Sample Reflection:
 As
noted in its logo (left), this program will weave together:
* four directions - North, South, East, and West
* four words/components - Nurturing, Women, Sanctuary, and Earth
* four relationships - women and women, women and the earth, women and
themselves, women and the One they call God.
A sample reflection from Vicki, along with questions for the reader, are
below:
North, Nurture, relationship to self
In the various roles I’ve played in my life, I’ve found myself to be
nurturing the lives of others – not
just their physical bodies, but their emotional health, their hopes or
dreams, their projects or their
relationships. I am frequently the one to offer support or sustenance,
compassion or empathy.
Attending to needs of the many, too often I have nurtured at the expense
of myself, almost at times to
the point of my own starvation. Though I may not look at all the part of
a starving refugee, I am aware
that much of my personal struggle with body size has to do with the
alternating extremes of either over-
feeding an unreachable hunger on one hand, or trying to ‘get love’ by
starving myself into attention
getting shapes on the other.
The need for authentic nurture is apparent in my life. Paradoxically,
lately the image of nurture for me
looks like an empty plate … a quiet space, a still place, a slow pace. I
hunger for the time and space
where the one, who lies starving beneath all the care-taking and
fulfillment of other’s expectations of
me, can surface to draw in some sustenance at last, be filled, and grow
into her own unique shape – a
shape that may not look at all like the one I’ve been trying to inhabit.
A shape I can’t even yet imagine.
Last week, I dreamt three words. A woman was reading aloud to me the
label from a loaf of bread.
There were only 3 ingredients listed. “Only 3 needed,’ she said, “Yeast,
Water, and Stillness.”
I was struck, of course, by the third ingredient, something that is
sorely lacking in my days. The first
two, I imagine I’d discover more readily when given the third. I
envision the yeast as those tiny grains of
unmet and untapped hunger in me; the water, almost naturally pouring
upon it when given the opening,
which stillness would afford it, to flow. How might I be filled? What
might rise to become food?
When I ponder the season of winter, I am drawn to the image of quiet, of
broad sweeping, uncluttered
(empty) landscapes, of hibernating animals and plants, of attending to
things underground, of long
stretches of still nighttime space. All of these add up to nurture for
me.
As I image a circle of women gathering for nurture, in pondering this
direction of North, my hope is
for there to be much space for stillness, for deepening quiet, for
slowing and seeking, for the gentle
invitation of our stories’ unfolding. My prayer is for an uncluttered
surface to be cleared where She
might rise to take her right shape in our lives.
Questions for self-reflection.
How do you notice your hunger? How do you attend to it?
Do you sense something beneath the surface of your life?
When you ponder winter, what images arise for you? What do they mean to
you?
Which of the three ingredients are you lacking? What do each mean to
you?
Where do you picture yourself in this circle of women? |
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