Questions to Walk With

QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH

•  In your journal, describe your history with shedding your skin and letting go. What does letting go mean to you? In what ways are you being asked to let go now?

•  In your journal, describe a time when you emotionally left an authentic situation too soon. What made you remove your presence? What might you do to stay present the next time you find yourself pulling away?

•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of someone you admire who stopped watching in order to join in the journey of another. Discuss why you admire this person and explore where this ability to lean into life lives in you.

•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a moment in which you felt the Divine Reality that exists in everything. What did that feel like? How did feeling the common aliveness in all things affect you? Where might you find such connection again?

•  In your journal, describe a situation in which more than one thing feels true at the same time. How are you meeting this? What happens inside when you try to choose between truths? What happens inside when you try to open your heart to let both in?

•  In your journal, describe a time when you put on an old way of being, thinking, or feeling to appease the fear, anger, or worry of a loved one. What did assuming a dead way do to you? What would happen if you discarded this old, dead way? What might happen if you try to be who you are everywhere?

Ocean of Sky

OCEAN OF SKY

The cloud shelf drifts toward what

still seems possible and the trees throw

up their arms wanting to follow and the

Brazilian singer in the iPod is pleading with

me to give up all that drags my heart. Now

the sparrows out of nowhere dart in all

directions like the tail of a sparkler set

off in the beginning. And the singer a

continent away sings. I don’t understand

a word but feel him like a brother, like

a voice wanting me to wake, like a secret

spilling from the lips of a forgotten god.

Oh, we’ve made it to another fall. The

wind swirls in and out of all my regrets.

We are alive. We are alive. We are alive.

For My Brother

FOR MY BROTHER

You were there when I had cancer

and now you’ve carried Dad over the

rickety bridge of his bones to whatever

time is left. And somehow you are tending

the argument that is our mother

like a kettle without a handle.

For all your gifts, your care is the well

that has no bottom and, though hoisting

it up bucket by bucket turns you inside

out, that you know no other way

makes you my hero.

Covenant with Time

COVENANT WITH TIME

In silence or in crisis, we can put