Don't Get Distracted

Don’t get distracted from your Soul’s fulfillment,
looking for that pat on the head.

Yearning to belong in a society that has forgotten
the meaning of the word, we sell our Souls —
or at least try — just to receive the possibility of
”I like you.”

How did our expectations get so low?
Or maybe they are too high, up in our
heads where they don’t belong.

We ignore our body’s yearning for the
sweetness of skin, the warmth of one we love
held close, not out of desire,
but from the pure need and enjoyment of belonging.

We all want to curl up in our pack, rest
in friendly arms, easy in their love.
This is everything.

The work is simple: What gets in the way?

Sharon Blackie

I can’t remember now how I first heard of Sharon Blackie. It was a couple of years ago, and like many of the good things in life, she came and then went, and then came back again. I bought her book “If Women Rose Rooted” a couple of years ago and then received it for Christmas this year.

Sharon Blackie lives in Ireland and offers many online courses from there. She is also coming to the United States this year for trainings and immersive experiences. Her work focuses on our connection to the land, and reclaiming our path of participation in “the land’s dreaming.”

This is a wonderful book to read all the way through or keep by your beside table. An inter-weaving of celtic myths, personal memoir, and time spent with rooted women, the book delivers its magic in many ways.

For many of us in—as she puts it—the celtic “diaspora,” her work speaks deeply to the longing to connect to our own, ancient, Earth-centered, feminine spirituality, something many of us have been brutally cut off from for thousands of years.

In this beautiful book is the story of her own awakening and an invitation to our own. I find her writing beautiful, soulful, and full of inspiration that speaks directly to the heart.

https://sharonblackie.net/

beloved communion

painting by Iceland’s Eggert Pétursson

Beauty is the way

The way is fraught,
but beauty is the way.

We are like the clouds I see,
morning sun coming through

We are also the mountains
strong and ancient,
a becoming that is also a letting go.

We are sky, too — vast, infinite,
so much to explore and know.

Cloud and mountain differentiate
light pouring through the —
what are they called? — ridges?
I want to say crevasse.

How can we give up hope in the face
of so much beauty?
Our mother is powerful and we have
rebelled like misunderstood teenagers,
full of desire and truth and longing.

Still, in this world, this morning exists.
Still now, here in this troubled time,
my eyes are squinting as morning sunlight
pours over a mountainside.
Still.

When I am awake in this way, I think:
what if everyone could feel like I do now,
trusting the day to open,
taking the sacred offering.

The Earth speaks a complex and terrible
language, vast in its implication

Understanding begins in the gentling of ourselves,
in soft whispers felt in the
vast intimacies of our own hearts.

Truth felt and then a breath,
big and full and sighing,
the body’s grateful participation
in a beloved communion.