Tag Archives: love

Pink Moon Peace and April Showers

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Those showers have arrived. Hurrah.

Are you crazy, they ask? You like chilly rain? No. but our beloved Mother Earth does.

And we need it. Just over 3 months into the year and we’ve had only slightly more than half the rain we need. We had a cold winter, not a snowy one, days off notwithstanding.

If you’re planting flower gardens, think drought tolerant… And start thinking about how you can become an activist for this beautiful planet. She needs your Love. Nature is out of balance.

But at the same time you plan… enjoy the drenching and think about what wakes up when the rains come. It’s quite an Earth we live on.

Here’s to April showers and the joyful blossoming of Pink Moon Peace.

PinkMoonLunacyApr8

“Greats” are really great

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I come from a nuclear family full of worriers. There is no one better for catastrophizing than my mother.   It didn’t take long before she and my sister (who had always wanted me to have a biological child) were kvetching about whether or not it was a good idea for us to have taken on such a challenging child. Along with their worry came a bit of detachment – because their fear would have likely lead them to stop the adoption process, they were a bit slow to warm in their commitment to seeing our son as a full part of the family.

Without grandma fully there, there was another unexpectedly unfilled role in our village. Where was our wise and loving female elder who was going to love him unconditionally and bake him cookies right before we wanted him to eat a healthy dinner? The answer came in a woman I have adored myself since I was about the same age as he – my beloved aunt!   Auntie came with us on a week-long timeshare vacation and came with a full and open heart ready to love our boy with all of her being, just as she has my sister and I through our whole lives.   Watching the two of them together – doing puzzles, watching the birds, giggling in imaginative play – it was suddenly clear that “Grands” weren’t the only loving elders who could play a role in community!

Sometimes our immediate families aren’t our best supports.   Who else is there in the extended clan that might be there in your village in a role you didn’t consider? A beloved aunt? A cherished coach?   A favorite teacher? A church member? Love can be packaged in many ways…are you open to finding it in a different package than you expected?

To Peace under the Full Pink Moon!

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It’s not always easy to stay in the present. Easy to be caught by the perfection of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow. Or the horrors of what happened and the fears of what’s to come.

And yet, here, one perfect day, ready to unwind before us. What could be sweeter? It’s to be a blustery spring day with a full moon rising in beauty. There are things to accomplish. Things to enjoy. Certainly there will be things to deal with. And so what?

It’s here. Here for us to treat gently. Here for us to make Peace with, to make Peace within, to make Peace for. And here are we… ready to Peace.

And later? here comes the full Pink Moon. ah… Beauty. For us. Enjoy. Go out and make some memories and Love and Laugh and Dance and Peace by the light of the full Pink Moon! I can’t wait to hear the tales you’ll have to tell.

PinkMoonLunacyApr4

Gently, Firmly, Saying “Yes!” to Peace

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There’s so much evil being done in the name of someone’s God. People are killing. People are hating and dehumanizing. And they’re saying that their religion doesn’t merely give them permission, it demands this of them. They’re believing that.

It’s horrifying. It’s heartbreaking.

And it’s perplexing. Where do people of good faith and philosophy enter into this? How do we do it in a way that is helpful?

How do we bring Love to the world? Each of us?

And how do we make that matter?

We’ve got to keep asking ourselves. We have to keep helping one another down the road to Peace. We must be active, because they are active. No time to wring our hands.

What do I do? What do you do? How do we Love? And how is Peace not a verb? How do we make that so? May the full flower Pink Moon shine love and Peace on this Earth.

PinkMoonLunacyApr3

 

April Fools and Lunatics

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Well, we woke up and the ugly laws are still there. Laws that say that what I believe means that I may forbid you services: health, food, housing. The Fools say: oh, we didn’t meant tha-at. The Lunatics say: this is not acceptable. Peace is inclusion.

This country was founded, with flaws, it must be admitted, on civility and citizenship.

Every amendment we’ve made to its founding has been for greater inclusivity.

But there’s something about homosexuality and this moment in history that makes us think it’s ok to say you’re less than human. And it seems that has given us permission to step up our racism and our misogyny.

Lots of people sitting back and smugly shaking heads that this just proves how crazy people are. It’s not the right reaction. We have to stand up and change the laws. We have to stand up and shop other places. We have to vacation other places. Wake up. Stand up. Speak up. Step up.

As I write, I realize beloved nephew is getting married in Arkansas. So Miss Wake up. Stand up. Speak up. Step Up, Priestess had better figure out how she’s going to respond when there.

Everyone has worth and dignity. Everyone is precious. People of faith and philosophy had better figure that out. We’re here to celebrate creation and create community.

Watch out April Fools whose jokes have turned mean. We are Pink Moon Lunatics for Peace. and we vote, in the voting box and with our dollars.

