Sacred Turtle Prayer for Peace

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     Turtles are associated with healing, wisdom, protection, fertility, longevity, and spirituality. Turtles are also the peace-makers. May this special turtle bring peace.

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     For as long as the moon shall rise,

For as long as the rivers shall flow,

For as long as the sun shall shine,

For as long as the grass shall grow,

Let us know peace.

~ Cheyenne Prayer

 

My Heart Flew Open on Wings of Delight After Two Pages of "A Book of Life"

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"This book has a life and intelligence of its own. Or to be a little more precise, each chapter is a conscious being. Their words are nothing but the crustings sometimes attached to a creature's back, not the whole story by any means."  ~A Book of Life

 

I Was Only Raking Leaves

I was only raking leaves.
Raking piles of leaves like snow drifts
wind-blown against the house,
raking them away from the pathway.
The gusts responsible for this pile up
lingered still,
at first blowing the leaves back,
undoing my work.
The wind, like an unruly puppy,
Wagging and wriggling around my legs.
danced around me, through me,
teasing me.
So,
I talked to the wind.
“Nooo”, I pleaded, “not over there”
as the leaves spurted up into the air
waist high,
and scuttled,
re-cluttering the pathway.
I fought to gather the leaves with my rake,
the wind puffs shifted,
blowing the leaves in the direction I was moving them.
I giggled with the wind.
“Yes, thank you.”
My task became easier,
and I chose to believe there was a power in the wind,
playing with me in the morning sun.
I was not alone in the autumn morning frolic
of leaves and wind
and sun and rake
and me.
I was courting the Power in the wind,
flirting with the Power in air current.
Then the Power in the wind
kissed my legs,
embraced the back of my knees,
and the inside of my thighs,
then laughed softly in my ears.
I fell in Love right then,
and walked with a quiet grin
throughout the temperate, autumn day.

When Feeling Left Out is Feeling Let In

In the New Thought Philosophy of belief there is a spiritual law that says: The Universe is for you, the Universe seeks to give you only Good, there is only Good everywhere all the time.

So what is happening when a person finds themselves lamenting about what they don’t have?

I found myself feeling left out and disappointed about a missed opportunity. So, one morning during my meditation a still small voice piped in and said, “Do you really want to be included in that situation? Are you sure you would be satisfied and fulfilled participating in that opportunity?”

I had to stop and think about that question. In truth I did not want to be ‘there’. I was right to choose to be right where I was. My soul would be compromised and unhappy trying to make things work in a situation that I did not resonate with. Oh, what a lift to realize this! It was totally unfounded for me to feel sad, left out, passed over, or ignored. Such a breath of freedom to know I have chosen to be right where I am. I felt happy; no more blame; no more lusting after something that I had perceived as being denied me by others, when in truth I had chosen to be right where I am for very good reasons.

So now, instead of feeling left out, I feel let in. I am feeling let in to the Good that is for me right here. We are all where we have chosen to be.

Perhaps the next question might be: What quality of life are you wanting more of that you perceive to be “over there”? Is it where you are and just not yet seen or felt?

May Peace Be With You.

The Myth of Happiness

In an article from the Huff Post web site, Martha Beck lists several life lessons she states we need to unlearn, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/14/life-lessons-to-unlearn-martha-beck-advice_n_4058438.html . On her list, and the one that applied to me the most, was:
“It's important to stay happy. Solving a knotty problem can help us be happy, but we don't have to be happy to feel good. If that sounds crazy, try this: Focus on something that makes you miserable. Then think, "I must stay happy!" Stressful, isn't it? Now say, "It's okay to be as sad as I need to be." This kind of permission to feel as we feel -- not continuous happiness -- is the foundation of well-being.” ~Martha Beck

In the culture of positive thinking, permission to feel the dark side of emotions and feelings can get lost. I have stumbled over this on my journey through the grieving process from losing my mother who died on August 30th.

My journey of grieving has been a walk, and sometimes a crawl, through a series of stages articulated by Elizabeth Kubler Ross. The stages of grief; there are 5 of them: 1) Denial, 2) Anger, 3) Bargaining,
4) Depression, and 5) Acceptance, take on a whole new meaning as I become immersed in them.

I recently experienced the depression phase, where loss of vitality, apathy, and sadness pulled me into a dark, very unpleasant cloud of non-living. I despaired at feeling so low; I considered myself a failure at living a positive life. My thoughts seemed to feed on this state of ennui creating an ever deepening foreboding; my life was a failure; all things negative were plaguing my mind and my heart.

Then, that still small voice within stated very clearly that I was in the depression phase of my grief. Aha! There would be an end to this! I could give myself permission to be depressed and stay the course. I used the spiritual tools of prayer, mantras/affirmations, music, meditation, and spiritual writings to remind myself that even though I did not feel the love, peace and joy, that it would come back; for the scariest part of depression was the emotional experience of the loss of hope, of motivation and inspiration.

As I accepted depression it abated. Hallelujah! No resistance to anything—lack of happiness or no lack of happiness—has come around the circle of life to remind me again, and again.

So, the myth to stay happy has been revamped in my world. Stay in non-resistance to what is happening. Find the spiritual tools that provide a life line to living and purpose, to peace and acceptance and all will pass away; the season will turn and will be new once again.

Wild, Like a Wood Sorrell Bloom On the Forest Floor

I discovered a precious gift today. It bubbled up out of the memories of my childhood experience of emotional and physical abandonment by my well-intentioned, but oh so young, parents. My mother passed away on August 30th, and I have been immersed in the process of releasing and healing the past. This process includes lots of memories, and lots of choices about what to remember, what to treasure, and what to release and leave in the years gone by.

Oh, the anguish from walking the path of a solitary child, an unattached existence, wild, like a wood sorrel bloom timid on the silent forest floor. And now, to know its transformation into a deep appreciation for this life, led and fed, by a power and a love greater than any parent could have ever given me.

From a renewed look through years distant from those days this gift rose up. The gift--a perspective, cultivated and honed from a lifetime of walking without the closeness, the unconditional love of family. The gift—a deep appreciation for the solitude, un-enmeshed from the emotional dysfunction of the family I was born into. The gift—I now have the wisdom, temperament, and strength to hold my sister as she agonizes through the pain of the immediate family members crashing against each other.

I embrace this capacity born out of the wound as a precious gift.

When A Mother Dies

Iona Lucille Wirth Kudlacek
(November 5, 1933-August 30, 2013)

The inevitable spinning of the wheel of life has come around to the time of my mother’s death. I am surprised at how much grief and forgiveness I feel in my heart because we spent very little time together as adults. Our relationship was filled with pain and misunderstandings.
The memories that are flooding my awareness are the subtle sensations of being in my mother’s presence, the scent of her body, the sensation of the grounded bones of her German ancestry, large and strong. The goodness of my mother’s presence is gifting me with childhood memories of spending time on the earth, gathering earth’s bounty and taking it to our kitchen, preparing, canning, cooking, and creating nourishment from nature’s bounty. I am remembering her smile and the way she laughed when she thought something was funny. I see her large, fleshy hands, her large fingers busy with home-crafting.
I am forgetting the bitterness and the cruelty that spilled out in misguided coping moments from both of us. She suffered a great deal as women will do. And I forgive her. My once bad mother has become something of a wonder woman, my perspective forever changed, born out of the distance of time and the maturity of understanding. My mother loved flowers and gardening and she will always be standing in her garden surrounded by the beauty, the peace, and the calm that certainly fed her soul in hard times. She did her best with what she knew and had to work with. I feel a freedom in loving her in her death that I never knew while she walked the earth.
In saying good-by I am given the gifts we both never knew she had given me.