Tag — blessings
A Guide Through the Dark: “Lanterns” by Jennifer McGuiggan
Are you feeling alone? Do you need some light for your journey? I have the perfect little treasure for you to hold in your hands!
Lanterns: A Gathering of Stories, is a collection of photography and essays edited by Jennifer McGuiggan of The Word Cellar. In a moment of inspiration, Jennifer decided to call upon the women who have been lanterns in her life, gathering up their words and images so that you too could be encouraged by their insight. The results are truly lovely.
This beautiful square gift book is handcrafted, professionally printed, and thoughtfully created, making it the perfect gift for your girlfriends, your daughters, your mothers, yourself. It is a gift of hope, inspiration, and the reminder that creativity and community walk alongside each other, hand in hand, a string of lanterns lighting the way.
I feel so honored to be included with this tribe of soulsisters, including: Darlene J Kreutzer, Liz Lamoreux, Jen Lee, Lisa Ottman, and my amazing life coach, Jena Strong. Here’s what Jen Lemen says about Lanterns:
“Lanterns offers a kind light to weary travelers wishing for companions on the journey toward a well-crafted soul. Stories, poems, and essays offer signposts and gentle guidance, reminding readers that resistance melts away in the company of those who believe in the path set before us. By illuminating the ways we can move outside of our interior reflections into a more inclusive whole, this lovely book provides a way into togetherness that will encourage and inspire anyone longing for authentic connection around their creative work.”
~Jen Lemen, artist, activist, dreamer
Lanterns: A Gathering of Stories is now available for holiday pre-order. Buy a single book at the special introductory price of $18 or choose a gift bundle — two books for $32 or three books for $45. (A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Girls Write Now, a NYC nonprofit that helps teenage girls develop their creative, independent voices and explore careers in professional writing.
As a special bonus, if you purchase this book in the month of December you’ll receive a free podcast of me reading my contribution, a blessing for creative souls, in your January email. Just put “blessings” in the notes when you order.
Holiday pre-orders will be accepted until December 13, 2009. Pre-orders will start shipping by December 16 for delivery by Christmas in the U.S.
May Lanterns light your way this holiday season, and well into the new year!
A Blessing for Work
This given to me by poet Jessica Schafer, and I share it now with you. May it bless the work of you hands, and the work of you soul.
May the Light of Your Soul Guide You
John O’Donohue
May the light of your soul guide you.
May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart.
May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.
May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work.
May your work never weary you.
May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration, and excitement.
May you be present in what you do.
May you never become lost in the bland absences.
May the day never be a burden.
May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises.
May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.
May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected.
May your soul calm, console and renew you.
The Blessings
i promised to stop adopting teenagers, but they keep slipping into my heart…
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I love these young ones so much it’s ridiculous. Each one has crawled into my soul in a different way, and while at times this process splits me open, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
There’s a scene in the Princess Bride where a funny old crone makes a pill for new life, and she paints something on it croaking: “The coating makes it go down easier.” I want to wrap my arms around each of these precious ones and let my heart for them coat them like chocolate –one long-lasting dose of mama-love to help the new life of adulthood go down a little more smoothly.
I want wrap them up with affection. With warmth. With stability. With all the elements of unconditional love you can think to put on a menu. And then, when they are all warm and cozy, I want to drop integrity into the center of their chests, like a silver quarter slipping into a coin slot.
If they have integrity then all thier live-long days they will be the stellar creatures they are already becoming. Not integrity to the rules, but the kind of integrity that allows you to acknowledge who you truly are, and stand in that truth. The kind of integrity that is not beholden to outside rules, or your peer’s opinons, or because of ‘the way it’s done’– but because of a solid internal compass that will not steer you wrong if you listen. The kind of integrity that lets you live a life on the outside that is true to the life you hold in your heart. If they have that, well, they will have everything they need.
So that is what I bless them with, in my dreaming, in my words, in my living. And the old Christian mystic who married that witchy little crone in my soul says, “Amen, may it be so.”
“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid”
-Basil King
Sacred Life Sunday: What God/ess is this?
a lovely dinner grace from last year’s mapgie girl summer zine.
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Sacred Life Sunday: Solstice Blessing
Our solstice fire from last summer. Photo by madgiddy.
May light dominate your life in these coming days.
May the moments of darkness be far outnumbered by the presence of light.
When you next gather around the table in your homes may you remember light, and love, and the sun.
May these moments of holy time help us all to remember that the world spins, and the tide turns and the nights grow shorter – and regardless of our will or our work, the gift of Light Returning happens over and over and over again.
May the blessing of light be upon you –
Light without and light within.
May the blessed sunlight shine on you like a great fire,
So that stranger and friend may come and warm themselves at it.
And may light shine out of the two eyes of you,
Like a candle set in the window of a house,
Bidding the wanderer to come in out of the storm.
-a traditional Celtic blessing
The front porch of our Seattle home.
Sacred Life Sunday
click watch a joyful romp
mother’s prayer #105
may my children for always
feel this at home in
their holy, beautiful bodies.
amen.
