"We need spiritual nurture...a practice that comforts us...opportunities to find affirmation and the means of expressing our despair, and we need to be in ongoing conversation with [Mystery] in whatever way works for us."     Dayle Friedman

Sandstone Psalms for Your Days of Longing

You do not need faith to kneel in this place...where lichen-scribed stones, their grayed backs rounded beneath centuries of rain, keep their silent vigil.

Stones do not speak, but they listen,

holding the weight of their own mysterious transformations
like a river's surface holds moon, sun and sky,
quietly, gently, completely.

When your grief arrives, a storm without season,
hold the cool face of a stone in your hand.
Trace the map of eternity etched there:
the delicate vein, the crystalline scar,
cradling the world's fractures
without having crumbled to pieces.

These bones of the earth
are anchors for our drifting souls.
Each a silent hymn to what endures.

Bury one in your pocket, let its gravity
remind you: even the deepest sorrow
is a tide, another force of change. 

_________________

Let each teach you forbearance and patience;

how to persist in the paradox of life.

You are not finished with your transformations.

________

Being Human is the Hardest Path There is

Linda Clark-Borre

How to define spiritual wellness?  Anyone who's ever felt "dispirited," unbalanced, or discouraged can know it based upon what it clearly is not.  Spiritual wellness is the opposite of feelings of absolute despair, unrelenting grief, and endless loneliness. Though it mysteriously encompasses painful emotions, the durable spirit is not limited by them. It can encompass "religion" - or not.

Regardless of personal belief system, anyone can benefit from spiritual support and nurture.  Spirituality is less about rote precepts or rules, than how one is able to relate to everyday living. It's about being faithful to the ideals and beliefs that matter most to you.

We rarely have a chance to speak of such things outside traditional formal pastoral office settings. It's not common to open one's heart this way in community life. This, despite the yearning to release our pain, or to consider our deepest questions safely and without judgment. We may have been encouraged to "have faith" by well-meaning others, but it's the rawness of our unique experiences that comprise the essential spirituality from which a personal faith emerges. 

With that intro - welcome to these pages, which offer a hint of my lifelong research into the elements of spiritual wellness - or what I often refer to as spiritual durability.  

The philosopher Michael Polyani proposed that "we [each] know more than we can say." We are, indeed, wiser than we know. Plumbing our own depths as individuals is absolutely the work of a lifetime; but those willing to explore this way often find the effort itself leading to a richer inner life that is both solace and refuge.

This is The Shape of Belonging

Beneath the hum of wired skies,
we drift like shadows through the noise -
our voices frayed at the edges,
lost in the static of a thousand screens and dropped connections.

We have become strangers to our own tongues,
forgetting how the soul speaks
in the quiet between breaths,
how the ear must bend low
to hear the tremor in another's silence.

Eyes once fluent in the language of depth
now skim surfaces,
mirrors clouded
by the breath of hurry.

Yet the oak does not rush its roots
through the patient dark;
the river carves its truth
by staying close to the stone.

What if the way back begins
where pavement cracks?Where green tendrils rupture concrete,
the earth still dreams.

Let's find places where field meets forest,
and let dandelions and thistle
teach us the grace of resilience.

In our bending toward the fractured and the frail,
In our gentle cradling of the trembling wing,
In our search for ways to name the unspoken anguish,

we tend to the matter of our own scattered souls - the ash, pollen, and grit of our collective unspent grief

And unearth the shape of our own belonging—
a melody hummed by the world
when we finally learn to listen.

Linda Clark-Borre

___________________