To know humans like you are in this world, choosing direct experience and listening over control and agenda, fills my heart with hope. These forces of duality will always be here for us to answer with resistance or love, and I hear in you unwavering devotion to the heart’s unifying, harmonizing force. Bowing to this bright, necessary wisdom that flies through you.
Dear Renée, I feel such sweet tenderness brought to me through your words this morning. It grows in me that the words, the essence of your writing, the encounter with all suffering, the dark opening into the great labyrinth…. We both walk that journey expressing this through our own uniqueness. I am a grief tender walking the trail of sorrow. Yes, my heart has burst open in an infinitude of sensitivities to the despair of all creatures, to the intense beauty hiding within the tiny pockets of every tragedy, every trauma, every loss. To know this internal disorientation since B died, to know this great disorientation of the outer world. To hold this as an ongoing lamentation is the only way this heart can interpret its sacred agreement with the Unknown. Thank you. I look forward to being with you in Circle next week.
"I am a grief tender walking the trail of sorrow."
Mark, these words touch the innermost inner rooms of the heart.
Being a grief tender/tinder is "the only way this heart can interpret its sacred contract with the Unknown." It is a profound honor to walk the path with you.
Thank you for sharing, as always, from the raw depths.
Thankyou for introducing me to Simone Weil. I appreciate the image of being eaten by God. The depth of her elevation of ‘attention’ as Love has captured me. I know wherever you walk Renee is an invitation for Eucharistic Union.
I appreciate how you put this: "the depth of her elevation of 'attention' as Love." Her articulations on this depth and quality of attention have catapulted in me a novel orientation to attention itself with Love as the synergistic expression born/e in/of the subjective experience that comes to pass when (this quality of) attention indwells embodied presence: as above so below meeting in the human heart. . .
Or, to put it in the words of Brandt Stickley, per the Gebser talk we viewed:
". . . the alchemy of human wisdom, which is divine folly, with divine wisdom, which is human folly, the result a single wisdom, which understands both that which is above and that which is below”
I have been thinking of you, obviously. While you were entering the labyrinth, coincidentally, I wrote two chapters on 'Ariadne's thread'. It may be helpful.
Veronika, yes, a different kind of pilgrimage. Thank you for steering me toward your chapters, which I have saved to read later today. Still hoping to meet in person while I am here. . . . muito obrigada.
Renee, sending love and prayers to you and your son❤️
In a way your words read like a thriller. I know this is not likely your intention but I found myself leaning in, wondering what comes next, where is the opening and what happens when you step into it?
Donna, well . . . it wasn't my intention to write a thriller, but aspects of these days have had a certain thriller flavor! Thank you for your well wishes, love, and prayers. 🙏❤️
Dear Renée, I wish your heart could have a bit of rest. You were wise to start your Sunday silences - ensuring there would be at least that much time for it. I’m sending hope across the miles to you and also a bit of the hallelujah song of all things in all weather. That labyrinth passage from Simone Weil is just stunning. There is really nothing left to write after that, but on we go. With you, sister. I’m glad you are where you are.
Tara, dear mother of a son, I feel your sisterhood and the hallelujah song of all things in all weather. Thank you.
The Weil passage fell synchronously into this time-presence with such thanks to Doreen for sharing, as if by divine grace. I had read Weil’s Gravity and Grace and had been moved. Waiting for God has left me spellbound. I have missed details of what you are up to but have caught little whiffs. All good wishes this hope and hallelujah turn. I’ll find my way to your library in good time and look forward.
Oh Renée, I loved how you opened this post with passage about the labyrinth. A metaphor for the twists and turns as we travel through life. Not knowing if we are arriving or leaving, beginning or ending, getting closer or farther away. Then, how duality is resolved in a paradoxical way when we are eaten by God. In this space, love emerges as the liminal force uniting the divide between the opposites. As you later said, "where no is yes and yes is no and bad is good and good is bad because neither is—the paradox the tension teetering on the precipice of unknowing." And in that unknowing is the great knowing revealed.
I always find it interesting how a plan that seems so solid, really isn't solid at all. Again the labyrinth. The walk turning into walking in place. Yet the journey ends up being the same, in that paradoxical way. I appreciate your beautiful way of expressing this time in Portugal with your son. It sounds precious, tender and deep. Much love to you Renée, and blessings as you carry on.
Julie, we come to a turn when walking a labyrinth is no longer a metaphor only. Reading your words lifts the experience of labyrinth to that turn, and I thank you.
