DIY WildWood invites and encourages us to encounter the Holy exactly where we are. I am sharing some links, simple prompts and activities for you to explore and choose what is meaningful for this week. I hope you find something here that makes you think, provides you sustenance, and brings a sense of grounding to your week.
I started reading See No Stranger: A memoir and manifesto of revolutionary love by Valarie Kaur. It is brilliant and I'm excited to share more of it with you and maybe even dig in deeply with our Social Justice Book Club. This is a link for a video from her publishers that has clips from a speech she shared right after the 2016 presidential elections on New Years Eve at Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C. She proposes that this place in our national story and history is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb and invites us to breath and push into our nation's greatest transition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKMEqF0OVxs&t=127s This is a link to a longer TED Talk she shared in November 2017 about Revolutionary Love as a lesson for activism and advocacy. 3 Lessons of Revolutionary Love in a Time of Rage
Prayer for Parenting in a Pandemic. While it feels we are rounding a corner in the COVID pandemic, those with kiddos at home are still deep in precautions, adapting, uncertainty and exhaustion. I came across this prayer this week and felt my own shoulders relax a little as I read it, feeling seen, understood, and held by the words. "This is a prayer for bonding and breaking, for togetherness and too much togetherness." Amen.
Perhaps we can all take a cue from Anne, with an "e", and simply go outside and feel our prayers.
"Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods, and I’d look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer." —L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Blessings upon blessings to you. I hope these can offer you something sweet and sacred. Wherever this week finds you and however you connect with the Holy,
I hope you have a wonderful week.
-Liz