Dear Friends ~ I want to stride exuberantly into this new year "full of things that have never been" (Rilke). I'm customarily inclined to seek out those quiet, inward "cracks of silence where breath is connected to spirit" (Karyn Dedar). I need, we all need, silence, as Nan says, "for the Word to be heard." And on a crisp January morn when the air tingles, the tree limbs crack, and the sun slices sharp shadows on the landscape, an invigoration seizes me. I want to stomp around and inhale and shout and gaze about eagerly. I want to move my muscles, sinews, and bones. After all, we are fully embodied human creatures, wonderfully knit together in our mothers' wombs. As the poet David Whyte says, "To be human is to become visible, while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others." Our physical senses open holy gates, and the world pours in. Meanwhile, our body knows things, remembers what our mind cannot, expresses what our words muffle. Honestly, the scattering of quotes in this Letter is mere surface dust on the immense, multifaceted experience of embodied life and the thousands of ways we humans have of grappling with and celebrating our incarnate selfhoods. In 1939, in the midst of the ominous dark of pre-war Europe, Bertolt Brecht, exiled from his native Germany, asked "In the dark times, will there be singing?" and in the same breath, answered his own question, "Yes, there will be singing about the dark times." So, friends, let's claim what we are, bearers of Presence enshrined in the braided body-soul that is our birthright. Stand up. Make big shadows. Stride boldly, sing defiantly, dance! ~ Lindsay

The fullness of joy is to behold God in all.



~ Julian of Norwich

Christianity arrives in a Platonic landscape where the body is a husk around a soul, imperfect and soon to be shrugged off. For some pagans, the Christian notion of a resurrected body was distinctly odd, especially as there was no possibility of floating off somewhere more etheric. In the next life you still had a body, just not that one that slowly became dust... The body is not a tomb, it's a pleasure, and it goes where we go because we're completely bound up with it.

~ Martin Shaw in "A God with a Dog in the Race" (essay)

In many spiritual traditions of the world, the body is viewed with fear and suspicion, considered to be the seat of desire and at best a dumb beast that must be trained and brought into submission to the personal will. But what is missed here—and it is of crucial importance—is that the moving center also carries unique perceptive gifts, the most important of which is the capacity to understand the language of faith encoded in sacred gesture.

~ Cynthia Bourgeault in THE WISDOM WAY OF KNOWING

Please come home. Please come home.

Find the place where your feet know where to walk

And follow your own trail home.

Please come home. Please come home into your own body,

Your own vessel, your own earth....

And thank you touch of eyes and ears and skin,

Touch of love for welcoming us.

May we wake up and remember who we truly are...

~ Jane Hooper, excerpts from "Please Come Home"