon, and time to pray with icons.

Workshop leader Peter Pearson began working with various masters of iconography after entering a Benedictine monastery in 1991 and has continued the study and practice since. A student of architectural drafting, liturgical vesture, and art in worship, Peter designs worship space, furnishings, and vesture, seeking to combine sound liturgical practice with artistic quality. He has created hundreds of icons and taught people of all ages in a variety of settings. A priest of the Diocese of Bethlehem, PA, he serves as pastor of a small parish in New Hope.

Registration information

Register before March 15, 2012, and take advantage of the early registration fee of $295. After March 15, fee is $325. Space is limited to 25, so please register early to insure your place in the workshop. Limited partial scholarships are available. Please inquire. Your registration fee includes a $75 supply fee as well as coffee, snacks, and a light lunch on Saturday. To ask questions or to register, contact thecenter@saintandrewsseattle.org or 206-523-7476, ext. 304.

Listen, whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body, its spirit longing to fly while the dead-weight bones toss their dark mane and hurry back into the fields of glittering fire where everything, even the great whale, throbs with song. ~ Mary Oliver, from "Humpbacks"

Over the last several months I have been training to teach yoga. I began the program because I have practiced yoga for many years and longed to dive more deeply into it. I expected to fall in love with my own body even more in the process; what I didn't expect was how much I would fall in love with other people's bodies as well. As I walk around the studio and students are in their various poses I see the incredible variety in body types, shapes, sizes, flexibility, and bone structure. My training involves hands-on adjustments, which are less about "fixing" a pose and more about either offering a deeper experience of it or providing a sense of loving presence with a student through a shoulder rub or simply laying my hands on their back.

When students are in savasana, or corpse pose, which is always the final pose in any physical yoga practice, I go around and place my hands gently on their heads one at a time and I offer silent blessings for them and their bodies. I don't know most of their stories so I ask for healing in whatever is keeping them from being fully alive and fully present to their beautiful physical selves

Click here to read the whole article>>

**Make sure to stop by this week's Poetry Party!**

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

—David Whyte

Happy Valentine's Day my beloved Abbey friends! 

David Whyte's poem has been shimmering for me these days, calling me to consider the way the world invites me into a deep intimacy with it, to consider how each thing and creature I encounter is a symbol for my inner experience as well.  The open door, the bird taking flight, the bud just sprouting through the ground, each remind me that these exist inside of me as openings.  Each is a "dream-ladder to divinity."  I am in a time of transition in my life, I had a dream last week that I was pregnant and it felt very true, although I know not what I am birthing and that feels exhilirating.  Most days the unknowing feels comforting, a sense of deep trust in an imagination far bigger than my own.  Other days I feel more alone and frightened.  If I can remember in these moments to go for a long walk or to simply breathe, be still, and behold the world around me, I discover that everything is writing me a love letter.  Everything is indeed waiting for me.

And so it is with you as well.  The world lays itself at your feet, asking to be recognized, beheld, cherished.  What if you spent Valentine's Day simply offering love for the way the things of your life support you both physically and spritually.  With your morning shower you experience the cleansing waters, with your breakfast you take in deep nourishment, with your commute to work you feel yourself among a community of others doing the best they can, showing up for life.

This is my love letter to you: a simple reminder that you too are pregnant.  You too have the ancient well of new life springing forth within you.  Be silent and listen for it stirring.  See how the world around you offers itself to you as reminders of your sacred call.

**Make sure to stop by this week's Poetry Party!**

I select an image and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your own poem. Scroll down and add it in the comments section below. Feel free to take your poem in any direction and then post the image and invitation on your blog (if you have one), Facebook, or Twitter, and encourage others to come join the party! (permission is granted to reprint the image if a link is provided back to this post)

On Sunday, February 19th, I will draw a name at random from the participants and the winner will receive a free registration spot in my upcoming online art retreat for the season of Lent – Soul of a Pilgrim (February 22-April 7, 2012).

This week we celebrate Valentine's Day.  Instead of writing love letters and poems to our lovers and beloved ones, I am inviting you this week to write a poem that is a love letter to something from daily life, something absolutely ordinary, but when viewed in the right moment it becomes luminous.  It could be a seagull hovering over the water, steam rising from a cup of morning coffee, the beginning shoots of spring, even the dirty laundry left from someone we care about deeply, whatever it is that is calling your attention this week in the most ordinary and extraordinary way.

