The Wild Heart Of Longing

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“For the desert mothers and fathers, the monastic cell was a vitally important place.
It was both literal reality, a place where the monks retreated to experience a deep stillness.
Yet it is also the symbolic place within us where we welcome in the fullness of our experience.
Consider holding this image of an inner cell during this journey – the place within where you can
retreat and be present to the fullness of your experience.”

— Christine Valters Painter, PhD The Self-Study Online Retreat ~ Women on the Threshold: The Wild Heart of Longing
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Hidden From Our Eyes

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“…now it is hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:42)

Can you feel it
bouncing off steel beams
ricocheting off raw stone,

the sound of gunfire
off in the distance
grim and getting closer
in cold grey shuffling
grave-steps clotted
and rotted
and ruined
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it’s the sound
of relationships
already shattered
broken relationships bloody
gutted in the streets
and played out
before our eyes
horrified and haunted

we weep tears of disbelief
to the cold deaf earth
we sweep bodies like trash
into the yearning yawning earth
and yet we still will not
turn or
turn or
turn

in this season
in this time
and Byrds sing
desperately praying
it’s not too late
but we have chosen
rankly, rottedly

we have sung the zombie songs
and joined the charnel choirs
of the living dead because
we lacked the simple courage
to be the dead living…dead living!
we have chosen fear
we are drunk on distrust
we rave raw in revenge
we are sickened because
we ate only anger
and anger
and anger

and no one leads
no one guides
to whom shall we go?
who shall save us
from ourselves?

We shed another’s blood
when we run out of answers.
They shed Their own pure blood
as Their one and only answer.

We kill, buried in despair.
They rise, giving us hope…

but will we open up our hearts
and see Them shining in our brother,
hear Them singing in our sister
irregardless of skin color
or religion, creed, or dolor?
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Or will we just sink away
and slink away and dwell behind
those naked fig leaves and all truth

hidden from our eyes?

 

Under Her Mantle

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“Brigid sees the face of Christ in all persons and creatures, and overcomes the division between rich and poor.

“Our practice of inner hospitality as monks in the world is essentially about healing all of the places we feel fragmented, scattered, and shamed. One of her symbols is her cloak which becomes a symbol of unity.

“All can dwell under her mantle.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD The Self-Study Online Class ~ Sacred Seasons: A Yearlong Journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year

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Daily Conversion: From & To

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“In monastic tradition, there is great value placed on both conversion and stability. I think of conversion as always being willing to be surprised by God. Conversion calls us to remember that we are always on a journey, that we are always growing, that we have never fully arrived. It calls us to great humility, and the more we grow in wisdom, the more we realize how little we actually know.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD The Self-Study Online Retreat ~ Practicing Resurrection through Creativity and Archetypes

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Paradox

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“As human beings seeking to live meaningful lives, we hunger for some kind of structure, a set of practices that challenge us and help us to grow. Yet, if our rule is too rigorous, we can become suffocated by legalism.

“The paradox of the spiritual life is that it needs a healthy balance of structure and freedom to thrive. This is the paradox of the creative process as well.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD  The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom

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Until All Can Breathe

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It is not pretty
It is not comforting
Brace yourself…
for I rub our noses in it,
the hypocrisy

is too much for me
and horror, hate is
all I see this day
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Go ahead…
after reading,
go to the parades,
the barbeques, the picnics…
go to family and friends
and fireworks and fun…

but go
with these words
stuck in your craw and
mashed down in your marrow,
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and know that this is
the truth of where we are come,
where we have been led because
we will not lead and now we stand
on precipices and drunk upon our past
and deluded in our dreams of futures
that are just not real.
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I am glad for our constitution
one of the major leaps
towards true liberty
in world history…

but omg just baby steps
and not a signal that we have
arrived and can stop walking…
we must see how insidious
we have been taught
to play the fiddle
to scenes of horror
that would warm
the cold dead bones
of Nero his ownself.
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Extract yourselves
from the trappings
and tentacles that croon
to your swooning soul and seek
to pull you down into an addict’s
wet-dreamy tragic death

and make good your escape
while there is still a crack of time,
a sliver of hope milky moony white
and weakly glowing still
in this crashing night…
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for it will break indeed
in tsunamis of terror
not brought here
from foreign lands
but homegrown in
these places we did not
attend to carefully
and mercifully
and compassionately…

and then…
there, tonight
upon your bed,
in trembling,
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whisper a prayer
and ask that you be
just delivered of a sliver
of that silver privilege,
slippery that squirms away
and wriggles fierce to live like that
insatiable chest burster of Alien…

oh God
PLEASE DELIVER US TO TRUE LIBERTY
and do not rest until
all can breathe until
all can breathe
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Danse Macabre (July 4th, 2016)

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We are waltzing in this Danse Macabre,
spinning thru the fogs of night
while day is faltering in light
and our feet cannot stop or halt
but bloodytapping tripping faults
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See the fog dense, packed with fear
see odium’s terrain drawn near
and each one drinking bloody cups
raised heedlessly and lifted up
against the screaming skies…
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We are now there.
You must not
look away…

Dixie Land
is our Promised
Land…alas!
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What is happening here at home?
In “America the Great”?  We roam
the “Homeland” in this late
hour dolorous and dangerous
we have been washed away by hate.

