Tag: Richard Rohr

Joy and Sadness

…At the same moment, I experienced exactly the opposite emotion. The tears were at the same time tears of an immense sadness—a sadness at what we’re doing to the earth, sadness about the people whom I had hurt in my life, and sadness too at my own mixed motives and selfishness. I hadn’t known that two such contrary feelings (joy and sadness) could coexist. I was truly experiencing the nondual mind of contemplation.

Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, Tears of Joy and Sadness, 2025

A “better late than never” post, I knew when I’d read Rohr’s meditation yesterday that it would be good grist for my writing mill, but I’ve been struggling to find the words.

Yesterday, when I’d read another email with the invitation to share a favourite dog poem, I suddenly realized it had been two years to the day (not date) when we’d said our final “good-byes” to Annie. Reading and recalling, at the same time I was hearing Walker the Joy Boy, bounding up the stairs to watch squirrels with a second floor advantage. “His version of screen time“, says Sig, as he can spend hours glued to those floor to ceiling windows.

Bittersweet.

There’s the world close up, across the border, and oceans away…the new e-bike I bought last week…the need to find the perfect buyer for its predecessor, my Danish cruiser…the hail that for two nights shattered blossoms and shredded leaves giving a poor prognosis for some harvests…the rain that finally fell for hours and hours soaking the parched earth…a lingering sadness from my birthday…the delight with my new decade new haircut.

Bittersweet. The co-existence of two contrary feelings.

Still at a loss for this blog, I turned to editing some poems. Trying to track down a reference to one, I opened Breathe, a collection from Lynn Ungar. I know it’s not Friday when I typically post a poem, a photo, and a reflection, but this is it. With better words that I can muster at the moment to acknowledge life’s bitter and its sweet, and unabashed joy that comes from living with dogs – Beckey, Sassy, Torch, Peggy, Lady, Annie, and Walker.

Annie
sitting with Annie
Walker ready to play
Walker – where are you going?

JOY

I don’t need to tell you this world
is hard, and getting harder.
We thought it would be better than this-
more sensible, more neatly worked out,
more righteous, according to our impeccable
analysis of what righteousness should look like.
And yet, here we are. No good pretending
it isn’t both a slog and a crisis,
which is to say, wearing on every last nerve.
And still, when you least expect it,
you find yourself ambushed by Joy, who,
tail whipping and ears slicked back to her head,
launches herself into your lap,
leaving you breathless
and covered in kisses.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Love Letters to Life

“We were lovers who … decided to make the world a better place by slowing down long enough to pay for its improvement—by paying attention, the reverent, even holy attention of love.”

Brian McLaren, The Galápagos Islands 

My understanding of “paying attention” as a form of gratitude and reciprocity for the abundance we receive from the natural world first came to my awareness when I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. A couple of years ago, I wrote here about its impact on me. Now, reading last week’s daily meditations from Father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, with the theme “Befriending Nature,” and listening to podcasts wherein the notion of “anima mundi” had been mentioned, I re-remembered a gift of walking alone, or with another but silently: the slowing down to notice… to really take in… to pay with my attention.

Since July, I have walked over 400 km solo, accompanied by the soft tapping of my poles on dirt and pavement paths; voices heard through my earbuds narrating novels and poetry, or in podcast conversations; urban infrastructure; people and their dogs and babies. During every outing, along routes that have become like familiar friends, I’d stop several times to simply breathe deeper and take in my surroundings: the unusual birdsong; the season’s changing colours; temperatures warmed or cooled by a sudden breeze; the river’s surface. During every outing, always an image or several made with my phone to reflect some essence of that day’s beauty. And after every walk, I’d record the steps, kilometers, and time walked and post it together with my photos and a brief description of my experience. The longer I did this, the more I realized that what I was really doing was composing love letters to life. By showing up on those paths every other day for weeks and noticing and recording, I was saying:

I am here to be with you, to walk in, and among, and on you.
I am here to notice you, to be in relation with you, to be moved, and changed by you.
I am here to say thank you for always, unfailingly, uplifting me – turning my fatigue into curiosity, my sour mood into a smile or a tear.

When I walked the Portuguese Coastal Camino, most of that distance solo and unplugged, I composed a chant from words I’d read by Thich Nhat Hahn and Rumi, to help maintain my rhythm and bring some ease and pleasure to the long distances:

With every step I kiss the Earth.
With every step I make a prayer.
The Soul comes for its own joy.
Dance on, dance on, dance on.

This time, while I’d only remembered the first line, whisper-singing it in a new iteration as I walked, I was mindful of making prayers for friends unwell and suffering. This summer, and in a few weeks’ time in a country I deeply love, walking a section of the Via Francigena, I slow down long enough to pay my attention…my reverent, holy attention of love.

Much love, kindest regards, and many thanks for your support and encouragement during my preparation.


Be angry but do not sin.

an artifact from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

“…Then there is the anger that leaves us shaken and shaking because a sacred trust is being treacherously broken; because those who have done no harm are being gratuitously harmed; because those who have too little now have even less, and those who already have much too much now have even more; because egregious wrongs are being perpetrated, and the perps don’t even admit that the wrongs they’re perpetrating are wrong.

What has happened—is happening now, here, and everywhere—is not merely a sin and a shame. It is an outrage, and outrage calls for rage, rage that ought to come out. Anger in such instances is not merely permissible. It is obligatory, imperative.

Thus, the imperative: “Be angry.” Faced with an outrage, anger is the price we pay for paying attention. It is the rage that ought to come out, because, when faced with an outrage, it is a sin not to be angry.”

Allen Dwight Callahan from”A Surprising Command,” in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, Thursday, February 29, 2024

…February 24, 2022…
…October 7, 2023…
…February 29, 2024…

Most any time of every year in recorded history, anywhere in the world, on this precious Earth again soaked with blood, sacred trusts broken, egregious wrongs done.

This is not my usual Friday feature of photo and poetry. Yesterday afternoon, I’d written and scheduled one to drop at 0700 today. But sitting last night at a phenomenal concert featuring Canadian tour de force Allison Russell and her powerhouse band, opened by the equally remarkable Indigenous singer-songwriter Aysanabee, my thoughts kept turning the news of another massacre of more innocent people, this time starving people waiting for food to feed their families. And for those many moments and minutes of distraction – the price I paid for paying attention elsewhere -feeling numb, not yet able to access my own outrage, I knew I’d need to get up early and prepare another post.

As “luck” would have it, at 0500, tea steeping, I opened my email to find the daily meditation from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, this week’s theme, “When Anger Meets Love.” Thankful for another’s words, when the most I could muster are the dates above that I’ve been tracking this week, and the context for this post. When the most I could offer is the space here, without opining, to imagine the visceral horror and heartbreak of people like me, to pay with this kind of attention, until the anger comes.

#holyoutrage, much love and kindest regards, dear friends.


Bravo to We Who Are

“When you reach a stage when you can have a very
dark and difficult experience, without having to look
on the “bright side,” then you know that you have
made progress on your healing journey. Because one
significant measure of our emotional health, is our
capacity to tolerate all of our experiences without
jumping to reactive reframes. You reach a stage where
you can stretch to accommodate the truth of your lived
experience. You have enough light inside, to own the
shadow. And enough shadow inside, to own the light.”

Jeff Brown, Hearticulations: on friendship, love and healing, 2020

Taking a step sideways from my usual posting of a Friday poem, I found this quote scrolling on my Facebook feed this week, something I’m doing only occasionally these days (that might be a story for another time). Posted on a friend’s timeline, after reading the comments I was reminded that decades ago I had read something Shakti Gawain of creative visualization fame, wrote about positively thinking herself into a psychosis. At a time when a heavy theme within the new age thought movement was espousing “think positive and manifest thus,” her words left an indelible mark. In that same era, I read Ken Wilber in an issue of the New Age Journal calling out this same tendency, particularly with reference to blaming those suffering with life threatening illness, as his wife at the time was dying of cancer. (Wilber, having created the brilliantly deep and expansive Intergral Theory, is who Fr. Richard Rohr describes in a recent podcast with Brene Brown, “the wisest philosopher of religion on the American scene.”)

I received the gift of insight a few weeks ago, during an interview with a fellow doing a Masters degree in Tourism, studying the transformations experienced by we who walk “secular,” non-religious inspired caminos. In response to his final question, “What in 3 or 4 sentences would I describe as the main lessons learned from my camino?” and as I wrote here last week, after several moments of quiet consideration, searching for the most accurate words, I said that I am developing an embodied, visceral familiarity with what it means to live in Life’s messy, inchoate middle, engaging with, partnering with, Life living itself.

Bravo to we who are so fiercely tender and tenderly fierce in our refusal to only live on the bright side of life, ignoring its necessary, organic, abundant mess. Life needs us to be so.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Reverie of Sacred Dance

“Keep it simple, keep it kind” to grease and ease passage through resistance into the Dance of Sacred Yes and Sacred No. Known and named resistance for one so facile with words – spoken and written – knows Body Knows and will slipstream with Her own Wisdom, shape shift to Truth.

“By the sacred yes or the sacred no I mean that affirmation or negation that comes from a deep place of wisdom and courage, even if it creates conflict or disagreement.
The sacred yes is not willful or egocentric, but rather is willing and surrendered.
The sacred no is not rebellion or refusal, but always the necessary protecting of boundaries.”

Richard Rohr, in The Artist’s Rule by Christine Valters Paintner


The Deal struck – leave words and utterances behind for Body in its silence to teach, with music of shaman’s dream to guide.

Kneel before the altar. Candle lit. Head bowed.
Stilling, silencing, falling into the cave of the heart.
Listening to a beat older than time.
Imaginal images flutter through time and space.


SACRED YES sees ancient Sun Dancer, pierced with deer cord bound to Tree in Life Hoop’s center. Face to the sun, sweat and blood streaming. Is this not a Sacred Dance to the Sacred Yes of Life? 
Elephant Matriarch swinging her massive head and trunk, warning all to beware as she guides her family through danger.
Arms suspended as Seaweed floating on the ocean’s surf. Then outstretched seeking surfer’s balance as he rides the Wave.
Now bald Eagle silently soaring, high wide view of land and sky.
Hold hair tight like Kali, Durga.
Bounce and bound like Ape.
Silent belly rumble and laugh. Inhale deep. Exhale deeper like bellows.
Not a word. Not a sound.
Felt Sense Flashes.
All a truer expression of that commitment to Life through its ages, when all Bodies knew.
Then rest, dream of YES, slip into Dream Time to bring it through, to be it, to be with it.
No words needed. Body knows.
Space surrounding Body holds vibration and emanation of this Dance to SACRED YES.

SACRED NO awakens to Tibetan bells.
Flowing gentle melody instantly illumines Sacred No is always in service of Sacred Yes. In obedience bows to Life.
Bending forward to purge the false yes, compliance, making small, resentments and envies – all taken as truth those lifetimes of lies.
Rising up, strengthen arms and legs, back and front, shake head free of delusion, break free of an invisible bondage as concrete eggshell shatters.
Drum beat evokes fierce warrior. Strike and chop and kick and stomp. Claim and proclaim. Power and empower.
Swoon with sudden sick feeling as Ego slips in guised to taint and turn the Sacred against itself.
BIG MEDICINE here.
Stand still. Is not standing still on one’s ground like Mountain the Sacred Dance of the Sacred No?
Then sway and soften into Life, like Tree who knows to withstand Storm he must give and bend.
Be fluid, fluent like River flows.
Dance SACRED NO as betrothed partner to SACRED YES.
Shape shift through Ego’s seduction. Discern the step.
Quiet presence, fierce with fight.
When to be loud with silence, soft with strength.

“A thousand half-loves must be surrendered
to take a whole heart home.”

Rumi

And

img_00041.jpg

The Shining Word “And”

“And” teaches us to say yes
“And” allows us to be both/and
“And” teaches us to be patient and long suffering
“And” is willing to wait for insight and integration
“And” does not divide the field of the moment
“And” helps us to live in the always-imperfect now
“And” keeps us inclusive and compassionate towards everything
“And” demands that our contemplation become action
“And” insists that our actions is also contemplative
“And” is the mystery of paradox in all things
“And” is the way of mercy
“And” makes daily, practical love possible

– Richard Rohr –
A Spring Within Us, 2016