Hiding in Plain Sight: Spirit in Everyday Living and a Few Notes on Woo-Woo

Photo by Rhea Madrone Spirit in Every Day:  Living it now. By root and rhythm, I finally returned to prayer.

That is to say, I resisted for months my own fundamental spiritual practice.  Actually, its been longer than that.  For a full year now I've been on a (whiplash yanking) roller coaster ride that has changed my entire landscape, both inner and outer.  I can't even write about the developments.  They are too fresh.

Amidst it all I kept a writing practice, I kept an exercise practice.  And yet, the spirit world--my ancestors, my guardians, the Goddesses and Gods, the plants, the animals, the beings of this planet--kept nudging me to connect.  Okay, sometimes it was more bludgeon than nudge...

Finally, pushed to the brink of some impossible choices, I sat at my altar.  After lighting the candles, I prayed.  In the full way, the way I was taught.  I opened myself, gave time.  Surrendered my wheeling mind, my own agenda and bowed to all that is greater than the sum of me.  

And every day since--with a few exceptions-- I have practiced with prayer.  Gratitude, intention, seeking, connection.  Sure enough, things are moving.  I remember this from before.  Long ago my life was irrevocably transformed through the daily practice of prayer, in huge important ways.  It is not complicated, it doesn't take tons of time or energy, and the power of participating in the motions of life is undeniable.

It is about doing.  This is the difficulty.  Prioritizing, showing up, laying aside avoidance, this requires confronting the squirrel of ego pretending it knows better, knows all.  To live in flow with spirit we have to be willing to step aside, to offer our attention.  Mary Oliver says in her poem, The Summer Day: " I don't know exactly what a prayer is./
I do know how to pay attention"

And attention is possible everywhere, even now in this moment, as you are reading.  Right here. Photo by Karolina Daria Flora When All is a Miracle,  Everything is Possible Here's an exercise that keeps me from despair:

Sit in a quiet place where you won't be interrupted.  (Sometimes in my household this means the bathroom...)

Breathe deeply, and as you breathe imagine traveling out from your current location, up, up above your community, above your state with its invisible lines, above the country you call home, above the earth that drifts its marble blue on a miracle of axis.  Allow yourself a free flight into space.  Observe the stars, the countless stars, and the spaces between the stars.  Feel the expansion, the enormity.  See if you can sense a resonance in the universe, in the space beyond space.

Now begin your descent back to earth.  Bring your focus through the atmosphere, through identifiable shapes of land and water, back to your home, but don't pause at yourself, not yet.  Instead shift your focus to the soil beneath you, the stones and land.  See the intricate roots of trees, the teeming life in one square inch of soil.  Become minute, microscopic, see the dust, the cell, the atom.  This too, is infinite.

And between, we are.  Made of the same stuff as earth, as stars.  We live on this loom, warp and weft, micro and macro.  See yourself in the pattern, as you are, a part of everything that lives, exists.  Breathe with that miracle, be still and open your eyes. Life Calls You to Live:  Notes on Woo-Woo and Weirdness Here is a confession:

When I can't make a decision, however large, I flip a coin.

When I am sad, angry or alone, I walk to the river and wait for the world to sing.  Lately, the eagles.  The herons.  A beaver, the skeleton of a crow.  Fish splash, the wind answers, and in this language I will again find my way home.

A year ago I began working with the runes, and dreams came.  My ancestors, my grandfather seventeen years dead, visited me in dreams, holding their hands out to me along the path.  A raven began drinking from the water I set out for flower baths.  An owl called from my urban backyard in the night.  I felt a humming in my cells:  yes, this is the path, yes, you belong in the remembering.  And I learned about a concept called personal gnosis, wherein it is possible for each of us to receive information from spirit.

This makes sense to me.  But I know it is risky, daring, to admit all of this.  I have known this throughout my life, as a new bride, a young mother, a community activist.  As a professor.  Your reputation is on the line, you must be professional.  If you connect with spirit you are considered woo-woo.  Freaky!  Crazy.  Spooky.  Weird.  I'm sure some of you might be familiar with this.

I meet with clients all the time who want to reveal their relationship with spirit, but are afraid of the woo-woo.  In my students for years I saw true spiritual hunger.  But because our culture sanctions spirituality with religion and dismisses spirit without sanction as woo-woo, they approached with trepidation.  With reserve, ready to laugh away anything unfamiliar.

But our weirdness is joyful, and our own brand of woo-woo--our personal gnosis, the relationship with spirit that is uniquely our own-- is an embrace, not a denial.  We are inspired by those who wear their woo-woo, who shed the skin of fear and doubt, and come into a new sort of fullness.  Life requests of you life.  The world wants of us our unique attention, our individual participation, and our own true love.

Have you embraced your weirdness today?  Do you claim your woo-woo?  xoxo