We are off to Asheville on Thursday. It's been a season of richness and loss. Chickens, cats and furniture have been steadily disappearing from our home - going to their new homes via friends and Freecycle. Meanwhile the rest of our stuff moves around, disappears into boxes and merges into piles. Our feelings are doing something similar - shifting rapidly, flowing into little eddies and giant waterfalls depending on the day - excitement, sadness, overwhelm. It is not easy to radically shift the life of a family like this.
The love and gratitude that has been showered on us lately is almost too much to take in. I feel a bit stunned. I knew we were loved and appreciated but, wow. It's been amazing.
My friend Jill gave me a cool book called Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings by Rob Brezsny. I recommend it - full of inspiring stories.
By opening it randomly I found a story about an order of monks in China that dismantle and rebuild their entire age-old temple every twenty years. They do it to keep the ancient construction techniques alive, to create the bonding of the teamwork required, and to do a deep, deep cleaning of their space, right down to the dirt and then up again. Wow. What a great practice. I feel like we are doing something like this. Hopefully the benefits outweight the stress!
Below are 2 beautiful poems for the seasonal holidays from Gary Snyder, one of my favorite poets. My friend Jane turned me onto one of them.
lots and lots of love and peace in 2008,
Jennifer
Pine tree tops
In the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
what do we know.- Gary Snyder
In the next century
or the one beyond that
they say,
are valleys, pastures.
We can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
