Confluence Formation

Everyday I ask the loving voice of wisdom, which dwells in our hearts and in this world: “What would you have me know today?” And then I listen. This is what I heard one day, not long ago…

From elsewhere:

“Use even this sadness to carve out spaces in our souls where still greater repositories of holy affection might be held, unto the end that we might better love, in times of absence and in times of presence alike.” (Every Moment Holy)

From my heart:

You have a spacious soul, beloved one.

Everyday I ask the loving voice of wisdom, which dwells in our hearts and in this world: “What would you have me know today?” And then I listen. This is what I heard one day, not long ago…

From elsewhere:

“Watch, now, how I start the day…” (Mary Oliver)

From my heart:

I will. I do.

Everyday I ask the loving voice of wisdom, which dwells in our hearts and in this world: “What would you have me know today?” And then I listen. This is what I heard one day, not long ago…

From elsewhere:

“Thy name is as ointment poured forth.” (Song of Solomon)

From my heart:

And I am pleased to call you by your name.

Everyday I ask the loving voice of wisdom, which dwells in our hearts and elsewhere in this world: “What would you have me know today?” And then I listen. This is what I heard one day, not long ago…

From elsewhere:

“Come into the presence of still water.” (Wendell Berry)

From my heart:

Beloved one, though all around you life travails, be like me. Be the quiet water that you are.

Who do you know who needs to hear this?

In this post: I’ll share a listening practice, and then I’m going to invite you to join me for the next month, for about two-minutes every day, to practice listening with me.

The thing we’re listening for is a simple note from the loving voice of wisdom. That voice is part intuition and part divine prompting, and it is always eager to whisper sweet guidance to any and every quiet and attentive heart.

At the end of this post I’ll let you know how you can follow along, and even participate.

Last week when I wrote I want my attention back, I told you about a few practices that I do in order to subvert the things that distract me from my glorious-god-given-sacred-as-all-get-out capacity to pay attention. Some of the practices not only subvert distractions, but also strengthen that same capacity to pay attention.

I began one of those practices about a month after my daughter was born.

What led to it was one of those simple follow-your-gut-and-Google-it moments when I heard a friend say something about “two way prayer”.

Cautionary side note about Googling things: Outsourcing your curiosity to search engines and AI for immediate—and fleeting—intellectual satiation, is one of the things that tends to atrophy our capacity to pay attention. Our attention appreciates mystery, and, in fact, thrives on wonder. We have a primal need that often goes unmet. It is the need to wonder about things long enough to let our hearts and minds be massaged by the experience of not always knowing.

Even so, I let my curiosity roam. I searched out two way prayer. I listened to a couple of podcasts. And I learned about Elizabeth Gilbert’s stunning community, here on Substack, of two way pray-ers out there writing letters to love.

And I took what I learned and I adopted and adapted the practice for myself, giving it the shape I needed it to have in order to practice it consistently in the context of my daily living.

Side note: Read that last line over again. And next time you come across something you admire that someone else is doing, something that you want to weave into your life, consider that you might very well need to reshape it in order for it to weave well into your life. Redesign the thing so that it works for you. Don’t muscle someone else’s practices into your life. Give yourself a shot at success by making things easier—I’m not kidding. Make things easier and then do them that way consistently, rather than making things harder than they need to be and then quitting when they prove to be, well… too hard.

My practice of two way prayer was born.

This is what I do:

* I open my notebook to a blank page and write the date and this question at the top of the page: “What would you have me know today?”

* I set the notebook aside.

* I pick up a book that I suspect has some wisdom in it. A book of poetry, or some other sacred text, for example.

* I read, more or less at random, until something from the page snags on my heart. It doesn’t usually take much more than a few minutes, if that.

* I stop reading.

* I pick up my notebook and write out the line that snagged my heart.

* Then I listen for the loving voice of wisdom and I write down the message that it has for me—which is, of course, always a blend of universal wisdom and my own personal inner knowing. And it is always rooted in care for who I am as a beloved being who longs to generously, wildly, daily give myself to this world. It’s often quite direct, and it never fills more than a page.

That’s the practice. Now, your invitation.

Beginning on Monday, for five weeks, five days a week, I’m going to share with you a portion of what the voice of wisdom has been offering me day-to-day. Some of them will resonate. Some of them may not. None of them will take more than a minute or two for you to engage.

Here are four ways you can participate, each one deepening on the last:

* Read along via Substack. (Or listen via podcast.)

* Comment regularly—when it resonates and when it doesn’t—with the insight that you’re gleaning about the wisdom that I’m gleaning.

