Contemplations

Some possibilities for dwelling in the room of liminal space might be: tend to the losses and the withholdings, but don’t lose sight of the miraculous, keep an eye out for grace.

This is when we are able to sense something beyond the anxiety and helplessness and grasp the thread that is ours to pick up in this moment of turmoil and possibility. Who knows what that may be or who we may become?

Follow along at your own pace.  Allow yourself to make generous use of silence.  Enter the parts that call to you.  Let the rest go. 

There is gratitude: for the life we have right now and the gifts of the Earth we receive each day.  In mere minutes we have fallen into a timeless place where we may find courage and provision for voyaging over a foggy sea to a destination we can’t describe.

In the grimy morass of our present dilemma, amid the dis-ease and wrenching separation, lies the buried treasure of our belonging: our deepest passion. “Hope,” says another poet (Jane Hirshfield), “is the hardest love we carry.”

There is an instinct within us in such times to gather together and rekindle the fires of meaning, vision, love, hope. Perhaps the holiest grace of Rolling Ridge is that it offers a sacred, wild space where these impulses of the human soul can flourish.

The reason it is tricky to summarize neatly the activities and ethos shared here is because our collective work is ongoing and ever-changing. Like a quilt, there is a patchwork of partner groups, retreat participants and neighbors who share a love for this place and who arrive over and over again with hearts and minds open to whatever there is to encounter.

Mist is a threshold phenomenon. Sometimes one crosses the threshold swiftly, trailing clouds of glory and falling into the waiting, loving hands of a new life.  More often, I suspect, one lingers, wondering, scanning the veiled horizon. 

The marvelous thing about this question is that it has a thousand answers if we are willing to stand in the center of the whirlwind, brave the terrifying wind and the piercing heartbreak, and listen to the roar.

This is the unfair dilemma in which we find ourselves: how to hold the miraculous belonging, to accept the precious, joyous gift of kinship and community, while absorbing the telltale signs of a deeply unwell world and the unpreventable suffering of those we love.