What has happened to
“The American Soul!”
What the fuck is that, anyway?
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Dancing maniac-ally
at the cliff’s precipitous edge
and the fall is long deadly
but we have no recourse.
We have no recourse

because the only cure
has at long last become a curse
disparaged in our danse macabre
and mocked by all our ringing words
writ long ago as cover for

the drinking cup, the bloody cup
we lifted up in “Freedom”‘s name
and filled with slaveblood’s cursed stain
and now here in this hour dark?

Reason bleeds to death before our eyes.
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midst the fiddling of the powerful
and bodies littering the floors
of offices and restaurants
airports, clubs and nursery schools
and still we dance the Danse of Fools

How many families will be shattered
and offered up unholy terrors
on the altars of our dark god
foolishness?  And how we lecture

constantly wrapped in our privilege
disguised as Amendment Number Two
(it’s number two alright)
and truth dies screaming in the night
morality and reason run
in terrified time and treason comes
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to exterminate the drunken dancers
dead on feet dead to the horror
of the screaming suffering beings
that they dance upon and call it
streets of gold…welcome to hell.

Welcome to Hell.
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That Perfect Nothing

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the mountain
swimming in clouds
wreathing grey sheer granite
face, wedding veil lace
shimmering in the distance

and the river
sinewy twisty arrow
shot from austere heights
cataract-ing down
slim and yet so fierce

so present
yet framing that
place distant
that perfect

nothing

that defines all

Lured By What Shimmers

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“Richard Rohr tells us that when we move through life in a driven way we are being propelled by the ego.
When we allow ourselves to be drawn forward, lured ahead by what shimmers, we are moved by the soul’s desires.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD The Self-Study Online Class ~ Earth as Soul Care Matrix: The Wild Heart of Ministrytumblr_o88c2iVRrW1qat5pio1_500

To The One Who Seeks My Faith’s Tender Throat With Teeth

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I will never turn back. I will never not Love God…why do you keep making that a condition? When God has chosen (for what reason I know not, certainly not based on any merit I have, being the …

Source: To The One Who Seeks My Faith’s Tender Throat With Teeth

Inside Dead Wood And Splinters

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You
woke me
and I didn’t even
know I was sleeping
inside dead wood and
splinters waiting for
a spark or a coal
from Your
altering
Altar

The hate and ignorance
of the petrified forest
is matched only by
Your manifest mercy
and glorious grace.

And now I am awake
and walking free
in living flesh
Dryad Sculpture. A dryad is a tree nymph; the female spirit of a tree. In Greek drys means oak. Thus dryads are specifically the nymphs of oak trees, though the term has come to be used for all tree nymphs in general. "Such deities are very much overshadowed by the divine figures defined through poetry and cult," Walter Burkert remarked of Greek nature deities. They were normally considered to be very shy creatures, except around the goddess Artemis, who was known to be a friend to most nymp...:

Butterfly And Bone

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I’m a butterfly carved of bone
white, bleached, sun-baked bone
Butterfly, Carved Bonemy wings are just my lungs
spongy-red and wet but free
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Last Flight, 2009 | Used rubber flops. How cool is this?!:
inside my chest is open space
soaring chasms awaiting light
Fantasy Wire Fairies Sculptures:
butterfly, bone, breath over breadth
I’m a butterfly carved of bone
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I am diamonds in the night.

Boredom

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I don’t believe in boredom.
I think it is code for
something else,
and I simply
choose not
boredom.

I laugh when
I see people
cultivate a
“bored look.”

I hope
the only time
I look bored is
when I am laying
in my casket, waiting.
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That Table Small

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sitting around a table small
and caught by the heartstrings,
just a player on that stage, all
the rest again make up this gathering

of those who see the task as fencing
in, fending off, wriggling away
from what this Troubler of Israel is bringing
and defining her place, her place to stay.

I have not once been here…at this table
to be made glad over, to be thanked
or complimented or told I’m able
to do, to be, amazing…it’s to be spanked

that I am called there
to be yanked that I am hauled there
to be flanked by falderal there
sitting around that table

small
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Scraps

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those words
scribbled, jotted
scrawled across the
face of old envelopes
and dull
hearts

elements
spices sitting
poised to pounce
into a pot of poetry
or an essay or
an abstract

kinda makes
you think, wonder
where the meaning is
in the pot or in
the one who
stirs
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Deaf Earth’s Denial

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…I remember, sweet fields of red clover, green stalks soft and new, tops dipped in crimson, just before being baked by the shimmery sun but after they’d stripped off their equinox frock…

Source: Deaf Earth’s Denial

Taking Communion At Pride

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In the 57 years I have spent on this planet, I have taken communion tens of thousands of times.

The most recent of those times was at Pride in Portland Oregon on June 19th, 2016…served to me by Pat Christiansen while a gypsy troupe danced to insistent almost militant drumming behind us…

I closed my eyes as I took the elements, just as I always do, and looked to Them to see Them, to taste and SEE that the Lord is good…and I saw the Sacred Flaming Heart Icon…pulsing…beating…THROBBING…in time to the militant drums, and I was certain that this is the heart of the Risen Lord who wears the Two Edged Sword and Eyes like Fire…

The Heart was pulsing…pulsing…PULSING…

There was a frame around the Heart, and it was getting bigger…and it was pushing against the frame.

