Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the cycle begins again, the ancient whisper of our own frailty, slipping the fine clothes from our shoulders, taking the crown from our heads, bringing us back to that humble place where it all began and where it will surely end. We are the children of the Earth. Earth born, common as the ground we share, raised up by grace to breathe the mystery, laid back down to sleep the mystery deeper still. Dust to dust, life to life, the great cycle spirals our souls, sends us sailors of time, until we come to rest in our own humility, source of our true dignity.
All those days you felt like dust, like dirt, as if all you had to do was turn your face toward the wind and be scattered to the four corners
or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial—
did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?
This is the day we freely say we are scorched.
This is the hour we are marked by what has made it through the burning.
This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives within the ancient ashes, that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth.
So let us be marked not for sorrow. And let us be marked not for shame. Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less than we are
but for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made and the stars that blaze in our bones and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.
On Ash Wednesday, if you are in church, the minister will invite you to the observance of a “holy Lent” and mark your forehead with the ashes of repentance.
Let me be very clear about this: I love you so much. I delight in you. I cherish you. For ever.
Here are a few more things I want you to comprehend. Despite what you’ve been taught, “holy” does not mean pure and unearthly. “Sin” does not mean breaking my rules and making me mad. “Penitence” does not mean listing and wallowing in all the ways you’re wrong and bad. “Repentance” does not mean promising to do better to stay out of trouble.
Please think about these words a new way, on Ash Wednesday and every other day going forward.
What if you only sin when you refuse healing and cling to brokenness? When you use those sharp broken edges to hurt yourself and others?
What if holiness is when you choose to be whole, even though you’re terrified? When you embrace and enfold those pieces of yourself you’ve lopped off to fit into others’ molds?
What if penitence is when you see yourself clearly, and know, speak, and live from your heart?
What if repentance is returning to your true self in all her messy glory?
What if, this Lent, instead of focusing on the ways you’re not good enough and the ways you fall short, you commit to your own healing?
I was there at the Big Bang, enlivening every particle, atom and molecule. You are made of me, and through me you are connected to everything and everyone.
I am everywhere, my love. You live in me and I live in you. This means, my dear, when you let yourself be healed, your healing heals the world. And when you cling to your brokenness, the world stays a little more broken than it needs to be. Your healing is important and necessary.
You think your healing is selfish. That’s incorrect. On the contrary, your healing is crucial. I’m using that word deliberately, sweetheart. Your healingis the crux – where you and I come together.
This Lent, the only fasts I want from you are these: Fast from distractions that allow you to stay wounded and broken. Fast from believing you’re not good enough. Fast from making yourself small, and nice, and silent. Fast from all judgment, especially of yourself.
This Lent, make space for me to flow into you and through you. Befriend your fear, your anger, and your sadness. They are a deep source of nourishment and strength. Let your love go free. Let your joy be unconfined.
Sweetheart, healing isn’t complicated, and it’s always here for you. All you have to do is tap into it, like a springtime maple tree or an aquifer of living water. You know this. But it’s so easy to forget, isn’t it? All you have to do is let me clear out the dams and the trash, the resentments and identities and old, too-small skins that keep you stuck and stagnant.
Open your heart armor just a little. Let go, child. Breathe and soften. That’s all you have to do. I’ll do the rest.
This Ash Wednesday, let those ashes symbolize our unending connection, a connection so easy to forget and so simple to strengthen.
When the priest wipes those gritty ashes on your forehead and says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” celebrate your elemental oneness with this dear, dirty earth, and with me. I am in those ashes, in the dust, in the stars, and in you.
I need you, my daughter. You’re the only you I created. Please, let yourself be the creation I made you to be.
You don’t need someone outside yourself telling you how to live.
This post is for you if being told to practice gratitude pisses you off, even a little.
We’re prompted to be grateful. A lot. So many studies show that gratitude is good for us—body, mind, soul, and spirit. And self-help types aren’t shy about promoting gratitude practices.
Keep a gratitude journal. Keep a gratitude jar. Say prayers of gratitude. Daily is best, hourly if you can manage it.
This time of year, especially, it seems gratitude is all around.