With Love, from the Single Saints and Me
One year in college, a couple decades ago, my girlfriends and I decided to wear black on Valentines’ Day. We were all boyfriendless at the time, and Spring had hit early so couples were coming out the dorms like moths from a wardrobe. We rebeled against coupledom in all it’s sacchrine glory. And what else is a rebel to do, but wear black?
Many years later at graduate school a professor of mine asked me to tell her my life story. I told her all the basics: where I grew up, what my undergraduate degree was in, when I got married. When she asked me how old I was when I got married, and the age “23″ came out of my mouth, this wise woman nodded her head and said, “Oh, so you’ve never been single.”
No, I have never been single. I went straight from a small Methodist college, where (almost) everyone was not so much single as just not-married-yet; on to graduation; and then straight to “Here Comes the Bride.” I never lived a day in the life as a single gal.
But she had been a single woman, my 50-something thesis advisor, and many of my girlfriends have as well–either as women who have not married, or who have married and are single again. And there’s also those girlfriends who have had long-term partners and common law unions, only to find themselves on the single side of the chart once again.
These women do not live lives of bereavement. They are not bereft. And whether they are single by choice or by circumstance, all of them have built lives that are as full and rich as any woman with a ring on her left hand and someone else’s clothes in her closet.
So every year, on Valentine’s Day, I remember that year in protest-black, I recall that a-ha moment with my professor, and it prompts me to post this blessing. I wrote it out of love for St. Lucy, for my single friends, and for the passionate heart of St. Valentine. If you are single, I hope it is a gift to you today. Thank you for living lives of admiration, and for putting up with all of us who go all gooey under the influence of paper hearts.
With Love and Respect,
Rachelle
______________________
I bless you in the midst of your singleness,
In the ebb and the flow of it,
In the hot and the cold of it.
May you enjoy the gift of independence.
May you travel far and make brave choices.
May you find love within yourself,
In the arms of God,
And in the hearts of others.
I bless you in the name of Saint Lucy,
Single and Whole,
Who refused to marry at the demands
Of convenience and culture,
Proclaiming instead satisfaction with her singleness,
And in doing so lit the way for others.
I bless you in the name of Saint Valentine,
Brave and Kind,
Who brought marriage to those who desired it,
Healing to those who needed it,
And hope to those who forged the uncommon path.
I bless you in the name of the Great Divine,
She whom we call Wisdom,
She who knows your soul.
Amen.
Sunday Spiritual: A prayer for solstice and advent
A Prayer for Lighting of the Advent Wreath
Tonight, our nights grow shorter and our days grow long!
We look once more on these earthy symbols–firelight and evergreens–
and remember God’s promise to our world:
That our Light and our Hope, will come.
The Words of the Prophet
What came into existence was Life,
And the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
And the darkness could not put it out.
The people who lived in darkness have seen a great light, and we have beheld its glory, glory that only comes from God:
generous from the inside out,
true from start to finish,
full of grace, full of truth.
Sunday Spiritual: Praying with the Elements
My friend and fellow writing group member, Christine Paintner of Abbey of the Arts has a wonderful new journal: Praying with the Elements, Reflections in Word and Image. This full-color glossy wonder is small enough to tuck into your journal and beautiful enough to feed your soul through all four seasons. Celtic spirituality emerges in the form of photographs, poems, essays, and journal questions. Some of my favorite things in the journal are Christine’s original Celtic knot works and colored illustrations. (I’m particularly fond of the turtle on page 22.)
Praying with the Elements connects you to the soulfulness of the created order: wind, water, fire, and earth. Today, I’m soaking in the reflection questions for ‘water,’ my favorite of which is:
“What are the places in your life of ebbing and rising? “
With all the thoughts of moving overseas and the requisite ending and beginnings that go with that, I find this question to be very timely.
You can take Praying with the Elements along with you on your journey. Christine has one waiting just for you here.
I’m off now to sail the seven seas — well, at least to cruise the Copenhagen canal on a guided tour boat. I leave you with this lovely water-themed blessing from the journal:
“Blessings of water be upon you.
May you be carried by the flow of the great river of life.
May you discover a hidden spring within you, gushing forth,
May you be carried to the shores of the sacred and renewed.”
Today’s Theme: Contentment
The children are playing at opposite ends of the cove, each alone unto themselves. Eden surfs endlessly, riding the waves on her boogie board. She is brazen in her surfer-girl two-piece, whilst everyone around her is clad in neoprene to endure the cold water. Cate, on the other hand, is more cautious, standing only mid-calf in the surf, half-wrapped in a cover up skirt, her toes never leaving the protective shield of her water-sneakers. Cate throws fistfuls of sand in the air, her mouth forming songs and fairytales for only the surf to hear.
I marvel that they are so good at this – being alone, living within the present wave, drifting on the ebb and flow of the tide.
A Prayer of Thanksgiving:
Thank you for these, your gifts,
which we receive from your bounty.
Amen.
A sample from the small-is-beautiful book of our rockaway memories.