The frame began to splinter…and then at last, the Heart gave a MIGHTY PULSE and burst the frame, shattered it and splintered it, and then grew bigger and bigger until it utterly enveloped me and I knew it was off to the far reaches of everywhere.
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The nightclub’s name is Pulse.  The city is Orlando…which means “Famous Land, Land of Renown” and lesser meanings of Times of Importance.

I find the entire experience prophetic and insistent…and I wonder…
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…are you going to stay inside the frame?  The Heart has left, departed…gone outside the city gates.

Are you going to sit and imagine Jesus coming to earth to kick ass on all the people you do not like…yunno, sort of like the Pharisees did and when Messiah showed up and punched them square in the conscience they got so mad they killed Him?

Or are you going to understand that God is stirred in Mercy and Compassion to the point that those things become the consuming fire of Light and Love and each thing they touch responds according to its matrix of being…if it is true it becomes pure and if it is not it simply is consumed.
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Stand with The Sacred Pulsing Heart.  The time is now.

If you wanna be in the “next move of God”, it isn’t with the so-called prophets and evangelists who seek after gold dust and commit adultery on a mass scale while the crowd has what amounts to a spiritual cluster-fuck.

No…it is in the highways and byways, where Mama compels to come in, and the Heart races to rush out.

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A River Is Never The Same

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“We will never be the same again.
But here’s a little secret for you—no one is ever the same thing again after anything.
You are never the same twice, and much of your unhappiness comes from trying to pretend that you are.
Accept that you are different each day, and do so joyfully, recognizing it for the gift it is.
Work within the desires and goals of the person you are currently, until you aren’t that person anymore,
and everything changes once again.”

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To Feed You Evergreen (For Lil Mama)

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you’ve been running canyons
looking for yourself
that beautiful wild girl
who sat there in the dust
and wrestled with that trike

while others just looked on
(they had forgotten joy)
and cursed you with perspective
above and to the right
that made you second guess

and work hard in the night
to be the perfect one
and get them off your back
for good, for evil too
but it just distanced you

and gave you space to run
in canyons made of bones
along your Sangre River
still looking for yourself
alive and free and wild

well, Baby, you have found her
she thrives though she is short,
and though sun’s rays are slant
they still can peek down deep
to feed you evergreen

I have always seen you
I see you still, here, strong
and still, delicate, fragile
and still indestructible
growing wild and free

Bullets Flying Everyday

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Nightmares.

That’s how I have been…lately.  See, someone asked me “How have you been doing, lately?”

Nightmares.
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It was a common question asked in a common way.  When I answered that Orlando had really shattered me, she shrugged and said that the world was going to hell in a handbasket and that we just had to deal with it.

Indifference mixed with derision that I was “emotional” and “unprofessional”.

And I flinched under a fresh hail of words which might end up being something else…let me explain.

Here is why I have had these nightmares of being chased, being hunted and slaughtered, being tortured and tormented and left to suffer and die:

Because this man took action in the real world as an avatar of what our culture throws every single day…words.

Every.
Single.
Day.
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As you read here…people from all walks of life…you statistically are cis-normative and as such you swim thru the waters of our culture with the current, finding it easy to slip and slide thru waves of words which wash over you and pass downstream without even a scratch.

But that is not the case for me…for millions in the LGTBQIA community…for tens of millions of others who are not privileged…and ultimately, it is not the case for you.
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Every day words are slung around by trigger tongues shot from missile silo hearts loaded with radioactive fissionable words and those words destroy over and over and over.  But bodies do not drop to the ground right away and we think that there is no effect.

I have read hundreds of so-called christian messages that say God hates LGTBQIA people, that God is punishing us for what we have “sown” (but it is implied that God doesn’t punish a cis-normie cus they are not … what?).  I have read people who are celebrating and saying they wish he would have killed more people.

In a strange way, I think this man was more honest about things than the vast majority of haters, because he actually did it:  he actually took instruments of death, and looked human beings in the eye, and shot them down in hatred, in horror, in fear.

But you?  You who use your words everyday on others and shoot them dead in the heart?  You who sit three thousand miles away and use words to hurt and silence and kill?  You who cast stoney words?  You who use chemical weapons of mass destruction in the name of “hating sin” and call that “loving the sinner”?
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You are him.  And anytime, anywhere, any of us indulge our evil and hating hearts with our words?

We are making our Our Own Private Orlando.  Our own little abattoir of blood and bone and terror.

I read a FB friend who was so eager to decry the so-called terrorists of radical Islam that she momentarily forgot to carry the slaughtered in her heart…a gentle and indirect prompt stirred her, thank God and to her credit she took down the post and remembered the true enemy…but I tell you this:

Every single slur, every single sarcastic remark, every single angry slam, every single troll comment is a bullet.

And I have nightmares because all this man did was precipitate into the physical world the death and destruction and rape and violence and horror and rage that surrounds me, assaults me, overwhelms me every single day.
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Yes…I remember the days before I came to myself…and I was like any other typical white privileged christian who thought they did not hate anyone and yet made casual callous jokes and had no awareness of anyone different than me as a hurting human being…and I will always bleed over those years of blindness, for they indeed qualify me as chief of sinners.