Click on the "leave a comment" feature and scroll down to the bottom to share your poem with this community.

As with The Artist's Rule: Nurturing your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom, reviewed on StoryCircleBookReviews, I savoured Christine Valters Paintner's Lectio Divina as my morning reading practice.

Lectio divina essentially means "divine reading" of sacred texts, during which we "enter into an encounter with God." While the ancient practice has its roots in Judaism, Valters Paintner refers to the scriptures of different religious traditions, including Hebrew, Christian and the Qur'an, throughout the book. There are many passages from which to choose for your own practice.

Paintner invites an exploration of lectio divina in Part One of the book. "Listen with the ear of our heart" is the central movement of lectio divina and one of the rules of St. Benedict. His wisdom is very valuable to life in the twenty-first century when we would be well-advised to move mindfully through our days, remembering everything, objects and people, as sacred.

In Part Two, the four movements of Lectio Divina are fully described, chapter by chapter. They are—Lectio's Call to Awaken to the Divine, Meditatio's Welcoming with All Senses, Hearing Oratio's Call of the Spirit, and Resting in Contemplatio's Stillness and Silence.

Each of the four movements is a "process of contemplative unfolding" for which the author has her own terms: shimmering; savoring and stirring; summoning and serving; and slowing and stilling. She has done so well in organizing the information of a practice that is not meant to be linear, and in creating examples for contemplation that are inviting and peaceful.

I particularly enjoyed the beautiful writing of the author's "Invitation to Practice" in Chapter Five, "Listening for God's Voice." It is a reminder of a ritual such as lighting a candle to help signify something holy. The words of gentle advice are from someone of our own time who also has a busy life during which she makes the time for contemplative prayer.

Click here to read the whole review>>

You can buy a copy of Lectio Divina–the Sacred Art: Transforming Words & Images into Heart-Centered Prayer at Amazon.com here>>

I have been practicing yoga for about 15 years and while I have long felt drawn to further training, I resisted because I wasn't sure I wanted to be a "yoga teacher" per se.  I knew I wanted to deepen into my personal practice and bring some of yoga's gifts to my retreats.  I went to speak with the director to help my discernment and she said, "I am not interested so much in creating more yoga teachers, but in creating better yogis."  And those words helped to usher me forward into a commitment to this journey of training.  I want to be a yogi because for me, it means the same thing as being a monk in the world.  One of the things I love about yoga philosophy and practice is that the goals are the same as the monk – to release the chatter of the mind, to be present to what is deeply true, and connect to the heart of the true Self, the divine spark we all carry within us – and through yoga I can explore familiar concepts and ideas through another lens and language.

One of the many unexpected gifts that came with the fall training was a reconnection to this tender, vulnerable part of myself that I didn't realize had been hidden away.  I feel strong and confident when I teach my Abbey work, I experience ease and joy with presenting material to others and facilitating safe and transformative spaces.

And yet, when it came to our first practice teaching session on our retreat, I was suddenly full of anxiety and some fear.   I wanted to call forth my strong radiant self, but could only seem to muster this much smaller self, feeling tentative and somewhat shy.  Around our fourth day in, when everyone's defenses were being lowered by the intensity of the experience, I found myself weeping one afternoon and not knowing exactly why.  I told the teacher I needed to take a break and went for a long walk.  I breathed.  I listened.   I tried to make space for the tears to flow and just be with them without judgment.

Finally I walked by a pile of pine cones where I stopped and knelt down on the ground.  The smell of earth rose up to meet me.  I picked up these two large and glorious pine cones, stout and sturdy, impressive in their presence.  And then I picked up two small pine cones, much more delicate and fragile-looking.  I laughed because I saw myself there.  My inner strength is well developed – in archetypal language I feel connected to my inner sovereign or queen.  She loves feeling the difference her presence makes in the world.   But there is also an inner tenderness that has also had times of being more developed, but has gone underground for a while as I have cultivated my strong side.  I was feeling her renewed emergence and it was uncomfortable.  I found myself connecting to feelings of embarassment and vulnerability.

