For Listening

Yesterday I walked near my home. Where I live it’s the time of year when flowering trees are nearing full bloom. Their brilliance and fullness so often invoke drop-jawed awe from me. And listening. I find myself staring at these trees, with welcomed pause, to be quiet and to listen spaciously in the quiet.

I’ve been involved in a few podcast recordings lately. With thoughtful people making sense of the times, sharing wonderings, witnessing grief and joy in human experience.

Peek and listen as inspired.

Human to Human The Podcast — Featuring Casey Tinnin (16 minutes) — Casey is one of my favorite people in the world. His energy and his honesty are very inviting. I met him through the United Church of Christ Next Generation Leadership Initiative, at which I’ve been faculty now for three years. Casey brings insight, wonder, compassion and so many other delicious slivers of aliveness in making space for people.

Fire & Water — CoVid Grief, Anger, Sadness, Confusion, Hope (12 minutes) — These all go together, don’t they. It’s important to give ourselves to hope. Or to witness it. It’s also important to give ourselves to the grief. Quanita Roberson and I reflect on such notions.

Fire & Water — Paying Attention, A Reflection (20 minutes) — This recording follows an online community call with people associated / interested in Fire & Water as a leadership program and rite of passage. A big part of Fire & Water is the ability to pay attention to the unseen as well as the seen. 

 

Each Day — A Poem of Witness

Each Day

Each day demands more of being in the moment.
Leaning further forward with hearts not only cracked, but bleeding.
We are so far into it now
that I’m losing sight of where this path began.
It just is.

Each day reinforces protections and distance.
I’m in a bubble both respecting and guarding others’ bubbles.
People delight at transition to virtual
to which I add my marvel for creative resilience.
But I miss people.

Each day hope jitterbugs with fear,
clarity of essence with confusion of deeply creviced loss,
sadness of what once was two-steps with joy of what is birthing,
surrender stumbles to anger and back again to softness.
It too, this alive yet aching heart, just is.