But no more…and now I can see how each and every time christians say that God is punishing the LGTBQIA community with actions like this, and that God is angry and pissed off because They feel mocked and thus slap us down, and that we are reaping what we have sown when in fact we had nuffin to do with how we are made…each time this is the attitude?  They have made the sacrifice of Love that Jesus made for us on the cross null and void…

…and they nail us up there…and they nail their shadow and sin there…and they are the ones who vent their wrath and fear and loathing…on us there…and they have made Jesus sacrifice to be in vain.
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What I am trying to say is this:

Each and every time you speak in insensitivity, unawareness, privilege, hatred, anger, prejudice, and judgement?

You are the Butcher of your Own Private Orlando and the hearers of your words your victim.

I am gonna go out to the world today and walk in that hail of bullets, that storm of bullets flying everyday.

And when I show how they wound me?  I am gonna be the one jeered at, the one others recoil from with the forked fingers thrust at me with the christian evil eye ward…
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When you stop killing with your words, creatures like that killer will not have nearly the power waiting to channel as an avatar of a culture of hate.

Nightmares.
I am having nightmares.
I am a pincushion of death-words thrust into me…

Let us wake one another up, for the hour is getting late.blood_moon_forest_by_pastorjwallen

I Await Your Sacred Steps

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I dashed this off…
well, actually it just
shouldered its way
from my soul
and forced me open
and muscled forth.

No…
it is not polished,
or even much good,
but it is insistent
that it wants to be…
just as it is…
unfettered,
untamed,
unedited…

on fire and fierce.
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let its blood
trickle across your tongue,
down your throat to infuse
you with starfire unquenchable,
with the seeds of birth that come

when nebulas collapse
so that new stars
can be born.
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Will you let
something new
and unkillable
catch fire
in you today!!??

Will you rise
up unshakeable
though ye tremble,
undefeatable though
ye weep?
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Yea, weep
and mourn,
grieve and wail
on the mountains…
and drink this philter
as you pour your tears
like rain upon these bloody
sands so desperately needing
the touch of falling stars to ignite
the birth of light again in this dark night!
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Carry this fire inside
you, Prometheus returning
to those gods weak and beaten
and frightened in a pulsing night
cowering before their creatures
unfettered and held hostage
to hate and darkness…

bind it to your forehead
bright diadem of Hope
and going past the fallen
crumbled thrones of old gods
doddering and wetting the bed
of their comfort and ease…

and hail
to the Halls
of the Risen Lamb
slain and shining ever
in Love, our Sun/Son/Lion!!!
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We march
on Saturday.
We march
on Sunday.
Friday,
though you be bitter
and seem so final,
you are nuffin to me!
I have fought
thru 5 decades
of Fridays
to get to this
time and place.

And
I see
Abraham shining…
I see
Martin and Martin
there, glim’ring…
I see
Susan and Harriet and Joanna…
Joan and Hildegard,
Thomas and Peter
and John…
I see them,
a sea of those
gone before
who beckon,
exhort…

A panorama of the Milky Way over Indian Head Cove in Bruce Peninsula National Park

Yes, weep…
pour it out,
and then
TAKE IT UP,
your tears now
jewels of fire
and precious
and eat them,
living coals
feeding the fires
of new stars
in your souls…
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I await you
in the streets of life,
and I shall never
be silent,
I shall never
stop or waver…
forward!!
Onward!!

We have come this far by faith,
and we shall not turn back now.

See the enemy posture…
covering that cowering fear
as we loom, our faces bright
and fair with Love
and Mercy and Justice
our diadems and Mama
and Jesus Avatar of Love Eternal
our Sovereigns…
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I await you.
This is your time.

Come out this weekend, ye privileged!
Cast your crowns in the gutters
so they can find purchase and grow
and their roots tear down
the walls of Massa’s farm.

Come.
Out.
Ye.
Shining.
Chosen.
Singing.
Ones.

I await your sacred steps.
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Ode For Orlando

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I saw the stars fall in the night
it was dark and closing in
as I lay paralysed and still
and shivering in deathly fright.

In waves and showers down they plunged
as sable curtains tore and trembled
in the hand of some great evil
threatening to eat the sky
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But somehow, each one shot to me
and landed in my shaking soul
and burned within me fierce and fell
and banished fear and made me whole

Until I burned with stellar fire
and shone in gold galaxy gleams
my heart a starfield bold, untamed
for Mercy’s greater than hate’s schemes!
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And so, though Nebulas collapse
let them fall fast to this earth
into your open mouth and heart
Not for destruction, but for birth

Of new stars brilliant, unshakeable
that shine with Justice and with Joy
Children born of grief and ash
Who rise above hate’s cruel slash
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This is our birth, our ne’er turn back!
A thousand stars, a million dreams,
A myriad songs and voices shout
We burn bright…our light…

will never…never…burn out
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Rape, Hook-Up Culture, and Sacred Sexuality

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This Brock Turner rape case…rape culture…and yet there is still such a strong advocacy afoot in our culture for the de-sacred-ization of sex.

I have written in other places of my own views and axioms regarding sexuality and expression. These views involve the assumptions that sexual expression and interaction is the…THE…most powerful relational interaction in the created realm because it contains the potential to summon forth a fragment of God and a being full and free and possessed of free will.

I have mentioned my assertion that sexuality needs a suitable container in the same way that nitric acid needs one…how each one has the power to do mighty and epic things and each one has the potential to do grave damage…

I have opined that the container best suited for sexual activity is a long-term monogamous relationship that is deeply undergirded by sacrificial love.

