This week in the online interfaith dance chapel Nancy and I played with Mary Oliver’s instructions for living. Invoking through dance our astonishing lives, we asked through the wisdom of our bodies how much effort the Divine is really asking of us.
We danced with hard hard and soft soft—and finding the right balance for each of us. I am grateful to have Mary Oliver’s instructions for living to set the stage.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
To tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
What a wonderful practice we have in InterPlay! We move, we pay attention, we tell. Many of us find in InterPlay the missing home of embodied spirituality- our movement, voice, story, and stillness.
What astonishing thing did you experience recently? How will you tell about it?
One way to “tell” is to dance on behalf of the astonishing presence of life, beauty. We can even be astonished to be broken open by the dark, and by suffering.
I so appreciate the simple gift of being in a place of prayer or meditation where dance, paying attention, and telling is the expectation. This follows ancient patterns.
I also deeply appreciate having others mirror back attentiveness as a gift not a problem, especially as someone so sensitive who notices A LOT!
What is dancing you today? Mary Oliver goes on to say—
Ten times a day something happens to me like this—some strengthening throb of amazement—some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
I am grateful for this little online interfaith dance chapel, not as a place to predict astonishment, but as a place to strengthen my soul muscles and to live into this time with as much honest beauty as I can.
As an early mystic said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
You are welcome to attend Monday’s 5pm pst and/or Thursday’s 9:30am pst. This is truly part of the Hidden Monastery, everyone in their cell/home and yet connected through the great web of love.
This is an ongoing practice until Nancy Pfaltzgraf and I know different. Always the same link.
1. Please join my meeting. https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/850439213
Or, call in using your telephone.
United States: +1 (224) 501-3318
United States (toll-free): 1 866 899 4679
Access Code: 850-439-213
We accept payments of 25-49/month at the mystic tech store to support the chapel. You can come for any length of time! Even more than once.
Come be nourished by the dance, by wisdom and real community!
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