Sitting Still with The Sun
Good Monday morning!
Welcome to your first Monday morning with me on my new platform. Monday morning notes will now come to you via Substack. If you are not familiar with Substack it is a great place to find all kinds of writing about just about anything and to enjoy sharing and supporting the thought leaders of our times.
For those of you who have been with me in my previous MailChimp incarnation, not much is going to change. You’ll get this note in your inbox most Monday mornings and you don’t have to do anything else but enjoy it as usual. Now, here on Substack however, you have the option to subscribe to these notes. Subscribing is a way of supporting my writing and work with your own resources. Most familiarly, subscribing offers me the resource known as money but it is certainly not the only resource that you can share if you wish. Sharing your thoughts, comments, insights or experiences is sharing resources also. I value all of them equally, but as you well know, money is the only currency we can use for certain necessities. In any case, I appreciate and value all forms of resource that you might be willing or able to offer and I will continue to offer you these notes regardless.
As I mentioned in my last note a few weeks ago, this move to the Substack platform is really all about sharing even more widely the notion of health powered by choice. This is the pillar of my work and my reason for writing at all. I want people to know and feel their choices especially with regard to their health. We can’t change something we aren’t aware of, so, of course, raising, provoking, illuminating awareness remains a central purpose of these notes.
Today as we are poised at the apex of the Sun’s trajectory in the Northern hemisphere, things are well illuminated you could say. We are seeing so much, both as individuals and as a culture. We are seeing our heroic impulses, our activist impulses, our sympathetic, empathetic impulses and we are seeing acutely our desire to turn away from suffering, from pain, from war and from tragedy. This is the human situation.
What we are also seeing is the possibility of working with rather than against these fundamental facts of human existence. We can come together and choose to respond in ways that nourish, evolve and grow our capacity for compassion, kindness and joy.
Donna Henes, who writes about the celestial holidays writes that the solstice shift is about "a transferral of our spiritual reliance on divine illumination to the realization of our own personal response-ability". She goes on to say "ritual observation of such a celestially auspicious occasion allows one to enter into a personal, physical partnership with the powers of nature. Here, one is privy to the powerful reality of a participatory universe."
I love that she suggests we can rely on our own responses, our own knowing, even more than on divine illumination. Sunlight is, for me, divine. I crave it, I gravitate toward it and I am always drawn toward the light. And finding the dark corners of my own being where my true responsiveness originates, a place that exists in wordless presence at all times, is truly a new way of participating.
It’s messy, the way things go, participating does not always make life simple, that is for sure. But it does make things meaningful, impactful, powerful and possible.
In honor of the Sun and the myriad possibilities that arise in being together, I am offering a couple of opportunities for us to be together in real time tomorrow. First, in the morning I am offering an hour of sitting meditation. If you are in the neighborhood, you are welcome to join in person and if not the Zoom link is below. Second I am offering a group divination session at noon Eastern U.S. time. Again you can join in person or online.
We've done this together before and it is quite magical, both the sitting still and the divining. For the sitting together, it is simple, as we each sit wherever we are, allowing ourselves to fully receive the earth and the sky into our body and our bones, arriving at this moment together and appreciating each other in being rather than doing for a while. A short instruction will be provided for those joining for the first time.
For divining, we bring our hearts and minds together in the moment and then we ask for guidance on how to be with all the suffering and turmoil that we all experience on this planet. Divination speaks to us from the intersection between the spirit and the substance, invoking our shared spirit a.k.a. our hearts through our individual substance a.k.a our bodies. This is a beautiful way to participate and share your knowing with others.
I’ll be here all day tomorrow, sitting with the sun, enjoying quiet and conversation, sharing with the people, the animals and the insects this solar holiday.
I hope you can join me one way or another in whatever ways bring you joy!