And, alas…in spite of my best attempts to convey that this position is not motivated by ANY feeling or belief that sex and sexuality is in any way “bad” or wicked or evil or dirty or to be limited to procreation only, I stand accused of wanting to “police” other people’s sexual choices and/or actions…

Does the one who wants to rescue a jumper from a skyscraper want to police them in their despair-induced mental state?

I dunno how to answer that accusation except to say that in my own life, I have had few sexual “encounters” (read partners)…and those encounters have each and every one been one thing in the moment…and resulted in brokenness, hurt, and sorrow in the long run…until I met my love and began to build together that bulwark of trust and mutual support that became our temple of love…

Hook-up culture is antithetical to this. It places the value on the pleasure of the moment and it gives a version of reality that “ought to be”, attributing all things that slide sideways from that desired “ought” to the residue left over by the bad teachers and bad teaching that sex is evil, bad, and to be avoided…and that it is THIS teaching that causes the broken and shattered deadness inside when sexual contact outside the sufficient container results in the same thing that contact with nitric acid does when it is not safely interacted with.

And yes…when I posted those opinions on Grace Notes, I heard from so many people that I had no right to police their choices, their activities…etc. etc…but I found it so telling that they shifted the ground and asserted that I wanted to police them, when I mentioned not ONE argument for policing activity, but instead advocated for consideration of the sacred dimension of sexual interaction for we…divine image bearers and creatures…who have the exact power to create a being with free will…

But I digress a tad…because I wonder this:

I wonder if sexuality had been celebrated as a high and sacred thing to be used and experienced with great care, would Brock Turner have done this thing? Would the events of the evening have gone down the way they did, with the copious alcohol and the diminishing of judgment?

So many have made insensitive and unaware statements and ended up blame-shifting onto the victim and I am deathly skert of doing that here…I certainly do not in any way shape or form say that “if she had this” or “if she had that”!!

IF BROCK TURNER HAD NOT RAPED HER, SHE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN RAPED!!! Full stop.

But also…if that sacred presupposition was a bit more vital, a bit more viable…

“BAH!!!  You’re soo old-fashioned, Charissa!!”
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From Provence To Salamanca

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We had wine
rosé wine, pink
and blushing with
laughing joy in the midst
of a light crushing.
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We were in Provence,
and it was warm and sultry
but not thick or sweaty
in that yellow light seeping
out of the ruddy dirt.

It’s a long time
to where we were
from here in Salamanca,
midst minarets and tall turrets
of sandy stone…

but I can still
pour rosé in glasses,
Provence in glad glissandos
and glory.

Into The Sacred Presence

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It is the “Beyond”…that place we all know deep down in our core exists…is there.

To argue it does not exist assumes its existence in order to even have ground to stand on ontologically.

It is what I am striving to touch, pierce, and funnel back here in my poetry…and I call it “Poetry” with a capital P…and it is a place and a state and a thing and a flow all at once.

“In cultivating photography as a contemplative practice, the camera becomes a tool to develop our ability to see more deeply, clearly, and truly, beneath the surface realities of the world around us and into the sacred presence shimmering in the world.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice
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I Live Inbetween

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look for me, search
in my solid words…
and you will miss me
in their sparkle-spazzle
and solid spunk echoes.

i’m in the spaces
in between my words
shining and shim’ring in
dance-implications,
deep in the rhythms

uneven and steady
rising and falling
walking the edges there
of what is written
and what’s merely spoken

just beyond the words
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i sit in winds

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i sit in winds
and let my shawl flow
loose around me
and lifted like wings

and as it unfurls
the hard ground exhales
and i become light
as i sit in winds

my heart rises up
when liberty sings
though limbs sit so still
though limbs sit in winds

the wings of my heart
soar high as the sun
and over the moon
there, sitting in winds

To Make A Poem

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“Art-making as pilgrimage helps us to understand the arts as a process of discovery about ourselves and about God. When we enter the creative process with the intention of listening for the movements of the Spirit in the midst of the work, we discover new insights about ourselves and God.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD  The Self-Study Online Class ~ Pilgrimage of the Soul: An Online Art Retreat
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Unfurling From A Set-Free Throat

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I still struggle to dig it out,
that splinter you shoved into me,
down my throat without so much as
a shot of whiskey or
a shot in the dark.

and you are so certain, sure
of how to walk the world
and all her streets unfurled
when really you are justifying
dwelling in your fear.

But you look so damn normal and together
while I am flailing in the maelstrom of myself.
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Here is what you do to me:
Idealize
Exoticize
Misunderstand
Validate
Vindicate
Vilify
Victimize
Re-traumatize
Reframe
Take out of context
Murder mysteries

You lecture me, slay me with
hidden sneers and resurrect me with
empty scripts and steal my mystery…

and mysteries become stories
and stories become reality
and stories shape the mind
that tells and gives them shape.

stories about “them”
stories about “me”
stories about “you”
stories that isolate us,
separate and set us apart
from the world at large.
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You simply have no clue of how
the mind can terrify, filled up
with anguish, upset, turmoil, fury,
the mind makes meanings out of shadows
and is too easily taught
to fear what it does not know…

And that is your biggest blindest blunder:
You do not know what you do not know
and thus you fear the healthy YOP
unfurling from a set free throat!
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Your mind assumes what it cannot
make out clearly or take out easily.