I have a terrible secret, my friends. For me, gratitude feels like a death-dealing “should.” Gratitude feels preachy to me. Gratitude feels falsely sweet, a close cousin to denial and forced forgiveness. Gratitude makes my body tighten and harden, just a little, until I override that response because what kind of terrible person has a problem with gratitude, for god’s sake??
This is me. If you’re good with gratitude, rock on!
But if you, like me, find “gratitude” grating, I have a suggestion. Practice joy. Joy is still abstract, so let’s bring this concept down to the level of our bodies. What feels good to you? What brings you pleasure? In what do you delight?
I keep a Pleasure and Delight journal, not a gratitude journal. Every night, I note what brought me pleasure that day. Sun on my face. The dinner my husband cooked. “White Lotus, Season 2.” A hot shower. The smell of our pine trees being rained on for the first time in months. A scruffy-tailed squirrel hoovering birdseed on the veranda. A conversation. A cat in my lap. That first cup of coffee. Swimming in a wilderness lake. Reading (or writing) a beautiful sentence. Snow on our mountains. Sitting on a rock with my feet in the river. The color red.
So many moments of joy, when I stop and pay attention.
Am I grateful for these things that bring joy? Of course. Does keeping this list help me pay attention to what brings pleasure and delight? Yes. I’m more apt to notice what feels good to me, and also what feels bad to me.
Life is complex. We are complex. We, and life, can be two things at once. Maybe more than two things at once. At heart, we are just fancy animals with bodies that relish pleasure and delight. We benefit when we don’t judge the soft animals of our bodies, but instead let them love what they love. Make your pleasure and delight a judgment-free zone.
This holiday season, may we notice our joy. May we let our lives be what they are, containers for both beauty and pain. May we stand with hands open, hearts present, simply being here now. May we say “Thank you!” when we notice our joy. May we say “Thank you!” when we feel our pleasure and delight.
May we savor these moments, sink our roots down into them, and grow ever more strong, resilient, and able to weather our storms: sturdy trees who joyfully shelter ourselves, our families and communities, and our world.
Notice what brings you joy, and do more of that. Intentionally create pleasure and delight for yourself. Savor these moments. Remember these moments. Gather these moments and feed on them.
My joy practice ritualizes and nourishes my connection with Earth and the Ground of Being—the Source who gives life to all things and who receives us back into herself when we die.
To nourish and strengthen ourselves with pleasure and delight is a holy act.
Ithink this is the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness? ~Mary Oliver, Kingfisher
A note on Thanksgiving Day: Millions of Indigenous people died in the genocide perpetrated by White European colonists. For their descendants who remain, Thanksgiving Day is a day to remember and mourn. May we descendants of those White European colonists take seriously and reckon with this legacy.
I live and work on the original homelands of the Wasq’ú (Wasco), and the Tana’nma (Warm Springs) people. They ceded this land to the U.S. government in the Treaty of 1855. The Numu (Paiute) people were forcibly moved to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation starting in 1879. The Klamath Trail ran north through this region to the great Celilo Falls trading grounds and the Klamath Tribes claim it as their own. Descendants of these original people are thriving members of our communities today. I acknowledge and thank the original stewards of this land.
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Have you ever tried really hard to believe something that you knew in your heart wasn’t true? I’ve been trying to make myself believe a very important untrue thing for most of my life. I didn’t know I was doing it. I just felt wonky and off, a feeling I ignored for decades. I felt unaligned, and I thought all I needed to do was try harder to believe this thing that, deep down inside, I knew was untrue. Everyone around me believed it, or at least they said they did, so it must be true.
I thought the fault was in me, not the untrue thing.
I’ve known since I was a little girl that much of what I was hearing about God from church and family and culture justwasn’t true. Experience upon experience upon experience didn’t line up with what the people around me said about “God.” I thought that the remedy was to discount my experience of holiness, and cut off the parts of me that didn’t fit into the “God” box.
I’ve had this backwards all along. I want so passionately to articulate the importance of this shift that I’m struggling to find the words. Your experience of the sacred is the starting point for the stories and myths and theologies, the symbols and metaphors, that attempt to contain the sacred. If your heart-felt experiences of “God” don’t fit the theology your head is striving to believe, it’s the theology that’s wrong, not your experiences.
