Christmas, 2015

Greetings, dear friends and family, and blessings on your celebrations at this end of the year when the days are short, yet the promise of the Light blesses us with its dawning!

What a year this has been, beginning with my knuckling down to complete my thesis for the M.A. degree in Culture & Spirituality I received in May.  Titled, “Hymns for a New Story”, the thesis critically examines the metaphors we use for the Holy in Protestant Christian hymnody.  It suggests new images in four new hymns I’ve written, one of which has been sung publicly six times, to wild enthusiasm in the parishes that have used it.  I can hardly believe the poetry that comes through me as I write and re-write hymns.  Graduation was in May, and now I am preparing to do my part in what Roman Catholic priest and environmentalist Thomas Berry called “The Great Work.”

“The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”  (Thomas Berry)

Never to be content with what I have learned, I traveled twice to Colorado during the summer, to attend two classes with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of the book, Women Who Run With the Wolves.  She taught over 100 women and men how to facilitate a group to study and learn from this book, which contains lessons on the instinctual nature of humans, especially women, and does so through story.  In October, I convened a group of women who study with me once a month, and the sharing is deep, wide and very productive.  Early in 2016, I will start another group, and I’ll also attempt an online group for people who live in distant areas.

Finally this year, I began studying to become a spiritual mentor for people who are searching for their unique purpose in life: those who are asking the question, “How can I discover the unique soul gift I was meant to offer the world?”  The work is spiritually arduous and very rewarding, for I believe that the discovery of one’s gift and the offering of it to the world is the thing that produces a life deeply lived.  As the poet Mary Oliver says in her poem, “When Death Comes,”

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

 Neither do I.  And, I won’t.

But visit I did this year!  In addition to my Colorado trips, at a retreat center just north of Loveland, David and I took a two week road trip across Nevada in September, to Great Basin National Park and then to Southern Utah.  My goodness, I never knew that U.S. 50 going through Nevada was SO BEAUTIFUL!  We crossed range after range of mountains, singing, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”, stopped for the night in Kingston, which isn’t even on the map ‘cause there are only 80 people in the town, and then stayed outside of Great Basin in Baker, NV.  We did the hike to the Bristlecone Pines, trees which live at 10,000 feet and some of which are over 3,000 years old.  And the next day we participated in a special astronomy night with astronomers from the University of Utah among other places.  From there we dropped down to southern Utah where we rented a house from Air B&B and hiked in Zion (hid under a rock during a thunder and hail storm that ended up killing six), visited the North Rim of the Grand Canyon (where, across the canyon, we could see the trail we hiked, when we hiked to its bottom three years ago), and I volunteered to walk dogs for a day at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, UT.  From there it was north to Bryce Canyon and a spectacular hike, then to Valley of Fire State Park outside of Las Vegas, and back to CA via Paso Robles, wine tasting, and bluff hiking.  What a trip!

The last trip was a long weekend to Ashland, OR, where we saw “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and visited Crater Lake in the rain. 

Life is amazing!  I hope Mary Oliver agrees!  My son Peter returned to CA (San Diego) after living in Washington DC for two years, and Matt is living in Santa Cruz.  Both are in relationship with lovely, smart, accomplished women, who love them very much.  Kaisa the cat turned 17 in March and is still healthy and strong, though he is not beating up the neighborhood cats as he used to do in his younger days.  And David and I have completed five years of being together.

We are grateful in CA that it is raining; everything is pretty much soaked, and we hope the dangerously low level of water in the reservoirs rises, we hope that people will have compassion on each other and on the earth, our precious planet, and we hope to do more traveling around the country in 2016, as we attend each other’s high school reunions.

May your celebrations at this time of the year be blessed and may the returning Light of the New Year bring fullness to your lives and the lives of your loved ones!

Merry Christmas!          Happy Hanukah!          Happy Solstice!        Happy New Year!