Autumnal Equinox Meditation

Yee~ha! It's the Autumnal Equinox!!! Here's a short 12 minute guided meditation to bring us into autumn. Please feel free to share with others. 

https://us02web.zoom.us/…/xWVY7E8wO7tiPXByCIthJvT3l3Izv9bf1…Passcode: #FE+w2d?

Enjoy!

Leia

The God of Presence

It’s happening again. Temperatures have begun to drop, and the sun’s path across the sky has shifted south as the Earth tips her way toward winter. And it comes none too soon for me. When I lived in Maine, the summers were always too short and the winters far too long. Not here. And particularly not this year. I’ve had it with hot~hot days and fires near and far that lend a smoky heaviness to the air.

 

This morning, though, I am not simply relieved by the change. I revel in it. The sun’s later rising allows me to rise later myself and still catch those gorgeous predawn colors, though I may not be so fortunate today given the thick clouds overhead. Yet as I crest the hill, the sky is aglow, vibrant fuchsia where it touches the Earth’s eastern edge fading quickly to a mere hint of blushing pink in the grayness above. The color lasts only a minute or two, accentuating the gift of having seen it at all. 

 

I reach the lake, and am again startled at how our drought~~and I claim that pronoun for the species at least partially responsible for it~~has altered the lake’s contours. Its perimeter has shrunk considerably. Mounds of rock, usually fully submerged, are visible mid~lake, and boulders at the southern edge are completely exposed now, their lower portions showing the sculpting of years as water pooled about or rushed by.

 

After a vigorous walk to the far limits of the lake and back, I climb down to those huge stones, and sit with my back to them on a rocky slab near the water’s edge. The only sound is the combined chorus of red~wings and swallows greeting the day. It must be a trick of the rocks behind me, for suddenly those exuberant squeaks, clicks and chirps grow louder and louder still, until I’m engulfed in sound. I give myself to it fully, suspecting it won’t last long.

 

And sure enough, like the fleeting colors of dawn, this rollicking avian hymn to the new day soon softens, though I have moved not at all and the birds are as plentiful as before. And now comes the revving of a truck engine and the bark of a dog. The human world has awakened.

 

I’ve just finished The Book Of Longings, a new novel by Sue Monk Kidd. Set in the time of Christ, it is a fictionalized imagining of the women whose lives intersected his. It is their story that is told. As I sit now before the evidence of Earth changes amid a disturbing political and cultural climate, one of the most powerful lines of the book comes back to me. Yaltha, elder and woman of wisdom, states quite simply, “We must let life be life.”

 

Huge wisdom in six small words. Power is abused, tragedy strikes, living beings suffer. This was life then, and it is life now. Beauty lives as well, then and now, as do love and selfless acts of courage. These are the weft and warp of life.

 

Another powerful line in the novel comes when, after a grueling time of exile, the protagonist Ana shares that she no longer believes “in the God of rescue, only the God of presence.”

The God of Presence. I sit a bit longer…with the rocks, the brooding sky, birds who feed on gnats too tiny for me to see, and a pair of young bucks who sidle down to the lake to drink its cool water. And as tears come, I also sit with the God of Presence. I walk home with that God, experience that God as I hold my husband close, and now as I type these words. 

 

Yes, we must let life be life. And we must also heed its call to do all that our gifts and position urge us to do. And perhaps in opening to the God of Presence we will find rescue. Not that our challenges, both individual and collective, will be miraculously healed. But perhaps opening to the God of Presence will soothe, vivify, and reorient us, and offer us the courage to do all that we can for this wounded and glorious world.

 

Blessings on all that you are and all that you do, this day and every day.

 

Leia