It’s a survival tactic.

But it inhibits you from being open to learning.
It inhibits you from being students of life.

You’d be well-served to sit your assumptions down.
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Living Origami

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I feel your fingers
in my folds and
my fine feathers
ruffling, riffing

sometimes ripping
for your pleasure
folding me and
creasing me

until I do not
recognize
the shape
I’m in.

Turning this way
twisting that way
tossing hither
touching yon

then you show me
origami, I’m your
living origami
here today and

gone tomorrow

Prairies and Pearls

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These days I cannot tell
the difference between
Lara Croft and Laura Wilder

Didn’t they both face mummies?
Didn’t they both raid tombs?
Didn’t they both find secrets?

It’s somewhere between
prairies and pearls
that the line extends
to connect their hearts.

Precious And Hidden

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Ohh
how you
carry it gentle
in your faithful heart,
your treasure precious
and hidden from yourself
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speak it out loud, exhale in blue
let your truth breathe, sing
of how its blood runs
true and rings with
with only ever
you

To Come Back To

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it’s that moment
when lungs forget
how to billow in
and out faithful

when air is tangible,
shimmering silvery-alive,
right before our hushed
wide eyes

that moment when
we both know finally
that love is sacred
not scared

and yet the terror
wholly holy terror
towers tall within
and all around us deep

cus if we even move
even move a muscle
(let alone a molecule)
we will fall up and in

never to return again
for there will never ever
be a back again
to come back to,

back to
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At Stanage Edge

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Before the blizzard
sneaky beneath the rim
of the grey and trembly sky,
conditions at Stanage Edge
on Thursday were extremely
changeable and cold.

My heart like the sky
(but ruddy red)
my heart like the sneaky storm
(but only streaked with black)
my heart like the conditions
(but never cold).

I got out of the car.
I could see rain
developing over Mam Tor
to the right
(and a few miles away).
I thought that it was only
just building up
(inside these scintillating
winds of heart and skies).
I thought I would have plenty of time
to get to the millstones,

to get back to my car
before it came
my way.

How wrong was I!

Prelude hailstones heavy,
fine mini-millstones
gristed and ground
the ice cold winds
and soon had me retreating
back to the warmth

and glad for my bare
and unfettered neck
and the leagues between me
and the deep cold black sea.

This is an area I have visited before

I’m pretty sure
I will see it again

Letting Go To Arrive

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“It’s like a dance.
And we have to give each being space to dance their dance.
Everything is dancing; even the molecules inside the cells are dancing.
But we make our lives so heavy.
We have these incredibly heavy burdens we carry with us like rocks in a big rucksack.
We think that carrying this big heavy rucksack is our security; we think it grounds us.
We don’t realize the freedom, the lightness of just dropping it off, letting it go.

That doesn’t mean giving up relationships; it doesn’t mean giving up one’s profession, or one’s family,or one’s home.
It has nothing to do with that; it’s not an external change.

It’s an internal change.
It’s a change from holding on tightly to holding very lightly.”
— Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

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God’s Shiny Quarters

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“Christianity is often thought of as a set of principles that people struggle to follow, working their way into God’s favor by offering tokens of self-denial and obedience. Even Christians who profess a far bigger story sometimes live as if this is the reality. But such a story looks at God as we might look at a gumball machine or a bank. If the prize we seek is God, we cannot earn our way to the thing we have our eye on—no matter how many tokens we might come up with. For the shiny quarters we proudly offer, belong, in fact, to God.”
Jill  Carratini
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Present

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“Be. Here. This moment. Now is all there is, don’t go seeking another. Discover the sacred in your artist’s tools; they are the vessels of the altar of your own unfolding.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom

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Seen Not Saved

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“It’s important to meet people where they are,
not where we want them to be.
There is a tendency, in many,
to re-characterize people’s experiences
without being asked.

“You tell them you are feeling badly,
they tell you all the reasons you should feel good.
You tell them you are challenged by your circumstances,
they tell you what they think you can do to make things easier.
You tell them that you have a plan to do something,
they offer up another plan for you.

There is a place for these offerings

– particularly when requested-

but often times they just make things worse.

In fact, we are more likely to arrive at the next best place on our journeys
when someone actually attunes to where we are at,
without making any effort to improve upon or re-frame it.

We don’t need to be saved- we need to be seen.

That’s the healing, right there.

I hear you,

I see you,

I honor your choices,

goes a long, long way.”
— Jeff Brown
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A Potent Surrender

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Trusting is just such a powerful challenge
to lay down my life without knowing for sure
it will ever get picked up again…by…anyone.

a potent surrender to God (and to others)
that commends my only possession (that’s me)…
to the Hands and the Head and the Heart of all things.
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A turning away from the will to possess,
from power and reflex to cling and to clutch
with brazen heart, hard face and bravado whistling…

afraid in the night of the Breaking Day Coming…
the willing embrace of a breaking that gives birth
to wholeness and health…well…trusting is just such

a challenge
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Honor And Shame: Yes, All Men

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Climb that hill you Sentient Beast
Burdened by your Greed, your pride
Haunted by your stinking fear
Rotted deep inside.

Carrying your mouldy loaves
Stolen from The Lord of Old
on the day five thousand fed
from His blessing told.