Through the rest of the retreat I slowly felt less vulnerable about teaching yoga as part of our practice and now that I am in the practicum stage of the process my confidence grows even more.  But the encounter stayed with me and for the last few months she has been inviting me to pay more attention to her.  Later in the fall I had a spontaneous imagining where I invited this tender self to tell me her name.  "She who cannot be filled" said the voice.  Not with love, or money, or food, or education.  I found myself weeping again.  Then in my imagination I invited her to dialogue with my inner queen.  The queen part of me wants to take care of this tender part, wants to tell her it's okay because the queen is powerful enough for both of them.  And yet "She who cannot be filled" would have none of that and asked the Queen if she would simply sit at the edge of the abyss with her, without words.  To simply rest into the tender silence together.  This was enough.

In the last several years I have been discovering how much the heart of the journey toward spiritual maturity is to walk toward what is uncomfortable.  I don't like it very much, but I do it because I believe there is power in dancing on the edges of our threshold of tolerance, and I have discovered incredible grace from being on those edges.  We grow in our capacity to hold difficult things.  Sitting with this tender part of myself is an essential aspect of that journey.  And in recent weeks I have been finding all kinds of reasons to feel humbled and vulnerable.

In his Rule, Benedict has a long section on humility and its virtues.  The word has its roots in humus  which means "of the earth."  When we are humble we remember our earthiness, our limitations, our mortality. Humility is a form of truth-telling. In a recent interview with author Paula Huston, she writes:

Sin is complicated because it is rooted in lying. In order to convince ourselves to enter into sin, we must in some way deceive ourselves—rationalize away our doubts, tell ourselves a consoling story about our real motivations. Each lie necessitates another, and eventually we wind up morally and spiritually blind. Humility, on the other hand, refuses to self-justify. Humility would rather be unfairly accused than take the risk of egoistic self-deception. And thus it helps foster clarity of vision.

This call for me to embrace humility as a conscious practice these days is a way of stripping away my "egoistic self-deception" and refuse to deceive myself anymore, refuse to rationalize, or tell myself consoling stories about my real motivations.  Welcoming humility means I let go of self-justifying anything, I just let it be what it is.

In yoga philosophy, one of the foundational concepts is satya which means "truthfulness" or "being with what is."  Here I find kinship to humility, to the practice of being ever so gracious to the tender part of me that feels stripped of any protection or strength. Can I show up to myself and allow this to emerge, to give room to the whole of my experience?  How am I with myself in this place of vulnerability?

Where are you feeling the pull of tender vulnerability these days?  How might you make space for her (or his) voice and presence in your life without trying to change or fix anything?

I was sitting in St. Ephrem, a small Orthodox stone church near the Sorbonne in Paris, listening to the sublime solo suites for cello by Johann Sebastian Bach.  The young man playing did not have sheet music, he knew this entire piece by heart.  His eyes were closed as he stretched the bow back and forth in a kind of dance, his whole body was alert and engaged in this act of offering to the gathered crowd.

I was struck there in the middle of the piece by the awareness that he had spent likely thousands of hours practicing so that this moment he could offer his gift so freely to us.  At one time, there was not such ease, and he was not able to yet play by heart.  Hours upon hours were spent with attentive practice, showing up to the instrument and to his own longing to let music emerge from it.  His holding of the bow and drawing it across the strings, the careful placement of his fingers which had now become a kinesthetic memory, developing the proper rhythm and tempo, even his punctuated breaths at the moments of pause were in some measure learned over time, practiced.

I imagine the many events of his life that could have called his attention away from his practice.  Perhaps the death of a parent, the shattering of a love relationship, his own struggle with illness, or just the daily ache of living.  And somehow he kept showing up to the practice.

And then there was the moment he sat down to play and the sheet music remained closed, as did his eyes, and his entire body remembered what he had practiced again and again.  He suddenly found ease and flow and no longer had to labor to get things just right, he no longer had to engage in such a painstaking and attentive way.  He could lose himself in the music.  He became the instrument through which the cello could sing.

Click here to read the whole article>>

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

The fourth principle of the Monk Manifesto states: "I commit to cultivating awareness of my kinship with creation and a healthy asceticism by discerning my use of energy and things, letting go of what does not help nature to flourish."

This month I have a new podcast up at the Abbey, stop by for some reflection on cultivating our kinship with creation and for a spiritual practice of a contemplative walk.

Click here to listen to or download the files>>