Two years ago I formed a small spiritual direction practice: Be Still and Know. After 30 years of informal practice, it was time for me to both honor this work in public and incrementally deepen it, too. Given the richness of my retirement - travel, rest, solitude, and study - my commitment to community with L'Arche Ottawa, and the new music I was playing with Famous Before We're Dead, I moved into this practice slowly. There simply was too much to encounter last year - and I wanted to savor it all. Now I have nearly completed my on-line web page as well as a new Facebook site and will launch them over the weekend. This, too, will be a slow-moving train: I will only take-on a few more consultations each month so that I can be fully present with this these new commitments. My prayer is that I might engage with a few more individuals from both the Christian as well as inter-faith community who wish to go deeper on the inward/outward journey. Those who seek companionship on the path of compassion and contemplation. Those who sense the holy calling them into a spirituality of tenderness. Currently this is taking place both in-person (at my home) and will soon also happen on-line (via Skype.)
The wisdom teacher, Cynthia Bourgeault, writes that "seeing with the eyes of the heart" involves discerning connections and patterns in our lives. She also teaches that her spiritual guides have taught her that "human beings tend to prefer a manageable complexity to an unmanageable simplicity." That is, we love to make rules and rituals that clearly measure our spiritual honesty rather than moving in the freedom of the mystery of grace and trust. My hunch is that she is right - and when I saw the ripening tomatoes hanging up in my basement, and later clicked on my "poem for the day" and found Nickole Brown's "Prayer to be Still and Know" popping up - I could only smile and finish up working on the public web page.
Lord, let my ears go secret agent, each
a microphone so hot it picks up things
silent, reverbing even the hum of stone
close to its eager, silver grill. Let my ears forget
years trained to human chatter
wired into every room, even those empty
except of me, each broadcast and jingle
tricking me into being less
lonely than I am. Let my ears forget
the clack and rumble, our tambourining and fireworking
distractions, our roar of applause. Let my hands quit
their clapping and rest in a new kind of prayer, one
that doesn’t ask but listens, palms up in my lap.
Like an owl, let me triangulate icy shuffling under snow as
vole, let me not just name the name
when I spot a soundtrack of birdsong
but understand the notes through each syrinx
as a singular missive—begging, flirting, fussing, each
companion call and alarm as sharp with desire and fear
as my own. Prick my ears, Lord. Make them hungry
satellites, have your way with their tiny bones,
teach the drum within that dark to drum
again. Because within the hammering of woodpecker
is a long tongue unwinding like a tape measure from inside
his pileated head, darting dinner from the pine’s soft bark.
And somewhere I know is a spider who births
a filament of silk and flies it to the next branch; somewhere,
a fiddlehead unstrings its violin into the miracle of
fern. And somewhere, a mink not made into a coat
cracks open a mussel’s shell, and with her mouth full
of that gray meat, yawns. Those are your sounds, are they not?
Do not deny it, Lord, do not deny
me. I do not know those songs. Nor do I know the hush
a dandelion’s face makes when it closes, surrenders, then goes
to seed. No, I only know the sound my own breath makes
as I wish and blow that perfect globe away;
I only know the small, satisfactory
popping of roots when I call it weed and yank it
from the yard. There is a language of all
you’ve created. Hear me, please. I just want to be
still enough to hear. Right here, Lord:
I want to be.
If you would like to join with me - or want to know more - drop me an email and I will follow-up. Watch for an update re: the new web site, too.
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