Sisters, we will never fit into the myth of monotheism—one God for everyone, invented by Abraham thousands of years ago, the source of so much suffering in the world today. We will never find a home for ourselves in worship of a disembodied, unearthly, solitary Father God. We will never be lovable and whole in a theology constructed to shelter a male, celibate, lone ranger lawgiver and arbiter of holiness. Men have a hard enough time, but women? Women will never measure up. (I imagine that queer folk struggle even more.)
If “God” is ethereal, heavenly, and orderly, what do I do with my embodied, earthy, messy experiences of Holiness? What do I do with sacred dreams, making love and birthing babies, deep grief and soaring joy?
We swim in monotheism like fish in water. We don’t even notice it anymore, it’s such an assumed fabric of our lives. I see now that even as I scrape off and root out the patriarchal Father “God” from my being, I’ve been subconsciously searching for another monotheistic “God” to take His place. I’ve been disbelieving in that “God,” not understanding that I have gotten the cart before the horse. I’ve been searching for a pre-existing myth into which I can fit.
What I need to be doing is to make my experiences, beliefs, and values primary before finding, or creating, a myth that fits ME.
I cannot overstate the importance of this shift.
The three pillars of my mending ministry (aka “coaching”) are remembering who you are, reclaiming your authority, and recommitting to your priorities.
To reclaim my authority, I now see, means to honor my experiences of holiness. I am NOT limited to what others have already created. I must take seriously the values and beliefs that grow out of my experience – of embodiment as an Earthling, of friendship, of love and sex and marriage and motherhood and aging, of words and images, and more – and weave them into a theological garment that fits ME.
I can give up this exhausting search through the already-created for an existing temple I can tolerate. I can create a structure into which I fit as a flesh and blood woman on this beautiful earth. I can build a shelter for myself and maybe for you, too.
Any theology you now inhabit was made up by someone. Just because you were raised in it and four billion people believe it doesn’t make it true.
There really is nowhere to land but in your own holy heart.
All the goodness and wisdom you need is within you. When you go into your heart deeply enough, you’ll find that you’re connected to all the other hearts in the universe.
If you’ve been cutting off parts of yourself to fit into the patriarchal monotheistic myth, these steps could be the beginning of reclaiming your authority.
1. Make a list of your holy experiences. Remember that our English word “holy” shares a root with “healthy,” “healing,” and “whole.” When, where, how, and with whom do you feel or have you felt whole, healed, and holy? In what do you experience holiness?
My list of objects, moments, and memories is quite long. Here are a few, in no particular order: Pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing babies. Sitting on a rock with my feet in a river. Swimming in high mountain lakes. Standing in front of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” The companionship of cats, dogs, and horses. El Hospital del Alma in Castrojeriz, Spain, and my Camino vision of the deep heart. Hikes with Jed. Listening to wind in Ponderosa Pines. Mary Oliver’s poetry. Going to church with my grandparents. Water fresh from a spring. Granite and sandstone. Dippers. The night sky.
What’s on your list? Please take five minutes to start one.
2. Honor your experiences as holy. Ritualize the quotidian, everyday items and events. Reverence your holy moments. Remember your holy experiences deliberately, with intention. Pick a few items on your list, and find or make symbols of them for your altar.
4. When it feels right to you, begin to play with myths, spiritualities, theologies, symbols, and metaphors that contain your experiences of “God.” Let yourself roam in the wild unknown. There are no rules.
If you feel like you need a starting point, here are a few ideas. Perhaps Celtic spirituality, the pre-Roman Catholic version, works for you. Maybe Goddess spirituality is your jam. Maybe it’s Wicca. Maybe it’s even progressive Christianity. Or a little of this and a little of that to begin with. Since those are already invented, maybe your call is to invent something completely new, and invite us to join you. I don’t know. Only you know. If you do explore an existing theological structure, pay attention to how it feels in your body. Ask yourself if it feels true enough to contain your experiences of the holy.
As for me, I’m going to dwell in this wild openness for as long as it takes, which may be a lifetime. These roots go deep. It will take time, attention, and perseverance to disentangle myself from Father God’s possessive grasp.
No authority is higher than your own holy heart. Trust your good, strong, wise heart. Follow its yearnings, whether or not they make sense to your head.
