Transformations

In Tew's mailbox along the shore . . .

We humans become “woke” through an accident of life of one kind or another. The pain, the suffering of all kinds, the misery, and the chaos that are part of life, begins to wake us, shake us. From that comes the questions that lead to transformation: “Who am I? What am I? How is it that all these things are happening?” A realization arises that there is something in them that is asking those questions, something that is, in fact, intelligent and not exactly confused. – Chӧgyam Trungpa

Transformation comes, slowly often, but it comes. Always out of error, being wrong when we were insisting on our misguided righteousness. The Way has its Way with us. Sometimes It brings us a stone in our shoe, or, like Jona in the biblical story, a whale. –after Richard Rohr

April 5-13, 2023 Passover celebrates the emancipation of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery

Passover – by Lynn Ungar

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . . and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. —Exodus 12:7 & 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night, when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

"Passover" by Lynn Ungar in What We Share: Collected Meditations, Volume Two, edited by Patricia Frevert (Skinner House, 2001).

There is no cure for grief...grief is not a malady. No one can fix you because you are not broken. Your grief is a wild, holy thing to be honored when it comes. And it will come. – after Mirabai Starr

Sometimes we come to realize our capacity to care only after having cared.