Shame is under your right arm
Honor carried by your left
As you sneak around, you snake
In eating you’re bereft

Four Natural Sanctuaries

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East:
If you cannot hear silence
then it is not silence.
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South:
If solitude does not keep you company
then you are not alone.
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North:
It is in the eternal flow
that stillness is discovered.
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West:
The cleanest complex binding
gives simplicity.
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These Forgotten Stories Haunting

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Hearing
stained wooooh
strained whooosh
rise, fall, push, pull back
quieting and moaning,
crying, sobbing, groaning
creaking and repose
the wind asks…
whyyyyyyy
whoooooo
whhhyyyy
ohhhhhh
sigh
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It’s that question
that drives us skimming
across Lake Life edgy
bobbing in the troughs and crests
yet never to the sandy shore
and glowy fires merry.

It’s that rough splinter
in our minds digging
all the time and all around us…
why…
why

You see
Stories are descended from
on High like waterfalls and
we are born too, like
waterfalls flying
from the stars
cascading
down to
here
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into this world
starkly unique
and populated
with stories,
pregnant with
multiple meanings

(us and this world/one not one)
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Here I am on the edge
of the gleaming twilight
nudging, jostling my life
in waves and I’m still wondering
what it’s all about…

I think it’s about a Splinter from
some Bloody Beam so Ancient…
Our minds are splintered, peppered,
made numb with pressing inquiry
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The first thing I remember
about this world
and I pray it
may be the last
is that I am
a stranger
in it,
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at once a glory
and a desolation.
That’s the only thread
of consistency I can detect
in my lakey leaky life,
alone before a mind-boggling
array of options and
burdened by both
the responsibility and the authority
to reach some conclusion
that isn’t totally and completely
rooted merely in myself
(where’s the joy in that?)

Life itself is its own exile,
and its own inevitability,
but that does not lessen our grief
or alter the fact of us in the whirring
midst of that sighing windy whyyyyy
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Life became history and history
becomes legend and legend
begat myth and myth begets
merging slowly with unknowing
and unknowing bemoans

“it was all forgotten…”
(which infers remembering)

“real but forgotten”
(real and forgotten)
and passed and past…
but the echoes
the echoes
echoes

the echoes of our distant past
and our essential vital nature
still call out to us in wind,
in wind and waves
in dreams.

And They are calling us in wind,
in wind and waves
in…
These Forgotten Stories Haunting
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The Ear Of Your Heart

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“‘Listen with the ear of your heart’ is the first line of the Rule [of St.Benedict], an invitation to read the words that follow not just with the mind as one learns intellectually, but with the heart as one learns things of the soul.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD Illuminating the Way: Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics
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Love Wins

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I am sharing this for those of you who love God dearly, and yet still struggle with NT teaching (actually lack thereof) regarding sexual orientation. You KNOW deep in your bones that you are wrong to conflate someone’s state of being with someone’s behavior…and yet you live in such fear that somehow God will punish YOU if you are not mean and nasty to someone who’s being is something that you do not believe can be.

Here is the problematic passage, out of 1 Corinthians chapter 6, a passage in which Paul is speaking prescriptively to a body of believers who were so caught up in judging one another’s activities that he had to castigate them for their reprehensible hatred. He moves to a rather broad net of behaviors that he casts, designed to cover every single person who may think they had standing to boast of their own righteousness, and then he begins to teach about how the behavior of each can bring dishonor to the entire body of Christ, as we are all together comprising the Temple of Holy Spirit…and then he concludes with a discussion of the topic of sexual immorality (which he leaves remarkably undefined btw, but would most certainly include the sexual behavior of heterosexually oriented human beings.).

My purpose here is not to break down the mistranslation into English that happened during the translating of the KJV in 1612…there are scholars who understand the nuances of the Greek text far better than I. Rest assured that with a bit of Google-fu you can locate many articles that will help you become informed.

{UPDATE:  Here is a great one that did not exist when I originally published this post…

My quest to find the word ‘homosexual’ in the Bible  }

LAY ALL THAT ASIDE FOR A MOMENT THOUGH…

Here is the reality of what goes on: Cis-het Christian who lives in fear that you will offend God if you do not hate and reject LGTBQ-oriented human beings, I am talking to you!!
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Here is the passage:
“9 Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals,[a] nor sodomites, 10 nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”

Now, let’s see: I spot behaviors in this passage, behaviors that all focus on choices of the will…choices to commit various sexual sins (still not talking about orientations), choices to break commitments made to God and to other human beings (adultery and idolatry, which is a VERY tricky and subtle fault), choices to be envious that result in theft and coveting other people’s possessions, choices to become drunk and pursue a lifestyle of choice to indulge escaping from mature and fruitful living, choices to speak with anger and intense hatred in bitter speech to other human beings (yunno, like the comment section of articles), choices to THREATEN PEOPLE INTO DOING WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO…like the shunning that YOU REGULARLY DO to those whose ORIENTATIONS are imagined by you to be behavioral choices…

and yet somehow, ALL of the above choices you extend Grace and Mercy to, and almost all of those choices you have almost certainly been blood-guilty of yourself!! But you sit cheek and jowl in the pew with your fellow “unrighteous” and allow for yourselves and your cohorts in unrighteousness to participate in the Righteousness of Jesus and thus not only be forgiven, but in your mind EXCUSED from scrutiny…and you are content with the understanding that each person must scrutinize themselves with God (oh wait: Paul said that he did not judge even himself, for God is Judge)…

…and like electric barbwire your eyes SEIZE those English words about homosexual behavior that is the equivalent of a heterosexual choice that is unbalanced and abusive (which is what is being called out by Paul, btw!! Any sexual relationship that is exploitative and destructive to either partner is wrong, regardless of sexual orientation!)…and you make them into your scapegoats, and you WRITE OFF ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS WITH YOUR FAT BUTTS FIRMLY IN THE SEAT OF JUDGEMENT!!