Remember who you are. Reclaim your authority. Recommit to your priorities. This is the work. This is the call. This is the journey. This is the dream.
I turned 64 a couple of weeks ago. Growing old has been on my mind a lot lately. It’s been damn stressful up in my brain. Here’s what’s helping me, offered to those of you who are also thinking about growing old and feeling stressed about it.
We were at the coast last week for our annual post-Easter rest. (My Episcopal priest husband naps. I walk.) As is often true of the Oregon coast in April, the weather was wet and windy. But every evening for a couple of hours, the rain would taper off and I’d drag Jed down to the beach to watch the sunset. On this particular evening, the sunset was subtle. A solid bank of clouds out over the ocean seemed set to block the sun’s rays as it sank into the sea. The cloudy sky turned a beautiful mauve and pink, mist gathered at the base of Mount Neahkahnie, and waves reflected the sky back to itself.
We passed a photographer with his tripod at the waves’ edge, long lens pointed to where the invisible sun might be. A family of five, their big black poodle bounding in the surf, walked up the beach toward Manzanita, occasionally glancing toward the western horizon. Jed and I were ready to go inside out of the wind ourselves, believing we’d seen all the show there was to see.
We were wrong. Suddenly the sun peeked out from a hole in the clouds and shone right at us. Immense. Orange. Stunningly beautiful—clouds above, below, and all around the one little hole. The sun had an entire limitless Pacific horizon to choose from, and she came down in the one place she could shine through. We were awestruck. Through binoculars we watched the curvature of the sun slowly sink behind the clouds like mountains. Words cannot describe.
I turned to see if the photographer was catching this, hopeful that he’d capture the shot of a lifetime. He was walking up the dunes, tripod over his shoulder, his back to the beauty blazing behind him. The family of five was likewise walking up the beach toward Manzanita, seemingly oblivious, black poodle still bounding in and out of the waves. We watched until the last burnished edge of sun sank below the cloud bank, and reminded each other to breath.
If we’d let the wind and the wet keep us inside, if we’d turned our backs too soon, if I hadn’t brought my binoculars … We would have missed it.
What does this moment have to do with growing old? Here’s my takeaway. If I expect my old age to be a long slide into mellowness and mist, if I turn my back too soon, I’ll miss many extraordinary moments. We see what we expect to see.
Show up. Get out on the beach, no matter what the weather.
Be present with each step and each breath. The future radiates out from the present like a wave.
The quality of your peaceful presence in this moment determines how your future will feel.
Your thoughts about aging—your thoughts about anything, really—will strongly impact your experience. You can choose different thoughts, if you want to and you do the work. (Learning to notice your thoughts and how to choose better ones is a core component of my coaching work.)
PPS. Interested in talking more about aging and how to think more helpful thoughts about this inevitable change? I offer free, no-strings-attached Clarity Calls.
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Today is Holy Saturday in the western Christian tradition. Yesterday was Good Friday, the day of Crucifixion. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, the day of Resurrection. Nothing much happens on Holy Saturday. There’s a lot of waiting and more than a little hopelessness in the gospel stories.
This emptiness makes so much sense to me.
To pause between death and resurrection is appropriate. To honor our emptiness is necessary. This pausing to honor emptiness can be uncomfortable, especially in our productivity-worshipping culture. Silence and space can be scary. We have the urge to rush to fill the pause.
Sisters, stop and take a breath today. Grieve your endings. Fully inhabit your emptiness. Give yourself space and silence. Embrace this pause as a gift.
As we lose the roles and identities accumulated during the first half of our lives, we begin to uncover who we really are, and who we want to become, in the second half. For women especially, the identities and roles of our first four to six decades are often defined by who we nurture—friends, siblings, spouses and partners, children, other people’s children, parents, institutions. When these roles are stripped away, we can come home to ourselves.
Jesus of Nazareth preached trust in this process of losing and finding, over and over. “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” These words are in every gospel, often in several places. I conclude that he really meant them.
When we resist deaths, small and large, we stay stuck. When we cling to how life was, or how life should have been, or how we want life to be, we aren’t actually living at all. Because living happens right now, in this moment.
