Where To Next + Coming Soon

Dear Friends and Family,

Welcome to you who are new!

And to you who have been on this journey for a while, thank you as always, for sharing a few moments of your week with me.

Today’s letter is little different and threefold full.

I offer you a bit of “where to next” news, apropos your kind responses to the survey I posted several weeks ago.

I share a new offering.

And for this week’s reflections, I offer you a new “Welcome” page.

As I write, a butterfly, wings powdered in blue, flutters about a nearby bush, drunk perhaps, as I am, on the fragrance of spring.

Where To Next

When, several weeks ago, I asked where you might like to go next on this journey, you responded fairly evenly across the possibilities:

a) unfolding modes of being

b) absence and loss as portals to soul

c) uncertainty & indestructible joy

d) silence, solitude, simplicity

Poetics & why of 100 sq foot life did not appeal to you, which came as no surprise, really. But I wanted to get a better sense of you, and so I asked. Your responses were helpful guides.

The “where to next” themes you chose so evenly happen to be intertwined. We will begin with “silence, solitude, simplicity,” setting a tone to w[a][o]nder the other three.

If you are new to Beyond the Comfort Zone, note that we will not explore these themes through a purview of self-help, though that approach would certainly provide a valued inroad. Our exploration here will reflect on a phenomenology of being.

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Something New

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Each of us has an ever-faithful companion-presence. Something that is always with us. Something that helps us to live with inner integrity and depth, to see through the outer coverings of others and of the world to their purpose and core being, and to get over placing ourselves at the center of everything. This companion-presence is Silence. 

It never goes away. 

We go away from it, become distracted and forgetful, and lose the manners needed to nurture a companionship with it. We go away from Silence into the world of noise as if into a vast buzzing of insects, pushed to exist within the permanent irritation of dissonance.

~Robert Sardello, Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness, 7

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During these busy summer months, in lieu of a more structured offering, such as the Awaken Wonder course of several months ago, I will begin hosting an hour-long retreat into Silence as a once-monthly gathering. I have been contemplating this for a while, and the timing seems perfect.

Beginning June 2, I hope you will join me for a once-monthly, one-hour Zoom gathering in Silence.

You need not join us every first Sunday of the month, though I certainly welcome you every gathering.

I will share details about time and format next Sunday.

To nurture the sense of connection, intimacy, and communion that emerges in shared silence, these gatherings are available to paid subscribers and by registration only.

If you wish to participate and would like to become a monthly or annual paid subscriber, please do so and email me to register.

Existing paid subscribers and “Contributors’ Circle” members, email me to register.

If you wish to participate and life circumstances do not permit a monthly or annual subscription, please email me for a complimentary subscription and to register.

renee@reneeeliphd@substack.com OR reply to this email.

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Today’s Reflections

Today’s reflections are found on the new “Welcome” page. Some of you have seen earlier, very different, iterations of this page. A small handful of you dropped in while I was revising and formatting over the past few weeks.

This new iteration is at once an invocation, a photo essay, and an “imaginative encirclement” around an unfolding poetics of being.¹ Perhaps, you will be ushered along wholly of body. . . .

1. Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperPerennial, 1997), p. 111.