* Adopt (and, as needed, reshape) the two way prayer practice for yourself, and weave it into your life.

* Invite two friends to join you in doing any of the above.

See you on Monday for day one of paying attention to the loving voice of wisdom.

I thank god that I spent the bulk of my childhood in the 90’s. Me and my best buds riding bikes alongside the White River in the Indianapolis suburbs or adding to our rickety treehouse in the sycamore in my backyard or playing street hockey at the end of the cul-de-sac. And playing a little bit of Nintendo, too, here and there. But never once having to navigate the pings of a dumb phone or the siren call of anti-social media or the desperate screams of so so so many screens.

It’s tempting to stand now and holler from the platform: “Make childhood the 90’s again!”

But that kind of wanting to go backwards, that brand of nostalgia, doesn’t tend to lead to much of anything good. And it certainly doesn’t lend us the spiritual muscularity that we need in order to navigate novelty, integrate change, and make creative contributions to the here-and-now, right in the midst of whatever realities we and our children are living out.

Sometimes, when I’m reflecting on why I’ve led wilderness trips periodically and professionally for over two decades—and why I’m drawn to the wilds personally—I understand my propensity for wild space as:

* An escape from the spiritual clutter of so much consumer driven culture.

* A venue for sturdying up our spirits in order to be able to deal with those demands once we inevitably return to our front country lives.

I go to the wilderness for the same reason I write, the reason I pray, the same reason I read poetry and go for walks and paused just now to take a deep breath and feel the air rush into me through my nostrils:

I want my attention back, and I mean to have it.

Who else out here is in constant pursuit of their birthright?

Your attention is your birthright. What you give of your birthright should be yours to give, purposefully. It’s often not though. Which is not your fault. The attention economy grabs at your birthright pretty well everywhere you might cast a glance.

But is there anyone else out there keen, nevertheless, to keep on wrestling back your attention? You with me?

Here are three things I’ve been doing lately to help me pay attention better to the things and matters and moments that I want to be paying attention to:

* When I get home from the grocery store I take a minute or two to peel ever single sticker off of every piece of produce that I’ve purchased. It’s not as good, I acknowledge, as planting the garden or the orchard and growing the fruit myself, but it slows me down enough to see the thing for what it is. Every plum is a miracle.

* I’ve been religiously waiting, every day, to check my email in the afternoon. Not a moment before. In the mornings I’m committed to making something—anything—of my own volition, before opening myself to the asks of others.

* For about a month now I’ve been playing with this really great prayer practice, where I start my days asking, “What would you have me know today?” and then paying attention to what I hear back, and jot it down.

I’ll tell you more about that last one soon.

Meanwhile, how might you slow down a little bit today and wrestle back some of that attention that is rightfully yours?

My friend Danielle sent me a book full of prayers and liturgies for all sorts of quotidian occasions. Every Moment Holy, it’s called. Every moment really is, isn’t it?

The table of contents is full of titles like: liturgies for daybreak, midday, nightfall; liturgy for the preparation of a meal, for the keeping of bees, for the planting of flowers, for the morning of a yard sale; liturgy for a sick day, for missing someone, for the death of a dream; liturgy upon seeing a beautiful person, upon hearing birdsong, for the paying of bills. Things like that.

There are a full two separate liturgies for changing diapers. For there are, I now know more intimately than ever before, oh so many diapers in this world that need changing.

Emma and I have a daughter now. Her name is Juniper. She was born in early May.

I have become a father now. I have become it, and am becoming it, every holy moment of every day since.

And yes, of course, in so many ways I was becoming it all along with stacks and stacks and years and years of holy moments that preceded Juniper’s birthday. But the holiness of every moment really stands out, all on its own, at those sharp thresholds that carry us officially from one identity into the next.

At the threshold, I was rooted in the radical honor of being with Emma—witnessing her power in spirit and muscle—during every single rush of her labor. I was immersed in the ineffable privilege of receiving my daughter as she somersaulted out of her mother’s womb into this world, first submersed in the waters of the birthing tub, and then surfaced for a first breath and brought to her mother’s breast, the new center of her world.

At the threshold, I was mesmerized, washed in every small detail of that stretch of hours while Emma labored, and of those first hours (or minutes? or eternities? holy moments!) gawking at our child. The one right there. That one, in this very moment. The one with her own appetite, her own pulse, her own spirit, her own bowels.

Every moment is holy. And sometimes life makes that obvious.

It’s fortunate for us, how life works. Though it doesn’t always feel fortunate, because it’s not always birth, sometimes it’s birth’s opposite, or something in between. But one way or another it’s fortunate that life, from time to time at the sharp thresholds, takes us by the scruff and demands that we be awake to the sacred.