When we accept the endings and hold ourselves gently in the space between death and hoped-for new life, resurrection happens. It’s inevitable.
When we pause, when we wait, when we let what’s dead be dead, life will resurrect itself. Simply give it time.
This holy pause pertains in other traditions, too. Christianity does not have a monopoly on death, resurrection, and the praise of emptiness. Christianity simply echoes and amplifies the cycle of death and rebirth encoded in our earthling DNA.
Here’s the Tao Te Ching: We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the centre hole that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.
We work with being, but non-being is what we use.*
Remember who you are. Return to your body and your goodness. Reclaim your authority. Take your time. Honor your holy pauses. Honor the innate wisdom of change. Recommit to your priorities. Boundless compassion thrives within excellent boundaries.
As much as you can, praise the emptiness of this moment. Honor this emptiness, this fallow field, as it is the ground of new life. Simply wait, and watch for green shoots to break through the bare earth.
New life always breaks through.
New life always breaks through, when you are ready.
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Photo Credit: Wilson Arch, Utah, November 2016, Jed Holdorph *From Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.
“I hope she always looks at herself like that … “ This is my friend’s wish for her four-year-old daughter. Her photo shows her daughter looking in the mirror, admiring her new French braid, and she’s simply ecstatic with herself.
We all used to look in the mirror like that. When was the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror and were completely satisfied, even ecstatic, with the woman looking back?
What happened?
What happened is culture, family, church, school, patriarchy. We’ve been told so many lies about women’s worth – our bodies, our voices, our places. We absorb them from birth, if not before. They’re in the air we breathe.
I spent three days last week in a quarterly retreat with 65 other mostly women entrepreneurs. We were asked to reflect on our biggest obstacle. Hands down the biggest obstacle was that we were “playing small.”
Why? Because we’re afraid that if we go big, get visible, and say exactly what we mean, we won’t be safe. Here’s what I wrote: “I believe that the real me is unlovable. So I have to send out fake me to fool everyone with my perfect façade. Staying small and fuzzy keeps me safe, and I have to feel safe at all times.”
I know that none of this is true. Yet my default pattern when I’m about to say something that I think someone might not like is to freak out and silence myself in advance. I default to “I have to prove that I’m lovable. And being lovable means no one will ever get mad at me and everything will always go smoothly.”
Ownership of ourselves comes after awareness of our patterns. I’m noticing this pattern, finally, and dismantling the thoughts that make me suffer. Because they’re lies.
You heal this oh-so-painful pattern by gradually, one-by-one, relieving yourself of the weight of those lies. Your belief in your belovedness is down there, underneath all the garbage. Beloved shiny you, the you who looks in the mirror ecstatically, will rise up, expand, and gradually take her rightful place as you lift off the garbage piece by piece.
How to lift off the garbage? Here are a few suggestions, in order of time commitment required.
High Five Habit: Basically all you do here is look yourself in the mirror and give yourself a high-five. For more, check out Kara’s Unf*ck Your Brain episode with Mel Robbins.
RAIN: Dr. Tara Brach’s four-step process for becoming aware of what’s going on with us and giving ourselves kind regard.
Thought Work: Dismantle those lies through gentle, self-compassionate inquiry.
And finally, find a photo of yourself as a child, frame it nicely if you want, and put it where you’ll see it all the time. Ask yourself if that kid is unworthy. Does she need to prove her belovedness? Would you let anyone else tell her she’s not okay just as she is?
Our habits of unworthiness are based on false beliefs.
There is no lasting safety in playing small.
There is no true joy in smooshing ourselves into little appropriate boxes.
Making our belovedness dependent on how others treat us only leaves us bereft of our own kindness and compassionate self-regard.
We’re still the beautiful beings we were when we were babies, toddlers, and four-year-olds, before we started to believe the hurtful lies. Beloved, your belovedness is a given. Your belovedness hasn’t gone anywhere. Your belovedness is within you, waiting for you to remember.
Who do you think you are? How do you treat yourself? These are ultimately theological questions, deeply related to our conceptions of Being and our place in the cosmos.
Want to go deeper? Contact me for a free no-strings-attached conversation.
PS. Happy holidays and happy New Year! I’ll see you in January, beloveds.
