Daydreaming Into Daylight and Twilight

My LInc, a dear friend, and mentor in Italy at Christmastime . No longer earth side, yet he continues to guide me in endless ways.

Tosha Silver, has been offering a meditation if you will of holding oneself already within the solution. Offering ourselves the gift of being in the new time, however imagined.

Allowing our cells to absorb it all. Opening to the miracle of the solution. Feeling ourselves within the healing, a new career path,  a relationship, whatever it may be that has been swirling, perhaps feeling just beyond the grasp of our fingertips.   

Giving oneself the gift of being in the new time, however imagined. Daydreaming within daylight and twilight. Expanding and growing possibilities. Learning how to sit within the birth, and also be within the collapsing and shedding of what once was, and is no longer.

Trusting ourselves and feeling into the emotion of bringing the solution into this present moment. A birthing of the new, opening  one’s entire system into expanded possibility.

This is not grasping, attaching nor living in a fantasy world. It is quite the contrary.

It aligns closely with what Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, describes, “We need both sides of story telling- listening to others’ stories, and telling our own - to embrace one another in full humanity.”

I recall vividly when my brother was not going to live long. He was hospitalized, and one of his care team members was a chaplain named Andy. I witnessed the difference Andy’s grounded, loving, and kind presence was making. He sat quietly, listened, and held space for our family to be however we needed to be.

Something shifted within me, and I wondered and was curious if this might become my passion one day?

Upon return home, I visited the hospital that offered CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education.) The supervisor, Linc, met graciously with me, yet did not advise that I leave teaching until I could attain a pension because I had invested so many years within it. It would be five more years before I would change my path from teaching into hospital chaplaincy.

I returned to my elementary school classroom and created the kind of safe, loving, and caring haven, that I imagined being in a pastoral care setting might feel like. This was not new, yet clearly more intentional as I prepared for my next pivot.

Linc handed me the book, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, by Rachel Naomi Remen, with that famous impish grin of his and said, “Come back in five years.” Holy smokes, right?! I drove home on autopilot and was unclear about what had transpired? However, those five years were some of my most fulfilling in my teaching career. Time passed quickly, and before I knew it I was applying to be accepted into the CPE program.

I had certainly not anticipated this trajectory as I had imagined teaching for thirty plus years. I could not unsee what had been ignited within me when I was with my brother in the last moments of his life.

Witnessing chaplain Andy’s gentle companioning awakened a powerful, dormant seed, ready to take root. A power greater than me was privy to a path I was stepping into. I would sorely require the loving and caring embrace of my chaplain community as my son Douglas took his last breaths, and in the long days that followed.

“Before every session, I take a moment to remember my humanity. There is no experience that this man has that I cannot share with him, no fear that I cannot understand, no suffering that I cannot care about, because I too am human. No matter how deep his wound, he does not need to be ashamed in front of me. I too am vulnerable. And because of this, I am enough. Whatever his story, he no longer needs to be alone with it. This is what will allow his healing to begin.” ~Carl Rogers

― Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal

A Benediction for the New Year

By Sophie Strand

May your heart be as soft as rain on the hungry soil. May your heart be hungry soil. May the next year be today. And every day a kingdom.

May your day be filled with presence.

May presence bloom with such intensity that you stand transfixed. May there be snowdrops and trillium and columbine hung like lace across the limestone of your closed eyes. May your eyes open inwards. Downwards. Heart-towards.

May your day be as purple as your own song.

As blue as your own thought. As red as the string of love you are following, step by step, through the spiral.

May you trust the seashell curvature of your becoming. May you feel yourself becoming the shape and flower of your own belonging

in this one breath. This welcome, spacious hour.