I come to You with Nothing
dark abyss and empty
sometimes I pretend
sometimes I avoid
sometimes I hide.
But if I came to You
with my hands full
I would not be able
to receive anything.
You.
You spun heaven and
earth and light and
dark and land and
sky and birds and
beasts and me…
from Nothing.
You are not afraid of it,
the possibility of it,
and nor shall I be.
Dark abyss and empty
potential.
Talitha Fraser
You move in mysterious ways
but there’s no denying You move.
You don’t stay still,
You respond;
words, actions, choices, stories
seas and cities, family and friends
The Singer and the Song
May I have this dance with You?
Talitha Fraser
The gorgeous Dusk Liney of Inspirit Creative recently ran a customised (pretty damn special) contemplative birthday for me down at Pipemakers Park. As she as gifted, so are we all. Please be encouraged to use this for your own reflections on 2017.
Wurundjeri Garden
Mosaic
This mosaic depicts Aboriginal life before European settlers arrived. Find a place around the mosaic to reflect on your own life this year. Create your own Mosaic/picture – using illustrations, colours or words – that reflects how you experienced 2017.
Capture the good, the bad, the ugly. What surprised you? What enlivened you? What challenged you? What were the unexpected gifts?
Fireplace
Before you leave the Wurundjeri Garden, if there is any part of this year that you would like to leave behind, make your way to the fireplace.
Take a piece of paper, put that image, word or feeling down on paper, and burn it.
Early Settlers Garden
Footprints
As you walk to the next station, pause and place your feet on the child’s footprints. Take a moment to be still and be present to your inner child.
Whisper to her what your heart yearns for her to hear.
One sided Table
So much of the year is spent preparing food for others. In this moment, come and sit at the table. Think about the hospitality that you show to others and imagine the ways in which you can show that same beautiful hospitality to yourself.
What would it be like for the Divine to prepare a table for you? What would feed your soul? How can you show that hospitality to your soul this year?
Take a walk over to the apple tree and think of an apple dish that captures that imagining. Write it on a sticker and place it on your clothes.
Pipeworkers Garden
Dry Garden
Take in the fig tree, the succulents and the drought resistant plants. Each of these plants have survived dry, hot, tough conditions. It is actually in this landscape of lacking that they grow.
Sit here and acknowledge the dry places in your life. Think about the qualities that have grown in you within the dry parts of this year. Write them on a post it and stick it to the dry plant captures that quality.
Grapevine Colonnade
Then walk under the pipe colonnade shaded by the grapevines. Allow the coolness and shade to wash over those dry places. As you come to the end, sit with the sun mosaic.
Ask God / the Divine / the Sun to shine on you this year, to shine you with light and warmth. Name the desires of your heart and lay them at the Sun as offering.
Picnic Circle
When you’re ready, come and find a place on the blankets and we’ll gather in a circle to reflect together.
Sacred ground
trembles beneath
our feet
“Where do I stand?
Can I hold this?”
Do not hide but ride
for me and the earth are one.
After dark storms churning,
world is turning and
new day’s burning.
A star rises in the East.
Talitha Fraser
I’ve been trying to think a bit about what love looks like when both sides of the Marriage Equality debate are feeling persecuted and I come back, as I often do to the God who asks me difficult questions.
Maybe the pressure isn’t secular but wholly Holy, the Holy who asks: “Who do you say that I am?” It’s a good question to grapple with and we must grapple with our answer.
I can take bits and pieces of God, parts small enough to understand and think I ‘know’ but only a fool can imagine they can answer such questions because when You kneel before the One who made you, you realise how little you know, how little you understand, how little you are in this bigger Creation we all pay a part in.
Kneel. Be brought to re-awareness, re-awakening to the bigness of God. There is space there for all you fear and love, and love and fear.
Rise. Live, knowing that space is here too.
We carry it with us.
This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any men or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…
From the Preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
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