Here’s the thing though: Barring life’s occasional insistence, it’s up to us to make a practice of being awake to most of the holy moments.

A word of caution, however: Try not to put it on yourself to be awake to every holy moment. That’s simply too much for any single practitioner to contain. And it’s okay. It’s not up to you to imbue moments with holiness by noting them. They’re sanctified all on their own, and your consciousness at any given moment will not add to or detract from the sacred authority of every single moment.

So sleep sometimes too. Sleep is vital. But how about we make a practice—or better yet, just today, one time that you wouldn’t have otherwise—how about you be awake to that one moment, the one you’re thinking of right now. How was that moment a holy moment?

And with that, you’ll have to pardon me. I need to go wake a sleeping baby and change a diaper.

**Shared at the Christmas Eve candlelit service at Edgecomb Community Church**

Good singing! Good reading! Good songs! Good story!

Don’t you love a good story?

And what is it that makes for a good story?

What are the elements of a compelling story?

High stakes. Surprising characters and character development. Nefarious plot twists and near misses. Journeys full of obstacles. Encounters with implausible messengers. Fate. Purpose. Urgency. And of course, the emergence of new possibilities.

Good stories don’t leave the world the same as it was when the story begins.

Good stories are full of transformation—the characters change, the more central the character usually the more radical the change they experience; and their world changes too.

Good stories don’t leave us the same either, when we hear them, read them, witness them, take them to heart.

Good stories invite us to change, right along with the characters.

In good stories we find ourselves identifying—in big ways or small—with the characters.

Just like the characters in good stories:

We’ve also been asked to carry more than we sometimes know how to carry.

We’ve also been turned from time to time away in our moments of need.

We’ve looked to the heavens for answers and guidance.

We’ve longed for someone to come to our rescue.

Some of us have carried children—and know what is, through the children you’ve carried, to touch the divine.

Everyone of us was carried in someone’s womb. And since God Speaks Through Wombs, every one of us is a unique utterance of the divine.

Good stories invite us to be God-bearing; to bear God in our hearts— carrying and experiencing change in our own aching, angsting; curious, courageous; swooning, soaring; thirsty, weary, wandering, wonderful hearts.

And good stories invite us to be midwives, birthing new life into every conceivable—and perhaps especially into every inconceivable—corner of this world.

Don’t you love a good story?

Don’t you love a good song?

Early in her pregnancy, Mary sings this song that we call the Magnificat.

In it she sings:

“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

The poet, Drew Jackson, has a poem about this called “That Girl Can Sing!” It goes like this:

Watch out! The sound of her voice

will cast them down! Way down!

No doubt they will try to quiet you,

soften you, make you into

a domesticated maiden,

but we’re gonna play this song.

Go on, Mary!

Bless our ears with your sonic theology.

Lift us up with your melodic doctrine.

Magnify! Magnify!

This voice is magnificent.

You can imagine this magnificent mother, Mary, singing lullabies to the little baby Jesus with that voice of hers.

Lullabies full of grit and glory.

Honest lullabies. Powerful lullabies.

Lullabies that echo the heartache of living through hardship, and yet that resound with melodies of possibility.

Can you imagine Mary’s lullabies ringing through the night, stirring the spirit and soothing the soul. Can you hear her singing?

The light shines in the darkness…

Can imagine Mary singing to her baby? Her baby still splotched with blood from birth, wrinkly and hungry and wet, vulnerable as all get out, surrounded by the sweet stink and warm breath of barnyard animals, right there in the middle of their poverty, and displacement, and her justified uncertainty about the future—you can hear her sing, nevertheless:

The light shines in the darkness…

That’s the voice that was there to meet Jesus when he was born. That’s the voice of the mother and the message that helped to make Jesus into the man he became. That’s the voice that echoed in and through all that Jesus was and did and became and inspired.

The light shines in the darkness. And the darkness does not overcome it.

That’s the message that echoes through the lives of all of us who are compelled and inspired by this good story of a mother—against all odds—giving birth to a child who would change the world.

These days I have been praying more than I have in years. I have mostly been doing this in private, with a candle and some sacred objects, a few words and some silence each morning. Everyday, along with asking for divine help, I invoke the presence and companionship of seven archetypal figures which, to me, represent qualities of my own being. 

These archetypes are qualities of being that are already true. But what’s beautiful about this prayer practice is this: The archetypes that I invoke each have their own gravity that tugs on me as I strive to demonstrate the truth of them in my relationships, and in all the ways that I move through the world.

They are noteworthy rings of an integrated whole. They are who I am. And, at the same time, they are who I may become.

