Month: November 2021

Garden hoses and loving kindness

Garden hoses and loving kindness

Last weekend, I was struggling to roll up a garden hose for storage when I thought of my dad. I remembered watching him so many times cuss and fight to try to force his hose into a neat circle just like I was doing. I had to laugh. He was either delivering a message to me from the other side about a lesson he didn’t really learn while he was alive, or it was the Universe speaking.  Either way, I got it. Relationships are like garden hoses. You can cuss and fight to try to shove them into the perfect […]

Kwan Yin’s empty heart

Kwan Yin’s empty heart

A couple of months ago, I read a collection of essays called Erosion, by Terry Tempest Williams. An image from the book still haunts me–a statue of the goddess Kwan Yin that Williams visited at a shrine to the Divine Feminine in Yunnan Province, China. Here’s how she described it: “Kwan Yin’s right hand was raised upward with palm closed at shoulder height; her left hand protected a bowl resting on her lap. I raised my heels to look inside the bowl–it held her heart. I wept over what every woman knows. We give away our hearts daily. What remains is […]

Breath, grace & gratitude

Breath, grace & gratitude

I host a women’s new moon circle on Zoom every month and at our last meeting, we had a gratitude ceremony. As we traveled around our virtual circle each naming what we were grateful for, one woman noted that she was thankful for breath. Breath, I thought…so simple, yet so profound. That was last Monday, and I’m still sitting with this notion. Interestingly, just before I was to open our Zoom circle, my daughter had a mini crisis. She was leaving for the airport to fly back to college when she realized she had lost her driver’s license, most likely […]

My ofrenda to change

My ofrenda to change

I was born at full moon time on Día de Los Muertos, Day of the Dead, two days after Halloween. So, this time of year generally has me thinking about both birth and death.  Día de Los Muertos is a holiday celebrated in Mexico (and other places) to honor departed loved ones. It is said to have originated some 3,000 years ago from practices of the Aztecs. Back then, people had a more cyclical view of the universe and saw death as a fundamental part of life to be celebrated rather than mourned. Therefore, contemporary Day of the Dead gatherings are […]

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