That one constant of life, Change, arises.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
From Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
The clear pebbles of rain have been moving over this Devon landscape. Welcome rain reaching the parched soil after a hot dry summer. Change has been moving through my life. And we see the continuing upheavals in the world. The inspiration of Greta Thunberg, of Extinction Rebellion starting to shift the discourse, if not the actions of those in power. Here in Totnes as in many places there are conversations starting with local government about what it means to put the declared Climate Emergency into action. And simultaneously with the inspiration we see the continuing corruption of power and position used to make the rich richer and those with less poorer, to fuel hatred and division. Intense times indeed.
You may be called to change something in these times, to act. You may need to be still. If you are moved to be with others in the intensity of feelings that arise, here are some grief tending workshops coming up. There are spaces on all of them. All feelings are welcome as you know. The gratitude, the joy, the love of the beauty and tenderness, and the grief for all the loss and change, the injustice and suffering, the destruction and separation that is happening in this moment of life unfolding.
I hope the grief tending workshops can help us all to find a place where we feel welcomed as our fuller selves, where our loving hearts and beauty, our wild outrage, our numbness and our contraction all have a place. Where we learn again in our bodies and our souls that we and our feelings are needed as part of this extraordinary, indomitable, fragile, mysterious web of life. The last words of Mary Oliver’s poem resonate for me..
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
The listing of upcoming workshops is on our Events page, here