To know humans like you are in this world, choosing direct experience and listening over control and agenda, fills my heart with hope. These forces of duality will always be here for us to answer with resistance or love, and I hear in you unwavering devotion to the heart’s unifying, harmonizing force. Bowing to this bright, necessary wisdom that flies through you.
Kimberly, here's to hope and unwavering love that, like a river, always finds its way back to the ocean.
Dear Renée, I feel such sweet tenderness brought to me through your words this morning. It grows in me that the words, the essence of your writing, the encounter with all suffering, the dark opening into the great labyrinth…. We both walk that journey expressing this through our own uniqueness. I am a grief tender walking the trail of sorrow. Yes, my heart has burst open in an infinitude of sensitivities to the despair of all creatures, to the intense beauty hiding within the tiny pockets of every tragedy, every trauma, every loss. To know this internal disorientation since B died, to know this great disorientation of the outer world. To hold this as an ongoing lamentation is the only way this heart can interpret its sacred agreement with the Unknown. Thank you. I look forward to being with you in Circle next week.
"I am a grief tender walking the trail of sorrow."
Mark, these words touch the innermost inner rooms of the heart.
Being a grief tender/tinder is "the only way this heart can interpret its sacred contract with the Unknown." It is a profound honor to walk the path with you.
Thank you for sharing, as always, from the raw depths.
Thankyou for introducing me to Simone Weil. I appreciate the image of being eaten by God. The depth of her elevation of ‘attention’ as Love has captured me. I know wherever you walk Renee is an invitation for Eucharistic Union.
Megan,
I appreciate how you put this: "the depth of her elevation of 'attention' as Love." Her articulations on this depth and quality of attention have catapulted in me a novel orientation to attention itself with Love as the synergistic expression born/e in/of the subjective experience that comes to pass when (this quality of) attention indwells embodied presence: as above so below meeting in the human heart. . .
Or, to put it in the words of Brandt Stickley, per the Gebser talk we viewed:
". . . the alchemy of human wisdom, which is divine folly, with divine wisdom, which is human folly, the result a single wisdom, which understands both that which is above and that which is below”
A different kind of pilgrimage, Renée.
I have been thinking of you, obviously. While you were entering the labyrinth, coincidentally, I wrote two chapters on 'Ariadne's thread'. It may be helpful.
Veronika, yes, a different kind of pilgrimage. Thank you for steering me toward your chapters, which I have saved to read later today. Still hoping to meet in person while I am here. . . . muito obrigada.
Renee, sending love and prayers to you and your son❤️
In a way your words read like a thriller. I know this is not likely your intention but I found myself leaning in, wondering what comes next, where is the opening and what happens when you step into it?
May you continue to walk gently.
Donna, well . . . it wasn't my intention to write a thriller, but aspects of these days have had a certain thriller flavor! Thank you for your well wishes, love, and prayers. 🙏❤️
Dear Renée, I wish your heart could have a bit of rest. You were wise to start your Sunday silences - ensuring there would be at least that much time for it. I’m sending hope across the miles to you and also a bit of the hallelujah song of all things in all weather. That labyrinth passage from Simone Weil is just stunning. There is really nothing left to write after that, but on we go. With you, sister. I’m glad you are where you are.
Tara, dear mother of a son, I feel your sisterhood and the hallelujah song of all things in all weather. Thank you.
The Weil passage fell synchronously into this time-presence with such thanks to Doreen for sharing, as if by divine grace. I had read Weil’s Gravity and Grace and had been moved. Waiting for God has left me spellbound. I have missed details of what you are up to but have caught little whiffs. All good wishes this hope and hallelujah turn. I’ll find my way to your library in good time and look forward.
All this: ❤️
🙏 (thank you)
❤️
Oh Renée, I loved how you opened this post with passage about the labyrinth. A metaphor for the twists and turns as we travel through life. Not knowing if we are arriving or leaving, beginning or ending, getting closer or farther away. Then, how duality is resolved in a paradoxical way when we are eaten by God. In this space, love emerges as the liminal force uniting the divide between the opposites. As you later said, "where no is yes and yes is no and bad is good and good is bad because neither is—the paradox the tension teetering on the precipice of unknowing." And in that unknowing is the great knowing revealed.
I always find it interesting how a plan that seems so solid, really isn't solid at all. Again the labyrinth. The walk turning into walking in place. Yet the journey ends up being the same, in that paradoxical way. I appreciate your beautiful way of expressing this time in Portugal with your son. It sounds precious, tender and deep. Much love to you Renée, and blessings as you carry on.
Julie, we come to a turn when walking a labyrinth is no longer a metaphor only. Reading your words lifts the experience of labyrinth to that turn, and I thank you.