INVOCATION (a poem I’m writing)

I stutter through the fog of prayer.

I am always learning to pray,

Striving to get it right.

I call out for echoes.

Grace shimmers elusive on the other shore.

I know that I effort too much.

I try on different tongues, to embrace the mystery:

Il y'a en moi quelque chose plus moi que moi meme.

There is something in me more me than myself.

I try on different skins, to play with multiplicity:

I am king and fool.

I am warrior and lover.

I am mage and maker and scribe.

I try on different winds.

I pull out my charts.

I do my best to navigate the archipelago of my heart.

I call out for echoes.

I spot the shimmer,

And don’t mind the fog.

I learned to pray when I was four years old. My sister taught me how. She modeled for me the way we can bow our heads, fold our hands, open our hearts, and ask for the presence and strength of something outside of us to become a part of us.

Growing up as a person of faith implanted in me the idea and experience that some sort of relationship with prayer is important. My prayer practice was consistent for a couple of decades after my first lessons, then it dwindled and shifted.

I needed space as a young man. Space to differentiate myself in the world in the context of my relationships, to work out my understanding of divine energy, and to seek my calling. I needed the space to invoke less and explore more.

Yet that presence of something-outside-of-self that I invoked when I was a child—it’s almost as if that presence remained part of me, into and on through the spaciousness.

I’m still figuring out how to pray, which I think is good indication that I am doing it right. I wonder if prayer is the sort of thing that, if we think we know what we’re doing, we’ve kind of missed the point.

My prayer practice today isn’t actually that far off from what my sister taught me in the little house in Sussex, New Brunswick, in the shadow of the bible college where our father and our grandfather worked. When I pray today I am still opening my heart, and drawing on sources of presence and strength, to help me become more and more who I want to be.

I used to mostly pray with words. These days, along with some words, I mostly use objects and images and actions.

It used to be a one-way affair, asking the stuff outside of me to come be a part of me. These days my prayers are more of a dance between immanence and transcendence. Invoking the help that I need to become who I already am.

How about you? How do you pray?

And do you mind if I share more with you (i.e. explore more out loud) about the archetypes and qualities that are ever tugging on my heart?

This is a meditation that I wrote for another thing, which I will tell you more about later, but meanwhile I want to share it with you here…

In the poem that she called Wild Geese, Mary Oliver tells us directly: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body // love what it loves.”

Lest we forget, we are animal every bit as much as our mammalian kin. Our tenderness and our ferocity are both animal qualities. We express and convey ourselves through the soft squish of our animal bodies and in our fierce compulsion to love the life that we are given.

Mammals with imagination. That is what we are.

We distinguish ourselves—or do our best to—by what we imagine, by making meaning. With our stories, our myths, our rituals, ceremonies, and symbols we take the raw matter of life and shape it into something lovable. 

We are mammals who imagine. Our imagination is informed by our animal instincts. Hunger compels us to eat. Fear compels us to flee. Frustration causes us to freeze. Injustice stokes in us our fight.

When we dance in our fullness we wed our instincts with imagination and find the audacity to feel our way into relationship with wild nature. As wild beings we conjure courage and playfulness to experiment with our own wild ways of being. 

Simply put, we make up ways of moving in this world.

So: Do that now. 

Move your body in some small way. 

Swivel your wrists.

Make a fist.

Scrunch your face.

Lift your chin.

Stick out your tongue. 

Or some other small movement. Or all of them at the same time. 

Move your body for a span of several breaths in ways that are informed by only your own instinct and imagination.

Go ahead, take ten seconds, do that now.

“Whoever you are,” Mary Oliver writes, “No matter how lonely // the world offers itself to your imagination.”

You make up ways of moving in the world, and your movements bring you into meeting with the movements of others. We are curious creatures. So of course we heed the urge to explore the movements beyond ourselves.

We love to learn from the wild ways of others. 

When we dance with others in our combined fullness we wed our imagination with our capacity to imitate. 

Salvador Dali said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

In a sense, every swivel of our wrists, every vowel from our throat, every tilt of the chin is built on some imitation of those we witness around us and those who came before us.

So why not look to other wild ones, from time to time, and pretend we are them? 

Why not meow and howl?

Why not nap in puddles of sunshine?

Why not run in packs?

Why not, right now, up from where you are, go and do any of those things. 

Meow, growl, or howl. Nap or run. 

Or purr softly.

Or sit simply still like a stone for a while.

Or sway subtly like a tree.

Or honk like the wild geese “harsh and exciting // over and over announcing your place // in the family of things”.

Excerpts from Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver