Hello.
It’s the new moon phase of the month and for years that has brought a contemplative space for me. I have been graced with a very special gift since I was a young woman to have other dear and older women who spent time with me every month at this quieter time in the night sky. They taught me about this beautiful pattern in nature, how it could connect to my spirituality and to my body as a woman. It may be true to say that there are few other practices in my life that have made me feel more like a woman — childlike as ever! (Anyone want to go dancing in the moonlight?!)
These women taught me that I needed other women, to think with, to study with, to create with, to laugh and cry and relate with. I am reminiscent of it all this month especially as it was around this time about ten years again when one of my teachers told me it was time for me to no longer only be her student but to teach others as well. I recall distinctly finding poet John O’Donohue’s words,
“It is strange to be here.”
I latched on to them as my way forward, not as an excuse to hold back.
The word strange, in the origin-Latin-sense, extraneous, shapes images of otherness in my mind, something outside of what we understand or recognize. It strikes me over and again how it’s in the “strange” moments that we each get to choose for that to make us feel lonely or connected—two very opposing senses! So, if I may write yet another love letter and send it out into the world today, to you today, I’d like to spend time remembering here together how desperately we need to choose the latter. Connection.
It must be one of the most beautiful and precarious things that in the startlingness of life, the moments that give us pause and that old familiar sense of being “outside” or cold, alone, uncertain, tired, afraid, that this is where our invitation to lean in and be curious can also be heard. Yet, it is such a much softer quieter voice, isn’t it?
But imagine, what if, today, tomorrow, instead of when unsure and stopping… what if we ask a question, of ourselves or of another? This is not the same as a doubt which breads fear. This is an act of trust, with ourselves and with Life.
How dearly we need rewritten within us the old scripts that told us things like asking questions indicates weakness or a lack of authority. Show me a heart willing to peer in, look around a corner, beneath the leaf, the page, the sky—I cannot help but be captivated.
I looked back at an old journal this morning and noticed how words I had written then carried import and needed clarity that serve me, substantially, still for the days I find myself in now. For a moment, I felt it—negativity and concerns over why did I still need something I had written years ago to come back to me now? I wondered why I did not, “have that down by now?” But then, quieter and deeper—remembrance of how we are each so like a garden, soo in need of regular tending, nurturing and yes, pruning.
“…For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”
– On Friendship, From The Prophet (Knopf, 1923).
In a garden the ground gets turned many times, what is dark beneath comes up top and then after much life and goodness in that garden it finds it’s way below the surface again and gets turned again and…
These, and many others, are not new lessons to us but as sure as the ground gets turned, as sure as the sun and rain, moonless nights and full moon nights, will be needed, as long as this good earth keeps spinning, so too do we need the turn and returning of many things in the life of our minds and hearts and bodies as well.
Here’s one thing I am renewing remembrance of: Hans Hofmann, a renowned German-American abstract expressionist painter and teacher, famously said,
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”.
Whew, YES.
I want to hear!
For time out of mind, across cultures and lands, this is the time of year that it is customary to take account of the stuff of our lives, the material aspects and their real reverberations on every other corner of our human experience—spirit, mind, body, soul. This can look like Spring cleaning or Autumn releasing depending on the hemisphere this finds you in today. Renewal calls out like a beautiful lady passing by inviting us all to a deeper connection. I can see her and I want to follow.
How about you? What do you see and hear lately? I’d love to read your notes in the comments!
Love,
Raynna
Instead of posting more images inside my letter today I decided to invite you to visit my beginning gallery where I’ve begun to post moments I’ve captured and have prepared for purchase, including the one featured above. You can check it out HERE if your’e interested!
I’m looking forward to adding more over time, let me know if you have any special requests 🙂
But our quest is not over 🙂
The Loxian Gate (translated into English)
Through the gates of night
There is wisdom waiting to be found…
That first place of night
Was an island in the color of stars,
Spring;
Green grew and the flowers blossomed.