You know this is wrong…you F**KING KNOW that it is WRONG! So you make up platitudes about how you love the sinners but hate the sins…yeah I call supreme bull shit on that one! Because if you did? You would extend to EVERYONE the exact same pass you give first yourself and then everyone else YOU deem is worthy of it.

You need to repent, and I mean right now, and climb down out of the judgement seat and work on taking the friggin LOGS out of your eyes that you have been beating God’s little lambs with incessantly!!
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The irony is that Paul ends that passage with words about the works of Jesus to wash, sanctify and justify whosoever will believe in Jesus, and goes on to say that ALL THINGS ARE LAWFUL!!! And yes, all things are not helpful and many things are indeed harmful.

But his point is that the Work of Christ is GREATER THAN all human behavior and renders judgement of one another as not only null and void but likely a far more insidious and poisonous sin than any of the listed behaviors.

Humans are born, created in Their Image and given a certain being. Among the aspects of that being are our sexuality and our gender…and each of those aspects together with EVERY OTHER GIVEN ASPECT OF OUR BEING is to be brought to our Precious Lord and presented to Them as our suitable offering of Love, and then LIVED OUT as THEY lead us, according to the LIFE that is in THEM and thus flowing into and through US!

Our gender orientations can thus be reflections of the glory of God and mirrors pointing to Their Love and Grace.

Our sexual choices and behaviors can thus be reflections of the glory of God and mirrors pointing to Their Love and Faithfulness!!

And GOD FORBID that we take any aspect of our given beings and use it as a club on someone else’s precious head!

“20 For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body[c] and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

I can guarantee you, however, that your current inner judging of the LGTBQ community is a leprotic infection deep in your soul and in actuality you heap up for yourself such a severe measure by which you shall soon be judged.

May God be true, and love win.

I Want…

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I want my poetry to convey the Beauty behind the beauty.
I want to tell you of the Heart behind the core.
I want to show you the Sacred pulsing in all profane.
I want to show you the Meaning midst the random.

It isn’t enough to be pretty.
It isn’t enough to rub noses in ugly.

I want to scratch you…permanently…that you would ever then Bleed Desire and Longing for that Sacred Heart, that eternal Blood of the Diving running thru everything…always.

Beautiful and Meaningful.

Write that on my tombstone…but only if it’s True.

On Being Triggered and Abandoned (or NOT)

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“When you are triggered, it can feel like moving a mountain to soothe the pathways of abandonment, and to stay embodied to the energy as it surges through your belly and nervous system.

Something is longing to be met, that is for sure. An avalanche of previously disowned feeling, emotion, and sensation, seeking some sort of completion that was not available at an earlier time.

It may seem that there is no way for you to close the loop, that it’s just too much. Open your heart into the too-much-ness, slowly, for very short periods of time, and then rest. Even for just a couple of seconds, use your presence to touch what is emerging – just enough to light up a new path, but not so much that you overwhelm or re-traumatize yourself.

Soften into your belly, into the panic, and take pause from the ancient belief that you must quickly understand, shift, or transform your immediate experience. See that there is nothing to ‘heal,’ but only something to hold. Offer sanctuary for the movement of life as it washes through you, and it will integrate and liberate on its own. Care for yourself in new and wild ways.

To provide a home for sacred metabolization is one of the greatest gifts of love that you can give – not just to yourself but to those around you. To reclaim embodied responsibility for the orphaned pieces of your psyche and soma is not easy and requires a lot of practice. But more than anything, it demands an unconditional commitment to seeing the entirety of your inner experience as worthy, as valid, and as the very seeds of the path forming around you.

Despite how difficult it can be, the fruits of this work are infinite, they are eternal, and to do this may be why you have come here: To make an offering to a weary world, and to do whatever you can to help others, to rest in their majestic true nature.”

A Journey Inside

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One thing I catch a lot of grief for: I have not travelled internationally. There are a lot of complicated small reasons, and one large one…namely, that activity is the purvey of the privileged and powerful and wealthy, and I am none of those things.

I also am a bit nervous about it, so there is that.

But other than Mexico (Tijuana) and Canada (various provinces), I have only travelled the USA.

But in my region? Likely I know the roads better than most people and areas intimately and in detail…and it never ceases to amaze how there are discoverable territories right here under our noses while we fly across oceans to skim the surface of a place and then think we are seasoned travellers and oh so chic and diverse…

Here is a quote that sorta sums up what I am driving at:

“There is also a deeper, archetypal layer to [Brendan’s] journey, which resonates with our own inner Pilgrim—the part of ourselves drawn to make long voyages in search of something for which we long. This is the inward geography of the journey, and one where we may physically travel only a few feet or miles, but where the soul moves in astronomical measure.”

— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD Illuminating the Way: Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics 

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