PinkMoonLunacyApr1

 

Pink Peace Lunacy

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We hear and we hear and we hear about things that are wrong with this world. And there are many things. Isn’t it time that we begin to create the things that are right with this world? Isn’t it time we be what is right with this world?

I’m still grappling with this notion of sacred honor… trying to understand what it means to me… thinking that perhaps it needs to mean something so that things change. I believe that we’re the change. And that people in parts of the world where change is much harder than here need to know that we believe that they’re the change.

Although it’s certainly easier for me to consider what the change might be here far away from some of the awful violence people are experiencing.

But if Spring can turn a white world into pink beauty, if the Moon can go from nothing to bursting, if we can begin again, then Lunacy is not impossible — and neither is Peace. Let us be Lunatics of Love and Hope and Peace. Let’s start now!

PinkMoonLunacyMar21

Peace without Patron Saints?

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I like a party as well as the next woman  — or at least I used to before I discovered I could stay home and write…

But St. Patrick’s day (in addition to having been my Aunt Kathryn’s birthday) has always been a bit over the top as it’s celebrated in this country.

I spent my 20s and much of my 30s in New York City. What a day of revelry St Paddy’s day was! And I suppose still is. Marching bands and green beer. Lots of public drunkenness. Really, last night as I was sifting through images i thought, oh, my goodness, cops used to fall asleep on park benches and in the subway. That was an earlier trusting time. They were wearing guns! Nobody took them! Nobody hurt the cops. So I guess there is some good stuff to those earlier times. And recently, as in this year, LGBTQ folk get to march along with everyone else even in Boston’s parade. So, backing down the discrimination is good…

But the more I read about the Patron saint for this, the more I began to question the notion of Patron Saints… Rome, and it’s friend Christianity, were in Ireland to conquer it for the empire and spread their version of orthodox religion. I suddenly stopped and thought, right, they killed a lot of people, Pagan and Pelagian, in the name of the one true faith.

They drove out the “snakes.” How old were we before we realized, right, the only snakes they talked about were the Pagans, the unbelievers.

It makes me weary. Can we, we the people, start working on Peace that includes rather than excludes? It seems to be time, doesn’t it?

Peace for everyone… not just for one group… because that’s just oppression. Peace from Love.

SugarMoonLunacyMar17

Sweet Sabbath for Sugar Moon Peace

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An Anglo and a Palestinian woman walk into a doughnut shop: time to make the Peace.

Sometimes it’s that simple. Meeting up, in public places, so people get used to seeing women with and without headscarves sharing sweetness. Giggle for Peace. Share a pastry. Spend time with friends to build community.

It’s heartbreaking really, what’s going on in the world, all the places people were being killed. We named them, all the martyrs, all the ravaged lands, including our own.

Kindness, we need more kindness. Give up on your need to have others be wrong. Reflect on what you can do better. I’m not going to solve the problems in Africa or the Middle East. I can keep building community here. I can go out for a sweet slice of life in the name of friendship and wind up having it be Peacemaking.

If that’s not keeping a Sabbath holy, I don’t know what is. And every day is a holy day. This is the season for boiling our inclusive instincts down into kindness and compassion. Sugar Moon, indeed!

SugarMoonLunacyFeb22

Working with the Snow Moon Peace

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Having been watching the weather in Sweden, I know it’s far warmer there than here — at the moment it’s about 35 degrees warmer. (it is a bit brrr-ish here at 0˚. I currently have heaters aimed at the cold water pipe in my sink and am flushing warm water down the toilet… neither of those pipes have insulation… sigh.) So it’s not unreasonable to hear that they’re going out into the woods to gather winter fuel.

Still, oddly, I find it difficult to imagine my loved ones in anything other than my weather, so I find it extraordinarily brave of them!

What they are, in fact, is far better attuned than I to the difference the seasons make in the woods and how best to take advantage of that… or rather, more rightly put, to live with that.

it’s hard, since i’m an indoor girl to be to aware of how the earth moves… and it’s good to have a circle that includes people who know the forest, know when the mushrooms crop up and the berries come, know when the forest offers what’s needed.

I’m both wildly interested and disinterested in the same moment… Sometimes I think it’s just laziness… others, i’m not sure…

So i return as I often do to the circle. To having those in my circle who know what I don’t. Who pay attention differently, who turn their heads in other directions… Those friends keep us more widely engaged.

And now I have the image of birch logs blazing merrily in their fireplace… and I think of their eating one of my favorite pastries through the Lenten season… as they presage the Sugar Moon in so many ways. (who’d expect the Northlands to lead us into the the Spring?) I love them, and I love that I’m invited to see life through their eyes.

We make Peace with the Earth, with the Seasons and with our lives in so many different ways. It’s only as we gather them together that Peace can be seen as the beautiful patchwork it’s meant to be…

SnowMoonLunacyFeb16